The Useful and the Decorative at the Landing explores the relationship between fine art and design, and how the lines blur between them.

LOS ANGELES — If you ever admired Eero Saarinen’s modernist Tulip chair, a mid-20th-century industrial design icon, and thought it made for better sculpture than whatever you just saw in the art gallery down the street, you will enjoy The Useful and the Decorative at the Landing. Comprising seven artists — unfortunately, only two of them women and all of them white — the group exhibition explores the relationship between fine art and design, and how the lines blur between them. Underlying this investigation is the suggestion that these two arenas are distinguished by their use-value: design is explicitly utilitarian in its reinventions of items such as silverware, furniture, lighting, etc, while artworks are made without any practical function in mind, their central utility being conceptual. This exhibit is a nice opportunity to consider whether or not you buy that argument.

Installation view of at The Useful and the Decorative at the Landing, featuring furniture by Garry Knox Bennett
Installation view of at The Useful and the Decorative at the Landing, featuring furniture by Garry Knox Bennett

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A number of works in the show focus on domestic items, using furniture both as imagery and in functional ways, including plates and chairs. Alexandra Hedison presents two photographs of domestic items wrapped in plastic (furniture and a chandelier), both of which come off as melodramatic. The exhibition also features a series of ceramic plates made by Myrton Purkiss in 1948, presenting them as wall-based art, highlighting their pattern of concentric circles that dimly recall Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs but fail to impress. Garry Knox Bennett’s contribution to the exhibit is a mixed bag, with some unimaginative pieces in which famous designs such as Eames chairs are bisected and mounted to protrude from the canvas, which is then painted with faux cast shadows. When Bennett makes furniture, however, he can be charmingly inventive, as in his toy-like handcrafted side table (2006), the very first thing one sees entering the gallery, and one of the better things in the show.

Which brings us back to the question of utility: How helpful is it as a lens through which to think about art or design?

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