Reconciling Picasso, Matisse by David Pagel of The Los Angeles Times
Throughout their illustrious careers, Picasso and Matisse spent lots of time looking at each other's paintings. Each even made images in response to his competitor -- countering, criticizing and sometimes making fun of the other's compositions. Never did either giant of Modern art paint anything that complemented the other's works.
Kim MacConnel has taken it upon himself to turn the 20th century antagonists into 21st century collaborators. At the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, the San Diego-based artist's white-hot exhibition combines the structural solidity of Picasso's flip-flopping compositions with the sizzling color and cool gracefulness of Matisse's swiftly brushed shapes.
MacConnel makes what historians call radical revisionism look easy. Each of his 4-foot-square panels seems to have been made by someone without a worry in the world -- and even less concern for established canons of taste.
His colors are garish and wonderfully vulgar: Screaming yellow, blazing tangerine, mint green, electric lavender and luxurious turquoise slam against one another as they slip up against such standard tints as red, white and blue. Black is thrown in to mediate the chaos, and a few shards of white provide just a crack of open space.
MacConnel's colors may not be subtle. But what he does with them is sophisticated. Transforming jarring messes into jazzy symphonies, he makes color sing.
MacConnel's compositions are even nuttier: Sawtooth zigzags, fat stripes, skinny crisscrosses, irregular diamonds, pinched lozenges, out-of-step checkerboards and skewed circles line up loosely in his 15 canvases, forming wacky banded patterns that pack loads of action into compact dimensions. Each painting has the presence of a close-up. Together, they demonstrate that zeroing in on the best details is more inspiring than surveying the overall context.
MacConnel's paintings are about being in love -- in love with seeing, in love with art history and in love with art. So what if he has to turn manly competition inside out to get to the good stuff?
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by Joe Lewis of Art in America
Kim MacConnel’s new series of 28 small pseudo-origami and watercolor collages focus on a seemingly endless number of American foreign policy and military disasters in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe. He crumples, folds and twists U.S. dollars and foreign currencies collected on trips to make convincing armaments and ordnance – battleships, tanks, helicopters, rocket-propelled grenades and bombs. Augmented by loose but recognizable gesture drawings and graffitilike markings, these implements of war roam freely within watercolor depictions of desert scenes, jungles and, in a few instances, Washington, D.C.
Moreover, MacConnel deconstructs each currency’s design by cutting out or reorganizing elements of its motifs or iconography – portraits of leaders, historical moments, etc. – to enrich his narratives. Set in unevenly cut oval mats suggesting cartography, the territorial connections between each story further magnify a “New World Order,” but not the one you would think.
In Disasters of War: Iran 1979, MacConnel explores the government’s failed attempt to rescue Americans taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. A tangled helicopter lies in a desert wasteland. The chopper’s body is made from a $50 bill. The face of the great general Ulysses S. Grant is crushed almost beyond recognition. Floating about it all with a Mona Lisa-like smile, Ayatollah Khomeini (an omnipresent image in contemporary Iranian society) looks upon the crash site, contemplating the flawed mission while extolling the hostage-takers. Their jubilant images, which still appear on Iranian currency, rest comfortably in the foreground.
Ironically, the central figures in Shock n’ Awe, a chilling portrait of saturation bombing, are two of U.S. democracy’s founding fathers, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. We witness the final blow: a single U.S. – currency bunkerbuster bomb is dropped from the $100-bill fighter plane onto an earth-toned oasis community. No bodies or blood, just a landscape littered with mushroom clouds made from folded images of Washington from the $1 bill.
Capital Values is a rogues’ gallery of former allies and foes stapled together in an arc pattern similar to a spread deck of cards. Nine recognizable foreign leaders – the Shah of Iran, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Che Guevara, etc. – teeter on the pinnacle of the U.S. Capital building’s lantern, itself conveniently positioned on top of the world. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
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 by Leah Ollman of Los Angeles Times
Long dismissed as frivolous, the Pattern and Decoration movement gets a serious new look from the art world.
“It gets awfully tiresome to go to art galleries and find yourself being lectured at,” Amy Goldin wrote in a 1976 review for Art in America magazine. The art critic was writing about the first New York solo show of her former student Kim MacConnel – but it wasn’t MacConnel’s work she complaining about. It was the predominance of Minimal and Conceptual art, its austerity and seriousness.
MacConnel too chafed at the “stranglehold” of these styles in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70s. He and his like-minded peers were put off by all the rules, bored especially by Minimalism’s aloof and literal forms, left cold by heady sobriety and machine aesthetic. For inspiration, they turned toward the unconventional – to non-Western art and ornamentation, to the worlds of craft and traditional women’s work, toward accessible art that embraced joy, color, life.
The paintings that MacConnel showed in that New York exhibition were brushed on freely hanging bedsheets that had been torn into strips and sewn back together. Their vibrantly colored designs were copied from Chinese pattern books. Far from the systematic dryness of Minimalism, the paintings were spirited, irreverent, a bit crude and very much alive.
“What a pleasure,” Goldin exclaimed in her review, “to have something happening, and that something so sweet-tempered!”
When MacConnel first brought those works to New York, not everyone greeted them as warmly as Goldin did. “People would say, ‘You’re never going to get a show, because it’s not serious?,’” MacConnel recalls. “How do you be serious? Well, solemn colors. These were too bright. I couldn’t believe people would actually say things like that. It’s absurd.”
MacConnel and his fellow travelers – Robert Kushner, Joyce Kozloff, Valerie Jaudon, Robert Zakanitch, Miriam Schapiro and others – went on to achieve decades of acclaim for their work. The movement they launched, Pattern and Decoration – P&D for short – fizzled out by the early ‘80’s and has been given only nominal attention from art historians. The early resistance MacConnel encountered lingers.
“Pattern and Decoration relates to so much that is going on today, but it hasn’t been looked at,” says independent curator and writer Michael Duncan. “It remains a great taboo.”
“Whenever you use the D-word (decoration), people break into a cold sweat. It’s a radical movement that relates to ‘60s notions of breaking away from the sanctity of high art. These artists wanted to explore how the decorative intersects with out lives. It’s incredibly celebratory. The underlying premise of the movement is that ornamentation is an affirmation of life. It’s getting back to an instinct that high Modernism tried to suppress or weed out of us from some puritanical reason.”
Now, thanks to Duncan, a champion of under-recognized artists and movements, a broad-ranging introduction to P&D can be had in a single trip to Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. The centerpiece of Duncan’s efforts is “Parrot Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel,” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. With paintings, sculpture, rugs, painted furniture and collages spanning 30 years, the show is the most comprehensive for the Encinitas-based artist.
Duncan organized two additional shows at Bergamot Station galleries to give MacConnel’s work context. “NYPD: New York Pattern and Decoration,” at Shoshana Wayne, is not a survey, Duncan is quick to explain, but a glimpse at the movement through work by 16 of its core members who lived or showed in New York, as well as a few younger artists, like Polly Apfelbaum, whose work resonates with the concerns of Pattern and Decoration’s first generation.
At Rosamund Felsen, Duncan presents “LAPD: Los Angeles Pattern & Decoration,” joining work by 31 Southern California artists, from 1966 to the present.
“The movement has a lot of nooks and crannies, and the concepts of P&D were manifested in a lot of different ways,” Duncan says. “Once you start looking for pattern, it’s everywhere. I think this show will surprise people.” Among the artists represented: Maura Bendett, Karl Benjamin, Dinh Q. Le, Ed Moses, Grant Mudford, Adrian Saxe and Tom Wudl.
Several more galleries are holding solo shows of artists variably bound to the Pattern and Decoration approach. The exuberant ceramic sculptures of Betty Woodman can be seen at Frank Lloyd. Patricia Faure is showing new paintings of dogs by Robert Zakanitch, and at Richard Heller, abstract paintings and sculpture by Chicago-based Michelle Grabner partner with a drawing installation by Belgian artist Carla Arocha.
Between all the different shows and the “Parrot Talk” catalog, Duncan hopes not only to focus attention on the Pattern & Decoration movement but to clear lingering misconceptions about it – that is emerged in New York, for one, and that the work is primarily about surface issues, for another.
‘WEIRDO’ IDEAS
The earliest stirrings of the movement took place at UC San Diego, where critic and art historian Goldin came to teach in 1969. A heavy smoker, plain speaker and fearless scholar, Goldin had an enduring effect on undergraduates MacConnel and Kushner.
In an essay for the “Parrot Talk” catalog, Kushner remembers dismissing Goldin at first as “a weirdo” because of what seemed like far-fetched interpretations she made in her discussions about art. But both MacConnel and Kushner came to regard her as a crucial catalyst for the evolution of their own styles as well as for the birth of Pattern and Decoration.
She introduced a wealth of new visual sources to her students – New Guinean body decoration, Islamic ornament, Moroccan pottery. These forms of decoration, she taught, are not just stimulating to the eye but powerful vehicles of cultural and personal meaning.
“Decoration,” she stated in a lecture, “involves the marker in a relationship to the world around him that is much more intimate and practical than the specialized, alienated world of professional art.”
MacConnel, who received his bachelor’s degree from UCSD in 1969 and his master’s in 1972, a year after Goldin left, remembers plenty of give and take between the professor and her students.
“She was a dyed-in-the-wool New York formalist,” he recalls, sitting in his exuberantly painting kitchen. “To her, you could break down anything visually using a range of terms.” When Goldin expressed concern once about how to communicate these terms effectively to her students, Kushner and MacConnel, teaching assistants for one of her classes, came up with an idea.
“Bob and I collected flat-woven kilims and repaired them, and we suggested that she use these carpets rather than formalist paintings as examples, because it moved our of the box. She started looking at them and what she came to was essentially that you could apply the same formalist terminology to textiles as you could to New York School painting. This was a real breakthrough.”
Their discussions gravitated toward the traditional hierarchy within the arts (the fine arts lording over the applied) and the importance of reordering it.
“If you can discuss a decorative object like a carpet or a piece of Iberian pottery the same as you can discuss a Barnett Newman painting, are they equal?” MacConnel asks.
LESSONS LEARNED
A trim, compact man of 57, dressed casually but colorfully in a lime green Polo shirt and blue denim shorts, MacConnel has been teaching at UCSD for most of the past 20 years. In the deliciously defiant environment that he and his wife, artist Jean Lowe, have created for themselves – the surface vividly painted or patterned, the proportions playfully askew – it seems that Goldin’s lessons about identifying and transgressing boundaries have sunk in well.
Goldin, who died at 52 of live cancer in 1978, wasn’t the only on at the time to shake up the art world’s rigid hierarchies of status. Feminist art programs and organizations were emerging in California, asserting the validity of intensely autobiographical work and materials like cloth that were traditionally associated with feminine, domestic pursuits.
Kushner started to paint flowers and design outrageous garments displayed in performances. MacConnel started on his bedsheet paintings and went on to collages with enlarged postcard images from his travels, small clown sculptures pieced together from plastic beach trash, rugs made up of dozens of smaller ones with images from “Sesame Street,” kitschy puppies and rainbows.
MacConnel has complied an impressive exhibition record over the past three decades, participating in numerous Pattern and Decoration group shows and earning a spot in the stable of artists at the renowned Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, long a hotbed of P & D activity. He was picked for the Whitney Biennial five times and has been in museum exhibitions internationally.
Nevertheless, MacConnel and Duncan agree that his work’s been largely misunderstood.
“His work is at a very sophisticated level, but it has wacky humor and off-the-cuff drawing style,” making it easy to dismiss, Duncan says. The Pattern and Decoration movement in general has been similarly underestimated, both say. Too quickly it was pegged as a riff on Matisse’s famous dictum that art should be as soothing as a good armchair.
“Everyone just thought it was frou-frou disco in an era of frou-frou disco, which is absurd,” MacConnel says. “This was really a seminal period of time, with issues being debated about identity that relate to feminism, culture, Western/non-Western issues, high art and low art.”
Much of the 1970’s-inspired art being made today engages those same issues, with or without recognition of P&D’s role in bringing them to the vividly painted surface. Work by such artists as Jim Isermann (included in the “LAPD” show) and Jorge Pardo blur the distinctions between art and design in a way that owes much to the founding artists of the movement.
Duncan’s curatorial project pays homage to the underappreciated P&D artists. As he worked on the shows, even he was pleasantly surprised at how meaty a subject he had taken on.
“I really didn’t expect the work to deliver as much as it has. You can really enter the dialogue of issues of the 20th century through P&D, and especially through Kim. A whole new can of worms opens up once you get over the hump of fearing decoration. It’s where art and life truly intersect at the most basic visual level, where you can look down at your shirt and think, ‘Where did those doodads come from?’ They’re part Indian, part French, part Chinese. That’s the political side of it, breaking down our reality basic colonial inheritance.”
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by Christopher Miles of Artforum
The centerpiece of a Pattern and Decoration-fest filling six Bergamot Station venues, this exhibition showcases thirty year of work by San Diego – area artist Kim MacConnel, one of the best-known West Coast P&D devotees. Curated by Michael Duncan, who organized two other P&D shows on view across the parking lot, this survey revealed MacConnel’s work as far more complex than the words “pattern” and “decoration” might imply.
A piece like Top Dollar, 1979, confirms MacConnel as a lover of color and a shrewd practitioner of garish formalism, and demonstrates the artist’s flair for smart semiotic play on the levels of style, material, symbol, and image. In this work, MacConnel overlays clip art-ish diagrams of modern architecture onto patchwork and plaid; images of transistor radios atop diamond-based geometric patterns; and electrons orbiting nuclei over a handkerchief’s pinwheels and snowflakes.
MacConnel reminds us of what every homemaker knows – that decoration denotes, connotes, and implies, that it’s a channel as effective as any sign system for the delivery and subversion of ideas. In Flourishing Sideline Occupations, 1978, one fabric scrap is pit against another. Stiff plaid bridles against the exotic/erotic tiger stripe, and swatches of doughnut shapes, checkerboards, and floral motifs become just as “tribal” as the more “ethnic” patterns with which they share territory. Red Lantern, 1975, an early painting on bed sheets, is made up of vertical strips, each itself containing a pattern. The ensemble seems innocent until one notices the crossed rifles and sheaves of wheat repeating on the far left and the sitting duck recurring on the far right. But clear messages bow out in favor of more poetic slippage in MacConnel’s creations, which, while appearing to reference the “surface scan,” instead propose a world where nothing should be taken at face value.
At times MacConnel seems to prioritize the formal qualities or curiosity value of his borrowed materials above a more informed use – but on the other hand, perhaps this position is right on. He privileges neither form nor content on anything other than a case-by-case basis, and by this token he’s a surrogate for all of us who employ and encounter visual culture from myriad, ever-waffling points of understanding and engagement. From this perspective, MacConnel is part of a lineage that includes the Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and the Pop artists, as well as more recent figures such as Sigmar Polke, David Salle, and Mike Kelley – artists who place quotation and juxtaposition at the center of practices devoted simultaneously to formal concerns and to plays of meaning. In terms of attitude, however, MacConnel may be more akin to decorative West Coasters like Karen Carson, Carole Caroompas, Lari Pittman, and Alexis Smith. His colorful composites might well have their dark and uncomfortable passages, but ultimately they propose not a drama of anxiety and endgame but a celebration of life and endless possibility.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Doug Harvey of LA Weekly
In the early 1970s, many artists became fed up with the overblown critical rhetoric surrounding post-painterly abstraction, a term coined by über-critic Clement Greenberg (as the title of a show at LACMA) for that work encompassing such non-Pop post–abstract expressionist painting styles as minimalism and Color Field. As the psychological, spiritual, figurative and narrative content was systematically removed from visual art during this period, the arguments in its defense became increasingly grandiloquent and elitist, and it was that, along with the cramped possibilities and ungenerous aesthetics of minimalist abstraction, that begat a reactionary torrent of works wallowing in sensuality, complexity, inclusiveness and humor. A number of these artists coalesced into various regional movements, including Funk Art in San Francisco and the Chicago Imagists. But none was as well-known as Pattern & Decoration, probably because of the misperception that it was an East Coast phenomenon, and therefore more important. Not to mention the fact that it was so, well, decorative. And while Funk Art had clear roots in the ornate visual explosion of psychedelia, and the Chicago Imagists in the outsider art of the insane, P&D’s most obvious historical referent was craft and textile design — disdained by many but hardly unwelcome in museums and collectors’ homes.
Moreover, P&D’s political agenda was ahead of the curve, explicitly taking the visual vocabularies of traditional “women’s work” and “primitive cultures” and positioning them as equivalents to high Modernism, as valid, highly evolved ways of looking at and interacting with the world. On top of that, P&D turned from the competitive introspection of the New York establishment in favor of a playful, socially interactive pluralism that drew as easily from Navajo blankets and Chinese tapestries as it did from last week’s painting trend. This was a clear rebuttal of the dominant view of American painting’s increasingly conceptual abstraction as a kind of aesthetic and spiritual manifest destiny. Which is curious, because although the visual tropes of high Modernism — stripes and biomorphic blobs, for instance — are still very much in play in the work of many contemporary artists mining the mid–20th century for “ideas,” their function has been wholly subsumed by the idea of painting as decoration. This probably wasn’t such a big surprise for the P&D artists. “Minimalism carried no message other than its formula that was clearly self-referential, and ended up being decorative and being used decoratively,” says San Diego–based P&D pioneer Kim MacConnel in the catalog for his Santa Monica Museum retrospective, “Parrot Talk.”
The show, which opens Saturday, is the hub of a piecemeal survey of P&D history and traditions drolly titled “The LAPD Project,” taking place at six separate venues in Bergamot Station and orchestrated by critic and increasingly busy curator Michael Duncan. The five adjunct gallery exhibits include two minisurveys of L.A. and N.Y. artists, reflecting the bicoastal legacy of the movement, housed at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, respectively. The other participating galleries
are showing contemporary work by original P&D artists and pieces by younger artists working within the P&D oeuvre. Duncan has done an admirable job representing the actual participants in the movement, but it must have been difficult to decide where to draw the line in terms of influence.
Removed from its historical context and stripped of its most high-profile (if inaccurate) sociopolitical reading — as a feminist art practice — Pattern & Decoration starts to blur at the boundaries. Indeed, in the overall scope of 20th-century visual-art making, it is minimalism that stands out as some kind of glitch. With precedents including Matisse, William Morris, Sonia Delaunay and several abstract expressionists, and later artists like Philip Taaffe, Lari Pittman and Sigmar Polke, it’s hard to make a case for P&D as an underdog — based solely on its visual content, anyway. For better or worse, P&D may reasonably be seen as an essential part of the first wave of postmodernism, and as the door by which the torrent of visual content that had been systematically excised by the Modernist juggernaut re-entered and quickly dominated the art world in the 1980s.
Which is to say, if you go to these shows expecting to see some earthshaking, radical discontinuity from the art you’re used to seeing, you will be disappointed. Artists have always engaged with the world and their audiences. It is only in relation to the dead-end solipsism of late academic modernism that P&D bears any trace of outrageousness. In fact, it is to that very context that P&D is able to pull off the neat trick of simultaneously refuting and embodying the kind of dialectical confrontation that defined Modernism — saying “Fuck you!” with flowers.
Given that, I have to say that Kim MacConnel is a pretty hot painter. The West Coast’s claim to P&D primacy rests on two centers of activity — one being the Feminist Art Program at CalArts led by Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago, the other a cluster of like-minded UC San Diego artists, including MacConnel, who gravitated toward the ideas of visiting professor Amy Goldin. Goldin, who died in 1978 at the age of 52, was emphatic about the essential difference between pattern painting and art painting. Much of the catalog is given over to her essays, and while her position is beautifully argued, I just don’t buy it — Goldin’s insistence on the humility and sensitivity of the pattern artist subtly reinforces the Modernist mythology it supposedly undermines. MacConnel’s paintings have to stand on their own, against any other painting. And they do.
The most immediately dazzling of MacConnel’s works are his trademark with brightly colored, loosely rendered patterns borrowed from Third World cultures or invented, as well as cartoonish clip-art images of contemporary American life and technology. Amassing several hundred of these strips, MacConnel eventually began sifting them down into sets of five or more wildly varied patterns. He successfully explored this motif until 1983, articulating the combination of a complex and joyous color sensibility with a subtle interrogation of Western colonialism — MacConnel would be the first to concede that the designs he appropriates were already art to begin with — that typifies all his work.
Around this time, MacConnel started looking for new elements to throw into the mix, or different formulas altogether; one of the best pieces in the show is the straight-up painting Charles Ist (1983), which balances the cheeriness of his children’s-book palette with an ominous sense of foreboding. Other experiments were less successful. MacConnel took to incorporating painted picture frames — often within a larger composition —as well as commercially printed tourist post cards, both of which resulted in awkward compositions whose intrusive jumbles of off-kilter rectangles, with their built-in art-historical and global political significance, stray into the realm of the just plain ugly.
I would say that these decisions were missteps if MacConnel hadn’t persisted, pursuing the combination of snapshots and painted frames to an exquisite resolution in work seen last year at Rosamund Felsen, where pieces like Silk Embroidery Factory Worker and Local Labor Al Dafar (both included in “Parrot Talk”) paired large-scale original photos of indigenous craftspeople of China and Yemen with painted decorative frames. By jettisoning P&D compositional strategies in favor of an iconic Modernism, MacConnel finds an elegant formal solution emphasizing his political insights. Hey, whatever works.
This goes for the rest of “The LAPD Project,” too. There are plenty of awesome pieces, none of which needs an elaborate critical apparatus to prop it up; few if any demonstrate ways of seeing that haven’t been inherent to art making since art making began. While P&D may be under recognized as a historical moment, its triumph was all-encompassing— opening a window to the world, returning artists to their senses, and redefining the function of high Modernist abstraction as just another category of “mere” decoration.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times
A local critic once organized an exhibition to make the argument that Pattern and Decoration art — a movement that flourished in the 1970s and then flamed out — was significant because of a simple difference between artists and everybody else. Most people have really bad taste, went the show's insulting critical claim, while artists are avatars of style. Artists could transform the humdrum mediocrity of the everyday into the aesthetically smashing, if only drab civilians would let them.
This design-on-a-dime philosophy might work on HGTV, where tired middle-class domiciles get instant makeovers by confident pros, but it's arrogant foolishness for the art gallery and museum to espouse. With friends like that, enemies are redundant. Needless to say, the Pattern and Decoration survey sank into the annals of obscurity.
Still, its viewpoint is not untypical of the nonsense regularly spoken in the vicinity of Pattern and Decoration art (or P&D, for short). Even champions of P&D can seem flummoxed. The puritan antipathy toward regarding decoration as anything but morally frivolous and intellectually shallow is deeply embedded in American culture.
Happily, though, the norm is now being bucked at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where an absorbing 30-year survey of work by one of the most gifted founders of the P&D movement opened this week. "Parrot Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel" is refreshing, challenging and succinct. In 39 paintings, a group of drawings and some painted furniture, the playful show offers more substance to revel in than many shows twice its size.
For one thing, MacConnel's art demonstrates that the type of hierarchy that puts artists "up here" and regular people "down there" is fundamentally at odds with everything P&D stands for. MacConnel's paintings borrow cultural imagery from innumerable societies around the world, from Asia to Africa, but there's nothing colonial about it. Colonialism is about the powerful subjugating the weak and foreign; MacConnel's art is about the humanizing awe and delight that arises from worldly estrangement.
Call it an aesthetic of radical egalitarianism.
The first painting, "Pattern Blu," dates from 1972. Stripes, checks, stars, lima beans, ripples and other patterned motifs occupy irregular, interlocking shapes on a large piece of loosely hanging fabric. The colors are saturated, the unstretched canvas hanging like a banner.
For all its visual aggressiveness, though, the painting feels formally unresolved. But think of the date. By 1972, Minimal and Conceptual art had captured the avant-garde.
Traditional art objects were suspect. Chromophobia, a fear of the unruliness of color and its resistance to language, was just beginning to rear its head. The political chaos of Vietnam was unfolding, Watergate loomed, and demands for new forms of social realist art were reawakening from a 30-year slumber. Yes, MacConnel had unhinged his painting from its wooden stretcher bars so that it could fly free, but a painting by another name is still a painting, which tied it to the Establishment.
"Pattern Blu" reads like a somewhat clumsy but nonetheless concentrated assault on these and other fences that were being rapidly erected around art. Its bright legacy in Pop painting rejects the cultural isolationism of Minimal and Conceptual art. Pleasure trumps pontificating. Matisse seems to matter here more than Duchamp does. Radicalism is understood as a vigorous defense of freedom, not the moralizing self-righteousness of the claque.
MacConnel was newly graduated from UC San Diego (today he teaches there), where he and fellow student and P&D innovator Robert Kushner had come under the influence of visiting professor and critic Amy Goldin. The best-kept secret of postwar American art criticism — she died young, at 52, in 1978 — Goldin was the brilliant theoretician of P&D; the Santa Monica Museum show helpfully includes an homage to her.
Within three years, MacConnel was making his signature work: vertical strips of plain or machine-printed fabric, each painted over in vivid patterns of abstract shapes or figurative motifs, sewn or glued together as large hangings push-pinned to the wall. Among them are some breathtaking paintings, among the best of the decade — paintings whose casual sophistication remains fresh today.
The format is deceptively simple (as most great compositional schemes are). Each vertical strip functions in two ways. It's an independent field of imagery — tumbling fans, woven plaids, floral motifs, commercial products, scientific symbols, etc. And it's simultaneously a frame or border for the field next to it. Together, their lively visual rhythms establish the distinct syncopation of the painting.
This formal structure holds important content of its own. In traditional paintings the field is the center of attention, while the frame plays a supporting role. By contrast, as your eye bobs and bounces around a MacConnel work, that strict hierarchy collapses. Field and frame keep trading places. First it's one, then the other. The center becomes the periphery and vice versa, in a boundless and lively vista of egalitarian wonder.
In the crisis-ridden 1970s, P&D showed a valuable social role art could play. It's a variation on form and function.
Pattern and Decoration picks up on an old European Modernist idea, then takes it for an American spin. Modernism gave art the grid, which Minimal art exalted. But before there was the grid, there was plaid. Like Jasper Johns, who painted targets and American flags because they were things the mind already knows, MacConnel began to exploit the submerged power of plaid as art.
Pattern, as Goldin lucidly explained, is not determined by the repetition of a motif. Use a rubber stamp to repeat an image over and over on a piece of paper and a pattern won't necessarily emerge. Instead, she wrote, pattern is created by the constancy of the intervals between motifs.
Pattern is space, in other words, experienced through time. Decoration, on the other hand, is a question of use.
Sometimes it's playful ornament. Elsewhere it's a sign of honor (as when a hero is decorated). Always it's a mark of humanity. Globally, different societies maintain different traditions they may or may not label as art, but all societies employ myriad forms of decoration.
Artistically, P&D can be profound precisely because it's mindless — which is not to say unintelligent, but wary of the limitations that consciousness can impose. In the 1970s Conceptual art was being championed as an art of sheer ideas, an ideology that partly became ingrained because artists were moving rapidly from downtown bohemia into the swelling ranks of university professorships, where such credentials matter. Against these prevailing winds, P&D asserted that an art of imaginative experience matters more than a mere art of ideas.
Take MacConnel's "Charles 1st" (1983), which is intellectually acute. At the left stands an equestrian silhouette of the 17th century British monarch, whose reckless foreign adventures and curtailment of civil and religious liberties at home generated the exodus that led to European settlement of North America. Symbols of nuclear power separate the king from an enormous bird at the right, squawking like the canary in the mineshaft and hovering above a plate of pointedly burned toast. Below them Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public look on, dwarfed by the explosive spectacle of riotous color above.
One could read this garish, gutsy, post-Three Mile Island painting, made the year Ronald Reagan announced his Hollywood fantasy of "Star Wars" missile defense, as an incisive political tract. Official arrogance meets public disengagement in a lethal era of nuclear power.
And one could also let its bright, brassy, magnificent visual music wash over one's eyes. The ancient low-tech reality of pigments smeared on cloth is successfully pitted against our eternal yearning for fantastic technology to save us.
The Santa Monica Museum show, which was ably organized by guest curator Michael Duncan, is a terrific launch for the fall art season — the prescient work of a major but underappreciated artist, which resonates against many of the social, political and aesthetic issues in art today. The show is also given some interesting context by five group and solo exhibitions at nearby Bergamot Station commercial spaces (at Shoshana Wayne, Rosamund Felsen, Richard Heller, Frank Lloyd and Patricia Faure galleries). They show the depth and breadth of P&D, both in California and New York, past and present, warts and all.
And collectively, the endeavor bespeaks a certain fearlessness. Pattern and Decoration was a coherent movement that has never been the subject of a major American museum exhibition. It still scares the bejabbers out of art world puritans. Kudos to the Santa Monica Museum for taking the first leap.
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