Seeing the pattern

By Leah Ollman

Sept. 21, 2003 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

“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 was 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 ‘60s 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 its 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 ‘80s 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 our 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 for 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 and Decoration movement but to clear lingering misconceptions about it -- that it 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 potteryThese 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 maker 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 painted 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 out 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 not 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 surfaces 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 liver cancer in 1978, wasn’t the only one 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 compiled 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 1970s-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 really basic colonial inheritance.”

A parade of P&D;

What: “Parrot Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel” at Santa Monica Museum of Art

Ends: Nov. 15

Contact: (310) 586-6488

What: “NYPD: New York Pattern & Decoration” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Ends: Oct. 4

Contact: (310) 453-7535

What: “LAPD: Los Angeles Pattern & Decoration” at Rosamund Felsen Gallery

Ends: Oct. 4

Contact: (310) 828-8488

What: Betty Woodman at Frank Lloyd Gallery

Ends: Oct. 11