MacConnel show is a movement reborn

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 proposal for a “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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‘Parrot Talk’

What: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel

Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station,

2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica

When: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Ends: Nov. 15

Contact: (310) 586-6488