To many at the time, by contrast, P&D seemed ridiculous and irrelevant. In the conceptual chess game inaugurated by Duchamp, in which each successive avant-garde movement was understood as a dialectical response to its forerunners, postmodernism was checkmate. From this point on, art movements could be only subcultural spasms, or worse, marketing ploys. Though postmodernist art shared certain strategies with Pattern and Decoration work-fragmentary collage and an emphasis on the signifying surface-it tended to be more theoretical and introverted, often hostile to “grand narratives” of progress. The bellwether “Pictures” show at Artists Space in 1977, coinciding with P&D’s peak, augured a crisis of authorship, most clearly exemplified by appropriation-based practices. To grasp the force of this argument, it helps to expand on an observation about P&D by New York Times critic Holland Cotter: it was “the last genuine art movement of the twentieth century.” 2 In a weak sense, this is true just because of the great fragmentation that came right after-the rupture of postmodernism. It all adds up to an extremely convincing case for the relevance of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which Katz sees not as a divergence from more weighty avant-garde matters, but on the contrary, the key turning point in recent art. The publication accompanying the MOCA show also addresses the role of the curators and critics who supported the movement, including Jane Kaufmann, John Perreault, Jeff Perrone, and particularly Amy Goldin, whose vibrant voice was lost tragically early when she died of cancer in April 1978. It is the most thematically broad and visually intense show of the lot, while MOCA’s “With Pleasure” is arguably the most scholarly. Back in the United States, curator Jenelle Porter’s “Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art and Design” at the ICA Boston is a spectacular swathe of over-the-topness. A version of “Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise,” co-organized by Esther Boehle at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen and Manuela Ammer at MUMOK in Vienna, will open at Budapest’s Ludwig Museum next month under the title “Pattern and Decoration,” while “Pattern, Crime and Decoration”-curated by Lionel Bovier, Franck Gautherot, and Seungduk Kim-can now be seen at Le Consortium in Dijon after debuting at Mamco, Geneva, in late 2018. In Europe, where P&D was collected early and in depth, two exhibitions are currently on tour. The movement’s key protagonists, a tight circle based in New York and California-Cynthia Carlson, Brad Davis, Valerie Jaudon, Richard Kalina, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Tony Robbin, Schapiro, and Robert Zakanitch-are being shown alongside other artists who shared their visual impulses, but not necessarily their intellectual goals. Meanwhile, there have been no fewer than four major exhibitions in 2019, all foregrounding Pattern and Decoration while also opening up to a broader purview. ![]() ![]() The show juxtaposed works by one of P&D’s founding figures with related examples by younger artists. ![]() ![]() The deluge began last year with “Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro,” curated by art historian Elissa Auther at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
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