So writes Hamza Walker, director of LA's LAXART, in the multi-author catalogue for "With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972-1985," an exhibition opening next month at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).1 Curated by Anna Katz with Rebecca Lowery, the survey is one of a number of major international exhibitions about the Pattern and Decoration movement launched in the past year. Viewers from California to Europe are being treat­ed to a wide range of works from this oft-neglected epi­sode in 1970s art, one in which member artists rebelled against restrictive modernist abstraction by vigorously embracing craft, color, and cultural content.

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. The show juxtaposed works by one of P&D's founding figures with related examples by younger artists. 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 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.

In Europe, where P&D was collected early and in depth, two exhibitions are currently on tour. A version of "Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise," co-organized by Esther Boehle at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen and Manuela Ammer at MUM OK 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 Bavier, Franck Gautherot, and Seungduk Kim -can now be seen at Le Consortium. in Dijon after debuting at Mamco, Geneva, in late 2018. Back in the United States, curator Jenelle Porter's "Less ls a Bore: Maximalist Art and Design" at the ICA Boston is a spectacular swathe of over-the-topness. It is the most thematically broad and visually intense show of the lot, while MOCA's "With Pleasure" is arguably the most scholarly. 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 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.

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. 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. 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. From this point on, art movements could be only subcultural spasms, or worse, marketing ploys. In the conceptual chess game inaugu­rated by Duchamp, in which each successive avant-garde movement was understood as a dialectical response to its forerunners, postrmodernism was checkmate.

To many at the time, by contrast, P&D seemed ridic­ulous and irrelevant. Writing in Artforum in 1981, artist and critic Thomas Lawson characterized the pluralist blanket of the movement as nothing but a decorated funeral shroud for abstraction, the "last gasps of a long overworked idiom."3 The movement's detractors had been trained to believe that decoration was simply bad abstraction, the condition that a painting or sculpture fell into if it lacked, well, whatever made it good art. This was of course circular reasoning, and the Pattern and Decoration crew saw right through it. But unlike postmodernism, which would shatter the canon irrep­arably, P&D sought the opposite: a radical extension of relevance. "We were seeing films from all over the globe and listening to world music," Kozloff has said. "The hermeticism and provincialism of the New York art world became painfully obvious."4

Childhood memories, she noted, were a source of inspiration for many of the artists: "Zakanitch's grand­mother's wallpaper, Schapiro's yard sales, and trips up and down the escalators at Bloomingdale's."5 The P&D artists also exalted polychrome pottery, Celtic illumina­tions, woven carpets, tiled walls, printed silks, Persian miniatures, quilted blankets -"everything," as Robert Kushner puts it, "that was left out of Janson's History of Art."6 Some artists actually learned the skills associated with these "minor" art fo1111s - MacConnel and Kushner spent time repairing antique kilims - while others just quoted them, as painted motifs. Even modernist abstrac­tion, notionally the movement's antithesis, was part of its hybrid vocabulary. Schapiro had previously been a hard-edge painter, as had Goldin before establishing her­self as a critic. Jaudon has retained a singularly rigorous formalism over the course of her long career, malting paintings that are equally in dialogue with Islamic callig­raphy, Gothic architecture, and early Frank Stella.

What the P&D artists did reject was modernist restraint. As if it had left them ravenous, they gorged themselves on inspirations of all kinds, all at once, from cultures across the world and throughout history. This "promiscuity," Katz argues, is what made P&D such a crucial breakthrough. It inaugurated a new phase of art history, a phase that we still and may for­ever inhabit, in which any qualitative hierarchy that manages to establish itself is considered ipso facto illegitimate. The movement's members understood the gravity of this. To truly accept decoration as equal to fine art, Goldin saw, was "to deny the very possi­bility of revolution -art history is just one thing after another."7 John Perreault, poet and critic, agreed: "art proceeds -it does not progress."8 Artist Jeff Perrone more positively described a "new space where the low an_d the high no longer battle it out: we're at peace and breathing again."9 This is why we are seeing so many shows about P&D now. Its enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism and multiplicity feels like a far more useful model for the present than the nihilistic end­ game of postmodernism. Why mourn the death of the author, if we can all be authors together?

But this utopian impulse presents its own difficulties. At the time, Pattern and Decoration was often dismissed because its sources were thought to be trivial. Today, when discourse about cultural appropriation is much further developed, the problem looks to be the opposite: we respect other cultures too much to treat them as quarries to mine. It is true that, as curator and critic Michael Duncan writes in the catalogue for "Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise," "the cross-cultural pillaging" undertaken by these artists was intended to "bend and expand the tropes of Western art."10 However, as Katz points out, though the P&D group never intended to be exploitative, "appreciation does not always hold up as a defense against appropriation."11 Kozloff puts it suc­cinctly: "We were honest, but naive."12

In assessing this critical question, it is important to bear in mind that while the Pattern and Decoration artists were exclusively white men and women, they hardly saw themselves as powerful arbiters of the art world. ("With Pleasure" includes figures like Sam Gilliam, Al Loving, and Howardena Pindell, but there was little direct contact between these artists and the core P&D group.) For its time, though, the Pattern and Decoration movement was unusual in advancing mar­ginalized voices and vocabularies. Kushner describes it as "a coming out about what we were attracted to," suggesting an implicit queer aesthetic, but its most evi­dent ideological allegiance was with feminism.13

Pattern and Decoration artists saw the history of women's work-particularly domestic crafts -as a forgotten canon that could be reclaimed as a source of contemporary expression. Connections to the feminist movement were numerous: Schapiro had been one of the leaders of the Womanhouse project at CalArts in 1972, some early and important texts by members of the P&D group were published in the feminist journal Heresies, and several of the participants were involved in consciousness-raising and other practices. For Kozloff and Schapiro, especially, an interest in women's art led to an exploration of Asian, African, and Latin American cultures, where techniques like weaving and pottery are more often practiced by female artisans. This way of bringing politics into art also resonated with artists outside the main group: the prominent feminist and conceptual artist Elaine Reichek says, "when I heard 'pattern,' I thought about knitting patterns, develop­mental patterns, patterns of colonialism.''14 P&D was, then, a generative model, one that remains pertinent for recent art. Its preferred technique of "cut-and-paste" has rightly come to be seen as an inadequate way of dealing with cultural difference. But it was ahead of its time in advancing an intersectional aesthetics, in which identity is conceived as a matter of selective affinity.

It is important to emphasize that while P&D did make room for visual pleasure, and plenty of it, it was not hedonistic. The movement has occasionally been treated as a welcome relief from thinking too hard - as in a Hyperallergic article by Anne Swartz about the current exhibitions, which enthuses, "art has again decid­ed to BE HAPPY and make pretty." (Caps very much in the original,)15 But there was more method than madness in the movement. One revelation of "With Pleasure" is its inclusion of the Criss-Cross collective, based in Boulder, Colorado_ This countercultural exper­iment, which emerged from the famed 1960s hippie commune Drop City, was devoted to pursuing pattern as an anti-hierarchical force, a "democracy of parts," in the words of its n1ember George Woodman (husband of the great ceramist Betty Woodman).16

The Criss-Cross painters, who also included Gloria Klein and Clark Reichert, were fascinated by systems of symmetry and tessellation. Most of the core P&D group did not share this interest in hard-core math­ematics, an exception being Tony Robbin, whose paintings were informed by his studies of four-di­mensional geometry. The others did, however, bring an equally rigorous consideration to more culturally embedded patterns. Kozloff made the astute obser­vation that ornament was a "third category of art," neither abstract nor mimetic, but just as susceptible to theorization as either.17 As early as 1966, in an essay in Arts magazine, Goldin had reacted to debates over opticality-which pitted Clement Greenberg's ideal of visual transcendence against the flickering, transitory effects of Op art-by doing something few other critics bothered to: looking closely at the mate­rial substance of the works. (She hilariously described Jules Olitski's spray technique, for example, as pro­ducing an effect that was "airy, rather flatulent.") This led her to conclude that "the formal problem of the incompatibility of visual mass and optical space " -that is, the attempt to narrow the distance between the image and what it was made from -had led to "the so-called emptiness and reductiveness of contemporary painting." Goldin predicted this would not last: "Artists are not notably renunciatory-they don't give up anything they want."18

It took her about a decade, but in decoration, Goldin obviously felt that she found the answer to this conundrum. Her 1975 essay "Patterns, Grids, and Paintings," as close as the P&D movement ever came to having a manifesto, argues that rugs and ceramic tiles have an intrinsic density and complexity, thanks to the inextricable relationship between their visual and material registers. This produces an aesthetic object that is "incredibly tough," able to accommodate interruption and variation in a way that conventional abstract painting cannot. She also distinguished between the autonomy of the modernist artwork and the contingency of pattern, which actually gains in effect when placed in a strong context: "The con­ceptual richness of pattern can be fully realized only through the juxtaposition of related patterns."19 This was an inversion of the usual assumption of decorative inconsequentiality. In effect, Goldin was saying that pattern had everything that modern art lacked, or per­haps, had simply lost touch with. A rug was something to look up to.

Perrone adopted a similarly positive view of contin­gency. Writing of the signature P&D maneuver of the floating motif-excised from a source image and res­caled, as in MacConnel's spliced-together paintings -he argued: "Decoration becomes decontextualized by virtue of its being borrowed .... Removed from its usual role, the decoration becomes both sign and design, both itself and quoted material (as in the dual situation of [Jasper] Johns's Flags)."20 In retrospect, this line of thought, which borrowed from the semiotic theory then just coming into fashion, suggests 011.e area of overlap with post­ modern theory. The idea that decoration can be at once itself and a reference to "the decorative " at large -both a visual and a value system-resonates with the "double coding " that design theorist Charles Jencks claimed for communicative architecture. For Perrone, an early adopt­er of deconstructivist theory, that duality also related to Jacques Derrida's concept of differance -the inconclusive quality of language, which always remains open to sub­sequent interpretation, and derives its meaning through endlessly ramifying internal difference. It was just this sort of open-endedness that Perrone found in the decora­tive, writing that it can "always be understood as other than, different from any base or established basis or bias. ... Grid and function, as paradigms of the ideal and real grounding, are the very bases from which the decorative deviates and flies free: it flutters on their surfaces."21

Once we see past the lush opulence of Pattern and Decoration -looking it in the eye, as Hamza Walker says -it becomes legible by putting these ideas into practice. Kozloff's installation An Interior Decorated (1978-80) demonstrates the power of rich juxtaposition that Goldin advocated. The work beautifully embodies Perrone's notion of decoration that is both applied and autonomous, dressing the gallery in a riot of vertical and horizontal planes of ceramic tile and printed silk that are raised off the walls and floors on columns and a platform. Kozloff emphasized this matter-of-factness, writing that she wanted to escape the "metaphors" in her earlier works, which transcribed ornamental motifs into abstract compositions, and instead create an environment in which the ornament would be lit­eral and physically palpable."22

If Kozloff reclaimed architectural space for the pure­ly decorative, Schapiro folded the logic of patterning inward, into dense compositions. In her "femmage" paintings -the term is a portmanteau of feminine, col­lage, and homage -multiple fragmentary patterns are arranged and overlaid, sometimes in an intentionally sentimental format like a heart or a fan.23 These works manifest a deconstructivist technique comparable to the one Perrone pursued in his writings, for example, in the way that their frames cascade right into the core of the images; as Auther notes, this "complicate[s] the categorization of ornament or decoration as merely supplemental, secondary, or peripheral to the 'real' or deeper meaning of a work."24 As with Kozloff, materiality was of the utmost importance for Schapiro: she used fabric, glitter, handmade paper, and other elements associated with hobby craft. In Perrone's terms, these materials were in a "dual situation," both a signifier of craft and the genuine article. Schapiro was simultane­ously indicating her political sympathies with unherald­ed amateur makers, and also forcing the question of her own status, and by implication that of any professional artist, into the open. Who, she implicitly asl
It is this last idea that constitutes the Pattern and Decoration movement's most enduring challenge. Zakanitch and Kushner were once asl
Not every P&D artist would have gone that far, even rhetorically. But all felt that the art world was far, far bigger than had previously been imagined. And they were willing to think through the implications of that dramatic inclusiveness, in ways we are still catching up to today. Ultimately, this may come down not so much to celebration -a word that gets thrown in P&D's direc­tion frequently-but rather to modesty. They saw that art is itself in a "differential" condition, gaining much of its meaning through adjacencies and affinities.•

Glenn Adamson is a critic and art historian based in New York.

1Hamza Walker, "Rebecca Morris and the Revenge of P&D," in Anna Katz, ed., With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972-1985, New Haven, Yale University Press/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2019, p. 182. 'In his review of the first (and until recently, last) retrospective P&D exhi­bition, "Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975-1985," held at the Hudson River Museum in late 2007, Cotter added that it was "also the first and only art movement of the post-modern era and may prove to be the last art movement ever." Cotter, "Scaling a Minimalist Wall with Bright, Shiny Colors," New York Times, Jan. 15, 2008, p.El. 3Thomas Lawson, "Last Exit: Painting," Artforum, October 1981, p. 40. 'Joyce Kozloff and Robert Kushner, "Pattern, Decoration and Tony Robbin," Artcritical, Aug. 2, 2011, artcritical.com 5 Ibid. 6 Author's interview with Robert Kushner, New York, June 29, 2019. 'Amy Goldin, "Rugs" (1972), in Robert Kushner, ed., Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt: Art Criticism 1964-1978, Stockbridge, Mass., Hard Press Editions, 2011, p. 118. 8 John Perreault, "Issues in Pattern Painting," Artforum, Nov. 1977, p. 32. 9 Jeff Perrome, "Every Criticism is Self-Abuse," Arts Magazine, June 1980, p. 110-17. '° Michael Duncan, "More Than What Meets the Eye: The Continued Relevance and Legacy of Pattern and Decoration," in Esther Boehle and Manuela Ammer, eds., Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise, Cologne, Walther Konig, 2018, p. 15. 11Anna Katz, "Lessons in Promiscuity: Patterning and the New p.47. 12Joyce Kozloff, email to the author, July 11, 2019. 13Interview with Robert Kushner, New York, June 29, 2019.

In a nuanced consideration of this alignment, art historian Anne Swartz cautions, "Feminism helped make P&D possi­ble. But it was not a Feminist movement." Swartz, "Pattern and Decoration a11d Feminism," in Boehle and Ammer, eds., Pattern and Decoration, p. 24. 14 Author's interview with Elaine Reichek, New York, July 10, 2019. 05 Anne Swartz, "The Pattern and Decoration Zeitgeist," Hyperallergic, June 13, 2018. hyperallergic.com. "Quoted in Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery, "Infinite Progress: Criss-Cross and the Gender of Pattern Painting," in With Pleasure, p. 117. "Quoted in Arthur C. Danto, "Pattern and Decoration as a Late Modernist Movement," in Pattern and Decoration: An Ideal Vision in American Art, ed. Anne Swartz, Yonkers, New York, Hudson River Museum, 2007, p.10." Amy Goldin, "A Note on Opticality," Arts Magazine,May 1966; reprinted in Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt: Art Criticism 1964-1978, ed. Robert Kushner, Stockbridge, Mass., Hard Press Editions, 2011, p. 41. "Amy Goldin, "Patterns, Grids, and Painting," Artforum, Sept. 1975; reprinted in Kushner, ed., Art in a Hairshirt, p. 167. 20 Jeff Perrone, "Approaching the Decorative," Artforum, December 1976, p.26. "Jeff Perrone, "Do Not Throw Stone at Mouse and Break Precious Vase," in New Decorative Works from the Collection of Norma and William Roth, Orlando, Fla., Loch Haven Art Center, 1983, p. 10. As quoted in Katz, "Lessons in Promiscuity," p.33. For a related discussion, see my essay "Craft and the Allegorical Impulse," in Knut Astrup Bull and Andre Gali, eds., Material Perceptions, Stuttgart, Arnoldsche, 2018, pp. 93-114. ''Joyce Kozloff, artist's statement for "An Interior Decorated," Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1979. 23Tl1e term was introduced by Schapiro and artist Melissa Meyer in "Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled-Femmage," Heresies, Winter 1977-78, pp. 66-69. 24 Elissa Auther, "Miriam Schapiro and the Politics of the Decorative," in Katz, ed., With Pleasure, p. 79. 25 For more on this point see Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Oxford, Berg, 2007, p. 31. 26 Interview with Kushner, June 29, 2019. See also Katz, "Lessons in Promiscuity," p. 38.