MacConnel unbound: a three-decade survey traced the high-spirited, sly and frequently impudent art of West Coast Pattern and Decoration pioneer Kim MacConnel - Report from Santa Monica I

Art in America, Feb, 2004 by David Pagel

Just what is it that makes Kim MacConnel's art so different, so appealing? Part of the answer resides in what he did for decoration--not to mention pattern--in the mid-1970s. If MacConnel and his cohorts Amy Goldin and Robert Kushner at the University of California, San Diego, did not make the West Coast safe for curlicues, hand-painted designs and wacky ornamentation when they helped found the Pattern and Decoration movement, they at least made a place for outlandish visual vigor, exuberant fun and vibrant Fop colors at a time dominated by the stripped-bare seriousness of Conceptual art's mental gymnastics and the bombastic grandeur of Earthworks. Both of those ascendant movements regarded transportable art objects as if they were little more than pathetic concessions to a bourgeoisie eager to bedeck its walls with accoutrements of privilege. The artist's "touch" was merely the sentimental hokum of yesteryear's tastemakers, while artificial color--or artifice of any sort--was dismissed as if it were as frivolous as so many girlish shades of makeup.

As a graduate student, MacConnel had little interest in art that so eagerly sacrificed domestic-scaled objects, handmade gestures and bold colors in the name of intellectual integrity and high moral purpose. It wasn't the first time a Californian made works that were everything the Establishment wasn't. In MacConnel's case, however, flying in the face of convention was not merely a matter of rejecting a single dominant position. Los Angeles's leading artists had already defined themselves in opposition to the intellectualism and historical portent of New York by advancing their own brand of West Coast hedonism--a fantasy of fun-and-sun playfulness made famous by the slick surfaces of Fetish Finish works and the trippy, perceptual refinements of Light and Space installations. MacConnel went further--or elsewhere. Based some two hours south of L.A. in San Diego, where he has lived since 1968, he operated at one remove from the either/or opposition of Los Angeles/New York. His art dispensed with the highly polished look and stylized Zen sophistication of the works by his northern neighbors as well as with the anti-object and idea-oriented extremes prevalent on the East Coast.

The messy rambunctiousness that runs full speed ahead throughout all of MacConnel's paintings, drawings, collages, furniture and photographs is the biggest revelation of "Parrot Talk: A Retrospective of Works by Kim MacConnel," which was ably organized and intelligently installed by guest curator Michael Duncan for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. No U.S. museum has yet presented a comprehensive exhibition on the Pattern and Decoration movement, so Duncan enlisted five galleries across the Bergamot Station parking lot to mount shows featuring related works: "LAPD: Los Angeles Pattern & Decoration" (at Rosamund Felsen) and "NYPD: New York Pattern & Decoration" (at Shoshana Wayne), along with one-person exhibitions by Robert Zakanitch (at Patricia Faure), Betty Woodman (at Frank Lloyd), and Carla Arocha and Michelle Grabner (at Richard Heller).

At the heart of MacConnel's 30-year oeuvre is an irreverent, anarchic sense of humor that links it to the hilariously flatfooted image-and-text works of John Baldessari (whose hometown is nearby National City). Both artists expand the parameters of collage, transforming its traditional, cut-and-paste placement of images atop one another to pieced-together fragments lined up side by side, sometimes neatly and sometimes unevenly. Very little overlaps in either artist's laterally oriented pieces, which expand outward, like the suburbs, rather than build upward, like urban centers.

The deadpan elan that animates Edward Ruscha's picture books and painterly conflations of language, illusionism and abstraction plays an equally significant role in MacConnel's over-the-top arrangements of hand-painted fabrics, which also combine components of all shapes, sizes and stripes in festive mongrels that make a mockery of the boundaries between mediums, not to mention the distinction between supposedly lowly craft and highly ambitious fine art. Although Ruscha's Pop icons may seem too wry and cool for MacConnel's hot, clashing patterns, both artists plant their feet firmly in the ordinary stuff of everyday life. More importantly, each in his own way demonstrates that having your cake and eating it, too, is not a problem for art in Southern California. Here, seemingly antagonistic styles and conventions are more likely to inhabit the same plane and intermingle promiscuously, just as they do on the street, where commerce and cosmopolitanism make for far more interesting exchanges than exclusively formal ones.

What marks MacConnel as an original is his shameless embrace of decoration and the messiness with which he manifests his vision of a world run riot with dots, dashes and zigzags. His spirited assaults on highbrow sanctimony are loudly and liberally interspersed with sinuous lines, slapdash shapes and simplified renditions of bounty, beauty and leisure--fruits and vegetables, flowers and fleurs-de-lis, barns and buses--all adrift in faded or saturated fields of color. MacConnel's cacophonous, cobbled-together compositions are made to hold their own in the real world. They don't need the lily-white walls of galleries and museums, nor would their visual impact be significantly diminished by less chastely hospitable settings.