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

"Parrot Talk" flaunted a hippie crash-pad sensibility. Interior walls were built to divide the museum's huge, pillarless space into five staggered alcoves to accommodate roughly 40 works. The first two alcoves were hung with MacConnel's signature wall works, vertical strips of cotton fabric that are painted in loose, often sloppy patterns and sewn together to form circuslike banners. Some, like Gold Lame (1973), Silver and Blue (1973), Made in Korea (1977) and Des Moines (1978), are entirely abstract. Others, among them Red Lantern (1975), Collection Applied Design (1975) and Raindrops Pattering on Banana Leaves (1976), include images such as a Chinese planter, a group of handheld Japanese fans and a slice of dense jungle foliage. Imagery asserts itself more dramatically in Parrot Talk (1979), Victrola (1980) and Thunderbomb (1980), signaling a shift away from rhythmic patterning toward implicit narrative. Some of the characters in MacConnel's nascent stories include a hawk disguised as a parrot and an octopus paired with a California brown bear in need of a meal.

All of these stitched-together works hang loosely on the wall. All are painted in acrylic on thin cotton fabric. The colors are not nearly as intense or saturated as they are in subsequent pieces. Instead, they have the presence of old T-shirts and jeans, favorite articles of clothing whose colors have faded and whose fabrics have softened as they've gotten more and more comfortable. By contrast, in the center of the first gallery was a room's worth of furniture: a sofa, chair, coffee table, lamp and rug. Rescued from a thrift store and swiftly painted with clashing linear patterns, MacConnel's cheap vinyl furniture is too trashy and forlorn to suggest the well-worn comforts of beloved garments. Rather it embodies the unlovely, rough-around-the-edges intent of his work, which delights in affronting the polite snobbery of good taste. Top Dollar (1979), hung nearby, does something similar. It is one of the few works in which MacConnel has painted repeated images over printed plaid patterns. The nearly 10-foot-long wall-hanging is so hard to focus on that its effect is almost nauseating.

Two groups of works were interspersed in the next two alcoves; each takes up one of the two procedures MacConnel tried to fuse in Top Dollar. The first consists of found elements stitched together in piecemeal compositions. Flourishing Sideline Occupations (1978), for example, is a head-spinning collision of swatches of wildly patterned fabric so busy and conflicting that they make the craziest crazy quilts look staid. Likewise, Miss Piggy (carpet), 1985, is an irregular grid of small homemade hooked rugs that MacConnel found in thrift stores and sewed together to make a room-size carpet. It's so materially pathetic yet tightly structured that you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

The second group consists of abstract paintings on stretched canvases. Upper Volta (1986) looks like a kid's coloring book gone awry. Roman Landscape (1986) is even messier; its approximated primary and secondary colors jockey for position against the three empty picture frames MacConnel has affixed to its surface. And both Cara Dos Mil (1988) and Volta (1988) stand out precisely because their formats, paint-handling and compositions are utterly conventional. Their neatly painted angular shapes, dots, waves and zigzags, all in unmodulated blocks of bright color, would add up to perfectly traditional paintings if not for the flocking MacConnel sprayed on some sections.