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

That's as close as MacConnel's art gets to traditional respectability. The final alcove was jampacked with works that add travel snapshots and promotional photographs, either enlarged or regular size, to the dizzying mix. Masai Frau (1992) is a billboard-scale panel with two movie stills and five shots of Africa scattered across its jazzy surface. Meilleurs Voeux (1990) is a flimsy, 16-foot-long frame adorned with cardboard cutouts and blown-up photos of an African man pumping gas and another herding cattle up a rocky mountainside. Chinese embroiderers and Middle Eastern townsfolk appear in other works, whose frames are made of scrap wood and cut-up cardboard boxes, hastily painted black or white.

Always interested in redeeming viewers from closed-minded inattentiveness to happenstance, MacConnel's art throws a spotlight on the accidental beauty all around us. Indeed, one of the best things about "Parrot Talk" was that it changed the way one sees the world. For hours after leaving the show, almost everything that came into view looked like out-of-control decoration, or at least a madcap pattern in the making. Cars stuck in traffic, rows of telephone poles and the shadows of palm fronds on blacktop rarely look so inspired. The effect included some works of art, which seemed to be given new life by the manically animated patterns that stuck in the mind's eye long after visiting MacConnel's show.

Paradoxically, it was in the two group exhibitions, "LAPD: Los Angeles Pattern & Decoration" and "NYPD: New York Pattern & Decoration," that this tendency to see everything as potential decoration screeched to a halt. Viewing works by artists dedicated to high levels of finish, polish and craftsmanship (like Jim Isermann and Valerie Jaudon) or hard-edge abstraction (Karl Benjamin and Linda Besemer), or inspired by Op art (Polly Apfelbaum and Albert Contreras) or high-tech design (Carl Fudge and Virgil Marti), in such proximity to MacConnel's radically casual conflations of gesture and pattern was the visual equivalent of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard.

Intellectually, the juxtaposition made sense. But experientially, it was jarring. It highlighted the messiness of MacConnel's art, emphasizing the side of his work that's funky, grungy and deliciously indiscriminate. Although an abiding commitment to sensuality, visual stimulation and its satisfaction in resplendent, physical things united all of the works in the two group exhibitions--which also suggestively sketched influences from one generation to the next two--what stood out most dramatically was the absence of the nutty rambunctiousness of MacConnel's art, which is the only real canstant in his diverse works from the 1970s to the present. Compared to his hybrid wall works and collages, the legacy of Pattern and Decoration looked mild mannered, well behaved and tidied up--not quite corporate or academic, but not nearly as raw, unkempt and unruly as anything MacConnel ever got his hands on.

MacConnel's roots may go back to the Summer of Love and the Age of Aquarius, but his art packs a punch that's unmistakably punk: barbed, loaded and fueled by the fervor of a dyed-in-the-wool do-it-yourselfer. Calmness is not MacConnel's strong suit. Vigor, not voluptuousness, is his modus operandi. And there's nothing languid about Iris works, which leave no room for long, lazy afternoons. Simultaneously slapdash and rigorous, his pieces lead equally to the art of Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and Jeffrey Vallance as to that of Lari Pittman, Philip Taaffe and Jorge Pardo. Even the slacker scatter mentality of such artists as Sarah Sze, Jason Rhoades and Jessica Stockholder finds solid footing in MacConnel's disciplined willingness to pile it on. This impulse is Kerouactan. It embodies wide-eyed, open-armed adventurism. It's fast and furious ornamentation punctuated by edgy abandon and urgent glee. MacConnel brings this impulse indoors without pretending to tame it.