Glittering gardens: in his paintings on antique Japanese screens and sliding doors, veteran Pattern and Decoration artist Robert Kushner brings a high degree of opulence to a melange of Eastern and Western influences

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Edward M. Gomez

In the three decades since Robert Kushner emerged on the national scene as a member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, his art has taken a wide variety of forms, from black-and-white large-scale drawings executed directly on walls to paintings on stitched-together patches of fabric, collaborative artists' books and large-scale mosaics. Kushner was a precocious talent in his early 20s when his work, like that of his Pattern and Decoration comrades Kim MacConnel, Valerie Jaudon and Robert Zakanitch, first appeared in galleries in the U.S. and Europe. A thematic consistency has continued to frame his research and prompt his ongoing experiments with materials and techniques. Kushner has always been a deliberative artist; even his early, light and seemingly uncomplicated works were informed by copious research.

Despite the vicissitudes of a marketplace that has embraced and rejected dozens of styles and movements since the time of his professional coming-of-age, Kushner has maintained his focus on the esthetics of what he has referred to as the "fully resolved" art object. Some of his art-making may have unwittingly employed what postmodernism's adherents might identify as a "strategy of appropriation" here or a "recontextualization" of an art genre there, but he never set out to make works as exercises in postmodernist theory per se. There may be a temptation to read Kushner's borrowings or reworkings of ideas, materials or techniques from other cultures as critiques of or attempts to "deconstruct" them. The artist insists, though, that his objective has been the assimilation and understanding of his sources, not their subversive conquest.

Kushner's art, which in its early years looked and felt refreshingly handmade and spontaneous, especially in contrast to the industrially fabricated precision of the era's cool Minimalism, has become more refined as it has evolved and matured--particularly his most recent painted works, which use Japanese screens or sliding-door panels as supports. He has brought to greater prominence his sophisticated, historically informed techniques, his effective use of materials and his pursuit of elegant, lavish form. It is as if he has traded loose cotton trousers for a tuxedo, and freewheeling experimentation for tighter control. Yet he has also built into the new works a certain degree of spontaneity, incorporating chance operations in their production, and keeping in mind some guiding principles about beauty and art's spiritual values.

Already during his undergraduate years at the University of California at San Diego, where he studied with the art historian and critic Amy Goldin (1926-1978), Kushner became intrigued by works of art and design in which pattern was key: "carpets, textiles, and Islamic decoration--works that were extremely complex and required time and attention to decode," as he says. (1) (Newly arrived in New York from the West Coast in the early 1970s, Kushner worked as a restorer and collector of Oriental carpets.) Goldin, who had attended the University of Chicago and later the Art Students' League and the Hans Hofmann School in New York, was a visiting lecturer at U.C. San Diego in 1969-70. A stickler for exact definitions of art terms and precision in language in general, she taught a seminar in which both Kushner and MacConnel were enrolled. Although she had studied with Hofmann and exhibited her own work, by the time Kushner met Goldin, she had stopped painting. (2) Bringing her penchant for exacting observation to her interest in the history of decoration, Goldin became, Kushner recalled, his and MacConnel's "intellectual guide." She persuaded Kushner to move to New York, and their student-mentor relationship deepened. Their critical dialogue focused on the essentials of decoration, which Goldin characterized as being flat, infinitely expansive (a true pattern, she noted, could be continued indefinitely) and inherently without meaning. "If it has too much content, it's not decorative," Kushner observes, paraphrasing one of Goldin's maxims.

In 1974, Goldin and Kushner traveled together to Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, where they visited mosques, tombs and gardens in Istanbul and in Mongol-era towns along the old Silk Road. Kushner's moment of artistic epiphany came when he and Goldin found themselves at a remote tomb tower in Sultaniyeh, in northwestern Iran. The sight of the centuries-old structure, covered in ornate mosaics and undergoing restoration, struck the young artist with awe. "Seeing that tomb tower, I wanted to refocus my work," he recalls. He recognized then, he says, that in the culture of ancient Persia, "the greatest minds had been making decoration." In an instant, he was "no longer interested in the kind of male feminism--frilly aprons and gender roles" that he had previously addressed, and his own in-depth investigation of decoration began in earnest.

During the mid- to late 1970s, buoyed by his interaction with his Pattern and Decoration peers, who were increasingly experiencing success at home and abroad (in New York, activity centered around the Holly Solomon Gallery, where a number of them, including Kushner, were showing), Kushner made exuberantly colored, even flamboyant, painted-fabric works that were often influenced by fashion or costume. He rarely focused on a single pattern, but routinely cut up and collaged hand-painted pieces, inspired in part by the ikat-weave textiles of Uzbekistan, in which patterned fabric patches are stitched together in decorative wall hangings. Thus, in painted acrylic-on-cotton works like The Lake and the Forest (1975), Kushner stitched together six vertical panels of homemade, patterned fabric (featuring a melange of roughly sketched plants, geometric forms and wavy. lines) to create a monumental, horizontal piece nearly 20 feet wide. Presented in this way, the elements seemed to churn like the suds and clothes in the window of a front-loading washing machine. In large, multipart works like Cincinnati ABC (1978), arrangements of randomly shaped, round or vertical pieces of fabric, all differently patterned (and made of painted cotton with nylon appliques) sprawled across several walls like giant swatches of origami paper. In reproductions, they seem to have held their own in the vast whiteness of the walls against which they were hung.