THE DECORATIVE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ART: A STORY OF DECLINE AND RESURGENCE
PAMELA GAUNT
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Art Theory
Postgraduate Board, University of New South Wales
August 2005 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname or Family name: GAUNT First name: Pamela Other name/s: Mary Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MA (Art Theory) School: School of Art History/Theory Faculty: COFA Title: The Decorative in Twentieth Century Art: A Story of Decline and Resurgence. Abstract: This thesis tracks the complex relationship between visual art and the decorative in the Twentieth Century. In doing so, it makes a claim for the ongoing interest and viability of decorative practices within visual art, in the wake of their marginalisation within Modernist art and theory.
The study is divided into three main sections. First, it demonstrates and questions the exclusion of the decorative within the central currents of modernism. Second, it examines the resurgence of the decorative in postmodern art and theory. This section is based on case studies of a number of postmodern artists whose work gained notice in the 1980s, and which evidences a sustained engagement with a decorative or ornamental aesthetic. The artists include Rosemarie Trockel, Lucas Samaras, Philip Taaffe, and several artists from the Pattern and Decoration Painting Movement of the 1970s. The final component of the study investigates the function and significance of the decorative in the work of a selection of Australian and international contemporary artists. The art of Louise Paramor, Simon Periton and Do-Ho Suh is examined in detail. In addition, the significance of the late work of Henri Matisse is analysed for its relevance to contemporary art practice that employs decorative procedures. The thesis put forward is that an historical reversal has occurred in recent decades, where the decorative has once again become a significant force in experimental visual art.
Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).
Signature Witness Date ……….……………………...…….………………………………………..……………………………….. The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing to the Registrar. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances if accompanied by a letter of support from the Supervisor or Head of School. Such requests must be submitted with the thesis/dissertation. FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award: Registrar and Deputy Principal THIS SHEET IS TO BE GLUED TO THE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF THE THESIS Acknowledgements: I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr Toni Ross, Head of the School of Art History, Theory, University of New South Wales, for her guidance, academic rigour, and patience with the progress of this thesis. Without Toni’s support and commitment, this project would not have been possible.
I am also indebted to Marco Marcon for his advice, feedback, and support in the development of the thesis.
In addition, I am grateful to the staff in the Department of Art, Faculty of Built Environment, Art and Design, Curtin University of Technology, who have assisted and supported this endeavour. I must also thank the Division of Humanities, Curtin University of Technology, for supporting my ASL in 2002, which enabled me to spend some time researching in Sydney.
Finally, I would like to thank my family who have supported me during the long process of this project. ORIGINALITY STATEMENT I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have beenaccepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.
Signed …Pamela Gaunt…………………………………………...... Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER ONE: MODERNISM AND THE DECORATIVE...... 9 THE DECORATIVE AND ORNAMENT BEFORE MODERNISM ...... 9 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM...... 15 THE VALUES OF MODERNIST PURISM...... 22 RE-ASSESSING ADOLF LOOS’ CRITIQUE OF ORNAMENT...... 26 BINARIES OF PURIST MODERNISM ...... 37 GREENBERGIAN MODERNISM AND ELITE CULTURE ...... 59 CHAPTER TWO:POSTMODERNISM AND THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE DECORATIVE...... 67 INTRODUCTION: THE POSTMODERN DEPARTURE FROM MODERNIST MAXIMS...... 67 TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE PARADIGM OF ART PRACTICE – THE RETURN OF MODERNISM’S OTHERS...... 71 THE DECORATIVE AS A SUBVERSIVE ELEMENT IN THE WORK OF 1980S ARTISTS...... 97 CHAPTER THREE: THE DECORATIVE AND ORNAMENT RECONSIDERED IN CONTEMPORARY ART...... 120 HENRI MATISSE AND THE DECORATIVE...... 121 CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE DECORATIVE ...... 130 CONCLUSION ...... 175 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 179 List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Pablo Picasso, The Italian Woman, 1917, oil on canvas, 149.5 x 101.5cm. Stiftung Sammlung E.G.Bührle, Zurich (page 19).
Figure 2. Paul Klee, Assytrian Game, 1923, oil on cardboard, mounted on cardboard, 37 x 51cm. Private collection (page 19).
Figure 3. Adolf Loos, Steiner House, 1910 (page 33).
Figure 4. Adolf Loos, Villa Karma, library, 1930 (page 34).
Figure 5. Adolf Loos, Villa Karma, bathroom, 1930 (page 34).
Figure 6. Miriam Schapiro, Anatomy of a Kimono, detail, 1975-76. Fabric and acrylic on canvas (5 of 10 panels), whole 6’8” x 52’ 1/2”. Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich (page 85).
Figure 7. Miriam Schapiro, Lady Gengi’s Maze, 1972. Acrylic and Fabric on canvas, 72 x 80” (page 86).
Figure 8. Joyce Kozloff, Three Facades, 1973. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 59”. Collection Massachusetts Institute of Technology (page 89). Figure 9. Vestibule view of Amtrak station, Wilmington, Delaware, 1984. Hand-painted glazed ceramic tiles, 30 x 20 x 15’ (page 89).
Figure 10. Joyce Kozloff, An Interior Decorated, 1980, at Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, September 1980. This piece is one of several installations, started in 1978 and completed in 1979. Hand-painted, glazed ceramic tile floor, pilasters with grout and plywood, silk screened hanging silks, lithographs on silk laminated on rice paper (page 90).
Figure 11. Valerie Jaudon, Bellefontaine, 1976. Oil and metallic pigment on canvas, 72 x 72”. Holly Solomon Gallery, New York (page 94).
Figure 12. Valerie Jaudon, Ballet Russe, 1993. Oil on canvas, 90 x 108”. Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (page 95).
Figure 13. Rosemarie Trockel, Joy, 1988. Machine knitted wool, 210 x 175cm (page 102).
Figure 14. Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled, 1988. Machine knitted wool, 2 panels, overall 2 x 3.2m (page 103).
Figure 15. Lucas Samaras, Box #94, 1976. Mixed media, 13 x 13 x 26”. Saatchi Collection, London (page 108).
Figure 16. Lucas Samaras, Chair Transformation #10A, 1969-70. Formica, wood, and wool, 38 x 20 x 20”. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (page 109). Figure 17. Philip Taaffe, Old Cairo, 1989. Monoprint, acrylic on linen, 231 x 172 cm. Daros Collection (page 114).
Figure 18. Philip Taaffe, Painting with Diatoms (1997). Mixed media on canvas, 137 x 167 cm. Daros Collection (page 115).
Figure 19. Henri Matisse, A wall of cut-outs at Matisse’s villa, Le Rêve, Vence, 1947 (page 125).
Figures 20 & 21. Henri Matisse, Oceania the Sky 1946, 166 x 380 cm., and Oceania the Sea, 1946, 177 x 370 cm. Silk-screen printed on linen after paper cut-out maquette. Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (page 126).
Figure 22 a. Henri Matisse, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, in progress, Nice. Gouche on cut paper (page 129) .
Figure 22 b. The Parakeet and the Mermaid, finished version, 1952. Gouache on cut and pasted paper, 337 x 773 cm. Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum (page 129).
Figure 23. Louise Paramor, Lustgarten, installation, 2000. Cut paper wood, glue, dimensions variable (page 136).
Figure 24. Louise Paramor, Detail, Lustgarten, 2000. Cut paper, wood, glue, no size noted (page 139). Figure 25. Louise Paramor, Chandelier for World Without End exhibition, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne. Aluminium foil, staples, 5 m (page 141).
Figure 26. Louise Paramor, Chandelier, installation Schloss Pillnitz, Dresden, Germany, 2000. Cut paper, no size noted (page 141).
Figure 27. Louise Paramor, Detail, Lustgarten, 2000 (page 146).
Figure 28. Simon Periton, Small Anarchy Doily, 1996. Cut paper, 51 x 21 cm (page 150).
Figure 29. Simon Periton, Your War My Love, 1996. Cut paper, 840 x 420 cm (page 151).
Figure 30. Simon Periton, Breathless, 1998. Cut paper, 28 x 31 cm. Unilever plc Contemporary Art Collection (page 156).
Figure 31. Simon Periton, Notorious B.L.Z., 2002. Cut paper, 208 x 129 cm. Lindemann Collection, Miami Beach, Florida (page 157).
Figure 32. Simon Periton, The Hole in the Wall Doily, 1996. Cut paper, 51 x 76 cm. Destroyed (page 160).
Figure 33. Do-Ho Suh, Floor, 2001. installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Mixed media, dimensions variable (page 165). Figure 34. Do-Ho Suh, Who Am We?–Green, 2001, installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Printed wallpaper, dimensions variable (page 166).
Figure 35. Do-Ho Suh, Floor, 2001, detail of installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Mixed media, dimensions variable (page 170).
Figure 36a. Do-Ho Suh, Some/One, 2001, installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Stainless steel military dog tags, nickel plated copper sheets, glass fibre reinforced resin, stainless steel structure, rubber sheets (page 172).
Figure 36b. Do-Ho Suh, Some/One, detail of installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale, 2001. Stainless steel military dog tags, nickel plated copper sheets, glass fibre reinforced resin, stainless steel structure, rubber sheets (page 172). INTRODUCTION
This thesis maps the complex relationship between ornament, or the decorative, and visual art in the twentieth century. In much of modernist art and theory, ornament was relegated to the margins of the art system as a meaningless, superficial practice. This study analyses marked differences between modernist and postmodern attitudes to the ornamental in the twentieth century. It begins with an investigation of ornament’s abandonment within certain currents of modernist art and then moves to an analysis of
Postmodernism’s embrace or acknowledgement of this aesthetic register. The study then presents a case for ornament’s renewed role and revived value in contemporary art.
In the course of the study I occasionally digress from the focus on art to include architects and architectural movements in order to highlight or exemplify certain points.
As in art, decorative codes were part of the architectural aesthetic norm until the twentieth century. It is therefore useful to address this parallel cultural field, especially considering the abandonment of ornament in architectural functionalism.
For the purpose of this project it has been necessary to define Modernism in broad terms. This is not to deny historical and national differences within the tradition of
Modernism, but unless otherwise stated, I use the term Modernism to refer to an artistic phase that devalued and marginalised the decorative and the ornamental.
It is necessary to clarify my use of the terms the ornamental and the decorative which, until recently, have meant different things. Ornament has tended to refer to structural ornament, which is relatively permanent (as when used in architecture, for instance); while decoration usually denotes a more evanescent form of ornament used for rituals, 1 festivals, and the like, or for surface embellishment. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary the terms ornament and decoration refer to each other, and the definition includes the act or process of embellishing, as well as the nomenclature for an object designed to add aesthetic value to something.1 From this definition it appears that both ornament and decoration refer to something that enhances a person or thing, and that the two words are often used interchangeably. This thesis thus draws on the contemporary application of these terms, which tends to use them in accordance with how they have been applied throughout modernist art discourse as substitutes for each other.2 For the purposes of this study, the term the decorative encompasses both ornament and decoration.
This thesis also foregrounds the complexity or ambiguity of the ornamental register, which is derived from its elastic definition and flexible condition. The difficulty in defining what is meant by ornament or decoration has arisen because of the diverse application of these terms over several centuries. As with the title ‘decorative arts’, the words ornament and decoration have come to mean various things. This elasticity in definition includes both functional and non-functional decoration, including interior decoration, structural architectural decoration, superficial decoration of objects and surfaces, ornament, adornment, and design.3 There is often no distinction in definition
1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition, Revised, ed. Judy Pearsall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2 For further insight see Ornamentalism, ed. Andrew McNamara (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art and Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1997), 6. 3 See Jenny Anger, “Forgotten Ties: The Suppression of the Decorative in German Art and Theory, 1900- 1915”, in Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 132. 2 between the type of artistic expression, its function or utility, cultural context, or the time frame in which ornament existed.
Historically, ornament has encompassed decorative or ornamental motifs, usually applied to the surface of objects ranging from architecture and ceramics, to skin, cloth, paper or canvas, but sometimes it is integrated into the structure of something, such as a woven design in cloth or an architectonic design. In addition to the numerous applications and functions serviced by the decorative, we need to acknowledge differences in meaning in different cultural contexts and periods in history. For example, a piece of ecclesiastical embroidery or sacred ornamental architecture containing symbolic imagery serves us differently to decoration on a fork, a hinge, a dress, or other utilitarian object. In all cases the role of the ornamental is to beautify, but the symbolic meaning of the ornamental function in each is different. This mass of objects, utilities, applications and symbologies are all embodied in the two words ornament and decoration. It becomes apparent why there is a difficulty in making any useful distinction between the decorative or ornament.
The features of ornament and decoration, as I will analyse them, promote a shifting between margin and centre, surface and structure, and a reflection on the space between these binary opposites. These contribute to the ambiguous status and significance of this aesthetic category. As will transpire in the following chapters, the meanings of ornament and decoration are interrelated and deeply complex, an important issue in ornament’s recent evolution.
3 One of the fundamental issues often left out of discussions of the decorative is that it came to be defined by Modernism and beyond with little regard to what existed prior to these definitions. Whilst the exclusion of ornament from that which is considered central to art has not gone uncriticised, it has tended to be a convenient and dominant perception of this modality, and in real terms has proved difficult to undermine. But the modernist negative view of ornament is a cultural construct, which obscures a historic view of ‘high’ art whose pre-modernist existence depended on a valued interaction between art and the ornamental. What is masked in the denial of the decorative’s historic relationship to art is its semantic role: its meaning – for when this aspect is considered, it is not possible to position the ornamental as purely adjunctive or superficial. The negation of the decorative’s semantic capacity in art and architecture is a crucial factor in the demise of ornament in Modernism.
Once categorised negatively in Modernism, the enormous cultural and aesthetic significance of the ornamental, its immense variety and diverse application, shifted from a gregarious position with expansive tendencies to a constrained marginality. It remained there for decades. It is almost inconceivable that within one short period, one stream of Modernism could negate the value of ornament’s tradition for an extended time. This negation, and the removal of the theory of the decorative from modernist art and design theory positioned ornament in a very different framework from the one it occupied at the height of academic debate about its value and identity. This position differed significantly from the philosophical support enjoyed by other visual art forms.
The extended absence of a theoretical discourse on the decorative undoubtedly contributed towards its subsidiary position in twentieth century Modernism.
4 This thesis is made up of three chapters. Chapter One, “Modernism and the
Decorative”, examines the consolidation of Modernism and its desire for a self- referential art based on a purist aesthetic. Because ornament’s pejorative branding as marginal and supplementary begins in the eighteenth century and subsequently sediments within orthodox Modernism, some reference to pre-Modernist texts and authors is necessary to understand the genesis of certain key issues. The early history of
Modernity and Modernism that led up to the demise of the decorative in Modernism is summarised, with a focus on the essentialist values of Functionalism and Purism. Many influential writers and theorists in early Modernism were architects. In acknowledgement of their contribution to the debate, the writings and architectural practice of Austrian architect Adolf Loos are examined to highlight some discrepancies in his categorisation of ornament. I argue that the essential contradiction between exterior structure and interior space in Loos’ architectural works is crucial to a contemporary understanding of the decorative.
Chapter One also analyses Modernism’s binary responses to the decorative and to certain other parallel categories it conflated with the decorative, such as the feminine, the domestic, and mass culture. This binary logic located the decorative as supplemental to core values, a notion that is challenged by drawing on Jacques
Derrida’s reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant’s concept of parerga – an idea central to
Derridean deconstruction. An examination of two contemporary theorist’s work in relation to the parergon as supplement forms the basis of this discussion.
The shift from a European to a North American form of late Modernism is also considered in Chapter One. This section highlights the continuation of an anti-
5 decorative stance by Clement Greenberg and his contemporaries. Ultimately, ‘high’ art’s anxiety regarding mass culture justifies itself towards the end of high Modernism, when the embrace of mass culture by some modernist art currents begins to fragment its hermetic existence.
Chapter Two, “Postmodernism and the Decorative’s Re-emergence”, deals with a shift in attitude towards ornament in the visual arts and architecture. It considers the general features of a postmodern condition, and the transition that led to the decorative being reinscribed into advanced art. These shifts in thinking are examined in the light of Pop
Art’s adoption of mass culture, Feminism, and aspects of Minimalism. The chapter also considers why an early incorporation of ornament was significant for a group of post-
World War Two Italian architects who utilised its familiarity and sensorial appeal to revitalise architecture in late European Modernism. As representative of the broader concerns of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration art movement, I refer to three artists,
Miriam Schapiro, Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff. Through a detailed analysis of their work the path this art movement forged for the subsequent re-legitimisation of the decorative as a form of expression in art is revealed.
This chapter continues by investigating three artists from the 1980s who adopted the decorative as a deliberate reaction to modernist thinking. These artists are Rosemarie
Trockel, Lucas Samaras and Philip Taaffe. I will argue the inclusion of the decorative in their respective art practices is indicative of the postmodern condition, but also reveals the diverse semantic and formal potential of the ornamental register.
Chapter Three, “The Decorative Reconsidered in Contemporary Art”, elaborates on the position of ornament in contemporary art practice. The 1990s witnessed a resurgence of the
6 modernist taboo of beauty, along with an expanded recognition of the decorative’s application in art. Often demanding more than a cursory investigation of surface, ornament and beauty have reclaimed their conceptual roles in aesthetics to become centrally significant agents in expressing personal, political and cross-cultural meaning.
Throughout the thesis I have tried to stress the multivalent nature of Modernism and foreground the persistence of a decorative current despite its exclusion by one dominant trend in Modernism; therefore, an analysis of the aesthetic concerns of Henri Matisse’s late works forms the first part of Chapter Three. His modernist practice allowed the decorative to maintain a buoyancy during Purism and Formalism that culminated in his remarkable architectonic paper cut-outs. But Matisse is also important because he was able to express both affective and transcendental concerns in his work, despite Modernism’s insistence that the decorative remained pinned to the former. As a counter to its theoretical erasure in the agendas of Purism and Formalism, the work of Matisse foregrounds the importance of sensorial expression in art – a form of expression bound to the decorative and to pre- modernist notions of beauty.
The section on Matisse acts as a preface to the other main focus of Chapter Three, which analyses several contemporary artists and exhibitions. The work of Louise Paramor, Simon
Periton and Do-Ho Suh is examined to illustrate ornament’s continued semantic and aesthetic import. In examining these contemporary art practices I return to the binaries that I argue have been significant to the fate of the decorative in Modernism: the feminine versus the masculine, domestic versus public space, the supplement versus essence, and mass culture versus ‘high’ culture. The artists studied were selected because their work engages with, and challenges, these binary oppositions, and because they insistently explore the
7 ornamental in their work. Through an examination of recent exhibitions devoted to the decorative and the individual artists work, I demonstrate the prevalence and importance of ornamental expression in contemporary art.
8 CHAPTER ONE: MODERNISM AND THE DECORATIVE
THE DECORATIVE AND ORNAMENT BEFORE MODERNISM
This chapter charts the decorative’s relationship to certain aspects of Modernism, from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century to a point in the 1950s where the
Formalist ethos gradually dispersed. The central aim of this chapter is to examine the various ways in which the decorative was marginalised within Modernist discourse and cultural practice, so that it is possible to appreciate fully ornament’s repositioning in
Postmodern and contemporary art. Because the decorative is multivalent and its relationship to Modernism is complex, I have taken the time to unpack the intricacies of ornament’s rejection by Purism, Functionalism, and Formalism. Since these forms of
Modernism expunged the decorative by conflating it with a myriad of binary constructions, it is necessary to understand the density of that negation in order to flag the falsity of its premise. In doing so I will foreground the complexity of the distaste for the decorative that still remains in some instances, although often in diluted form, even today. I will also highlight the significant role of architectural Purism in early
Modernism, in perpetuating an anti-decorative stance that undermined ornament’s aesthetic credibility in art and architecture. The decorative became a problem for architecture in Modernism, but in many ways architecture also became the decorative’s problem.4
4 See Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 29. 9 In formulating a context for the examination of the decorative in modernist and postmodernist art, I wish to briefly summarise the position of decoration prior to its marginalisation within twentieth century modernist art and architecture. The act of ornamentation and ornament’s status as a valued aesthetic element was not significantly questioned until the advent of Modernism. It is remarkable that the ornamental register, with such a long and significant reputation, could be so thoroughly challenged. But despite Purism’s concerted attempt to eradicate the decorative in art and architecture, what is often overlooked is Modernism’s diversity. Massimo Carboni and Robert
Kushner have both addressed this issue. Carboni asserts,
Modernism was never as monolithic as various post-modernists claim, and if we
fail to see its diversity and complexity, if we reduce it to the erasure of any and
every tradition, we lose a great deal not only of the concept of the avant-garde
but also of its practice.5
Robert Kushner echoes Carboni, and argues that Purism and Formalism were only one part of a broader Modernism. He also claims that often the longevity of the decorative and the range of its application are conveniently ignored. For Kushner, this breadth spans historical notions of art and craft and in more recent times is accommodated in
Western design and most non-Western art, textiles and other forms of practice.6
Modernism perceived the broad catchment of diverse ornamental practices referred to by Kushner as a weakness, but for those outside this orthodoxy, diversity was a strength
5 Massimo Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, Artforum (September, 1991): 106-111. 6 Robert Kushner, “Defiant Decoration: A Short History of Decoration”, in Studio Potter, 24/2 (June, 1996): 33-34. 10 and a rich resource for cultural practice. For Kushner, the broad spectrum of the decorative encompassed the extremes of the menial and the highly significant, from transitory “crepe paper decorations” to the symbolic, intentionally detailed and highly treasured ornamental forms such as “the meticulous embroidery on the Pope’s collar”7.
The decorative’s span is inclusive of what is intrinsic (essence) and what is supplementary, as well as the space between these two polarities – a richness that
Purism and Functionalism denied. For these movements ornament’s mutability formed one of the rationales for its negation. Thus, the decorative’s uncertain and precarious modern condition unfolds alongside the story of orthodox Modernism.
An introduction to the evolution of Modernist values is necessary to the discussion.
Isabelle Frank states in her introduction to The Theory of Decorative Arts that the idea of the decorative as something separate from art was inconceivable in Greek and Latin thinking. Art encompassed both fine and decorative art and was considered to be “a skilled craft or science rather than [belonging to] an inspired creative activity”8.
However, with the birth of aesthetics and the codification of a new system of the arts in the eighteenth century, the decorative often found itself positioned on the margins of this new paradigm. It is useful here to refer to Paul Oskar Kristeller’s 1951 paper, “The
Modern System of the Arts,”9 to understand how this re-alignment was structured.
Kristeller outlines the generally accepted subdivision of the arts from the eighteenth
7 Kushner, “Defiant Decoration”, 33-34. 8 Isabelle Frank, ed., The Theory of Decorative Art - An Anthology of European and American writings 1750 –1940 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 3. 9 In Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts(New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 163-227. 11 century onwards. This, he states, includes five major components: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry:
The basic notion that five “major arts” constitute an area all by themselves,
clearly separated by common characteristics from the crafts, the sciences and
other human activities, has been taken for granted by most writers on aesthetics
from Kant to the present day.10
This re-alignment intensified in the twentieth century, where the separation of certain disciplines from others was central to the decorative’s demise. The historical genesis of this compartmentalisation was further accentuated by the rise of academies for painting, sculpture, and architecture, and with the development of specialist theoretical discourses for these disciplines. Of particular concern to this thesis are the philosophical texts of
Immanuel Kant that address ornament and its relationship to the system of the arts.
Through Kant we see the beginnings of the high/low polarity in art which aligned the decorative arts with an eclectic group of “other” applied arts, a group that remained external to philosophical art discourse until Postmodernism.
However, before its exclusion from canonical Modernism, the decorative enjoyed a renaissance of sorts from 1850 until 1900. This revival was fuelled by bourgeois interior decorating – an activity that became both advantageous and problematic for the decorative. Bourgeois aspirations to mimic the aristocracy and emulate wealth stimulated the development of “bad taste” consumption. Parallel to this, an intense theoretical debate developed as a response to the negatively perceived form of interior
10 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II, 165. 12 embellishment, in an attempt to distance the decorative from this practice.11 This debate produced an array of texts by reformers, historians, philosophers, designers and artists advocating theories, or sets of principles, that explored the role and aesthetic value of art, architecture and decorative art. Whilst there were disagreements on the theory of ornament, by 1900 the overall agenda of pro-decoration writers challenged the orthodox aesthetic hierarchy, re-elevating the decorative to a status equal to that occupied by art and architecture.12
The decorative’s parallel status to fine art at this time is discussed by Arthur Danto in the essay “Crossing the Boundary Between Craft and Art”. Danto writes:
In the earliest phase of modernism, at the turn of the century, craft and art were
closely united through a common dedication to decoration. No sharp line would
have been drawn between paintings and useful objects from this perspective:
The art nouveau spirit found stylistic expression not only in paintings but in
lamps, books, wallpaper and furniture. But when painting began its tremendous
adventure of self-discovery, in cubism, futurism, fauve, and beyond, the tie with
decoration was weakened, and with it any deep affinity with craft. There was a
momentary coming together with art deco in the twenties, but decoration was
sensed as something abstraction had to distance itself from, which meant that the
gap between art and craft became ideological.13
11 For insight into the key writers involved in this debate see Frank, The Theory of Decorative Art.
12 See the texts by William Morris, Alois Reigl and Gottfried Semper, amongst others, in Frank, The Theory of Decorative Art. 13 Arthur C. Danto, “Crossing the Boundary Between Craft and Art”, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, 1996 Craft Essay, 13th April 2002, pg 1 of 2:
Despite the contributions of writers at the turn of the century, the attempt to develop new theories incorporating the decorative into debates on art and architecture eventually failed, giving way to the purist and functionalist aesthetic that dominated from the second decade of the twentieth century. Art shifted towards a non-mimetic form of representation, an approach that was heralded as a new aesthetic appropriate to the perceived need to challenge the traditional conventions of art. Interior decorating was vehemently criticised as a mimetic artform, an activity that replicated ornamental forms rather than creating new types of art. This evaluation contributed to ornament’s conflation with the feminine and the domestic.14
At this point it is necessary to briefly define the concepts of Modernity and Modernism applied in this study, so that the confluence of events that led to “the gap” between art and craft that Danto refers to can be understood. The discussion will focus on those central facets of art (and architecture where relevant) that pitted the decorative against modernity, highlighting the beginning of a system of binary oppositions that sustained a dominant modernist narrative.
14 For further insight refer to Brent Brolin, Flight of Fancy, The Banishment and Return of Ornament (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 8. 14 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM
Modernity’s putative beginning has always been a matter of debate. Some locate its genesis in the seventeenth century, while for others it is located in the 1840s.
However, Astradur Eysteinsson’s description of what constitutes Modernity concurs with the majority of contemporary discourse:
There is a rapidly spreading agreement that “modernism” could be described as
a legitimate concept broadly signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt,
beginning in the mid-late nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and
aesthetic traditions of the Western world.15
Out of this shift there developed a series of new aesthetics that inspired the production of art and architecture. What is important to acknowledge is that there exists in
Modernism a complex and often contradictory co-existence of disparate trends such as formalism, realism and expressionism. The various distinctive modernist movements –
Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Abstraction, Bauhaus, De Stijl, among many others
– all responded to the new conditions of modernity in different ways. Harrison and
Wood describe the situation in the modern era:
On the one side there is the impulse to an art whose first duty is to decode the
modern world and perhaps even to participate in changing it. On the other is that
15 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, New York, and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1-2. 15 art whose principle response to the modern condition has been the conclusion
that art must transform itself.16
From this statement we can conclude that there existed two different tendencies in
Modernism. One insisted on transforming art into an agent of social change, and the other, Formalism, sought to reduce fine art to a narrow and hermetic trajectory (an adventure of “self-discovery” in Danto’s terms). Thierry de Duve’s account of the variant European practices during this nascent stage of Modernism offers another perspective. He asserts that the avant-garde tradition associated with Paris “functioned by means of rejection, whereas Munich, Berlin, and Vienna worked by means of scission”17. Both paradigms generated new approaches to the production of art, but their modi operandi differed. One operated from a stance of disavowal of past values, the other operated more fluidly through a reforming process, acknowledging appropriate historical traditions that informed the emergence of new movements.18 Of the latter, architects and artists in Austria and Germany in particular, merged the decorative arts into their practices and produced paintings, furniture, wallpaper, objects, buildings and the like. Architects like Joseph Olbrich and Joseph Hoffman, through their reworking of the ornamental, became rivals to the Austrian functionalist, Adolf
Loos.
16 . Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art In Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000), 129. 17 Thierry De Duve, “Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Munich”, Marcel Duchamp, Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989), 44. 18 De Duve, “Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Munich”, 45-46. 16 As Eysteinsson suggests, one of the key motivations of Modernism’s paradigmatic shift was the desire of artists and architects to embrace a new century, to look to the future rather than the past.19 As a consequence, anything representing past decorative excess embraced by aristocratic or bourgeois society was considered anti-progressive.
Advancement was only considered possible through a persistent rejection of inherited traditions, styles and values. The lack of moderation in the aristocratic and bourgeois taste for: dress, objets d’art, bibelot, and architectural embellishment contributed to the pejorative labelling of the decorative as decadent, extravagant and vulgar. It came to signify the wealth, luxury and wastefulness typical of a particular societal class or classes. For some streams of Modernism, the quest to rethink what visually reflected the new era led to an attempt to create a tabula rasa on which to build a rationalist, purist modern identity. This required the removal of all traces of the decorative from art, architecture and design.20
Parallel to the rejection of past values there developed an increasing fascination with the machine. The invention of cars, aeroplanes and war machinery contributed to the rise of a new machine aesthetic, which, coupled with the human experience of increasing speed and the ability to move between cities and countries, saw modern society transformed.21 Machines offered new industrial opportunities and new means to transport labour, opening the way for the intensification of capitalism, consumerism, and mass culture that had significant implications for the decorative.
19 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 1-2. 20 The story of the attack against Rococo in the 1750’s was similar to the problem suffered by ornament at a later date. 21 See Harrison and Wood’s introduction to “The Idea of the Modern World” in Art In Theory,126-7. 17 Many streams of Modernism (for example Functionalism, Futurism and
Constructivism) embraced the shift towards industrial materials and processes, the notion of utility, and the machine ethos. Others like the purists and the pro-decorative reformers held philosophies that were incompatible in some ways. Yet both parties saw industrial, or mechanical, production as antithetical to art; and the purists absolutely opposed art to use and function.
The move away from mimetic art towards abstraction or non-representational art did not pose a threat to the decorative per se. Ornament, and non-western art have always embraced different forms of organic or geometric abstraction (and representation). In addition, several post-Modern commentators have noted that the numerous scholarly texts on ornament written by pro-decoration theorists prior to the birth of abstraction can be interpreted as forming one matrix for abstract art. 22 Markus Brüderlin explains,
Though not intended thus, nineteenth century discussions of the crisis in
decorative art, and the theories of ornament they engendered, sometimes read
like manifestos laying the foundations of abstract art.23
In this regard Alois Riegl in particular made some interesting observations in his attempts to promote artistic and conceptual facets of the decorative. In Frank’s words,
22 For key essays on pro-decoration theories see essays by Alois Riegl and Gottfried Semper in Frank, The Theory of Decorative Art, and Markus Brüderlin, ed., Ornament and Abstraction – the Dialogue Between non-Western, Modern and Contemporary Art (Basel: Beyeler Foundation, 2001), 18. Also see Ernst H. Gombrich’s chapters “Ornament as Art” and “The Psychology of Style” in The Sense of Order, A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London: Phaidon, 1st ed.1979), 33-62 and 195-216. 23 Brüderlin, Ornament and Abstraction, 18. Markus Brüderlin, Isabelle Frank, Ernst Gombrich and Chris McAuliffe (among other contemporary writers) all make reference to ornament as the genesis of abstraction. 18 Fig. 1 Pablo Picasso, The Italian Woman, 1917.
Fig. 2 Paul Klee, Assyrian Game, 1923.
19 Riegl even argued that ornament “was a more direct expression of artistic creativity than narrative painting and sculpture, because it offered a pure visual play of form and colour in space (a worrisome claim for later abstract artists)”24 (my emphasis). For those artists who chose the stance of reform rather than rejection (Kandinsky, Klee,
Matisse, Picasso et al.), ornament formed the basis of the new aesthetic and was not distinguished from “high” art production. Their methodology borrowed decorative
(abstract) imagery from a broad range of non-European origins, often described in terms of “oriental” or “primitive” sources. (Figs. 1 & 2)
But whilst their art evolved new visual concepts through a relationship to the decorative, uneasiness grew out of the potential for their work to be labelled as merely decorative.25 Again, De Duve highlights the tensions of the time when he writes:
a good part of the ideological ambitions of the new painters was to free
themselves of the status of artisans and, in particular, to avoid any confusion of
their work with that of the decorative arts. The more they moved toward “pure”
painting and toward abstraction, the greater was the danger of this confusion,
and so the greater was the insistence on getting rid of the utilitarian and artisanal
values associated with the decorative arts.26
24 Frank, The Theory of Decorative Art, 12. 25 The implication is that ornament was devoid of meaning or content and ultimately feminised. This is discussed in full in the section entitled “The Decorative, The Feminine and The Domestic”, in this chapter. For further insight on Klee, see Jenny Anger, “Modernism and the Gendering of Paul Klee”, Thesis (Ph.D) Brown University, 1997 (UMI Dissertation Services). 26 Thierry De Duve, “Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Munich”, 52. 20 De Duve’s statement alerts us to two problems. The first one concerns the artisanal nature of decoration, which will be discussed later. The second is highlighted by De
Duve’s reference to a potential confusion between abstract painting and the decorative.
To avoid the possibility of “potential confusion”, the early abstractionists dealt with the problematic visual and formulaic links to decorative pattern using non-visual solutions.
They formulated a theoretical framework that underpinned their work in relation to transcendental concerns, thus rising above the merely utilitarian aims and mass culture associations of decoration. For Chris McAuliffe, artists risked their work becoming
“mere patterns, images indistinguishable from carpets and neckties” through their engagement with abstraction.27 Thus, ironically, through their desire for transcendental justifications, the discourse of abstraction ultimately suppressed the discourse (of ornament) that was “partially grounded” in its conception.28 And as McAuliffe suggests, the decorative was forced to follow “its nemesis, mass culture”, rather than the pathway of “high” art.29 But it is also important to stress at this point, as does
McAuliffe, that:
Above all, it has to be recognised that the decorative is a historicized concept;
that its use in a pejorative sense is the result of the dominance of the rhetorics of
formalism and architectural purism, and not the product of any inherent
incompatibility between painting and the decorative.30
The unravelling of this “historicized concept” begins with the next discussion.
27 Chris McAuliffe, “Redecorating”, Art and Text 45 (1993): 15-18. 28 Jenny Anger, “Modernism and the Gendering of Paul Klee”, 136. 29 McAuliffe, “Redecorating”, 15-18. 30 McAuliffe, “Redecorating”, 15-18. 21 THE VALUES OF MODERNIST PURISM
Out of the complex reservoir of different responses to modernity arose a purist trajectory bereft of the desire to embrace anything not relevant to its autonomous cause.
Purism refers to a form of art that is only concerned with what is essential for its existence. In this context an art object makes reference only to itself, so that content is no more than its own form, or the specific set of issues and features that characterise its distinctive formal identity. This type of art is not only “pure” in its physically stripped back appearance, but also because it finds the criteria for its existence within itself.
Self-referential autonomy in art requires nothing external for its existence and is often described as “art for art’s sake”. An excerpt from Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist
Painting” essay, whilst written at a much later stage, exemplifies this aesthetic position:
Thus would each art be rendered “pure”, and in its “purity” find the guarantee of
its standards of quality as well as of its independence.31
From a Greenbergian vantage, an art object not only exists independently of everything other than itself, but also by its practice of internal self-regulation licenses itself to control its own functions totally.
Jonathon Harris describes the development of an “art for art’s sake” trajectory essentially as an art practice that was
31 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969”, ed. John O’Brian (London: University of Chicago press, 1993), 86. 22 not concerned with the world…but rather a form of self-referential enquiry
centred on the media and techniques of art-making.32
This self-reflective tendency in aesthetics avoided the realism and narrative content of pre-modern works of art, preferring to focus on a purely abstract language of aesthetics that subscribed to a kind of self-absorption with its own medium.
The critical European condition of modernity at this time was one that subscribed to a form of “utopian rationalism”, and a rationalist ethos was adopted by the proponents of
Functionalism and geometric abstraction.33 In modern aesthetics, anything considered inessential or surfeit, beyond the realm of function, was simply excised. But the rationalist ethos collided with ornament in another way, through its use of repetition.
Serialised structures (especially excessive forms) could connote limitlessness, or a loss of control, which was counter to a rationalist orthodoxy.34 Many of the early abstractionists, who valued the ornamental as a new direction for painting, disrupted the predictability of its propensity for serialisation and floated ornamental motifs and shapes on the canvas to release them from the structure of repetition but contain them within the frame (Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró).35 Their avoidance of formal serial structures changed the organisation of the traditional ornamental form but retained its infrastructure. In a sense they created a “new order”.
32 . L. Dawtrey et al., eds., Investigating Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 143. 33 See Harrison and Wood, Art In Theory 549-550. 34 For a contemporary discussion on this see Anna Chave’s introductory essay, “Disorderly Order: The Art of Valerie Jaudon”, in René P. Barilleaux, ed., Valerie Jaudon (Mississippi: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1996), 9-46, particularly the section on Eva Hesse and repetition. 35 However, artists like Matisse and Klimt often retained aspects of repetitive formulas in their work. 23 However, as pointed out earlier, the problem they had in this restructuring was justifying the incorporation of something from the past in order to create something new. Whilst their paintings did not utilise strict repetitive rules, their imagery still retained a link to ornament’s historical tradition.
The early theorists of a purist, functionalist and rationalist ideology in architecture such as, Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe and, later, Le Corbusier and W.R. Lethaby advocated “pure” denuded forms that exposed “truth” to materials in architecture, art and design. For Andreas Huyssen, the perpetuators of a purist architectural lineage followed a narrow trajectory, denying “the richest possible reading of the past in relation to the present”.36 Huyssen means that the purists, like the functionalists, were not interested in re-articulating past values in art in new models. But it is important to highlight the contradictions inherent in their trajectory. On the one hand they celebrated modernity, but on the other they rejected many integral aspects of it, such as consumerism and mass production.
The advocates of Purism in art positioned themselves independently of the market and in opposition to mass culture. For Peter Bürger, the precursor for the idea of the autonomy of art was the division of labour established by industrial capitalism and its new system of mass production.37 Artists were perceived to avoid the division of labour that affected the majority of the population, and remained physically in contact with the
36 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide – Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 55. Note that modernist architects like Le Corbusier and Louis Sullivan were initially only concerned with the removal of “superficial” ornament. 37 See Peter Bürger, “On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art”, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 52. 24 production of their work.38 Paradoxically, whilst painting shifted towards upholding artisanal values, by the 1920s the decorative moved from being equated with the hand- made to being equated with the machine produced, thus becoming linked to mass culture. Through this process ornament’s conceptual framework was questioned and re- assessed.
Modernism supported many contradictions concerning ornament. Historically rooted in artisanal methods, the decorative was ironically banished to the periphery of orthodox modernism by the claim to an autonomy premised on those same artisanal values.
“High” art staked a claim for manual production, yet discredited the artisanal factor traditionally embedded in the production of decorative utility items. As de Duve indicated earlier, as self-referential art progressed in Modernism the contradiction became more apparent. Either decoration was removed completely from functional items or it was aligned to the rejected domain of mass production.
Another Modernist contradiction was the difference between functionalist ideals in architecture and the trajectory towards self-referentiality in painting. In a sense they were antithetical approaches. One advocated industrialisation as characteristic of the new century and promoted the utilitarian distinction of architecture and design. The other was at odds with function, utility, industrialisation and mass production.
Nevertheless they were united in their rejection of the decorative. Functionalism attempted to combine the beauty of utility into its constructions, demanding an aesthetic
38 Outside this debate was Marcel Duchamp who rejected painting for its “artisanal pleasure” and whose art was the “readymade”, and post-war artists like Sonia Delauney and Léger who attempted to liaise between the purist aesthetic and the usefulness of a utilitarian art. See De Duve, “Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Munich”, 43. 25 based on architectural structural essence, so that beauty and form became determined by function.39 In other words, the aesthetic was the essence of a structure, and to achieve this it was purified of any “extraneous” ornament. This, of course, differed enormously from the past beautification of buildings, where the addition of various styles of ornament (usually through artisanal means) had dominated architecture for centuries.40
Several functionalist architects became anti-decorative critics, and their ideas affected art and taste well beyond architecture.41 The Austrian architect Adolf Loos is a salient example of this phenomenon. Loos was not alone in his criticism of the decorative, and his ideas proved influential in twentieth century modernist discourse, although his texts often contain contradictions regarding the decorative. Some of these inconsistencies are examined below.
RE-ASSESSING ADOLF LOOS’ CRITIQUE OF ORNAMENT
Adolf Loos is often quoted in contemporary discourse for his stance against ornament, and in particular against the ornamental tendencies of the Vienna Workshops and the
Art Nouveau style. Much of Loos’ anti-decorative agenda was rooted in an anti-
39 Joseph Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style: Architectural Ideas from the Picturesque to the Post- Modern (London: John Murray, 1987), 225-249. 40 For further insight see, Joseph Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice (London: Academy Editions, 1982), 92. For insight into the complexities of Modernism during this early period, see Harrison and Wood, Art In Theory 217-222. 41 Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant claimed, “A work of art is an association, a symphony of consonant and architectured forms, in architecture and sculpture as well as painting. To use as a theme anything other than the objects of selection, for example, objects of decorative art, is to introduce a second symphony into the first; it would be redundant, surcharged, it would diminish the intensity and adulterate the quality of the emotion.” See Harrison and Wood, Art In Theory 239. 26 bourgeois ideology, as he attempted to divorce architecture from so-called “high” art and “high” cultural associations. His critique was initially aimed at the Viennese
Secessionists such as Joseph Olbrich and Joseph Hoffman who embraced the decorative in their attempts to articulate a new turn-of-the-century aesthetic. Loos’ criticism even extended beyond the decorative and architecture to Viennese haute cuisine for similar reasons – its excess. Kartsen Harries writes that Austria was “well known for its love of food, drink, sex and ornament” in the previous century; the program advocated by Loos was in conflict with this.42 Loos claimed that the pervasiveness of ornament in Vienna
“inflicted serious injury on peoples’ health”.43 In keeping with a functionalist ideology, he desired “function and simplicity” in buildings, objects and cuisine.
Excerpts from Loos’ 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” are frequently quoted – in particular, his infamous equation of ornament with “crime” and “barbaric” behaviours.
When read in its totality, one can appreciate why this essay created enormous controversy in its time, and why it remains controversial today. One can also see why the frequently quoted homophobic, xenophobic, and sometimes misogynist assertions in some of Loos’ other essays have also provoked negative responses. More relevant here are the frequent inconsistencies and contradictions specifically related to ornament that are scattered through many of his texts. The inconsistent nature of Loos’ arguments are relevant to this study because they reveal a broader uncertainty about the decorative, consistent with modernist contradictions. His desire to separate ornament from the intellect and the masculine by default realigned it with “uncultured” society, the feminine, fashion, the erotic, and the domestic.
42 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 35. 43 Loos cited in Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 34. 27 A comment from Adolf Opel in his introduction to “Ornament and Crime” contextualises Loos’ texts on early Viennese Modernism. Opel writes:
It would, however, be wrong to regard Loos’ writings as the testament of a
practitioner, and even more wrong to treat them as the theoretical system of a
“high priest of modernism” into which Loos is often built up. Most of his texts
were first conceived as lectures for non-specialist audiences. They were
published mostly in daily newspapers, only rarely in specialist periodicals. They
lay no claim to intellectual rigour, nor do they represent a comprehensive,
integrated body of theoretical work.44
This is an interesting comment in light of the frequent airing Loos has received for his anti-decorative statements throughout Modernism and Postmodernism. Even more relevant is the fact that Loos became more famous for his controversial texts, written
“in a style closer to speech than to writing”, than for the small number of buildings he created.45
Other commentators such as Joseph Rykwert and Panaystis Tournikiotis consider Loos an important twentieth century architectural writer. Tournikiotis points out that
“Ornament and Crime” was first published in French in 1920 and not published in
German until 1929. This is significant because it implies this text may not have been as influential as previously thought in suppressing architectural ornament in the early years
44 See the introduction by Adolf Opel in Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 1998), 1. 45 Panaystis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (New York: Princeton University Press, 1991, English trans. 1994), 22. 28 of Austrian Modernism.46 Loos’ rivals in the Austrian Secessionist movement largely ignored his polemical, anti-decorative claims, thus instigating his move to France.
Despite its specific Austrian context, to Loos’ surprise “Ornament and Crime” was heralded in France as a purist manifesto.47 Tournikiotis, outlining some of the misinterpretations that affected the reception of the essay outside the intended Viennese context, claims that
the initial meaning of this essay, with its provocative title, was altered. In Paris,
it was received as a purist manifesto that demanded the total suppression of
ornament (“Ornament IS Crime”). This slippage of meaning: the identification
of ornament in general with crime – this “crime” which, in Loos’ pamphlet,
appeared a sort of “ornament” of discussion – even shocked the author himself.48
For Tournikiotis it is clear that Loos never intended to argue for the total eradication of ornament: the purists who interpreted his text did so to their own advantage.
Tournikiotis highlights Loos’ less extreme attitude to ornament in “Ornament and
Education” (1924) where Loos is quoted as saying,
I affirmed twenty-six years ago that the evolution of humanity would cause
ornament to disappear from functional objects, an evolution which would follow
its ineluctable and logical path…. But I never thought like the purists who
46 See Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, 23. 47 The French modernist canon rejected the decorative much earlier than their German and Austrian counterparts, and so Loos was more readily accepted by some of his French contemporaries such as Le Corbusier. 48 See Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, 23; and Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London: Phaidon, 1st ed.1979), 59-61. 29 pushed this reasoning to the absurd, that ornament should be systematically
abolished.49
This ambivalent attitude towards ornament appears to be overlooked by many writers, even today. Tournikiotis suggests that “Ornament and Crime” not only suffered from misinterpretation by the French purists, but is contextually displaced by many contemporary theorists. This may be the case; however, it does not reduce the influential nature of Loos’ arguments and, once published, the impact these polemical texts had in fuelling anti-decorative discourses. It is evident from reading many of
Loos’ texts that there is not always a clear abandonment of ornament. In many cases
Loos demonstrated a dogmatic determination towards the removal of ornament, but also occasionally advocated its retention – for example, in neo-classical architecture.
Whilst it is important to keep the scholarly merit of Tournikiotis’ remarks in mind, in many of his other essays on ornament Loos made some quite remarkable claims which contributed to the general broad confusion about and derision of ornament. In my view, this points to one key factor relevant to this study - the decorative’s mutability. I refer here to my earlier emphasis on the decorative’s ability to shift between structure and surface. It is important to emphasise that Loos’ anti-decorative trajectory is based on the belief that there are two different kinds of ornament. One is essential; and for Loos, neo-classical ornament belongs in this category. The other type is supplementary, and thus at odds with Modernism’s rationalist, purist aesthetic. To borrow a term dear to
Loos, “moderns” had no use for this latter kind of “superficial” ornament.
49 Loos cited in Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, 23-24. 30 Much of Loos’ commentary revolved around the conflation of women with the decorative. In some respects he was a socialist, advocating equality in many things, and even endorsing the relaxation of certain restrictions surrounding women’s lives. But it is as though Loos speaks of two different kinds of women. The first is the new twentieth century woman, emancipated from entanglement in a past romantic era; the second type of woman is still deeply enmeshed in a romantic epoch he abhors. In general, however, Loos accused women of being unintelligent, childlike, “primitive”, and obsessed with “frivolities” such as fashion and mass culture.50
The contradictory nature of Loos’ view of women arouses suspicions of another agenda, one that conflates the decorative with the feminine and erotic. For Loos, the erotic associations of the decorative grew out of his identification of ornament as a “barbaric” act linked to body adornment in tribal cultures. Ernst Gombrich argues that Loos rejects ornamentation because he “identifies ornament with primitive eroticism and, at least by implication, the absence of ornament with purity and chastity”51. Women were inscribed into this sexualised equation, an issue that is expanded upon in the section on the feminine, later in this chapter.
Loos sometimes rationalised his embrace of traditional or neo-classical ornament by equating it with the value of stability consistent with classical architecture. Classical ornament appeared to resonate more with the purity of form pared back from excessive ornament. He perceived women’s fashion (even underwear and buttons), and the
50 Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, 24-26. See also Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail – Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 51-53. 51 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 61. 31 designs on functional objects produced by the Viennese secessionists, as the antithesis of this classical ornamental ideal. According to Tournikiotis, Loos desired “forms that had resisted the fluctuations of fashion” and which thus reflected “a deep and durable modernity”52. The longevity desired by Loos was only possible with “purity” and
“chastity”, which translated to a de-eroticised ideology of form following function. In turn this led to the propensity for buildings and other objects to become decanted of ornament’s seduction (Fig. 3).
Loos’ attitude to clothing epitomises his general stance on ornament’s relationship to the erotic. For him, erotic desire is tied to the cladding of the body. In his terms a naked female body is not erotic, but becomes so through the embellishment of dress. If we translate this Loosian concept to architecture, then buildings removed of extraneous ornament become un-erotic and thus in keeping with functionalist philosophy. For
Loos, the premise of authenticity appears bound to a form of binary logic, and can only be maintained through a suppression of adornment, and thus the erotic, in the façade of architecture and in dress. Ornament’s seductive appeal is equated with inauthentic,
“low”, and feminine culture, tied to the whimsy of fashion and sensate seduction and opposed to the stability and longevity of art and architecture.53 Loos’ binary logic not only feminises ornament; it also denies its mutable nature. For him the condition of the ornamental slippage does not exist: he sees two different aspects of the decorative that never blur or collide. Despite his firm advocacy and respect for “classical” forms of
52 Panaystis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, 27. 53 This highlights a broader male anxiety of this period that positions female sexual power as something requiring severe control. 32 Fig. 3 Adolf Loos, Steiner House, 1910.
33 Fig. 4 Adolf Loos, Villa Karma library, 1930.
Fig. 5 Adolf Loos, Villa Karma bathroom, 1930.
34 decoration, Loos felt it inappropriate to replicate this tradition within a twentieth century context. If we scrutinise some of Loos’ architectural creations in relation to these ideas, a critical contradiction arises that may have contributed to a further misunderstanding about the decorative. It appears that many of Loos’ domestic interiors are not stripped entirely bare of ornamentation. In many of his creations, Loos integrated ornamental elements, not always with “classical” restraint. The furnishings or embellishments – carpets, tapestries, marble and textile surfaces on furniture – were integral to the theatrics of the domestic spaces that Loos created. For the writer Marilyn
Stokstad, the Loosian exterior exemplifies his functionalist, purist ethos and stands in stark contrast to the “sumptuous interiors, which often featured colourful marble, reflecting enduring ties to the nineteenth century”54 (Figs. 4 & 5). This stark difference between exterior and interior can be explained by Loos’ gendered view of the domestic.
In this regard Loos wrote, “the interior is the other of the exterior”55. He continues,
When I was finally given the task of building a house, I said to myself: in its
external appearance, a house can only have changed as much as a dinner jacket.
Not a lot therefore….. I had to become significantly simpler. I had to substitute
the golden buttons with black ones. The house has to look inconspicuous. The
house does not have to tell anything to the exterior; instead, all its richness must
be manifest in the interior.56
In this passage we have the interior positioned as the other of the exterior. Loos’ analogy of the dinner jacket also alludes to a familiar gendered binary. The dinner
54 Marilyn Stokstad, Art History (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 1995), 1073. 55 Cited in Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994), 33. 56 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 274 35 jacket (exterior house) is masculine, undecorated and in the public sphere. The
“richness” of the interior as other conflates the decorative, the feminine and the domestic within the embellished private erotic sphere. It becomes host to sensual, seductive, erotic and embellished indulgences in a contained and feminised private realm. 57
Although Loos insisted on a rationalist approach to ornament, defining it as either superficial or structural, his architectural creations contradict this dichotomy. On the one hand Loos treats ornament as inappropriate for the exterior of his buildings, basing his approach on a gendered binary logic. But does this necessarily make the decorative contained within ‘merely’ supplemental? It could be argued that whilst Loos might have defined these interior ornamental elements in opposition to the exterior of his buildings, the “richness” of the interior was absolutely essential to the existence of the whole. Their otherness was intrinsically necessary for a building to function as Loos intended, perhaps pointing to a “lack” in the exterior structure on its own. A Loosian building required the tension between the denuded structural exterior and the
“supplemental” interior to be complete.
For Loos, ‘non-essential’ ornament is rejected from the ‘authentic’ structure because, among other things, it represents the potential to disrupt the clarity of his aesthetic imperative. Though not articulated by Loos, this disruption or confusion, is tied to the notion of the decorative as something that occupies both supplemental and essential positions and slides between these two categories. The slippage, or interstitial space in
57 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. In particular see Colomina’s essay “Interiors” for a detailed analysis of this. 36 which the ornamental thrives, interferes with Loos’ stripped down exterior austerity.
Rather than deal with ornament’s indeterminateness, aesthetic clarity is maintained by asserting ornament’s supplementarity. This point is further expanded in a later section of this chapter.
In retrospect, it is not difficult to be sympathetic towards Loos’ endeavours to remove the extremes of aristocratic excess and extraneous ornament. However, ultimately
Loos’ reductionist approach paved the way for later modes of purist and self-reflexive
Modernism. Ornament was disowned by this trajectory and pushed to the periphery, joining other outcasts including, femininity, domesticity and pre-modern notions of beauty.58
BINARIES OF PURIST MODERNISM
Eysteinsson has claimed that “Modernism signals a dialectical opposition to what is not functionally “modern,” namely “tradition”.59 Past traditions were inappropriate for an avant-garde that desired change and looked to the future. Eysteinsson’s definition reflects Modernism’s tendency to construct binaries such as past/present, essence/supplement, rational/irrational, conceptual/intuitive, production/consumption, as a means to secure a distance from perceived threats to its hermetic existence.
Andreas Huyssen believes that these politics were driven by a persistent anxiety towards the “other” as a devalued opposite. He writes,
58 See Jenny Anger, “Forgotten Ties: The Suppression of the Decorative in German Art and Theory, 1900-1915”, in Reed, Not At Home, 130-146. 59 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 8. 37 To argue that this simply has to do with the inherent “quality” of the one and the
deprivations of the other – correct as it may be in the case of many specific
works – is to perpetuate the time-worn strategy of exclusion; it is itself a sign of
the anxiety of contamination.60
Huyssen articulates this oppositional trajectory as follows: “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other”. He continues, “Not surprisingly this anxiety of contamination has appeared in the guise of an irreconcilable opposition, especially in the l’art pour l’art movements of the turn of the century”61. Taking Huyssen’s point further, it is the perpetual anxiety within Modernism that forms the basis for the construction of binaries aimed at securing the autonomy of art through a resistance to anything that threatens to destabilise its premise. Huyssen believes Modernism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the artwork, and desire to remove itself from political and economic issues and the culture of everyday life, propelled it towards a narrow focus that required strict criteria for acceptance into the hermetic “master” narrative. This paradigm “remained amazingly resilient” in opposition to other art movements, in particular against the perceived threat of mass culture, until the late 1950s.
I would now like to turn to the particularities of certain terms within binary logic that were established as “contaminants” within the modernist discourse. Of particular concern the conflation of the feminine and the domestic, and the decorative as
60 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. 61 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. 38 supplement.62 Another important victim of the modernist exclusionist strategy was mass culture. Modernism’s opposition to mass culture was paradoxical as it concerned modern reality and not an inherited tradition. Although Modernism generally rejected the past, it seems it also discarded the modern phenomena of mass culture from its present.
The Decorative, The Feminine and The Domestic
Ornament’s subordination as feminine arises in the wake of the Enlightenment institutionalisation of art and architecture and their respective theories. In the same way that ornament’s separation from art was unthinkable in pre-Enlightenment cultures, so too was the idea of the domestic as an identifiable entity. Christopher Reed regards the construction of domesticity as a “specifically modern phenomenon”, and suggests that it is “a product of the confluence of capitalist economics, breakthroughs in technology, and Enlightenment notions of individuality”63. In his terms, if we examine what is meant by domesticity – “separation from the workplace, privacy, comfort, focus on the family” – it becomes obvious why it was attached to notions of femininity.64 But it is possible to argue that the origins of this separation arise from the division of
62 Pre-modern notions of beauty were similarly discredited; although beauty is a complex issue in its own right, it is not singled out but mentioned with particular reference to the decorative. 63 Reed, Not At Home, 7. 64 See G. Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”, in Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. F. Frascina and J. Harris (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), 121. Pollock confirms that women were mostly positioned differently to men at the beginning of twentieth century Modernism and that these differences were socially constructed through a change in attitude towards women, and in turn, the domestic realm. 39 public/private space in fifteenth century masculine notions of “house”, where the erotic containment (of women) was desirable.65
By the mid-eighteenth century the bourgeois household defined itself as a reaction to aristocratic values, traditions and imagery. It became an expression of female identity through decorative embellishments, bibelot and other “frippery”. But with the advent of
Modernism, interior decorating was cast as an unbearably claustrophobic form of aesthetic practice, the antithesis of modernity although, as we have seen, for Loos certain forms of ornament were appropriate if confined to the interior. However, it is this particular form of bourgeois interior embellishment and its fashionable whims that
Loos and other modernists reacted against so strongly.
The sexual division of labour in capitalism served to avoid bringing women into direct competition with men for employment; and this general social condition was also reflected in art practice.66 Women did have access to a filtered or diluted version of the
“visual shifts” in early Modernism through home decorating journals, but ultimately the activity of interior decorating further reinforced the conflation of the feminine, the decorative and the domestic. 67
65 For further insight see Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender”, in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 327-389. 66 For further insight see Anthea Callen, “Sexual Division of Labour in the Arts and Crafts Movement”, in A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design, ed. J. Attfield and P. Kirkham (London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1989), 151-163. 67 For more information on this subject see, G. Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”, in Frascina and Harris, Art in Modern Culture, 121-135. 40 In the introduction to Uncontrollable Beauty Bill Beckley discusses the disappearance of beauty as a value in modernist art and criticism. He asserts,
when flat pictorial space triumphed over the effeminacy of illusionist space, the
“gender” of the work of art changed. It became masculine, impenetrable.
Consequently, we replaced feminine descriptives like beauty, harmony, and
generosity with masculine terms like strength, singularity, and autonomy.68
The implications of connecting the feminine to pre-modern notions of beauty meant that the masculine became aligned to “high” art and architecture, and to the intellect, the rational, and the realm of the sublime. The sublime here refers to a masculine process of transcending the physical world, in opposition to the earthly, the corporeal, and the intuitive realm allocated to women. Women’s perceived relationship to corporeal experience excluded them from “high” aesthetic practice because it did not fit comfortably with, to use Beckley’s terms, “strength, singularity, and autonomy”.69
Neither did it align with the machine age image of a modern logical, rational, intellectual male.70 It is not my intention to propose that there existed a wholesale masculinist, modernist agenda, but what is important to stress is that the feminisation of the decorative resulted in its general exclusion from “high” Modernism.71
68 Here Beckley’s use of the word “gender” quotes Dave Hickey from the essay “Prom Night in Flatland”, The Invisible Dragon; see Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (New York: Allsworth Press, 1998), xv. 69 Beckley , Uncontrollable Beauty, xv. 70 See also Huyssen “Mass Culture as Woman” in After the Great Divide, 52-62. For insight into the origins of this intellectual split see the essay by P. Zeglin Brand, “Beauty Matters”, from the symposium of the same name in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57/1 (1999): 1-10. 71 Except Matisse and others who did not fit so easily within Modernism’s critical discourse. 41 Many have commented on the relationship between male sexual anxiety and the modernist hostility towards the feminine. As one example, Mark Wigley makes an interesting observation regarding this masculine/feminine binary when he refers to seminal texts by the fifteenth century architect Leon Battista Alberti. Wigley highlights how the early twentieth century still echoed the fifteenth century desire to confine women to the domestic realm in an attempt to control their perceived erotic power over men, while encouraging masculine mobility.72
Michael Carter’s observations about the masculinisation of the public sphere in the early twentieth century coincide with Wigley’s observations. Carter asserts:
The domain of the Public/Public, the site of work, power, is a site of a pervasive
masculinity and all those who enter it become, if not men, then honorary men
for the time they occupy it. It is also, at least officially, a de-eroticised space, a
space of reason, of straight lines, right angles and creative accountancy.73
What emerges from this statement is the concept of a de-eroticised public space situated in opposition to the private, intimate space of the domestic. Carter’s description of the
72 Here Wigley refers to Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia and The Art of Building in Ten Books to lay the foundations of his discussion. In Alberti’s terms the “natural” feminisation of the domestic develops through a control of women (and their sexuality) via architecture. According to Wigley the source of male anxiety in this matter is potentially linked to female mobility. If women ventured into the world beyond the domestic their uncontrolled circumstance made them sexually threatening and, further, capable of corrupting others. It was therefore necessary to confine women to the realm of the domestic. These texts are also significant because they were “crucial to architecture’s promotion into the liberal arts and therefore into the academy”, creating the historical split that is at the forefront of the decorative’s demise. 73 Michael Carter, Putting a Face on Things: Studies in Imaginary Materials (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 60-61. 42 pervasively masculine, de-eroticised public sphere alerts us to the privileging of the male “modern”(a term dear to Loos) who could enjoy the balance offered by being able to access both the public and private spheres. Women could not access both spaces but remained confined within the orbit of the eroticised domestic realm, referred to by Loos as the “rich” interior.74 Modernism continued pre-modern notions of gendered architectural space to relegate the ornamental to an interior, private realm populated with feminised and eroticised fantasies and experiences.75
As we have seen with Loos, however, the modernist approach to controlled erotic space did not stay within the domestic but extended to fashion and in particular to women’s fashion. For Loos, the erotic suggestiveness and connotations of the “evil” seduction of ornament and clothing was linked to women.76 The frivolities of dress, sex, and seduction interfered with a “moderns” ability to go about “his” work, and so it needed to be hidden and contained.77 In a sense, Loos was the oracle for broader attitudes and anxieties of his era.
Given this stance, Carter asserts that the functionalist ethos pervaded even the fashion houses, and the modernist body found itself mirroring modern architecture in its quest for a stripped down austerity.78 First occurring in male fashion, this pared down
74 Wigley makes a significant point about the exclusion of sexuality from early twentieth century modernist architecture (beyond the domestic). He claims, “The exclusion of sexuality is itself sexual.” See Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” in Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space, 328. 75 For more insight see Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 41-74. 76 See Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, 33. 77 Here I use the term “moderns” as Loos would have used it. Loos often used the term “we moderns”, or “moderns” with no apostrophe. 78 Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 83. 43 architectonic appearance was intended to match rational thought, de-eroticised and streamlined architecture, and a progressive society. It was also an attempt to keep the private/erotic hidden behind the façade of dress. In this intent it is not difficult to see misogynistic overtones in the trend towards “art for art’s sake”. The conflation of ornament, beauty, the erotic, and women appears to highlight a persistent masculinist anxiety.79 More recently, Postmodernism has embraced and celebrated Modernism’s exclusions. A comment from Reed affirms this tendency. He asserts that “the domestic has returned to a position of cultural prominence, impelling us to look back over the mainstream of modernism in an effort to trace its domestic subcurrents”.80 In addition, we have seen a return of categories othered by Modernism, realising a massive engagement with the quotidian, the evolution of the Feminist movement, and an interest in notions of cultural identity, all of which flowed through to contemporary art practice.
We will visit some of these impulses in later chapters, but now I wish to flesh out the discussion touched on earlier in the section on Loos: the decorative as supplement.
The Decorative As Supplement
As we have seen, the decorative at times found itself in a ‘third space’ in relation to the dominant modernist discourse of fine art, design and architecture. Ornament was perceived as superfluous to the structure of buildings, clothes and objects, and in purist painting it was sidelined as it lacked that which was central in a work of art. Purism negated the possibility of the decorative even attaining recognition as a form of
“structural beauty” in Loosian terms, because its aesthetic essence was considered to be
79 For further insight see Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 33. See also Harries’ notes for other authors on this subject. 80 Reed, Not At Home, 17. 44 non-essential to the central properties of an artform.81 Thus a theoretical separation and subsequent devaluing of the ornamental register occurred.
What were the conditions that allowed the decorative to be relegated to a devalued supplemental position in western aesthetics? In an attempt to understand this question I wish to expand on how several contemporary theorists perceive the formulation of the supplement/essence binary that subtended Modernism.
Earlier I argued that the marginalisation of beauty within aesthetic discourse resulted in a theoretical split between art and architecture (for which beauty ceased to be an important value) and “minor” arts aspiring to the beautiful. Ornament’s auxiliary position in the system of the arts is an issue in Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgement. In this highly influential text on aesthetics Kant outlines what constitutes beauty in art. In
Kantian terms, the ergon is that which is central to a work of art’s aesthetic and conceptual intent, whereas the parergon is a secondary, non-essential addition. I argue that Kant’s theory of parerga is relevant to an understanding of Modernism’s definition of what is central and what is marginal in a work of art. What I wish to focus on in this section is an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretation of the parergon by some contemporary theorists. To fully appreciate this discussion it is important to refer to a statement by Kant on the parergon. Kant writes:
Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e. what is only adjunct, not an
intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object, in augmenting
81 Pre-modern notions of beauty, confused with beautification (superficial decoration of architecture), also became bound to this problem.
45 the delight of taste does so only by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames
of pictures or the drapery on statues or the colonnades of palaces. But if the
ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of the beautiful form –
if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win approval for the picture by
means of its charm – it is then called finery and takes away from genuine
beauty.82
Kant’s description of ornament as parerga (not ergon – that which is the work, or central), posits its aesthetic value only if it is perceived as “intrinsic” in the work, despite its lack of centrality. He cites examples such as the architectural details of colonnades, or the drapery on statues, as being successful representations of this intrinsic decoration. But this statement suggests that for Kant ornament needs to be stripped of its sensual appeal for it to be intrinsic to a work of art. In his terms, ornament is required to privilege its formal qualities and reject the sensate appeal of its materiality. Here we witness the beginning of the expulsion of the corporeal or affective (supplemental) register from art, which flowed to modernist architecture. And whilst this appears to be the historical root of the decorative’s problem, its full impact was delayed until the early twentieth century, when ornament’s aesthetic significance was severely diminished in some quarters. Kant also advises us that if the ornament
“does not itself enter into the composition” then it can only detract from the aesthetic pleasure of the work (this is perhaps what Loos referred to when he made a distinction between “essential” or “classical” ornament and “superficial” ornament). What Kant
82 Immanuel Kant, cited in Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 119. For further insight also refer to David Morgan’s essay discussion on Karl Philipp Moritz, “The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 50/3 (Summer, 1992): 231-242. 46 appears to advocate here is the stifling of ornament’s capricious play across surface and structure – limiting it to structural, formal manifestations.
In the seminal text Truth in Painting, Derrida has discussed Kant’s parergon as supplement, a notion that is central to many of his seminal works on the theory of deconstruction.83 For Derrida there exists in the work of many philosophers certain elements that are apparently marginal or trivial, but which could be shown to be fundamental to the philosophical discourse in question. This is what Derrida called the supplement, an apparently marginalised element that could be revealed to be much more significant; even capable of destabilizing the author’s declared intention. Through
Derrida it is possible to see how a reinterpretation of parerga could result in a theory of ornament as occupying a subversive or conceptually destabilising in-between zone. The disruptive potential of ornament calls for further analysis and it is useful at this point to turn to two contemporary views on this matter.
In different texts, Michael Carter and Marco Marcon discuss ornament’s problematic position within mainstream Modernism.84 Their analysis of the ergon and the parergon in Kantian philosophy (via Derrida) offers a different perspective from the conventional modernist position on the decorative.85 Carter explains that Derrida identifies
two modalities for the supplemental relation. The first is a relation adding
something in the sense of making up for a lack in the initial condition while the
83 See Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon”, Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. Mcleod (Chicago: University press of Chicago, 1987). 84 See also Anger, “Forgotten Ties” in Reed, Not At Home, 143. 85 Other contemporary theorists to consider are Christopher Reed, Chris McAuliffe, Andrew McNamara, and Dirk Pültau, who have all contributed to this debate in different texts. 47 second adds something extra, something not regarded as integral to the initial
concept, situation, or thing.86
From this reading Carter focuses on the second modality of the parergon,
“supplemental additions to the work such as the frame and ornamentation”. Carter highlights Derrida’s suspicions of any rigid distinction between the essential and non- essential (supplemental) registers and argues that both the supplement and the essential are necessary to constitute the work. Carter alerts us to the fact that it is only “within the play, the tension between both terms that the work is able to stabilise itself as that which it strives to be, the essential component of the work”87. This interstitial interplay between supplement and essence allows the work to establish itself without lack, and is where meaning is created.
With a slightly different emphasis Marcon interprets Kant’s description of the parergon
(or ornament) as “something which is placed on the boundary between the “proper” work of art and the surrounding environment”88. In this sense it occupies an ambiguous space that is neither totally “outside” the work, nor totally “inside”. For Marcon, ornament occupies a zone “which belongs to both the work and the world”89. From this reading it appears that the positioning of ornament in this liminal zone, where it contributes to the aesthetics of the work and yet is not totally contained within this space, places the decorative in a potentially subversive position. It has the ability to
86 Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 118. 87 Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 120. 88 Marco Marcon, “Excessive Beauty: Ornamentation, Supplementarity and Modernism”, Pam Gaunt, Selected Works 1989-1996 (Perth: Pam Gaunt, 1997), 39-43. 89 Marcon, “Excessive Beauty”, 39-43. 48 disrupt the boundaries of the work if not controlled (and this is probably what Kant alludes to). Simultaneously it contributes positively to the aesthetics of the work. To deny this aspect of the decorative and only view it as marginal or disruptive is to disavow its essence.
Marcon highlights for us what Derrida identifies (in Kant) as the ambiguity of the parergon. He observes that the parergon
has for Derrida [a] crucial theoretical implication because it destabilises the
fundamental philosophical distinction between what essentially and intrinsically
belongs within a certain class of phenomena, such as “art”, and what is
absolutely excluded from it.90
Both Carter and Marcon claim that the positioning of parerga as adjunct acts to determine that which is considered essential to a work of art within western aesthetics.
At the same time, it denominates what is unnecessary, or required to be excluded, for a work of art to establish itself within this realm. What was at stake for a modernist trajectory was the threat of destabilisation or contamination by the ornamental register that had the ability to rupture the purity so desired by the tenets of this canon. Derrida’s interpretation of Kant on the ergon and parergon challenges the assumptions that led to the modernist accessorisation of the decorative. If the non-essential is seen as an intrinsic part of the whole, this “other” cultural register, the decorative, is the periphery that turns out to be central after all.
90 Marcon, “Excessive Beauty”, 39-43. 49 The split between the formal (conceptual) and the material/sensual (corporeal) aspects of an artwork was mentioned in the section on the gendering and eroticisation of ornament. It is important to expand on this notion to emphasise how this affects the idea of the periphery as central in a functionalist and purist ethos. Returning to the last quoted part of Kant’s remarks on genuine beauty and the split between the “formal” and the “material” registers of his description, Marcon indicates
that for Kant the ornament can attain to the level of “genuine beauty” only by
disavowing the immediacy of the sensuous appeal of its material base and by
privileging purely formal values.91
In other words, the work requires appreciation of the “intellectual pleasure of the beautiful”, whereas the world, and its associations with the material and with sensorial pleasure, must be excluded for the former to establish itself.92 However, Marcon’s analysis of Derrida’s commentary on Kant shows that the work is in danger of suffering a “lack” through such an exclusion of the ornamental and material other. Ultimately the excluded material and its affective characteristic provide an essential sensorial and tactile experience of the physical world. For Marcon, to ignore this aspect “means to ignore the carnal reality of the body in all its perceptual, libidinal and physical richness”
93. In this sense, the elevation of pure form in certain discourses of Modernism risks negating an arguably significant ingredient in its rejection of the corporeal.
91 Marcon, “Excessive Beauty”, 39-43. 92 Marcon, “Excessive Beauty”, 39-43. 93 Marcon, “Excessive Beauty”, 39-43. 50 To further illustrate this point I wish to use Derrida’s reinterpretation of parerga to revisit the ambivalence between the external face and the ornamental interior in the houses of Adolf Loos. As we have already seen, the exteriors of Loos’ buildings were devoid of any decorative, sensate, erotic suggestion, in sharp contrast to the “richness” of the interior. Paradoxically, what is described as supplemental appears as literally central to the structure, highlighting the necessity (in Loosian terms) for the “rich” interior. It is unlikely that Loos consciously realised that his approach to architecture was reflecting an essential condition between structure and supplement, ergon and parergon, but through it we see the potential for modernist architecture to suffer an absence that may be counterbalanced through the addition of parerga or decoration. A
Loosian building viewed in total (that is, including both external and internal parts) may be read as a reflection of the tensions necessary between supplement and essence that a building (or a work) manifests in order to exist without “lack”.94 I would argue that this architectural relationship between essence and supplement is also transferable to discussions on art.
Both Carter and Marcon confirm that the supplement paradoxically occupies an essential inside/outside boundary, a space that is neither “the work” nor “the world”, but is situated between both. This liminal zone occupied by the decorative allows a slippage between an artwork’s core and its perimeters that echoes purist modernism’s
94 To further exemplify this point refer to the work of Mies van der Rohe. For van der Rohe the role of his architectural design is an aesthetic one with no concessions to the habitability of its buildings. For him, domestic architecture became “corrupted” by the clutter of decorative additions through the occupancy of his buildings. This cluttering is also indicative of a “lack” in the original design, suggesting the necessity for decorative additions. Again the decorative’s central aesthetic role and the significance of sensorial appeal is reinforced in this realm. 51 concern about ornament’s potential to disrupt its aesthetic program. The ornamental inside/outside locus is elaborated by Massimo Carboni. He asserts, “if we only accept ornament to the degree that it grows out of structure, we legitimise it through principles that are not its own”95. For Carboni, then, if constantly justified in accordance with only one facet of itself, the more complex meaning of ornament is denied. If ornament is described in simple or isolationist terms, as either structural or supplementary, it will always lose aspects of its meaning. Therefore, to tolerate its fluidity in definition, in the fusing of the polemics, essence and supplement, the potential for a meaningful and authentic expression of the decorative is created. Ornamental detail is one of the oldest aesthetic manifestations; and what this thesis attempts to stress is that the decorative in itself did not change, but its value and categorization was shifted towards the negative, within some currents of Modernism.
Earlier I pointed out that Modernism thrived on a reductionist approach to the production of art that devalued what is perceived as non-intellectual, affective elements in aesthetic experience, and removed anything surfeit to its cause. But this persistent quest to contain Modernism within a self-referential methodology generated the paradoxical danger of a complete reversal of its ambitions to high seriousness. Andrew
McNamara has commented on this potential in his discussion of the decorative as supplement. He writes:
In its nascent form, modernism’s general tendency to a critical self-referential
inquiry could so easily be confused with its other, mere pattern. Abstraction
95 Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, 106-111. 52 could so easily be viewed as lacking substance, as simply artifice or aesthetic
fluff.96
In this passage McNamara partly explains Modernism’s constant anxiety about the decorative. We are drawn to an interesting premise where the possibility exists for the blurring of the supplement/essence binary and even its inversion. By this I mean that if it is possible for Modernism to be mistaken for its inconsequential decorative other, then it is equally possible for ornament to be at the centre of the modernist trajectory.
This idea has resonances with Carter and Marcon’s previous analysis of Derrida’s text.
But McNamara’s reference to “aesthetic fluff” points us towards a less discussed binary opposition. This is what one could describe as a serious/frivolous polarity that devalues playful and spontaneous approaches. The serious tone of rationalistic, self-referential
Modernism is pitched against the playfulness or frivolity of the decorative. The notion of play with its perceived unserious, non-intellectual connotations is a potentially disruptive element to a controlled purist regime – another cause for anxiety, because whilst play has rules or parameters, it is not always rational, and is often spontaneous and irrational. 97 For a rationalist ethos, the potential irrationality of play is often linked to the feminine; and furthermore, “play has a tendency to be beautiful”.98
96 Andrew McNamara, ed., Ornamentalism (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art and Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1997), 11. 97 John Ruskin has also commented on the separation of play and seriousness: “You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you mix play.” Cited in Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 29. 98 Johan Huizinga, cited in Martha McWiliams, “Play and Postmodernism and the Barvarian Rococo”, New Art Examiner, Vol.27/2 (October, 1999): 28-31 and 64-65. McWilliams quotes from Johan Huizinga, “Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950) i. Huizinga observes here that because play “to a large extent” lies “in the field of aesthetics” it has a tendency “to be beautiful”. 53 But does play lack seriousness? I wish to foreground Martha McWilliams’ article “Play and Postmodernism and the Barvarian Rococo” to address this question. Referencing
Johan Huizinga’s 1930s celebrated work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in
Culture, she quotes from the chapter on “Play and the Arts” where Huizinga states that
“seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness”99.
Whilst McWilliams uses Huizinga’s text to advocate postmodern art and links this with the often-criticised Bavarian form of Rococo ornamentation, the issues she raises have implications for the decorative in general. McWilliams believes Rococo ornamentation is a compelling example of serious playfulness.100 Through Huizinga, McWilliams alerts us to the fact that play has parameters, an intellectual aspect, and a relationship to order. This can also be evidenced in the serious-play of some of the anti-formalist
Modernist avant-gardes like Dada or Surrealism, and in the works of modernist mavericks such as Henri Matisse and Antoni Gaudi.101 Matisse’s entire life’s work was never considered commensurate with orthodox Modernism. As an example, his early work Dance II (1909-10) and many of his later papier decoupés wall installations are playful and decorative configurations, and understandably at odds with a trajectory that was unwilling to entertain notions of play. These examples of Matisse’s work reinforce the possibility for seriousness and play to coalesce in art. Thus Huizinga’s point that
99 Martha McWiliams, “Play and Postmodernism and the Barvarian Rococo”, New Art Examiner 27/2 (October, 1999): 28-31 and 64-65. 100 But there is a historical precedent for the disregard of serious play. Decorative imagery on Medieval and Gothic illuminated manuscripts was generally considered in the 19th century (and beyond) as absent of serious meaning, frivolous and inessential. More recent interpretations of this often marginal imagery indicates that whilst its appearance might suggest a non-serious, playful approach to decorating these documents, the embellishments were certainly not devoid of content or meaning, more often than not they were the very opposite – integral to the text. They typify the notion of serious play. See Michael Camille, Image on the Edge (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 31. 101 Note that all the abovementioned were excluded from purist Modernism. 54 “seriousness seeks to exclude play” but not the reverse, appears correct. It emerges that the “lack” in purist Modernism, examined in the previous section, applies not only to notions of the corporeal but also to the role of serious-play. And from Huizinga it can be deduced that serious-play involves an intellectual process that was denied as a matter of convenience by those committed to formalist principles.
And now we turn to discuss an aspect of the final binary construction of Modernism relevant to the decorative – the decorative as feminised mass culture.
The Decorative As Feminised Mass Culture
In twentieth century culture, ornament has often mediated between the spheres of art and the “everyday”. The everyday, or mass culture, was perceived as a disruption of
“high” Modernism’s hermetic trajectory. This “public aspect” of the decorative became linked to a feminised perception of mass culture.102 There were several levels to this perceived threat.
Despite mass culture being a product of the new century, its “public aspect” was rejected by Purism. In the previous section on autonomy I discussed modernist art’s desire to distance itself from mechanization and utility. As a consequence, mass culture’s significant antithetical positioning to Modernism bound it to the decorative.
Mechanical production was collapsed into mass culture and mass consumerism, and both were equated with the feminine.
102 This term is used by Harries in The Meaning of Modern Art. 55 Modernism’s separatist approach to mass culture was based on a fear similar to that fuelling its rejection of ornament. It appears that ornament’s tendency for category slippage and aesthetic disruption was comparable to mass culture’s potential to diffuse boundaries and allow a merging of “high” and “low” registers.103 Andreas Huyssen claims that Modernism perceives mass culture as a catalyst towards the
“homogenisation of difference”, through “technologies of mass production and reproduction”.104 The link to mass production is more obvious than its relationship to the “homogenisation of difference” but both are tied to the notion of repetition.
Historically, most decorative patterns relied structurally on the repetition of motifs. The logic to this structure is bound to symbolic rituals and the desire for order in particular cultures, and these are tied to the role of familiarity.105 In a twentieth century western cultural context the idea of repetition is also tied to notions of the familiar, but in addition it becomes representative of mass production, the ability to produce the same thing ad infinitum. By discounting the individuality or uniqueness of something through mass repetition, we create anonymity, or the “homogenisation of difference”. Through sequential patterning, ornament becomes linked to the familiar, and the repetitive, and even to mass embellishment. Compared to purist painting (and its affiliation with individual expression), these categories are opposed to notions of the individual.
Repeated imagery or sequential patterning was something autonomous art had difficulty with because of its propensity to go beyond “the frame”, suggesting the unlimited rather than a closed, autonomous structure. This is precisely why postmodernist artists like
103 See McAuliffe, “Redecorating”, 15-18. 104 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 9. 105 For further insight see Hans Zitko, “Rationalisation in the Service of Tradition: Ornamental and Serial Forms in Modern Art”, in Brüderlin , ed., Ornament and Abstraction, 57-63. 56 Andy Warhol and Rosemarie Trockel utilised repeated identical elements in their serial structures, recalling the techniques of mass reproduction as an anti-modernist device.106
Karsten Harries, in commenting on the relationship between ornament and mass culture, argues that the decorative “betrays” the “revolutionary potential” of art; and that unlike art, it “means to make us more comfortable, not less so”.107 Its familiarity and repetitive nature allows for a mediation “between art and the everyday”, which positions ornament in a space loaded with disruptive potential. Orthodox Modernism could not express its hermetic individuality within the “comfort zone” of the quotidian. Comfort implies more of the same, repetition of the familiar. “High” art needed to take a risk, be experimental, place itself outside the familiar in a space where it was able to maintain a distance from perceived notions of identity and sameness. Mass culture threatened to disrupt difference, and subsume it into mediocrity and anonymity. And so it emerges through their positioning as, or with, mass culture, both women and the decorative lost their respective individuality and identity.
For the purists the notion of “mass” was opposed to notions of “authentic” and
“individual” art, whether in reference to production, consumption, anonymity, or identical elements presented as serial structures. This is exemplified in Siegfried
Kracauer’s seminal essay, “The Mass Ornament”.108 Both Huyssen and Brüderlin refer
106 Warhol’s screen printed serialised works (e.g. Marilyn Diptych, 1962) are intended to reflect and critique the culture they generated from, and in that sense they read as reflections of mass consumption, mass production, mass media etc. Trockel’s use reflects Warhol’s but extends the repetitive format further to critique social rituals and reference repetitive women’s work, using a mass produced product with serialised imagery. 107 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 51. 108 See Siegried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”, in Harrison and Wood, Art In Theory , 462-465. 57 to Kracauer’s text to elaborate on the association of femininity and ornament with mass culture.109 Kracauer first describes the phenomenon of mass ornament in 1927, in reference to the revue girls’ mass dancing formations in the entertainment industry.
Kracauer, according to Brüderlin, “sees this as analogous to capitalist methods of production”, and the description is intended as a pejorative comment to which ornament is bound.110 But this mass ornamentalisation of society could also be considered a form of “mass homogenisation”, its resultant anonymity again a significant threat to artistic individuality.
Modernism saw the decorative and its audience as one – there was no differentiation.
As Chris McAuliffe puts it, particularly for Kandinsky, Loos, Corbusier, and Gropius,
“the decorative (and its audience, for the two are inseparable) is attacked as an impediment to the attainment of a purist utopia”.111 As a result of this process, mass culture was homogenised and feminised, and thus viewed as an entity to which the decorative was coupled. But as recent art history shows us, mass culture and the quotidian, once considered as extraneous or external to the modernist paradigm, are central to the conceptual concerns of many streams of contemporary art practice.
109 Markus Brüderlin, “The (Digital) Mass Ornament”, in Ornament and Abstraction – the dialogue between non-Western, modern and contemporary Art, ed. Markus Brüderlin, (Basel: Beyeler Foundation, 2001) 219-231.The original text Das Ornamnet der Masse – Essays, 2 vols., was first published in Frankfurt in 1927 and is referred to in Huyssen, After the Great Divide 48. 110 Kracauer is cited in Brüderlin, Ornament and Abstraction , 219-231. 111 McAuliffe, “Redecorating”, 15-18. 58 GREENBERGIAN MODERNISM AND ELITE CULTURE
The inter-war years leading up to the re-location of the modernist “centre” from Paris to the United States saw a re-shaping of the Modernist framework in relation to mass culture. This period generated variant experiences and responses in different countries and for different artists. I don’t wish to explore this situation in detail, except to briefly acknowledge the existence of differences of context that led to a re-assessment of ornament’s appropriateness by artists and architects. For example, the positive re- engagement with ornament by several post-war Italian architects occurred as a reaction to the war and its devastation, and was an attempt to redress the perceived lack in modernist architecture due to its non-specificity and failure to engage with post-war society. These particular architects also utilised the decorative’s ability to convey cultural and symbolic meaning in architecture, in their quest to instil site-specific qualities in buildings that resonated with the ordinary person. However, the parallel story of ornament in post-war America evolved in a very different way, in both architecture and art. During this period of re-articulation of the modernist project, ornament was positioned as representative of capitalism, which was seen as the social force behind the war.112
The ascension of New York as the post-war global art centre was greatly assisted (and articulated) by several rising American critics of the time, including Clement
Greenberg.113 It appears that art-critical debate in mid to late Modernism owes much to
112 The latter can be explained, in part, by the embrace of classical models of beauty by the Nationalist Socialists. 113 Other important contemporaries include Harold Rosenberg and Theodor Adorno. 59 Greenberg’s ideas and the varying responses to his work from his contemporaries.
Though not without his critics, Greenberg has been regarded by many contemporary theorists as the foremost critic of the 1940s-50s. The emergence of the New York
School during this time (with Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Newman, Gorky et al.) supported and promoted by Greenberg’s writings was, in part, responsible for the shift of the global “centre” to New York.
A re-articulation of artists’ interests and priorities occurred as an obvious response to war and it is difficult to generalise these varied reactions. However, Greenberg’s exhortation for artists to make “ambitious art” was premised on an attempt to create a conduit through which a European Modernism could continue to progress, albeit in a tightened, more hermetic form. Many artists felt that their work was not disconnected from the reality of their lives and that perhaps Greenberg was asking them to make work in an apolitical vacuum. But it was precisely this isolationism that perpetuated a further narrowing of the Modernist ethos. Huyssen describes the shift from a European
Modernism to the form that evolved in the United States through Greenberg and the
New York School as a kind of “death” of the “historical” avant-garde. For Huyssen,
Greenberg developed a “single-minded trajectory” that denied the existence of multiple
Modernist narratives.114 The narrowing of the modernist legacy and its dislocation from society ultimately led to a crisis in the 1960s. But how did this trajectory maintain a
114 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 6-8. Huyssen’s use of the word “historical” borrows from Peter Bürger’s use of the word. 60 sustained autonomy and difference from other practices?115 Huyssen offers some suggestions and describes the autonomy of late modernist art as
always the result of a resistance, an abstention, and a suppression – resistance to
the seductive lure of the mass culture, abstention from the pleasure of trying to
please a larger audience, suppression of everything that might be threatening to
the rigorous demands of being modern and at the edge of time.116
What I have just outlined sets a context for the next discussion where I intend to expand on Greenberg’s invocations of the decorative in order to deny it.117
Like its European counterparts, American Modernist Abstraction often rejected the decorative, including anything contained within the domestic realm. In tandem with the
Europeans their modus operandi perpetuated the binary of transcendence/immanence, not totally rejecting corporeal engagement with the world but aiming for a higher realm.
For Johnathon Harris, Greenberg established a kind of closed judgement about values of good and bad art, and what constituted “authentic” art practice.118 In his now famous essay “Avant Garde and Kitsch”, Greenberg sees mass culture as responsible for creating a new kind of kitsch and “low” culture; the gap between this and avant-garde
115 For further insight see Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan Press, 1986), 176-177. 116 Huyssen, After the Great Divide , 55. 117 This is a reference to Christopher Reed’s earlier comment where he made a similar statement in relation to the domestic and post-war United States avant-garde theorists and artists. I have substituted “decorative” for his word “domestic”. See Reed’s introduction to Not At Home, 16, for the original quotation. 118 Frascina et al., eds., Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties (London and New Haven: Yale University Press [in assoc. with the open university] 1993), 56-57. 61 art is described by Huyssen as the “great divide”.119 To illustrate aspects of Greenberg’s anti-decorative rhetoric we can refer to Christopher Reed who quotes from another of
Greenberg’s important theoretical texts, “The Crisis of Easel Painting” (1948). Here
Greenberg wrote:
the “fatal” influence of “all-over” abstract art, which, because “it comes very
close to decoration – to the kind seen in wallpaper patterns that can be repeated
indefinitely,” now “infects” painting as a whole.120
The words “repeated indefinitely” and “infects” are significant here. Commenting on this statement Christopher Reed elaborates:
For Greenberg, the only value of decoration was to destroy itself by becoming
“vehement”, “turbid”, and “violent”. Part of the “mission” of modernist
painting, he (Greenberg) said, was “to find ways of using the decorative against
itself”.121
Greenberg’s propensity to invoke the decorative in order to deny it recalls Loos’ polemics against the “criminal” decorative. Greenberg’s derogatory reference to wallpaper and its unlimited propensity for ornamental repetition is highly significant, because it evokes domestic space as representative of the reviled decorative as a whole.
Wallpaper was nothing more than decoration in its purest superficial form and worth invoking in anticipation of its own self-destruction. By connecting the decorative to mass culture, wallpaper, and kitsch, Greenberg affirmed a blanket discrimination
119 Huyssen, After the Great Divide , 57 and 59. 120 Greenberg, cited in Reed’s introduction to Not At Home, 15. 121 Reed, Not At Home, 15. 62 against these categories. Modern art was much more than home decoration, and the risk of it being viewed as wallpaper potentially undermined the high ambitions of the
Modernist project.
Greenberg often aligned painters who failed to conform to his criteria of absolute, pictorially flat abstraction122 with the decorative or interior domestic space.123 Reed observes, “For Greenberg, and his contemporary Harold Rosenberg, the domestic was the antithesis of art”.124 Reed quotes Greenberg’s comments on certain Motherwell paintings, attributing to them “an archness like that of the interior decorator who stakes everything on a happy placing”, and continues with another quotation in which he says of de Chirico’s late work, “It was not even easel painting; it was elementary interior decoration”.125 We can infer from this that easel painting was not highly regarded by the new United States modernists; but the decorative was rated well below this genre of practice. This and other forms of anti-decorative rhetoric can be found scattered throughout Greenberg’s texts. For him, ornament is devoid of the essential properties that constitute authentic art. His discomfort with decoration in general seems to reflect a fear of the destabilizing threat posed by parerga, and if Derrida is correct in his claims about the subversive power of parerga, then Greenberg’s assumptions about its potential to disrupt his formalist agenda were accurate.
122 By this I mean an absence of three-dimensionality; and self-reference through process and materiality. 123 And in a post-war context many women had become bound to the domestic again. 124 Christopher Reed, Not At Home, 15. 125 Greenberg cited in Reed, Not At Home, 15. 63 The coherence of Greenberg’s critical position was achieved at the expense of a whole series of exclusions. Harrison and Wood suggest the many aspects of the aesthetic experience were either “derogated, marginalised or simply ignored in Modernist criticism” by Greenberg and his contemporaries.126 The systematic negation of different ways of experiencing and expressing modernity in their critical writing contributed significantly to the protracted exclusion of the decorative and mass culture from advanced art practice.
The Greenbergian form of late modernism tended to be gender and medium specific and marginalised a large number of the diverse art practices that arose in the period in question. Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg produced experimental works that were influenced by other modernist narratives, and later in the sixties, performance, installation, assemblage, and Pop Art were also rejected because of their affiliation with vernacular culture. The influence of Greenberg in supporting those artists who passed his visual “test of quality” should not be underestimated. And whilst a progressive decline of “high” Modernism is apparent from the early fifties onwards, the legacy of Greenberg’s criticism was felt well into the 1960s. Eventually, the
Greenbergian model generated such prescribed and narrow criteria it reached what it had predicted for the decorative: inevitable entropy.127
Whilst Greenberg offered many artists a positive critical environment, he promulgated an absolutist ethos of pictorial flatness and self-referentiality at the expense of art’s
126 Frascina et al., Modernism in Dispute, 181. 127 For further insight see Arthur C. Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), 324-329. 64 many other potentialities. Paradoxically, for Greenberg the anxiety over mass culture eventually legitimised itself. The cracks in the limited “master” narrative became apparent when broader Modernism’s vagaries of art practice came to the fore. Artists began to engage more with mass culture and Modernism’s marginalised others. These include the corporeal, the feminine and the domestic, which were mobilised against
Greenberg’s elitist aesthetic imperative.
It is not possible to define a discrete break between Modernism and Postmodernism, but
Huyssen believes this transition occurred when Modernism, avant-garde and mass culture “entered into a new set of mutual relations and discursive configurations that we now call “postmodernism”.128 Huyssen remarks that this new paradigm is as “diverse and multifaceted” as the earlier Modernism had once been, “before it ossified into the dogma”.129
Undeniably, some great art was produced during the time of “high” Modernism’s dominance, but at the expense of the persistent exclusion and disparagement of other tendencies in visual culture. The decorative’s rich and lengthy history and its discourse was suppressed, but not entirely eradicated. This, and the fact that purist Modernism operated as a privileged category within art discourse, are the main issues I have attempted to discuss in this chapter. The decorative is only one of the many aesthetic modes to see a recent liberation from the segregation imposed during the reign of the modernist project. Postmodernism began a necessary renegotiation of the rigid modernist terms of reference towards a multi-directional paradigm. This, among other things, made it possible to reconcile the decorative with modern and contemporary art.
128 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, x. 129 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, x. 65 In other words, Postmodernism came to view the Greenbergian notion of abstraction as only one possibility among many other approaches.
This chapter has attempted to illustrate that the functionalist and purist trepidation about the decorative’s potential to disrupt their agenda was theoretically accurate. The inconsistent nature of Loos’ arguments underline this modernist anxiety. The repression of ornament’s semantic capacity by limiting its potentiality through binary constructions served to contain any destabilisation that threatened the existence of a rationalist regime. To foreground the ornamental’s liminal position between margin and centre in a work of art creates a sense of uncertainty that undermines the supplement/essence binary. In response to the decorative’s mutability, Purism may only outwardly suppress its potential. The ornamental survived stubbornly as a barely suppressed other, generating a well-founded anxiety in its modernist “host”.
It is not my intention to foreground a pluralist approach as the counter to purist
Modernism, but since the demise of orthodox Modernism, a fresh vision has evolved allowing artists and theorists to re-think the limited way ornament has been defined in fine art over the past one hundred years or so. Chapter Two seeks to determine how the decorative became re-articulated within Postmodern art and discourse.
66 CHAPTER TWO: POSTMODERNISM AND THE RE-
EMERGENCE OF THE DECORATIVE
INTRODUCTION: THE POSTMODERN DEPARTURE FROM
MODERNIST MAXIMS
This chapter addresses the articulation of the decorative within Postmodern art discourse, and focuses upon Postmodernist developments whose aesthetic orientation is relevant to the concerns of this thesis. Significant to this are Pop art, aspects of feminist art and the Pattern and Decoration movement, but also Arte Povera and facets of
Minimalism.
In defining the gap between modern art and mass culture Huyssen’s expression “the great divide”, mentioned previously, signifies a major breach in Formalism’s legacy.130
He describes the embrace of mass culture and the role of feminist art as two of the key developments that mark the difference between Modernism and Postmodernism. 131 I propose to flesh out the significance of the issues addressed by Huyssen with particular reference to ornament’s repositioning in postmodern art practice. Added to this, the decorative permeation of architecture will also be addressed as representative of an early anti-modernist current in this area. The discussion of architecture foregrounds the corporeal and semantic content of the decorative, neglected in Modernism, which
130 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 59. 131 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 59. 67 becomes a central issue for its revival in Postmodernism.132 This contributing factor facilitated a more general acceptance of the decorative in art associated with postmodernity.
It is evident that a pluralist ethos arose from Postmodernism’s deconstruction of modernist hierarchies. Although the acceptance of the notion of diversity in
Postmodernism may be considered an important factor contributing to art’s more recent positive reception of the decorative and its various forms, I intend to focus on the aspects of pluralism concerned with the adoption of mass culture and the questioning of the gap between “high” and “low” culture.
The difficulty modernist Purism had in containing the plurality of the manifestations of ornament led to a blanket dismissal of all ornament rather than an attempt to come to terms with it. Postmodernism however, opened the door for a re-evaluation of the plurality of previously marginalised approaches. The adoption of mass culture indicated a shift towards the acceptance of variance in Pop Art’s renegotiation of “high” and “low” art, as will become evident in the discussion of the Pattern Painting
Movement. Mass reproduced materials in the work of some minimalist sculptors, and feminist art’s embrace of “low” art forms such as craft and the decorative practices of knitting, weaving, embroidery and other forms of surface embellishment, were also incorporated; but the development of Pop Art and the rise of women’s influence on the culture of this era is perhaps most significant for the decorative.
132 Irving Sandler highlights the role postmodern architecture played in rejecting modernist values for art : “Because of the clarity of postmodernist polemics in architecture, and because their target was so clearly defined, they played a vital role in discourse in the other arts.” See Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the early 1990s (New York: Icon Editions, an imprint of Harper Collins, 1996), 5. 68 In light of this, it is ironic that mass culture and feminism, although conflated and marginalised in Modernism, become the impetus behind the decorative’s return as a legitimate form of expression in advanced art practice. Together they contributed towards the acceptance of greater difference and diversity in art practice. These two areas will be addressed in the section following a general introduction to
Postmodernism where I discuss several movements that were important to ornament’s renaissance before I examine several artists whose work integrates the decorative in order to deconstruct Modernism’s aesthetic imperatives.
Whilst the exact date of Postmodernism’s genesis has been debated there is general agreement that from the late 1950s onwards signals appeared that flagged the beginning of a shift away from key features of Modernism. Charles Jencks observes that
Postmodernism
…is so precise and ambiguous at the same time; accurate about the port we have
left and richly suggestive of the destiny for which we are heading.133
The term postmodern is used simultaneously as a reference to the past and the future –at the centre of a tug of war between the two, something Jencks terms “double coding”.
Postmodernism in general was most successful in making significant that which was previously considered marginal in cultural practice. From the late 1950s onwards art, like architecture, began a series of departures from modernist notions, allowing what
Modernism rejected to re-surface and claim a legitimate place within art. Like
133 Charles Jencks, What Is Postmodernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1996), 15. 69 Modernism, Postmodernism was also multi-faceted, although contrary to its predecessor it acknowledged its trajectories and their differences.
Until the 1960s, there had been a general acceptance within visual arts practice that fine art consisted of only two broad categories, painting and sculpture. In the new open climate the rigidity of the old system of artistic categorization began to break down.
Many artists developed a fascination with the quotidian and appropriation, or a willingness to embrace notions of chance and “everydayness”. Others ventured into the creation of “happenings” staged outside the institutions of art.134 Some artists still continued to paint, but more and more artwork went “off the canvas” and challenged the museum context that was so important for Formalism. The development of large-scale international exhibitions not only encouraged the establishment of international networks reflective of a post-industrial society, but encouraged many artists to develop a migratory existence that transcended national boundaries. It was in this climate of expansion that the ornamental register in art and architecture resurfaced, often to position itself as a deliberate anti-modernist gesture.
At this point it is relevant to turn to the particular discourses within Postmodern art practice that prepared the ground for the decorative’s return.
134 Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 9. 70 TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE PARADIGM OF ART PRACTICE – THE
RETURN OF MODERNISM’S OTHERS
Shifts in architecture theory and practice
Jencks believes the first signs of the tension between Modernism and Postmodernism became apparent in architecture. One of the origins of this shift may be traced to a group of post-war Italian architects and the artists who collaborated with them.
Between 1944 and 1960 one part of Italian post-war architectural culture sought to depart from the established rationalist ethos.135 The initiators of this split tended towards fragmentation rather than a distinctive or identifiable movement, with those architects involved making quite different aesthetic decisions in different regions of
Italy. Many architects were involved in this new approach to building, among them
Ernesto N. Rogers,136 Marco Zanuso, Mario Ridolfi, Robert Menghi, Giovanni
Michelucci, and artists such as Lucio Fontana. Their departure from the modernist approach saw a reconsideration of ornament as one means to reconcile Functionalism’s propensity to subtract individual, social and cultural identifiers from built forms. Their deliberate inclusion of ornament as a reaction to the perceived social failure and sensorial deprivation in Functionalism is worth mentioning because it has clear parallels with the ideas promoted by Adolf Loos, and as with his work , it translates to an art context.
135 See Luca Molinari, translated as “Ornament for “The House of Man”, in L’Architecture D’Aujourd’Hui, Vol 333 (March-April, 2001): 62-63. 136 Ernesto Rogers was a member of the BBPR group (Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peresutti, Rogers) and co- founder and director of the review Domus, 1928-1940. 71 The Italian writer Luca Molinari argues that the move away from Modernist conventions in architecture at this time was due to the post-war urgency for the built environment to “meet the people half-way to establish a dialogue between them and modernity”.137 In attempting this reconciliation in a post-war context, architects looked to ornament for its repetitive familiarity and its affective appeal as a way to reconnect architecture with mainstream society. To illustrate the relevance of ornament in this instance, it is useful to return to a previous statement by Marco Marcon in Chapter One, where he describes ornament as “a vehicle for the expression of our concrete bodily engagement with the physical world”, and “the corporeal texture of experience”.138
Marcon’s comments arguably exemplify the ornamental register’s significance for postmodern architecture and art, and also highlights the missing ingredient from
Modernism for these particular architects. 139 This is especially the case if we recall the binaries in Loos’ writings on architecture where the sensuous “richness” of the decorated interior is an essential constituent of the “whole”, or the unadorned exterior.
According to Molinari, ornament was recognised by the aforementioned Italian architects as something capable of expressing “the human dimension of things”, and the appropriate aesthetic and semantic vehicle to “build a modern architecture closer to society and to diverse contexts”.140 Through their collaborations with artists, these
137 Molinari , “Ornament for “The House of Man”, 62-63. Also see Molinari,”Between Continuity and Crisis: History and Project in Italian Architectural Culture of the Postwar Period”, 2G, 15 (2000, III): 4- 11. 138 Marco Marcon, “ExcessiveBeauty”, 39-43. 139 The move to embellish architecture in the immediate post-war period did not go uncriticised and was in fact described in derogatory terms by one critic as “a new wave of Neo-Liberty”. (Translated, Neo- Liberty means Art Nouveau and is intended as a negative comment in this context). See Molinari “Ornament for “The House of Man”, 62-63. 140 Molinari, “Ornament for “The House of Man”, 62-63. Note Joyce Kozloff (one of the Pattern Painters referred to later in this chapter) made a similar comment, cited in Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 72 architects instigated a shift in architecture well before postmodern architects based in the United States such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown challenged modernist dogma in the 1960s.
As Postmodernism progressed in the 1960s and 1970s many more artists, architects and designers began to reject the modernist paradigm. Charles Jencks claims that
As Modernism developed into Late-Modernism and further stripped itself bare,
as the slogan “less is more” became “less than less is more than more and is
nearly nothing!”, silence became the dominating virtue.141
With the incorporation of vernacular imagery and the statement, “Less is a bore”,
Venturi set about interrupting the visual “silence” of modernist architecture.142
This shift in architectural practice is testament to ornament’s ability to operate on a semantic level and contribute towards cultural and symbolic meaning. Whilst the post- war architects noted above specifically refer to the decorative’s re-colonisation of architecture, it is possible to transfer their rationale to the implementation of the
148. The post-war architects did not take ornament out of context or use it sentimentally; rather their ornamental inclusions relied on local referents and a sense of the familiar to imbue a form of social and cultural relevance to architecture. By contrast, a statement made by Clement Greenberg in 1949 shows how far these architects had moved away from the modernist dominated orthodoxy: “Only when it becomes mere decoration does abstract art proceed in a void and really turn into ’dehumanizing‘ art.” See “On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting” (1949), in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 174. Here Greenberg affirms the decorative’s propensity to “dehumanise” art. This is the exact opposite of what the post-war architects claimed to be the value of the ornament’s power to redress the perceived absence of sensual deprivation and isolation from life’s experiences in Modernist forms. 141 Jencks, What Is Postmodernism?, 26. 142 “Less is a bore” is a response to Mies van der Rohe’s proposition “Less is more”. 73 decorative in design developments such as the 1970s Italian Memphis style, and to several other tendencies in art.
Shifts in sixties and post-sixties art
Within the new paradigms established through Postmodernism’s break with
Modernism, the shift in art practice resonated with previous avant-garde movements such as Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism and further developed Duchamp’s challenges to Modernism’s foundations. Media culture’s expansion in the 1960s significantly contributed to destabilising Modernism’s “cultural authority”. Pop Art’s early influence in bridging the gap between “high” and “low” art exemplifies this shift.143 Pop became an attractive form of expression for various subcultures, and for youth and underground movements. There were differences between American Pop Art and European Pop,144 but in general the movement appealed as something different and radical to those who had a political or social agenda that differed from previous views and prejudices. For Huyssen, Pop Art represents a kind of “reconciliation” between art and reality, perhaps best illustrated by Andy Warhol whose approach was to reproduce the already reproduced.145 Pop’s greatest achievement in terms of the critique of
Modernist dogma was to erase the perceived separation between aesthetic and non- aesthetic realms. New visual opportunities were created whereby artists used mass produced imagery or employed the quotidian as source material for the production of art, or as art.
143 Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Space (London: Pandora, 1995), 224. 144 See also Huyssen After the Great Divide , 14-142. 145 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 143. 74 Predictably, some critics in the sixties denounced the Pop Art movement for its perceived alignment to kitsch and non-art. However, this criticism only served to assist in positioning Pop Art as both a realistic threat and an alternative to the reigning artistic orthodoxy. The accommodation of mass culture by Pop Art was significant for the decorative because it perhaps unintentionally created a platform for the reintegration of
Modernism’s feminised “others”. Penny Sparkes suggests this occurrence was momentous for the decorative because “The alignment of high cultural Postmodernism with the popular culture of mass media” resulted in an engagement with “fashion, colour, decoration, symbolism, irrationality, spontaneity and sensorial experiences”.
Many of these characteristics were of “the material world long associated with the value system of the feminine sphere and women’s pleasure”.146
Due to Pop Art’s incorporation of mass culture signs in art there unfolded the same opportunity for other marginalised categories such as ornament and the feminine. The deconstruction of modernist binaries and hierarchies that led to feminism were a by- product of Pop Art’s orientation. However, the impetus of the Pop project arose from notions of consumption, urban living, youth, and technological progress.147 It did not intend to foreground feminine interests – in fact, many of the early streams of
Postmodernism maintained the masculine emphasis of Modernism, albeit in a new form, that persisted well past early Postmodernism.
146 Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, 226. 147 It is for this reason that Sparke believes it was youth, not gender, that enabled a cultural evolution from Modernism into Postmodernism. 75 Parallel to the development of Pop Art, Minimalism evolved as a movement that followed a very different telos. It encompassed a diverse range of mediums from painting to object based works. But this did not entail a broad inclusiveness: in some of its manifestations Minimalism retained facets of Modernism’s purist Formalism.
With the exception of certain aspects of minimalist sculpture, much of Minimalism functioned in a late-Modern framework of no particular relevance to the decorative, although some facets of this movement contributed to the demise of autonomous art – but in a way quite distinct from Pop Art. By rejecting notions of internal composition,
Minimalism moved sculptural work off the plinth to reflect its immediate environment.
And for the theorist Michael Archer, Minimalism defied autonomy because it “existed for an audience. . . it was something not quite life and not quite art, but rather the one somewhat self-consciously presenting itself as the other” Further,
Any meaning this kind of art had, then, was dependant upon the experience of
the person viewing it. Such meaning was contingent, an aspect of the flux of
everyday life.148
Autonomous art dismissed ornament and its audience as one mass “other”, but according to Archer not only did aspects of minimal art mirror or resemble everyday objects and materials, but the viewer’s response was meant to be part of the quotidian, or a slippage between everyday experience and art. So the audience became an intentional part of this new artform and there began a decade of interdisciplinary merging and expansion of mediums and genres so that art became less easy to define according to the specificity of medium. This inter-media orientation helped set the stage for ornament’s return.
148 Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 60. 76 The Italian Arte Povera movement also incorporated materials and ideas from the quotidian. Amongst other factions, this movement contributed to the blurring of distinctions between “high” and “low” art that helped open a space for many feminist artists to adopt a similar approach. For the critic Germano Celant, Arte Povera offered an exploration of “the convergence of life and rich art” rather than the “binary parallels” of Modernism.149 Members of this group, including Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, also attempted to merge art and life, and to challenge established conventions by privileging materiality, the ordinary, the banal, the ephemeral, and process over outcomes. They also allowed for the corporeal presence of art to become visible, as in other strands of Postmodernism. One Arte Povera artist,
Alighiero Boetti, is particularly relevant for this discussion because of the incorporation of the decorative in his work between the 1970s and 1990s. Boetti outsourced many works to artisans mainly in Afghanistan, but unlike minimalist artists, Boetti’s works were hand rather than industrially produced, often utilising embroidery as a decorative craft method. The absence of the artist’s direct involvement in these particular decorative works positions Boetti between the minimalist artists who integrated mass production and many of the feminist artists who reintroduced feminised craft practices into fine art.150
149 Cited in Archer, Art Since 1960, 86. See also Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev ed., Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999). 150 In fact there is a strong relationship in Boetti’s work, executed between the 1970s-90s that displays an ornamental register, and some of the work by the Pattern and Decoration Painters whose impetus was forged by the feminist movement. Here I refer to work from Boetti that might include the Tutto (Everything) series and others such as the Arazzi Picoli and the Arazzi Grandi (Small Embroidered Pictures and Large Embroidered Pictures) series. Tutto, for example, has direct correlations with the Pattern and Decoration painter Joyce Kozloff’s conceptual intentions, in that Boetti attempted to incorporate variant global iconography to represent the “world holistically” and in “totality” by including both non-western and western imagery. See Rolf Lauter, “The Manifestation of the “world” in the work 77 Feminism gained recognition for women as legitimate contributors to culture, and also paved the way for the acceptance of difference in tandem with the re-articulation of
Modernist “others” such as the decorative, craft, the domestic, and minority rights. For some commentators, feminist ideals were crucial to many of the major shifts of emphasis in postmodern visual arts. Huyssen observes that
it seems clear that feminism’s radical questioning of patriarchal structures in
society and in the various discourses of art, literature, science, and philosophy
must be one of the measures by which we gauge the specificity of contemporary
culture as well as its distance from modernism and its mystique of mass culture
as feminine.151
Feminist art capitalised on Pop Art’s symbiosis of art and mass culture and built on the foundations laid by post-sixties departures from Formalism. It also sought to establish a more inclusive arena for art, one that advocated matriarchal agendas and gave a voice to both traditional and non-traditional approaches, processes and materials. Keen to find different theoretical constructs, feminist art contested existing masculinist models of art production and challenged Modernism’s patriarchal notions of the artist as heroic genius. By the 1970s there emerged a climate favourable to the re-articulation of the decorative in art.
of Alighiero Boetti: Sources to assist an understanding of his oeuvre”, in Alighiero Boetti, Mettere al Mondo il Mond (Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst, Cantz, Verlag and Autoren, 1998), 83. As with Kozloff, there is no doubt that Boetti’s ornamental inclusions recognize the semiotic and semantic potential of this approach. 151 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 62.
78 Traditionally the concept of the avant-garde required an external positioning to the mainstream for an effective challenge to occur, but women sought to make change from within the mainstream. The decorative, the feminine, the domestic were validated and celebrated as expressive and meaningful subjects. Unlike art associated with other politically motivated movements, it is important to highlight that feminist art did not really possess a shared aesthetic – particularly in the later years. While artists within this paradigm often utilised chance, sensuousness, and decoration as alternatives to the dominant male aesthetic of the 1970s period, they were not limited to these approaches.
The artist Miriam Schapiro describes how ornament’s qualities were used to embellish surfaces in works that attempted to “revitalise the sensuousness of painting” as a reaction to the reductiveness of modernist abstraction in painting.152 Other artists, including Judy Chicago and Faith Ringgold, sought to legitimise “low” art such as craft practice. Mary Kelly and Judy Chicago looked to the domestic realm as a source of inspiration. The decorative was historically linked to both domains, and many artists used it to question the value systems and standards of modernist visual art.
Pattern & decoration painting
The artists of the Pattern and Decoration group adopted ornament as their raison d’être, and positioned it as an orthodoxy disrupting means of expression.153 Though not all women, many of these artists were interested in Feminism’s aspirations and sought to elevate marginalised forms of practice through experimentation with the ornamental.
152 Miriam Schapiro, cited in Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 143. 153 Sandler, “Pattern and Decoration Painting”, in Art of the Postmodern Era, 141-163. 79 The Pattern and Decoration group emerged in the late 1970s when painting was being decried as passé by conceptualist tendencies. Conceptual art promoted many other forms of expression over painting, as offering a better opportunity to negate
Modernism.154 The Pattern and Decoration artists instigated the return of the decorative more than any other movement in this period, although they were positioned somewhat at the margin of contemporary practice.
Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were precursors and influential figures in this style of painting. In the early 1970s they began incorporating the decorative and other craft techniques into their work. Others in the group included Valerie Jaudon, Cynthia
Carlson, Ned Smyth, Joyce Kozloff, Mario Yrissary, and Amy Goldin’s ex-students
Robert Kushner and Kim MacConnel. Many artists in the group were represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York and were supported by critics Amy Goldin and
John Perrault. At the same time, Goldin was analysing the potential of the ornamental register for architecture. She became a catalyst in drawing together artists whose work focussed on the decorative, in the establishment of a studio in SoHo, and an alternative exhibition space in West Broadway. Perrault described this painting style in 1977 as
“two dimensional, non-hierarchical, allover, a-centric, and aniconic”. This is an interesting statement in consideration of the values associated with high modernist painting. Perrault continues,
154 Brandon Taylor, Avant-Garde and After – Rethinking Art Now (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 39-40. Very few painters were considered to be working “on the edge” during this time. Taylor cites Marsden, Polke, Richter, Ryman, Twombly and Stella as male artists amongst those at the forefront of redefining painting. Taylor points to the fact that Postmodernism needed to do more than adopt “mere sensuousness” and “maximal abstraction” to challenge the orthodoxy of Modernism. 80 The grids of Minimal-type painting are being transformed into nets or lattices
for the drawing out of patterns that are sensuous and that have content that goes
beyond self-reference and the immediate art context, but includes both.155
Here Perreault suggests that this direction in painting makes reference to the geometry of Formalism but moves beyond the aesthetic confines of pictorial flatness and autonomy by utilizing many of the qualities it denies. In this sense, these artists built on late modernist painting’s decentring of pictorial space to develop non-hierarchic compositions in which the iteration of decorative patterns dominates.156 The common denominator for both was the grid or a grid-like matrix. Writers like Perreault questioned why a painting cannot concomitantly accommodate both decoration and semantic content, as it did in pre-modernist times, in non-western art, and at times in the works of artists such as Klimt, Matisse and Picasso.
The Pattern and Decoration artists re-introduced craft and decorative practices such as collage, embroidery, sewing and weaving, previously conceived as “low” art or kitsch.
Their approach appeared as something “fresh”, and was perhaps intended to shock contemporary audiences and critics. Building on Matisse’s legacy, these artists also privileged ornament for its hedonistic sensuousness, eccentricity and playfulness, but
(unlike Matisse) utilised it with subversive anti-modernist intent. One of the criticisms retrospectively levied at this group was that they concentrated on an aesthetic format at
155 John Perreault, “Issues in Pattern Painting”, in Artforum XVI/3 (November: 1977): 32-36. 156 In another sense, as I have argued, the reverse may be true. It may also be argued that structurally, the genesis of abstraction and Formalist pre-occupations in art grew out of the formal structure of ornament. 81 the expense of intellectual content.157 But this critique ignores both the significance of their decorative imperative and ornament’s semantic potential.
The decorative became an empowering tool for the members of this group in their desire for an inclusive approach to art that would incorporate past and existing decorative iconography from diverse contexts. Like Boetti, many artists were concerned to elevate the cultural and symbolic significance of the ornamental idiom.
The art historian Ernst Gombrich’s 1979 publication The Sense of Order: A Study in the
Psychology of Decorative Art was of great interest to members of this painting style.158
This text was seen as proposing that pattern underpinned a universal human desire for order or a sense of symmetry.159 Henri Matisse’s works were very influential for this group, and Frank Stella’s late 1960s works with their decorative interlaced circular and semi-circular coloured bands.160 Also influential were postmodern architects such as
Venturi, Scott Brown who exploited the decorative in anti-modernist architectural experiments. Whilst the decorative was a shared concern for the Pattern and Decoration artists, the work collectively demonstrated an individual and diverse approach to the production of art, often represented in large-scale architectural or theatrical works or installations.
I now wish to examine in more detail the decorative practices of three artists from the
Pattern and Decoration Movement: Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and Valerie
157 Brandon Taylor is one critic in this category. See Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 40. 158 For further insight see Gombrich, The Sense of Order. 159 Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 145. 160 Anna Chave, “Disorderly Order: The Art of Valerie Jaudon”, in René P. Barilleaux, Valerie Jaudon (Mississippi: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1996), 13. 82 Jaudon. Miriam Schapiro had been concerned with expressing a “female” subject matter since the late 1950s. Starting as an Abstract Expressionist, she went on to make collages of doilies, aprons and chair covers entitled Femmages, which draw on the associations of a collective female past as well as on the modernist idiom of collage.
By 1972 her involvement with Feminism’s collaborative approach began to influence her painting. Schapiro described her work as “antiminimalist in its employment of rich colour, personal handwriting, and sumptuous texture”161. She focused on the established modernist hierarchies by re-evaluating what was previously regarded as trivial, unimportant, and frivolous in an attempt to legitimise women’s experience within art.162 Schapiro began synthesising references to domestic and craft practice like patchwork quilting, with geometric abstract forms that simultaneously pointed to the
Modernist grid. The fan, a traditionally female accessory that Schapiro transformed into a large-scale art object, also became a significant part of her oeuvre. By elevating craft skills to the status of fine art she challenged the traditional male categorization of this field.
Schapiro’s work presents the decorative as both an aesthetic and an intellectual domain, and as a forum for highlighting important feminist issues. Femmages, which contains images of aprons, kimonos, the fan, the heart, the house, the cabinet etc., focuses on popular culture, domesticity and kitsch.163 Prior to the 1970s Schapiro had made geometric abstractions (such as her Ox series) whose subject matter referred discreetly to vaginal imagery. She claims that it was difficult to discuss the content publicly at the
161 Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era , 145. 162 Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 145. 163 See Thalia Gouma-Peterson, “Femmage: Fabric, Ornament, and Sentiment”, in Miriam Schapiro, Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 71. 83 time. After her meeting with Judy Chicago and other Californian feminists , whose work validated the traditional activities of women, Schapiro’s work shifted dramatically towards a visual language that became loaded with political intent and sought to redress the marginal positioning of women and destabilise notions of “high” art practice. Her works developed into large scale, sumptuous, and complex decorative collages, described by critic Linda Nochlin in 1973 as “impassioned yet controlled sensuous extremism”, a “daring way out of the reductive corner into which mainstream abstraction has painted itself”164 (Fig. 6). Decorative collage doubled as “a technique and a weapon” to become a central means of destabilisation for Schapiro. She patchworked patterned cloth into large scale wall pieces whereby the work’s materiality also became the content.165 In these collages the seductiveness and richness of the surface disrupts the formal structure. An early piece that exemplifies Schapiro’s oeuvre is Lady Gengi’s Maze (1972) (Fig. 7). In this work Schapiro utilises a linear grid-like structure at the base of the painting that shifts to become a painted set of steps.
Emerging from this setting are three highly patterned square shapes, two made from fabric and one painted, that appear to be animated in contrast to the fixed matrix. The linear framework simultaneously represents the formalist grid and a domestic interior, and demonstrates Schapiro’s strategy of fusing late modernist abstraction, minimalism, and the decorative, or of integrating the masculine and feminine. In this sense the painting is at once universal and autobiographic.
164 Linda Nochlin, “Miriam Schapiro: Life Work”, in Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro, 8. 165 Nochlin, “Miriam Schapiro”, 8. 84 Fig. 6 Miriam Schapiro, Anatomy of a Kimono, detail, 1975 –76.
85 Fig. 7 Miriam Schapiro, Lady Gengi’s Maze, 1972.
86 Schapiro trained, in her terms, in a masculinist system and Lady Gengi’s Maze attempts to overthrow the security of this paradigm by using large-scale ornamental formats that disrupt the linear structure.166 The decorative squares refer to patchwork quilts, exotic carpets or other textile forms, and reinforce a feminine domestic shivaree that shakes them from the entanglement of the matrix and allows the elements to float freely in the spatial arrangement. The starkness of the structural base in comparison to the sumptuousness of the patterned elements creates a dynamic tension where the ornamental parerga are central to this work’s success. Schapiro has created on a flat plane what a Loosian building offers aesthetically in total; but it also discloses a feminine liberation. The richness of the decorative forms asserts a salient feminine influence into a masculinist, architectonic grid structure. In addition, one square of the trio possesses an organic shaped aperture, which for Schapiro is a feminine bodily sign.
This, coupled with the sensory stimulation of the ornamental elements in the work, remind us of that which has been excluded from the modernist aesthetic regime.
Joyce Kozloff’s work moved “paintings” off the wall to decorate whole interiors. In a similar vein to the post-war Italian architects mentioned earlier, she claimed that decoration “humanises our living and working spaces”.167 Her initial experiments with interior spaces were eclectic anthologies of decorative pattern and mediums. This architectonic shift produced “environments” incorporating printed textiles, ceramic mosaics and lithographs that, like Boetti’s, drew on a diverse and rich iconography inclusive of non-western cultures.168 Later works from 1979 involved site-specific
166 Thalia Gouma-Peterson, “Femmage: Fabric, Ornament, and Sentiment”, in Miriam Schapiro, 72. 167 Kozloff, cited in Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 148. 168 Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era, 148. 87 public works where Kozloff constructed cultural depictions of the cities within which the works were situated. Also, like the post-war Italian architects, her later public works made reference to familiar decorative codes that explored the particular history and existing cultural context of the site.169 Added to the diverse ornamental inclusions in Kozloff’s artforms were variant approaches to mediums and their construction, including the merging of painting, sculpture, and the applied arts.170
In tandem with Jaudon in the late 1970s, Kozloff produced manifesto-like critical texts.
With other female members of the group they formed a collectively run journal entitled
Heresies and published their own articles such as “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture” and “Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics”. These articles not only commented on the decorative’s marginal positioning, but on other equally marginalised social and cultural agendas including anti-war and environmental concerns.171
One of their major concerns was western dominance over non-western visual idioms and their work manifested different realisations of the same idea. Kozloff’s work drew on Pre-Columbian artefacts and Islamic ornamental traditions.172 She borrowed eclectically from these practices, re-interpreting their iconography through various media to produce “homages” that foregrounded her concerns about cultural imperialism.
Two examples of this tendency are the painting Three Facades (1973) (Fig. 8), and the
169 See Norma Broude, “The Pattern and Decoration Movement”, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 224-225. 170 Chave, “Disorderly Order”, 25. 171 See Chave, “Disorderly Order”, 23-24. 172 For further insight see Sandler, especially the chapter “Pattern and Decoration Painting”, in Art of the Postmodern Era, 141-161. 88 Figs. 8 & 9 Joyce Kozloff, Three Facades, 1973 (above) and vestibule view of Amtrak Station, Wilmington, Delaware, 1984.
89 Fig. 10 Joyce Kozloff, An Interior Decorated, 1980.
90 installation created between 1980 and 81 at the Mint Museum, North Carolina, entitled
An Interior Decorated (1980) (Fig. 10) whose material forms include textiles, tiles, and painting. Like most of Kozloff’s work from this period, both pieces foreground the cultural significance of patterned imagery translated through different mediums.
Arranged in vertical strips, Three Facades utilises representations derived from architectural and folk art iconography from several Pre-Columbian places of worship visited by Kozloff in Mexico.173 This approach also became the basis for a series of paintings she completed after visiting Morocco and Turkey in the mid-late 1970s. She transformed the patterns from these cultures into large paintings that bridged a western aesthetic language and the non-western sources she quoted in the work. The installation
An Interior Decorated was the name for four discrete “shifting” environments created in gallery spaces over a three-year period. These architectonic works became a personal compilation of decorative miscellany that merged different craft techniques of fabric printing and mosaic work into large decorative presentations that covered the gallery walls and floor (see also Fig. 9). Paradoxically, in her attempt to valorise the idioms she quoted, Kozloff was accused by several critics of the very abuse she was attempting to critique. Her efforts to distinguish her postcolonial involvement with the decorative from the kind of early modernist borrowings of artists like Klee, Matisse and Gauguin, who had little regard for the original content or context, was lost on some critics.174
Chris McAuliffe’s observations about the decorative may be quoted here in defence of
Kozloff. When discussing the artist Stieg Persson’s work, McAuliffe suggests that in postmodern art the decorative is a signifier of “the existence of other cultures, other
173 See Broude, “The Pattern and Decoration Movement”, The Power of Feminist Art, 221. 174 Chave, “Disorderly Order”, 25-26. 91 modes of signification, other audiences against the monotheism of purist modernism”.175 McAuliffe’s point identifies precisely why Kozloff incorporated ornament from diverse cultures: to flag their existence in light of western dominance.
To some extent her work also parallels Boetti’s conceptual intentions between the 1970s and 1990s, although his interest was not in ornament per se. In more recent times a similar approach informed the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition,
Approaching Decoration (1999), which included Narelle Jubelin, Enrico Baj, Yinke
Shonibare and Constanze Zikos. The curatorial rationale stated,
Ornamental forms were used by these artists to signify hybrid identities or
relationships between cultures. Their works reveal how decorative patterns
accumulate layers of meaning through colonisation, trade and migration. 176
The critics of Kozloff’s work approached it as though it was generated from the same premises as early-modernist exoticism. Whether we agree or not with the criticisms levelled at the early twentieth century artists who drew inspiration from non-European sources, it seems obvious that Kozloff’s work did not stem from the same context or intent. Her excessive use of the decorative can be compared to Yinke Shonibare’s work in the sense that it was intended to communicate a socio-political message. And it is the deliberate use of ornament as a conveyer of a meaning related to inter-cultural relationships that separates both artists’ utilisation of the decorative from the early modernist artists. To view Kozloff’s work only in aesthetic terms negates the
175 McAuliffe, “Redecorating,” Art and Text 45 (1993): 15-18.
176 No author noted.
92 possibility that the decorative is capable of signifying meanings beyond surface appearance.
It is significant that the Pattern and Decoration movement was historically poised between high Modernism and Postmodernism in art. In many of the artists’ work, particularly Valerie Jaudon’s, we can observe the legacy of Modernism and a simultaneous desire to challenge it. Perhaps more than any other artist in the Pattern and Decoration movement, Jaudon seriously embraced the modernist grid. However, through playful experiments and deliberate disruptions her art moves beyond the constraints that affected the works of past modernist artists who used this structure. Her paintings recall the geometric decorations of Islamic and Celtic traditions and contain strong references to architectural form. Unlike Kozloff, her restrained translation of decorative motifs seems to be one step removed from their source, even though their foundation remains evident. Jaudon was determined to defend the decorative as a relevant and meaningful form of expression in art, and her approach also differed from
Kozloff’s by fusing visual quotations from non-western decorative traditions with other elements. She deployed a strategy of nuance and restraint from within the dominant paradigm of geometric abstraction, and used the modernist abstract idiom against itself by stretching and exploring its limits. Through structural, compositional and surface shifts Jaudon’s works produced a form of lyrical abstraction, serious-play that contrasted with the high-seriousness of formalist painting. Bellefontaine (1976) and
Ballet Russe (1993) exemplify this approach (Figs. 11 & 12). The former presents a grey structure built from interlocking arcs thickly rendered on a plain background. It speaks of abstract geometric pattern, yet its restraint hints at the lineage of a modernist aesthetic. The curvilinear repetitive element that activates the surface pays homage to
93 Fig. 11 Valerie Jaudon, Bellefontaine, 1976.
94 Fig. 12 Valerie Jaudon, Ballet Russe, 1993.
95 Islamic imagery and organic form. Typical of Jaudon’s oeuvre, the work constantly and playfully shifts between structural restraint and rhythmical disruptions.
Ballet Russe is made up of a series of coloured horizontal stripes with red hieroglyphic- type motifs floating rhythmically over the surface. At first glance the motifs appear to be repetitive, but closer inspection reveals their individuality. With this painting, like the previous one, Jaudon confronts us with a dialectic of formality and informality. The stripes constitute a formalist palimpsest for the dynamic hieroglyphic motifs to move across the surface. This interplay points to Jaudon’s feminist strategy in which social and cultural concerns are expressed by introducing diversity into a rigid grid-like format. Her use of expansive repetition subverts geometric abstraction’s orthodoxy while also mirroring repetitive “women’s work” such as weaving, knitting, and sewing.
The disruption of modernist flatness through seductive surface variation and textures deliberately denotes the idea of diversity.
It is work like that of Valerie Jaudon and Miriam Schapiro that challenges Kant’s notions of parerga and modernist perceptions of decoration as visual pabulum.
Because Jaudon attempts to create disruptions from within the constraints of the grid structure, her work foregrounds the decorative’s potential for slippage and recalls
Derrida’s reinterpretation of parerga as a privileged position from which to launch a deconstructive re-reading of inherited traditions and hierarchies.
Unfortunately, many of these artists have been somewhat marginalised by critical and art historical discourse. The Pattern and Decoration Movement was a relatively brief one, in an era unready to accept it. However, retrospectively these artists’ work
96 contributes significantly to ornament’s ongoing purchase in art and the built environment.
Ironically, at the time when the Pattern and Decoration Movement was waning painting experienced a major revival largely dominated by men. In contrast, many women artists turned towards other mediums such as photography, performance, and installation as preferred means of expression.
THE DECORATIVE AS A SUBVERSIVE ELEMENT IN THE WORK
OF 1980S ARTISTS
1980s art saw a renewed interest in painting by a new generation of male artist
“superstars” whose work reacted against Conceptual Art but was informed by the radical diversity of conceptualism.177 The imagery and style of painting moved towards exploring multiple possibilities, including figuration and representation. In addition, a re-engagement with expressionism and sensorial experience became important for artists across Europe and America. Conflicting critical responses confronted each other on the international art scene, and those who disliked the new emphasis on affect and expression regarded the return to painting as a sign of a loss of serious critical engagement with art.178 These critiques condemned the re-establishment of manual skills as a deliberate attempt to reverse Minimalism, Conceptual Art and early avant- garde art’s evaluation of the hand-crafted as fetish and art market commodities.
177 Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 32. 178 For further insight see Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 69. 97 The return to the value of “making” contributed in broader and deeper ways to painting’s revival. It signalled that Postmodernism had moved away from a modernist notion of non-reversible linear progress. It was now legitimate to borrow freely from previous genres of art, whether “high” or “low”, and across a spectrum of concepts, cultures and mediums. The new, widespread use of quotation and appropriation undermined previous notions of originality and drew inspiration from the work of artists of the seventies who worked outside the paradigm of Conceptual Art. Work by
Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, and David Salle represented this new approach to painting. Exhibitions such as The
New Spirit in Painting, Zeitgeist and the Transavantgarde were particularly important events that showcased contemporary shifts in painting, and in many ways undermined the aesthetic austerity of the legacies of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Other large international exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre (1989)179 at the Pompidou
Centre in Paris sought to confront past exclusions of western imperialism by bringing together the work of artists from different ethnicities in one exhibition. The intention of exhibitions such as this was to raise issues about identity and cultural difference. The decorative’s presence was evident in many of the works from non-western cultures in this show, in stark contrast with its absence in many works by western artists.
In a climate where the fragmentation of a singular, dominant authority was becoming increasingly evident, the space of the decorative became of interest to many artists in the 1980s. Markus Brüderlin saw the need to incorporate ornament at this time as a counterbalance to the “dramatic speed of globalization and the increasing mobility”
179 Magiciens de la Terre was curated by Jean-Hubert Martin. 98 which gave “rise to a growing feeling of dislocation”.180 For Brüderlin, ornament’s conceptual role in post-minimalist art of the 80s and 90s became “closely related to the idea of place”.181 We have already witnessed this idea: approximately thirty years after several post-war Italian architects decided to use ornament for similar reasons, we are again reminded of ornament’s facility and application as a cultural signifier.
It is not possible here to discuss the many artists in the 1980s whose work embarked on a process of ornamentalising Modernism. Such a grouping might include Phillip
Taaffe, Christopher Wool, Johnathon Lasker, Enrico Baj, David Reed, Alighiero Boetti,
Carla Accardi, Lucas Samaras, Frank Stella and Rosemarie Trockel. Artists Sol LeWitt,
Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, Tony Cragg, and Walter Obholzer, among others, engaged in the transformative process of expanding the parameters of Modernism in their transitions from canvas to the wall. Their efforts resonate with Matisse’s wall works and whilst there is clearly little shared conceptual empathy, the urge to break out of the frame and intervene in architectural space is a common aspiration.182
Rosemarie Trockel, Lucas Samaras and Phillip Taaffe worked against the modernist blueprint and built on the ornamental platform established by 1970s pattern painters.
Unlike the latter group, their work obtained much more critical acceptance. In different
180 Brüderlin, Ornament and Abstraction, 206. 181 Brüderlin, Ornament and Abstraction, 206. 182 LeWitt describes his approach in the following statement: “When presented with the scale that walls have one must begin to engage their physical properties. The theatrical and decorative are unavoidable and should be used to emphasise the work.” Cited in Heinz Stahlhut, “Invading the Wall”, in Brüderlin, Ornament and Abstraction, 150. Here LeWitt accentuates the inescapable dramatic and decorative elements in his large wall works and encourages others to take advantage of the qualities offered by ornament in this context. 99 ways they all looked at the decorative as a meaningful component of their work and – like their Pattern Painting predecessors – they utilised it to deviate from the modernist paradigm. However, the positioning of the decorative in their work appears to be informed by certain shifts in art produced by conceptualism. Their engagement with the ornamental deconstructs or comments on Purism and Formalism, just as Pop and
Feminist art did in the 1960s and 70s. These three artists offer a diversity of approach to the ornamentalisation of Modernism.
Rosemarie Trockel embeds the decorative in her work through the repetition of patterned imagery built into the structure of knitted surfaces. The technique of knitting draws on the craft traditions used by many feminist artists in the 1970s. However,
Trockel’s imagery re-positions the feminist debate by broadening the conceptual focus, fragmenting the directly feminist concerns of earlier feminist artists. Lucas Samaras’ idiosyncratic work often brings together the polarities of high modernism, or expresses a contemporary Baroqueness alongside the quotidian, with craft based materials. Philip
Taaffe’s practice in the 1980s revived the focus on painting but whilst his often hedonistic and expressive use of pattern draws on non-western imagery it also includes a critique of Modernist painters through the format of many works.
Rosemarie Trockel
Rosemarie Trockel currently lives and works in Cologne. In the late 1970s she trained at the Werkkunstschule in Cologne and was exposed to many artists who worked with socio-historic references and “eclectic, quotational styles”.183 Her formative years were informed by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (as were several minimalist artists)
183 Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 126. 100 and she was also influenced by the legacy of Feminism, although the way she embedded feminist concerns in her work differed considerably from many Anglo-Saxon feminists who preceded her.184 In 1987 Klaus Ottmann described the diversity offered by her work as “vigorous, subversive, postmodern, sensitive, German, disquieting, feminine, autonomous, surprising, masculine, poetic, obtrusive, modern, decorative, deconstructive”.185 More recently, Véronique Bacchetta explained that Trockel’s work simultaneously addresses women’s issues and is “centred between two poles: sex and politics”.186 In the 1980s she produced several serial structures that incorporate knitted fabric with pattern or interwoven decorative elements as a negative statement on the modernist exclusion of women. Whilst this series of knitted works is only one aspect of her repertoire, it is an important one nevertheless. Although producing work from a feminist platform, Trockel disapproved of some feminist art and often parodied it. Her strategy stemmed from a different critical political angle, critiquing the masculine not by exclusion but through hybrid works that knitted together both the masculine and the feminine.
The first of the knitted series produced in 1985 were small knitted vertical striped pieces that graduated to larger works incorporating repetitive abstract motifs and logos borrowed from the media and the political arena. Another part of Trockel’s oeuvre are knitted objects of adornment, displayed as sets on occasion – jumpers, balaclavas, and stockings – which sport the same logos. On close inspection their shapes reveal evidence of tampering. Trockel has intervened in their construction to
184 This is noted by Brüderlin in Ornament and Abstraction, 214. 185 Klaus Ottmann, “Rosemarie Trockel”, Flash Art: Two Decades, 134 (May, 1987): 170-171. 186 Véronique Bacchetta, “Rosemarie Trockel: Provocation and Poetic Enigma”, Parkett, 33 (1992): 40- 46. 101 Fig. 14 Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled, 1988.
102 Fig. 13 Rosemarie Trockel, Joy, 1988.
103 create, for example, two-necked jumpers that allow for a cosy (or restrictive) co- habitation, extra long stockings, and balaclavas without mouth sections, so that just the eyes are revealed. Trockel’s tinkering with these familiar fashion pieces reveals a suggestion of other humorous/serious roles and it is their whimsicality and ambiguity that redeems them from a totally grim or anti-male reading. She suggests many different female “types” in these works, yet also overlays and destabilises the masculine. This is achieved by inscribing the ornamental, alongside disruptions to the usual form of domestic clothing.
Rather than reproducing traditional handcrafted items, Trockel charged the “female technique” of knitting with political and controversial icons that linked their existence to the media. Trockel’s claim that “Art about women’s art is just as tedious as the art of men about men’s art”187 goes some way towards describing her intentions. For Trockel, creating computer-knitted “paintings” became a subversive gesture: they became parodies of purist and formalist canvases. She also used these serial structures to critique repeated, but questionable, cultural and social norms, particularly those concerned with the role of women (Fig. 13). These pieces, coupled with her knitted objects, reference a familiar gendered surface, yet they are removed from the repetitive realm of the hand-produced. In this sense she works in opposition to many feminist artists. Nevertheless, repetition is significant in her work, albeit in a more abstemious sense (compared with Warhol’s serial works for instance). Trockel balances the traditions of painting, sculpture and drawing with the mass produced. Her incorporation of representational imagery was in the vein of other 1980s painters but also followed
Warhol’s legacy of reproducing the reproduced. Trockel’s use of repeated text such as
187 Cited in Bacchetta, “Rosemarie Trockel”, 40-46. 104 Made in West Germany, and the iconic or Pop Art style motifs she quotes, such as the
Playboy logo, the hammer and sickle, the swastika, and the wool-mark, disrupt the everyday patterned surface with somewhat seditious elements.188
Trockel tosses traditional role models aside to merge “the masculine realm of commerce and politics” with the “female domain” of repetitive handicraft work and decoration.189
This appears evident in the knitted work Untitled (1988), where two panels with two different patterned formations come together (Fig.14). The first uses the woolmark icon
(symbolic of “quality”) repeated across the surface of a red background, and the other displays red multiples of the Playboy bunny on a light brown background. Both images are sourced from mass culture, the former from “women’s” magazines and the latter from advertising: thus both surfaces are gendered, but are interwoven in one computerised, mass produced, patterned piece. Her work disrupts the modernist imperative of a feminised mass media because the decorative enfolds the masculine and the feminine with the mass produced and the ostensibly hand-crafted. The relationships she builds between disparate elements such as the familiar and the absurd in this work
(wool-mark and Playboy symbol) heightens the awareness of difference and challenges fixed meanings and gender roles. In many ways the knitted pieces became her signature, despite the fact that her work spans a diversity of approaches, formats and materials. Undeterred by the pejoratively branded knitting trademark Trockel continued to use knitting and wool in future work and expanded her repertoire of female coded symbols and objects into patterned works that challenged male “conventions of taste
188 B. Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 127. 189 Véronique Bacchetta, “Rosemarie Trockel”, 40-46. 105 and value”.190 While not all Trockel’s works can be read as overt feminist statements, and her conceptual concerns on occasion may link with Duchamp’s lineage, there appears a consistent attempt to subvert heroic male art. The decorative thread underpinning many of her knitted works, pitted against the reference to the machine, are consistent devices she adopts to achieve this objective.191
In Danto’s terms, there is a sense that Trockel “forgives” our faults; and he argues, whilst she is “tough, at times as acidic as Duchamp, at times as frightening as Beuys. . . she is kinder to those she accuses – us – than either of them could possibly be”.192
Perhaps the decorative underpinning evident in the serious-humour in her patterned surfaces assists in this process.
Lucas Samaras
Lucas Samaras’ decorative work began to consolidate in the late 1970s. His oeuvre oscillates between figurative pieces (photographic and painted) that belie any relationship to the decorative, to intensely decorative pieces, or series, that unashamedly flaunt it. The theorist Roberta Smith asserts that Samaras’ work is, “ferociously decorative, with a psychological intensity that’s obsessive and implicitly erotic”193. His work reveals interplay between the familiarity of the materials he presents and the
190 L. Cottingham, “The Feminine De-Mystique: Gender, Power, Irony, and Aestheticised Feminism in 80’s Art”, in Flash Art 147, (Summer, 1989): 91-95. 191 For further insight into the link to Duchamp see “Rosemarie Trockel” in Danto, Embodied Meanings, 212-219. 192 Danto, Embodied Meanings, 212-219. 193 Roberta Smith, “Repeated Exposures: Lucas Samaras in Three Dimensions”, in Lucas Samaras, Objects and Subjects 1969-1986 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 53. 106 tensions created through their placement in unusual contexts. In many ways there are resonances with Simon Periton’s work, discussed in the next chapter. Whilst there are no visual connections between the two artists, Samaras’ approach to the decorative ricochets across diverse materials and approaches, in the way that Periton bounces between conceptually different subjects and periods of history. In discussing Samaras’ decoratively inclined works I refer in particular to the mixed media Box series: the embellished chairs (and sometimes tables) incorporating wool and wood and, occasionally, found objects. Also discussed are the Reconstruction series with sewn fabrics, and the Untitled series in paint, photography and pastel. The latter incorporates various abstract geometric motifs and dotted patterns, where the dots function as decorative elements.
Defying Modernism’s agenda, Samaras’ approach is aimed at transforming the familiar.
He wilfully incorporates libidinal references, craft and decoration in evocative and sometimes confrontational ways. The quirky “rawness” of many pieces is not a negative trait, for it affects what he combines more than how he puts his materials together. For instance, in most of the Box series Samaras integrates everyday found items with painted embellishments. One example, Box #94 (Fig. 15), draws together odd elements such as knife handles thrust into circles which are carefully defined by coloured yarn glued down to form part of a decorative pattern on one surface. This amalgamation is at once reminiscent of kitsch or craft objects and of a somewhat menacing kitchen knife storage unit. The exterior of the box has been transformed into a dense silver surface of randomly encrusted pins that become a rich embellishment.
The underside of another flip-out section contains nails hammered randomly into a deep blue surface. Their white painted heads operate as star-like punctuations to create a
107 Fig. 15 Lucas Samaras, Box #94, 1976.
108 Fig. 16 Lucas Samaras, Chair Transformation #10A, 1969 – 70.
109 random pattern against the depth of the blue. A multi-coloured striped painted border offsets this. The drawer revealed when the flip-out compartment is pulled up has been painted in tiny multicoloured polka dots. In this hybrid construction Samaras builds relationships between craft, kitsch, decoration, and sculpture. His decorative inclusions fuse with the folk art or craft elements in the piece and are a strange addition to the knife handles that penetrate one side of the box. His uncanny approach to materials and the inclusion of recognisable components in a bold and unfamiliar way presents us with evocative yet disturbing tensions.194
Many of the chair transformations present as idiosyncratic hybridisations bringing together the unexpected. In Chair Transformation #10A (1969-70), a formica-clad wooden chair is cut vertically in half and joined with another half-chair the same size that has randomly been covered in a mass of tangled woollen yarn (Fig. 16). The multi- coloured mass of strands operates on half the chair as a decorative disruption to the bland smoothness of the formica half, and the dual formation establishes a curious dialogue.195 But in each case it is the incorporation of the ornamental components that invoke Modernist binaries in order to undermine them. Another project that displays a ubiquitous decorative presence is the Reconstruction series. In this, Samaras employs pre-patterned fabric strips sewn in a layered lattice-like fashion to create visually chaotic “paintings”. The intensity of the many different coloured patterned strips is balanced by the formal inclusion of black and white linear elements, often striped or spotted fabric that absolve the dense patterned surface from homogeneity and give the
194 See Smith in Chambers, Lucas Samaras , 51-65. 195 For further insight see Thomas McEvilley, “Intimate But Lethal Things: The Art of Lucas Samaras”, in Chambers, Lucas Samaras, 11-29. 110 pieces a dynamic presence. From a distance the pieces appear to be paintings, but close examination reveals their materiality and their construction. As with other pieces,
Samaras’ use of everyday materials and his compositional format suggests that the decorative purpose in this series operates as part of many other clues he builds in to his deliberately ambiguous intent.
In many of Samaras’ works, the decorative is omnipresent – sometimes extremely overt, as with the Reconstruction series, and at other times seemingly disruptive of his use of quotidian and modernist references. His use of ornament is applied in more diverse ways than Trockel, but persistent in both artists’ work (either through context, format or material) is a disquieting, menacing or uncanny presence in tension with the familiarity of pattern or decoration.
Philip Taaffe
Whilst Trockel’s serial ornamental structures express a sober message, the ornamental aesthetic in the work of Philip Taaffe appears more hedonistically sensual. On the surface his work may appear to be principally concerned with ornament and decoration, but this impression is misleading. Taaffe does not completely break with Modernism, but uses pattern to distance himself from purist Formalism and create abstract works full of parodic and ironic comment on orthodox Modernism. As Matthew Collings notes, Taaffe’s early works “re-do” the work of Bridget Riley, Barnett Newman (plus other geometric or semi-geometric painters), but with ironic twists.196 For example,
Taaffe added a decorative twisted column, like a minimal piece of ironwork, to
Newman’s sublime painting oeuvre that replaces the original plain “zip” and operates as
196 Matthew Collings, It Hurts: New York Art from Warhol to Now (London: 21 Publishing, 1998), 158. 111 a kind of ornamental sublime.197 His Riley look-alikes are collaged strips of paper.
Other works with cobras asymmetrically strewn across the canvas could be seen to refer to Pollock’s gestural paintings, but they are silk screened rather than poured or splashed. In each case the re-writing or ornamentalisation of Modernist paintings eschews a programmatic formalist approach in favour of richly decorative surfaces. In addition to the sensorial experience expressed through ornament, Taaffe’s artwork embraces many realities that Modernism rejected, such as history, tradition, representation, sentiment and cultural symbols. By layering pattern on pattern in some works (as in Al Quasbah, (1991)) Taaffe uses a visual device akin to the perspective evident in many early works of Henri Matisse.198 Yet in many ways, Taaffe simplifies and re-works the decorative source material he chooses without totally de-exoticising the work.
Taaffe’s work communicates a visual language which references itself but, unlike autonomous art, also refers to the world we live in. This is achieved by juxtaposing the use of pattern that becomes both a signature and a signifier of the known in his art, with the layering and compositional relationships that are suggestive of narratives beyond the familiar. Like Boetti’s and Kozloff’s, Taaffe’s artwork contains elements from culturally different decorative sources intended to function as signifiers of other experiences. Taaffe remarks,
197 See also Brüderlin, “The Ornamentalisation of Modernism: Painting in the Eighties and Nineties”, Ornament Abstraction, 206.
198 See Edmund White, “Philip Taaffe”, Artforum (Summer, 1994): 66-67. 112 I like syncretist situations, the kind of situation where incursions from many
different geographical sources have a layering effect of culture and historical
density. 199
In the hedonistic vein of Matisse, Taaffe describes his works as equivalent to
“imagined, constructed places”, and this is perhaps one clue to reading the work.200
Taaffe’s all-over surface patterns appear to be familiar or recognisable, yet his works are not totally mimetic but make reference to art or architectural history through a transformative process of re-contextualization and the layering of information. He explains that he wants to “search for ways of healing rather than continuing the process
Taaffe’s idea of “healing”. This is exemplified in such works as Old Cairo (1989) where the title, and to some extent the imagery, refer to ancient Egypt (Fig.17).
However, Taaffe employs a Rothkoesque strategy whereby he divides the canvas into three horizontal coloured and layered rectangles, then layers mixed media to create a patterned surface with different vegetal motifs in the three sections.201 The overall surface appearance of this work evokes an aged or faded outer layer reminiscent of aged wooden lattice or well-worn printing blocks, or perhaps even treasures dug from an archaeological site. Unlike traditional Islamic arabesque ornament, the fluidity of the vegetal motifs in Taaffe’s work are contained in the Rothkoesque format of the rectangle. This oscillation between past and present, between different cultural patterns
199 Taaffe cited in Enrique Juncosa, “Index and Metaphor: Johnathon Lasker, David Reed, Philip Taaffe”, in Abstraction Gesture Ecriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection (Zurich: Alesco AG, Berlin, New York and Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 149. 200 Taaffe cited in Juncosa, “Index and Metaphor”, 151. 201 See Brüderlin , Ornament and Abstraction, 82, and Juncosa, “Index and Metaphor”, 152. 113 Fig. 17 Philip Taaffe, Old Cairo, 1989.
114 Fig. 18 Philip Taaffe, Painting with Diatoms, 1997.
115 and locations, is an attempt to bring disparate elements together in order to “see what they might have to say to one another”.202
Taaffe’s work is conceptually multi-layered and diverse. In addition to quoting modernists such as Newman, Riley and Rothko, he also refers to Spanish Baroque,
Moorish architecture, Arabesques, and nineteenth century botanical illustrations. What links his work so strongly to ornament are the figure ground relationships he deploys, the rhythmical patterns created through repetition, and their sensuous expression. In many of his works there exists a dialectic between order and disorder. This is evident in
Old Cairo and also in a later work, Painting with Diatoms (1997) (Fig.18). In this, organic forms are floated over a roughly stained background. The floating forms are precise representations of diatoms, the biological nomenclature for single cell algae.
Here Taaffe may be referring to early forms of life or perhaps expressing a fascination for the aesthetic appearance of microscopic existence. Whatever the case, they become ordered ornamental disruptions to the gestural and somewhat chaotic background. The visual seduction of this work is predominantly expressed through the beauty of the decorative interventions that enrich Taaffe’s expressive pictorial composition. By drawing together different elements Taaffe asks the viewer to reflect upon other dimensions, other utopias. Possibly what makes Taaffe’s art so successful is its ability to embed the decorative at the core of the work, allowing an interplay with the modern traditions and structures of painting.
Brandon Taylor makes an interesting comment about Taaffe’s work in the 1990s:
202 Taaffe cited in Juncosa, “Index and Metaphor”, 152. 116 Taaffe’s recent painting can be claimed for femininity because it defies the
reductive good taste of “male” art and celebrates arbitrariness and
decorativeness as values which, so to speak, have no stable value in the male
aesthetic pantheon.203
Taylor’s remark uses Taaffe’s work to foreground important aesthetic elements in
“feminine” painting. His comment regarding the claim for femininity “derives not from the gender of the painter, but from the values prevailing in the work itself”. However,
Taaffe’s intent is not feminist per se, but rather a realisation of the problems inherited through Purism’s exclusionist project. His paintings become a quietly disruptive force from within, successfully merging geometric order and the patterned “arbitrariness” referred to by Taylor.
An observation from Michael Archer further elaborates Taaffe’s practice. He claims that in response to the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, “Taaffe’s use of ornament as a means to relieve unremitting circumstance. . . reintroduce utopia to dystopian reality”.204 This may account for the aesthetic richness of Taaffe’s surfaces, which were perhaps intended to celebrate beauty and optimism and offer alternative visual opportunities at a time when it may have been viewed as provocative to celebrate these
203 Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 68. 204 Archer points out that several artists such as Taaffe turned to Op Art to represent the “hopelessness” felt with the advent of AIDS. Their continuation in the production of art at this time allowed them to “project beyond the present moment.” See Michael Archer, Art Since 1960, 163 and 166. 117 things.205 Perhaps Taaffe, more than the other artists discussed in this chapter, pointed the way towards the 1990s revival of beauty as a valued aesthetic element in art.
By drawing attention to the different approaches to the ornamental by three artists working in the 1980s I have endeavoured to show how the decorative was repositioned within Postmodernism as a meaningful and significant register, central to the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of these artists. This could not have occurred without the foundations laid previously by Pop Art and the Feminist movement, as well as by aspects of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Both Pop Art and Feminism contributed significantly to the postmodern re-positioning of ornament by drawing attention to what was lacking or excluded in Modernist art and architecture.
The work of several artists in the 1990s developed from the pro-decorative precedent established by artists in the 1970s and 1980s, and their inclusion of ornament as a key element of their practice is indebted to the trends begun in art movements challenging the aesthetics of Modernism. Chapter Three explores different aspects of the decorative in contemporary art that may be linked to the exclusions discussed in Chapter One, but also expands on Derrida’s theory on the double-sided dimension of parerga. As I have suggested, the repression of the decorative may be viewed as an exclusion of the feminine, the domestic, corporeal expression, political or social content and mass culture. It is therefore appropriate to return to these issues in the final chapter and
205 For more insight see, Lisa Liebmann, “Taaffe’s Temple”, Elle Decor (Dec/Jan, 1994):30 quoted by Chave, “Disorderly Order”, 44. 118 revisit them through a discussion of the work of three contemporary artists whose ornamental inclusions are linked to a questioning of the binaries on which purist modernism was based.
119 CHAPTER THREE: THE DECORATIVE AND ORNAMENT
RECONSIDERED IN CONTEMPORARY ART
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter I review the work of two artists whose raison d’être is quintessentially decorative, and a third artist who has made a series of works incorporating mass ornament.206 Common to all three artists is the use of repetition either through labour intensive processes or via the replication of forms. I also discuss related contemporary group exhibitions by other artists from the 1990s onwards. In doing so I wish to foreground the decorative as an important intellectual and conceptual element in contemporary art. I also wish to signal that the recent proclivity for the decorative beginning in the 1970s was more than an intermezzo in the art of the last three decades.
Chapter Two dealt with the “re-introduction” of the decorative in Postmodernism, but there had already existed an “other” Modernism that continued to engage with an ornamental idiom at the height of modernist Purism. Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt,
Hundertwasser (Friedrich Stowasser) and Antoni Gaudi were among the Modernist artists and architects who expanded and developed the vast pre-modern decorative legacy. For Matisse, the decorative offered a lifelong source of inspiration. I therefore intend to preface the contemporary focus of this chapter by discussing aspects of
206 The phenomenon of mass ornament refers to Siegfried Kracauer’s (1927) term in relation to mass culture and the entertainment industry mentioned in Chapter One. Reference is also made to this by Markus Brüderlin in “The (Digital) Mass Ornament”, Ornament Abstraction, 219. 120 Matisse’s ornamental oeuvre, particularly his later mural works, as one illustration of the “other” Modernist tradition. But in addition, this path is taken to elaborate
Matisse’s relevance for the contemporary artists who are the focus of this chapter. As I will argue, Matisse’s papier découpes simultaneously embellish the walls and in their simplified reduction of form challenge reductivist ideals of Purism and Functionalism.
In particular, the late works of Matisse express a successful oscillation between ornamental structure and surface, an achievement that is also reflected in the work of the artists on whom I will focus. In addition, the work of Matisse, and the three artists I address in this chapter belies modernist claims about the absence of meaning in the ornamental. I will argue that all four artists utilise ornament for its conceptual potential.
HENRI MATISSE AND THE DECORATIVE
Considering the rejection by Modernism of aristocratic and bourgeois indulgences in luxury and aesthetic excess, it is not difficult to see why Matisse’s work was perceived as lingering dangerously close to these categories. His ancestry in weaving gave rise to his passion for collecting and replicating visually rich ornamental surfaces and textile patterns.207 Often interpreted as hedonistic, privileging sensual pleasure, Matisse’s work did not appear to embrace “the new” in modernist terms.208 However, the shift towards a more sensual and intuitive form of expression within aspects of the
Postmodern sheds a different light on his work. Ornament was a prime vehicle of
207 See Hilary Spurling, “Material World: Matisse: His Art and His Textiles”, in Matisse: His Art and His Textiles (London: Royal Academy of Arts 2004), 14-33. 208 From a postmodern vantage point it is paradoxical that one could criticise certain late modernist artists for a kind of hedonism, through the self-indulgence in autonomous art and their negation of multilateral approaches to art making. 121 expression in Matisse’s aesthetic, and he also drew from the flat pictorial space that characterises many non-European artistic traditions. In pursuing a methodology in which abstraction and colour are linked to pattern and other ornamental elements,
Matisse transfigured the prosaic world into an imaginary one.
When comparing the Cubists with the work of Matisse, Arthur C. Danto refers us to the tradition of platonic art and asserts that “the senses are at once the sources of cognitive illusion and of fleshy distraction”.209 Danto believes Cubism’s use of subdued colours directs the viewer’s focus onto the intellect rather than appealing to the senses. In his terms, “by looking as if made of mud” Cubism “bypassed the senses as hedonic traps.
So it was pure platonic art”.210 In contrast, ignoring the need to create illusion, Matisse chose saturated colour as a means of achieving sensual stimulation.211 Danto believes that Matisse “must be read as appealing to the senses as centres of visual pleasure”. For
Matisse, visual pleasure meant pictorial harmony that articulated sensuous expression.
What exactly constitutes this so-called visual pleasure that led some proponents of purist Modernism to reject Matisse? Again we can turn to Danto for insight. He asserts that Matisse, in offering surfaces that contain “all the reality one wants or needs”, selects motifs
for the connotations they carry of sensory pleasure: bare skin, especially female;
flowers; dinner tables; sweet interiors; lush gardens; ornamental fabrics of a
209 Danto, Embodied Meanings, 282. 210 Danto, Embodied Meanings, 282. 211 For Carboni, Matisse translates “the traditional languages of ornament into the codes of modernity, ignoring the classical rules of perspective and eliminating the illusion of depth that was so great an achievement of Renaissance art”. See Massimo Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, 106-111. 122 palpable luxury; the earth, this world, as a kind of paradise in which human
beings dance, sing, play pipes and violins, feed one another as well as benign
animals, bathe.212
For Danto, Matisse’s “fleshy distractions” pertain to his use of ornament’s stimulation of the senses through visual, oral and tactile suggestion. Danto mainly refers to
Matisse’s earlier works, but similar features are evident in his later wall abstractions. In this late period Matisse continued to pursue his long-standing interest in creating paradisal gardens and other utopian environments by using large-scale motifs and repetitious patterns that foreground the decorative in a more focused and prolific manner than his previous work. The “fleshy distractions” in these works are not about the painted figure or the sensuality of paint, but how sensorial suggestion through ornamental configuration can evoke utopian, exotic, or paradisal landscapes.
John Elderfield offers a view of Matisse that runs contrary to many post-1905 accounts of the artist’s work. Elderfield locates Matisse’s work beyond its sensuous appearance, claiming that it is “abstract, spiritual and subjective. But it nonetheless remains also luxurious”:213
his work is seen as transcending the merely pleasurable. Just as modernism
itself has been considered transcendental in rising above the local conditions of
its creation, so Matisse’s art has been viewed as detaching itself from its
apparent materialism.214
212Danto, Embodied Meanings, 282. 213 John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 16. 214 Elderfield, Henri Matisse, 15. 123 For Elderfield, Matisse’s art is redeemed from certain modernist claims of being a source of ‘mere’ visual pleasure; rather than exposing a “surrender to materialism” it offers an “escape from it”.215 In Elderfield’s terms, however, this higher dimension does not negate the visual pleasure or the “luxury” Matisse offers his audience; and this is an important point. This interpretation of Matisse’s work is of interest to this study because it reinforces the notion that sensorial expression and the transcendental in art are not exclusive of one another.216
I will now turn to some examples of Matisse’s later period with specific emphasis on the paper cut-out mural work. These spatial arrangements by Matisse were created by working directly onto walls of the spaces he lived and worked in, and through them he explored architectural space (Fig. 19). Interestingly, one of the essential tenets of pictorial Formalism was the separation of the canvas from the wall. In contrast to this rule, between 1943-1954 Matisse almost completely removed the canvas, both transcending and hybridising the boundaries between architecture, painting, illustration, and graphic design. The wall became the canvas and the architecture became a surrogate frame. His approach, utilising the simplicity of gouache-coated paper cut with scissors, began as maquettes that he produced for an illustrated book entitled Jazz.
Here, very like the tradition of synthetic cubism, Matisse resolved to cut coloured paper instead of drawing the outline of shapes and colouring them in. The transition in his
215 Elderfield, Henri Matisse, 15. 216 Matisse believed that the co-existence of substance and visual appearance were crucial to his practice. See Massimo Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, 106-111. 124 Fig. 19 Henri Matisse, A wall of cut-outs at Matisse’s villa, Le Rêve,Vence, 1947.
125 Figs. 20 & 21 Henri Matisse, Oceania the Sky, and Oceania the Sea, 1946.
126 work for Jazz allowed him to “draw” in colour with the paper cut-outs.217 From here on,
Matisse pinned the shapes directly onto the walls in the various rooms he occupied, creating elaborate organic configurations reminiscent of all-over wallpaper decorations or friezes. This line of work, combined with conventional drawing, eventually became his sole means of expression. Matisse considered these wall-works as artworks in their own right, and as means whereby architecture and the decorative were integrated.
The first large pieces refer to the region of Oceania. Prior to their translations in screen- print, Matisse’s Paris studio in 1946 became transformed as the hand-cut paper motifs expanded around the walls, corners, door frames and other architectural panels to finally intersect as one work in the corner of his studio, namely Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea (1946) (Figs. 20 & 21 ).218 In this work, Matisse’s previous use of semi-abstract and geometric forms transformed into animated organic imagery in the shapes of summary outlines of coral, seaweed and other oceanic forms, loosely pinned to the wall.219 But despite the success of the Oceania pieces, it is their origin, the maquettes, where Matisse’s new line of work comes into its own.
217 For more insight into Matisse’s equation of scissors as a drawing tool, see Hilary Spurling, Matisse: His Art and His Textiles – The Fabric of Dreams (London: Royal Academy Publications, 2004), 17. 218 Many works were later affixed to paper or fabric to preserve them or they were reproduced using the silk screening process; but these particular cut-out works are apparently lost and only exist in photographic form and in the silk-screened translations for which they were maquettes. See Elderfield, Henri Matisse, 24. 219 This and other similar works have been described by Elderfield as “a sort of imaginary garden to be harvested for making a new kind of work of art.” Elderfield, Henri Matisse, 413. 127 One piece that exemplifies his propensity to disrupt uniformity through irregular arrangements, rather than conforming to the repetitive tradition of pattern making, is the large and florid The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1952). In this highly ornamental work
Matisse continues with the same formula as Oceania, to create an over-all pattern that extended around a corner in his studio (Figs. 22a & 22b). The multi-coloured use of repetitive but irregularly placed vegetal motifs form the basis of the work. Two simplified figural forms inserted into the pattern – a mermaid and a parakeet – temper the repetition. Matisse sought to include these two elements as a nod to his past paintings and as a disruption of the repeated imagery. His idea for The Parakeet and the Mermaid was to create an imaginary paradisal garden in the interior spaces he was confined to in his years of ill health.220 This is probably the most exuberant of all
Matisse’s cut-outs, a work evocative of a garden abundant with fruit, flowers and lush vegetation inhabited by two figural silhouettes dwarfed by the foliage. Matisse used the decorative to disrupt the solidity of walls as it offered the potential to shift between the viewer’s perceptual space and the suggested space beyond the architecture. Carboni describes Matisse’s late ornamental configurations as akin to “a garden suspended in air”, freeing the environment from “the limits of convention”.221 In these wall-works,
Matisse explores the dialectic between spontaneity and purposeful intent, the solidity of architecture and the freely placed motifs, dissolving the relationship between ergon and parergon, structure and surface, supplement and essence. His late works also challenge purist Modernism because they simultaneously embellish and abstract, or decant the
“unessential”.
220 See John Elderfield, The Cut-Outs of Henri Matisse (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 28-29. 221 Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, 106-111. Carboni’s use of this description refers to Paradise in the Koran. 128 Fig. 22a Henri Matisse, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, in progress.
Fig. 22b Henri Matisse, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, 1952.
129 For Matisse both the ornamental and affective registers were central concerns well before they became re-legitimised in Postmodern art. The fact that Matisse
experimented with the decorative throughout Purist modernism’s dominance, and expanded its potential into the most recent tendencies, is a remarkable achievement.
His practice existed in tandem with purist Modernism until the 1950s, when certain quarters of the orthodoxy began to realise perhaps something was missing. Matisse’s work points us to what those missing elements might be, and reminds us of the multivalent nature of Modernism.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE DECORATIVE
Along with other tendencies, art practice in the 1990s has witnessed a renewed interest in beauty and ornament. This period has seen a number of group exhibitions that reflect a continuing interest in the decorative within an evolving contemporary context. Some of these exhibitions include Andrew McNamara’s Ornamentalism (1997); The
Hayward Gallery’s Secret Victorians, Contemporary Artists and a Nineteenth Century
Vision (1998); Markus Brüderlin’s Ornament and Abstraction; and the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Approaching Decoration (1999). These exhibitions all make reference to modernism’s relationship to the decorative, and foreground ornament as an expressive keystone in the works of the artists included. This expression manifests through a variety of forms and intentions, again signalling the complexity of ornament. Ornament is not simply the opposite of “pure” form. For
Michael Carter, one contributor to the Ornamentalism catalogue, it is an oscillating
130 register at ease with locating itself either as “coating” or “core” or any position between.222
Many current artists who employ the decorative are no longer interested in opposing
Modernism. The exhibition Ornamentalism suggests a continuum of the decorative by contemporary Australian artists that, in the words of the curator Andrew McNamara, isn’t simply an “anti-modern” exercise but is perhaps suggestive of an aesthetic principle.223 McNamara’s exhibition attempts to present Australian art’s historical perceptions regarding ornament as valid aesthetic concerns. For McNamara, it is not a matter of negating Modernism to create a space for the decorative, but of exploring a potential intertextuality between both. This is a significant point and perhaps foregrounds the difference between current concerns and the early Postmodern artists who tended to position themselves as reacting strongly to Modernism.
Not all the artists in the exhibition Secret Victorians embrace ornament, but this tendency is clearly evident in the work of Lari Pittman, Louise Hopkins, Simon Periton,
Saint Clair Cemin, Yinka Shonibare, and Elliott Puckette. Like the artists in
Approaching Decoration, many of them combine historical formats, sources, or patterns with contemporary imagery or concerns, and incorporate the decorative.
Swiss curator and writer Markus Brüderlin explores the issue of ornament’s relationship to Modernism in an exhibition entitled Ornament and Abstraction (Basel, Foundation
222 Michael Carter, “Where Did Ornament Go?”, in McNamara, Ornamentalism (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art and Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1997), 21. 223 McNamara, ed., Ornamentalism, 11. See also Rex Butler, “Ornamentalism”, Art and Text 58 (1997): 94-95. 131 Beyeler, 2000). In this exhibition Brüderlin attempts to displace the purist ideology by placing modernist works adjacent to ornamental art and artefacts that cross time and space. Brüderlin makes visual connections between geometric abstraction’s genesis in the decorative and its continued existence throughout the canon that denied it. This is clearly an adventurous exhibition with good intentions, which also risks critical questioning regarding the assumptions inherent in its juxtapositions.224 Oleg Grabar, one of the contributors to the catalogue, warns that whilst it makes sense to construct visual and formulaic connections between ornament and abstract art, this premise is based on western art and thought, and perhaps assumes that this idea can be valued as a universally acceptable principle.225
A consideration of this statement leads me to ask whether it is appropriate or possible to make comparisons between decorative imagery from non-western art and twentieth century western art, if this analysis is based purely on aesthetic or formal summations that disregard original meaning or context. Perhaps what Ornament and Abstraction does best is to challenge Modernism’s hierarchical categorisation of artwork into significant and insignificant domains. It collapses modernist evaluation frameworks and suggests that a postmodern reconsideration of ornament allows contemporary artists access to the interdisciplinary élan that Matisse achieved in his art practice.
224 For further insight see Oleg Grabar, “Islamic Ornament and Western Abstraction: Some Critical Remarks on an Elective Affinity”, in BrüderlinOrnament and Abstraction, 71-73. 225 Grabar, “Islamic Ornament and Western Abstraction”, 71-73.
132 I now turn to three contemporary artists who engage with different aspects of the decorative, to examine in detail the conceptual and aesthetic role ornament plays in their art. For two of them, Louise Paramor and Simon Periton, ornament is a consistent and central element of their practice. For the third artist, Do-Ho Suh, ornament plays a socio-political role in several installations produced between the late 1990s and the early twenty first century. In many of the works produced by these three artists ornament is both a structural template and the conveyer of content. The selection of these particular artists is intended to foreground the relationship between the decorative and the negative categories that Modernism associated with the ornamental, as examined in Chapter One. They include the domestic; the feminine/erotic comprising corporeal or sensate expression; and mass culture. Incorporated is a focus on the supplement/essence binary intended as a theoretical framework crucial to an understanding of the purist negation of the decorative. Whilst I have used this framework as a means to identify artists appropriate to this study, their embrace of the decorative is not necessarily intended as an overt anti-Modernist gesture. In addition, all three artists engage the decorative’s structural framework of repetition, albeit in different ways. As this is also something incommensurate with modernist ideals of purity, the notion of seriality becomes a significant, unifying underpinning.
For a decade or more Louise Paramor’s work has explored the feminine/erotic connotations of ornament and it is through her large-scale sculptures in particular that we witness a combination of the structural and surface aesthetics of the decorative.
Simon Periton is an artist whose work for several years focused on the doily, an icon of past domestic decoration. Periton’s work also intervenes in the relational space between the decorative and mass culture, including kitsch. Through the use of humour
133 and socio-political imagery he brings the domestic, mass culture and decoration into collision. The final artist I shall discuss is Do-Ho Suh, who has explored socio-political concerns through mass ornament. These three artists are part of a current in contemporary art practice that interfaces the decorative with aspects of Modernism.
They are three of many contemporary artists whose work testifies to the argument posed by this thesis that it is no longer possible to consider structural ornament in opposition to surface or “superficial” ornament. These artists capitalise on the capricious nature of the decorative generated by the oscillation between structure and surface. 226
Through the work of these artists in relation to ornament, it is possible to observe what
Massimo Carboni describes as the maintenance of an infinite “regenerational” condition. Carboni asserts that “ornament undermines hierarchy, questions its legitimacy”. Like Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, it is “freed from traditional opposites of true and false, authenticity and derivation”, and as such, Carboni continues, ornament is capable of “neutralizing” the power and stability of binaries.227
Louise Paramor
Louise Paramor is an Australian artist currently based in Melbourne. She completed her undergraduate training in Perth in 1985 and has exhibited extensively in Australia.
Since the 1990s she has participated in several national and international artist-in- residency programs and held exhibitions in Europe and India. In many ways much of
226 Among the many artists who incorporate ornament in this way, one could also include Belgian born artist Wim Delvoye, who has produced large-scale steel machines and objects that reference Gothic architecture and lace structures manifesting as public artworks in New York’s parks. See “Steeling Beauty”, Surface 43 (Fall, 2003): 66-70. 227 Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, 106 -111. 134 Paramor’s work displays a direct link to Matisse’s paper cut-outs. Whilst Matisse worked to a flat (two dimensional) formula, Paramor’s work tends to be three- dimensional. This difference aside, there are similar qualities of sensuality and lightness in both artists’ work. The deeper one investigates Paramor’s art, the closer to
Matisse’s late works her sculptures appear. Both artists hand-cut paper, transforming it into elegantly seductive configurations that appeal to our visual sense of pleasure and other sensorial experiences.228
Paramor’s skill converts insignificant, fragile materials such as paper and foil into significant forms that mimic giant cut-paper Christmas tree decorations.229 Her delicate forms best demonstrate an inseparable relationship between ornament as structure, surface aesthetic, and process, where none can exist independently of the other.230 She succeeds in displacing the supplementary/essence binary – the ergon/parergon dichotomy previously discussed. In this sense, Paramor’s art exemplifies Carboni’s point about the “collapsing and recomposing” condition of the decorative, and recalls
Carter’s observations about ornament’s shifting condition between “coating” and
“core”. In some ways this fits with Carboni’s observations on the same subject. For him, ornament is embedded in certain tribal artefacts such as clothing as an essential component of the object. If the stitches were removed, not only would the clothes no longer function, but the garment would cease to be embellished. In this sense, in tribal
228 This also resonates with the ornamental aesthetic of Paramor’s contemporaries Elizabeth Gower, Jim Hodges and Bob Verschueren. 229 Other works utilise materials such as foil, cellophane, wire, and glass. 230 For an interesting discussion of three-dimensional ornament refer to Michael Carter’s discussion of European women’s hats between the 1870s and the First World War. Carter elaborates on three dimensional ornament in a section subtitled “Ornamental Space” in the chapter “Hats, Ornament and Nature”, in Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 111-153. 135 Fig. 23 Louise Paramor, Lustgarten, 2000.
136 garments, the decorative manifests as a juncture between structural function and aesthetic embellishment. We are presented with a “fusion” or “oscillation” between essence and supplement, a view that recalls Derrida’s theory of the supplemental.231
Carboni’s account of the position of the ornamental in tribal clothing can be applied to
Paramor’s sculptures. Like the stitches in tribal clothing, the hand-cut, delicate surfaces she creates are as much embellishment as armature. The work in the solo show
Lustgarten (translated as Pleasure Garden) exhibited in Germany and Australia exemplifies this fusion and oscillation, and is a good example of Paramor’s ability to destabilise the binary oppositions that historically have marginalised ornament in modern art (Fig. 23).232 In this exhibition her paper cut-out sculptures, and the chandelier pieces made in the same period, are remarkable fusions of surface and structure, expressed as combined ingredients as though the icing has infused the cake to become its structure. With Paramor’s art, ornamentation is immanent.
Lustgarten was first shown at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin as the culmination of an Australia Council residency where Paramor spent several months in residence in
2000. Eve Sullivan explains the title of the exhibition:
The spectacle of Lustgarten refers directly to the palace pleasure gardens on
Berlin’s Museum Island, first created in the seventeenth century and revamped
231 Carboni, “Infinite Ornament”, 106-111. 232 See Louise Paramor: Lustgarten (Berlin: Künstlerhaus, Bethanien, 2000) essays by Knut Ebeling and Dominic Eichler. The exhibition in Germany was at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2000 and in Melbourne at ACCA in 2001. It is an interesting coincidence that the subject matter for the works under discussion from Matisse and Paramor happen to be about imagined gardens. 137 in the nineteenth century in conformity with the period nostalgia for the neo-
baroque.233
The historical referents to grandeur and decadence in Paramor’s Lustgarten forms and chandeliers paradoxically deny any sense of permanency because of their non-durable
nature and their fleeting life expectancy. In this exhibition Paramor transforms paper to produce large-scale forms made from the cut-paper technique that has become her leitmotif. These free standing paper decorations speak of opulence and excess on the one hand, simplicity and restraint on the other. If Paramor’s work is an example of the transformation of banal materials the work itself evidences no sign of clutter or litter, no extraneous addition to structure.
The blatantly decorative nature of Paramor’s work has been the subject of criticism on occasion. Her first solo show at William Mora Gallery, Melbourne, elicited some objection for being “just decoration”.234 In Paramor’s own words, the works are unashamedly “dumb objects and ridiculous decorations”235 that combine ephemerality and aestheticism. Her forms do more than simply refer to ornament: they are quintessentially decorative, recalling the aesthetic extravagance of the Baroque or
Rococo. And like the Baroque, Paramor materialises the notion of serious play. In
Lustgarten, for example, Paramor’s large-scale sculptures are suggestive of child’s play
233 Eve Sullivan, “Loiuse Paramor, (the) love artist”, Art and Australia 40/1 (Spring, 2002): 86-93. 234 See Dominic Eichler, “Fancy: The Recent Sculptures of Louise Paramor”, Louise Paramor: Lustgarten, 5. 235 Noted by the author from an artist talk by Paramor, Department of Art in the Faculty of Built Environment, Art and Design, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, 11th August, 2003. 138 Fig. 24 Louise Paramor, detail Lustgarten, 2000.
139 continued into adult life. Their collective whimsy, playful forms and ruffled surfaces remind one of childhood experiences that are re-framed through an adult’s perspective, conveying both play and seriousness (Fig. 24).
Two cut-paper forms for different exhibitions emulate the structure of a chandelier.
One is a suspended candelabra piece she made for the group exhibition World
WithoutEnd in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne.236 The other was created for the
Baroque summer palace, Schloss Pillnitz, near Dresden. The Saint Patrick’s piece was made from heavy gauge silver paper, and the work for Schloss Pillnitz was made from plain white paper (Figs. 25 & 26). When suspended, the large chandelier forms blend harmoniously into these respectively sacred and extravagant spaces, simultaneously mimicking and mocking their historical predecessors.
In B. L. Magner’s words, “Paramor’s works seem as sensitive to the dynamic of their surroundings as litmus paper, soaking it up and reflecting it back”.237 Their presence as mimetic and familiar yet ambiguous forms, enhances their capriciousness, sliding across different historical and contemporary contexts and associations. For example, the grandiose Baroque chandelier made for Schloss Pillnitz assumes the role of a decoy candelabrum that lures us into its past splendour with its intricate ornateness and
236 The exhibition was attended by the author in 1997; but also see
Fig. 26 Louise Paramor, Chandelier, installation, Schloss Pilnitz, Dresden, Germany, 2000.
141 associations of opulence and abundance. 238 Through the use of mimicry and the incorporation of ephemeral material, the chandelier becomes a parody of the Baroque.
The material transience in this context also denies traditional associations of wealth and excess, and its seduction is disrupted by the awareness that we have been tricked by this silent, functionless object. In both chandelier works the ornamental register metamorphoses between past and present, real and fake, permanence and ephemerality, florid excess and quiet restraint. Our curiosity is roused regarding the origins of the objects. They demand extended contemplation about their displaced or hybrid condition. The ambiguity of the relationship between surface and form is suggestive of the flux between physical and metaphysical realms.
In much of Paramor’s art there are references to simple, celebratory, festive or ritualistic forms made from transient material. A good example of these qualities is a “tree necklace”, Festoonery #2 (1993) – an early work made from cut mirror pieces strung together: a visually light, playful and decorative piece, as adaptive to different contexts as the candelabras. In this instance, the multiple vertical strands strung from the top of a tree recall the ritual of the maypole as they move in the breeze and fan outwards towards the ground. The vertical ribbons shine like tinsel and reflect glimpses of the surrounding environment. The tinsel-like quality reminds us of the ritualistic role played by the decorative in festive events and is suggestive of playfulness and fantasy.
The reflective surfaces also offer moving vignettes that link us to the immediate environment.
238 For further reading on contemporary interpretations of the Baroque see Stephen Calloway, Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess (London: Phaidon Press, 1994). 142 Through this celebratory element, we are reminded of the role of decoration in our collective cultural history – of festivities, rituals and sacred moments. The nostalgic suggestiveness in Paramor’s art is also evoked through the “retro” flavour of her other motifs, like fans, pom-poms, ruffled costumes, and Victorian paraphernalia. Other objects from her repertoire resemble overblown collapsible decorations, such as
Chinese lanterns, Christmas decorations, and party garlands. Cheap and trashy connotations are tempered by opposing allusions to a past opulence, and in this sense her sculptures are both domestic and exotic.
Chapter One explored the Modernist conflation of the decorative with the feminine and the feminine/erotic. On one level it appears that many of Paramor’s artworks embrace this conflation. Yet, their allusiveness transgresses historically clichéd interpretations of the feminine. Magner’s essay in the catalogue for the Melbourne version of
Lustgarten states,
Without wishing to relegate Paramor’s art to the sometimes stifling realm of the
feminine, it also bears an obvious connection with the work of the traditional
homemaker or hobbyist.239
The undeniably feminine connotations of Paramor’s art can be read as referencing domestic or menial concerns, reinforced perhaps by the laborious manual process involved in producing the objects. Traditional time-consuming female activities, such as the production of needlework samplers, folded paper and cut-out decorations, handicraft, the maintenance of domestic bibelot, and other ephemera or trivia, spring to mind. But for Magner, Paramor’s sculptures transcend a predictable reading of the
239. Magner, Lustgarten (Melbourne: ACCA, 2001). 143 feminine/handicraft connection and assume a less determinate nature. In her terms their
“unclassifiable” condition is determined “through their canny referencing of more elite, high cultural styles”.240
Whilst the feminine is omnipresent in Paramor’s sculptures, the orientation towards decadence is one crucial factor in their redemption from a purely feminine/craft conflation. Their voluptuous large scale, precision, and erotic suggestiveness translate a contemporary response to the problematic of a historical reading. At times, the re- insertion of these objects into sites that refer to their historical origins is another clue to their contemporary success. Adding a different aspect, Knut Ebeling views Paramor’s process of laborious repetition as resembling “the figures of fractal geometry, infinite unfoldings of the ever identical”. 241 In this sense her “infinite unfoldings of the ever identical” remains a key to unravelling their familiar yet mutable quality. Creating textures reminiscent of ruffles, petticoats and tutus, repetition in her work operates as something between the secret of her laborious construction and the material manifestation of the seductive honeycombed surfaces. Drawing us into their sequential hollows and folds, they beg to be touched.
The scale of the Lustgarten pieces both maintains and monumentalises the process of paper cutting and celebrates the feminine, taking it into the realm of the theatrical. It is as though Paramor creates a stage for the viewer where her forms can act out multiple
240 Magner, Lustgarten (Melbourne: ACCA, 2001).
241 Knut Ebeling, “Substancelessness”, Louise Paramor: Lustgarten (Berlin: Künstlerhaus, Bethanien, 2000), 10.
144 roles as we wander amongst their chameleon activity. One might recall female fashion of the 1850s when crinolines made women appear to float across the floor. Despite their scale, the works in Lustgarten hardly seem to touch the floor, hovering just above the surface, suggesting at any moment they might float away. Their presence suggests playful innocence, yet also projects a sense of powerful self-possession. The feminineness of these forms is tied to their erotic appeal, evident through their folds, voluptuousness and curvaceous forms, but at times seems to float free from these constraints. The layered sensual tendency of Paramor’s work presents as overtly erotic, and yet this power sits quietly alongside other qualities, neither overbearing nor silent
(Fig. 27). In addition, the feminine erotic is occasionally interrupted by suggestions of a masculine erotic, which appears embedded, or to arise from, the feminised forms, shifting between sexualities and disrupting the expected. As onlookers we are fatally attracted and seduced by them but also realise our interest is not reciprocal.
Lustgarten also recalls Carboni’s reference to Matisse’s “garden[s] suspended in air”, where one could imagine assuming the role of Alice wandering amongst oversize bibelot in a contemporary theatrical setting or giant perfume bottles in some kind of exotic parfumerie. Paramor arranges an exotic garden for us to meander through, but we are not entirely comfortable with it. The associations triggered by the installation are challenged through the contextual relationships of the objects and their somewhat ominous, commanding and confrontational presence. We are constantly pulled between frivolity and seriousness, childhood and eroticism, nostalgia and presentness, fantasy and reality, ritual and spontaneity. Paramor’s forms become a repository for adversaries
– a dwelling place where the blurring of opposites occurs – but they also include self- imposed binaries, different to the ones she conflates, that oscillate as beauty and kitsch,
145 Fig. 27 Louise Paramor, detail Lustgarten, 2000.
146 detail and restraint. Without the tension of these relationships the work would loose its seductive potency.
Both Paramor and Matisse exemplify in art what Adolf Loos achieved through binary contradiction in architecture. In Loos we see a separation of supplement/essence through external and interior difference. In Matisse’s and Paramor’s art there is no separation: both the minimal restraint of Loos’ exterior and the “richness” of his interior are collapsed and at play.242 Loos’ interiors were designed as controlled spaces where private domestic and erotic events were performed.243 Paramor merges Loos’ architectural methodology into one stage or performative arena, and in a sense makes public what Loos intended to be kept private and separate, by hinting at the domestic but commanding another more erotic or theatrical interpretation. This Paramorian stage then enacts a melting of Baroque excess with Modernist abstraction, or of male dominated “high” art and feminine “low”, where neither category is privileged. Here, the feminine erotic meets cool, contained exterior and become complicit in seduction.
These elegant, simple paper forms are evocative, secretive, and allusive, and conjure responses spanning a spectrum of human experiences from childhood memories to the erotic. Their layered associations and formal simplicity also play with the viewer’s expectations and perceptions, as what they actually allude to is as indeterminate as ornament itself. It is the shifting condition of Paramor’s work that defies a univocal
242 Here I refer in particular to the later cut-out works of Matisse. 243 For further insight see, Panaystis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, English transl. 1994 (New York: Princeton University Press, 1991), 28.
147 reading and also explains the dilemma for her audience. The conceptual register of her art is deeply embedded into the aesthetic core of the work.
Simon Periton
Simon Periton is based in England and studied at St. Martins School of Art, London, graduating in 1990. He has held numerous solo exhibitions and exhibited throughout many European countries and in the United States. Periton has also worked on several commissions and collaborative projects with artists, designers and stylists.244 However, since 1994 he has focussed on the paper cut-out sculptures that form the basis of the following discussion.
In the introduction to Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and
Architecture, Christopher Reed states, “When we think of modern art, we do not generally think of domestic imagery or objects for the home”.245 Reed has commented that Postmodernism has created an environment where “the domestic is returning to a position of cultural prominence, impelling us to look back over the mainstream of modernism in an effort to trace its domestic sub currents”.246 The postmodern revival of the domestic informs the work of Simon Periton. Periton tosses modernist inhibitions aside, enthusiastically embracing feminine culture – not to reproduce
“female” work, but rather to extract from it what it offers him as an artist and to combine it with numerous other eclectic sources. From a structural point of view,
Periton’s early works recall rocaille or lace textiles, and link to Victoriana through the
244 Art4, Selected Artists 2003, Simon Periton, 8th Nov. 2003, 1.
Adam McEwen describes one of Periton’s persistent forms, the doily, in straightforward terms: the lacy mat placed under a lamp or glass to protect the furniture, is itself a
surrogate surface; a degraded, almost laughable item on account of the gap
between its fussy purpose and its intense decorativeness.247
McEwen suggests that Periton “exploits this gap; after mining it for its blank suggestiveness, he can then pack it with whatever he wants”. A piece that exemplifies this subversion is Target Doily with Spikey Farts (1996) that presents as a beautiful lacy blue, black, red and white target with spiky explosions around the perimeter.
Alternatively, Thorn Doily (1996) manifests as a pink, continuously writhing vegetal motif that makes reference to the rocaille, but sports linear edges punctuated with numerous thorns. Periton’s initial giant paper doilies have subsequently developed into other, more complex forms that he has installed as room dividers or curtains strung across the architecture of gallery spaces. More recently, works such as Free Radical
247 Adam McEwen, “Simon Periton: Sadie Coles HQ London”, Zingmagazine 5, (1998) 8th November 2003
150 Fig. 29 Simon Periton, Your War My Love, 1996.
151 (1999) have become three dimensional through the joining of one repeated cut-out motif suspended in space.
In the artist’s first monograph, Will Bradley lists some recurrent thematic dualities such as, “order and anarchy, imprisonment and escape, love, sex and death”.248 The politically charged issues connoted by Periton’s lace structures span a wide array of visual symbols. Anarchy As, thorns or barbed wire on the tendrils of decorative vegetal motifs, targets, bullet holes, skulls and hooded gunmen’s silhouettes are some of his devices (Figs. 28 & 29).
Other imagery includes knives, farts, Queen Victoria, Iggy Pop, Punk, the Dalai Lama, wicker chairs, and plants. Periton often creates an interplay between different histories, tracing iconographic lineages from Gothic to Romantic to Victoriana to early Modern – with direct influences by William Morris’ contemporary Christopher Dresser – to more recent references of punk and counter culture.249 But Periton denies a specific identity in his work, shifting constantly between disjunctive and opposing ideas that amplify and extend the complexity of readings already available. The longer one contemplates this artist’s work the more apparent becomes the satirical intent.
Periton is often compared to his United States counterparts: Jim Hodges, Terri
Friedman, Bill Davenport, Mindy Rose Schwartz, and Tom Friedman, who explore decoration, appropriation, women’s issues, and kitsch.250 Yet Periton’s art also shares
248 Will Bradley, Simon Periton (London: Sadie Coles HQ, 2003), 2-4. 249 Bradley, Simon Periton, 2-4. 250 See Michelle Grabner, “Cut Out and Keep”, Frieze 42 (September/October, 1998): 76-77. 152 similarities with Paramor and the late works of Matisse. The connections with Paramor are worth dwelling on briefly. For Periton, the decorative acts as an inseparable aesthetic and conceptual register, unable to be peeled apart, and (to recall Derrida), neither essence nor supplement, margin nor centre are privileged. The work fluctuates between both. Although similar to Paramor’s merging of ornament’s surface and structure, Periton’s coalescing is different because many of his pieces are only marginally three-dimensional, even though heir thinness does not detract from their commanding presence or their ability to interweave supplement and essence. Like
Matisse in his later stages, both artists work extensively with paper, foil or card using a simple, cut-out technique that transforms the materiality of their paper source into something significant, seductive and beautiful. However, a darker register, embedded into their airy aesthetic, trips up the visual and physical lightness of their works.
Working from an aesthetic platform between the decorative, the domestic, and the feminine, Paramor and Periton engage the viewer with multiple associations including various historical references. However, unlike Paramor’s works, Periton’s pieces give the ornamental an overt or aggressive political inflection and are testament to the decorative conveying meaningful, even political content, thus contradicting the modernist assumptions discussed previously. In fact, his pieces could be viewed as assemblages made from many of Modernism’s “others”.
Author and artist Stephen Hilyard discusses beauty and craft in relation to United States artist Lari Pittman in an essay entitled “The Anxious Maker”. In this text Hilyard refers to Dave Hickey’s essay, “The Self-Reliant Seductress Visits the Museum”,251 to argue
251 Dave Hickey, cited in Stephen Hilyard, “The Anxious Maker”, Artweek 29, January 1998, 4th May 2002
my main point about contemporary postmodernism is that it operates in a field
of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass
culture and high art, in which the second terms are no longer automatically
privileged over the first. . .252
Periton’s precise and accomplished craftsmanship, merged with his wry intent, blurs boundaries between mass culture, kitsch, beauty, functional craft, decorative arts, hobby making, and “high” art. For him the act of paper cutting provides a means to challenge some of the art school rhetoric he experienced as a student, and also signals a desire to return to an “innocent” way of working.253 Initially it was a method he used to see where the repetition of a simple process would lead him, but its naïve appeal and somewhat unpredictable process drove him to continue a way of working that echoes childhood experiences of magic and anticipation.
The beauty of lace is determined by its holes, and the beauty within Periton’s delicate, paper-thin structures similarly evolves from simultaneous additive and subtraction processes. The patterns and iconography in his works are provided through excision rather than addition. The layers and absences in his constructions suggest equal value
252 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 216-217. 253 See web log “Simon Periton Doilies”, May 16th 2003, 8th November, 2003
Periton they do not overshadow the whole. His use of non-repetitive pattern making at times echoes the disruptive intentions of Matisse’s paper-cut work. In a post-industrial age of enhanced digital and electronic arts it is interesting to observe artists like
Paramor and Periton who work with labour intensive processes that reference the handcrafted practices of lace making and other crafts.
Periton’s work treads familiar territory along with the anomalous. His subject matter appears idiosyncratic and plucked from diverse imagery to suit his intentions for one piece of work, and is vastly different for the next. It takes time to unravel the intricately layered web of motifs and allusions in his imagery. Beauty, humour and whimsy are qualities often countered by serious, socio-political concerns. The political flags Periton waves to the viewer are issues bound to post-colonialism, anti-racial concerns, human rights abuses, and the environment. However, one is not entirely sure if a covert mocking of our well-intentioned progressive concerns is also at play.254
These “heavy” socio-political issues contrast with the visual, physical and metaphorical lightness of the pieces. His works appear to be almost immaterial – light, decorative and linear, they move with the slightest breath and threaten to reveal their vulnerability even if gently handled. If the subject matter isn’t readily evident, darker elements are
254 See Michelle Grabner, “Cut Out and Keep”, 76-77.
155 Fig. 30 Simon Periton, Breathless, 1998.
156 Fig. 31 Simon Periton, Notorious B.L.Z., 2002.
157 revealed on reading the seemingly flippant titles. For example, Breathless (1998), seductive in its laciness, is a paper cut-out of a pair of blue lungs which forms part of a series of work on lung cancer exhibited at the Camden Arts Centre, England (Fig. 30).
Another example, Domestic Violence (2001), at first appears to represent a cute cat in three different frames that manifests through the layering of wicker patterns, but closer inspection suggests a disfiguration that is not completely spelled out. In Untitled
(Wicker) (2001), a hooded figure is revealed as a cut-out wicker pattern from a black and mauve rectangular background, but the striking thing about this piece is the way the familiar wicker pattern flips to become bullet holes in the body of the figure. In other works, menacing elements emerge after extended viewing, as with the tiny skull and cross bones embedded in the wings of Beelzebub (2001) and Notorious B.L.Z. (2002)
(Fig. 31).
The successful duality of aesthetic beauty coupled with dark subject matter contained in each work form a tension between serious intent, play, and aesthetic beauty. This appears to resonate with the decorative and bizarre nature of United States artist Kara
Walker’s shadowy wall works. Her gallery murals refer to wallpaper and other historically decorative practices, but implanted in the two-dimensionality are a range of malevolent subjects: slavery, racism, marginality, gender, and post-colonial issues.
Walker’s subtle approach demands time from the viewer to discover the multi-layered identities and nuances in the work.255 Ornament has always made room for these seeming contradictions, and we need only look to the perverse and decorative imagery contained in the margins of illuminated manuscripts or the marginal architecture of
255 For example, see Slavery, Slavery! (1997), an installation by Kara Walker at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, reproduced in Brüderlin, Ornament and Abstraction , 174. 158 Medieval and Gothic churches to verify this. In the former, words and images are merged, with the imagery often playfully ridiculing the content of the text; and in the latter, the marginal sculptural reliefs mock the sacred symbols contained in the rest of the church. Modernism dismissed this dual potential of the decorative, claiming it operated from a superficial and conceptually shallow basis. But Periton and Walker’s art signals the falsity of this premise and reveals contemporary evidence of ornament’s ability to fuse serious issues with a decorative impulse.
Recently in a piece titled Free Radicals, commissioned by the Victoria and Albert
Museum for its 150th birthday, Periton created a light installation that projected images onto the exterior dome. The work comprised 50 different cut-out silhouettes inspired by decorative pieces in the museum’s collection. These were projected onto the exterior of the building as a timely reminder of the museum’s pre-modernist origin and the nature of its collection. But Periton perhaps also mocks what architecture became not long after the birth of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In an interesting twist, his work projects onto the exterior what Adolf Loos always intended should remain within the
“richness” of the private, domestic interior. Michael Carter has commented that
Despite considerable divergence over matters of detail, ornament is still
positioned as the polar opposite of a pictorial regime whose aim is to produce an
accurate copy of the world.256
Carter is not suggesting this marriage is not a possibility, but foregrounding another prejudice the decorative needed to overcome. Andreas Huyssen would agree with
Carter on this point. For Huyssen, both figuration and realism were dismissed by most
256 Carter, Putting a Face on Things, 124. 159 Fig. 32 Simon Periton, The Hole in the Wall Doily, 1996.
160 of Modernism.257 In light of this statement, Periton’s oeuvre fuses representational imagery from mass culture with decorative structures and successfully subverts the
Modernist split between representation and decoration. This is exemplified in works such as The Hole in the Wall Doily (1996), Breathless (1998), Notorious B.L.Z. (2002),
Jayne 11 (2002), and Gate (2003). As one example of this tendency, The Hole in the
Wall Doily is based on a rectangular format whose four divisions convey a mirrored image of a brick wall with a large hole smashed through the “bricks” (Fig. 32).
Periton’s “bricks” are cut-out brick shapes which leave the mortar (normally the space between) as the lacy structure holding it all together. The multiple questions raised by the hole in the wall allude to issues of freedom, escape, defiance, revolution, and invasion. In another piece, barbed wire might appear to deny any resemblance to doilies, lace structures or beauty, but in Periton’s hands this spiky wire becomes transformed into decorative, fragile and beautiful objects. In this and many other works, Periton achieves a successful fusion of representation and ornamentation.
Throughout all of Periton’s work a continual intervention and stripping away of the original subject matter transforms its aesthetic essence into decorative expressions with political intent. The use of concentric target doilies exemplify this trait. While recalling Jasper John’s use of the target, Periton also builds in iconography that includes punk, occultism and the political arena of Islam and colonialism. His re-working of the original intentions of things create quirky aesthetic transformations that nod to their origins, but produce a new set of principles and associations. Periton’s ornamental playground confronts us with historical and contemporary referents, common symbols,
257 Huyssen, After the Great Divide , 188.
161 and metaphors that appear familiar, yet couched in a decorative armature, they become unfamiliar in their forced cohabitation.
Do-Ho Suh
Do-Ho Suh was born in Seoul, Korea and studied art in both Korea and the United
States. He currently lives and works in New York. Since 1989 Suh has exhibited extensively in several countries including: Japan, Korea, Australia, the United States, and Brazil; and in 2001 he represented Korea in the pavilion of the Republic of Korea, at the 49th Venice Biennale.258 In reviewing Suh’s art it is appropriate to recall Chris
McAuliffe’s claim that the decorative is a signifier of “the existence of other cultures, other modes of signification, other audiences against the monotheism of purist modernism”259. Do-Ho Suh’s politically inspired work manifests this pluralist ethos through its openness to mass culture and mass ornament. Through mass ornament
Suh’s work signals the existence of other issues beyond those immediately obvious in the work.
As discussed in Chapter One, Siegfried Kracauer first analysed the phenomenon of mass ornament in the 1920s. 260 A contemporary interpretation of Kracauer could substitute his examples with cheer squads at sporting events or even mass formations of uniformed army personnel performing in unison. Markus Brüderlin makes a connection between this form of mass order and the work of contemporary artists such as the
Iranian/American Shirin Neshat and the Chinese artist Yue Minjun. Both Neshat and
258 “Plateau of Mankind”, curated by Harold Szeemann, 49th La Biennale di Venezia, 2001. 259 McAuliffe, “Redecorating”, 15-18. 260 Kracauer cited in Brüderlin, “The (Digital) Mass Ornament”, Ornament Abstraction , 219. 162 Minjun combine mass ornamentation with “socio-political order”.261 The significance of their work lies in the replication of human figures to create mass ornamentation. The work of Do-Ho Suh is apposite to this discussion because he employs a similar device in several of his installations. In the twenty first century Suh takes Kracauer’s dancing girls analogy – the gendered repetitious notion of “mass” – and inscribes it in a non- gendered, global, political dimension. Exemplified in several of his works is the idea of multiple figures, which create a mass configuration of forms suggestive of social unification. But hovering somewhere lurks an invisible controlling force with a tendency to homogenise, disempower and render the individual anonymous.
In discussing Suh’s work I will confine my remarks to two works exhibited in the 2001
Venice Biennale entitled Some/One (2001) and Floor (1997-2000), exhibited alongside
Who Am We? (1996-2001). I will also address a work called Doormat: Welcome
(Green) (2000), included in an exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York. These pieces use repetition to generate images of mass order. Suh’s use of symbolically loaded elements: military dog tags, faces, wallpaper, plastic figures, when placed in repetition overwhelm us through their ornamental detail and spatial formation. In
Doormat: Welcome (Green), the viewer’s familiarity with a common domestic item normally used to wipe the dirt from one’s shoes on entering a dwelling is displaced when its socio-political intent is revealed. This realization occurs on close inspection when massed pink and green figures spell out the work’s Welcome message, alluding to the role of the domestic in cultural structures that rely on regimentation. At once decorative and political, this work collapses numerous Modernist binaries, offering the ornamental register at play between surface and structure, individual and mass.
261 Brüderlin, Ornament Abstraction, 219. 163 In all Suh’s works under discussion, the major concerns are tied to the relationship between the individual as a member of society and the control this social order has over any one person. On a personal level his work raises issues to do with individual identity or expression262 and their suppression by the higher importance of the collective. It also considers identity from a Korean perspective fused with issues of transmigration In an exhibition review of Suh’s work at Lehmann Maupin, Edward Leffingwell commented that his work “plays on the resonant image of the individual’s place in the vastness of the earth”, and that he “considers cultural and sociological issues expressed. . . as the force of the collective made powerful by the subjugation of the individual”.263 This reading of Suh’s work is only possible in relation to his use of mass ornamentalism, which is typically grounded in repetition. In Do-Ho Suh’s work weare faced with a dilemma, because his installations signify both the collective power of the repetition of a single unit, and its cancellation due to the same process. This points to a dichotomy, signifying the struggle between individuality and anonymity in homogenisation. For
Suh, as for Periton, repetition is doubly ornamental and political. Unlike Periton, Suh pushes the mass aspect of ornament to the extreme. His work shares similar concerns with contemporary artists such as Neshat and Minjun.
The “play” in Suh’s creations is in the space between distant and intimate engagement.
The recognition of “play” is seemingly absent from both these views, but in the space between we begin to understand the role that serious-play performs. As examples of this we might turn to the works Floor and Who Am We?–Green, co-exhibited to create a
262 Concerns not unfamiliar to Purism. 263 Edward Leffingwell, “Do-Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin”, Art in America (November, 2000): 164. 164 Fig. 33 Do-Ho Suh, Floor, 2001.
165 Fig. 34 Do-Ho Suh, detail Who Am We? –Green, 2001.
166 “room”. Floor is a slightly raised platform situated in the gallery space and designed for the viewer to traverse (Fig. 33). Who Am We? is barely visible wallpaper covering the four walls of the “room” (Fig. 34). Both works offer the potential for the casual viewer to miss the content and the decorative registers embedded in the work. Close consideration reveals the details necessary to communicate meanings revealed through the dual whimsical and sinister elements at play. By placing these works together Suh intensifies their reading in the same way that the power of multiples, through repetition, gives power to the singular person or motif.
This notion reflects the significance of ornament in his work. With the exception of
Some/One, Suh’s work shares resonances with Periton’s work in that both artists use either the format of a domestic space or something contained within it, or its threshold
(in Suh’s case a floor, wallpaper, or a floor mat). Floor and Who Am We? draw on different aspects of domestic space. Who Am We? discreetly lines the walls of the space, from a distance suggesting a bland painted surface. The playful interaction between the two works is also apparent within different components of each individual piece. Suh uses this interaction as a counterbalance to the serious intent, causing the viewer to smile on discovering the individual components. For example, the nondescript colour in Who Am We? is ultimately revealed to be wallpaper printed with thousands of tiny cameo faces only visible on very close scrutiny. Suh entertains us
(albeit fleetingly) using wallpaper discreetly. Unlike a lot of wallpaper that assumes its ornamental role as an immediate visual celebration, Suh’s wallpaper is unassuming, visually restrained and barely visible.
167 It is interesting to note that wallpaper has undergone a renaissance in contemporary art and design in recent years, even prompting the release of a high-end design magazine
Wallpaper. It has a reputation as an easily accessible and mass reproducible surface, but also suggests notions of surrogacy, pretence and fakery. Wallpaper can mimic all sorts of surfaces and structures: materials, scenes, architectural forms; this proclivity for impersonation has been exploited by contemporary artists.
The European origins of wallpaper began in the 12th century to accommodate religious icons printed onto paper. These performed a dual role: they reminded the occupants of the house of a higher order of reality, and covered the cracks in the wall of their present reality. Religious imagery gradually shifted towards other decorative motifs, and wallpaper became a symbol of 17th and 18th century middle class aspiration. It mimicked other, more expensive fabrics, frescos, or architectural details; and as it did with Matisse, visually opened interiors to spaces beyond the reality of their domestic existence.264 In the case of Do-Ho Suh, wallpaper is a signifier laden with meaning through the repetition of tiny human portraits that become a blur from less than a metre away. Suh’s use of wallpaper goes beyond the ‘merely’ decorative and enters into the realm of socio-political commentary. After discovering the amusing tiny faces, however, rather than experiencing a higher spiritual order we become aware of something more chillingly controlling.
264 For further insight see Toni Ross, “Why Wallpaper? A Minor Tropism in Contemporary Art”, in McNamara, ed., Ornamentalism, 28-33; and Jessica Smith, “Wallpaper: Seeing Beyond the Surface”, in Surface Design Magazine (Winter, 2002): 32-35. Many artists, including Andy Warhol, have built their ideas around wallpaper’s inherent quality to impersonate, decorate and misrepresent. 168 Suh’s work accommodates both public and private, a spatial public experience and minute detail. In the seemingly endless sea of tiny faces, each individual is acknowledged but also boxed into a repetitious structure that homogenises individual elements and recalls Huyssen’s phrase, “homogenisation of difference”. Though wallpaper is linked to the domestic realm, this is not what is evoked in Suh’s work.
Who Am We? takes us beyond our own (domestic) existence into a global political arena.
Floor consists of masses of tiny cast figures sandwiched between slabs of thick glass which are installed on the floor of the exhibition space. Visitors to the space walk over and across the work. Floor’s content is not as easy to miss because the interruption in floor surface and the work’s height compels the viewer to look more closely and discover the small cast human figures that are trapped underneath (Fig. 35).265 With their palms squashed against the glass sheets, they appear to support the floor the viewer is standing on. The decorative register in this work is realised through the repetition of the thousands of tiny figures and the patterns their difference in colour and form create across the surface. As in Who Am We? the ornamental is tied to detail.
According to Jenny Liu, the figures of both genders and different ethnicities are cast in
“gradations of beige, sand, tan, brown and putty”266. Difference is implied through skin colour variation, but it is simultaneously blurred by being presented as a total tonal shift across the whole work, mirroring the cancellation of the power of a singular motif in any overall pattern. The Lilliputian quality of the figures evokes a double response, pulling the audience between a sense of play and a sinister oppressive reality to which
265 Here I refer in particular to the installation at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). 266 Jenny Liu, exhibition review “Do-Ho Suh”, Frieze (Jan/Feb., 2001): 118-119. 169 Fig. 35 Do-Ho Suh, detail Floor, 2001.
170 the viewer contributes by standing on the tiny figures and adding to their burden.
Another duality suggests that the figures’ situation is symptomatic of an individual’s desire to express his/her identity and the greater order that suppresses it, forcing each individual to conform to the good of the greater order.
Initially, the thousands of tiny hands pressing against the glass can be viewed as a decorative surface of small flowers. This suggests that the ornamental register is Suh’s key tool in drawing the viewer towards the serious concerns evident in his work. In fact, in all the pieces under discussion, Suh’s decorative intent performs a central role beyond the surface aesthetic, contributing to both formal structural effects and his conceptual intent. In addition, according to Miwon Kwon, the omnipresence of the figure in Suh’s work “functions as a constant through and against which the world of objects, from the ornament to the monument, finds meaning”.267 Suh positions the figure (and the viewer) in between the public and private, between intimacy and community. Some/One (2001) features an installation of thousands of overlapping stainless steel military dog tags. At the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), the dog-tagged floor commences prior to entering the exhibition room, and continues to line the floor until it seamlessly culminates in a commanding, robe-like form that references the traditional Korean warrior or formal imperial costume (Figs. 36a & 36b). This hollow embellished form with its back to the viewer grows out of the floor and stands statuesquely and somewhat menacingly in the centre of the room. When examined from
267 Miwon Kwon, “The Other Otherness: The Art of Doh-Ho Suh”, Do-Ho Suh, exhibition catalogue (London: Serpentine Gallery, Washington: Seattle Art Museum, 2002): 11. Here Miwon Kwon makes reference to minimalist discourse in the use of the words “public and private”, and in particular to Robert Morris’ “Notes on Sculpture, Part II”, in Artforum (October 1966): 20-3, where Morris discusses the public notion of sculpture. 171 Fig. 36a Do-Ho Suh, Some/One, 2001.
Fig. 36b Do-Ho Suh, detail Some/One, 2001.
172 the front its empty cavity is exposed. Suh plays on the decorative seduction and detail of the military dog tags, small, silver shapes that when overlapped and laid en mass create a sensuous silver surface on which we need to walk to enter the room. As in his other work, close inspection reveals their true identity and presents an unexpected reading. The viewer is pulled between the seductive quality of the surface and the war- like meaning of these items. Here Suh’s work expands beyond the aesthetic parameters of ornamental detail to articulate power and authority, but also the dichotomy between individual identity and mass anonymity.
Andreas Huyssen writes that Postmodernism has paved the way for western culture to recognise the limitations of its own authority and traditions and to view the potential that exists in other non-Euro-American cultures. For him, Postmodernism has also given us the ability to bring “high” art into closer proximity with forms of mass culture and the culture of everyday life.268 Do-Ho Suh’s work embraces all these notions. It is suggestive of other cultures and other experiences of everyday life, and the ornamentalisation of mass human formations allows the decorative register in Suh’s work to become an aesthetic element that assists in manifesting his concerns.
This chapter has elaborated on the decorative proclivity of several recent exhibitions, and three contemporary artists, to foreground the continued significance and relevance of the ornamental in a contemporary art context. The section on the Modernist artist
Henri Matisse asserted that this artist’s oeuvre, in particular his decorative paper
268 For more insight see Huyssen, After the Great Divide , 178-221. 173 interventions in architecture, is significant for those artists who utilise the ornamental as a conceptual constituent in art practice today. As part of broader Modernism, Matisse is not alone in disrupting the monotheism often ascribed to Modernism today, but he is a remarkable example. His tenacious, life-long relationship with the decorative combines expressive and conceptual components that some proponents of Modernism denied as co-habitants in art. This coalescence of meaning and ornament is also evident in the three contemporary artists I discuss. In addition, in both Matisse’s paper cut-out murals and in the art of the other artist’s discussed in this chapter, the ornamental presents as a fusion of surface and structure. Belying the modernist categorisation of the decorative as superficial, expendable and incapable of conveying content in art, they foreground the main concern of this thesis: to present the decorative as a vital aesthetic constituent one that is not easily peeled off the surface as an “optional extra” as Modernism would have preferred. In this sense, its essential role in art and the built environment is tied to meaning.
174 CONCLUSION
This thesis has mapped the ornamental’s complex relationship to western art in the
Twentieth Century. Since the last century, ornament has had to justify its existence in art and it has become apparent in this study that the modernist difficulty with ornament has been analysed as something to do with ornament per se, and not with art. In other words, ornament doesn’t have, isn’t, a problem when art shifts its perception to encompass a broader understanding of aesthetics. Joseph Rykwert has argued that this issue for architects is tied to attitude, and he believes it is not possible to progress towards a valid relationship between architecture and ornament unless “it is seen to be necessary, not gratuitous: as long as it will be seen not as a problem of ornament, or not ornament, but as a problem of meaning.” 269 The perception of the decorative in
Modernism was of a form devoid of meaning. Given this, its aesthetic value was not based on ornament’s semantic capacity but on what it represented in pejorative terms.
Whilst Rykwert’s comments are specific to architecture’s relationship with the decorative the same argument might be applied to art.
Despite the Modernist view, I have proposed in this thesis that the removal of the ornamental from art is not a simple process. It must be recognized that in the relational space of ornament and art there exists a complexity that transcends mere coexistence. I have argued for the acknowledgement of an inseparable relationship, one that demonstrates an oscillation or a mutual reliance on each other.270
269 Joseph Rykwert, “Ornament is no Crime”, The Necessity of Artifice (London: Academy Editions, 1982), 92-101. 270 See Markus Brüderlin’s introduction in the exhibition catalogue, Ornament and Abstraction, 17-27. 175 To simply peel ornament off the surface may be possible in some instances, but in many others it is not so easy, as illustrated in the work of Louise Paramor, Simon Periton and
Do-Ho Suh. The works discussed in Chapter Three would cease to exist if the ornamentation were removed. The decorative is often aesthetically deeply embedded, and has a tendency to shift around. Its separation from art may perhaps be interpreted as an hypothesis, merely an exercise in rationalist thought. This hypothetical separation that associates one aesthetic form with conceptual tendencies and the other not, is challenged here and by other contemporary theorists. Since Postmodernism, conceptualisation or meaningfulness in artwork does not necessarily exclude the ornamental from the lexicon of art. The promotion of such an approach denies the relevance of the decorative across many cultures, ethnicities, geographic regions, artefacts, art forms and timeframes.
To reinforce this point it is relevant to refer to a statement by Ettore Sottsass, one of the members of the 1970s Memphis group. Sottsass argues:
To me, sand-blasting a steel span, painting a door red or even choosing teak
rather than thin strips of bamboo for a floor, or deciding where to put doors and
windows already comes under the heading of decoration.271
For Sottsass ornament is an integral part of objects, architecture and design. He argues that it is not necessary to separate these very everyday actions or decisions we perform into a category of “decorating” or “decoration”.
271 Ettore Sottsass, “Necessity of Decoration”, L’Architecture D’Aujourd’Hui Vol 333 (March-April, 2001): 87 176 In considering the relationship between art and the ornamental, Sottsass points us to an integrated method for the future, but it is also one that invokes the past, when the fusion of art and ornament was thoroughly acknowledged.272 The point Sottsass makes is evident in many cultures and perhaps expands Carboni’s earlier point about tribal garments. In Sottsass’ terms, an embedded process of ornamentation exists in the general act of making something, including choice about colour, materiality, composition and context which are not separate processes. For Sottsass ornamentation is integrated into the modus operandi of life rather than being a separate or additional process.
Western attitudes to aesthetics, where ornamentation is not separately determined from the making of art, design or architecture, existed in several streams of Modernism and in non-western approaches to art, artefacts and built forms.273 That charivari space of
“otherness” that Formalism and Purism attempted to retreat from, has become central and significant. Unlike Gothic marginal art that, according to Michael Camille,
“…flourished from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century by virtue of the absolute hegemony of the system it sought to subvert”, the decorative was not graced with a similar expansive opportunity during Modernism.274 Its return was forestalled until Postmodernism’s raiding of the margins signalled a shift in attitude towards the role of the decorative in experimental art.
272 And also many artists in broader Modernism. 273 One example that illustrates this is Chris McAuliffe’s statement about the Delauney’s fusion of art, craft and architecture in his article “Redecorating”, where he refers to artists like the Delaunays who facilitated “the creation of an aestheticised environment in which painting, architecture, furniture, fabric would fuse into an organic whole”. See Art and Text, 45, 1993, 15-18. 274 M. Camille, Image On The Edge, Reaktion Books, London, 1992, 160. 177 It is not my intention in this thesis to privilege or over-glorify the decorative over formalist art outcomes. Nor do I wish to deny the importance of some of the artwork produced in this regime. I began at the beginning of the Twentieth Century and have concluded at the commencement of the next, where as I have argued, some reconciliation between the decorative and art has occurred. However, residues of last century’s prejudices towards the ornamental, perhaps initiated by those still in sympathy with Modernist formalism, occasionally persist into this century. The alleged
“problem” of meaning, a key issue for the decorative throughout the Twentieth Century, endures at times, attached to perceptions of ornament as an inferior aesthetic form. If a
Sottsassian approach were to become widely accepted, we might envisage a situation where art and ornament are recognized as the embodiment of each other, where the
“corrupt” becomes “pure” and where the decorative is restored to its central role in art practice and theory.
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