In spring 2019 I had the opportunity to spend 2 months in New York. The goal was simple: to meet old friends and make some new, to explore as much as possible of the city, the museums and galleries, and to come back with a comprehensive body of new works. Many of my inspirations and motifs for new works are collected while traveling, always curious and open to discoveries outside the usual pathways.
Just before I left for New York, I saw the 'P&D: Ornament as Promise' exhibition at Mumok in Vienna, an overview of the work of the Pattern and Decoration movement (1975–1985), which for me became a life-changing experience. Working now for twenty years with patterns, the movement and most of the involved artists were completely new for me. It is almost unbelievable that I could never have seen something that seems so fundamental to my own work, but it also shows the prejudices about the decorative as well as the feminist in art, which are still huge and make important works disappear in the archive. I was thrilled with the overflowing energy and color of their works, showing the revolutionary and theoretical potential of patterns. There were large-format pattern-paintings, mosaics, and huge textile collages, without any of the reservations of modern art towards folk art, decoration and the joy of being colorful. Many of these artists, like Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Valerie Jaudon, and Robert Kushner were committed feminist artists, who used the techniques of artisanship and various ornamental traditions as protest against a purist, misogynist and racist environment.
“As feminists and artists exploring the decorative in our own paintings, we were curious about the pejorative use of the word ‘decorative’ in the contemporary art world. In rereading the basic texts of Modern Art, we came to realize that the prejudice against the decorative has a long history and is based on hierarchies: fine art above decorative art, Western art above non-Western art, men’s art above women’s art. By focusing on these hierarchies we discovered a disturbing belief system based on the moral superiority of the art of Western civilization.”
Many of the former P&D artists are now living in New York and the planned trip became a sequel and a search for traces to the exhibition. My perception was focused on the possibilities of the decorative. In a shop in Chinatown I found old Vietnamese festive decorations, flowers of metal-coated paper in red, pink, and green, probably offered in the store decades ago, dusty, yellowed, wrinkled. They became my material, I took themapart and combined them with my painting into new compositions. As a result I was able to bring a series of about 30 new works to Austria.
“P&D artists were interested in color; patterning and floral motifs; surface density and energy; the grid; non-Western visual culture and mimetic appropriations of wallpaper, fabrics, carpets, and quilts; Islamic tile work; Celtic and Gothic architecture; Byzantine, Roman, and Mexican mosaic; embroidery; and Iranian and Indian miniatures. Some P&D artists were key to the feminist art movement and gestured in their art to so-called domestic materials such as fabric and ‘women’s work’ such as needlework. Their art was at once an affirmation and an ‘anti-‘ response. ”
“I like elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than ‘straightforward,’ ambiguous rather than ‘articulated,’ perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as ‘interesting,’ conventional rather than ‘designed,’ accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality.”
“Nature run wild, the savage: these pernicious mythologies were part and parcel of the colonial age, and ornament became synonymous with the atavistic and depraved. The most infamous articulation of this phobia was that of the architect Adolf Loos, who condemned the adornments of the Jugendstil as profligate and degenerate in his notorious Ornament and Crime. The transgressions of adornment were even comparable to prostitution and miscegenation; the ‘woman’ and the ‘Papuan’, guilty of embellishment, become the objects of this hysterical, orientalist bigotry. Loos’s polemic thus exposed some of the most vitriolic tensions within the idea of ornament: a contest between (meaningless) decoration and (meaningful) abstraction, interior and exterior, impure feminine and pure masculine, primitive and modern; the fear that significant form could somehow disintegrate into mere wallpaper, function into futility. (...)
Decades later, in the 1950s, this spread of design into nearly every aspect of life was registered and met with equal alarm by the critic Clement Greenberg, who condemned decoration as ‘the specter that haunts modernist painting’. (You wouldn’t want to confuse your pathos-ridden Pollock with the horror of machine made chintz.) High modernist abstraction - transcendent aesthetic experience - was always dangerously close to becoming non-representation, on the verge of dissolving into meaningless pattern.”
The lack of clarity is a central concept in my work. It always opposes rash understanding. A painting, you can grasp at a glance does not interest me. I'm interested in creating a labyrinthine look, distracting from supposed centers and staggering layers so that ultimately it's impossible to decide what's in front or behind. And besides, what is 'behind', overpainted and invisible, is still there, it is part of the painting. I see my paintings not only as the top layer of paint, on which everything takes place, everything is visible, but as a temporal staggering of layers, which includes what has become invisible. The temporal dimension is important, because the paintings are constantly being reworked, remain unnoticed, are brought out again. Spatial aspects also flow into the work. I travel with the paintings, I always have unfinished work in my luggage. A painting may have been started in New Zealand, then further processed in Lower Austria, and perhaps completed in Spain. While I'm on the road, the work takes on influences and color, traces of my movements and reflections. It is important not to erase these tracks for the sake of some superficial clarity.
“What purpose is served by making the distinction between decoration and art?”
more about:
Michelle Kuo: Postcards from the Edge. in: Yinka Shonibare MBE: Criminal Ornamentation
Valerie Jaudon & Joyce Kozloff: Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture. 1978
Esther Boehle, & Manuela Ammer: Pattern and Decoration. 2019