ART-PRESENTATION:Less Is a Bore

Borrowing its attitude from architect Robert Venturi’s witty retort to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernist edict “less is more,” the exhibition “Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design” showcases a field of creative production that proves decoration, patterning, and ornament to be multivalent and exceedingly adaptable methods to make artworks that reference ideas, forms, and symbols at once personal and political, contemporary and historical, local and global.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: ICA Boston Archive

Spanning a concise 50-year, the exhibition “Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design” at Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, examines how artists have used ornamentation, pattern, and decorative modes to critique, subvert, and transform accepted histories and trajectories related to craft and design, gender, multiculturalism, beauty, and taste. The exhibition begins in the early 1970s with works of art that sought to challenge established hierarchies that privileged fine art over applied art, and Western art over other art histories and traditions. The exhibition continues to the present, dipping into 1980s postmodern painting and appropriation art, multiculturalist expressions of the 1990s, and more recent craft-based practices that chart the legacy and transformation of these trajectories. The exhibition features more than 40 artists and is comprised of o60 works, including a new site-specific, room-size installation by Virgil Marti and works made for the exhibition by Ron Amstutz, Polly Apfelbaum, Taylor Davis, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Dianna Molzan, and Pae White. The first two rooms of the exhibition situate the work of artists associated with Pattern and Decoration, an art movement inaugurated in New York in 1975, such as Valerie Jaudon, Robert Kushner, Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, and Robert Zakanitch alongside other works from the same era that challenged entrenched artistic categories. Jaudon’s “Pantherburn” (1979), a metallic painting that synthesizes the architectural language of Romanesque and Gothic arches, for example, hangs next to Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing 280” (1976), an architecturally-scaled work and one of the artist’s earliest to adopt color. The exhibition continues these juxtapositions, for example with formally similar patterning in Jasper Johns’s print “Scent” (1976), Howardena Pindell’s “Autobiography: Artemis” (1986), and Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates’s custom fabric “Grandmother” (1983). The third room includes a gathering of works that explore the use of vegetal ornamentation, from arabesques and French curves to other natural motifs. Frank Stella’s “Brazilian Merganser, 5.5X” (1980) from his “Exotic Bird” series, which marked the artist’s radical turn to dimension, color, and shape, this work is viewed with Nancy Graves’s “Trace” (1979-80), a cast-bronze polychromed and patinated sculpture that resembles a schematic tree. The exhibition continues by looking to both the decorated body and the body in décor. The provocative “Looks” of Leigh Bowery, an iconic and iconoclastic fashion designer and performer captured by photographer Fergus Greer, are presented along with Jeffrey Gibson’s “DON’T MAKE ME OVER” (2018), an adorned performance garment that hangs from horizontally suspended teepee poles. Miriam Schapiro’s “Vestiture: Paris Series # 2” (1979), a robe shape composed of collaged printed fabrics. The final room of the exhibition gathers recent maximalist artworks and design objects. From Sanford Biggers’s painting on collaged antique quilts and Betty Woodman’s monumental installation of painted ceramic surfaces, to Marcel Wanders’s sensuous, golden Bon Bon chair and Virgil Marti’s decorated trompe l’oeil environment, these works demonstrate the continued significance of pattern, decoration, and maximalism in contemporary practice.

List of Artists: Ron Amstutz, Polly Apfelbaum, Jennifer Bartlett, Sanford Biggers, Tord Boontje, Leigh Bowery & Fergus Greer, Roger Brown, Taylor Davis, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Jeffrey Gibson, Nancy Graves, Valerie Jaudon, Jasper Johns, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Ellen Lesperance, Sol LeWitt, Liza Lou, Babette Mangolte & Lucinda Childs, Virgil Marti, Dianna Molzan, Joel Otterson, Laura Owens, Howardena Pindell, Lari Pittman, Ruth Root, Lucas Samaras, Zoe Pettijohn Schade, Miriam Schapiro, Ettore Sottsass, Frank Stella, Stephanie Syjuco, Philip Taaffe, Venturi (Scott Brown & Associates), Marcel Wanders, Pae White, Kehinde Wiley, Franklin Williams, Betty Woodman, Christopher Wool, Haegue Yang, Ray Yoshida and Robert Zakanitch.

Info: Institute of Contemporary Art-Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, Duration: 26/6-22/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.icaboston.org