Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art and Design
At the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through Sept. 22
The backlash against minimalism in art may have been inevitable, but it has been anything but organized, said Jonathon Keats in Forbes.com. An important exhibition in Boston this summer suggests that the opening shot was a small 1976 group show that filled the walls of a downtown New York City gallery with the decidedly pretty work of 10 littleknown artists. “To a casual passerby, the paintings might have appeared to be innocuous wall covering made for a luxury hotel or condo. But Ten Approaches to the Decorative— the inaugural showing of a new movement called Pattern and Decoration—was nothing less than a fullfrontal assault on 20th-century modernism.” Even though the movement itself soon faded, its embrace of decorative traditions such as wallpaper, carpets, and fabric pointed a way forward for other artists impatient with the essentialism and asceticism of much art from the modernist era.
At the ICA Boston show that the ’76ers inspired, “feeling overwhelmed is a distinct possibility,” said Pamela Reynolds in WBUR.org. “What you’ll find here is a no-holds-barred, full-immersion blast of living and creating with abandon, no concern about being a little, well, ‘loud.’” The oldest work in the show is a 1969 sculpture by Lucas Samaras, which offers “a humorous vision of a chair, adorned in primary colors and exploding, cheekily, like a furniture version of a jack-in-thebox.” That work was made shortly after architect Robert Venturi twisted the “less is more” dictum of modernism to coin the phrase that gives this show its title, and Venturi’s attitude appears to have gradu