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 open-
ing shot was a small 1976 group
show that filled the walls of a down-
town New York City gallery with
the decidedly pretty work of 10 little-
known 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 show-
ing of a new movement called Pattern and
Decoration—was nothing less than a full-
frontal 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 dis-A 2015 canvas by Pattern and Decoration alum Joyce KozloffExhibit of the week
Less Is a Bore: Maximalist
Art and Design
At the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, through Sept. 22
24 ARTS
tinct 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-the-
box.” 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-One year after her U.S. breakthrough,
Hannah Gadsby “continues to rede-
fine the stand-up comedy form,”
said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood
Reporter. The 41-year-old performer,
who has been well known in Australia
for years, vowed to quit comedy in
Nanette, her previous stage show. But
then Nanette was released by Netflix
and became a sensation even as it
sparked debates over whether it was
more a lecture or monologue than
a comedy stand-up special. “It was
a silly discussion, one that Gadsby
rightfully dismisses in Douglas.” In
the earlier show, she attacked her own
habit of using self-deprecating comedy
to cope with personal traumas and
the various insults she faces because
she is a woman, a lesbian, an autistic,
and, as she puts it, “heavy of the hoof.”
Douglas, which is named, in part, after one
of her dogs, “feels like both a natural exten-
sion of Nanette and a gentle buffering of
it,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment
Weekly. Either way, “it’s a pleasure just to
watch Gadsby’s brain work.”Gadsby and friends: Interrogating comedy for laughsDouglas
Daryl Roth Theater, New York City, (800) 745-3000 ++++I wanted more from her, said Hilton Als in
The New Yorker. Though Gadsby is adept
at building audience expectations—“like
a confectioner licking her lips over the
candy that she may or may not hand over
to eager children”—she otherwise wins a
lot of her laughs through self-deprecatinghumor. Then she turns on white
men, the people she blames for mak-
ing her feel bad in the first place,
and the members of the audience all
get to be enraged by how she’s been
victimized and how white men have
victimized them too. Douglas thus
comes across as “a revenge fantasy
you pay for.” It “makes a party of
self-absorption.”It also leaves none of Gadsby’s foes
standing, said Jesse Green in The
New York Times. “In answer to
those men who derided Nanette as a
mere monologue, she offers another,
unanswerable one. And to those
who called it a lecture, not comedy,
she responds with one of the funni-
est lectures ever”—a disquisition on
female beauty through the ages, complete
with slides of Renaissance art and refer-
ences to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Yes, this is an angry show; it’s even furious.
But “it draws its energy from the effort
to master and direct that anger into sharp
insight and its by-product, laughter.”Review of reviews: Stage & Art
Sa
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t^ a
nd^DCMoore^ Galleryally grown contagious. Luminaries
such as Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella,
and Jasper Johns are revealed here
to have dipped their toes in visual
excess, joining a larger movement
whose celebration of patterning and
of crafts associated with women’s
work presented “a not-so-subtle
challenge to the male domination of
the art world.”“It’s no coincidence that many of
the works here were never sold,”
said Murray Whyte in The Boston
Globe. “That’s what happens when
transgressors buck the norms,”
and “maximalism” is a term that
describes not a historical movement
but a free-floating hunger for gaudiness
and busyness that defies normal notions
of good taste. “Done right, maximalism
should feel slightly illicit.” Take Robert
Zakanitch’s “colossal, ravishing” 1992
painting Big Bungalow Suite III. “It’s
a sticky mess of thickly painted repeat-
ing forms of fruit and foliage.” With its
30-foot sprawl, “it feels like excess and
rot” and “it’s spectacular.” So what if the
only thing that makes maximalism cohere
as an art-world concept is a sense of too-
muchness? “It gives permission for joy. It
colors way outside the lines, and that’s a
good thing.”