ABSTRACT
This chapter of the study, Pluralism of a Kind, will take as its central area of focus the Pattern and Decoration movement. Militating against modernism’s reductivism, Pattern and Decoration instigated a wholly separate approach to painting, one which was more inclusive in scope and import and that was achieved, in part, through a willingness to embrace and avail itself of a diverse range of aesthetic and cultural sources. Rather than a history of the movement, the chapter will consider how Pattern and Decoration sought to mobilise what Arthur C. Danto has described, speaking of the period in question, was a “radical feminist critique.” That this critique “was an appeal to Pluralism of a kind…,” will be key to our understanding of both Pattern and Decoration and the group exhibition Bad Painting, held at the New Museum in New York in 1978. Although Pattern and Decoration’s pluralism arguably differed from how artists included in Bad Painting utilised its aesthetic effects, what it denoted was an increasing move away from the modern and towards the postmodern.
