Jeff Perrone, founding figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement, died this spring in New York at the age of sixty-nine. His death was confirmed by artist Elaine Reichek, his longtime friend. Perrone was a renowned art critic whose 1976 art forum essay “Approach the decorative” reshaped the conversation around the decorative in contemporary art. Her own work was as powerful as her writing: Perrone discordantly placed materials typically associated with feminized craftsmanship, such as buttons, trims and fabric, in the service of aggressive statements, in works that seemed both embrace and eject the viewer. “All I can say is that you put your best impulses into your work, not your worst impulses,” Pennone said. BOMBIt is Roberto Juarez, a friend, in 1993. “If I can do that, that’s enough.”
Jeff Perrone was born in Atwater, California in 1953. After earning his BA in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to New York, where he taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1977 to 1983. “I always looked like I was from Brooklyn,” he told Juarez. “That’s why I moved to New York as soon as I could.” During this time, Perrone began to write regularly for art forum. In “Approaching the Decorative,” a review of the landmark group show “Ten Approaches to the Decorative” at New York’s Alessandra Gallery, he defended the long-neglected value of craftsmanship in an art history that valued painting and its masculinist tendencies.
“[I]It’s easy to see how prejudice against the decorative can arise at any time in relation to anyone’s work. This bias is both relatively new and unevenly administered,” he wrote.
“In this century we have the clothes designed by Sonia Delaunay and the architectural decoration of Matisse, the tapestries of Stella and Frankenthaler, the ceramics of Picasso and Lichtenstein, among hundreds of other examples. Scratch any art movement or established artist, and you’ll likely find some form of “non-deep” activity involved in the applied form. More than a simple prejudice against the decorative, the criticism I quote reveals an assumption of a certain set of minimal and reductive standards for art that emphasize calm rather than restlessness, images holistic rather than fragmented. These are inherited biases, not inherent biases.
After brief stints in the mid-1980s teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio (“It was extremely depressing,” he told Juarez. “Since there is nothing to do in Texas besides drinking and shooting animals, I started playing with clay to relieve boredom”) and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Perrone moved permanently to New York. Just in time to witness the carnage wrought in his community by AIDS, he made a serious move from criticism to artistic creation, working in a printing press to support himself.
Pennone’s works from this period took both canvas and fired clay tiles as mediums. These were hung directly on the wall, via nails that pierced the ceramic tiles. “The fact is that you can’t frame them,” he noted. He quickly brought influences ranging from the vibrant outpouring of Indian art, which he discovered at a young age, to the brilliant minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly to wear in works consisting of hundreds of carefully selected buttons, often collected over the decades he has sewn. fabric for spelling biting polemical and political phrases.
“Perrone’s words and phrases could also constitute a personality distant from the man himself, or their vernacular motto could be one of his intellectual interests”, writing art forumby David Frankel in 2018. “And yet, undeniably, part of the pleasure of this work is the feeling that an artist, under the guise of an elaborate and complex formal exercise but also in plain sight, is telling us exactly what he think.”
Perrone has continued to create his text-centric works for over two decades, more recently experimenting on a larger scale. He has enjoyed solo exhibitions at New York galleries including Cheim & Reid, Holly Solomon Gallery, Sperone Westwater, and Charles Cowles Gallery, and has had his work included in group shows at the American Craft Museum in New York; the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; and the JB Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, Kentucky, among other institutions. His latest show “A revolution is not a dinner party” which will now serve as a memorial exhibit, is featured at Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey until June 17.
