In his polemical 1913 essay “Ornament and Crime”, architect Adolf Loos argued against decoration as wasteful, indulgent and impending obsolescence. He was right on the last point: Modernist architects and designers, spurred on by his righteousness, spent decades methodically ridding their work of excess, leaving cities full of joyless glass and pristine concrete.

The ornament nevertheless flourished because there are always empty spaces to be filled. Satisfying a universal desire, man adorns himself and decorates the surfaces that surround him with jewelry, souvenirs, clichés, patterned fabrics, religious figurines and other crimes.

The clamor of ornament, an exhibition at Manhattan’s Drawing Center that strives to shake off the curse of Loos, bursts with decorative exuberance. In their search for opulent surfaces, curators have found tattoos, wallpaper, designer knockoffs peddled by Canal Street vendors, scrimshaw carvings on whales and much, much, much more. The title thumbs its nose at the triumph of rational classification by Owen Jones in 1856, The grammar of ornament. Offended by what he saw as sordid mid-Victorian taste, Jones appointed himself an aesthetic enforcer, listing rules for every design task, according to elaborate codes and hierarchies.

Curators Emily King, Margaret-Anne Logan and Duncan Tomlin see ornament not as a set catalog of references to be deployed with professionalism and restraint, but as a global need for profusion and complexity. The show wanders through cultures and centuries, in search of resonances and communication channels. It’s rigorous, in a way, tracing the way a geometric pattern common in Ottoman metalwork and textiles (unfortunately absent) appears in a late 15th-century drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, is reproduced in engravings unattributed and reappears a few decades later in the fine tracery of a woodcut by Dürer. The track isn’t quite cold yet: Dürer’s lacy disc reappears on Bob Dylan’s forehead in a 1968 poster by Martin Sharp, peering out from the thicket of the singer’s explosive hair like an all-seeing eye boosted by psychedelic drugs.

Ornament has long been presented as the pinnacle of refinement and also dismissed as primitive. Jones believed that all societies cherish patterns and that their desire for them “grows and increases with all in proportion to their progress in civilization”. In 1925, Le Corbusier decreed the opposite: “Decoration: trinkets, charming entertainment for a savage”. The Drawing Center show treads common ground, gloating in the pleasures of too much, but also trying to make museum-worthy sense of a craving that knows few bounds.

Ornament has long been held up as the pinnacle of refinement and also dismissed as primitive

This balancing act points curators back to the chimerical efforts of the past to categorize the uncategorizable. During the Depression, the US government sent 400 illustrators nationwide to discover and document a uniquely American approach to craftsmanship and its manifestation in ornament. This army of seasoned watercolourists rendered their finds in punctilious paintings, some of which are shown here, of saddle blankets, painted chests and patchwork quilts. The images obtained were collected in The American Design Indexa landmark work that aspired to define national character and a modern aesthetic.

Sober reporting was sometimes pushed aside by a mixture of imagination and indolence. Perkins Harnly, under the guise of recording the contents of a typical American Boudoir, actually painted a room in the boarding house where he lived, which he claims had once been the home of actress Lillian Russell. The concoction he dreamed up was half real and half made up, a Victorian vision of chic abundance, filled with rugs, curtains, books and an impressive array of trinkets. Every surface abounds with faithfully rendered objects, a thoroughness that both fulfilled its federally issued record and indulged its tumultuous fantasy.

The Index did a great job of compiling American tastes for products and influences from Europe, Asia and Africa. It is less successful in unearthing a true national vernacular. But if it failed, it failed in awe-inspiring fashion, racking up 18,257 images of idiosyncratic and sometimes eloquent objects. Perhaps the most telling editorial decision was the decision to ignore Native American design altogether, treating the continent’s rich traditions of rugs, beading, sewing, jewelry and body art as if they weren’t. had never existed.

This curatorial team is not about to repeat such a mistake. They are more interested in how ornament travels along the routes traced by trade, tourism, slavery, and migration, and in patterns that cross cultures without announcing their origins. The colorful amoeboid pattern we call cashmere is named after a Scottish town specializing in machine-made versions of patterns that originated in Kashmir. We are duly presented with two pieces of evidence: an intricate 1880 design for a shawl believed to have been handwoven in what is now Pakistan, and a cruder English watercolor intended for industrial production.

Here, curators pause for a nod to fashionable concepts of authenticity and appropriation. Colonial designers and engineers, they suggest, stole cultural products from across the empire, diverted them for profit, and robbed skilled craftsmen of their centuries-old livelihood. True, but there are a few pieces missing from the story. The British Empire created a huge market for Kashmiri shawls in the first place; Indian artisans fell victim to the same forces of mechanization that afflicted British weavers. All adornment starts locally but is not immune to the global forces of technology and economics.

For a noise show, Clamor is curiously muted, with works on paper replacing the three-dimensional experiences of buildings, houses and costumes. Architects once trained by designing classical ornaments; a Louis Sullivan garland and several sketches by Piranesi for a fireplace remind us that the hand that signed a paper sometimes lifted a city.

For a survey of sensuality, moreover, the show is downright uncomfortable. Designers at London-based Studio Frith seem to have forgotten about the actual viewers, forcing us to lean, stoop or squint to read text and distribute objects and wall panels in such a confusing way that it can be hard to tell which belongs to whom.

Yet the exhibit clarifies just how indispensable Loos’ supposedly superfluous really are. Our brain perceives symmetries in the seeming randomness of nature and we look for patterns to situate ourselves and reduce anxiety. In a way, the theorists who debated whether ornament is advanced or atavistic were both right: you decorate to soar and to survive.

As of September 18, drawingcenter.org

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