WHAT PATTERNS ARE FOR

“Christ! What are patterns for?” wails the distraught young heroine of Amy Lowell’s famous poem, Patterns.

Her question is hardly surprising.  Patterns have been with us from the very beginning:

Red dot patterns painted on the cave walls at El Castillo date back 40,000 years.

Star pattern from the ceiling of an ancient Egyptian tomb

Well, the world has waited long enough for the answer.

Lowell’s heroine yearned for passion and spontaneity, but found herself trapped in a formal world of patterns, from the designs on her brocaded gown and corset to the ornate garden paths which she paced, waiting for her lover to return from the war in Flanders. She dreamed of casting off her gown and racing naked through the gardens, pursued by her lover:

And he would stumble after, 
Bewildered by my laughter. 
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes. 
I would choose 
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths, 
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover, 
Till he caught me in the shade, 
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me, 
Aching, melting, unafraid. 

Together they could free each other from a life of closed patterns but alas, it was not meant to be:

The softness of my body will be guarded from embrace 
By each button, hook, and lace. 
For the man who should loose me is dead, 
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, 
In a pattern called a war. 

Pattern is an act of repetition, symmetry, order and uniformity, not passion and spontaneity.  It permits few creative choices once the formula is set.  It is more often the work of anonymous artisans on assembly lines, or patient, long suffering women in huts rather than the work of creative geniuses who invent bold new styles.

Dhiagliev ballet costume

Persian rug, 19th century

So what the heck are patterns for, anyway?  They can be lovely but can they ever qualify as significant Art?

Our era prefers flamboyant celebrity artists to the steady, predictable hum of patterns by artisans.  Great artists are the ones with the courage to break the established patterns and run naked through that garden, right?

International superstars Tracey Emin (Royal Academy of Arts, CBE) and Miley Cyrus (VMA)

Despite this fact, let's consider whether patterns have anything of value left to offer us. Tolstoy, who was a more profound thinker than Lowell, wrote about the "chaste young girls" in Russian villages who labored for years making lace patterns:

As these girls worked over their looms, the rhythm of their patterns transported their thoughts to a faraway land:

lace makers in olden times... used to depict all their lives, all their dreams of happiness in the pattern. They dreamed in designs of all that was dear to them, wove all their pure, uncertain love into their lace.

There's no record of these young women tearing off their gowns and running naked through the garden, but that hardly diminishes the pathos of their situation, or makes the objects in which they invested their lives any less beautiful. Similarly, look at this ancient Egyptian illustration of the frankincense trees that grow in the legendary land of Punt (Ta netjera), a paradise rich with incense and gold:

The artisans detailed each and every leaf, despite the fact that each was identical to the one before. This was not an occasion for artistic economy, it was a time for being true to the pattern.  As the ancient craftsmen worked on long rows of leaves in the hot sun, I'm sure their minds drifted off to the land of Punt.

When I hold my love close, and her arms steal around me, I'm like a man transported to Punt...  the world suddenly bursts into flower. --  Egyptian love song, circa 1500 BCE

For viewers with patience and imagination, patterned objects can be rich with context. Poet Stephen Crane (1871-1900) offered a very different perspective than Amy Lowell on that "running-naked-through-gardens" business:

If I should cast off this tattered coat
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue
Echoless, ignorant --
What then?

A century has almost passed since Amy Lowell asked her burning question, "Christ! What are patterns for?" Today, famed artist Tracey Emin shows us how artists have freed themselves from the constraints of pattern, and also of spelling:

Tracey Emin masterpiece, The Hole Room, 1999

Many in our generation of artists are puffing and panting, intellectually and morally exhausted from racing through the garden for the limits of art, looking for some new article of clothing to cast off. They've put so much distance between themselves and the tyranny of patterns that their work is devoid of structure. Its atoms are so diffuse that they no longer cohere in a way capable of sustaining life or heat. As Clement Greenberg wrote:

The nonrepresentational or abstract, if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint. 

Discernible pattern can be one of those worthy constraints.  The order created by patterns may seem superficial and restrictive, but it is also one of the brakes on the road to artistic entropy.  Rabindranath Tagore observed,

The freedom of the storm and the bondage of the roots join hands in the dance of swaying branches.

So what are patterns for? Patterns provide the bondage of the roots, and unless you have both the storm and the roots, there just ain't no dancing.