Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/041392/0413400.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 6KB | 125 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 73

The Faberge of Funk


The tiny, witty works of California ceramist Ken Price belie the
notion that real sculpture ought to be big

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Anyone who still believes in rigid divisions of
importance between craft and fine art -- pottery and sculpture,
for instance -- could do worse than visit the show by the
California ceramist Ken Price, now on view at the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis. Artists have been making sculpture out
of baked clay since the dawn of time -- mud was God's medium for
fashioning Adam -- and yet, in America, there lingers an
irrational feeling that "real" sculpture ought to be made of
steel, or bronze, or stone, or wood: anything but clay, in fact.

    Price's work, in its terse, witty and episodically lurid
sharpness, argues otherwise, and has been doing so for nearly
30 years. To complicate matters, Price plays with traditional
forms of useful ceramics such as the cup and the vase without
producing a usable object: they become a sort of armature for
flights of entirely nonutilitarian fantasy.

    The American preference for big art has worked against his
reputation, because his pieces are tiny. None is more than 2 ft.
high, and many of the best of them are to be measured in inches.
You enter Price's imagination from the wrong end of the
telescope. His objects don't declare themselves across the room
at you. Like certain Joseph Cornell boxes, or like the tiny clay
caricature heads by Daumier that so influenced Giacometti's
ideas of scale they pull you close in with their bright and
almost fetishistic visual promise until you have shrunk, as it
were, to their size.

    Some have critters on them -- a snail crawling round the
base, or a worried-looking frog leaning backward; one piece,
Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968, is borne on the back of a turtle
laboriously crawling its way across a sandbox. Yet curiously
enough, they look mysterious rather than cute. Victorian potters
like Mintons produced a plethora of whimsical, curate's-joke
animal majolica, laden with cows and sheep and bees and other
homely creatures; the surface of earlier French Palissy ware was
encrusted with reptiles and insects to the point where the plate
became an unusable plaque.

    Price's work has nothing to do with such discursive
archness. And it has even less to do with the Bernard Leach
tradition of quiet good taste and honesty in materials that grew
out of Chinese and Japanese ceramics. As Edward Lebow points out
in his engaging catalog introduction to this show, Price, from
his student days in Peter Voulkos' West Coast classes, "devoted
much of his studio effort to clearing his throat and going
ptooey on `creative craft' and `good design.' "

    Right from the start, Voulkos -- the father figure of
California pottery at the time and for decades thereafter --
inspired Price to break the rules, and the most binding of these
was the integrity of the glaze: all color on a ceramic object
had to come either from the clay itself or from the glazes that,
through firing, were bonded to it. But this was California, the
territory of outlaw artificial color, metal flake, Duco gloss,
candy stripes, epoxy bases. Price didn't go for the mass and
roughness of Voulkos' work; he wanted a more concise style of
object, perverse in its craftsmanship and highly mannered.

    Accordingly, by the early 1960s, Price, now 57, had
started using auto enamels and industrial pigments along with
the low-fired glazes on his work. These gave an extreme density
of color and, unlike in traditional pottery, a relentlessly
inorganic and sinister look to his "eggs," enameled clay shells
with weird lobes like giblets or tongues merging from fissures
in their surface -- an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers
aesthetic," as someone remarked at the time. Its payoff would
come 20 years later, with pieces like Big Load, 1988, and Stamp
of the Past, 1989, ceramic chunks like blotched meteorites, with
sharply cut surfaces of an eye-straining chrome yellow in which
a perfectly square black hole opens on the mysterious emptiness
inside.

    A series of cups followed the eggs, through the 1960s and
'70s. In a sense the cups were Price's bread-and-butter work --
they were popular, and no California collector's knickknack
shelf was complete without one -- and yet they were consistently
inventive and spry, displaying a constant buzz of fantasy and
a growing mastery of color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972,
the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down
the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of
color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of
Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in
the 1920s abstracted the shape of a chair into a penitential
parody of itself. Not only Cubism gets its share of parody, but
other styles as well -- Frank Stella's paintings or, in a tiny
architectural piece with a tower and a tilted ramp called De
Chirico's Bathhouse, 1980, the theatrical piazzas of Italian
"metaphysical painting."

    All these references would seem rather a heavy load for
small clay objects to carry, but one of the virtues of Price's
work is that it never seems pompous and only rarely trivial.
Some of the time, it mocks itself. Certain Prices look like
exquisitely glazed versions of stuff you would want to scrape
off your boot. And what about Wart Cup, 1968, for a title? One
can't claim too much for his cups, which is a relief in a
culture that tends to claim far too much for its paintings, but
the whole show in Minneapolis is infused with an educated sense
of style that consorts finely with the craftsmanship and laconic
wit. Price's sensibility does not so much come out of Pop as
emerge, on its own terms, from the same ground, becoming both
demotic and superrefined. As the Faberge of Funk, he has no
rivals.