Word: clays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Great Wall; shards from champagne bottles used to christen battleships; a miniature compass embedded in an acorn from an oak tree that George Washington planted at Mount Vernon; President Eisenhower's red pajamas with five stars on the lapels; Jimmy Durante's fedora and Henry Clay's boater; Teddy Roosevelt's Teddy bear; Mrs. Grover Cleveland's wedding-cake box; Abe Lincoln's frock coat; the chairs from the Kennedy-Nixon debate; Hubert Humphrey campaign cookies; Tom Seaver's college baseball uniform; waxed flowers from President Garfield's funeral; L.B.J FOR PRESIDENT...
...1950s, was Peter Voulkos, now 57; a group of his pieces from those years begins the show. They record his decision-and it cannot have been an easy one 25 years ago-to apply the latent violence of abstract expressionist paint handling to the solid medium of clay: to twist, punch and slash the continuous form one expects of a pot's surface, opening it up to create the visible inner spaces that belong to sculpture. Compared with the best abstract expressionist Voulkos' sculpture (David Smith's, say), somewhat clumsy and overworked, but its impact...
...went with another ambition: to push the accepted use of clay beyond its ordinary limits. Clay sculpture began to verge on the technically stupendous, as with Voulkos' ex-student John Mason, 54, whose dark walls and slabs of mottled stoneware are triumphs of craft. So, in a quite different way, is the work of another Voulkos protégé. Sculptor Kenneth Price, 46. But where Mason's work is rocklike and lumpen totemic. Price's involves an elegant denial of clay's earthen nature. His sharp-angled, cubistic "cup" sculptures look so machined and precise...
...most robust-looking character in the exhibition is Robert Arneson, 51, whose favorite subject is his own head, blown up to more than Roman proportions and subjected to various odd indignities. In Splat, 1978, it has taken a bucketful of liquid white clay full in the face, like a vaudevillian copping a pie; a disembodied brown finger wipes the gunk away from his right eye socket. Arneson's mocking self-monuments are carried through with vast gusto and panache, and his technical resources seem limitless; besides, his formal ambitions are clear enough, below the funky surface. Even...
...trade unionism of the In joke. Such longueurs threaten but do not overwhelm the effort to improve coast-to-coast cultural communication. This show is well worth seeing; and it will do a lot to dispel the faint condescension which, in some quarters, still clings to mere clay. -By Robert Hughes