Word: clays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...
...slow clay wasn't enough of a test today, the Crimson must make a quick turn around and meet the Quakers on some of the fastest hard courts in the league tomorrow...