Molding the Human Clay

By ROBERT HUGHES

Six California sculptors try putting new life in an old medium

The exhibition of "Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists," now on view at Manhattan's Whitney Museum, is meant to mend at least some of the failures of cultural communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America. In California, for the past 25 years, there has been a strong tradition of clay sculpture. In New York, by contrast, any sort of earthenware was generally felt to be inferior as sculptural material, compared with bronze, steel, stone or wood. By showing the work of six leading Californian clay sculptors. Curators Richard Marshall and Suzanne Foley hope to show once and for all that clay can take on an expressive power beyond the limits of "mere" craft.

Of course, anyone who has seen a clay modello by Bernini or a Della Robbia plaque, a Kaendler figure or terra cotta Madonna by Verrocchio, knows that all ready. In that sense the debate is pointless. But the misunderstanding survives, though clay is the oldest form of sculpture: God did not chip Adam from marble, or weld him together in Cor-Ten.

The father of Californian ceramic sculpture, in the 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 on the art community in California was immense; Voulkos had opened up the territory of an entire medium, and the use of clay became a standard sign of independence from New York.

It 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 protege. 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 that they might have been conceived in metal; the brilliant visual punch of the industrial glazes in De Chirico's Bathhouse, 1980, accentuated by the thin white lines where the facets of clay meet, gives these tiny objects a mysterious, artificial density.

The same pitch of high manneristic skill can be seen, though used to wholly variant ends, in the work of Richard Shaw, 40; drawing from the American trompe 1'oeil tradition begun in the 19th century by Peto and Harnett, Shaw casts objects--playing cards, books, tin cans, ax handles--in porcelain and then glazes them into a more than photographic accuracy of surface. Sometimes, though not often enough, a flash of real poetry appears in the midst of Shaw's virtuoso pedantry. Moonlight Goose, 1978, with its loving simulations of flaking paint and marbled paper, attains a wistful charm almost worthy of Joseph Cornell.

The 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 so, his work has a way of wandering off into a pointless anecdotalism, as with his tabletop sculpture of a tract home he once lived in, entitled--in a maladroit homage to Giacometti--The Palace at 9 A.M., 1974.

From such Californians, one learns that funk is fun. But no antidote has yet been found to the bite of the state's most annoying insect, the California Cute-Fly, which gathers in swarms at art schools and among the hills of Marin County. Quaintness, a whiff of sinsemilla, weaknesses of the bone structure, a pervasive reek of the petted ego--such are the main signs of this gnat's attack, coupled with the hermetic babblings which, on that coastal paradise of the half-blown mind, stand in for Imagination.

At its worst, the creature's sting produces mutants: witness the work of David Gilhooly, 38. Gilhooly does pottery frogs; rafts of them, dressed up as Mao Tse Toad, posing as the Gautama Buddha or smothering--deep social commentary, this--beneath piles of super market produce. This kind of sensibility, which surfaces in the weaker patches of Arneson's work as well, is meant to be disarmingly ironical.

Of course, its effect is the reverse of irony; one cannot have irony without rigor. Instead, it turns into the defensive chumminess that is one of the hallmarks of provincial art--the 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

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