American Clay Artists

American Clay Artists 1989 celebrates the new stature of clay in the old way. It isolates clay to make distinctions and question assumptions rather than to reinforce discriminations about the medium or its disconnection to other artistic expressions. Contemporary ceramic activity is reviewed within a context that has shifted and spread in ways that eradicate some prior opinions and boundaries. Both function and the use of the figure have been redefined by the last two generations of artists using clay. John Roloff transcends these obvious categories and reminds us that clay is but another material for three dimensional art. But the figurative motifs featured here of Arneson (who, like Frey, draws with equal accomplishment and frequently works in bronze), Robert Brady, Jack Earl, Judy Moonelis, Richard Shaw, and Patti Warashina make it clear that clay expresses the human figure as effectively as any other material and perhaps with even greater implicit poetry and metaphor. These figurative artists use clay idiosyncratically and demonstrate no overall unity or cohesive aesthetic; anger, psychic stress, humor, clever conjunction, and sensual fantasy describe some of the different attitudes they explore. Clay's venerable identification with function and the pot has also diffused as one considers the dissimilarities of the vessel-based forms of Christina Bertoni, Jim Makins, Ron Nagle, Adrian Saxe, Chris Staley, Toshiko Takaezu, and Arnie Zimmerman in the works exhibited here. Conventions are repudiated as the vessel form is treated with variegated textures and adjusted in minute or extra large scale. Through complexity and elaboration, function is obscured or completely abandoned. In clay, form no longer must follow function; it symbolizes it or in a current philosophic term "signifies" it. These large and small vessels no longer simply serve to contain, but ruminate more upon the differences between inside and outside and on surface and shape.

Though the community of artists in clay enjoys a degree of loyalty and comradery that is rare within the visual arts, competitiveness and extreme pluralism now prevail, and within it individual talents are now more sharply in focus. The ceramic centers established at Alfred, Bemis, Boulder, Cranbrook, and above all Berkeley, have generated significant academies and coalitions. But, in discussing the evolution of American ceramics, the apostolic legacy of Peter Voulkos is firmly historic, no longer a holy truth. Numerous European artists and now art market-conscious factories must be considered. Several artists who use clay refuse to be in clay surveys, publications, or collections. Many production potters have turned into ceramic sculptors who pursue big prices, commissions, and corporate clients, not the crafts fair passersby or annual studio sales. Many sculptors who use clay now wish to be affiliated with galleries that only represent artists using other media. The folksy repartee of ceramic artists' demonstrations and the team spirit of ceramic artists, so amusingly observed in spirited volleyball games, have been replaced with the realities of individual career development.

The crossover is sufficiently advanced to collapse the differences between art and craft, sculpture and pot. Motives, aesthetics, and ultimately higher prices make craft vs. art of dubious dichotomy. One is left with good and bad art; issues of quality, not category, prevail. Jasper Johns paints George Ohr pots because he enthusiastically collects them. They perform iconographically, and his inclusion of them within his art is a quiet homage to another great southern-born artist. Schnabel's broken crockery speaks of fragmentation and domesticity under siege as effectively as his potent, flat images. Jeff Koons wants to make ultimate commodities, so he turns to a material that attracts by repulsion and asserts class as it negates taste. The surprisingly numerous ceramics of famous modern artists that have been appearing of late in exhibitions and at auctions and galleries elucidate new aspects of these artists, while being their only works that remain economically accessible.

In the hierarchy of fine art, good clay sculpture along with photography, glass, and fiber art, has in the last fifteen years indivisibly joined the rarified realm of painting and sculpture because, in truth, it was already there.