Posts Tagged ‘Art’
Doors
Every day we pass through all kinds of doors. If I focus my attention on how many doors I use in my daily life, it’s mind-boggling. One day I tried to count, but lost track after this sequence: out my front door, into and out of the car door, in the elevator doors to my gym (and out again), in the locker
room, out again, back to the car doors.
I figured I would do a little research. I looked for a definition, but words like “moveable barrier” didn’t help. I found a tattered copy of Architectural Graphic Standards, Student Edition. But dimensions and specifications were hardly the answer. Architects and builders speak in materials and physical dimensions —but I wanted poetry, imagery. So, I decided to take a tour of some exceptional examples in nearby Pasadena.
Early architectural influences are with me for a lifetime, and as I’ve noted before, I was lucky to grow up in South Pasadena, where the heritage is strong. It’s easy to find examples of great Craftsman doors—even the 
garage doors that Greene and Greene designed are superb. I revisited these double garage doors, framed with a massive masonry walls on a clear winter afternoon.
Inspired, I walked over to see another street-side monument to architectural design. La Miniatura, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1923 Millard House, was the first time the architect used hollow, pre-cast concrete blocks. On the north side of this perfectly sited house are
the powerful wood doors, amazingly compatible with the Mayan monumentality of the building.
I recalled many other times I had become conscious of the passages we make in daily life, and how artists have addressed the idea. Some of the artists that I know have designed and sculpted the best solutions. I considered the inspired example of Georges Jeanlcos‘ doors to the 
Cathedral in Lille, France. I remembered my trip to see those doors with his son, Marc.
I once built an entire show around a pair of doors by John Mason. I rescued the massive doors that were made for a house in Laguna Beach. The 1963 commission, for the actor Sterling Holloway, was the entrance to his art collection. For our exhibit, I designed a simple post and lintel framework to hold the powerful portals.
There is a reason for my focus. For the past seven days, since I walked up to the plaza level of the cathedral last Wednesday, I keep seeing the image of the pallbearers surrounding the casket of Robert Graham. A group of men formed a rectangle around the casket. The body was moving through a portal, through a symbolic passage. There was such a profound presence to the sight of the procession entering the very doors that he designed and sculpted.
Jennifer Lee in Japan
Sometimes I need a break from the stress of the electronic world. I use lightning-fast technology, I’m surrounded by computers, and I’m constantly turning to e-mail, voice mail, and yes–now I’m even blogging. There’s a sense of overload, and I crave a respite. So it’s good to know someone like the artist Jennifer Lee. In the digital age, Scottish-born Jennifer Lee seems to be from an earlier time. Her hand-formed pots, her hand-written letters, and her timeless aesthetic are from another world.
She’s now globally recognized for the work, and looking forward to an exhibit in Tokyo. Not just any show, however. It’s an exhibition that features 100 works by just 3 artists, and it’s a show that will give visitors “a taste of the limitless universe of U-Tsu-Wa (vessels).” Organized and designed by Issey Miyake, the show will be held in Tokyo at 21_21 Design Sight. It is scheduled for February 13 to March 10, 2009. There are three artists included in U-Tsu-Wa: Lucie Rie, Jennifer Lee, and Ernst Gamperi.
When I look at Jennifer’s work, I can see a stillness, a sense of quiet contemplation. In solitude, her works bring to mind a variety of images, mostly from the natural world. But, as Leah Ollman wrote about her work in the Los Angeles Times, “Their textures and pigmentation do not just evoke natural elements and processes, but convey an equivalency with them. Lee’s pots conjure the essence of sand, stone, silt and sedimentation. Breathtaking in their simplicity, they don’t just illustrate conditions of nature but elegantly, gracefully manifest them.”
Voulkos: Clay as a Medium
“Wielding clay is magic. The minute you touch it, it moves, so you’ve got to move with it. It’s like a ritual. I always work standing up, so I can move my body around. I don’t sit and make dainty things.”
—from “Breaking Ground Still Fires Him Up”, by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, L.A. Times, November 14, 1999
Artists: On Peter Voulkos
Some of L.A.’s best artists were students when Peter Voulkos was active here in the late 1950s. I’ve often heard that the most powerful and charismatic figures in the 50s art scene were John Altoon and Voulkos. It’s amazing to consider just how influential he was:
Ken Price
“For anybody who doesn’t know who [Voulkos] was, he’s the hero of American ceramics. He’s the guy who essentially liberated the medium from the craft hierarchy that was controlling it up to that time. The way he taught was just to come into the studio, and he approached making work by a method I call “direct frontal onslaught.” We were a small group of very committed students. Some people thought they were pretty good before they got there, but when we saw him, he just blew our minds. This is a short talk, and so I can’t go too deeply into it, but he was so far ahead of us, it was just ridiculous.
Anyway, I learned to work from watching him.”
—from Ken Price’s lecture at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas in October 2004
John Baldessari
L.A. Conceptual artist John Baldessari recalls that Voulkos, who at the time was painting in Abstract Expressionist style as well as building massive abstract clay sculptures, seemed the very embodiment of the advanced New York art world. Baldessari, who was studying painting at the time, remembers, “I soon discovered that he was more of an inspiration and a goad than any of my painting instructors, who were relatively academic. He psychically gave me permission, because the teachers I had always seemed delimiting.”
—from “Breaking Ground Still Fires Him Up”, by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, L.A. Times, Nov. 14, 1999
Richard Shaw: On Ships
Richard Shaw‘s trompe l’oeil ceramic works usually show mundane objects. He also puts together a group of found objects, and that makes for some pretty unlikely combinations. Our show, Still Life, opens next week on the 17th of January. In his still life sculptures, he talks about time (idle moments in the studio), fragility and luck (a house of cards), and mortality (a sketchbook with a skull and a cup). But one thing keeps coming back: the representation of a ship. In an interview last year, he talked about the ships:
Shaw: I had a show in 1970 of ceramic pieces…and that was the beginning of the ship pieces, too. Then the ship pieces culminated the next year, 1971, when I did that couch piece with the sinking ship that Rene di Rosa has…I got into the Titanic because-first of all, it’s kind of spooky. I mean the idea of being so confident, and the bad fairy gets you right in the middle of the ocean, and in the nighttime! But some of those pieces are kind of funny, too, you know-making lids of ships that you could take off…
Richard Whittaker: It seems to me there is a layer in some of your work that does reference the dark side of things.
Shaw: I think it’s spooky and everything is on levels. I don’t know if you saw some of the iceberg ones. I made a ship on an iceberg and then everything lit up. They’re from about 1990. It’s spooky, but then it’s kind of funny because it’s an object made out of something else. Again, I’m not making fun of tragedy, but when some of these things get old enough, they sort of become something else. They get into the joke mythology.
(portions of an interview published by Braunstein/Quay, 2007)
Desire, Delight, and Dirt
One of the themes of this blog is to shed a little light on the worldview of the artist.
Funny, playful, open and brilliant are words that come to mind when talking about Adrian Saxe. Adrian often includes social topics in his work. In fact, he told me that his ceramic sculptures are a platform for discussing cultural issues. It’s something that his work shares with the Sevres porcelain he knows so well. Desire in contemporary culture is, well…everywhere…and Saxe has often addressed it. He made a series of Magic Lamps, and exhibited them at the gallery in 1997. The show was called Wish I may, Wish I might. Each lamp (they were functional oil lamps or incense burners) dealt with a form of desire: for luck, for a perfect wave, for a getaway vacation, for security. The piece shown here, Hi-Fibre Gyno-Monocle Magic Lamp, is an example, and it’s now in a significant survey exhibit.
Saxe’s seductive, humorous and intelligent work is included in a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The show, titled Dirt on Delight, is the brilliant work of Ingrid Schaffner, Jenelle Porter and Glenn Adamson. There have been a few shows in the past couple of years that have surveyed the new developments in ceramics, but this one promises to be the best. It has a strong curatorial premise, and includes the young with the old. It’s on from January 16th through June 21st. After Philadelphia, the show travels to the Walker Art Center. Another Saxe, shown here, is also in the show: Sweet Dreams, 2004.
2008 was a good year for the recognition of Saxe. Adrian’s work was also included in a scholarly, inclusive exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum. Titled Rococo, The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008, the show traced the origins of rococo style and its evolution over three centuries. It reminded me of why Peter Schjeldahl once wrote “His fantastically ornate vessels, their academic orders exaggerated, are spectacularly skilled, harshly jokey, and show-off erudite. Saxe’s ceramics are engines of simultaneous seduction and insult.”
Richard Shaw: On the Money
I read a short article in the L.A. Times about the total cost of the bailout, so far. The figure pledged to date was pegged at $8.5 trillion. The Times author, Mark Milian, reported that the U. S. bailout costs more than the combined, inflation-adjusted costs for nine big expenditures in history:
“With figures adjusted for inflation, the Marshall Plan cost 115.3 billion; the Louisiana Purchase, $217 billion; the race to the moon, $237 billion; the Savings & Loan crisis, $256 billion; the Korean War, $454 billion; the New Deal, about $500 billion; the invasion of Iraq, $597 billion; the Vietnam War, $698 billion; NASA’s lifetime budget $851 billion. Total $3.92 trillion.”
I thought about those huge numbers when I saw this image of a Richard Shaw piece that will be in our next show. Shaw’s sinking ship is a timely commentary on the global financial crisis. The origami ship is fashioned, seemingly, from U.S. dollar bills. It is sinking into the top of a stack of books, though it seems like it was headed west, toward China. For over 25 years, Richard has used clay to recreate the mundane objects of everyday life, gathering them together into ceramic sculpture that has the power to both amuse and amaze. He’s an artist with a powerful sense of humor.
Cabinets of Wonder
If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that we learn about art through our friends. Collectors and exhibitions inspire us; they give us a worldview based on exploration. Scholars tell us that the origins of museums came from the cabinets of curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe. The obsessions and discoveries of collectors are expanded versions of that, usually displayed in a domestic setting, as something to be shown and discussed with friends.
In my last post, I mentioned an organization called the Friends of Contemporary Ceramics. It’s a non-profit support group for the ceramic arts, and has helped tremendously with exhibition funding, publications and educational symposia during the FCC’s fourteen year history. As with many art support groups, there are also trips to attend important exhibits, and seek out fascinating collections.
Great shows have been supported by the FCC, which was founded by Linda Leonard Schlenger in 1995 (that’s Linda on the right in the photo, along with Peter and Ann Voulkos in the center, and me). The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1999 show Clay into Art was just one of the highlights. The FCC gives an annual award to a contributor to the field, and helps to sponsor exhibitions in the field of ceramics.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll let you know that I am on the board of directors of the FCC. I organized two trips to Los Angeles, and helped the group to become better acquainted with artist’s studios, museums and private collections. We gathered many of the most important artists for a lunch at the gallery. This photo shows, from left to right, the late Ralph Bacerra, Harrison McIntosh, Toshiko Takaezu, John Mason, Ruth Duckworth, and the late Roseline Delisle.
Ed Moses: On Painting
I am fascinated by the way that artists talk about their work. Almost two years ago, painter Ed Moses was interviewed by Kristine McKenna at the gallery. She asked him, “What did you do in these paintings that you’ve never done before?”
Ed Moses: Nothing. I don’t believe in change—I believe in mutation, and every painting I make comes out of the painting that preceded it. There’s one thing in my work that never mutates, however, and that’s the fact that I don’t conceive of imagery when I work. I never think pictorially—what I do is work physically. I like pushing and shoving paint around, but I’m not trying to express anything and I don’t want to be creative—that’s a word I’ve always hated. What I want to do is hang out with the materials until something appears that I had nothing to do with.
As for this new work, I’ve always liked watercolors and always wanted to make them big, and I’ve been painting wet into wet for the last twenty years. Truthfully, I’m baffled as to why people are responding to these paintings so much more enthusiastically than they have to other work I’ve made using the same technique. I guess every dog has his day, even a dirty dog. All my friends have had their day, but I never have, so now is my moment. I don’t think it has anything to do with the work, though. I think it’s just my turn.
Kristine: How do you know when a painting is finished?
Ed Moses: It lights up.
Frank Lloyd's blog 