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Review: Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramic
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| by Judy Seckler
The Gladstone Gallery’s recent exhibition “Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramic” represents a collective conceptual exploration of 31 artists (see www.gladstonegallery.com). It includes a cross section of artists known for their ceramic triumphs, others that use clay as one element in part of a larger mixed-media context, as well as some artists who seldom work with clay at all. The scope of the sculptural work is refreshing at a time when galleries rarely devote much space to ceramics.
With the exception of a parody ceramic jug, there are no cups, saucers, teapots or serving bowls to be found here. Instead, several themes emerged in the bright Chelsea, New York, gallery: mimicking objects normally manufactured with other materials, and playfully paying homage to familiar artistic icons. Plus, there was an investigation by some artists into the emotional and tactile properties of clay, exploiting its shape shifting traits or the use of runny, painterly glazes.
Rosemarie Trockel’s life size, white daybed “Watching and Sleeping and Composing” is an immediate eye-grabber. Her obsessive attention to industrial design proportions beckons viewers to recline on the steel, wood and glazed ceramic construction. It’s not a flashy pop art statement like Jeff Koon’s 1986 stainless steel “Rabbit” sculpture, still the work radiates confidence. Although Trockel is not new to ceramics, she is largely known for her knitted wool fiber paintings, which makes her clay sofa sculpture seem all the more imposing.
Sam Durant’s “Light Blue, Unique Mono-Block Resin Chair” in porcelain follows in a similar vein. The generic appeal of a familiar vinyl lawn chair finished in a polished glaze elevates it beyond its retail roots. The stark palette of these furniture pieces contrasts with the organic appeal of other similar works focused on footware. Fischli & Weiss’ “Untitled,” an unfired clay climbing boot and Andrew Lord’s “Modeled shoe, the Bowery, August, 7 pm” endow the still clay with an emotional history that transcends what we expect from its leather counterpart. In both cases, the temptation is to slip a foot in the opening to check out the fit. Lord has an additional series of abstracted pieces inspired by body parts and mottled with rivulets of glaze that lacks a certain spark.
Some artists in the gallery like Anna Chu, Thomas Schütte, Sarah Lucas, Matt Johnson and Klara Kristalova work in a representational mode, borrowing from a rich painting or sculpting history. Johnson pays homage to Sandro Botticelli’s well-known painting “Birth of Venus” with his own clay version of the same name. Johnson uses fossilized clamshells extruding from the torso, knee and base to suggest the ocean and the memorable half shell from the original. However, the cracks in the finish and the expression of this Venus suggest a troubled life.
By contrast, Lucas’ “Richard” [the Lionheart] jug is reminiscent of one of those souvenir Bavarian beer steins that often find a prominent place of display on the shelf in the den or the bedroom. Lucas’ humor and surface treatment of the clay is a counterpoint to the psychological drama created by the work of Schütte, Chu and Kristalova. The shimmering, red glaze of Schütte’s “Red Woman Head” fills the room. The more than two-foot wide disembodied head evokes simultaneously melancholy and a spirit at rest. Missing body parts is a recurring theme here. Chu’s “Nine Hellish Spirits: No. 7” is a provocative, smoke-fired harlequin with arms dangling by wire hooks and a missing hand. Two pieces by Kristalova, who works often in bronze, are a nod to Surrealism. In “Game,” glaze drips down the blindfolded face of a young woman, giving the bust’s surface a plastic consistency. A male head sits in a puddle submerged from the mouth down in “Pond,” creating a palpable tension.
Toggling back to abstraction, Liz Larner astounds with her white, modular sculptures that could be companion pieces to Trockel’s daybed. The crisp angles of the cast porcelain “smile (declining)” and “smile (abiding)” show clay at its most uncharacteristically brittle. Yet, her complete architectural forms radiate a strength that is to be admired. Veteran ceramist Ken Price pushes his sculpture in the opposite direction. Price works his material to extract every last curve. “Zoma” looms like a sensuous stack of colorful ostrich eggs.
For complexity, William O’Brien’s “cinaedus table MDCCLXXV” wins the prize. His table filled with glazed ceramic, unfired clay, string, fabric, glass, found objects and plaster make the ceramics a participant in the controlled chaos. His use of dreary and day-glo colors conjures up a demonstration circa the 1960s. A refined use of assemblage can be seen in Gert and Uwe Tobias’ “Untitled,” a green glass vase filled with three ceramic sculptures immersed in water with one rose. Sometimes, the tactile impact of clay can be heightened in combination with other materials but in this case, the ceramic components of the piece become lost among the other elements.
The piece with the greatest commercial allure is Victor Man’s “Untitled,” a series of three glossy, photo-impressed, funerary plates with gold edging. The dark Victorian images have great theatrical appeal whereas, a series of unfired clay pieces by Anish Kapoor are massive and raw and owe a great debt to the Abstract Expressionist influence of Peter Voulkos.
The exhibition’s strength lies in creating a grand arena for a majority of artists who seldom work with clay. It would seem the time is also ripe to give a forum to those artists who do.
the author Judy Seckler is a frequent contributor to Ceramics Monthly and a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
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| by Dorothy Joiner
Few pleasures are as genuine as a hearty laugh. Provoking that kind of merriment, Wesley Anderegg stages jokes and witticisms as vignettes, melding the sometimes outlandish fantasies of farce with the drab and everyday, creating a visual dialectic integral to the comedic. Like freeze frames from early silent movies, Anderegg’s little scenes in clay capture the perennial intercourse of insecurity and inhumanity played out against the diurnal backdrop of life, death and rebirth.
Exemplifying the artist’s signature offbeat proportions—diminutive, flesh-colored body and oversized head, here a deep, mottled blue—the naked miniature figure titled “Praying Man I” joins his hands devoutly, knees together, feet lifted in alarm. Swimming below, two behemoth piranhas vaunt sharp, irregular teeth, their eyes popping in anticipation of their meal. Secure in our perceived “safety,” we can laugh at the poor fellow’s plight that inspires him to beg for an uncertain succor from above.
Other micro-dramas make us laugh nervously at the debasement of both man and beast. “Spectator Sport #2” shows twinned canines with gaping mouths and spiny teeth rearing up in a realistic dog fight—one head yellow, the other blue; one body yellow, the other blue. Painted on the screen behind the fierce contest is the crowd described by the artist as “wacked out”: some eyes wide in horror, others glazed over as though drugged; mouths agape with savage cries. Who indeed is more bestial here? Man or animals?
Anderegg explores other familiar theses as well. Aiming at a different but no less universal propensity, “Shopping at Target” pictures a blond stretched out on a tiny lawn chair. Lifting her arms, she shrieks in terror as two buzzards swoop over her, eyeing the three concentric circles decorating her bikini at strategic points: breast and pelvis. The title says it all. Spoofing the stereotypical good guy-bad guy mentality of westerns, “High Noon” places two busts in front of a colorful street scene, painted in skewed perspective. The white hat brandishes a revolver at the black hat, who presses his hand to the wound in his shoulder, wailing in pain. And is anything more risible than the alleged dominance of the male? Based on Olive Oyl and Popeye, “Dancing to Her Tune” features a woman sitting with splayed legs, fixedly fingering an accordion. Almost like a marionette, her partner lifts a leg, dancing to the music she makes. Who is calling the shots here?
A leitmotif throughout the exhibit, the buzzard takes center stage in its own piece, appropriately called “Buzzards.” Three red, white and blue birds sit on a metal fence, wings extended, sunning themselves with obvious delight. A homely variant of the vulture, the buzzard is a scavenger known for its voracity. At the same time, however, that the buzzard consumes carrion, it purifies, becoming a force for good and a symbol of regeneration. The buzzard serves, therefore, as a fitting emblem against which we view Anderegg’s mini-comedies exposing the human condition.
Comedy, as the celebrated cartoonist Al Capp has so aptly written, is based on exploiting the pleasure we experience in observing the foibles and vulnerability of others. And isn’t that “what a comedian is for,” Capp queries, “to make people feel fine?”
"Exit Stage Left" was on view recently at Goldesberry Gallery (www.goldesberrygallery.com) in Houston, Texas.
the author Dorothy Joiner is the Lovick P. Corn Professor of Art History at LaGrange College, LaGrange, Georgia, and a frequent contributor to Ceramics Monthly.
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| by John K. Grande
Kathy Venter’s latest sculptures have the same sense of having been uncovered by time as her successful “Immersion” series exhibited in 2006 [see December 2006 CM cover article]. As artworks, these terra-cotta and polychrome sculptures involved an ongoing process, and emerged from the kiln reduced to 15% of their original size. The “One” series, as the latest pieces are called, are life-size incarnations of a process that is painstaking, challenges the artist and rewards at the last stage with surprises, in terms of final coloration, the figural surface effects and the overall impact. It is at this stage that Venter will sandblast these bodyworks, to give them an added patina of wear, something that contrasts the added layers of surface color.
As Venter comments, “I have chosen, as the subject for this series, a young woman who has shared my island community and thus, indirectly, been a part of my physical, daily circumstances for seventeen years. By using only one person as the subject, I provide the viewer with an uncluttered reflection of self through another. The sculptures are direct and engaging, life-size, a measure of our humanity.”
In her early years, apprenticed to the South African ceramist Hylton Nel, Venter was exposed to ancient ceramic sculpture from China, England, Mycenaean Greece and Italy, and the human body quickly became a subject. These recent sculptures likewise capture one body—that of an adolescent girl entering into womanhood and, like the earlier Immersion series, these have some of that archaic feel, like the found figures preserved at Pompeii by the volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius. They simultaneously cover and uncover, reveal and disguise the subject—a young woman. These instant archaic-looking sculptures capture their portrait subject with an intensity and accidental surface effect, something that recalls Manuel Neri’s innovations…A distancing accompanies the tactile surface immediacy in these sculptures.
Venter’s One series, unusual for this era, explores the artist–model relationship. The Sculpture Site Gallery exhibition, on view recently in San Francisco (www.sculpturesitegallery.com), evidenced Venter’s great capacity as a sculptor who takes chances, using classical composition, while engaging in challenging polychrome surface effects that build a tension in the overall production whether in “Here and Here,” “Second Order” or the “Head” series. Venter has taken the process of building up her sculptures using the hand pinch method a step further by adding multi-colored layers of hydro-stone (a cement-like plaster) and clay engobes to suggest wear and accretion. Unusually (due to the surface color splashes), a postmodern and relativist aesthetic that can borrow from many traditions and eras, including modernity, has emerged in these recent terra-cotta sculptures. Interestingly, these sculptures are not presented on pedestals. Instead, they engage us directly as physical presences. The dialogue with the viewer is active, and the language is as much about the process, and the artist’s inner narrative, as it is about the physical product that results from that process.
While Venter cites the found terra-cotta army of sculptures created and buried with China’s first emperor Qin, as an influence on her work, the innovations are not at all like John de Andrea or Duane Hanson’s super real sculptures that captured the everyday with a heightened realism, like three-dimensional photographs. Instead, Venter engages in building a relation to history through the simple act of interpreting her model, over a period of a month, in varying poses, at different times of day, in various moods. And the surface likewise references a process of mold making, where the traces remain after the mold is removed, a process Venter used while a student in South Africa. These memories of process remain in the language of her unique sculptural accomplishment to this day.
The process of being and making or creation are thus both part of the essence of Venter’s recent work. These works establish a dialogue about the relation between the sculptor and emergent form. All this is done with a basic humanist intuition. We are always in the same place, these incredible sculpture from Venter’s One series seem to communicate, wherever we are, not by choice but by chance.
"Kathy Venter: One" was on display recently at Sculpture Site Gallery (www.sculpturesitegallery.com) in San Francisco, California.
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