Revolutions of the Wheel Full Video

Clary is capable of the wildest materially substantial poetry it comes very close to being a sacred medium on the other hand it comes close to being one of the most vulgar mediums man uses if there's at once eternal and absolutely momentary things have survived that are 5,000 6,000 7,000 years and older and they can be all smashed nothing with one hammer [Music] what is a Potter [Music] what is a powder it's the person to make spots or quite know how else to put it the Potter is somebody who makes pots and it's a generic term that can mean many things are different but generally people who make pots or potters a Potter is a sculptor a Potter is a painter a Potter is a dreamer a Potter is a shaman whose arms are around a holy circle and Potter is bringing out into the world like a mother a Potter is a birther [Music] [Applause] touches clay and other finds dirt it's all romantic crap can't reach out for those handmade plates he can't get him clean you know the good crackle glazes don't fit so and they're dangerous eat of you there's Salmonella specials tell you the truth this is a person lost and found in the process of moving earth this is a person wrapped up in heat and light and touch and romance and vision the poetry of the Potter working with the earth let's go to the beach and have a raku party I mean you know it's everything I hate about ceramics you know everything but the marshmallows I consider myself a Potter but I don't always present myself as a Potter to artists I call myself a Potter to Potter's I call myself an artist you must first be an artist before you can be a Potter because pottery is different than dishes [Music] you asked me what a vessel is the dictionary says a craft for traveling on water well you know a vessel is a vessel Perseids up you usually hold something you know it's a container of some sort of vessel well it could be a boat right I mean a boat - that hole with the water on the outside and our pot isn't vessel with the food I mean pretty second did I get that right I would say a vessel is that which contains that's which holes that which finally has room light connotations that which functions almost like a breast a vessel is something that has gained a certain kind of borrowed prestige and and added value so it's a kind of an honorific for a pot an a ship a hollow a concave utensil as a cup bowl picture bars use for holding liquids for other contents that's what we're referring to have something for holding contents I can work with that I wish your vessel forms I did I get them all little teacup so all the way up and what I'm working on now is the vessel it's a vessel form it sold my spirit and that is a container of some sort doesn't mean you got to put water in here no you put a bunch of flowers there no but it does contain something that I put into it and that is a container right there and it does contain me that is the vessel you know and there it is so you look at it as a vessel what's the difference between a pot and a vessel $5,000 there are Potter's who make knickknacks sold and dime stores there are Potter's we make vast bowls in a crazed green glaze filled with bubbles there are Potter's who make tiny little changes your Potter's over cohorted what is happening Potter's all artists [Music] what was parties and more often enough what is to be [Music] clay is Earth's first that has been tempered and warned so that it becomes easily used by the hand well what's the earth but your brought and stuff in the ground who knows I might be throwing my own grandmother who knows clay is earth clay is also flesh in the way it feels so what's alive see it's a lot of material no see it just doesn't record that you know it records that emotion oh I that's playing it's changed my whole life you know I don't know what it is so maybe I had that toilet-training who knows it's yucky to a lot of people it has to do with dirt and the organic honey that's precisely who I like it so clay the very primitive material you get it in the earliest civilizations long before the Copper Age or the Iron Age people were making clay pots it was the beginning of civilization in a kind of way so it's been here forever there's been waiting forever you do something [Music] just to say may there wasn't a national tradition of a high art in painting and sculpture that was uniquely American there was no real national tradition in ceramics the ceramics in America were very derivative from European ceramics there was no American tradition that ceramics really not forget the American Indian you know and all those great tribes down in the southwest had a history of ceramics that just some of the greatest things that were ever made but that was the American tradition at that time so that was good for us the tradition of no tradition that's great throughout the first three quarters of the nineteenth century while European potters produced teacups designed to encourage the ideal positioning of a ladies pinky American potters were digging in and beginning all over again in the 18th century the question of whether or not there's a uniquely American motor pottery is colored quite strongly by the fact that we're not Americans for British Colonials and the British economic system dictated that the colonies were not permitted to compete with their manufacturers it's the only pottery we could legally make would be rustic wares folk art things on a scale that does not compete with the great staff that your pottery is the great Wedgwood the great Minton the Americans have to kind of keep way below that level or else we'll be a shot out of the water it's not till the 19th century is getting to the 1800s when we're our own country that we start our own fledgling ceramic industry to work in a ceramic factory or industry in the late 19th century was often very an artistic in fact it was scut work the same forms were produced day in day out year in year out the same work was done day in day out by the same people it was comparable in its time to the person who slaps and hubcaps on a car in Detroit women often were decorators men were Glaser's throwers the potters the kiln men they were the technicians as well as the administrators one did the work that one was told to do that work could be the work of a Killman a glazier a thrower but it's dictated work so the conditions were not as happy and virtuous as we like to believe a kill that is a firing could contain several thousand pieces it depends on the size of the kill and the size of the objects that are being fired a firing takes many hours and maybe days so your work is really designated well into the future here's what you will do today here's what you do tomorrow prior to that time a craftsman was an artist and an artist was a craftsman from that time forward there was a division between the arts and crafts the division is totally artificial an artist has to be trained in craft by which I mean use of the hand how to do it he has to be trained in the brain and that risk of having everybody annoyed the spirit too unable to compete with cost-efficient manufacturers most Potter's hired themselves out to one commercial factory after another in the latter half of the 19th century however the regimen of commercial production provoked a backlash called the Arts and Crafts movement out of which emerged the first evidence of a uniquely American clay art volumes have been written about why the Arts and Crafts movement began I think for want of a clear simple answer it began because of what the Industrial Revolution was creating it was creating havoc at the turn of the century there were some monumental changes in art which reflected I think changes in social and technological conditions of the day the Industrial Revolution which had started perhaps 40 or 50 years earlier had really taken hold and it had created a revolt in artists and creative people all over what you see happening is a great concern amongst artists of all kinds certainly amongst the potters as well that in the technology the artists might become lost from his art that in the division of labor the person would be disconnected and out of that fear came the great changes in the Potteries the answer and Crafts movement was founded in England it's a natural reaction to the Industrial Revolution which it was vehemently opposed to the two principal advocates for what became the Arts and Crafts movement were John Ruskin and William Morris William Morris put into practice what John Ruskin advocated they wanted to see the designer and the craftsman united in one person so that it wasn't a design being imposed on someone who would have to implement it that the person who designed it was actually the person who understood the process the Arts and Crafts movement was not just about design reform it was social reform and therefore it was political reform it was a highly politicized movement it was a movement that was looking to a distant past to deal with the present it's a anti-modernist but also is an anachronism when you consider that the Machine world was moving and XAR ibly into the future in America we have much more of a focus on the object itself and the crafts and much less of a focus on political reforms that we find happening within the movement in England and so wherever the Machine can relieve tedium it is freely admitted into the process and that's the compromise that it makes it much more popular in America than it really ever was in England modernism in America pottery in America social change in America all of these are intertwined and perhaps most deeply affected are the women it's the women who are first involved in China painting who commandeered great Potteries hired hundreds of people and developed modern American idioms [Music] begun as a naive challenge to commercial industry the Rookwood pottery emerged at the forefront of the American art pottery movement in 1876 with the start of the Philadelphia Centennial and the introduction of china painting many of women in America became interested as an avocation in the idea of getting together socially to paint and decorate pottery and out of a social event grew great potteries major potteries like Rookwood which won gold prizes in Paris for the work that was developed the Rookwood pottery company of cincinnati was founded in 1880 by Mariah Longworth Nichols Mariah Longworth Nichols was a member of one of those China painter's groups in Cincinnati and she had been to the exposition in Philadelphia she was among those who was so outraged America's lack of success in comparison to European wares that she came back to Cincinnati determined to experiment and close that gap she came from a wealthy family she was able to persuade her father to fund what became the first state of the art pottery in America the Brookwood pottery mrs. Nichols didn't really have a philosophy when she founded Rookwood she had an idea the idea was to create artistic ceramics [Music] up to that time there had not been any pottery purely devoted to heart pottery most art pottery that was even conceived of was a sideline in an industrial operation and work wood was a pottery built to be a studio pottery in art pottery for artists to come and focus on ceramics and pottery as art and not necessarily simply utilitarian vessels and table wares compared to large ceramic factories requite pottery was an enlightened place to work William Watts Taylor who was the business manager sought to nurture the employees especially the decorators by giving them time for lectures outings river boat rides picnics and so forth at the same time though we have to think of the company as a business on the business side Taylor did have time and motion studies made he was careful to nurture the corporate image of the pottery through advertising through retailing and other measures to ensure that the company was always in the public eye Brook wood is often given credit for developing a special type of decoration it's a type of decoration in which thick slips were used under the glaze to create really almost a painting on the pot Rookwood straddles two traditions traditional ceramics and art the artistry of the pottery is primarily in the finish and in the decoration it is in effect canvas painting given three-dimensional form and clay [Music] Brookwood set the standard for art potteries in the early part of this century and part of that was the fact that they originated this atomizer technique of being able to do a background that was gradiated and other art pottery such as Weller were very envious and imitative of Rookwood where every piece of Rookwood was intended to be artist designed artist created there came a point in robits production when purely for commercial satisfaction of demand they began producing a design over and over and over Rookwood was in many ways like Camelot it began with a glorious ideal began with an intention to create something that had never been created and then became a victim of itself of other forces beyond its control and ended on a sad note having become an anachronism having become a passe tradition Rookwood had women involved in ceramic production but they were relegated to certain positions women were considered to be china painters that was sort of the clean part of the job but generally women china painters were not seen as originators of an idea or of a design out of that china painting tradition grew an expertise which of course wanted to go step further there emerged a number of women who distinguished themselves as art Potter's are not simply trying to painters the greatest of them all I think would have to be Adelaide I'll stop revenue dissatisfied as a China painter limited to the stereotype spray of flowers and the inevitable butterfly Adelaide Alsip Robin Howe dropped her decorators brush in 1903 and within eight years became America's first world-renowned Potter revenue is important for a number of reasons as I mentioned she was a China painter but she very early on became interested in far more than China painting she was determined to start working in porcelain it's just something most Potter's feared porcelain being the hardest of the ceramic bodies to work with she was obviously driven by a strong motivation to achieve and to achieve the finest quality on line with the Europeans for emphasis and she did following a series of lessons written by taxi'll dawat the master potter at the Ceph pottery and france robin o consolidated her understanding of the complex porcelain making process setting up a studio next to her Syracuse home Robin o embarked on an arduous series of tests with delicate porcelain compounds and crystalline glazes every one of the new pieces is warped and blistered her husband Samuel complain I have never felt so disgusted and discouraged I think anybody foolish enough to do porcelains ought to be shut up in an insane asylum Robin Hood's work is extraordinary because she was able to take the medium of porcelain and really exploit its finest characteristics I think the thing we associate most with her is her extraordinary carving porcelains fired at such a high temperature it becomes extraordinarily hard and can be worked very finely and still retain its strength so Robin Oh would carve the porcelain to limits that one could never achieve with coarser bodies Adelaide Robin knows work was absolutely obsessive for hours carving the scarab face said to be a thousand hours of work it's very work and labor-intensive but for her I think it's a very rewarding experience because it allows her the vehicle to excel in an area where nobody had done so before despite Robin OHS achievement perhaps no one fulfilled the ideals of the art pottery movement better than George or Rookwood is a frog my name is mud the unequaled unrivaled undisputed greatest Potter on earth you contradict or was one of those strange it is syncretic American characters that seem to emerge and it did emerge in the 19th century after learning basic techniques visiting Potter's throughout the South George or the mad Potter of Biloxi mastered every facet of ceramics and virtually we fashioned them in his own image fiercely independent or dug his own clay out of Mississippi riverbeds built his own potter's wheel and invented a variety of glazes that have never been duplicated Oh was just simply idiosyncratic and disagreed with everything that was going on and suddenly saw the medium is one in which he could be very self expressive according to the good book or said we are created from clay and as nature's had it no two of us alike so I make disfigured pottery couldn't and wouldn't make it any other way I'm a man who's crazy I mean wonderfully crazy you know he did things to his his vessel forms were his take off for art and he would turn them side out and inside out nobody would do this if auras pots were art then their museum was the Biloxi art and novelty pottery after a visit critic Lyle Saxon reported that there were shelves filled with pottery some classic others distorted willfully misshapen never have you seen work which bore the mark of the maker to such a degree you are holding a teapot beautifully executed yet you are shocked at the perverse pot next to it you can hear the Potter chuckle as he turned it on the wheel slapping the face of conventional art or has tired of the beautiful and found joy in the bizarre you find yourself liking the pyre immensely I think where prided himself on being radical on pushing clay in ways and means that it had never been exploited before he tortured his vessels into new shapes he created glazes that one had not seen before in American ceramic history and he prided himself on being as bizarre and as outside the norm as possible he had gigantic mustaches he would often stand on his head he was an exhibitionist and he decided to make some very exhibitionist pottery buttery that was strange it was even overtly sexual so much so he was teaching at a woman's college and they fired him because of the sexuality of his pottery art critics of the day were unimpressed mr. or suffers from his efforts to make it original at any cost of beauty and aesthetic charm it is the lack of good proportion of grace and of dignity that makes it fail to produce the effect a work of art should uninterested in holding a job unable to stay too long in any one place or often took his show on the road traveling along with exhibitions and carnivals throughout the south or sought the notoriety he felt he deserved as the unequaled unrivaled undisputed greatest art Potter on earth he never found it George fourth importance rests in the fact that he proves a nothing can win poor George or felt terribly neglected but he achieved what he wanted to about 60 years after his death unfortunately in 1969 the 11,000 pieces that or had created for posterity were discovered in the Attic of his son's auto shop upon seeing or as delicate yet structurally sound pots first hand many contemporary potters regarded ores techniques so sophisticated they considered him the most expert thrower that's ever lived I am making pots for art's sake for God's sake and for future generations when I am gone my work will be prized honored and cherished so he comes out of nowhere not caring what the world thinks doing what he wants to do his importance was that he indicated one did not have to be a part of the messy mob in the mud not [Music] [Music] action and reaction the Industrial Revolution in America was the action the reaction in America - it was the artistic change which was the groundwork for modernism in this country as the 20th century began the first organizations supporting independent art pottery emerged at University City Missouri Adelaide Robin o taxi'll doís and Frederick Reed consolidated their expertise in 1900 in Lishman Charles Fergus Benz founded America's first ceramic department at Alfred University in New York Bin's promoted individual experimentation yet encouraged Potter's to share information openly at Alfred bins offered a new sensibility the notion of the studio Potter cooperating with others in order to realize their own personal vision at the same time came great social upheaval in the country and throughout the country there was a massive move toward the west and California what the West represented was the idea of paradise achievable free from technology that the East was overrun with open arid and undeveloped California attracted many highly skilled play artists from the east and no their depictions of this exotic locale resulted in dramatic imagery few California Art Potter's succeeded commercially and as the Machine moved west independence faced an impossible struggle even Fredrik Reid perhaps the consummate designer of his time returned to industry remarking that the artist however gifted who attempts to function as an independent is attempting a hopeless job [Music] during the first three decades of the 20th century the California desert became the domain of a booming commercial industry California became a locus for ceramic production beginning in the late 19th century specifically in 1889 Lena Ireland the wife of the statement er ologist wrote an article called pottery in which she advocated that California with its natural clay deposits had the potential to become a major clay producing state on the par with Ohio and New Jersey in contrast to the rigid practices of the East California's lack of tradition offered a panacea of creative freedom and in the 1930s California would emerge as a new locus for modern clay art due largely to a Potter from Missouri named Glenn Lucas determined rugged and self-taught Lukens developed a crude style evoking the privations of the Depression era in Flynn lupins of course was the beginning class in handmade ceramics here in Southern California prior to that they'd had really basically industrial ceramics but there wasn't any there was a very tiny little tradition of handmade clay we have to understand that in California in the first half of the 20th century an inspiring Potter wouldn't go to a class and learn all the rudiments of play making most of these artists were self-taught Glenn Lukens was not very well educated in ceramics he didn't really have any technical training so his background was limited and he didn't even have a decent wheel the only time I saw Lukens demonstrate on the wheel used the traditional European style treble wheel and of course another reason he didn't do work on the wheel at that time he really suffered quite a lot from arthritis so it was difficult for him to do very much throwing and this may be another reason why he did mainly hand-built pieces and put so much emphasis on the glazes he used to take the students out to the desert and they would dig minerals out of the ground take them back and melt them down and they became the first kinds of raw mineral glazes that were you know locally oriented as opposed to just buy him from lays company who was doing the more individual pieces as big shallow bowl that had a turquoise glaze in it that would give almost like the effect of water Lucas's work is wonderful in its dynamic use of glaze it's heavily potted forms the whole work is about finish and color their glorious examples but at the time they were often seen as mistakes he writes that his pottery would be rejected by fairs or committees because it appeared to be damaged but he was searching for clay working that was different from what came before him that was more robust and dynamic and not as refined one of the problems with Glenn lupins was that all the glazes were secretly this was in the 1930s and 40s at a time when it was difficult for him to get technical information too so that the things that he discovered on his own he felt he owned them and it was hard for him to allow others into his world so that kind of secrecy was permeated the ceramic world partially because people were trying to make a living and they didn't want to give their glazes to anybody else one of the reasons for that was that if you discovered something if you created a glaze that was significant that was how you made your reputation and if you gave it away it was no longer yours or at least that was the thinking Lukens himself was so secretive about all the ingredients in his blazes that he locked them in a safe in his ceramic department and he wouldn't let anybody have the key except his assistant he never let the students glaze their own work the students would tell him what they wanted in terms of color and he would do the glazing and the assistant one time when he was gone got in through the safe and they copied the glazes down and discovered after they tried to melt them that he had deliberately left off two or three ingredients the essential ingredients so the glazes wouldn't even melt there's a lot of secretive things that happening back in the early days like even to the idea of where you got your clay originally I thought you got clay at the store I didn't know gonna hook and there where's the store we're not going to tell you because the oh and where'd you get that Glaser not gonna tell you cuz you'll know and it was just that closed every time I walk through the glass room to get to the kill room people have their notebooks open like this doing their glazes any of these scales out weighing things all these weird materials you know yeah I don't know what they're doing in there but anyway weird time I walked by they closed their books like this they didn't want me to see this secret corner that was apparently a dead book anyway some guy took me to the side one day I'll show you how to make all the glaze you're walking about ten minutes and he showed me how to calculate glazes is no secret the bottles who the hell cares in the post-war era as Lukens influenced way California received an infusion of highly skilled craftsmen immigrating from Europe resulting in a rebirth of formal and technical conservatives the criteria for the standard of pottery in the 1940s was a European aesthetic again that was highly influenced by both the Bauhaus and Scandinavian ceramics and this came out in the work of Laura Andreessen and especially Marguerite Wilden King in 1919 Marguerite Wilden hain a young apprentice pottery decorator became the first woman ever accepted into the Bauhaus pottery in vimar run like a rigorous industrial workshop the Bauhaus imposed upon its students a strict regimen under the supervision of pottery master max crayon Wilden Hanes spent eight and a half hours a day at the wheel throwing hundreds of vessels until the techniques became second nature about how to live to be a couple is also a way of life that is what we did learn at the brows that the cup was only the beginning if you don't have something to say you might as well stop making it in 1940 Wilden Haines left Germany to escape Nazis establishing the pond farm arts collective in Northern California the discipline training Wilden hain had received at the Bauhaus would stay with her the rest of her life and helped her become the dominant force in American pottery throughout much of the 1940s and 50s in the beginning you have to be strict so that they learn all those things that belong into the cup just like a bandage you know the time that the wound is not going to do it you need also discipline [Music] Marguerite's and methods were really very regimented she would demonstrate doing a form just like a little cup so everyone would throw cylinders one after another and then pick out one piece that you'd consider the most perfect one so then the next day make the taller cylinders and the idea was to get that as perfect as possible so you'd pick out just one of those and everything else would go back into the scrap clay and probably the most complex piece was to make a teapot so you'd make a row of teapots and then save just one and this would take up the world summer is hard to believe but you've made a lot of putts the criteria was perfection of form if you threw one pot or a hundred pots they had to be perfect in form and yet even while that was the ideal things were beginning to change toward other interests because after you've thrown a hundred pots that are absolutely perfect all you can do then is be imaginative about the surface and certainly artists were at that time but it was limiting so there had to be something else happening some other idea had to come into play I think we're not gonna graduate school down here went up to see her one time and she had her little treatise and little paper the sound was all well and good real Bauhaus but when you have a heavy German accent anything sounds great and that being rented on a piece of paper that what they just thought you're talking to you buddy see this is this it well she was the enemy you know I mean absolutely she was a carrier of the torch for you know the community of clay but there was a very specific kind of look and form and so forth that she thought you had a make to be legit you know as a Potter it's just dogmatic and the real cornball romance you know with her and her you know at the toe kicking that wheel and I thought man that just says it all you know the artists in and her wonderful tool poetically poised ready to kick that piece of stoneware into immortality it's by and large characterized by an effort to create a harmonious object in which the surface and the decoration and the form and the function have a kind of unitary seamlessness the traditions these unitary traditions of pottery represented a fantasy an idealized nature-based dream that if one could live a moral life with this phase as a model one would live a happy life well after the atom bomb went off this was a little hard to believe [Music] this harmonious tradition is what Volk has busted up what Peter Volk has managed to do is to take the form to surface the decoration and tear them apart set them against each other so that rather than having this harmonious unified form you had a rock his piece of stuff whose parts were competing for your attention and this distinguished it from really anything that had come before with an intensely experimental and aggressive approach to clay no one ever changed the course of American ceramic art more radically than Peter volga's in 1946 after his tour of duty in world war ii as a machine gunner in the Pacific Focus returned home to Bozeman Montana where he enrolled as a student of painting but within the next decade volka switch catalyzed the clay revolution an art movement that would turn the classical tradition of ceramics on its ear when I went to school I studied painting as I wanted to be a painter when I had no idea that how do you make a living fantasy become really I have no idea up in Montana what are you gonna do paint horses or whatever but I was forced into doing a clay course you know to get out of school I did actually put it off till almost my last year because I didn't want to go around fool around that mud I could see these people working in my life I was wondering what the hell are you doing and I just put it off and I had to take it to get out so I took that class and that completely changed my life right there as soon as I started feeling that clay that was a big change for me I couldn't paint anymore it was just gone completely I stayed up day and night because I was so involved in the energy of that clay and being able to work and I had a friend of mine that told me his uncle knew this brick maker by the name of Archie Bray and they were gonna start a pottery and maybe I could get a job there for the summer it was really a 19th century Brickyard workshop that this kind of century doesn't even know what that was about it just must have been a crew of about 35 to 50 people working there making brick most of them are itinerant workers that were passing through most of them were alcoholics and they would make enough to get get the next drunk down the neighborhood late you know but Dad this crew they kept coming here they come through every summer and Archie treat him yep pretty well there's a little gruff but you know he's all right had a big bark but he didn't bite you hard you know you could deal with him he dish you off a lot but it's okay so we worked right along with the labor gang we ate in the cook Shack and we went back in the Brickyard we nipped bricks and we dug clay and we made sewer pipe and you name it we were laborers in the field and I'll tell you when you worked on a brick line picking up bricks and moving them onto cars it damn near killed us they hated his hard work nipping bricks ready to come off the line yet it's the bricks and stack them you know this and that and then at night we could go over and work in one of the sheds there there's a potter's wheel over there and some clay [Music] while volca says early forms remained within the classical tradition of western ceramics as he refined his mastery over clay the proportions of his work steadily increased at age 25 just two years after touching clay focus won first prize in national competition earning a reputation as potteries new prodigal son he did beautiful pots beautiful pottery on wheel just decorating and glazing and some of the best firings that I ever have recalled were in that period my recollection of the pottery that was being done in those early years was that it was sort of utilitarian and you have to remember that we weren't really students of history of ceramics at the time it was just an activity that seemed important to us and if it came to questions of art our heads seemed to be in some other corner and here I was this dumb Potter from Montana is just sort of a hick you know and yeah I hadn't been to New York and been in maybe about the one art museum in my life everything I knew came from books peach drawing was an adaptation of having seen some of stig Lindbergh's tiny pots and the magazines and mentally thinking they were very large and so he started to make him large so our contact was limited to the few trade publications and the very very rare exhibitions that happen to come through Montana but in 1952 we had an important visit by several of the world's most important figures in ceramic art and that was sort of headed by Bernard leach of England who was the famous important Potter traveled widely had been in Japan for a number of years he was the kind of man who could sit there and do very nice pots and it was a kind of a blend of the Oriental in the English he's a very brilliant man let's put it that way and he did write a brilliant book and we all uses it as a Bible for a long time there are philosophies and faith in the east from which the West could learn much we have overstressed intellect and individualism there is insane belief a quality called mu this is the quality we most admire in parts and it is that rare condition of which we catch bmc's in men and women when the spirit of life blows through an open window I like watching him here's his tall lanky sort of a figure and he'd put a little ball of clay on the wheel he had a suit on all the time and a white shirt and a tie he would work that way he'd throw one of these you know like pitcher forms put a hand along like that he never got dirty I mean you know I never once getting a you know spot of clay on and I kept looking at and I wondered how so I tried to emulate Ted - I had that fail over me all the time then so I sort of made it a point to stay out of the way of the clay is fun you're right so I was pretty clean for a while anyway I remember driving around in the mountains and just getting cold at that time was freezing and remember Bernard leach would say stop the car stop the car and you see little seen a little tree out there yeah I see a lot of mother I mean it's all you can see see particular tree out there and he jump out with his Japanese paper and he starts putting the water on like this get the thing on the damn stuff with freeze what it was I had just turned to Crystal's I think when he came to the Archie Bray Foundation he wasn't expecting much and I have to remember that we were just young men in the field and we were just getting started out but I don't think that he had a great deal of respect for the American Potter at the time and I think that's the reason we didn't like him I had a problem with leach myself yeah this quasi oriental thing but he you know it is basically a judge maker from Europe along with him was this very important friend from Japan Shoji Hamada and Shoji Hamada perhaps more than any other person at least gave me an insight into what what clay was about I think that watching Hamid of work was was an immediate bond at least for me and I think that peat also responded to that how many times he get close to a living legend you know like he was I sat on a kick wheel he sat cross-legged in front of me I kicked the wheel for him and he'd start rowing and I I just have to keep it at the right speed and it's a too fast too fast slow down slow down you know helping a guy like that it experiences you'd never forget Muhammad would make a few very economical moves on the wheel and I immediately began to respond to the fact that this wasn't just us something that you would make to sell in a gift shop having revitalized the ancient tradition of folk pottery in Japan hamada now seduced American audiences with an assortment of exotic techniques [Music] extolling the inherent beauty of the accidental camerawork course clay into simple organic forms then applied crude blazes with elegant spontaneous brushstrokes as he traveled across the United States comedies demonstrations immediately fuel that the found change in the practice of many American Potter's yet while hundreds of Americans became devoted hamada imitators Peter Volquez incorporated Hamada's influence more discreetly it started to loosen up a little bit I started drawing more and the forms started to change I got to be able to handle more clay and I wanted to make shapes on the wheel that I could start painting more on decorating you know and the changes at that point were very very slow the real big turning point was when Volquez traveled to Black Mountain College and met some of the more important people in the world of art at that time one of the big change in my life came when I was invited to go to Black Mountain College in North Carolina this place we're all hardest want to go in a summertime is a good gig you know I was up there in the mountains and all that's prison and so when I was there I met Merce Cunningham and John Cage there were a lot of painters there at the time remember like Esteban Vicente it was the first time I heard a poetry reading first time I'd seen modern dance happened so it was a big revelation to me and my mouth was just open all the time and they'd come over to watch me and they couldn't believe me either answer to see tonight would you make me a picture and some cups and all that I'll trade you of paintings of drawings well when Pete returned to Montana it was just like he was transformed you could almost see it on his face I mean there was a kind of a glow about what he'd been through it opened my eyes to a lot of things and I wasn't just stuff in the wheel anymore I could do anything I wanted at that time now as his reputation spread Volkers continued to attract curious visitors from across the country though most were eager to witness focuses unconventional techniques in the fall of 1953 Volquez confronted a rather conventional visitor from California Marguerite Wilden hanga Marguerite Weldon in was a tough personality she came to the braze I guess we were a little intimidated by her and to tell you the truth there was an awkward distance between Pete and Marguerite at least according to what I felt she came up to the break Foundation did a workshop she's a dictator you know she was stuck in her ways certain ways you hold your hand and this and this and that and there was nothing in betweens you would allow you know my way is the only way Marguerite would throw some pots but everybody around there knew that beat the throw better pots Pete had a very short touch about throwing and you while you may not believe it he was very modest and somewhat shy person in those years but he didn't exactly like to perform all the time and when he did he was very good at it because I don't think that there were many people who had taught themselves to throw that well thing that really irked her was that the audience kept saying you should watch Pete throw that why don't we have Pete come in here in thrall see and I think she was totally outclassed when Pete raised those cylinders very easily and shaped him into difficult narrow neck bottles she had this feeling and I was some sort of a troublemaker and I'm throwing something into the stews that shouldn't be there and I'm just sort of feeling about it you know night I didn't agree with her Bauhaus ideas either but it's very it was very dogmatic and I was not into dogma and I'm still not and I mean a Dogma a free living and being able to express yourself any way possible [Music] [Music] as you know Peter Volquez came back from World War two he'd been a gunner he had been working in Montana and he arrives in Los Angeles he has just seen abstract expressionism in painting in New York and he's all jazzed he happens to get around him a group of talented very talented people and from that the movement sprang I really hated to see Pete leave Montana but but you know he got this enormous offer of something like five thousand a year to go down there and teach and we just said well you can't really turn down that money Pete and I can understand it if you want to leave well I decided to do that after a lot of thought I didn't feel like I really wanted to leave Montana into that that big Cataclysm hunter whose Los Angeles although they were fine craftsmen working here before Peter Volquez there wasn't a lot of innovative or inventive kind of thinking going on in ceramics the conventional material that was being produced was at best very good craftsmanship it wasn't very exciting but when Peter focus went to Los Angeles the whole nature of what clay art could be changed focus had been up in the Bay Area and seen abstract expressionist painting and knew there was a new school of painting different from European painting which was seeking an American identity so he wanted to bring an American identity into the work of ceramics Wallace was hired by sheesh to come down and set up ceramic department I think Millard had some conceptual idea of about what a ceramic department was and Volquez came with an agenda of his own which was to do something different with clay I don't know that he clearly knew what it was but he did have a vision the problem for people who made ceramics was that ceramics were functional objects they consisted of bowls vases platters things that could hold things service objects what are we gonna do with this milk jug with a handle on it we don't need that anymore not in our technocracy you know all the technical stuff is having eat off with plastic plates is fine if you imagine these guys living in Los Angeles in the fifties city that was suddenly being transformed from a small city into a suburban sprawl in which an aerospace industry was starting to get off the ground in which Disneyland had just opened who could believe the nature-based dream that characterized clay as it existed in the United States from the beginning well what do we do now we had a table in a room and a bunch of chairs so I said where's his students there were no students and pretty soon in walks this guy that they'd accepted as my first student well their guy was Paul solder he he he fit the bill he said well welcome to the school you know they promised me a new building but it hasn't been started yet and I said well where are we going to work and he said down in the basement come on I'll show you and when we got there I was shocked because there was nothing in the room other than a few tables and a sink when I went there to visit Paul and Pete for the first time and find out if Pete was really there I walked into a basement room with nothing in it but a table and the two guys were sitting there there were no kill they're in a wheel in fact they weren't even working I wondered now how are we going to make pots and I said what are we gonna do four wheels or Pete mentioned well we got to figure out where to get some wheels for a while he would go around to other schools and visit them to find out what they were using and they were using everything from modified sewing machines to commercially made wheels but none of them really satisfied Pete and he said okay I guess we're gonna have to make our own equipment it was kind of like an ideal situation because they started naked and they could just find out what the hell would make a terrific shop Paul is a very inventive man he's like a Hoosier and Vetter he was really interested in figuring out a whole new kind of wheel new kinds of kills new ways of using wheels so Paul brought an enormous amount of that kind of evangelism into this shop this is like a vacuum and the magnet he knows right where to go to pick up these things he's got an uncanny sense of direction thank God for him because I I used to get lost just driving to school usually when you go to school everything works then that everything is provided this was totally opposite we had to buy our own clay from commercial sources and we heard that you could use a bread dough mixer to mix clay and I eventually went out and found one on the market and a restaurant supply house an old used one and that was a breakthrough for us because now we could mix lots of clay at will we could change the composition and each person could tailor the clay to their needs it wasn't like in the school where you get 25 pounds of semester of clay you know a garbage can you locked it up we had two piles of clay out there and this is it this is your stuff this is your material you're gonna start there and I don't give a damn what you do as long as as it works for you you know I was loosing up like out myself you know I was breaking through traditions of what was good design what a vessel should be and all that sort of thing and I got to the point record here diddly squat about that anymore I said okay I'm in your class Pete and he said okay there's the clay there's the wheel and that's the only instruction he ever gave me that was all I needed when you started working with Pete you had a master potter working right beside you and he was just like you and do you had to keep up or else if you couldn't make it that was your problem and not his in fact it was like not being in an academic situation all of us were just working in the shop together focus never gave a formal lecture the whole time I was there and you wouldn't even tell us how to make glazes we had three different kinds of glazes that had absolutely and there were dumbest glazes you ever saw or think of I mean one was a shiny glaze one was a matte glaze one of the semi matte and one was just black yeah I told my students that this is all the glazes you're gonna get now if you want those pretty glazes you can out of the glade store and get it but don't bring him in here you know you've got three dumb glazes as a barrel over there in this area here and you're gonna put it on these dumb forms you're gonna take a domed shape whatever you've got you on there and you've got three dumb four dumb glazes there and if you could make something aesthetic out of that you're gonna get an A you could set your own course in that kind of situation and right there beside you you had an example of a man who was setting his own course who was giving up slick wear and suddenly carrying his clay apart having become a master over clay focus could let the material go free in the process he pulled clay out of its confines as craft and into an art what you've got to remember is this ceramics were not part of what was called modern art they were relegated to crafts did not belong within the tradition of high art so the problem for these ceramicists on the west coast was how to break through this barrier it was a puzzle for them how to proceed how do you find what you are seeking this is the struggle the ceramicist had to go through one of the first things that focused appreciated in order to make his move was to get rid of function [Music] [Music] like many people I was first astounded I was confused and couldn't really distinguish what it was I was confused by his his technical ability was so great that even the the craftsmen couldn't overlook that he was a major force and he and he really did innovate a lot of things he might have acted like it was nothing but he innovated everything his glazes everything were major innovations and his firing techniques or innovations and the kills renovations and and the physical condition that he was in was a major innovation I think the thing that he brought to ceramics was something was never there before which was a physicality no matter a fact that he wasn't going around in his little Sahara boots and and having tea which was a scenario of ceramicist this is a heavy and tea time he was a black coffee worked through strong man and anybody that hung out with him had to keep up he was not going to make decorative cups and sauces objects be used with flowers put in them instead of putting refined glazes chemical glazes on he would come up with epoxy paints on top of the finished products instead of making it refined and beautiful he took the clay and he savaged the clay he attacked it he punched it he enacted it if it broke he went and got a poxy brooded together again he made an enormous break into violent personal expression in half a dozen works vulgus match totally all of the work that had been done in the world [Music] fusing the earthy perfection of ancient Greece with the water and wind of Japan focus transformed his vessel forms into containers of human expression the scale and volume of all causes work was unprecedented the search for new form relentless inspired as much by Picasso as Pollock as much by Charlie Parker as Segovia Volquez himself became artist and merged painting sculpture and clay into one [Music] focus had tremendous difficulty in getting his work accepted by the critical establishment art establishment he had an exhibition he was invited to an exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art and that should have been the crowning moment of the beginning of his acceptance when in fact the exhibition took place it took place in the members lounge of the modern so there were all the people sitting there having their lunch on their nice clean white gratis with a nice white cups their nice white bowls and along the walls will focus as lumpy expressionistic pieces so they were shown as a kind of decorative adjunct not in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art for the famous artists of the world so it was a bitter frustration and disappointment for him I think resistance is at least to me is a very motivating kind of thing if people resist what I'm doing I did I just do well on that stuff points it this guy hit isn't getting it you know an area he resists it and that's all well and good to me because I don't expect to be understood at that kind of level where it's being resisted you know the resistance comes on quite a ways down their own aesthetic ladder let's put it that way they refused to accept that ceramics could be art they thought it was a craft Pete stepped over that and jumped from from cruets to Picasso in time a number of people began to understand and see that focus was a remarkable artist and his reputation spread among the cognoscenti among those who understood ceramics there was a very famous painter Sam Francis and he married happen to marry a Japanese woman and when he went to Japan he went through one of the greatest living masters of Amyx in japan and said will you teach me to make ceramics and the master said to him but aren't you from California he said yes he said no no I can't teach you to make ceramics you must go back to California there was a great master there an American you are an American you must go to him Peter Volquez I was looking for school to attend in Los Angeles and I stopped in that Otis and I didn't who focus was actually but when I told him I was looking for school then much to my surprise he said well we'll have to get you a car and a place to live in Echo Park and you know after a person says something like that I couldn't just walk away and not commit myself so I came to Otis everybody that became involved with Peter volga's became very different each of these people became entirely different than the other they discarded the conventions and created their own conventions for their work you know I hadn't had much teaching but I knew enough about freedom to leave people's asses alone you know and let him develop but put him in a situation where it can happen this way I conducted my classes there free wheeling classes I I just put out clay there and a lot of good things happened the classes were pretty free there was no traditional type class Lucas actually never he somehow set up an environment where people were inspired to do their thing I wasn't one with the syllabus it was up there today we're gonna do this this and this so I was trying to build sort of a menu there where there was just energy that could happen between people and they could feed on each other so anybody didn't fit into that homey you was out so it was not comfortable because you are always going in an area that you just didn't know what was happening but what you were doing it was a kind of art that had no tradition stuck to it you just went forward and you did your thing he was really thinking about making an advance for himself in the world of form and structure and finding new ways to use clay and all these kinds of things and when you're in that kind of a thing you can't help but react you have to remember that of this group of people clustered around focus each of them was searching for their own way each artist is quite different these are Westerners and these are men trying to be their own men there was something that happened at that school that was an us-against-them situation it was us against the craftsman and us being basically a misogynist group trying to be the biggest guerrillas in the world and at night is when most of the work I think was done everybody work independently not in the same room but somehow had drifted apart and worked in their own area focus more often and not would come in around 9:00 and it's not unusual to gobble up two tons of clay at night then we'd stagger off and have breakfast and Pete would always pay I have to say that Luke has never taught I remember but he did spend a lot of time sitting in the office and playing flamenco music on his guitar and vocals had been to the Black Mountain College and heard all these exciting new ideas and I think he brought it back we're hearing new sounds you know we're seeing new things we're seeing new movements and dance new kinds of theater is happening when New Times theater started there happened in that damn room down in the basement there were all these guys were something was happening there there were people stopping by people were driving from the east coast to just drop by and look hey these guys are throwing clay all over the floor this is a murals big murals going up like this and he and the abstract expressionist kind of things were happening you know and the most play the better you know things were just popping all over the shop as we were also painting we were painting on the wall they're painting on paper then we weren't even painting with paint we were painting with play wasn't for posterity or anything like that which is a way of expressing yourself and then throw it in the garbage can after who gave a damn focus set it up that you worked I mean not in a forced way he just created an environment where you went beyond what was familiar to you I didn't quite grasp it but now I think that's the way you should work an artist if you did something familiar something that years seen there will be no value to it and in a sense I think that's the secret of art we were all aware that there was some friction developing between the director of the school mr. sheets our work and of course Pete's work eventually it it happened that there were some problems because Miller sheets had one idea for the school and the teachers he had recruited had other ideas Millett wanted to produce I think first class commercial artist I want to give Miller cheese a lot of credit because he changed the whole makeup of ODIs and we hired a lot of really professional artists but he had a mixed kind of taste and I think focuses surged into all these unknown areas of ceramics was really disturbing to somebody that has a real structured way of looking at art and it feels the most important thing about artists teaching art as a way to make a living focus never even thought about that his idea of working close to kid had a lot of craftsmen together and using a prescribed ideas and designs to put on buildings specifically his buildings you know he wanted a lot of mosaics put up there with horses and stuff and sculptures in the front of these buildings very fresh its take a look at buildings you know and it was a kind of a thing that nobody really wanted to do I mean what he wanted was somebody to work on his ideas and he'd expected me to tell you got like solder Mason price and all these with hey you got to do these Commission's were all sheets and they set up your what and I I told you're not gonna do it don't worry about oh I think one incident was that Billy al Bengston had put on his sculpture four letter words and the story goes Millett had walked in and seen that and he said by four o'clock out all of this out in a dumpster well needless to say you know after many meetings with him in his office lot of headaches and all this in between I sort of slammed the door in his head he got his last migraine I think and next thing I knew they wanted to get rid of me [Music] puffin Berkeley Peter Volquez continued to work primarily in bronze throughout the 1960s yet through his teaching focus encouraged his students to develop their own aesthetic styles and launched an artistic movement with an impact still evident among ceramic artists at the forefront of the field the first work of people mrs. R never saw I thought it's the ugliest stuff I've ever seen in fact it was so revolting but I couldn't get out of the room fast enough but I couldn't get that work out of my mind and I thought I'll find out what this man is Mike because I couldn't get this work out of my mind and I was sure that I wouldn't like him but I had to find out so I did and it changed my life I was trying to figure out what courses to take and here's this ceramics class offered by Peter bol cos I'd never heard of so I enroll in it and it changed my life yeah Berkeley you know I call it the hot bed there was just a lot of activity going on there was like the energy level was just incredible I mean Pete was sort of the nucleus obviously sort of he was you know the reason the causing of it all as I say I did I made it possible for a lot of things to happen and I realized that but I just took all that tradition that came from other places and made it our own tradition you know that something else was gonna happen Volkers gave everybody the right to be themselves his intensity of expression continues in the work of half-a-dozen people doing clay art today you [Music] you having witness Peter Volquez Heath clay and museums of high seriousness Robert Arneson and the Davis group scouted out less glamorous tre inspired by Duchamp Warhol in the ceramic collection of the corner thrift store they brought clay into the realm of the comical the political and the uncalled-for the Davis ceramic group were perceived as being kind of sacrilegious to that religion that Peter balkis and the Otis group pioneered it was the first sort of massive turn away from exploiting clay as material in its earthy sense and Bob Arneson who was also influenced by vulgus finally kind of broke through and began to exploit a whole nother arena of clay and glazes and being influenced by pop art the work of course was about imagery and the everyday object kind of all the things that were relegated to Sunday Potter's and things our aunts and grandmothers seemed to do they took that and began to exploit that and people really put off by that so they were perceived as heretics [Music] the funk movement was early 60s movement and one of their first interest was to create things that were shall we say casually crafted other people would say they were made very badly and in that way they kind of thumbed their nose at the tradition of craftsmanship well I've never heard a definition of funk no actually to this day I couldn't tell you what funky is I think a George Clinton myself but other people think of other things you know fun yes issue I have no idea the term to me is extremely annoying I think the man at the Berkeley museum invented it cleaned it out of someplace out of the snot-nosed attitude there's typical of the 50s and 60s there are a number of things that have been said about fun first it was California rebellion against New York secondly it was a general here's mud in your eye thirdly there's an angry perversity to it refers to a certain kind of brute what we used to refer to as dumb when something was dumb it meant it was good but it was dumb you know just sort of very clunky kind of imagery kind of clunky I mean clunky dumb and punk maybe those are all of us and I don't know I don't know if there's words for it more than attitude it was the opposite of being very careful and just to make ironic peculiar and upsetting objects what was called funk art included a broad range of things much of which had to do with social commentary and political commentary we think of Bob Arneson there were very few artists whose works on the surface call attention to them make you interested in who they were who they are etc Arneson was one of these people Arneson had the guts to make himself his own subject carry that self-importance up to unspeakably obscene levels and gorgeous glorious levels I listened to me was almost like Peck's bad boy you know ami he could do to cause a controversy of some sort since eighties I made okay guys look the controversy I'm causing over allows a little piece of art but Arneson seemed always to take ideas which we didn't face directly and force us to think about them ba Garson was an honest person and and in his honesty he really wanted to delve into the human condition and he believes very firmly that if that offended you if what came out of that offended you that was your problem and not his [Music] he had this joyous quality of stirring everything up in good humor he made fun of people himself he made fun of me to myself he made me funny to myself and he nonetheless was arrogant patriarchal at all most godly figure [Music] Bob started out working in ceramics when he was that hired to be a high school teacher and he just got like the Sun set how to do book or whatever the how to do book was then it kept one step ahead of the students he got fascinated with the material and then went to Mills College under the direction of Tony credo where he learned to be a very very good Potter in the image of Tony Pareto which is what Tony creative demanded and he got into a lot of trouble when he tried to break out of that mold and he did break out of that mold Tony Prieto was a classic Potter and he couldn't figure out why somebody who had a choice to make something beautiful would choose to make something ugly and he thought Bob's work was really ugly and Tony just raved and raved about what's wrong with this guy he can't make good art and first Bob went on to become a very very important artist wanna make bioceramics but incapable of and restore the lost beauty of this most ancient noble art Bob Arneson set himself off onto the fringe of the ceramic community and I think was proud of that in 1962 Bob took himself out of the surrounded community by virtue of the position he was offered as an instructor at the University of California Davis and he was teaching with people who were not involved in clay William Wiley Wayne Tebow Rowland Petersen Roy DeForest they were just artists and bob was an artist among them so the expectations I think that he had of himself were quite different than someone who was involved all the time with people who were just working in clay and he just left behind or he just stepped aside from that world of making pots he essentially challenged worked over work through questioned virtually every aspect of what had been hitherto thought of as appropriate to ceramic art he was very aware of what people cos was doing he spent some time in Berkeley he would go down and visit Pete but when he was invited to being an exhibition and he knew that John Mason and Pete balkis and those people were going to be in there he knew that the kind of mini volka psa's he'd been making just wouldn't cut the mustard and so he as he would describe it he really searched for a form he could use I think that he sort of knew for himself at a certain point the direction he was going I remember distinctly one night when I was in TV 9 and he was kind of pushing this huge ball of clay around the floor there's a lot of stuff on the floor he picked up you know dirt and pieces of clay and things that were there at all textured the clay very heavily you know he wanted to have it a certain way but he couldn't quite get it and I heard him cursing and goddamn this and the stuff doesn't work and you know damn it and he hung it over a table he punched it and he just ran and raved so I just came around and awesome casually everything everything was alright you know and he says you know get out of here I'm trying to do this stuff but it shows United the struggle that he had he was trying to get at certain kinds of things it remains today in my mind one of the most ghostly haunting recollections big exhibit and there amid all the Chinese pots high fire reduction glazes copper Reds chemicals so on there sat this squat ugly wild [Music] he decided to make toilets because that's the ultimate ceramic form the first time I saw the ceramic toilet you know you look up and that was the end of it I never got turned down by these pieces at all but people are very upset by this there were people certainly in the pottery world that were offended that he would do this with such a noble material the vice-president of Kaiser Industries thought that bob was attacking American capitalism and the piece was removed from the exhibition it was a quite shocking piece in the early sixties Arneson consciously created controversy to draw reactions and some people couldn't handle it so to speak and did not do with it and couldn't go past the subject matter which is very unfortunate because it was very elegant fees [Music] a great depth to them you know Bob could be absolutely offensive if you wanted to certain times he would excessive and go over the line but bogged in duality its way to fit in with the people's sensibilities one of the charming things about if he thought something he would straight Farley express it and the chips would fall where they might he really enjoyed playing the role being a provocateur his early work with the ceramic toilet and the all the other objects were done for shock value this was the ceramic people's way of competing with what was going on out there was being as outrageous as they could be I mean you know Peter Volk is his group was outrageous when they were in the 50s and so this was their way on the 60s of trying to to see how far could they go with play you know they went pretty far Arneson vernacular eyes day medium which in its finished product has been associated with fine surfaces you know whether you go from mean bosses to precious porcelain it's always been a precious meeting artisans importance to ceramic art exists on half a dozen different levels one he introduced the comic into the art Mobb sense of humor was a very elegant Three Stooges kind of humor was nothing particularly subtle about it Bob artisans typewriter was a very funny thing at first and done in a kind of crude spontaneous manner not demonstrating all of the crafts that Arneson had it's easy to just see the humor and he liked that he thought that that was a way to get people involved with the work but when you look at a piece like the typewriter it's often overlooked that there was a strong political element in his art from the early 60s on I suppose for Contemporary feminists look what this suggests the woman a machine the secretary who's simply a part of the machine a nonentity a nun human being looking back at that now over decades it has increasing significance to us and that's that's one of the tests of good art yeah I think he was trying to jar people to think of ceramics as a viable medium it's just another thing like wood or plaster it's not just something you make pots out of so he probably had to go a little or did go overboard on that a little bit just trying to make a point in the early days Bob didn't take himself as seriously as he did later usually he has a certain sense of irony and could laughing himself but occasionally he'd go the way I think did needlessly stir up a hornet's nest there were a number of instances that Bob's blue committee to stir up things got him in deeper than he thought he would get at first of course this resulting finally in his piece about the assassination of Moscone the mayor of San Francisco in a way that we hated really to think about [Music] president of the Board of Supervisors it's my duty to make this announcement both mayor Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed [Music] dan white in a fit of anger we went into City Hall and gunned down George Moscone when the mayor and Harvey Milk a supervisor there was a call for proposals for public pieces to be placed in the Moscone George Moscone Convention Center once I got started on the piece I said a lot of people came forth who knew him personally and a lot of Andy Oates and stories and yeah about the man and he seemed like someone I might have known and I got very comfortable working on the piece so he makes the portrait he made he made it first you made a drawing of the portrait which showed a blank pedestal now everybody who knows Bob's work knows he didn't make blank pedestals but anyway he in this drawing the pedestal was blank mrs. Moscone came and looked at the head and she patted it and said that's George and Bob felt really wonderful about that Bob did not show her the pedestal I don't know Bob ever actually said as much but I knew him well enough speaking between the lines that deep down he knew the writing on the base and so forth would stir up a hornet's nest as it were this is what sent city officials into a mild frenzy when it was unveiled last night a bust of the late mayor George Moscone not the bust itself but the pedestal upon which it sets the pedestal depicts various stages of the mayor's life and his murder the lower portion of the pedestal includes an outline of mosconi's body a likeness of the weapon used to kill him blood like splatters bullet holes the words bang bang bang and the name of Dan white the widow of the late mayor doesn't like it and city officials want it removed or redone people were very upset immediately I mean the next day everything the mayor called and people were very at mayor Feinstein called I'm not sure all the reasons people were upset about that I appreciate the artists work but I think some of the people in San Francisco might be a little hesitant to take that to their hearts being as close to him as they were it made it a much better peace when he added all these all these different kinds of parts of Moscow and his life but when you do a commission you know you gotta follow what the Commission asks for he tells me he was very serious when he did the bust of Moscone he won't admit it but she got the feeling that he was cut deeply by the rejection of his work and he just can't understand what all the fuss is about when you true that an artist that you're you it's to be assumed you give him artistic freedom to do the finest work that he's capable of doing and not just a decoration when the whole thing got ruling I think he was taken back a bit and it was pretty psychologically wearing arm it was a very large controversy in San Francisco it was on the front page of The Chronicle for a number of days herb Keynes wrote in his his column that it should be broken into a lot of pieces and dumped in the deepest part of the San Francisco Bay it stirred up a lot of anger Bob's life was threatened twice we had news people camped out on our front porch irrepressible impish whatever you call him whatever you think of the Mosconi bust I think if you spent a few minutes with Robert Arneson you'd find it impossible not to like him I kind of hoped that Bob would be kind of a Chum and he never was that he kind of stayed at a distance most the time he would work in his studio and maybe come over to my studio once a week or maybe once a day and kind of poke his nose in and poke around and and make some sort of flip and comments that were always sort of critical or trying to create confusion and I finally decided he was kind of like one of those Zen masters throwing out a comb where he would say something that was basically impossible to interpret or solve but it would cause you to think Bob was Frank he didn't mince words you knew what he thought about things he didn't let you get away with an ambiguous remark but you often had the feeling with him that he was borrowing in to try and see what was behind your face he did always ask you know and well what are you doing here you know why are you doing this or in my case one time he said your your your imitating me you know I don't want you to do that I would need to have to acknowledge that I was doing that or refute that notion and say that I wasn't you know which would get us into an argument and he could get quite angry about it and and upset because he was screaming number of times at me and I was screaming right back at him you know I like that has humour with iron and playfulness I want to make higher art that is outrageous and exposes the frailties of the human condition a danger in this of course that one can come up with some silly stupid stuff why play safe clay can't hurt you for about the past 10 years or so I've been modeling oversized portrait heads of myself and clay I like the model faces that talk back to you faces after all are what most of us relate to the human face unlike frogs there's a window in mind Bob was often asked why he used the self-portrait and his answer was always that he was a model who was there for himself and he didn't have to worry about what he was doing to him so he could explore gestures like sticking your tongue out or sticking your finger up your nose or gouging your eye out that might be offensive if it were you or me Bob had a ferocious desire to go down in history as important artists as he could and I think the vehicle of self portraiture and they kind of persistence with it helps drive that nail deeper I can't speak for Bob but I think it's fair to say that in doing so he was being really very honest that so much of the focus of people in any creative activity is somehow themselves and you can make if as Bob did yourself kind of as a universal and his own approach to himself was was not narcissistic it was actually very denigrating and he would make kind of a fool of himself and sculpture after sculpture you know there is the cliche that artists really have only one image in them and they're always dancing around that well maybe that's true of him also but it was an incredible dance he did I mean he kept varying this image this self-portrait to bring the formal in the human together and he did this an extraordinary way which signaled Arneson myself he was able to use this medium of clay which generally had been used rather in personally through history whatever the personal mark of the ceramicist to make a as it were demonstration of himself to perform himself in a variety of ways humorously tragically to document himself right up to the end of his last works which dealt with his cancer [Music] bob was diagnosed with cancer in 1974 and between 1974 1984 he had 35 surgeries and I believe that his health was always an issue in his work as Bob's health began to be a problem he changed in many ways enormous psychological pressure on she became a more in a certain way more conventional but more of a kind of Griffin figure to fill an art-history position he told me one time that he'd been in a hospital in a prep situation for some kind of surgery or minor for about 80 times I remember when I was going to go in to have a bypass once and I was a little too gay to read about it and bob says well he said Roy he said I'm living proof it takes a hell of a lot to kill a person and somehow I was very comforting bob Arneson did offend some people in the art world who had a very thought you had to be cool to be philosophical thought what Arneson was not a cool person and his approach to art was not cool it was very involved and very hot and very emotional and he was kind also he was sensitive but he could also be very crude you know I mean Bob would have been intolerable taking these positions except I always had a sneaking suspicion that back of it all he was really kind of unsure and he got to a certain point any sense of humor would save him if he had been really a dead serious about I really papas had been impossible to deal with Bob Arneson was an egotist he would have to be to be able to carry on the way he was he was persistent never gave up even in his very earliest work he hung in there people admiring it or not admiring it had very little to do with why he made his work he made the work because he felt that's what he was going to do he was going to do this he did it and if you didn't like it there was something terribly wrong with you from Bob's point of view and he's probably right he really wanted to live the art figure he always had this certain amount of ego and in a melodramatic way he won't be Jasper Jones again our Jackson Pollock not just to make art but to play the part of an artist whatever that might mean you know and we all know what it means in a romantic kind of a way certain XS say outrageous things he enjoyed that he really enjoyed playing the role being a provocateur so that was an important time for him to do to act out that that lifestyle and he did [Music] you [Music] in the 1950s peter Volkers let Cley speak in the 60s robert Arneson gave it something to say and by the 1970s clay artists were exploring vast new terrain [Music] at Davis clay artists such as Richard Shaw were redefining the aesthetic that Arneson had so carelessly cultivating in Los Angeles John Mason took volka PSA's heroic Expressionism to its logical extreme Mason left the wheel entirely producing immense chiseled sculptures and majestic freestanding walls of crudely handled clay up in Berkeley Peter Volquez continued to work primarily in bronze throughout the 1960s yet through his teaching he inspired a new group of young ceramic artists though volca schnauzer denter stage with Arneson and the davis group his radical innovations had set a new standard unto young clay artists like James melter focus held near mythic status it seemed that everything in his world was better than anything in my world I remember buying shoes that looked like his shoes and I started smoking cigarettes and listening to a lot of flamenco music and it wasn't until several years after I'd worked with him that I realized I know I had to shed a lot of things that didn't belong to me that were part of his personality his world that didn't fit with my mail charts work throughout the late 60s and early 70s confirmed his fascination with the ephemeral his preoccupation with language philosophy and perception gradually Melcher discovered a style all his own indulging his interest in philosophy French literature and photography maltreat began to produce conceptual clay eventually he would forego the notion that the ceramic artist had to produce any ceramic object at all one thing about clay that was bothering me a lot by the early 70s is that it was fine for making objects and yet I wanted to do something that went beyond objects during a visit to Amsterdam Melchett was invited by Dutch artist Hetty Houseman to do ceramic work at her studio instead he devised an experience well I had set up two rows of benches and between them one end I had a charcoal fire and that I had some blocks of ice I saw depending where you would sit the cold damp of the ice would affect the performance of certain way the heat of the fire would affected forms in a certain way it went very well because when I went over to this vat of slip that I had prepared a great big tub of clay slept in the room who solids because people thought my goodness he's really going to do it i kneeled down stuck my hand into it kept my glasses on and when I came up again people saw obviously like a sculpture we've become what happens when your head is encased in slip that you become entirely enclosed so that you hear your heart beating you can you can hear your breathing in a very different way and you are removed from society from a social context [Music] you can't hear anybody else because your ears are sealed out and yet has the slip dried they would be this explosion like this so you've heard sounds of other people breathing [Music] eventually you could open your eyes and then you would come back to the world as it were here was a way in which each of us could become removed to one another and returned to one another [Music] whereas Melcher's exceeded in giving clay new relevance by bringing it completely under the present another student at Berkeley was seeking to create clay work that might reveal the archaic I never was involved in pottery so as a result of not having that orientation I I would try things that were really kind of off-the-wall and I used to lay down enormous slabs of clay on the floor and take off my shoes and if I was in my own studio is you know let's just strip down and just trounce the clay just kind of jump up and down on it and create all kinds of surfaces that you can't get from a little tool I was until later I realized I was really trying to find a sculptural equivalent for landscape painting but not painting with two trees and the rocks but the essence of landscape swellings and depressions and erosions and cracking and shearing and rocks and you know kind of crumbly clay can do all that because clay is earth and the very special spirit it has as comes from that fact alone clay wants to do lots of things on its own and it's very easy to thwart that way by being heavy-handed a lot of people I know very gifted with clay get so clutched up when they try to make something out of the pot vernacular they have a real hard time taking clay in a a free sense or in the sense of letting the clay be free so the challenge slowly emerged is how to make form happen and play letting it do what it wants to do largely without looking as though you entered into the process at all so it's like trying to make imagery where you the maker or invisible and slowly inside these landscape forms the figure was beginning to emerge but it was a real tough kind of birthing the stay brochures one thing with Volquez that is immense mysticism Fontaine qualities focus in abstract forms de Stabler in emerging forms one never knows whether one with the Stabler is at a beginning or at an end one is fully aware however that one is in front of an art object of extraordinary profound emotion while Stephen D Stabler pursued an abstract spiritual archaeology back at the University of Davis artist clayton bailey explored the flip side of the same coin exploiting clay in pursuit of archeological fraud [Music] I never started out to be a Potter actually I I studied at the University of Wisconsin with Harvey Littleton who was a Potter but I always remembered students calling one another Harvey's followers and I wanted to be something a little different when Pete volkl's came to do a workshop I remember one comment that he made that he knew his piece was good when it made him laugh and even though his work didn't make me laugh I like that idea so I started putting noses and lips and teeth on the pots that I was making no nose where is what I called it though his critters were gaining acclaim at regional ceramic competitions when Bailey caught a whiff of the stink Robert Arneson and his students were causing out in California he smelled a winner I was doing doing pretty good in Wisconsin but I really felt like the excitement was and he was on the west coast and when I got to Davis it was nice to be amongst a group of artists they were more or less all nuts but by the time Bailey arrived in 1967 the Davis group had been pinned with the label funk and Bailey saw a little reason to crowd in under their umbrella instead he developed a plan to locate himself at the center of a major new art I've often been accused of being a funk artist but I I never really felt comfortable with it because I wasn't one of the funk artists at its inception and so we always tried to promote the idea of not art and I invented dr. Gladstone that's a nut artist so that I could talk about dr. Gladstone and the strange ideas that he had wearing things that had done dr. Gladstone would collaborate with another artist for example to make the world's largest ceramic piece by dribbling a trail of clay across the country on highway route 66 Gladstone really came into his own most prominently as the discoverer of the skeleton of a Bigfoot in my backyard Gladstone was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for the discovery of Kail ISM which is the scientific analysis of thermally metamorphosed mud to reveal science facts and fiction we found bones of giant dinosaurs c-cert this is a sea serpent part here he's where all I found in my backyard here and they all represent finds from a period that we call the pre credulous period the point in time when people will believe just about anything behind his assumed identity as a scientist Clayton Bailey received a notoriety of betaine by few ceramic artists before him among the prestigious honors bestowed him he received an invitation to be the artist in residence at the Kohler toilet Factory in Cheboygan Michigan he humbly accepted and his contributions there were felt immediately toilet tpod made this one I was an artist in residence at the toilet factory in Sheboygan I thought maybe they'd appreciate having a teapot so if there was a downturn in construction they could still sell toilets to people after a 200 year struggle to find legitimacy American clay art had come to this I don't think they ever started producing this clay artists begin at an intrinsic disadvantage by choosing a nature-based material in a culture in which nature based living is history is gone but great artists always take disadvantages and make them the basis of their work so if you're working with a disadvantage and can transform that disadvantage into an asset then you've really got something going and that's what Peter Volquez did and that's what Ken price did and that's what Adrian sacks did elegant erotic settled and Confused the vessels of Adrian sacks at once entice and defy in the process of making a teapot sacks assembles a collage of historical symbols and produces an object rife with cultural collisions whether using the tools of the Potter the jeweler or the dumpster diver sack sets the icons of privilege opposite the debris of poverty to make complex peculiar vessels in tune with an age of contradiction from his stance as the Potter of popular culture sacks crouches gently into his seat amidst the porcelain gods I first started thinking about college and a life's work in sciences particularly chemistry but I found myself spending all my time and energy working with ceramics which in fact had a big science component to it and so I started making pots after a number of years of working in ceramics I was looking for somebody that I could attach to as a mentor as a hero and when I was ready to take that journey I was looking to Volkers actually as many other young ceramics were and it didn't work out because I had a automobile accident so then I had to find my own way if you were going to bust up the tradition of ceramics there are essentially two ways you could go one was physical which is the route that Volquez took and the other way you could go was conceptual with the idea of what ceramics was and what ceramics stood for and embodied if you imagine that you want to make a pot the thing that you do is take a lump of clay and slap it down on a wheel and you have this disorganized mess which you then begin to spin and at some point in pushing that wet clay around suddenly everything clicks into place and it becomes what they call centered well this feeling of centering clay on a wheel is pretty terrific I mean it it sort of makes everything right with the world what artists like Adrian do I think is begin with that centering that wonderful centering and then they attempt to D Center it they attempt to to destabilize what your expectations are [Music] Adrienne's artwork quite often goes over the heads of the people who see his work many people respond at the level of the beauty of the glaze many respond because of the complexity of the form or the interest of the form or they're drawn in by some interesting contrast which makes them giggle if they really were to look at it and study his work and get to know his entire production they may be insulted a bit by what Adrienne is really talking about at some point in the late sixties early seventies Adrienne was doing what a lot of Studio potteries do in order to survive and that is producing dinnerware to sell at craft fairs or whatever to make money and it occurred to him that there was a significant difference in the kinds of things he was making he could make a plate out of stoneware and then make exactly the same plate out of porcelain no difference between them except the kind of clay in which he was using and he could get a heck of a lot more money for the porcelain plate than he could get for the stoneware plate why was that well porcelain has a certain tradition stoneware has a certain tradition stoneware has certain plebeian aspects or associations porcelain has certain upper-class associations which have nothing to do with the two plates that Adrienne was making if people valued them differently because of their histories what Adrienne did was a little different you began to play with traditions which were actually for bird [Music] it wasn't clear to me but I really got very intrigued in all of the social history of porcelain and all the symbols of power and wealth and status that they could express and in fact become visual signposts for so Adrienne followed this dichotomy between stoneware and porcelain back to the origins to the porcelain factory outside Paris a place where in the late 18th century the absolute mania for for porcelain among the French aristocracy eventually bankrupted the entire French state and lit one of the fuses to the French Revolution what we have to remember is court porcelains were objects of power and prestige owning these objects indicated a certain refinement indicated a certain class and indicated quite simply a clout within their culture so when you look at court porcelains these are instruments of power and in many cases instruments of greed and this is a kind of subtle under text that is there in almost all of Adrienne's work porcelain is a luxury medium it is considered the queen of the clay bodies now Adrienne's use of porcelain when he first began was criticized by other potters who felt that it was an elitist material but Adrienne Sacks's main goal is to communicate the ideas behind his work to that end he uses humor he uses titles that augment the meaning of his work and he uses a mix of forms that are from any any place that he can find them there's a piece of Adrienne's a beautiful blue jar with gold buttons on it and this piece speaks about a particular moment in history when the French Revolution came the monarchy was torn down and how the south portions were actually one of the great indulgences of the King and one of the things that brought down an entire dynasty he's trying to seduce the viewer into coming toward the object because it looks like it's a rich object and that they are in fact being seduced by this obvious play to their avarice he is manipulating the audience to get them to value his work and he does it through imitation jewels he does it through the application of Luster's and gold and things that look rich and refer to rich histories and then he often undercuts the viewer by confusing your expectations I'm always playing with people's expectations and sometimes I want to leave people to think that something functions in one way and then do something that's contradictory in other words if you're operating a pot with a lid if you're removing the lid or thinking about putting something inside one of my pots and all of a sudden you find that you're handling a douche wand in the normal place a handle might be then it becomes surprising so I started bringing that into my work adrian is a brave artist in that he will tackle topics that are not normally considered in within the realm of fine art everybody knows about feces it's a universal experience and not only do they know about their own but people are generally concerned about their dogs and their cats and their babies and their grandparents and their siblings and their spouses and and so it's something that people think a lot more about than they would like to admit or or make the subject of polite conversation so I think it's something that that is worth you know addressing and in some work well I mean clay looks like looks like it feels like it certainly Adrienne has been very conscious of that and makes the case very explicitly by putting these sort of lovely porcelain objects on top of these clumps of people matter Adrienne's work is a mass of contradictions both physically and conceptually he can fire in a single piece both porcelain and stoneware which technically is quite a feat and at the same time he can put the most exquisitely handmade flourish on a pot that the whole thing just takes off now Adrienne is a bit of a techie he knows his chemistry he knows his various glaze technologies inside and out but I think he gets a little giggle out of putting in front of his audience beautifully made elegantly conceived objects that often refer to things that are not discussed in polite society I like to get people engaged on one level through purely sensual appeal and get them involved in that and then grow stand out but it's not to grow stand out it's to undermine their assumptions about what something is Adrian's work is also always conscious of being some kind of vessel and vessels by their nature are meant to be used but they're so beautifully made that you have to think twice before you would think about picking up an Adrian sacks teapot and that double take is something that makes you very self conscious it is so exquisite and often made from such junk Adrian takes the great disadvantage of working with clay to such an extreme to such an extreme of perfection and craziness which one would think would be opposing ideas and they work they they somehow come together during the mid century a vessel was supposed to simply be a vessel it was to be about form and containing and glaze as time has gone on and clay has been opened up to deal with other kinds of topics Adrian's work with social content has been offensive to those who are enamored with the notion of the vessel being just a vessel [Music] Adrienne's pots set up a great visual semiotic and historical clamor of different motifs traditions referential and invented forms there's a quality to Adrienne spots of uncertainty about what it is they are they part of a trophies display objects Adrienne's work is really a mass of contradictions and one of the fundamental dichotomies that Adrienne manages to bring together in his work is the one between something sinister and something erotic which i think is also very much of its time of the 80s and 90s that kind of marriage of errata tsa's and sinister qualities can be seen within the context of the era of aids of body questions in political life having to do with abortion so in the same way that you can look at historical examples of Ceph pottery and read the society of late 18th century France you can look at that Adriane spots and read the society of late 20th century America it's about a kind of terminal self-consciousness a kind of catastrophe of self-consciousness there's a kind of running off the edge of the cliff quality to their self-consciousness it's sort of like somebody being asked what they know and trying to tell you everything all at once they're not comfortable and uncomfortable to look at or think about he's as much as tipping his hand confessing his discomfort in a way that evokes something of a common condition I mean work they're very timely to the end of the 20th century looking across cultures and across time I came to this realization that I could draw on every tradition because we had no particular tradition that I could draw and I don't even have any religious or secular traditions that are easily recognizable but what I'm really trying to do ultimately is make something where all of these differences are understood to be natural conditions for our times I'm really like a village Potter but I characterize it as I'm the village Potter for the global village because we're drawing on every tradition and no tradition and creating new awarenesses and new ways of working [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 136min 1sec (8161 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2019