The Faberge of Funk

By ROBERT HUGHES

Anyone who still believes in rigid divisions of importance between craft and fine art -- pottery and sculpture, for instance -- could do worse than visit the show by the California ceramist Ken Price, now on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Artists have been making sculpture out of baked clay since the dawn of time -- mud was God's medium for fashioning Adam -- and yet, in America, there lingers an irrational feeling that "real" sculpture ought to be made of steel, or bronze, or stone, or wood: anything but clay, in fact.

Price's work, in its terse, witty and episodically lurid sharpness, argues otherwise, and has been doing so for nearly 30 years. To complicate matters, Price plays with traditional forms of useful ceramics such as the cup and the vase without producing a usable object: they become a sort of armature for flights of entirely nonutilitarian fantasy.

The American preference for big art has worked against his reputation, because his pieces are tiny. None is more than 2 ft. high, and many of the best of them are to be measured in inches. You enter Price's imagination from the wrong end of the telescope. His objects don't declare themselves across the room at you. Like certain Joseph Cornell boxes, or like the tiny clay caricature heads by Daumier that so influenced Giacometti's ideas of scale they pull you close in with their bright and almost fetishistic visual promise until you have shrunk, as it were, to their size.

Some have critters on them -- a snail crawling round the base, or a worried- looking frog leaning backward; one piece, Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968, is borne on the back of a turtle laboriously crawling its way across a sandbox. Yet curiously enough, they look mysterious rather than cute. Victorian potters like Mintons produced a plethora of whimsical, curate's-joke animal majolica, laden with cows and sheep and bees and other homely creatures; the surface of earlier French Palissy ware was encrusted with reptiles and insects to the point where the plate became an unusable plaque.

Price's work has nothing to do with such discursive archness. And it has ^ even less to do with the Bernard Leach tradition of quiet good taste and honesty in materials that grew out of Chinese and Japanese ceramics. As Edward Lebow points out in his engaging catalog introduction to this show, Price, from his student days in Peter Voulkos' West Coast classes, "devoted much of his studio effort to clearing his throat and going ptooey on 'creative craft' and 'good design.' "

Right from the start, Voulkos -- the father figure of California pottery at the time and for decades thereafter -- inspired Price to break the rules, and the most binding of these was the integrity of the glaze: all color on a ceramic object had to come either from the clay itself or from the glazes that, through firing, were bonded to it. But this was California, the territory of outlaw artificial color, metal flake, Duco gloss, candy stripes, epoxy bases. Price didn't go for the mass and roughness of Voulkos' work; he wanted a more concise style of object, perverse in its craftsmanship and highly mannered.

Accordingly, by the early 1960s, Price, now 57, had started using auto enamels and industrial pigments along with the low-fired glazes on his work. These gave an extreme density of color and, unlike in traditional pottery, a relentlessly inorganic and sinister look to his "eggs," enameled clay shells with weird lobes like giblets or tongues merging from fissures in their surface -- an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers aesthetic," as someone remarked at the time. Its payoff would come 20 years later, with pieces like Big Load, 1988, and Stamp of the Past, 1989, ceramic chunks like blotched meteorites, with sharply cut surfaces of an eye-straining chrome yellow in which a perfectly square black hole opens on the mysterious emptiness inside.

A series of cups followed the eggs, through the 1960s and '70s. In a sense the cups were Price's bread-and-butter work -- they were popular, and no California collector's knickknack shelf was complete without one -- and yet they were consistently inventive and spry, displaying a constant buzz of fantasy and a growing mastery of color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s abstracted the shape of a chair into a penitential parody of itself. Not only Cubism gets its share of parody, but other styles as well -- Frank Stella's paintings or, in a tiny architectural piece with a tower and a tilted ramp called De Chirico's Bathhouse, 1980, the theatrical piazzas of Italian "metaphysical painting."

All these references would seem rather a heavy load for small clay objects to carry, but one of the virtues of Price's work is that it never seems pompous and only rarely trivial. Some of the time, it mocks itself. Certain Prices look like exquisitely glazed versions of stuff you would want to scrape off your boot. And what about Wart Cup, 1968, for a title? One can't claim too much for his cups, which is a relief in a culture that tends to claim far too much for its paintings, but the whole show in Minneapolis is infused with an educated sense of style that consorts finely with the craftsmanship and laconic wit. Price's sensibility does not so much come out of Pop as emerge, on its own terms, from the same ground, becoming both demotic and superrefined. As the Faberge of Funk, he has no rivals.