NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Thinking outside the Box Clay, in its wet, malleable state, is fast moving, responding instantly to the touch. It demands spontaneity, speed and the instinct for improvisation. Cheap and abundant, it leaves the artist free to take risks, to waste his material, even to destroy his work with the exhilaration of a kid popping balloons. Over the years, Peter Voulkos has taken this humble material long associated with utility and craft and created a new kind of art. Harnessing destruction as a creative force, he focuses on the character of clay in the course of its breaking up -- its cracks, edges, flaws and fragments. He tests it to see what it will do, how far he can pile it up before it collapses, making of the drama of crumble and fall its vista and vocabulary.
The heaving surfaces evoke earthquakes or volcano spills. Voulkos sheds new light on the role of the clay itself, highlighting its compelling possibilities as a material of transformative power. The story of Peter Voulkos' 50 -year history with clay is the story of the artist's passage from risk to revelation. (Kit, p. 8) By infusing clay with the spirit of Abstract Expressionism, Voulkos created a new art of ceramics in America, charging his material with the energies of Action painting. Like a Pollock canvas, a Voulkos clay work always contains the element of surprise, the implication of violence, and the beauty of the energy it embodies. Abstract Expressionism's relentless demand for a high pitch of spontaneity and on-the-spot improvisation has exacted a high human cost from its practitioners. Although Voulkos has not escaped unscathed, he continues to demonstrate his artistic stamina and to turn out new work of enduring innovation.
His recent sculptures are among the best in his long, complex career. His show at Chicago's Perimeter Gallery in October 1997 presented stacks, ice buckets, plates, monotypes and etchings done since his exhibition at Charles Cowles Gallery in New York the previous year. He also included two of his large Abstract-Expressionist paintings from 1960, Flying Black II and Flying Red, with their impasto of blue, red and black vinyl paint heavily textured with sand. The last couple of years have seen the walls of his cylinders grow more massive and solid around their dark interior voids. Nemo is a 250 -pound stack thrown in four cylindrical sections, fired in summer 1997 in the traditional Japanese wood-burning alabama kilns of Peter Callas, in Belvidere, N.
J. , where Voulkos does most of his firing. About 43 inches tall and 24 inches in diameter, the piece is more than 3 inches thick in its wall at the base. It's worth noting that in order to achieve the thickness and mass Voulkos now wants, he has gone back to hand coiling, a basic and primitive method of pre-wheel forming. (Belgrad, p. 49) The last stack in the Perimeter Gallery, an untitled work, arrived an hour before the opening, in typical Voulkos style. Despite what may seem like daredevil doings, there is not a detail in the creation and production of the work that is not carefully organized and supervised by Voulkos himself.
A unique partnership between the two Peters -- Voulkos and Callas -- makes everything possible. Voulkos, whose home base is Oakland, Calif. , makes his sculptures not only all over the country, but all over the world. Some of the ceramics undergo an unbelievable zigzag odyssey before reaching their destination, as did Nemo. Voulkos made the piece in Colorado, then shipped it to New Jersey for firing, then to Oakland for photography, before it was finally sent to the Chicago gallery. Yakiimo (1996) was fired in Shigaraki, the pottery village in Japan where Voulkos is invited to work as a master every year. Much of Voulkos' esthetic relates to 16 th-century Japanese and Korean ware; he brings a new boldness to the ceramic art at the very heart of both ancient and modern Japan.
Big Missoula, made in 1995 and acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is an amazing stack about 40 inches high on a 30 -inch base; wheel-thrown in four parts, it is a massive elephant's foot of a form. Reeling under its heavy accretion of raw, random patches, scrubby edges, cracks and lumps, stroke and splatter, its outside hide is scarred, its big lip scraped and broken. Inside, the piece has a satiny skin. (Belgrad, p. 70) Scaled like a coat of armor of many disparate pieces clinging crazily to the central cylinder, balancing tier on tier of ragged, ruffled edges climbing to a still aspiring neck, it is a direct descendent of the three-part, over- 3 -foot stacked and epoxied Red River, made early in 1960, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 1954, when the artist made what he jokingly refers to as his first rock-and-roll pot, to the present moment as the latest series of plates with their holes, accretions and incisions are being taken out of the Callas kilns, Voulkos has been making art about what happens in his interaction with the clay, as all events and accidents are incorporated into the new ceramic presence.
Voulkos' methods and innovations were clearly stated from the beginning, and have remained surprisingly consistent over the years. His lifetime achievement award in 1997 from the College Art Association took cognizance of the years of stormy, passionately obsessive work in ceramics as well as in the other mediums and disciplines he practices -- monumental bronze sculpture, painting, lithography, monotype, etching, collage. What is yet to be recognized is the extent to which Voulkos' ravaged clay forms embody a new art synthesis, encompassing and combining the essentials of four traditional disciplines: painting, drawing, sculpture and pottery. His surfaces resemble Abstract-Expressionist painting and drawing, bearing the marks of the gesture and the stroke, the splash, the slash; as sculpture, a Voulkos pot stands as form materialized in space; as pottery, its wheel-thrown references to traditional vessel shapes are distorted and reassembled for new meanings.
Voulkos has put together a hybrid of such stamina and independence that it has enlarged the perceptions of the art world, not to speak of the clay world, which he literally shocked into realizing its own new power. The moment he touched clay in 1949 in his senior year at Montana State College in his native Bozeman, Voulkos recognized it as necessary to him and belonging in his hand. He was a natural. His gift for clay and its affinity for him certainly did not develop because clay work had any prestige in art circles at the time.
Ceramics had no status whatsoever in the art hierarchy, where painting sat imperiously at the apex of the pyramid. He did not, as some art historians have written, enter ceramics through painting, although he was enrolled as a painting major when he first reluctantly took the ceramics course that would allow him to graduate. (Belgrad, p. 114) Voulkos remains as controversial as he was in 1956 when he made his first appearance in the pages of the old Craft Horizons magazine; upon publication of his works in the magazine, its editors (including this writer) were fired -- and then quickly rehired, afar the first blast was out voiced, if not outnumbered, by the volume and intensity of the cheers, including those of the Japanese-American sculptor Islam Noguchi. (Belgrad, p. 117) Even now, it can be tough for the lover of beauty and craft to accept the turmoil and violence of Voulkos' approach. This factor may explain the American Craft Museum's surprising downplaying of the 1995 - 96 survey show, "The Art of Peter Voulkos, " organized by the Oakland Museum, which contained about 70 pieces created between 1956 and 1994, with emphasis on, the wood-fired ceramics made since 1978. The entire show was crowded onto one floor of the American Craft Museum; it was not the installation of an institution proud to show the stuff. And while in 1995 Voulkos was given important shows in Japan, where he is highly thought of, at the Second Museum in Tokyo and the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, that same year the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened its new building with three rooms devoted to California art -- and not a single Voulkos. Throughout his early years, Voulkos absorbed influences as a chameleon takes on the color of his environment -- Picasso, Matisse, ceramist Josep Llorens Artists; Franz Kline's brushy sweep, de Kooning's fragmentation and explosions of form and color, the deliberate crudeness and spontaneity of Zen pottery.
His work evokes Greek Classical pottery culture combined with French modernism and American mud-and-muscle roughhouse, Tiffany with Tom Sawyer. (He also values the skills of carpentry, weaving, shoemaking, plumbing and masonry. ) (Dormer, p. 89) Despite his love of hand work, however, Voulkos did not hesitate to change to industrial materials, tools and technology when he found he could get faster results that were interesting to him. At a time when potters were making a religion of their processes and their glazes, Voulkos shocked the clay world yet again in 1958 with his use of epoxy paint on his clay. "You want red and you get red. It doesn't turn out purple, " he says, referring to the uncertain color effects of firing glazes. (Belgrad, p. 168) Like Willem de Kooning, Voulkos brought a blue-collar workingman's presence to the studio, with his workaday approach to clay and the other disciplines he practices. His gruff manner, somewhere between working stiff and country boy, coexists with an appealing naivete and shyness. It is reinforced by his straight-from-the-shoulder talk accompanied by deliberately corny jokes -- a front to keep the arty out of his art. Voulkos is fascinated by the interplay between clay's fluid, yielding response and its grainy, weighty resistance; the material must be worked rapidly before it dries.
His instinct for the right moment in the drying process, when the clay can be handled in its leather-hard state -- not so dry that it is brittle and not so wet that it will collapse -- and the forms joined and manipulated, is so precise it is uncanny. He actually produces many of his pieces while an audience watches, much like a jazz musician who creates his music while the audience listens. Voulkos enjoys the give and take with his observers. Voulkos' productivity is legendary. From The Rocking Pot, made in 1954, to Gallas Rock, made in 1961, Voulkos produced more than 5, 000 unique pieces in the...
Free research essays on topics related to: ceramics, museum of modern art, museum, abstract expressionism, clay
Research essay sample on Museum Of Modern Art Abstract Expressionism
