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... form of plates "with holes for people who don't like soup, " ice buckets "with cracks that leak out the water so all you have is ice, " bowls "to put your old socks in. " (Dormer, p. 118) For Voulkos, the crack is the destiny of the clay, the event within the object. "I can't make a bowl without a crack. All my ice buckets are cracked. I got a lot of broken plates that I glue back. I like that line. " (Dormer, p. 119) During the same period he made over 200 stacks, 4 feet high and under, and 17 major sculptures 5 to 8 feet high. The Rocking Pot was made with discarded slabs attached as rockers to the foot of an actual pot; here Voulkos satirizes one of the cardinal rules of ceramics: as every potter knows, a good pot is supposed to be stable on its beautifully spun foot.
It is not supposed to rock. Voulkos left Montana to teach in the summer of 1953 at the experimental Black Mountain College in Asheville, N. C. , where he had his first encounter with members of the New York School -- Esteban Vicente, Jack Tworkov, de Knowing -- and others including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, M. C.
Richards and Charles Olson. He also heard about Jackson Pollock, who came from Wyoming. Following a trip to New York, Voulkos returned home a changed man. (Belgrad, p. 180) In 1954 he was invited to teach at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (now the Otis College of Art and Design). Los Angeles was ready for Peter Voulkos.
Soon the basement of the Otis Art Institute became the gathering place for the most creative and productive group of clay artists in the country, a workshop in which students and teacher shared experience, exchanging knowledge in an ambience of give-and-take, camaraderie and good times. It was an irreverent group, unafraid to break the rules (after first learning them), inventing themselves by reinventing the game. Adapting the high Zen art of finishing a Sumi-ink-and-brush drawing in no more than two minutes, the bad boys of the basement made a small modification. They applied it to the making of a teapot and started a competition as to who could make the ugliest teapot in the fastest time, with a maximum of two minutes.
Among the people who passed through the Voulkos workshop, now known throughout the world, are Kenneth Price, James Melcher t, John Mason, Paul Soldier, Billy Al Bengston, Jun Kaneko, Ron Nagle, Michael Frimkess, Richard Shaw, Stephen De Stable and the late Robert Arneson. (Lebow, p. 37) Beginning in 1956, for several years Voulkos came to New York every summer to teach at Columbia University. He rented the studio of Herman Cherry on Cooper Square. At night he hung out at the Cedar Street Tavern with all the other artists of the era who were not yet summering in East Hampton or Provincetown. The New York School artists he got to know -- some of them friends from Black Mountain, plus many others -- were important to him. In 1957 and ' 58, as Voulkos reached for larger and larger scale, he began to experiment with thrown forms as volumes which he paddled to change and vary their shapes, then balanced and cantilevered on a skeleton of basic cylinders, building them around the central core. These developed into a series of 16 massive, voluptuous sculptures -- perhaps the largest enclosed, self-contained, in-the-round ceramic works to be done in our time.
Assembled from basic pottery forms, the individual parts and the way they were joined dictated the final consolidated form. He piled them up as far as he could make them go. He often worked on as many as four sculptures of the series at one time, with different elements in different phases of completion, always in motion as he troweled, cut and welded his way into the clay. The robust, billowing sculptures collapsed repeatedly; sometimes they even blew up in the kiln, but Voulkos persisted.
These stoneware sculptures included Little Big Horn and Flying Back. He won the Rodin Prize at the first Paris Biennale in 1959 with Black Bulerlas, a work about 5 feet high that consisted of some 30 sections. (Belgrad, p. 211) The culmination of this phase is the 8 -foot-high Gallas Rock, for which he received the commission from Digby and Julia Gallas in 1959; he completed the piece in 1961. It contains all the vocabulary and spirit of his life's work up to then, and all the elements of his work to come. It is composed of over 100 thrown and slab pieces attached to a series of central core cylinders.
It was installed and is still on view in the sculpture park of the Frederick S. Wight Galleries of the University of California at Los Angeles. Gallas Rock represents a major straggle over a two-year period. All its components hold on to each other with the strength of the grid and the power of the labyrinth. It is an amazing achievement of engineering.
Voulkos tries to explain how he did it; as he speaks, he seems still to be surprised by himself and by the piece. "The basis of that sculpture, and the smaller ones that preceded it, is the core cylinder inside the slabs. There is a lot of construction inside -- stacked cylinders to support a lot of weight -- sometimes several cylinders at the bottom, outside and inside grew together, building on themselves and each other. I was working in such a way that I had to relate to everything at the same time and keep the spontaneity. " (Belgrad, p. 226) The Los Angeles years were the most exciting, intense, obsessive and productive of Voulkos' career, and sparked a clay movement that spread throughout the country and the world, continuing in its varying modes of experimentation and stylistic diversity to this day. The inevitable clash between the Voulkos group and the Otis Art Institute administration finally took place in the fall of 1959. Voulkos was fired, and was immediately invited to join the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. First, however, he had a one-man exhibition in the penthouse of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Peter See.
At that time, his work was largely ignored in New York, with the exception of a significant but voluble group of fans that included Noguchi, David Smith, Cherry, Matsumi Kanemitsu and Louise Nevelson (who was herself working in clay at the time), as well as his Black Mountain College friends, especially Cage and Cunningham. But the New York art world was in general not ready to pay attention. His show passed with little notice. When he returned from New York, he moved to Berkeley and tackled the next be beginning -- a foray into bronze casting made possible by the university's studio equipment. At Berkeley, where he was to remain for about 30 years, he approached casting with the same obsessive dedication as he first gave to clay. For the next 10 years he made bronze his major focus, using the basic, well-engineered methods he applied to all materials -- prefabricating his primary forms, stockpiling them on huge shelves in his new studio on Third Street in Oakland, then composing them in his spontaneous work style, putting them together, taking them apart, finally welding the forms in place.
Once again, Voulkos attracted students from all over the country. As with his clay, he improvised within a vocabulary of known forms -- geometric T sections, domed shapes, hollow forms often cast from molds taken from inner tubes (a fact reflected in his titles, Pirelli and Firestone). Altogether in this period, he turned out 17 monumental bronzes. From 1967 to 1971 Voulkos worked on and completed his 30 -foot-high San Francisco Hall of Justice commission, a combination of platforms and serpentine tubular forms, reminiscent of musical stanzas with notes. The 40 -foot-long bronze, Mr. Ishi, installed at the Oakland Museum, was completed in 1970. (White, p. 15) Later on Voulkos' ongoing involvement with cocaine took on serious significance.
He had originally looked to the drug for the energy and insight he held so dear. He felt it contributed to his work. With time, the markings on the clay became more agitated and more aggressive. Some of these pieces came to be recognized as his "cocaine drawings. " From 1986 to 1989 he was unable to work, partially because his addiction to cocaine and alcohol had exhausted him. There were those who thought he would not recover. In order to continue, he had to walk away, forget it and start over, if he could.
After three years, one day it all came back. The new plates are larger and more aggressive than the ones that preceded them. The long process of wood firing to which Voulkos has been committed since 1978 requires a heavier, more rugged form than those originally spun out for firing in the gas kiln. The plates are now thrown from about 75 pounds of clay with foot, rim and surface thicker and heavier to endure the long firing process. Surface marking and drawing appear more active than ever, with the color and ash glaze more variegated -- blacks, purples, ochers, rusts -- and the slits, slashes and scoring bolder. (White, p. 16) The stacks, in particular, have increased to over 250 pounds of clay on the average, with generally three to four cylinders stacked on top of each other in various combinations until they reach the desired height. He unites them by making one slash from top to bottom, thereafter patching fragments, hacking and gouging, carving and slicing, puncturing, plugging, feeling out the clay.
In the last few years there are recognizable motifs of pyramid and pot shapes. Today, Voulkos remains an anomaly, teetering somewhere between the self-taught outsider artist, obsessing over his visions, and the sophisticated university-trained, career-focused professional art maker astutely in control of his gallery and museum visibility. Words Count: 3, 384. Bibliography: Belgrad, Daniel, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.
Dormer, Peter, The New Ceramics: Trends and traditions, revised edition, Thames& Hudson, London, 1994. Kit, Gudrun H. , "Peter Voulkos: Ceramics in Action, " Ceramic: Art & Perception, June 1996, pp. 7 - 10. Lebow, Edward, "The Art of Peter Voulkos, " American Craft, February/March 1996, pp. 34 - 39. White, Cheryl, "West Coast Clay: A Conversation with Peter Voulkos, " Artwork, May 1995, pp. 15 - 16.
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