ART REVIEW : Peter Voulkos’ Revolution in Clay

Peter Voulkos doesn’t throw pots, he builds them. Yes, he uses a potter’s wheel on which to spin the initial clay forms; but the homely, traditional method of wheel-thrown pottery is soon overturned, as Voulkos stacks, slices, layers and peels apart the clay. The result: aggressive, chunky vessels of uncommon liveliness.

He’s been doing it for 40 years. Voulkos, 72, is the well-known artist who engineered a revolution between 1954 and 1959, when he headed the ceramics department at the Otis College of Art and Design. Otis clay, as the legendary work produced by Voulkos, John Mason, Michael Frimkess, Henry Takemoto and several others has come to be called, represented the first artistic movement in Los Angeles to generate sustained national enthusiasm.

As such it established a critical foundation for the city’s extraordinary artistic legacy in subsequent years. Despite this claim to fame, Voulkos’ art is not often encountered here. His last museum retrospective was mounted in 1978 and came nowhere near L.A. And the list of selected solo exhibitions in “The Art of Peter Voulkos,” which opened last week at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, shows but a single L.A. outing in the last 20 years--in 1986 at the Garth Clark Gallery (where else?).

All of which conspires to make the Newport show an exhibition of unusual interest. And just a tad disappointing. For although it begins in the late 1950s and continues into the present, “The Art of Peter Voulkos” is not a full-dress retrospective.

Instead, the survey turns on relatively recent work, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, which is bolstered by selected examples of Voulkos’ earlier output in clay, bronze and paint on canvas. Recent Voulkos is certainly not without interest, but early Voulkos is a thrill ride.

Here, you board the roller coaster mid-whoop. The exhibition starts with eight ceramic works made between 1958 and 1962--late in the Otis revolution, and a period of unusual turmoil for the artist. He had begun to make dramatic, large-scale ceramic sculptures in his Glendale Boulevard studio early in 1958, while the year concluded with a double bang: an unprecedented solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum and a forced resignation from Otis.

The exact circumstances of the Otis ouster have never been fully explained, but it seems likely to have been a case of a teacher with an exploding artistic career running headlong into the narrower institutional demands of a school. It has been plausibly suggested that Voulkos wanted to make art, while Otis Director Millard Sheets wanted him to prepare students for careers in the growing aerospace industry, where scientifically driven ceramic technology was proving useful.

Whatever the case, the show at Newport, which was organized by the Oakland Art Museum, pretty much begins with Voulkos’ departure from Los Angeles and his move north to UC Berkeley. He taught there for the next 26 years.

Otis clay tends to be blurrily remembered as an attempt to mix ceramics with painting and sculpture, and “The Art of Peter Voulkos” holds to that muzzy view. Monumental vessels are emphasized to bolster the sculptural interpretation, while two large paintings in the first room show Voulkos’ affinity for the gestural mannerisms of Abstract Expressionism, with its zeal for considering the creation of a work of art as an improvisational adventure.

“Little Big Horn” (1959) is the most impressive of the early clay works, a craggy monolith whose titular allusion to the landscape where Gen. George Custer met his fate, pointedly infers a romantic, life-or-death idea of art as battleground. Just over five feet tall, the muscular clay sculpture is composed of a variety of vessel forms that have been joined, carved, stabbed, hacked, scraped, pocked and piled into an abstract structure, somewhere between a fortress and a mountain. Rudely glazed in dull graphite-black, watery blue and dirty white, which emphasizes the structural discontinuity of its assorted forms, it is everything traditional American ceramics of the 20th century are not.

The long-reigning standard against which pottery had been measured was a naturalized aesthetic, prizing harmonious balance among form, function, shape, decoration and surface. Voulkos exploded it into a tortuous field of edgy improvisations and unexpected dissonances.

While there’s an important truth to the mainstream characterization of Otis clay as “Abstract Expressionist ceramics” or “ceramic sculpture,” Voulkos’ radical work affected subsequent painting and sculpture not one whit. Instead, his revolution overthrew the conservative tradition of pottery, which hasn’t been the same since.

His pots are still pots, but they are pots transformed by the hand, eye and mind of an artist, rather than a conventional potter. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, when Voulkos set clay aside and turned his attention to making bronze sculpture, did he get into trouble.

How much more tradition-bound can a sculptural medium get than bronze, especially during the artistically dynamic 1960s? Voulkos’ big bronzes are adept--and dull. Long, twisting, tubular shapes ending in segmented cubic or spherical forms unfold across the landscape, in a marriage of improvisational lightness with industrial manufacture that is all very tasteful and important-looking. Which is to say, thoroughly corporate.

Voulkos didn’t do much ceramic work during these years--mostly demonstration pieces, like perfect souffles turned out by a master chef for adoring cooking classes--but since 1980 he’s returned to clay, using a wood-fire method related to Japanese raku. In the show, the principal form that’s repeated in more than a dozen monumental recent works is called a “stack,” which consists of a hollow, 250-pound earthen mound topped by a cylindrical neck.

A hill crowned by a tower, an oven topped by a smokestack, a womb surmounted by a phallus--the stack is a sculptural form that readily invokes descriptors like primeval and aboriginal. Add the ancient process for making ceramic vessels--earth mixed with water, then transformed through fire--and the possibilities for romantic myth-making are plain.

Two things make the stacks unexpectedly compelling. One is Voulkos’ sheer technical skill, which is flat-out prodigious. (Watch him at work in the accompanying videotape. Wow!) The other is the sweetly melancholic sense you have of witnessing the end of an era, which is being played out in the ritual repetitions of Voulkos’ late work.

Voulkos’ distinctly masculinist impulses, which from the beginning sought to break up the effete associations of traditional art pottery, are hopelessly dated and sentimentalized in the post-1980 work that is the focus of this show. But he’s an artist deeply of his time, which is the 1950s. There’s no use expecting his work to reconfigure itself according to tenets that, after his pioneering breakthrough, found their way into the foreground.

* Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (714) 759-1122, through Feb. 25. Closed Mondays.