Telling an Endless Story With Clay

John Mason emerged in the mid-1950s as a leader of Los Angeles’ ceramics revolution. Caught in the spell of Peter Voulkos at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design), he was part of a group that transformed clay from a traditional craft medium to an adventurous means of expression.

“The thing about Pete is that he had a vision,” Mason said. “Working in clay was an art involvement that was open-ended, and it was there for the doing. He really believed in large scale and exploring the possibilities and the limitations of the material. The interesting thing is, his vision allowed people to go in their own direction.”

Mason made his mark with massive roughhewn pots, walls, towers, monolithic rectangles, crosses and X-shapes. He switched to conceptual installations of firebrick in the early 1970s and returned to clay a decade later, making geometric vessels and sculptures. During the last four decades, he has compiled an impressive exhibition record at museums and galleries, but he hasn’t achieved as much recognition as might be expected.

That’s partly because Voulkos’ energy, talent and charisma eclipsed everyone around him. But Mason himself is partly responsible for his rather shadowy presence. He moved from Los Angeles to New York in 1974 and back again in 1982, extending the range of his work but also disconnecting himself from his supporters. In addition--like most artists who deserve more notice than they receive--Mason would rather do his work than promote it.

He isn’t complaining. He’s pouring all his energy into his next exhibition, opening Saturday at the Frank Lloyd Gallery at Bergamot Station. “I was up until 4 o’clock this morning,” Mason said last week, walking past the kiln in his cavernous downtown studio into an open area where towering sculptures awaited glazing and a final firing. The modular constructions, reaching up to 6 feet in height, will form the nucleus of his show, “Spatial Concepts.” He also plans to display a few geometric vessels and drawings of monumental sculpture.

Dressed in jeans, a denim jacket, white tennis shoes and an olive brown hat, he settled into a swivel chair to talk about his work. Approaching his 70th birthday, Mason is vibrant and muscular. But in the warehouse-like ambience--furnished with long plywood tables, metal storage units, vast shelves of ceramic vessels and stacks of cardboard boxes filled with paper maquettes--he looks more like an elf than like one of the art world’s heavy lifters.

“Without a forklift, I’m out of business,” he said, confessing that moving his art often requires mechanical assistance.

Though identified with Los Angeles, Mason was born in 1927 in Madrid, Neb., and spent his early years in North Platte. His parents separated when he was 10, and he moved to Nevada with his father, who traveled throughout the state to work on construction projects. Mason picked up useful skills from his dad, but his interest was art. “I knew early that was the thing I preferred to do over everything else,” he said.

Determined to go to art school, he headed for Los Angeles in 1949 and enrolled at Otis. After a couple of years, he transferred to Chouinard Art Institute, where he began to work with clay. “The resources were very limited, so it required a lot of digging to get a little bit of information or skill,” he said. “I’m amazed that I continued, considering what little support was available.”

Working with traditional forms, he experimented with painted and textured surfaces. The results were tentative, but his reaction to clay was powerful. “It was more than just liking it,” he said. “I knew I had found something important and that I would be able to realize something. It was not just sensual pleasure. It was, ‘This is a material that has meaning for me, for a long time.’ That insight was important and it’s what really maintained my interest.”

While Mason was learning to use a pottery wheel, Voulkos was emerging in the Bay Area. In 1954, when Voulkos was hired to set up a ceramics program at Otis, Mason joined him. “I worked as a designer [for a dinnerware company] during the day and attended night classes,” he said. “Pete was around late, so I got very little sleep for a couple of years.”

Although Voulkos was the catalyst of the clay revolution, change was in the air, Mason said. “There was a feeling that the time had come to do something else,” he said. “The question was, what it would be, what form it would take and who would do it?”

Mason’s breakthrough came in 1955, in vessels that bore his stamp of vigorous form and lively surface. Within a few years, he was building fired clay walls that earned nationwide critical praise and curatorial interest.

“There was some prejudice,” he said of the struggle to win fine arts acceptance for works of clay. “But I got a lot of support very early. People were interested in the work and wrote about it, and it did get exhibited. I did not get a lot of support as far as sales were concerned. We kind of joke about it, saying, ‘It’s in the wine cellar. The work has to be 20 years old before people want it.’ ”

Mason had one-man exhibitions at the avant-garde Ferus Gallery in 1959, ’61 and ’63 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York also took a keen interest, displaying his work in “Fifty California Artists” (1962), “1964 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture,” “200 Years of American Sculpture” (1976) and “Ceramic Sculpture, Six Artists” (1981).

Mason continually pushed the boundaries of his work, but he made a major change in the early ‘70s. “After the L.A. County exhibition, I had reached a point where I knew I could continue on a track that I had laid out, but I didn’t want to do that,” he said. “So I restructured my approach and started using firebrick.”

Instead of fabricating art from clay, he began to use ready-made materials for conceptual installations. The first of them appeared in a major exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1974, just before Norton Simon renovated the bankrupt institution and transformed it into a showcase for his own collection.

Mason was clearly a major player on the local art scene by then, but he had become disenchanted with Los Angeles. “Things didn’t seem to have the same vitality,” he said. In 1974, he moved to New York and began working on a project that came to fruition in 1978 as “The Hudson River Series.” Organized by the Hudson River Museum--then directed by Richard Koshalek, currently director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art--the show consisted of 10 floor-bound installations of firebrick in six museums. Each work was designed for a specific site and constructed of local materials, either on loan or rented.

“The experience they offer is both systematic and sensuous, at once highly rational and elusively eccentric,” critic Rosalind Krauss wrote of the series in the exhibition catalog. “Assured and beautiful, they join themselves to that class of work known as post-Modernist sculpture.”

It appeared that Mason had given up clay, along with Los Angeles, but he kept his downtown studio when he moved to New York. In 1982, “feeling the pull to get back into fired clay pieces,” he returned to Los Angeles and began to make twisted geometric ceramic containers known as “torque vessels.” They seemed to represent a striking change from “The Hudson River Series” but actually continued Mason’s interest in geometric structures and movement. The vessels, in turn, led to the new vertical pieces.

“I have always had more ideas than I could ever execute in clay, and they continue to come, even today,” he said. “I realized very early in my experience with clay: Here was an endless story. The challenges and surprises remain constant.”

These days, he’s reaping rewards from being a vintage artist. “Collectors have really changed,” he said. “When I made some of those first sculptural pieces, they would say, ‘Oh, those are museum works. We could never put them in our house.’ Now that doesn’t seem to be a barrier.” The market for his massive walls is more limited. “But there’s even interest in those now,” he said. “They’ve been in the wine cellar long enough.”

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“JOHN MASON: SPATIAL CONCEPTS,” Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica. Dates: Opens Saturday. Gallery hours 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Ends March 8. Phone: (310) 264-3866.