My 1967 Article On Interpersonal Relationships : July 2017

Round Pot Pottery, Salt Glazed Ceramic Sculpture and the Modular Woman In Western Art
Bernard Pyron

https://craftcouncil.org/post/new-ceramic-presence
"Rose Slivka's groundbreaking article on ceramics, published in 1961 shortly after she became editor of Craft Horizons , highlighted the movement of clay artists toward the abstract. Peter Voulkos and others, like Paul Soldner and John Mason, used the medium to create very challenging work. Colors, shapes, textures, and size were juxtaposed in sculptural work against classical functional forms."
"Rose Slivica in 1961 wrote that "The current pull of potters into sculpture - in every material and method, including welded metals, cast bronze, plaster, wood, plastic, etc - is a phenomenon of the last five years. So great a catalyst has been American painting that the odyssey from surface to form has been made through its power."

"As a fusion between the two dimensional and the three dimensional, American pottery is realizing itself as a distinct art form. It is like a barometer of our esthetic situation."

It may be that the editors of Artforum in 1964 were aware of Rose Slivica's 1961 article on the American ceramic sculpture movement becoming an art form. This awareness may be a big reason why they published an article by an unknown professor at a Wisconsin State College, called the Tao and Dada of Recent American Ceramic Art,.I knew who Rose Slivica was as the editor of Crafts Horizon, but I do not remember reading her 1961 article on the new ceramic presence.

Rose Slivka's Craft Horizons article on Americam ceramic sculpture having become a distinct art form came out in 1961. My article in an Art Journal - Art Forum - about American Ceramic Sculpture as a new art form growing from Dada and Tao was published in 1964. The article I quote from below, Artweek, came out in 2012 and in 2015. It was written by By Dr. Cecile Whiting in 2012 and called " Contemporary Art, Studio Ceramics, and the Clay Revolution in Los Angeles. Dada refers to a brief art movement which came before the Surrealist moement and involved many of the same artists. Dada came out of World War I in 1914 to 1918 and was an irrationalist rebellion against the mainstream culture which produced that war.
The French poet Apollinaire first used the word surrealism to describe Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Parade, in 1917 as " ...a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness."
Tao is the creative spirit which was behind the influence of Chinese Tang and Sung Dynasty pottery upon some American studio potters of the fifties and sixties, at a time which overlapped the influence of New York Abstract Expressionism applied to the process of making ceramic sculpture. Harvey Littleton, for example, in the fifties was making round pot pottery somewhat in the spirit of Sung Dynasty Chinese pottery, but also of the American Midwest spirit in the fifties. Peter Voulkos, on the other hand, was beginning to create a new American form of ceramic sculpture by merging the processes of ceramic creation - wheel throwing, and slab building of relatively large pieces with the aesthetic of Abstract Expression developed in painting.
I have a color slide of Harvey Littleton and Peter Voulkos standing together at a workshop that Voulkos gave in 1962 in the pottery studio in the basement of the University of Wisconsin Education Building. Voulkos that night played his guitar in our house on Bittersweet Place in Madison's Crestwood. Later, Harvey Littleton, my pottery teacher, became a pioneer in the studio glass blowing movement.
The idea then was to create forms never seen before based upon a spontaneous momentary process of ceranic creation by potters who had already mastered the processes of throwing large forms on a potter's wheel and rolling out slabs of clay on a table which were cut and formed into sculpture without much pre-planning.
http://artweek.la/issue/january-26-2015/article/contemporary-art-studio-ceramics-and-the-clay-revolution-in-los-angeles
"Only art critic Bernard Pyron, writing in Artforum, sought to characterize within the pages of a major art journal the whole of the ceramic scene in southern California, rather than just the clay revolution. He described two competing directions open to ceramists and granted some aesthetic merit to both: “During the last twenty years, American studio potters have revived some of clay’s meaning, first by creating pots with a quiet beauty to be used as vases and tableware, and later by giving clay a new life through abstract ceramic sculpture.”3 Pyron demarcated a divide between functional pots and ceramic sculpture, between mass-produced and unique objects. His bias toward abstract ceramic sculpture was evident: he praised potters in the mid- and late 1950s who, inspired by contemporary painting and sculpture, broke with traditional functional pottery to pursue spontaneous creation, “letting the material itself and the potter’sideasofformarising,partlyunconsciously,duringtheactofthrowing, determine the final form.” While acknowledging the beauty of serviceable ceramics, Pyron singled out Voulkos as the artist who raised the pot “above the level of craftsmanship” to create “sculpture.”"
My article which is the subject here is at: The Tao And Dada Of Recent American Ceramic Art" , Bernard Pyron, Artforum, Volume II, March 1964.

Above is a piece I made in 1964 which has a conventional glaze. The photo is out of Craft Horizons, May-June, 1964, Page 55.

Above: Two of My Salt Glazed Wheel Thrown Pieces of the Sixties.

All the parts of the pieces put together to make these forms were thrown on a potter's wheel. No slab pieces were used.

My short story in Quixote Magazine, Volume 2, Number 7, 1967, The Night of the Great Salt, was written in 1964 and based upon our actual night salt firings of a small salt glazing kiln kiln and my larger more conventional kiln in Whitewater, Wisconsin. "We drove up to Old Main on the Hill and viewed the University as a wrecking machine...Inside the kiln we could see several of Claything's critters, some dead with their feet sticking up.....
We opened the kiln and shoved in wet salt. A small explosion shook the neighborhood and clouds of white chloride gas billowed out....The salt cloud hung low in the night sky.........,..
Never forget that the University is like a mad dentist. It opens the mind and then slams it shut...
Never doubt.....topple the wrecking machine, and tranqualize the mad dentist."
Though I mentioned driving up to Old Main on the Hill, a reference to Whitewater State College in Wisconsin, I was talking about viewing the University of Wisconsin at Madison as the Wrecking Machine, and as the Mad Dentist. At about that time in 1963 I had seen large wrecking machines tearing down two story houses in a block just west of University Avenue near South Park Street. The University as a wrecking machine which opens the mind and then slams it shut was more of a prophecy than an observation of something in 1964.
I started in pottery at the Madison, Wisconsin Vocational School in the late fifties, and the next year I took pottery in the art department of the University of Wisconsin - under Harvey Littleton.

Clayton Bailey, myself, Monona Rossol, occasionally Gloria Welniak and Carlon Welton, with some other art majors, were part of a group who met regularly to make improvised music based on medieval, far eastern and American folk music with a music major, Dennis Murphy, as our leader. Bailey and I were not musicians at all but Dennis taught us to play mouth bows which we made. Bailey still makes them.

Later in the mid sixties,Bailey and I taught at Whitewater State University, where I had a joint appointment in art and education.

I remember one time when Tom McLaughlin got married to a women whose name I have forgotten, but she was also a pottery student under Littleton. The Littletons were away and let the newly wed couple stay at their house out in the country southwest of Madison. Bailey and I with our wives parked on the road near the Littleton driveway and Bailey and I slipped up to the house and suddenly appeared under the kitchen window.
In the spring and summer of 1962 Clay Bailey lived in a rented place out in that same area , but not as far as Littleton's, where we had a music session around a large campfire with horns blowing, Dennis Murphy playing his sitar, Monona Rossol wailing or singing, some pounding on the drums etc and me occasionally blowing a Wolf Horn, that is, a horn from a Texas Longhorn cow which was used by hound doig men in Texas to call in their dogs to camp at the end of a Wolf Race. Raleigh Williams was also present.

I learned to build down draft gas fired stoneware pottery kilns when the larger kiln was built in about 1961 in the University of Wisconsin pottery shop under the Education Building. I built one in Crestwood of Madison and another in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Bailey built a smaller salt glazing kiln beside it.

In the mid sixties I returned to Madison and was in the Educational Psychology Department and took art courses, I took three semesters of life drawing. The Art Department chairman insisted I take Life Drawing courses though he did not have me start with the usual drawing course that did not use live models. I took a course in sculpture in the Art Department at this time.

Briefly I made figure sculpture. But I may have lost photos of the female human figure work I did in the mid sixties after I learned to make life size rubber molds backed by plaster. I used a form of plastic for the figure sculpture I did then. The plastic was in a liquid form and poured into the rubber molds to harden. I used a system of iron rods to support the clay as the form from which I made the latex rubber molds. I painted or sprayed on the liquid latex upon the clay form.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nuba/hd_nuba.htm
"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as esteem for classical culture ran high, so too did the prestige of the nude. The academies of the period directed young artists to develop their skills by drawing the naked form of ancient sculpture as well as live models, and many successful artists continued such exercises long after their student days."

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Round Pot Pottery, Salt Glazed Ceramic Sculpture and the Modular Woman In Western Art