In the Sixties Some Potters Became Ceramic Sculptors
Bernard Pyron
"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."
The link to this article is https://craftcouncil.org/post/new-ceramic-presence?fbclid=IwAR0VxKD1LanfVbGTFdUL4Zhhr43m69CYVTIjqmfEA9srNatPck6eK1hsdL0
"Rose Slivka 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."................" Slivka, Rose. "Erasing the Line Separating the Arts from Crafts," Smithsonian, March, 1978. pp. 86-93.
In 1964 Artforum published an article of mine called , "The Tao and Dada of Recent American Ceramic Art," Artforum, March, 1964. pp. 41-43. Bernard Pyron.
In the early and middle sixties it was unusual for a fine arts journal to publish an article on ceramics, since ceramics was then considered to be only crafts. Later I was called an art critic
I began my 1964 article in Artforum by writing about clay as a medium. "As a material of artistic communication clay has an old and deep meaning for man. Not only did he use clay, along with wood,stone and straw for his first tools and utensils, but clay sculpture preceded stone sculpture in some cultures and the knowledge of firing processes was necessary for the development of bronze casting."
I mentioned the tendency of people "to separate "fine art" from "minor art," or mere crafts, And I say that "Once one has gotten the feeling of the clay, preconceived notions of "good" or traditional form can get in the way of spontaneous creation, of letting the material itself, and the potter's ideas of form arising partly unconsciously, during the act of throwing, determine the final form."
Many American potters "wanted to express process even more than the Japanese."
"A large sculptural piece by Peter Voulkos (Fig 10) is expressive of the throwing process, the slab-building process, the process pf modeling with the hands or tools and the process of simply picking up bits of scrap clay and sticking them on."
The article title, "The Tao and Dada of Recent American Ceramic Art" is about the influence of Chinese Tang and Sung dynasty pottery and the Taoism which was behind this pottery on many American potters of the fifties and sixties. The Dada art movement went on briefly right before it turned into Surrealism, which was a major influence upon New York Abstract Expressionist painting on American ceramic sculpture that Rose Slivica wrote about in her 1961 Crafts Horizon article."
http://www.chicagoreader.com/ …/art-facts-erasing-t…/Content…
" American Studio Ceramics: Innovation and Identity, 1940 To 1979, Martha Dexter Lynn. On page 364, footnote number 32, Lynn quotes Cecile Whiting Common Ground: Ceramics In Southern California, 1945- 1975,, 2012, saying that "The art critic Bernard Pyron tartly noted three years after Slivika's article that even the fine art world was aware of the ferment in ceramics."
Paul Soldner, one of the potters mentioned above. who led the move from traditional round pot wheel thrown pottery to ceramic sculpture, was a World War II Veteran, who was in Patton's Third Army. Soldner said that the point was to make a pot never seen before. Clayton Bailey, who took part in the workshop on alternative sources of fuel for the firing of ceramic kilns in the Student Union Auditorium at the University of University of Wisconsin in 1974, had been taught to make pottery on the potter's wheel by Harvey Littleton. who was also my pottery teacher. But Bailey was having fun in his "demonstration" of the use of horse manure to fire a pottery kiln. He was "pulling the legs" of the potters gathered that day in Madison. Clayton Bailey had a stroke when he was 80. As far as I know, he is still alive. but not fully recovered from the stroke. Clayton Bailey was a member of the Dennis Murphy Gang in Madison during the early sixties, who made improvised music. Like me, Bailey was not a musician, but we both took part in the sessions by playing drums, mouth-bows and Jew's Harps. Clayton Bailey and Dennis Murphy are written up in wikipedia
Mouth-Bow and Jew's Harp music in the early sixties: See: https://archive.org/details/MUSICOF5710BittersweetPlace_201902
MUSIC OF 5710 Bittersweet Place, Music of Dennis Murphy Gang Early Sixties
Bernard Pyron On Mouth Bow and Clayton Bailey On Jew's Harp With Raleigh Williams on Guitar
https://archive.org/details/MUSICOF5710BittersweetPlace_201902
