Breaking the Abstract Expressionist Narrative
“Failure” is a term that is often linked to feelings of stigmatization or even fear. But what if it can be approached as a strategy that can be productively applied towards one's creative practice? Peter Voulkos was a contemporary American ceramist from the West Coast who applied such an approach towards his ceramics practice. While Voulkos may be widely regarded as heroic figure in the ceramics field, close examination of his career trajectory reveals that this heroic notion can be traced back to the Cold war, a historic period where America was struggling to establish its national identity, as well as its cultural dominance over Europe and Asia.
During the 1960s, America was in the middle of the Cold War. As the first all-American painting movement, Abstract Expressionism became a means for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to celebrate American identity. To this end, it was widely promoted as a nationalistic movement reflecting connotations of creativity and intellectual freedom. As a result, Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock were framed as national heroes. In order to semiotically place the ceramist on the same heroic pedestal as the Abstract Expressionists, two key figures, namely art critic Rose Slivka and curator John Coplans, aimed to insert Voulkos’ work into the Abstract Expressionist narrative.
In order to justify their association, Slivka and Coplans focused on ceramic pieces that are glazed in an Abstract Expressionistic style. Prominent examples of this are Voulkos' Untitled (1960), featured in Slivka’s 1961 article “The New Ceramic Presence” and Plate (1964), which was featured on the cover of Coplans’ exhibition catalog entitled “Abstract Expressionist Ceramics.” While Voulkos' work does share some overlaps with Abstract Expressionism, I argue that associating Voulkos’ entire ceramic oeuvre with Abstract Expressionism is problematic as it undermined the ability of the avant-garde West Coast Ceramists to establish an independent movement on their own terms. Today, Silvka and Coplans' efforts have resulted in a blanket narrative that obscures other key influences, such as Zen ceramics and American avant-garde music and dance. In other words, this exclusive, self-perpetuating "Abstract Expressonist hero" narrative has led to a crippling lack of criticality in regards to Voulkos scholarship.
Although Slivka referred to Voulkos as an Abstract Expressionist at a later date, her aforementioned article corresponds closely to Harold Rosenberg’s reading of the Abstract Expressionists as “Action Painters.” At the core of her argument, she compares Voulkos’ working approach to clay, in which the material is treated as a surface to be painted on, to the gestural approach of the Post-War American painters. Despite its original persuasiveness, Slivka’s argument fails to acknowledge that brushing is one of the most common methods of glazing. Simpler, circular forms like Voulkos’ Untitled may easily fit into this idea, but a more sculpturally complex piece like Sevillanas (1959) does not. In her enthusiastic attempts to associate Voulkos with Action Painting, Slivka overemphasized the “slashes” and “drips” that the ceramist used on his clay surfaces, claiming that they served to “obliterate” its underlying sculptural form. The art critic’s claim is problematic as it downplayed the logical, methodical aspect of Voulkos' working process that made Sevillanas structurally possible in the first place. In addition, the critic's claim perpetuates traditional western hierarchies of art that attribute precedence to painting over clay. Rather than being respected as an autonomous sculptural material, clay was viewed as a supplementary medium that served as a preparatory modeling material for more prestigious mediums like bronze and marble.
While Rose Slivka was the first art critic to associate Voulkos’ work with the Action Painters, the term “Abstract Expressionist Ceramics” was later coined by John Coplans, who curated a show of the same name at the University of California, Irvine in 1966. Coplan’s group show featured six West Coast ceramists, including Voulkos, whose plate was featured on the exhibition catalogue cover. Like Slivka, Coplans’ eagerness to associate Voulkos’ with Abstract Expressionism suggests that the ceramist’s achievements owed a large debt to this association, thus undermining his revolutionary, medium-specific achievements. This association is further aggravated by the fact that Coplans' exhibition was held almost two decades after the height of Abstract Expressionism. In his attempts to associate Voulkos’ work with the prestige associated with Abstract Expressionism (which was more or less canonized by the late 1960s and therefore, more widely accepted by the American public) Coplans ended up reframing the works of the West Coast ceramists as derivatives of a decades-old painting movement.
Although Voulkos had referred to himself as an Abstract Expressionist at one point, I argue that his most revolutionary works are those that transversed the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism. At the core of my thesis, I propose that it is more productive to see the ceramist as a revolutionary figure that engaged with failure and deconstruction in a medium specific way. To support my thesis, I will discuss Voulkos’ works in light of works by avant-garde composer John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham, who were Voulkos’ colleagues at Black Mountain College in 1953. I will also discuss Voulkos’ works in relationship to Zen ceramics, such as Japanese Kintsugi ware and tea bowls by the famed Japanese potter Shoji Hamada, whom Voulkos met at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana and served under as a temporary assistant.
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