The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 22
Led by Voulkos, they and others created a California-based
revolution in pottery from the mid-1950s into the late
1960s. Several of the Otis group followed Voulkos into
Abstract Expressionism and Frimkess went along for the
ride for a few years. But in the sixties he emerged, like
Price, as a Pop artist as we see in The Marriage of Auntie
Susanna (1977), in which classicism beds postmodernism.
After a long period of studying Greek vases at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Frimkess decided that the potters
must have thrown with dry clay to achieve such thin
Adrian Saxe, Untitled (Black Antelope Jar), 1984–85.
walls. It is an implausible thesis, nonetheless he used this
technique, using as little water as possible to lubricate the
truth to materials. Saxe was able to give a fresh voice to
clay. This practice tore up and bloodied his hands, but did,
court porcelain—one of the most original and inventive
admittedly, produce paper-thin, weightless-seeming large
periods in history—and bring it into the contemporary
vessels. The Auntie Susanna form, based on a Greek pour-
art arena, a zone where Saxe is greatly admired. Saxe
ing vessel, is one step in an uncompleted odyssey that the
saw these elaborate, costly bibelots manufactured by
artist calls “the melting pot.” He planned to make pots for
the royal porcelain factories of the kings, queens, and
every major ceramic culture and then after some years, to
princes of Europe as a means to achieve several ends:
synthesize these down to one ultimate pot that incorporat-
engaging the viewer in a dialogue about power and
ed all the content from these clay signifiers. It meshed with
luxury, unleashing extraordinary material hedonism with
his worldview, which was for mankind to all emerge the
lush glazes and precious over-glazes, and taking on the
same café au lait hue through colorblind lovemaking. Sad-
modernist’s (largely bogus) embargo against beauty in art.
ly, he developed multiple sclerosis and by the mid-seventies, lost his ability to throw and the program was blunted.
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Untitled (Black Antelope Jar) (1984–85) is the sum total of
several different gold glazes and black outcrops of schist-like
Adrian Saxe, from the Los Angeles Chouinard School,
faux rocks tipped here and there with splashes of the royal
mined another side of history, eighteenth-century court
blue of Sèvres. The finials offer a juxtaposition of “then and
porcelain. Until postmodernism became popular circa
now:” one is a baroque curlicue, the other an industrial-age
1980 this was considered a decadent, failed period of
cogwheel. They signify the movement of power from the titled
ceramics history by the pottery community—too effete,
to the new wealthy, the industrialist. The sculpted antelope on
mannered, and distant from the arts and crafts edicts of
the lid represents the glory of the hunt in eighteenth-century