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