Dump and Death: Peter Voulkos and Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture

“Dump and death” elissa auther

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Is it possible to see an echo of Peter Voulkos, however distant, in today’s ceramic sculpture, a field that is enjoying a surge of critical interest in the art world? That was the question I posed to the sculptor Arlene Shechet at the start of my research into Voulkos’s influence on contemporary artistic practice (fig. 1). I was curious to learn what this change in acceptance of ceramics as a sculptural medium might mean for Voulkos’s work, which still remains relatively obscure outside the clay community. I was braced for one of two equally disappointing responses: either a complete lack of interest in (or knowledge of) the history of midcentury American ceramics; or a reference to Lucio Fontana, whose ceramic sculpture has found a new fine art audience that corresponds to the recent rise of in popularity of ceramics in the contemporary art market.1 To my surprise and amusement, however, Shechet replied, “I am the female version of THE MAN.”2 Oh really, I thought? Setting aside the intriguing idea of a female version of Voulkos for the moment, Shechet’s response touches upon a complex of issues that make it hard to talk about a Voulkos legacy in any conventional sense of the word, even if you acknowledge his impact, which she does. Like other modern artists who have upended the conventions of art—from Duchamp to Pollock—Voulkos is a tough act to follow. The rupture Voulkos enacted with his abstract, non-functional, ceramic sculptures in the mid- to late 1950s was, like all ruptures in the history of art, a singular act. Voulkos owns his breakthrough in ceramics, just as Pollock owns his drip technique. To follow too obviously in either’s style would be to court irrelevance. In addition, Voulkos’s larger-than-life persona was (and to a certain extent remains) hard to compete with. His passion for clay as a medium, love of showmanship, and the cult of personality he created through teaching and demonstrations, of which Voulkos was a master, took up a lot of air space (fig. 2 and see Sorkin fig. 1, p. 14). To be sure, his ability to vigorously throw, build, and work the surface of what was often upwards of one hundred pounds of clay was impressive to behold. And as documentary footage of his demos attest, his physical strength was combined with a body intelligence that still has an enchanting effect on the viewer. Voulkos’s notoriety and stature in the field can affect how artists today relate to his history. For instance,

fig. 1: Installation view of Arlene Shechet, Twin Rockers, 2007. Ceramic, steel, acrylic paint, and plywood, 56 × 35 × 21 in. (142.2 × 88.9 × 53.3 cm). Collection of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz.

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Shechet admits that it wasn’t until her sculptures were installed next to Voulkos in the 2009 ICA Philadelphia group show Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay that she remembers consciously looking at his work. 3 As she relayed to me, before Dirt on Delight she was only “aware of the heroic myth of Voulkos” and his place in the canon as the one who created “a turning point in the history of art for ceramics.”4 The power of his persona had occluded his work for her. It was a kind of “non-seeing,” where too much is known of the artist’s biography and not enough about his achievement. 5 Shechet’s pairing with Voulkos in Dirt on Delight was an invitation to seriously study his work for the first time, and although it was a backward-looking form of recognition, what she discovered were myriad shared interests and approaches to clay, a subject to which I will return. Adding to the difficulty of assessing Voulkos’s legacy, his physically-oriented practice was viewed as a natural extension of his masculine swagger, cleaving together male virility and radical artistic acts (fig. 3).6 This combination of man and material transformation, fundamental to the discourse of modernist progress in the history of art, has left very little room for the woman artist. Critic Rose Slivka’s now classic essay, “The New Ceramic Presence” published in Craft Horizons in 1961, exemplifies what the equation between macho bravado, a highly physical style of making, and the concept of avant-garde disruption sounded like in Voulkos’s day.7 In the piece, Slivka sought to highlight a fresh, young generation of ceramic artists, Voulkos among them, who embraced a new emphasis on scale, vigorous surface qualities of texture and color, and the “validity of the ‘accident.’”8 All these elements violated the aesthetic norms and values upheld within the ceramics community, of this time and later. With the objective of validating the new radical clay movement, partly through comparison to the innovations of the Abstract Expressionists in painting, Slivka defended the work as evidence of an American spirit of creative energy and adventure. She asserted, Beauty as such—the classical precepts of harmonious completion, of perfection, of balance— is still a Western European idea, and it is entirely possible that it is not the esthetic urgency of an artist

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fig. 2: Peter Voulkos giving a demonstration at the Tenth Annual Super Mud Conference, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 1976.

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functioning in an American climate—a climate which not only has been infused with the dynamics of machine technology, but with the action of men— ruggedly individual and vernacular men (the pioneer, the cowboy) with a genius for improvisation.9 If in 1961 “the classical precepts of harmonious completion, of perfection, of balance” still applied to the European art world, which is debatable, Slivka’s comparison of the new radical ceramics to a “ruggedly individual” male persona typically associated with the AbEx circle feels positively retardataire, given the incipient rise of Fluxus, Pop Art, and Minimalism by that point. An artistic context that may have been more relevant to Voulkos’s work and served him better in posterity is suggested by Mary Heilmann in her interview in this volume about her time as one of Voulkos’s MFA students at Berkeley in the early 1960s. She describes a surprising fluidity between the disciplines of sculpture and ceramics at Berkeley, and remembers Voulkos as part of a circle of teachers and peers who opened her eyes to the nascent process-based art that would be in full swing later in the decade. In this context ceramics was simply one medium among many that could be utilized in process-oriented work. Also in this volume, Andrew Perchuk notes that while Voulkos never “intellectualized or conceptualized his method,” as process and post-minimalist artists would do, he didn’t have to in order to make “process the defining mode of his ceramic work.”10 Heilmann’s sculpture from this period and shortly after, which combines a wide range of non-precious materials and an investigational approach to making, provides an early example of what a Voulkos legacy could look like outside the confines of studio ceramics (see Heilmann fig. 1). When Heilmann turned to painting in the late 1960s, her distinctive use of pigment as a sculptural medium, something like a glaze, became another index of his influence.11 There were also artistic contexts outside the United States that might have been better suited for Voulkos’s ceramic work. Glenn Adamson has noted that in the 1950s and 60s “leading fine artists—including Joan Miró, as well as Pablo Picasso, Asger Jorn, and Lucio Fontana—either continued or intensified their involvement with the medium.”12 Less familiar work, but much more

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radical in form and intention, was being produced by Yagi Kazuo in Japan and Anders Liljefors in Sweden, to name only two additional artists working in clay at this time.13 Works by Voulkos such as Plate, Untitled, and Vase (plate 27, plate 28 and fig. 5), all produced in 1963, feel perfectly at home in this context, and one cannot help wonder what Voulkos’s reputation would be today if these works and others like them hadn’t been quite so sequestered within an American Abstract Expressionist context.14 All these factors—Voulkos’s radical intervention in the field of ceramics, his infectious personality, and the relatively narrow context in which his work was understood while he was alive—collectively spell doom for the search for a clear or definitive line of influence. In any case, such a quest might be missing the point. As opposed to a legacy or lineage, what is evident today is a shared set of affinities between Voulkos and contemporary sculptors. To be sure, there are differences between Voulkos and multidisciplinary artists like Rebecca Warren, Sterling Ruby, Arlene Shechet, and other contemporary sculptors predicated on varying levels of mastery (and interest in mastery) of clay.15 But the affinities are real too, and they revitalize aspects of Voulkos’s style and approach to clay. Today’s art audience is likely more receptive to the salient features of his work than at almost any point since their creation. As Adamson has persuasively argued, the popularity of clay in today’s art world is informed by a permissiveness enabled by the material’s historically low position in the hierarchy of the arts. Since the mid-twentieth century this has allowed the multidisciplinary artist with no formal training in ceramics “to take unaffected joy” in working with it.16 This sense of permissiveness continues today and is expressed in similar terms, as in this description of Rebecca Warren by curator Greg Hilty: “Clay is a very flexible medium,” he writes, “[and] allows her to explore unconscious free association.”17 In contemporary ceramic sculpture this permissiveness is materialized in forms and ways of making that push the capacity of clay to its sculptural limits; looks experimental, improvisational, casually made, or even amateurish; is ungainly or ugly in form; arrests process in time for a preferred unfinished look; and doesn’t shy away from thematizing clay’s vulgar connotations.

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fig. 3: Peter Voulkos working at Lake Lotawana, Kansas City, Missouri, c. 1984.

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These elements can be found variously in the ceramic work of Shechet, Warren, Ruby, Lynda Benglis, William O’Brien, Francesca DiMattio, and Brie Ruais, to name only a few artists working in physically dynamic manners reminiscent of Voulkos’s own visceral handling of clay. Sometime in 1955, exasperated by the “lift and life” philosophy in ceramics, which proscribed clay to light, symmetrical, functional forms thrown on the wheel, Voulkos proclaimed he was for “dump and death” instead.18 The phrase sarcastically but accurately described stylistic aspects of his work that definitively broke with received wisdom about what counted as good work in mid-century ceramics (and since, in many corners of the clay world). To some observers at the time, Voulkos’s rough, impatient, amorphous, and awkward-looking work was to be consigned to the trash bin along with other kiln disasters. To others the same formal language was viewed as heroic, a way forward for the field.

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Today, the phrase “dump and death” could be just as easily applied to Ruby’s outsized, crudely formed basins exhibited in the 2014 Whitney Biennial (fig. 4), Warren’s nebulous and obscene unfired clay mounds—which she has described as “mad and ugly,”19 O’Brien’s spastic, outsider-like vessels, and even Benglis’s extruded, folded, and pounded abstractions (fig. 6). The outrage in the clay world over Ruby’s bad boy anti-aesthetic when he was included in the Whitney Biennial echoes the ire directed at Voulkos’s dump and deathware sixty years ago. 20 His giant basins, filled with shards and tool-like fragments suggestive of archeological digs or fire pits, were installed near the flawlessly constructed, geometric, ceramic sculptures of John Mason, leader of the radical clay movement in the 1950s and 60s alongside Voulkos. In a weird twist of fate, now it was hard not to see Mason as the foil for Ruby’s rebellion, much as the potter Marguerite Wildenhain—whose legendary allegiance to “truth to materials” led her to

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cancel her Craft Horizons subscription over the publication of Slivka’s “New Ceramic Presence”—had once served for Voulkos. 21 The disregard for truth to materials that was central to Voulkos’s “dump and death” aesthetic is also a prominent feature of ceramic sculpture today. As in Voulkos’s work, it often appears as an embrace of mass and verticality that runs counter to clay’s technical capacity. As anyone who has worked with clay knows, it is a material that resists assuming large-scale form. At the scale and mass Voulkos worked in, and Shechet and Ruby have adopted, for instance, clay likes to slouch, tear, and ultimately collapse. Even Benglis, working at a smaller scale, is interested in this aspect of clay: “I continue to work with the sculptural aspects of the clay and pushing it around. I tend to work categorically and try to push the material as far as it can go.”22 Voulkos had a deep understanding of the limits of clay as a medium, and he took great advantage of this knowledge to create large-scale sculptures that were thrown and assembled, and in which clefts, ruptures, and slippage were arrested in time. The feats of engineering that Voulkos achieved were an influence on Ruby’s decision to work on such a large scale, and Shechet acknowledges that she shares with him the desire for “upward thrust” in her work. 23 In fact, this interest led her back to throwing on the wheel after studying how Voulkos created stable interior cores around which he added sculptural surfaces. 24 Pushing clay to its material limits facilitates a precarious asymmetry that is also characteristic of much contemporary ceramic sculpture. It was central to Voulkos’s unconventional exploration of clay, and frequently resulted in inelegant forms that were in violation, again, of the rules about what constituted a good pot. The two works by Shechet that were shown

near Voulkos’s sculptures in Dirt on Delight were her Twin Rockers (2007) (fig. 1). 25 The pairing led her to investigate Voulkos’s oeuvre, and Shechet recognized several points of convergence with her own work in his Rocking Pot (1956) (plate 11). The discovery began with what may seem like a superficial formal similarity—the fact that both Twin Rockers and Rocking Pot, although quite different in style, look like they could actually rock back and forth. But for Shechet, it was, in fact, this physical suggestion of instability that opened her eyes to the importance of Voulkos’s intervention in the field of ceramics and the privilege of coming after him. In his Rocking Pot the curved slabs on which the piece sits, which are also slotted into the pockmarked, upsidedown pot form, assert the brute materiality of the clay. By contrast, the instability of Shechet’s Twin Rockers with their long, tentacle-like gliders is the result of an inversion of clay’s organic associations—in this case, one that replaces its material weight with the ethereality of exhaled air. With Rocking Pot, Voulkos was cleverly upending the dictum that a well-made pot does not rock when placed on a flat surface. The use of instability in Shechet’s work—where it looms large— is about the body off balance and its response to gravity. Sleepless Color (2009 –10) (see Heilmann and Shechet, fig. 1, p. 88) and No Matter What (2013) (fig. 7) are two other works that illustrate this theme. Both rise up, but then partially sag or precariously lean. The implied movement of

fig. 4 (opposite): Sterling Ruby, Basin Theology/ Butterfly Wreck, 2013. Ceramic, 28 1/ 8 × 39 3 / 8 × 41 in. (71.4 × 100 × 104.1 cm). Collection? fig. 5 (right): Peter Voulkos, Vase, 1963. Stoneware and black epoxy paint, 7 7/ 8 × 12 5 / 8 × 6 3 / 4 in. (20 × 32 × 17 cm). Collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

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these works is more comparable to Voulkos’s work from the late 1950s like Tientos or Sevillanas as well as his later, large-scale sculptures from the 1980s in which clay’s fluidity is arrested in the fired, finished form (fig. 3). The muscle it took to create these pieces implicates the body—in Shechet’s words, “you feel your own body looking at these massive works”—a response she also strives for through her abstract language of awkward tilts and sags. Beyond the awkwardness of the asymmetric or unstable form, ugliness functions as an aesthetic virtue in much contemporary ceramic sculpture. It is present in Voulkos’s practice too, although not usually discussed as such. 26 Rebecca Warren’s work is relevant here. Her lumpen shapes are more monstrous in form than anything Voulkos ever created, but her kneaded mounds of self-setting white clay, as seen in sculptures such as Deutsche Bank (2002) or Totem and Taboo (2001) share the physicality and at times, the violence, of his worked surfaces. 27 There’s no evidence that Voulkos set out to be deliberately ugly, whereas Warren has said that when she sees a “lovely surface” in her work she likes “to interrupt that with a bit of ugly paint or tartan or a tail or a tit.”28 Warren’s ugliness slides into the realm of the

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perverted with her cartoonish nipples, butt cheeks, and vulvas. This connection between the viscosity of clay and sexual vulgarity was obliquely alluded to in Voulkos’s split and ruptured surfaces, but never explicitly emerged as a serious thematic in his work. The wetness and malleability of clay, the hollowness of its forms, and its requirement of an air hole in order to be fired, has long enabled comparisons of the medium to the body and sex. Anecdotal stories of Voulkos’s studio banter about clay and the female body abound, like the joke Shechet shared with Mary Heilmann in the interview preceding this essay. He is reported to have said that he “never saw a crack he didn’t like.”29 In another interview, one of Voulkos’s collectors reported that he would talk to himself during his demos and yell out things like, “I’ve got extra holes, anybody need a hole?”30 Photos of a shirtless Voulkos demonstrating his building technique with an arm plunged down the neck of a large vessel illustrate another way he was able to project sexual prowess. Against this masculine model of jokes and performances, Shechet has stated that, “as a woman artist, just like a woman in the world, one is mostly asked to be embarrassed or coy in relationship to sex.”31 How as a woman then do you join this particular conversation about clay’s provocative relationship to sex as selfconfidently as one’s male counterparts in the clay world? To do so, Warren takes on the objectification of the female body in the history of art and visual culture and mocks male desire through the exaggeration of female anatomy and a handling of clay that looks masturbatory. This is exemplified in her series SHE, and depending on your relationship to the history of the representation of the female body, her work’s obscenity can feel either embarrassing or empowering. 32 Shechet takes another path by multiplying the required air hole and making

fig. 6 (above): Lynda Benglis, Tangipahoa B, 2013. Glazed ceramic, 21 × 12 × 13 in. (53.3 × 30.5 × 33 cm). Collection of Storm King Art Center. fig. 7 (opposite): Arlene Shechet, No Matter What, 2013. Glazed ceramic and hardwood, 36 1/ 2 × 17 × 17 in. (92.7 × 43.2 × 43.2 cm). Collection of Joseph Hackmey.

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it visible, drawing attention to clay’s associations to sex but at the same time everyday bodily processes as well. The openings she incorporates in works like No Matter What (2013) (fig. 7), and No Noise (2013) (fig. 8), are part of an iconography of gaping mouths, flaccid protuberances, and orifices that call up associations to not only sexual organs, but also the impolite body that must eliminate gases, fluids, and solid waste. In both Warren and Shechet’s work an appeal to the abject body is essential, a means to appropriate a patriarchal discourse of sexuality that historically was in the hands of male ceramic sculptors. In a recent analysis of Lynda Benglis’s sculptures made from clay slabs and extrusions, a series begun in the 1990s (fig. 6), Bibiana Obler asks what this work could mean if art historians stopped positioning the artist as an heir to Pollock and considered her work in relation to Voulkos. Like him, Benglis works intuitively with clay in a processed-oriented manner that appeals to the viewer’s haptic sense. Likewise, her vocabulary of folds, tears, and twists records her direct manipulation of the clay. She also shares with Voulkos a desire to capture in the finished work the malleability of clay in its natural state, not unlike the quality of her monumental poured wall and floor sculptures that look like cooled lava flows. Despite these connections, and others having to do with Benglis’s career-long exploration of the high and the low—including the art/craft divide—Obler notes that the art historical analysis of this work has inevitably situated it in relation to a fine art tradition, reiterating the longstanding characterization of Benglis’s work in sculpture as essentially an extension of painting. The “complete lack of attention to ceramics history,” Obler concludes, “is obnoxious and naïve, but also simply lazy.”33 It is an observation that applies almost across the board to the work of multidisciplinary artists producing ceramic sculpture today. With few exceptions, very little effort has been made by art historians, curators, and critics to investigate what the history of ceramics might offer to our understanding of such work. Voulkos expressed a similar frustration with his peers in the clay world in the 1957 juror’s statement reprinted earlier in this book:

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some reason the contamination of any of the fields of creativity. For some reason they must believe that to let themselves go and really become involved must be a sin…. This to me seems very illogical for a person involved in a creative field. Sustenance must be looked for in fields quite unrelated. Voulkos’s vision of a rich, heterogeneous creative practice in 1957, was, like his work, radical in its implications and still coming to fruition. If there’s ever been a time for a more thoughtful, cross-disciplinary exploration of ceramics and sculpture, that time is now, with Voulkos’s work once again leading the way.

fig. 8: Arlene Shechet, No Noise, 2013. Glazed ceramic, acrylic paint, and wood, 67 3 / 4 × 17 × 14 in. (172.1 × 43.2 × 35.6 cm). Collection of Treacy and Todd Gaffney.

The people associated with craft work tend to confine themselves in a very tight little sphere refusing for

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1

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Among other recent exhibitions see for example, Lucio Fontana: Sculpture, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, 2012; Sterling Ruby and Lucio Fontana, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, September 10–October 22, 2011; and Briony Fer, “Immodest Proposals: The Art of Lucio Fontana,” Artforum 53, no. 3 (November 2014). Email correspondence with the artist, June 22, 2015. Interview with Arlene Shechet, December 24, 2014. Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, ICA Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, January 16–June 21, 2009; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, July 11–November 29, 2009. According to the artist, it was Glenn Adamson who made the suggestion that her work be installed next to Voulkos’s Rocking Pot. Interview with Arlene Shechet, December 24, 2015. A perfect counterpart in this regard is Georgia O’Keeffe. Voulkos was described as “tremendously virile” in print as early as 1956. See Conrad Brown, “Peter Voulkos,” Craft Horizons 16, no. 5 (September–October 1956): 12.

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(Philadelphia: ICA Philadelphia, 2009), 76. Voulkos traveled to Italy in 1967 with the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro where he met Lucio Fontana, whose slashed and punctured canvases it is reported he admired, although, sadly, there is no first-hand documentation of Voulkos’s reaction to his work. The art critic and supporter of Voulkos, Rose Slivka, reports the following: “[Voulkos] spent considerable time in Milan with Pomodoro, who maintains one of the largest and most completely equipped studios on the continent for the production of sculpture and jewelry, with sizeable crews of apprentices and craftsmen. Among the Italian artists he met with whom he shared an aesthetic viewpoint were Alberto Burri, who makes collages of burned and torn fragments, and the late Lucio Fontana, who slashed his canvases and his clay plaques.” Rose Slivka, “The Artist and His Work. Risk and Revelation,” in Rose Slivka and Karen Tsujimoto, The Art of Peter Voulkos (New York: Kodansha International and the Oakland Museum, 1995), 55. 13 See The Works of Yagi Kazuo and Mentally Handicapped People (Shigaraki, Japan: The Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, 1993).

11  On Heilmann’s use of paint as glaze see also the review, “Mary Heilmann,” Ceramics Monthly 33, no. 3 (March 1985): 52.

14 This is not to say these contexts are entirely inappropriate. As is explained elsewhere in this book, Voulkos painted in an AbEx style and in 1960 exhibited his paintings with his ceramics at MoMA. John Coplans and Peter Plagens were among the most insistent critics to contextualize Voulkos’s work as Abstract Expressionist ceramics. See John Coplans, Abstract Expressionist Ceramics, exhibition catalogue (Irvine: University of California, 1966), and “Abstract Expressionist Ceramics,” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November 1966): 34–41, and Peter Plagens, “Plain Ol’ Painting,” Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast (New York and Washington, 1974), 95.

12 Glenn Adamson, “Sloppy Seconds: The Strange Return of Clay,” Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay

15 Not to mention varying interests in the knowledge and use of glaze chemistry, a subject that I don’t address in this essay.

7

Rose Slivka, “The New Ceramic Presence,” Craft Horizons 21, no. 4 (July/ August, 1961): 30–37.

8

Slivka, “The New Ceramic Presence,” 33.

9

Slivka, “The New Ceramic Presence,” 32.

10 See Andrew Perchuk, ”Out of Clay,” in this volume pp. 29–50.

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16 Glenn Adamson, “Sloppy Seconds: The Strange Return of Clay,” Dirt on Delight, 76. 17 Greg Hilty, “ Rebecca Warren: She,” Parkett 70 (2004): 6–11, http://www. saatchigallery.com/artists/rebecca_ warren_articles.htm. 18 “Lift and life” was the mantra and determining element of a good pot applied by the ceramicist Vivika Heino, who taught at the University of Southern California. See Mary Davis MacNaughton, “Innovation in Clay: The Otis Era, 1954–60,” Revolution in Clay: The Marer Collection of Contemporary Ceramics (Claremont, California: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, 1994), 61. 19 Rebecca Warren as quoted in Neal Brown, “Rebecca Warren: Mad and Ugly,” Parkett 78 (2006), 36. 20 Garth Clark acknowledges Sterling Ruby as “one of the most disliked nonceramists in the ceramics world.” See Garth Clark, “Sarah Archer Hits the Bullseye with the Whitney Biennial,” CFile, April 29, 2014, https://cfileonline. org/commentary-sarah-archer-hitsbullseye-whiteny-biennial/. See also Sarah Archer, “The Meaning of Clay at the Whitney Biennial,” Hyperallergic, April 24, 2014, http://hyperallergic. com/122270/the-meaning-of-clay-atthe-whitney-biennial/. 21 Slivka annotated a notice in Craft Horizons about the tenor of the letters to the editor after the publication of “The New Ceramic Presence,” with a note that reads, “Marguerite Wildenhain cancelled her subscription and another reader called me a communist.” Rose Slivka, interview notes, n.d., Box 9, Folder 1–12, Peter Voulkos, Research and Reference Material 1965–1999, Rose Slivka papers, c. 1947–2006, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. For Voulkos’s relationship to female potters such as Wildenhain, with whom he trained before his arrival at Otis College of Art

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and Design, see Jenni Sorkin’s essay in this volume and her important study Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

33 Bibiana Obler, “Lynda Benglis Recrafts Abstract Expressionism,” unpublished paper delivered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, April 13, 2012.

22 Lynda Benglis, as quoted in label copy for the exhibition Lynda Benglis: Water Sources, Storm King Art Center, May 16–November 8, 2015. 23 The large scale of work by other members of the California Clay Movement such as John Mason were also influential. 24 Interview with the author, December 24, 2015. 25 The show included Voulkos’s Red River (1960) and Sculpture (1957). 26 Andrew Perchuk’s essay in this volume is the only example I am aware of. 27 For images of these works see http:// www.parkettart.com/downloadable/ download/sample/sample_id/77 and http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/ rebecca_warren.htm. 28 As quoted in Erica Cooke, “Rebecca Warren,” Frieze 136 (January–February, 2011) http://friezenewyork.com/article/ rebecca-warren-0?language=en. 29 Although anecdotal, such comments weren’t out of place in the studio, classroom, or demonstration context in Voulkos’s day. 30 Fred Maher, interview with Rose Slivka, Rose Slivka, interview notes, n.d., Box 9, Folder 1–12, Peter Voulkos, Research and Reference Material 1965–1999, Rose Slivka papers, c. 1947–2006, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 31 Interview with Arlene Shechet, December 24, 2015. 32 Works from this series can be viewed at http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/ rebecca_warren.htm

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