Charles Krafft - the private meaning of public outrage

I use the word censored lightly. It isn't censorship for a dealer to decline to exhibit a particular artwork within a show featuring that artist. It's called curating. But curating to avoid giving offense rightly troubled the dealer.

Created on the heels of the Rodney King verdict and the Los Angeles riots, the piece struck me as unbelievably racist. I didn't write about it, being stumped as to what to say and how to phrase it for placement in the PI. There was no way the PI would have reproduced the image unless it were accompanied by a ringing denunciation.

(Click images to enlarge.)

What if instead of an African-American minstrel who plays the sax as LA burns, the figure is a self-portrait, a slighted caricature of a marginalized group - those who make art as the world goes to hell?

What if the hostility is directed at himself? At the time, he was a Seattle artist approaching middle-age with little hope of a wider audience; passed over, ignored, full of rage, wicked glee and self-loathing. What does the plate "mean" in this context?

What did it mean when Philip Guston began drawing himself as a member of the KKK? However startling, it wasn't controversial to be sick of self, sick of America and in despair about the Viet Nam War.

Art. What is it good for? In order say  "absolutely nothing," Guston had to continue to make it.

During a studio visit in the mid-1990s, Krafft put the plate below in my lap. Immediate unease overcame me. He said he modeled the figure from a photo featuring a Jewish victim of Nazi experiments. The man was not not high. He's dead.

I told Krafft to get this thing off me, as I didn't want to touch it. Being Pop jaunty about mass murder didn't work for me. It worked for Mel Brooks, but he didn't have images of actual victims on stage.  Try to hum Springtime for Hitler while looking at this plate.

Krafft is the outsider son of an affluent and right-wing Seattle family. While his father saluted the flag, Krafft took drugs and got kicked out of a high school. In response, his dad was not above expressing parental frustration with his fists. If Krafft is the model in the center, the text makes sense.

AIRPLANE GLUE INTERESTED US MORE THAN AIRPLANES AND THAT DIDN'T GO OVER WELL WITH DAD.

Below, Krafft's version of a commerative plate. His dad would have liked the original.

Krafft was midway in the journey of his life when he found himself lost in a dark wood. He was painting in the mystic tradition of the Northwest School after the school had closed. Mark Tobey was dead. Morris Graves was holed up in his Northern California retreat. Guy Anderson was still in La Conner but uninterested in reviving an art movement. He focused instead on the celestial weather he was creating in his own work.

Krafft needed a movement, so he made one up.

Partly inspired by Seattle musicians (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden) and partly by his friend, the L.A. auto pin-striper known as Van Dutch, Krafft created his own version of Seattle Noir.

In 1991, he debuted his Disasterware,  with famous scenes of carnage painted in the kitsch style of tourist Dutch dinnerware. He followed with his Metropolitan Mobile Museum truck show, titled, Charles Krafft, 1974-1994: The Happy Years.

He honored Morris Graves by founding the "Mystic Sons of Morris Graves, Lodge Number 93," emphasizing the antic side of the dreamy flower painter and delighting him in his old age.
Looters steal back. Krafft wants it back, everything he tried to be among the bastards out there.

Not in the current sampling of his work at Seattle ARTresouce is anything from his Delftware weaponry, his mad-cow creamers, his human bone china, Hitler teapot or Holland windmills with swastika-shaped blades.

What does this artist want? Maybe the key is a white ceramic bar of soap with the word "forgiveness" impressed on its surface, along with a swastika. It's a tribute to Slovenian artist Peter Mlakar, who said as he and Krafft gazed out across a wrecked Olympics village in Sarajevo during a cease-fire:

 I love the smell of blood on the snow. If I could bottle that scent, I'd create a new fragrance for the 21st century and call it forgiveness.

Krafft says he has a few things in a show that opens in Seattle Thursday night, 7-9, at Porcelain Studio, 1020 1st Ave.