KEN PRICE

The Price Is Right

How cynical can I be? Is it an accident that not too long after the Edward Broida Collection display at MoMA, which included a whole room of Ken Price ceramic "gloop" works, Matthew Marks Gallery schedules an exhibition of more of the same? Business is business. The Broida gloops are now in the MoMA permanent collection.

The gloops have no openings, so they are not vessels. Cups used to be what Price was famous for, and we loved them for their references and wit. The gloops, except for a giant bronze (at Matthew Marks, 522 West 22nd Street, to Nov. 4), are made of clay that has been painted rather than glazed. They are Arps in color or shiny, speckled ca-ca, outsize Chelsea penthouse poodle poop. The latter association, which makes them funny -- unlike Piero Manzoni's classic canned excrement -- shows that you cannot totally defunk one of the primo California funksters of years gone by.

A big display of Price's previously unexhibited drawings gives the show away. Cups lurk here and there. Also, the openings of previous vessels are compared to vaginas. Anyone who knows ceramics knows that vessels are bodies and their openings are vaginas, anuses, mouths. Oh, what a surprise. That is part of their charm. But I guess sculpture people need to be shown this, graphically.

Discounting the vessel drawings, the stealth tactic works. Price is no longer a ceramic artist. His prices probably reflect this. On the other hand, instead of competing with Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, and Ron Nagel, he now has to compete with Tony Smith, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra. How will his gloops hold up?

James Prestini: Untitled (1925-1954?)

CanCraft Have Class?

A younger craftsmen, glassblower Josiah McElheny, became a sculptor when he had his first show at Andrea Rosen. He was subsequently in a Whitney Biennial and then ascended to the MoMA permanent collection. As director of UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, I facilitated McElheny's first exhibition in N.Y. in 1994, but that didn't count: the curse of craft, I suppose. The exhibition does not appear on the artist's official biography. But now, McElheny has won a MacArthur Fellowship.

McElheny is indeed extremely talented. Not only is he a master glassblower, he has the brains to marry his skill to narrative-art perspectives and art-about-art points of view. The latter are not new, but the marriage is surprising enough to impress the informed. I wish I could say: call it craft, call it sculpture, a rose by any other name is still a rose.

I used to say, rather sarcastically, that the only difference between craft and art is that you are allowed to handle craft before you buy it -- and, even more important, art costs more.

I gave up trying to convince both crafters and sculptors that the craft/art muddle is a language mistake. It is not a question of art versus craft. Craft is art as much as photography, performance art, painting, et al., are Formulating art versus craft is like proposing fruit versus apples, meat versus ham. If you like oppositions, you should be opposing sculpture and craft. And, of course, we have not addressed the idea of hierarchy, or if there really needs to be one. Some might put craft at the top and conceptual art at the bottom. But are apples better than pears?

Then again, one could say, as former MoMA curator Robert Storr once did at a Glass Art Conference, that craft and art are engaged in different games, so why would MoMA be interested? You could have heard a pin drop. Or a blowpipe.

I myself would rather say that craft artists are competing with a different set of ancestors than sculptors are. A ceramist is competing with George Ohr; a sculptor is competing with David Smith.

The C-Word

As it happens, this week I am off to the American Craft Council's Leadership Conference in Houston, where I am sure the muddle will hold forth, particularly now that there is no American Craft Museum, but instead something called the Museum of Arts and Design (M.A.D.).

Mad, indeed. Just because currently there is a rampant fear of the C-word doesn't mean that craft will go away. I think some artists will continue to make things by hand, referencing utilitarian forms and using craft-based processes, but the word "craft" is now too hard a sell. Are the values associated with the American Craft Movement irrelevant? And if so, why?

In general, these values are:

The preservation and the encouragement of traditional craft techniques and the use of traditional craft materials.
The use of utilitarian forms.
The valorization of the designer and the maker as one.

This does not mean that individual expression and originality are disdained. In fact, within the above brief, they are more difficult than in unfettered and perhaps overtly self-indulgent object-making.

There can be no doubt that most of what is called craft is garbage; but the same can be said for painting or sculpture or photography. One walk through the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show never made anyone give up on painting (although nowadays, one walk through Chelsea might).

Since there is a conservative, mindless, focus-group-generated trend to drop the C-word from the names of museums and even schools, my proposal is that the Museum of Modern Art -- which once operated a craft program for G.I.s; where genius James Prestini, the turned-wood vessel-maker, had a solo exhibition in 1949; which includes George Ohr in its design collection; which now owns work by Kenneth Price and Josiah McElheny -- should seize the opportunity and change its name to the Museum of Modern Art and Craft.

Paintings?

Speaking of paintings (which really and truly I have not given up on, since I sometimes make paintings myself), two exhibitions worth seeing are Alfred Jenson's classic number paintings at Pace (545 West 22nd Street, to Oct. 28) and Matthew Ritchie at Andrea Rosen (525 West 24th Street, to Oct. 28). Jensen (1903-81) could be mistaken for an outsider artist, if he hadn't worked so large and been so educated. The Mayan calendar? The breadth of his numerical craziness and its odd beauty still astounds.

Richie's exhibition is called "The Universal Adversary" and comes with a quote from Ezekiel:

Their appearance and their work was as if a wheel within a wheel; as for their rings, they were so high they were dreadful and their rings were full of eyes, round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.

This new installation of paintings, lightboxes and cut-out sculpture exhales the fiery breath of the apocalypse. Ritchie now pulls ahead of the pack of painters seen at the Whitney's "Remote Viewing" exhibition last year.

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