Ceramics and beauty have always been intertwined – which might be the main reason the Western art world has perennially circled around the medium with suspicion. In ancient Attica artisans inscribed their wares with the words kalos or kale – “beautiful,” praise for the lithe young men and women depicted on the pots. In the 18th century pottery designer and pioneering industrialist Josiah Wedgwood declared, “I think the instinct for beauty and all the desire to produce beautiful things … is a kind of sex quality, not unlike the song of birds or their beautiful plumage.” In 1940 British studio-pottery godfather Bernard Leach wrote, in his landmark A Potter’s Book, “[I]n looking for the best approach to pottery it seems reasonable to expect that beauty will emerge from a fusion of the individual character and culture of the potter with the nature of his materials.” It’s no accident that one of the most celebrated couplets in English poetry is about a particularly sharp-looking pot: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” say’st Keats’ Grecian urn.
Clayton Bailey calls bullshit on all that. When one of his students painted the slogan “Think Ugly” on the wall of the ceramics studio at what’s now the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the pupil was echoing a teacher in the process of rejecting thousands of years of aesthetic history. Bailey literally built the Whitewater clay program from the ground up in the early 1960s, constructing kilns and kick wheels from scratch. He went on to teach at the University of South Dakota and California State University, East Bay – and to found the First Psychoceramic Church, whose purpose, Bailey’s official chronology states, is “disseminating crackpot ideas.” It’s no surprise the man has earned a reputation as a mad scientist and a rouge as well as one of the most seminal characters in modern ceramic art.
In the ’60s Bailey helped inject the rapidly changing field of ceramics with a much-needed dose of humor – and, perhaps more importantly, with a sense of humor about itself. From the beginning he followed his own path, content neither to make purely functional pots or ceramic sculptures in the prevailing mode of the day, which was hulking forms influenced by abstract expressionism. Instead, Bailey produced pots and sculptures that were lumpy, bumpy, and – gasp – even sloppy. His work combined the lowbrow, grotesque caricatures of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth with an obvious love for his material. Along with Robert Arneson and David Gilhooly, Bailey helped to create what became known as the Funk movement.
On a sunny late-April day my wife, Claire, and I took the winding road to Bailey’s studio in Port Costa, California, about an hour’s drive north of the Bay Area. We drove past a hulking C&H sugar refinery, then into an idyllic rural landscape that hugs the banks of the Carquinez Strait. After driving for a while without seeing any houses, afraid we’d taken a wrong turn, we finally spotted Bailey’s studio, which doubles as his Wonders of the World Museum. There’s no mistaking that the place is Bailey’s: It’s guarded by dozens of ceramic gargoyles crouched on fence posts and keeping a watchful eye on passing traffic.
Even at the age of 72, Bailey cuts an imposing figure. He’s compact, muscular, and looks much younger than his age. The first thing you notice about Bailey is his signature mustache, which hangs in thin, wavy curls to middle of his chest. The artist’s persona and work are hopelessly tangled together – and that’s entirely the point. His mustache is styled after the one worn by George Ohr, the self-proclaimed Mad Potter of Biloxi, who in the late 19th century broke boundaries with wares that were anachronistically (and masterfully) twisted and folded. Ohr was also a brash personality who knew that a pinch of showmanship could help his career immensely.
Bailey’s studio/museum, which he’s been working on since he moved to Port Costa in the early ’70s, is an environment every bit as encompassing as Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden or Donald Judd’s various properties in Marfa, Texas. Inside the gate is Bailey’s kiln yard, which is dotted with all types of kilns, from commonplace electrics to superspecialized soda kilns that were built to achieve special glazing effects. The kilns are interspersed with more gargoyles sitting on pedestals of kiln bricks and the results of 40-plus years of artistic experimentation.
Bailey giddily led us into an area of the yard where he was conducting his latest inquiry, which consisted of finding our what would happen with he combined local clay from a defunct brickyard with a “special” ingredient to make it bloat to more than three times its original size when heated. He’d been throwing pots out of the clay, then putting slip and glaze on their surfaces before firing. The results are a little bit like David Banner after he’d turned into the Incredible Hulk, with the original glazed surface of the pots hanging like scraps of clothing on the pots’ massive, bloated forms.
Then Bailey showed us the Solar Pyrosphere, a large Jules Verne-styled ceramic vessel with a hole in one side and a cyclopean magnifying lens on the other. This machine records the movement of the sun by focusing a beam of light onto a two-by-twelve. Immediately after Bailey inserted the wood into the vessel, a wisp of smoke began to emerge – and that day’s time recording had begun, in the form of a thin line burned into the wood. “Each day,” Bailey’s website explains, “the new line is burned just above or below the previous day’s line, as the sun’s path across the sky raises or lowers with the changing of the seasons. A sunny day is represented by a continuous burned groove across the plank; a partly cloudy day by an intermittent groove, or one of varied depth. Rainy days leave a ridge of unburned material in the recording medium.”
Other alchemical experiments take up other spaces around the kiln yard. One is a series of large crucibles and pots stamped with the names of the rare earth elements contained within. “Claytonium,” which gives Bailey his artistic superpowers, is one. “Unobtanium,” the rarest material in the Bailey arsenal, is another. It’s permanently sealed into its one-of-a-kind container, a bottle whose neck has seemingly been tied into a knot.
We then toured the Museum of Kaolithic History, a sort of museum within a museum containing artifacts that Bailey “uncovered” on the grounds of his studio after a freak mudslide: a bigfoot skeleton, a cyclops skull, the fossilized remains of tiny Homus ceramicus industrious. According the Bailey, the kaolithic bones are “formed when the buried remains are entirely replaced by clay compounds which have been shaped through digital contact, compaction and impaction by unnatural forces. When the remains are exposed to high temperatures in a kiln, thermal metamorphosis occurs and the kaolithic fossilization is complete. The entire process can happen within a few days. By applying the scientific method to the visual and tactile examination of these thermally metamorphised mud pyrofacts, we have unearthed or created previously unknown animals from the Pre-credulous era of the Bone Age.”
That text is a great example of Bailey’s lifelong collaboration with his alter ego, Dr. George Gladstone, an authority who frames Bailey’s discoveries within a proper scientific context. Gladstone also develops sophisticated devices to authenticate and legitimize discoveries such as the kaolithic skeletons. Contemplating the projects that Bailey and Gladstone work on together is like peeling away the layers of a particularly pungent onion. What might at first seem legit, if far-fetched, soon reveals itself as part bunkum, part satire, and, deep down, part fundamental truth – or at least truthiness.
Bailey’s public performances are equally idiosyncratic. He’s always hated doing ceramic workshops in which the “master” demonstrates his work while chatting with a group of worshipful students. In the ’70s he worked up a series of public lectures and pseudoscientific demonstrations in which he held forth on various ceramics-related topics. For one conference he sent letters to top museums around the country asking if he could break pieces from their ceramic collections in the name of “compression strength testing” them. He didn’t get any takers – although he did get several irate letters from museum directors – so he went ahead with a staged demonstration using a compression machine and some convincing fakes.
Another performance used a pot form that Bailey cast out of latex. He placed the deflated form on a wheel and surreptitiously connected it to a canister of compressed air, then announced to his audience that he was going to demonstrate his “mentalist” throwing techniques. He concentrated hard – while secretly releasing an air valve – and gradually turned a brown blob of latex into a stunning pot without the use of his hands. By focusing the psychic energy,” his website in-jokes, “microscopic particles of clay can be Forced to ‘slip.’”
Curiously, Bailey is perhaps best known for his nonceramic work. He assembles elaborate robots out of cast-off kitchenware, old car parts, and other detritus that he keeps neatly arranged on shelves in his workshop. Each robot is imbued with a Pixaresque level of characterization and a back story worthy of Greek mythology. Bailey wires the robots with blinking lights and working clocks, but he prefers to make them immobile – so, obviously, they don’t rampage through their owner’s home.
The robots are displayed in his studio next to various pieces of equipment for testing kaolithic fossils, repelling demons, and all manner of other unlikely tasks. Our tour of the Wonders of the World Museum wouldn’t have been complete without some hands-on demonstrations. We also got to see legendary pieces like Bailey’s Urns for the Unconceived, vessels that playfully address fundamentalist Christian values by memorializing the vast numbers of sperm and eggs that are “wasted” each year.
I took a lot of memories and lessons back from my visit to Bailey’s studio. It struck me that Bailey should be thought of as a seminal figure not just in the world of ceramics, but in the field of craft in general. He pioneered the sort of humor, contextualization, and experimentation that have become hallmarks of both contemporary studio craft and “indie craft.” He’s capable of astounding feats of chemistry and craftsmanship, but he often opts for simple, direct solutions. When I asked him about the huge gulf in craftsmanship between some of his funkier pieces and his “old master” work, he replied that his approach has always been to give each object as much craftsmanship as it required – no more, no less. And his work has always reflected exactly who he is: alternately playful, cynical, and mystical.
The art world finally seems to be coming around to a greater appreciation of Clayton Bailey, which is a great, great thing. The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, which has long been a supporter of Bailey and the Funk movement, is currently putting together the first major retrospective of Bailey’s art. The show opens on October 22, 2011, and will run through January 15, 2012. During my visit to Bailey’s studio, I imagined white-gloved art handlers from the Crocker carefully “excavating” kaolithic fossils from his backyard and crating them for shipment. I can only hope those handlers use the same care to return those crazy old bones to their original home, so others can have the same experience that I did.
