Marketplace | Phillips Stern Collection: Ken Price's XXX-Rated Pots | CFile

Hide the children, dim the lights and draw the blinds. Most have not seen Ken Price’s pornographic art. Some would call it erotic, but he pretty much crosses that line and literally takes you into the performance using the pot as a theater. His retrospective avoided this work, the artist’s choice, but it would have been instructive to have included some of this art. It says a lot about the artist to those who would rather stay within the safety of his cubistic color and geometric form or his latter multicolored blobs (although those can at times even touch on the obscene).

Sexuality is a powerful drive and a potent force in Price’s art, even though, outside of this series of works, it’s not expressed literally. He once almost built one of those roadside religious shrines to the dead one sees on the road between Santa Fe and Taos, where he lived. It was going to be made up entirely of clay penises, but in the end, wiser minds (maybe not his) prevailed. New Mexico’s religious values are deeply fundamentalist. He also planned a porno cabinet for his Happy’s Curios series in 1979 but the Los Angeles Museum of Art felt that between them being ceramics, sensitivity to what might be seen as ethnic stereotyping, and religious taboos (all of which ruffled feathers) it was fine without.

Either way, once he lit on the idea of the pot-as-porn-theater he would visit this subject from time to time. Part of the shock value is taken away by humor and this body of work features some of his most elegant and economical draftsmanship. The Stern collection contains both pots and preparatory sketches; it’s an adult gem. If you are 18 or older you may proceed.

Garth Clark is the Chief Editor of CFile.

Above image: Ken Price, Study for Vase ‘Club Atomica’, 1986