Viola Frey, Studio View: Woman and Vase, 1982. All Photos: Chris Hanke. Courtesy of The Pit and The Artist’s Legacy Foundation.
When The Pit announced a show by the late ceramicist Viola Frey, it piqued my editorial interest. I myself first became aware of Frey when I began taking ceramics courses with other sculptors, who would often speak of her as a totemic influence on their practice and as a venerable patron saint of clay-fired art in California. In their eyes, she could do no wrong. I was interested to see what our duelists would make of her work. — Daniela, Editor-in-Chief
Desperate Relations
Eileen Havant Townsend
There’s no denying that the late artist Viola Frey’s retrospective exhibition at The Pit looks extremely ’80s. Though Frey created the works on view between 1980 and 2004, their defining aesthetic—funky, brightly colored figurative paintings, drawings, and ceramics arranged in art brut–esque anti-compositions—feels inseparable from the Greed Decade and, by that token, a bit out of fashion. Maybe it’s Frey’s preference for graphic hues, or her second-wave feminist sense of scale. Whatever it is, I suspect that the art world fashion police (for whom the call sign of good taste is…oh, I don’t know, Giorgio Morandi, or some other humble oil-paint-smudger obsessed with the color grey) would likely view this work as best consigned to the dustbin of history.
But the snobs are wrong about Frey. Her work has much to offer those of us unlucky enough to be alive today—and not solely because many of her paintings depict proto-Trump-like figures despairing amid the wreckage of Western civilization. What makes Frey’s art so necessary is the same quality that makes it uncool: its bare-faced urgency. The paintings and sculptures in this exhibition show what it looks like for an artist to be genuinely self-expressive—to make art because she has to.
Frey, who died in 2004 at the age of 70, was raised in a family of farmers in Lodi, California. She spent time as a young artist in New York and started as a painter, studying under the likes of Diebenkorn and Rothko. But Frey is best known for her ceramic works, which defined her career and helped elevate the medium out of its associations with craft and into the vernacular of contemporary sculpture. For three decades, she led the ceramics department at California College of the Arts while making work in the backyard of her Oakland home. What her outdoor studio lacked in square footage, she made up for vertically, growing her work toward the sky. She became best known for her larger-than-life figurative sculptures, assembled out of sections she fired in a small kiln.
Viola Frey, Largest Grandmother, 1987.
Two of Frey’s goliaths—approximately nine-foot-tall ceramic sculptures of a man in a business suit and a ten-foot-tall woman, primly dressed—loom near the center of The Pit’s exhibition. The viewer gazes up at these figures, dubbed Largest Grandmother (1987) and Leaning Man III (1984–1985), from the perspective of a child. Another larger-than-life figure, Seated White Majestic Woman (2004), earmarks the show in a far corner, looking much as the work’s title suggests. A survey of the literature on Frey left me with the impression that most critics fixate on the childlike perspective these works impose, interpreting these ceramic giants and giantesses through the (very 1980s!) lens of object relations. The idea is that Frey’s giants remind viewers of the moment in childhood when we discovered our essential separation from the world around us—a mental leap fundamental to creativity.
I may have joined this critical chorus if The Pit had not presented such an extensive, varied, and at times messy body of Frey’s work. (If I were one of the aforementioned snobs, I might also say the show was a bit overhung—but I am not such a snob.) The ten paintings and drawings on view, along with the eleven smaller ceramic works, confused the issue for me. After lingering over a pastel drawing of a nude woman perched atop a disembodied glove—Untitled (Pink Woman, Orange Glove) (1986–1987)—and subsequently encountering other disembodied gloves across the ceramics and oil paintings, I started wondering: Wait, what’s up with the glove? Is this really object relations, too? Other tropes emerged: piles of ceramic chickens, broken dolls, Classical columns and vases, open doors, nude women and suited businessmen, florals, monkeys. These Freyisms recurred across the hurried pastels, densely textured paintings, and smaller ceramics—the objects always collapsing into each other, as if a bull had just disturbed Frey’s china shop.
I found myself thinking not of the 1980s, but of the 1890s. Or maybe the 1980s’ take on the 1890s. Specifically, I kept thinking about the apartment/workshop of “genetic engineer” J.F. Sebastian in Blade Runner (1982)—a scene famously filmed in LA’s Bradbury Building, a downtown jewel of Gilded Age architecture. In the movie, Sebastian works amidst piles of animate toys (monkeys clashing cymbals, ballet dancers, miniature French infantrymen) as well as dust-covered divans that recall the shuttered country seats of aristocratic families. Sebastian himself is an isolated figure, an archetypal disfigured obsessive confusing objects for family.
One of the conceits of object relations theory is that the artist scales up her experience of her immediate family to the scale of the world. But I wondered if the inverse might be true—that Frey was more of a Sebastian, trying to make art out of the alienation of 1980s California, a backyard bricoleur trying desperately to relate to whatever remains of Western Civilization (the last unbothered moments of which were probably around the 1890s) washed up in her neighborhood antique store.
Whatever the case, it is the urgency to relate—rather than to make sense—that characterizes works such as Studio/Garden Painting (1982–1983), a 105 x 165-inch oil painting across three panels that depicts a violent whorl of toys, dolls, chickens, businessmen, gloves, and tiny figures diving toward an open door. Studio View: Woman and Vase (1982) offers a similarly nightmarish swirl. Both paintings look very ugly and feel very necessary. A smaller ceramic work, World Civilization: Two Men with Column and Elephant (1994)—a pile of man, beast, and object shown in the round—looks like a historical genre painting given weird dimension and melted. The similarly funky Untitled (Bricolage Bust with Fan Nose and Elbow on Pitcher, Untitled Round White Table) (c. 1981), offers a barely balanced arrangement of pitcher, limb, and bird.
Viola Frey, Untitled (Bricolage Bust with Fan Nose and Elbow on Pitcher, Untitled Round White Table) (detail), c. 1981.
Which brings us to the archetypal 1980s suited businessmen who—often faceless—appear throughout Frey’s work, figures now visually inseparable from the current President. Perhaps Frey somehow intuited the present zeitgeist, but I think it’s more that culture simply hasn’t moved all that much. We’re trapped in some kind of eternal return, in which we worry about or applaud the collapse of the West while distressed-looking Suits take advantage of the moment to plead their own persecution. The main difference I can see between something that could be made today and works like Frey’s Untitled (Nude Woman on Lying Man) (1985)—a naked woman and a seated man (the “lying” is a joke)—is that I can’t imagine any artist today making something that feels at once so genuinely free and so genuinely alienated.
If Frey’s world was a 1980s of washed-up tchotchkes and blank-faced archetypes—a disturbed world in which objects crashed off the shelf before they could be named—then we’ve traded that in for a 2020s in which everything is named and determined before we have time to truly experience it. The rational markets and the neural networks beat us to the punch every time. Not to mention that we no longer have a politics of faceless businessmen (e.g., the bland 1980s corporation) but are hurtling towards an oligarchy determined by several businessmen in particular, the names and faces of which we know too well.
How can we approach such a bright, known world with anything like urgency? We can envy Frey’s vulnerability, her evident confusions.
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The Work Without Qualities
Pat Williams
Viola Frey’s work raises questions, questions like: “Is this just boring and ugly, or is it boring and ugly for a reason?” and “If Viola Frey’s oeuvre was long-neglected, why not continue neglecting it?”
It is also the kind of art that answers questions—questions like: “What if people were lumpy?” and “What would art look like in Hell?”
A key to the particularly soul-deadening quality of Frey’s work is its ability to turn its every virtue into a vice. If it were less sincere, it might be more enigmatic; if it were more minimalist, it would be easier to ignore; if it had been less influential, it would remind you less of corporate lobby art or the patio clutter brought back from all your worst aunt and uncle’s warm-weather vacations.
Frey’s pieces are like a catalog of all the things art can be without being good. It employs the techniques of caricature without being satire, experiment without innovation, expressionism without a mood, craft without virtuosity, nudity without revelation. They are cartoony but no fun, free but not wild, omnivorous but monotonous, colorful but not stimulating, busy without detail, oblique but not poetic, autobiographical but impersonal, large but not confrontational, energetic but not passionate, stylized but not stylish, improvised but not surprising, elusive but not deadpan, tasteless but not juicy, never obvious yet never clever.
Viola Frey, Untitled (Cup Bricolage with Orange Monkey, Bird and Hand), 1995.
When pressed for any description of what Frey is good at, Frey’s critical boosters all seem to succumb to an almost ritualized vagueness, marshaling the bare facts of her existence as if they were assets: she was born outside the big city but moved to one to make art, she worked in male-dominated spaces, she lived surrounded by her work, she was obsessed with making it and made a lot of it—statements which apply to nearly all artists. The ad copy for a recent Frey monograph with the impressively meaningless title Artist’s Mind / Studio / World claims her drawings reveal “her devotion to line, color and scale” as if those things don’t appear in basically all drawings. Texts defending Frey will usually bring up the idea that her work conveys “emotion,” but they never seem to be able to figure out which one(s). Sometimes there will be a stray reference to the word “politics,” but no actual political ideas can be pinned to them.
The shape of Frey’s artistic identity seemed to have been traced by slaloming around the concerns of other artists in the ’70s Bay Area milieu that shaped her. She took painting classes from Richard Diebenkorn but says “we were taught nothing,” she had a lot in common with contemporaries in the California Funk Art movement who rejected the minimalism and abstraction blowing west out of New York, but she couldn’t relate to Funk’s emphasis on personality, humor, bold statements, and intentional weirdness. Like Ed Sheeran covering Steely Dan to the tune of a toy Casio, any relation Frey may have to Funk is purely technical.
Discussing profoundly funky fellow Bay Area ceramicist and former studio-mate Robert Arneson, she says: “Well, he was always very politically slanted. I was never that interested in specific stories or narrations. So the work is much more broad.” An interviewer asks, “So did you worry then that you might lose your identity as an artist, as an individual, if you didn’t pull away from Arneson?” and she agrees. What did she like? Picasso, Matisse, Dubuffet. One struggles to find the appropriate antonym to “groundbreaking.”
Among the few interests Frey admitted to sharing with the major artists around her was bigness. Bigness in clay. You see (we are always informed in discussions of Frey) it was once fashionable to disdain the expressive potential of ceramic objects. Frey’s generation was known for freeing them from the prison of being used to only make cups, bowls, plates and other things that ceramics were actually good at and proving that wet dirt, properly fondled and fired, was just as capable of being dragooned into the service of aesthetic contemplation as wood, steel, bronze, silkscreen, oil, alkyd, acrylic, tempera, iron, blood, rock, canvas, charcoal, pencil, pen, ink, plexiglass and every other material known to art (only harder to ship). A major part of this project was showing it could be big, which Frey did, arguably first. I will not deny that many of Frey’s pieces are very large as things made of clay go—mostly because there are very few good reasons to make anything that big out of something mushy and fragile.
Motifs and images appear in the work—a man in a suit, a nude woman, hands. Why? Frey saw them, somewhere, and decided to put them in art—only that is certain. A hoarder of tchotchkes born to a family of hoarders, Frey’s signal talent was the ability to turn nearly any object or subject into yet another Viola Frey. In pieces like Untitled (Oval Head Bricolage, Figurines on Hat) (1980), any form of cute junk might briefly emerge from the rim of a plate, a gloppy stack, or from a wall-label description before having all of its potential to create pleasure or meaning drained away by Frey’s siphoning hand. A true prophet of the thrift store, Frey was turning toys, figurines, gloves, and Buddhas into an anonymizing stream of charmless, inoffensive muck decades before the term “Mothball Contemporary” was coined.
Viola Frey, Untitled (Nude Woman on Lying Man), 1985.
Frey liked to watch television while she worked, with the sound off and the radio playing. She didn’t care which channel, claiming everything on TV was pretty to her. So, there we have it: the visual art of someone wholly incapable of deciding something looks better than something else. Indeed, one struggles to imagine what Frey might consider a mistake: If the yellow Raoul Dufy-derived doorway in the wretched Studio View: Woman and Vase (1982) were tilted left instead of right, would that throw off the balance? If Untitled (Cup Bricolage with Orange Monkey, Bird and Hand) (1995) featured a green monkey instead, would that be all wrong? Is any imperative being served other than a need to pile clay on a plinth and paint it like a vague
memory of 1910?
When Frey’s father died, some of the tractors he’d hoarded went to a tractor museum. Frey laughed, “Can you imagine that? A tractor museum?” Now I’ve spent my entire life avoiding looking at tractors, but who among us would not rather look at 25 tractors than 25 Viola Freys? The tractors will at least be complexly different from one to the next because technology, whimsy, rust, history, or industrial fashion have made them so; they will say something and perhaps even be oddly beautiful in saying it. The Freys won’t. Do not look at her art and find a tractor museum instead.
The source for all the quotes in this article is: Oral history interview with Viola Frey, 1995 Feb. 27–June 19. Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
