November 10 – December 16, 1997
Beaver College Art Gallery
PRESS RELEASE
This exhibition presents fourteen pieces from Michael Lucero’s “Reclamation Series,” the artist’s most recent and ongoing body of work begun in 1994. The seven sculptural works on view incorporate Lucero’s signature glazed vessels attached to dismembered garden statuary, broken African sculpture, and other distressed objects rescued from vintage thrift stores and antique fairs. (The damaged condition of the original artifacts is requisite to Lucero’s process and critical to the content of the finished pieces.) The seven gouache drawings included were executed on found pencil sketches from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, similarly acquired and “restored.” Together, the drawings and sculpture epitomize a form of “iconographic pluralism” that “interprets culture as an aggregate, formed over time by exposure, improvisation, and adaptation.”
White Poodle (1996) perhaps best exemplifies Lucero’s punning, syncretic approach. A metal armature inserted into the neck of a headless lawn ornament supports three glazed vessels. The one in the center, deftly painted with the sullen face of a dog to exploit the curved volumes of the pot, replaces the animal’s missing head. Near the folds in the long-necked vessel to the right, painted fingers pinch the clay, pointing to Lucero’s practice of altering pots wheel-thrown by an assistant. The floating “bubbles” on the third vessel and the metal rings, clamps, and stands (obtained from a chemistry set) suggest laboratory activity, confirming a kinship to “Frankenstein’s monster” and other creatures assembled from incongruous fragments. Lucero’s aesthetic prosthesis, however, not only re-animates and updates the broken garden toy, but refreshes our interest in it, creating a bold new breed of ceramic sculpture in the process.
Pink Nude (1995) resurrects a Latino santo figure, Knight (1995) recovers a dyed plaster “conquistador,” Luba Carolina (1995) repairs a cracked wood African sculpture, and Horse (1996) recuperates a decapitated equestrian statue. Treasure (1995) christens a drab miniature ceramic house with a sparkling coat of yellow “paint” dripping from a teapot. A tree once used as a theatre prop (Cedar, 1996) is put into service as a “bottle rack.” (Thinking of Duchamp’s “assisted ready-mades” here is apt, but ultimately limiting.) In each case, the cast-off object has been “reclaimed” by vessels potent with references to vernacular traditions such as the Native American totem pole, the bottle tree, and “face jugs”crafted by plantation slaves, as well as the eccentric vessels of Mississippi potter George Ohr, and other indigenous genres.
Lucero’s embrace of such explicit ceramic traditions is complicated by his conscious detachment from conventional attitudes toward clay, for example, his unapologetic use of commercial glazes and his adoption of “appropriationist” strategies developed by sculptors such as Haim Steinbach in the 1980s, who left his consumer goods and artifacts intact, but ideologically transformed by their presentation. Lucero uses pots to perform similar shifts in context and meaning, capitalizing on the medium’s fluid sculptural and cultural connotations. “In Lucero,” writes critic John Perreault, “everything, including ‘ceramics,’ is in ‘quotes.’ ”
Translated into two dimensions using found drawings, Lucero’s “reclamation” strategy operates more surreptitiously, but with no less invention. Exploring the pictorial possibilities presented by the negative spaces enveloping these earnest amateur figures, Lucero inscribes comic faces, strutting limbs, and third-world imagery to camouflage authorship while honoring difference. Each re-finished drawing becomes an unwitting collaboration that is all the more haunting upon the discovery, in some cases, of original dates and signatures.
Both the drawings and sculptural works are hybrid, quasi-surreal, history-sacking, boundary-busting, cross-cultural creations that defy the simple polemics of the machine vs. the handmade, high vs. low, and crafts vs. fine arts. Although Lucero’s approach could be regarded as irreverent, the net effect is celebratory. Restoring the vitality and aesthetic utility of these forlorn artifacts and sketches, he conveys what curator Barbara Bloemink has called “the ultimate triumph of visual cultures over anonymity, geographic displacement, and reigns of cultural conformism.”
Lucero’s exhibition continues the gallery’s interest in exhibiting innovative ceramic sculpture established by its shows for Daisy Youngblood in 1992 and Ken Price in 1995. With its focus on works from the “Reclamation Series,” this exhibition complements the artist’s traveling mid-career survey on view at the Renwick Gallery (National Museum of American Art) through January 4, 1998.
Currently a resident of New York’s East Village, where he has lived since the early 1980s, Lucero was born in Tracy, California in 1953. He received his B.A. from Humboldt State University before studying at Seattle’s University of Washington. Initially identified as a painter inspired by bay-area funk, Lucero chose instead to pursue ceramics because he was fascinated by the possibilities of using glazes as a way to paint on three dimensional forms. Early acclaim came with his large hanging figures assembled from clay shards and his “Dreamers” of the mid-1980s, sleeping heads glazed with visionary landscapes. The recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship and three Individual Artists Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is included in public museum collections across the country, in Mexico and Korea. His retrospective, organized by The Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, North Carolina), concludes it’s tour this spring at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Lucero’s work is represented in New York by the David Beitzel Gallery.
“Michael Lucero: Confounding Artifacts” is funded by grants from the Arcadia Foundation, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Advisory Board and Friends of the Beaver College Art Gallery.
