The Clay Movement

First he spun the soft wet clay into flat dishes, then bulging pots. Slapping them together, he formed twisting columns and knobby mountains. He hardened and fired them into strong ceramic towers, and suddenly they ceased being pottery and became sculpture.

Peter Voulkos' rough, ragged monuments are powerful weapons against the slick coffee-table pottery that often passes for modern art, and already a generation of fierce West Coast individualists has joined him at the barricades. Their fast-burgeoning "clay movement" dominates a wide-ranging, determinedly original show of California sculpture, organized by the ambitious Oakland Art Museum, now on display in the four-acre garden atop Oakland's Kaiser Center parking garage.

Bronze & Clay. Two of Voulkos' works in the show are clay, the other is bronze. Twenty years ago, after growing up in the tough world of Montana sheepherders, Voulkos got a job making castings in a Portland iron foundry. Artisanship led to art. At first he tried painting but found the materials too thin: he thickened his paint with sand, gradually moved to clay and worked searchingly until he discovered all its possibilities. Monumentality gripped him from the beginning. "I had lots of stuff fall down on me," he says. "I'd be up on a ladder and working, and all of a sudden I'd be on the floor, under a mass of wet clay."

He needed sterner stuff--and recalled his days in the foundry. Joining the art faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Voulkos and two fellow teachers organized a foundry on the junk-strewn east shore of San Francisco Bay. There he now works with huge wax blobs, which he melts and presses into thin sheets. He shapes the sheets into curvilinear planes, joins them into tormented, zigzagging giant winged forms, finally casts them in bronze and welds them into thrusting, soaring pieces of sculpture.

Big Is Little. Though metal, these works share the essence of Voulkos' clays: great size, roughness, the look of having been shaped not by tools but by his own long-fingered hands and powerful arms. The clay movement has become California's first native contribution to contemporary sculpture. Dozens of potters and post-potters, led by Voulkos' colleague John Mason, are busy around Los Angeles, and Voulkos, now 39, carries on in the San Francisco Bay area.

"I often tell my students to make the best cup in the world," he says. "They struggle with it, and all at once that cup becomes everything." He explains the bigness of his work by calling it little. "When I'm out in the trees and flowers, it all looks so immense," Voulkos broods. "The sky is big and the trees are big. What I do suddenly seems terribly small. Maybe that's why I like to work in little rooms at midnight."

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