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William Daley: Inside/Outside  by Matthew Drutt |
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(From the catalog) Iconography may be understood in several different ways. It is either the variation of forms upon the same meaning, or the variation of meanings upon forms.
Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectic of yes and no, which decides everything.
My interest in the subject began with bumps and holes. I made them from sheets of clay modules to make big pots. When I put them together to become enclosing
walls, I was thrilled at how different the same forms felt from inside to outside.
When he was thirteen, William Daley asked his parents if he could sail on the Hudson River in his friend’s homemade boat. A neighbor’s husband had recently drowned in the river, so his parents were more reluctant than usual. “ After two nights of Irish parental talk my mother gave me their answer. She said, ‘Billy, if you are born to be hung, you will never be drowned, so sail.’” This paradigm of Irish wisdom has haunted Daley ever since, serving both as a catalyst for his experiments as an artist and teacher and as a reason for his elliptical interpretations of history and ritual. For more than forty years, Daley has pursued the expressive potential of the vessel form, alternately positioning himself as an artist or potter, but never wavering from his belief in the ability of the vessel to resonate with references to myth, location, and spirituality. His assimilation of the language of ritual artifacts, architecture, and landscape has evolved through a combination of accidental discovery, willful absorption, and a, romantic sense of being metaphysically linked with his Celtic ancestry. It is a journey that connects him to ancient traditions of both East and West, where vessels used in ceremonies and as architectural adornment have played a central role in mediating between the physical j and spiritual worlds and function as signifiers of cultural heritage. It is a pursuit that is part of a modernist : tradition, where the search for “the spiritual” through I visual form has distinguished the art of Kasimir Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, among many others. , For the modern American potter, the symbolic value of 1 the vessel reemerged shortly after World War II, when I Bernard Leach sparked an interest in Eastern philosophy and aesthetics through his writings and lectures. Offering an alternative to the utilitarian credo of design that was the offspring of the Bauhaus, Leach espoused axioms of inner harmony and piety. Numerous issues define contemporary ceramics, but arguably the most prevalent are those in which the vessel is articulated as a metaphor for the body, for location, and for containment. Such matters have occupied a broad range of contemporary American ceramists over many decades: Richard DeVore, Ruth Duckworth, Wayne Higby, Rudolf Staffel, Robert Turner, and Peter Voulkos to name but a few. Daley shares much in common with these artists: an interest in the formal language of the pot as a means of exploring plastic values; physical size and psychic scale; and the elusive boundaries of inner and outer form. What differentiates Daley’s career from these artists over time and, hence, what has become his lasting contribution to contemporary ceramics is his focus on architectonic form and the way he uses drawings to develop his ideas. Unlike painters and sculptors, for whom drawing in a secondary medium is a requisite part of the creative process, most clay artists talk about drawing in the clay, shaping the work on the wheel, or allowing the material to determine its form as it is worked. Some artists, such as Tony Hepburn, Wayne Higby, and Paula Winokur, do draw as a related activity, but Daley’s persistent exploration of his ideas through drawing as a primary exercise makes him unique in contemporary ceramics. There is rarely an exact translation of drawings to objects in his work; rather, although drawings are made either in preparation for or in tandem with the construction of his pieces, they function as a way to give shape to thought, allowing Daley to formalize abstract ideas. In one sense, Daley works in a way commensurate with standard design practice, rendering forms in plan, elevation, and section, using perspectival and axonometric views, drawing fragments or complete objects. His drawings can also be pictorial, however, demonstrating the graduation of organic into geometric, of figurative into abstract. Daley has stated: To me, the way line can be manipulated as pot encompasses compelling reasons for making drawings. First of all, line is the elementary boundary; it supports our sense of inclusion and habitation. Second, it is the means by which we sense the illusion of space (silhouette); it qualifies our sense of inside-outside, which can describe the location of alien and intimate. Third, as cross-section (slice), line describes the boundaries of volumes and the axis of their symmetries. In his search for an iconography that communicates the most universal ideas with the greatest economy, Daley has arrived at a vocabulary of geometric forms that can be infinitely divided and re-employed to create different shapes and Structures. This enchantment with permutation—aided through the process of drawing—is coextensive with Daley’s focus on the dynamic relationships of inside/outside. Whereas the traditional hierarchy of a vessel privileges the exterior, Daley has deconstructed this relationship to the point where both locations have equal status. They are at once interdependent and exclusive. One is struck by how different the interiors of his works are from the exteriors, all the more so given that a mark on the outside defines its location on the inside, and vice versa. Inside/outside is a correlation that is also bound to convex/concave, positive/negative, and presence/absence. But our experience of these conditions assumes a complexity beyond their implied binary opposition; to take in one of these works and comprehend the relationships of parts to the whole, we must move around it, look inside and out, side to front and back. While looking in, we cannot see out; conversely, the inner realm of the pot is barely distinguishable from the outside. Our encounter with these objects is never the same twice, as each different view creates a new understanding of forms. Michael McTwigan has identified Daley’s manipulation of the rim as pivotal to such encounters. Since the edge becomes the entrance or passageway to our experience of the vessel, Daley’s playful transfigurations of its forms are especially apt. The edges of his vessels are either thin and sharp (Axial Inn, Our Turn) or curled and folded to form soft, rounded contours (Onegas Passage). He also combines these two kinds of edge in a single work (Toas Procession). The complicated pattern of a Daley rim is never the common or expected sort of thing, so our eye is immediately drawn to tracing its perimeter. The rim is more than simply an access route to the pot, however. For we encounter barriers, false doors, ramps leading nowhere, small spout-like ducts and rims that nearly conceal what they frame. This exhibition moves through thirty-nine years of Daley’s art. It is not a retrospective, in that certain aspects of Daley’s career—such as architectural commissions and sculpture—cannot be accounted for in so modest a survey. Rather, the project is the first critical examination of his work in clay, looking closely at his sources and offering insight into the relationship of these works to his drawings. Daley was born in 1925 into a poor Irish Catholic family. His mother worked in a carpet factory and raised him with a brother, sister, and foster children. His father, a house painter and factory worker by trade, never gave up his dream of improving himself. He could recite the poetry of A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg from memory. He took a course in calligraphy at a local school and practiced each morning on the kitchen table’s surface, producing elaborate renderings of the family’s address in pencil. Daley recalls how one form would evolve from the next, so that the table would be covered with meandering patterns. Before breakfast, his mother would simply wipe off the table, and the process would repeat itself the following morning. This anecdote is revealing for its connection to Daley’s drawings. In addition to his works on paper, he draws on a large white wall in his studio, often moving back and forth between drawing and object when works are in progress. In the end, the wall might be covered with images. When he begins a new project, he whitewashes the wall and starts with a clean slate. In grade school, Daley showed early promise as an artist in an unusual way. His disinterest in mathematics led him to ignore questions on arithmetic tests, responding instead by copying the upper- and lower-case letters of the alphabet that were posted on placards on the classroom wall. He also drew war pictures, air and ground battles dense with hundreds of connected dots and dashes representing bullet traces. Like his art later in life, it was a strategy devised of his own, personal logic. Rather than discourage or correct such musings, the nuns left him alone. Eventually he was transferred out of Catholic school. The move was pivotal, for it is thanks to the attention of Miss Travis, his sixth grade teacher, that Daley claims he was able to become an artist. Where the nuns had been stymied by his talents, Miss Travis kindled them. She supplied him with materials and allowed him to take them home. She also gave him issues of National Geographic, whose photographs of animals and forest scenes he copied endlessly. Such imagery \ remains an inspiration for his art as an adult. Upon graduation from high school in 1943, Daley went straight into the Army Air Corps and served in Europe during World War II with the gunnery crew of a bomber. He was shot down on his first mission, taken prisoner of war by Serbians, and served out the rest of the war as a German prisoner. His passion for knowledge was unobstructed by even this most harrowing of experiences: He kept his mind sharp by reading the Oxford Guide to Classical Literature, which he had managed to borrow. “In it I found all of the constellations I knew from sailing. It led me to make a chart of all who ‘begat’ whom with all their cosmic infidelities. I really started to see how rich the caprice of discovery is. ” After the war, he entered the Massachusetts College of Art intent on becoming a painter. He emulated the works of John Marin, Ben Shahn, and Rufino Tamayo. He also loved all of the social realists and Mexican muralists, whose paintings he saw on frequent visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was deeply impressed as well by the architectural renderings of Hugh Ferris, whose drawings of radiant skyscrapers are reflected in many of Daley’s later columnar forms. He abruptly changed his major from painting to ceramics in his junior year, however, through the persuasive example of Charles Abbott, a ceramics teacher who became Daley’s mentor and friend. Years later, Daley spoke of Abbott as a fascinating combination of opposites...one part...the arithmetic-measured, problem-solving pragmatic Yankee another part...the romantic Emersonian New Englander a gentle follower of the Tao, Abbott sang the praises of Sung pots. ...Being an enlightened and secure traditionalist, he was open to anything new that you wanted to try—it was science. If you thought chicken fat might make a good glaze, he was up for it, and if asked, he would do the calculations on his slide rule. Along with fellow students John Cataldo and William Wyman, Daley graduated in 1950. That fall, he married Catherine Stennes and also entered Columbia University Teacher’s College to pursue a master’s degree in art education. Daley’s first job out of school, in 1951, was at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, where he began teaching ceramics and sculpture. With but a minimum of formal training as a potter and no teaching experience, Daley was concerned about his ability to fulfill his professional obligations. He had never fired a gas kiln, but that didn’t stop him from ordering one for his classes as soon as he arrived. Having no idea even how turn it on, and convinced that he would blow up the ceramics studio if he tried, he turned to his teacher Charles Abbott for answers. This began a rich correspondence that continued until his death in 1985. In the summer of 1953, Daley attended a session at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred university. There, studying with Charles Harder, he gleaned the technical knowledge he had lacked with glaze formulas and firing gas kilns. However, he was resistant to the emphasis on the perfectly thrown vessel form, an aesthetic synonymous with Alfred. Never particularly adept at working on the wheel, Daley saw it as one step in a process of manipulating the material that continued after throwing, rather than a means that was an end in itself. In Daley’s words, “The idea of dividing the space...it wasn’t sculpture, but it wasn’t a pot at all. Pottery was round and had a lid on it. ” This was a significant position to take, one that would steer him away from the popular notion of a potter and send him in a direction shared by several other young ceramists whose innovations with form and process would influence the course of contemporary ceramics. The earliest works in this exhibition date from 1954, when Daley was teaching ceramics, design, and sculpture at the State University of New York College in New Paltz. The work from this period is intimate in scale, mannered and exaggerated in form, organic but with a machinelike tactility. Its biomorphism is reminiscent of larger sculpture by Jean Arp and Joan Miró, while also displaying an affinity for the abstract purity of Scandinavian modern design, which was exerting a powerful influence on commercial design in America at this time. “[My pots] were like Scandinavian models gone to excess, losing the logic and just going with it.” Daley’s pots were quite different from the dominant currents in American studio ceramics, like the painterly, Eastern-influenced functional works being produced in California by Peter Voulkos or by Robert Turner on the East Coast. Like the pieces Daley made earlier in Cedar Falls, these works are anthropomorphic, derived from animal forms such as birds or turtles or based on the human figure. In his studies for these works, the drawing for a vase form, for example, begins as an abstract figure with its arms raised in the air, gradually becoming reduced to the formal components of a vase as the features become more elemental and linear. Unlike Daley’s earlier works, however, these works have an identifiable origin in Chinese ritual bronzes. They were my first conscious source after the learning time of imitation. I was enthralled by their dramatic shapes in space. My first responses were to Shang [Dynasty] Bells with ellipsoidal cross-sections and scooped rims. My favorite form was a three-Iegged wine vessel stretched in the air with its large bird-like spout. The bronzes’ forms, exotic appendages, mysterious bumps, patterns and ancient greenness, created a sense of spirit that I still feel. This connection came about coincidentally, however. Even in Cedar Falls, Daley had begun to scoop the rims into bell forms. In New Paltz, he happened upon a book by Phyllis Ackerman entitled The Ritual Bronzes of Ancient China, recognized the forms he was after, and began to make works based on the images photographed in the book. Later he would write that he was struck by how “every move [in the book] had a symbolic, ritual, and religious meaning. The book analyzed every shape and surface.” In response to these images, he burnished away the traces of any handmade impressions in the surface of the clay and glazed them in uniform greens and tans, so that even their hues evoked the patina of an ancient bronze object. This body of work was a watershed of sorts, for it became the basis for both his formal concerns and his technique of working with the material that would govern the rest of his career. When he arrived at New Paltz, Daley began weaning himself from working on the wheel, cutting the pots and reassembling them. He had also become bored with things being round; there wasn’t enough he could do within that parameter. He attributes the need to change and alter works to his days as a painting major, when he would rework a single canvas hundreds of times before getting it right. The process of cutting the pots and reassembling them also drew his attention to the mirror effects of inner and outer form and caused him to begin thinking about the vessel in a different way. In 1956, these works were the subject of Daley’s first major solo exhibition, held at New York University’s Art Education Gallery. The show was organized by the painter Jules Olitski, who was a colleague and friend of Daley’s at New Paltz and who ran the exhibition space ~t the university. In a statement written for the show that has been paraphrased and restated by the artist many times since, Daley offered his first articulation of artistic intention. To me the expressive quality of a vessel form is of first importance. My work is an attempt to experiment with these forms. My interests are sculptural rather than utilitarian. The function of a vessel need not be specific. Work created to be held, touched and seen is valid to the degree that a person responds to its form. Its presence is the vessel’s reason for being. I aspire to be an artist rather than a craftsman. For Daley, being an artist meant having the opportunity to invent his own past and future, whereas a craftsman was consigned to the role of imitator and of looking backward. His statement is an example of the thinking that evolved among many post-World War II craft artists, who began to ascribe ideas to their work beyond function. The principal argument being advanced whether consciously or by default—was that craft was not merely about technical facility and use, as popularly perceived to be. It was a radical shift, one that would establish a hierarchy within the crafts movement between production potters and ceramic artists, and one that continues to create controversy for ceramic (and other crafts ) in the arts today. In championing Daley’s work, Olitski was also his chief critic. Just when it seemed that form and content were in perfect harmony for Daley, Olitski encouraged him to stop making smooth, tight pots and to loosen things up. “Why don’t you make action?” Daley took the advice to heart and responded by placing clay slabs over plaster forms and beating them with a board. It was great, in the sense that it gave me a lot more possibilities than I could have envisaged. The minute I started hammering it, I was filling condoms with plaster, which was revolutionary in 1957. . . . My inclination as an Abstract Expressionist was to take an oak board and put a sheet of clay over a mold and throw pieces of clay onto it and sprinkle it with coffee grinds and whack it with a board. I was trying to make plastic surfaces, and I understood being painterly. The sense of liberation and excitement that resonates in Daley’s recollection of this shift is demonstrated in the works themselves. They became slightly larger, with richly textured and corroded surfaces. They reflect on the passage and consequences of time. Contrast, for example, the playful yet sober dignity of Bell Form (1954) with the liberated energy of Split Form (1956), a work that is ripped apart and fossilized in a state of collapse. Its surface is punctuated by impressions and bumps that resemble ancient glyphs and stellae. The form melts away and dissolves into itself, as though subjected to intense heat. The interior is now a visible part of our experience of the exterior area, creating a subtle ambiguity in the conventional hierarchy between those two spaces. It is surprising that the notion to do something like this hadn’t occurred earlier to Daley. Action was a buzz-word for American art during this time, and the aesthetic of scumbled, tactile materials became commonplace. Abstract Expressionism was in its heyday, and its absorption into the pioneering clay works of Peter Voulkos, John Mason, and others was by then well known. But Daley was not in synch with the work of other artists. His so-called Abstract Expressionist works were still tighter and less modern in appearance than those of Voulkos or Mason, whose charged brushwork and raw plastic forms {still derived from wheel-thrown elements) invoked the maxims of speed and action. Daley still felt in many ways an outsider to the field, and investigated sources not specific to the medium. In March 1957, Daley quit his job at. New Paltz, in protest over the dismissal of several younger faculty of the art department—Olitski, Robert Forth, Paul Harris, and Robert Newman, among them—on the grounds that their art proved them to be communists. It was the age of McCarthyism, and the works of these artists were deemed subversive. Although Daley was spared, his conscience and sense of camaraderie forced him to leave, despite having no offer of a job elsewhere. By September, he was teaching industrial design at the Philadelphia College of Art {P.C.A.), thanks to his college friend Joseph Carreiro, who was chair of the department of Industrial Design. At P.C.A., Daley divided his time between industrial design and the ceramics facility, which made him the only teacher floating between the two areas. In addition to Carreiro, among his colleagues on the faculty were Richard Reinhardt, a silversmith, and William Parry, who ran the ceramics studio. Daley quickly became close friends with Reinhardt and Parry. But whereas Reinhardt cultivated the rational, vocational side of Daley’s creativity, Parry fostered the romantic side. Daley and Parry shared a passion for reading and a utopian view of art. As Parry recalls: There was something spiritual in realizing something from this old material and process. Changing clay, breaking down the ground into something plastic and then into something hard as rock again...had to do with essences and primary, transcendent kinds of possibilities 1 think it had to do with some other path than [that of] the honorable craftsman. The book that confirmed this conviction for them was Henri Foçillon’s The Life of Forms in Art, which Parry discovered and then presented to Daley. Foçillon delved into past civilizations to explore how forms carry universal meanings, the same journey that Daley and Parry were engaged in as artists. “In writing about Celtic interlaces,” said Daley, “he [Foçillon] writes of them as ‘an art of thinking that has nothing to do with thought.’ He really speaks to my condition.” Daley refers here to his desire to work with an art of empathy that has an intellectual framework as well. Again, his enterprise is comparable to the precedent of a Malevich or a Kandinsky, who used abstraction as a transcendent visual stimulus to heightened experience. By 1959, Daley’s work had undergone another significant change. He drifted away from the Shang forms and gradually increased his scale, embarking on a series of totems, pod forms, and oval tanks (e.g., cat. 10), which Ward Doubet has likened to an Edgerton stop- action photograph of a milk drop. His sources were culled from the organic language of plants, bones, and eroded natural forms. They are shapes that express ideas of growth and morphology, ancient in design, articulated by an order and structure rooted in the natural world. His interpretation of these forms gradually took on a more elemental quality, such as Pod Form (1962) and Seed Form (1962), where the organic shapes are simplified into a series of repeating, geometric contours. The surfaces also became less active, both in texture and decoration. Around this time, Daley recalls seeing, with Parry, an exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Alliance of sculpture by Max Bill. What impressed them was that the work, while based on natural form, did not look like nature; it was about nature and its structures. Parry recalls that it “took something natural in terms of geometry and rendered it so that it became an aesthetic issue rather than a mental issue.” Daley was also enormously impressed by the collection of Brancusi sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where nature, geometry, and minimal form are combined with breathtaking elegance. And he had discovered another book, Urformen der Kunst (Archetypes of Art). This 1920s collection of plant photographs by a German scientist, Karl Blossfeldt, rendered the organic world as if produced by modern industry, demonstrating that natural forms could belong to a machine aesthetic. As Daley puts it, “Nature was not the touchy stuff. It was the tube.” Daley’s reverence for forms in nature was a paradigm of craft in the early 1960s, the closest he ever came to the mainstream. The relationship of craft objects to the natural environment in this period was ubiquitous, not only through earthy forms decorated with grassy striations, floral motifs, and cave like drawings of animal life but also in the way objects were photographed, often in a landscape or other natural setting. Although related to this trend, Daley’s work still had a different drift. His involvement with the industrial design program was making its impact, and it was this “other side” of his activity that nurtured the concern for geometry that gradually took prominence in his forms. It also led to the first in a series of architectural commissions that enabled him to move into a larger format and combine clay with other materials like wood and bronze. In 1963, Daley, in a bid for greater freedom to pursue his art, left his job at P.C.A. to accept a position as associate professor teaching ceramics, sculpture, and design at SUNY, Fredonia. There he “decided . . . [he] was going to become an artist once and for all.” His wife Catherine had become a partner in his studio, and together they spent the next two years working in every medium they could imagine: metal, stone, cast concrete, cast plastic, and stacked wood. Meanwhile, he was missed at P.C.A. Carreiro had become dean, Reinhardt was now head of industrial design, and Parry had departed to teach at Alfred University. They lured Daley back to Philadelphia in 1965 by offering him “everything but the kitchen sink.” Daley was in Philadelphia to stay this time, becoming a fixture in both the school and the arts community. He resumed his dual role as a teacher of industrial design and ceramics, a persona that would distinguish most of the rest of his career. It was an opportune moment. The crafts movement was experiencing a major upswing in the United States, and Philadelphia was a principal stage upon which important events would be played. Crafts disciplines were becoming majors instead of electives, and graduate programs were opening up in art schools to train teachers and send them into the field. With crafts faculties at three of its art schools—Moore College of Art, Philadelphia College of Art, and Tyler School of Art—Philadelphia was unique among American cities. The role it played in the contemporary crafts movement has been overshadowed by the more celebrated events in California and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, but the level of activity in the city during the 1960s and 1970s was unrivaled in the country. In addition to local artists with national reputations, distinguished crafts artists from around the world visited to give lectures and workshops, including Robert Arneson, Ruth Duckworth, and Howard Kottler, and their works were seen increasingly in exhibitions held at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center, the two most important public venues for crafts in the city at that time. The gallery system also emerged as a viable forum in which to sell crafts objects. Gallery 1015 in Wyncote, Pa., founded by Gladys Myers, was one of the first commercial galleries in the area to show ceramics in addition to painting and sculpture. In so doing it dignified the medium as a viable art form alongside the “fine arts.” Daley showed there with Staffel and number of other local artists, and through the gallery’s social activities Daley met some of the local patrons of the arts. It was there, in 1965, that he met Helen Drutt, who soon became a friend, professional colleague, and, years later, Daley’s primary dealer. As the visibility of crafts intensified, a group of interested professionals and artists sought to differentiate themselves from the membership of the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen, which opened its ranks to anyone working in craft media. Formed in 1967, the Philadelphia Council of Professional Craftsmen (P.C.P.C.) became the main catalyst for crafts activity outside the schools in the city over the next seven years. The organization set high standards for membership, admitting only those who had earned a master of fine arts, any artist earning a .living directly through his or her work, and anyone regarded by the executive committee as established in the craft community. Under the leadership of its volunteer executive director, Helen Drutt, the P.C.P.C. focused on generating exhibitions and educating the public about the existence of nationally and internationally known craftspeople living in Philadelphia. In 1969, the P.C.P.C. sponsored a solo exhibition of Daley’s art at the Philadelphia Art Alliance that unveiled work remarkably different from anything he had done before. This seemingly abrupt transformation in his art would plot the future course of his career. When he first returned to Philadelphia, Daley was exploring a combination of geometric/organic exercises through commissions and figurative sculpture in clay, metal, and wood (often in combination) which are not included in this exhibition. What little ceramic work he made was decorated and glazed, not unlike Floor Pot (1964). With this new group of mostly unglazed clay vessels, all of Daley’s past interests and experiments coalesced. In U Form (1968), for example, the surface has been divested of all drawing and decoration, exposing instead a raw, orange-colored clay body with an utterly smooth skin. The work is divorced from any discernable utilitarian form, except that it is clearly a vessel. For all of its simplicity, there is a complex articulation of inner and outer space, understood best through the artist’s study for the work. Here one finds tubular shapes, alternately rendered as ruts and valleys, like snakes weaving in and out of the main body. Each view reveals a new set of relationships between parts to the whole, set in complete symmetry. From above, the shape is oval, but divided into two D-sections, which is also a circle seen in perspective. It echoes the overall shape of the pot, which is ovoid and tubular. Reptilian Chiclet (1968) introduces a geometric form that Daley would return to several times in his career. A chiclet is a square with rounded edges, to which Daley has added a tubular element that is substituted for one of the corners. The pot looks like an abstract model or foundation for a building complex of some ancient design. It is actually an abstraction of a childhood visual memory, when he and his friends would go to the local sinkhole and hunt snakes. It foreshadows later works where the theme of location becomes more conspicuous, such as Toas Revisited (1989), which refers to Daley’s connection to New Mexico, discussed later here. Whereas the raw clay would seem to emphasize the material as itself, Daley’s manipulation of its color and texture through firing and adding elements like iron to the clay body gives the works an appearance of stone or metal. This is not an attempt to disguise the material; rather it challenges the limits presented by a raw material. Even more than his pieces from the 1950s, these works collapse a temporal distance between ancient and modern, where machinelike surfaces with roughed-up textures suggest erosion through distant pasts or futures. The shift to this geometric vocabulary was anything but spontaneous. Rather, it was the result of Daley’s evolving interest in elemental forms. “Being in I.D., seeing the mechanics all the time, teaching basic engineering, making models and structures, all had a tremendous impact on me. . . . There was this whole sense of responding to minimalist, reductive things, trying to get at abstraction by doing more with less. Touch didn’t matter anymore.” The “soft” geometries he developed in these objects addressed not only organic references; intentionally flawed and enigmatic, Daley also saw them as expressions of the flawed heroes in books by James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. Like such characters, the chiclet form was ambiguous; neither square nor circle, it remained indeterminate. Daley’s pursuit of psychic scale and geometric form matured at the same time that Minimalism and Earth Art were at the forefront of American art, and his work shows certain parallels with these tendencies. For example, Robert Smithson’s interest in location as an intellectual and formal device seems closely related to Daley’s. Similarly, Donald Judd’s stark geometric objects made from industrial materials dovetail with some of Daley’s theoretical constructs: the aesthetic of raw materials, geometry as a framework, and the absence of a handmade quality. However, the political orientation of such artists’ works—the desire to be outside the gallery system and the rejection of an expressionist mode of art—is clearly at odds with Daley’s aesthetic. Although he had begun working with maquettes made from cardboard and Styrofoam, he would never abandon the final phase of working directly with the material. To have his works fabricated would remove his “presence” from the objects in away Minimalist artists would have embraced, but for Daley it would nullify the work’s soul. From this point forward, the style one recognizes as Daley’s is unmistakable, evolving as new variations upon forms assumed deeper connections to identifiable influences. In 1971, he spent a year in Albuquerque as a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico and rediscovered the landscape of the American Southwest. Now he discovered a place where landscape and architecture melded together. “The wind blew through and Swiss-cheesed the joint, and the Indians came in and lived in the holes.” The culture and myths of American Indians took hold of him, as he learned of such legends as the Hohokam deity Friendly Brother, who dwelt in the caves. Daley began thinking of caves and other dwellings as vessel-like spaces, until he experienced the entire landscape as one giant pot. Ruins of the great Pueblo kivas—sacred rooms created underground within larger dwellings for purposes of meeting and worship—were like vessels scooped into the earth. Daley initially responded to this experience with a series of what he calls “ Mesa ” pots, mostly chiclet forms with rounded rims and tubular interventions, where he began to assimilate the language of ritual architecture with that of the vessel. Mesa Pot (1972), for example, is based on Daley’s encounter with a ruined Spanish colonial church. The church had no roof left, so that the sun filled the interior space, reminding him of a vessel sitting in a landscape. The rib shapes recall the orange tiles found on such buildings, but they are also an abstraction of the formation of canyons and mountains. The zigzag or ribbed pattern developed into a signature motif for Daley, functioning alternately as a dominant design element and a decorative embellishment. The motif becomes stylized and angular in a series of hanging planters Daley undertook in the early to mid-1970s. In such works, the convex-concave shapes are a perfect exponent for the ambiguities of inside/outside relationships, as pyramidal forms float amid a web of lines and alternate between transparency and opacity. Recalling as well the positive/negative decoration of Mimbres pottery, the steplike forms underscore the pots’ association to sacred spaces, such as Mayan step pyramids. When viewed inside, they have a stadiumlike appearance, where the step forms surround a plazalike space at the bottom. If hung from above or if something is placed inside the pot, the inside is no longer perceived except through one’s imagination. This, however, proves to be one of the most engaging premises of Daley’s formula. In 1974, the Helen Drutt Gallery opened in Philadelphia and Daley had his first solo exhibition there. The works from this exhibition reveal his focus on architectural space and rhythms, with pieces entitled Stadium Pot and Architectonic Volume. Most of these are sober and controlled, but others like Columnar Floor Pot (1974) show the pot spiraling like a tornado, the form evolving both out of and into itself. A comparable convoluted dynamism is expressed in his drawings—which were shown with his pots for the first time in this exhibition—such as his study for this pot (1973). Although his earlier drawings reveal relationships between forms that are evolutionary or intertwined, the main image of the pot is isolated and distinct. In Study for Columnar Floor Pot, a new complexity informs the drawing style, with elements overlapping like a collage. There is a feeling of simultaneity, as though the drawing were trying to express the viewer’s experience of looking at a three-dimensional object. In this respect, Daley begins working with a drawing system related to Cubism, where space and form are subject to kinetic interchange. Like the dichotomies of inside/outside, the sense of foreground and background space oscillates, forms blending from opacity to transparency. A sense of architectural rendering also inhabits the sketch, where details—such as a section of rim—are drawn in isolation and axonometric views afford understanding of the inside as it relates to the outside. By the later 1970s, Daley was returning to earlier themes and rendering them with greater formal clarity. There is a self-assured quality about these works, and their titles move beyond the generic “vessel form” or “floor pot” to address more directly their links to spiritual inspiration. Shang Form (1977) harks back to interests first explored more than twenty years before. Now, however, the ritual bronze is given the scale and presence that his smaller pots could hardly convey. Made from a deep brown clay, the pot combines the attributes of an architectural column with the trappings of a Chinese bronze. The smooth surface is interrupted only beneath the rim, where a series of vertical incisions forms an even pattern around the neck. This creates a matte effect that absorbs the light from an otherwise shiny exterior, reinforcing the feeling of an ancient metallic object with built-up patina. It also approximates the way light dances across a landscape or a building, where highlights and shadows redefine our experience of a space as the light continues to shift. The sacred space of a Pueblo kiva is revisited through works like Kiva Form (1979), but now with an elegance uncharacteristic in earlier interpretations (e.g., Mesa Pot, 1972). Low to the ground like its ancestor, the symmetry in Kiva Formbetween symbol, geometric form, and abstract design has achieved an exceptional balance. The rim curves inward, in conscious imitation of the transition of the earth at these sites. Indentations form complex inside/outside dynamics while also serving as reminders of location—the niche on the rim, for example, suggests a doorway to inner spaces. The two triangular “peaks” below the rim not only echo the elongated concave incisions inside the bowl, but they refer back to the bird and body forms of the 1950s. The cross in the belly of the pot functions as the axis of the form’s construction and relocates a religious symbol from one culture to another, a practice Daley begins to employ with greater frequency in expounding his ideas about universal “geometries of location or residence.” It also relates to the abstraction of the landscape—as in maps where “x” marks the spot—underscoring the multiplicity of associations conveyed with a concise set of symbols or forms. With the success of these works came national and international recognition. The award of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1977 sanctioned Daley’s efforts outside his smaller circle of colleagues and patrons. Ceramics seemed finally to be coming into its own. However, the esprit de corps that the community of artists had previously enjoyed would yield to the competitive pressures of professional concerns. Moreover, Daley’s works were beginning to enter the collections of major museums, and invitations to show nationally accelerated, with dealers competing for work and exclusive representation. In 1979, Daley had his first solo exhibition at a major gallery outside Philadelphia (since joining Helen Drutt), when a group of works, including Kiva Form, was shown at Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco. In 1981, his solo exhibition at Exhibit A Gallery, in Chicago, resulted in his first review by a mainstream art magazine, when Janet Koplos, writing in New Art Examiner, likened his works to the architecture of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. That same year, Daley’s work graced the cover of American Craft, and Garth Clark’s book American Potters identified Daley as one of twenty modern masters in American ceramic. Taking his place alongside Ruth Duckworth, Toshiko Takaezu, Robert Turner, Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman, and several younger artists, Daley was celebrated by Clark as the major voice of architectonic ceramics. In 1982, the ultimate recognition of Daley’s achievements came when he was honored with a retrospective exhibition at his alma mater, Massachusetts College of Art. The following year Daley had his fifth solo exhibition at the Helen Drutt Gallery. The response to his work was overwhelmingly positive, one reviewer noting that it had “the kind of weight that a strong tradition imparts to its faithful adherents.” The show offered a variety of each type of pot Daley had been exploring: columnar forms; low, expansive saucers; and large bowls with multiple geometries. “The color [of the pots] was glorious. Red but going toward brown, like dreams of Indians when you are little. ” They epitomized his investigation of a “geometry of change” or“whacked geometries,” where forms reside within and evolve from one another. The works expand the indeterminate binary opposition of inside/outside to include both/and, either/or. Tri-D Out (1983) one of the principal works from this exhibition resembles a cauldron or ritual well. It invokes familiar forms of pots past—the “D” shape and the jagged lines—and executes them with a clearer sense of proportion its squarish angularity on top is compromised by its bending rims and flowing contours. The flared top gives it the impression of having been flipped over, like an inverted pyramid uprooted and swept from the ground toward the sky. The movement and precarious balance in the work is now graceful and no longer turbulent, as it had been nine years earlier in Columnar Floor Pot. Toward the middle of the 1980s onward, Daley’s concern with the “pot as habitation” and “geometries of residence” becomes more refined. The works are characterized by less dramatic shifts in form and bear titles that suggest cosmic journeys. In Pentagonal Destination (1984), for example, Daley uses a pentagon, a geometric shape seldom used by him in the past. Here it resides comfortably within a circle, alluding to mystical diagrams and sacred architecture where the number five represents the flowering quintessence of life and the properties of the Golden Proportion as it relates to human form. A related study makes further reference to this connection, showing a five-pointed star inscribed within the form. The overlapping sketches of pigeons are a curious inclusion reappearing frequently in Daley’s drawings to the present. Occasionally they serve as models for geometric forms inscribed in nature—oval eyes, curved beaks, and so forth. Here they add a dimension of reverie, as though the kaleidoscopic images were culled from drifting thoughts or memories of a dream. They inhabit the space like sacred guardians, calling the artist back to his youth when he raised the birds as a hobby. Oval Chamber (1987) exemplifies the classical proportions that Daley’s columnar forms have assumed. Less baroque in temperament than his Shang Form of a decade earlier, its controlled lines and dignified presence endow it with a scale that feels larger than life. The anthropomorphic attributes of a spine, head, and arms are abstracted into a geometric vocabulary but are somehow reminiscent of the earliest works in the show (e.g., cat. 3). Appearing narrow and circular from the side and ovoid when viewed frontally, its vocabulary is by now familiar, with step forms and zigzagging ornament. In Cryptic Oval (1989), a montage of different forms becomes a magnum opus of Daley’s sources. Its curved rim is reminiscent of the kiva pots, while its appendages refer to Shang bronzes and step pyramids. Whereas the exterior is constantly shifting, the interior reveals a completely different experience. Although articulated by forms on the exterior (or is it the other way around?), the inner design is calm and ordered. The transition of parts is smooth and seamless, and the space has the presence of ritual architecture, underscored by the cross that defines its cross-axis. With his official “retirement” from teaching in 1990, Daley entered a new phase of his career, characteristically steeped in projects. Free to travel more, he has criss-crossed the United States giving workshops and lectures at art schools and community art centers. Much of 1991 and 1992 was spent working on a commission for Arrow Corporation in Reading, Pa.., that eventually went unrealized. Consisting of a series of high and low planters that would reside in the lobby of the new corporate headquarters, it became a site for Daley to experiment with increased scale in the pots while abiding by his formula of inside/outside. When each attempted pot began to collapse under the weight of the clay, he was faced with devising an internal structural support that would reinforce the walls but would f have no relation to the design of the exterior. After much reflection, the project was abandoned rather than compromise a system that has sustained him for so many years. One of the eight proposed prototypes for the project was successful, however, and one is included here. The form that embraces the best of his recent work is the vesica. Derived from the overlapping space that results from the intersection of two circles, the ovoid vesica carries a host of symbolic meanings. In the MiddIe Ages, it was the central diagram of sacred geometry for Christian mysticism, its fish shape linking it to metaphors of Christ. Assimilated into sacred architecture, the shape became the dominant element in gothic architecture. In symbolizing the space between heaven and earth, it is understood in a more universal context as balancing consciousness—the realm between changing and unchanging principles—encompassing proportionality, mediation, and human consciousness. These are fitting symbols for Daley’s late work, representing for him the ideal reconciliation of formal and spiritual values. As a recapitulation drawing of the vesica form illustrates (recapitulations for Daley are a didactic restating of forms and ideas), the form unifies his concerns for spiritual location (rendered here as the transept of a church); a geometry of nature (the shape of the pigeon’s body, eyes, and head); and a geometry of change (derived from two circles, the vesica becomes triangular when cut in half, referring back to the trinity, pyramids, and so forth). The vesica is furthermore the shape of a boat, and in their narrow views, these vesica pots resemble the prows of ships. They are vessels, after all, replete with all the attendant metaphors of a boat, bringing Daley full circle to an object whose subject matter he first explored in college. The shape also refers back to the passion of his youth— sailing—that Daley has called upon repeatedly as a metaphor of his life experiences. His reexamination of these references has become increasingly abstract as well as concrete, and the puzzle of forms that defines his pieces is more complex. Yet the forms remain accessible, insofar as their formalism has not become divorced from the object’s design. As these impulses continue to inhabit Daley’s art, the passages and destinations that inform his work hold promise of further enduring contributions.
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