Californian feat of clay
Tanya Harrod
THE CLAY ART OF ADRIAN SAXE by Martha Drexler Lynn Thames & Hudson, £19.95, pp. 160 The Clay Art of Adrian Saxe takes us into the febrile world of contemporary Cal- ifornian arts and crafts, in which a fleeting Los Angeline impulse for 'fetish finish' will be dutifully chronicled as a full-blown art 'movement' within the year. For Saxe the whole history of the applied arts — East and West — is ripe for appropriation. Mal- raux's musee imaginaire is taken to post- modern extremes. Song ceramics, 18th-century porcelain garnitures, grand services and table sculptures, Ting bronzes and Akan gold weights are all grist to his mill.
Saxe vulgarises and personalises his sources in a way that probably delights a certain type of West Coast patron/collector — the kind who would actively want to own a lustred non-functional vase studded with pink rhinestones and adorned with gilded mounts from which dangle a whimsical array of silken tassels, fishing lures and bits of glass. But, although much of Saxe's work seems overwrought and allusive to the point of visual nausea, there are a few sim- ple and witty pieces which provoke gasps of delight and reflection that Saxe is certainly a superb technician. His vessels cast from fruit and vegetables topped with odd finials and poised on metallic-looking stands are hard to resist and have a jokey ambiva- lence that matches some of the best 18th- century porcelain. This book is handsomely illustrated and Martha Drexler Lynn's worthy text backed by an overload of scholarly appara- tus — tells us all we need to know about Saxe. We learn that Saxe likes to 'quote' Mickey Mouse's ears; that he is fond of phallic symbols and 'off-color humor'; that he has worked at Rvres and explored Paris — an experience which 'honed his appreci- ation of visually layered artwork'. It is hard to decide whether to get excited by Saxe's ease with a universalising visual globalisa- tion or whether to feel a sense of mild despair at this example of fin de siecle 'Cal- ifornia dreamin' in its most rootless, con- textless form.
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