By Susan Griffin

In this age of non-conforming gender, they seem almost like artifacts exhumed from a forgotten past, portraits of men and women, dressed according to the conventions of an earlier time, men in suits, women in flowered dresses.

And, yes, in a certain sense, the clothes do fit. Indeed, when it comes to Viola Frey’s gigantic figures of men in suits, any tailor could be proud. I can see no visible stretching, no wrinkles, no excess, flapping fabric. Though the fit, as I keep looking, does not seem altogether comfortable. Ceramic, which is so malleable, can be made to appear smooth as glass, soft or rough, even granulated, flowing like water or heavy and crude. And here the garments seem stiff, the way they hang, inflexibly, so that in a subtle way this apparel begins to suggest armor. Which, given the association of such suits with power and dominion (one that the artist herself has noted), is, in one way, appropriate.

By contrast, except for the hats, so often perched at perilous angles on their heads, the beautifully patterned dresses the women wear seem to embrace their bodies, revealing breasts, stomachs, and other soft curves.

But here is the rub, there is a radical deviation in the way Frey portrays so many male figures. In contrast to the hype about masculinity we have all absorbed, the expressions on the faces of the men and the postures their bodies take—even if, like much of Frey’s work, they are seasoned with wit and irony—appear hesitant, fearful, at times even anguished, above all vulnerable. Especially compared with the women, who seem comfortable, feet firmly on the ground, calm, in a word, strong.

A similar polarity can be observed in the nudes Frey has created: the men seem exposed and vulnerable, while the women, neither modest nor cloyingly seductive, appear to be wholly unconcerned about the eye of the beholder, as at the same time they radiate the power of the human body, both sexual and existential.

Certainly, Frey undermines conventional notions about gender (as she chips away so many presuppositions). But beware of jumping to conclusions. Her work does not engage directly in feminist polemics. Did she ever call herself a feminist? The question seems irrelevant or at the very least ahistorical for an artist who was born in 1933. Like Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, Lorraine Hansberry, or Louise Nevelson, she belongs to an earlier generation of women, who, willingly or not, inspired my generation by refusing to submit to the command, so insistent in the fifties, that they spend their time performing domestic tasks.

Frey’s work in the world was to make art, to mine meanings that cannot be found in any established terminology, argument, or conceptual map. Her sculptures, ceramics, paintings, photographs travel into subterranean regions, beyond what is ordinarily understood about our shared culture or even within more private realms of the psyche. Though with her lifelong habit of reading (as a child she read through the books titled A through Z in the Lodi public library) and a sharply curious mind, she was influenced by many thinkers, her work—as she described her process—originated less from ideas than from her hands. Her hands pinching the edges of clay together, for instance, to make the ceramic pieces out of which she would eventually build towering sculptures. In this way she could explore the clay and, I might add, the hidden contours of her own mind.

Of course, as with any artistic work, she often started with concepts about the work too, but one senses from her remarks that instead of proceeding from any theoretical formulation, she usually began by imagining what she might construct and how. As when she wrote in a letter, “Next project in mind, a sculpture six feet high to be constructed in sections…based on the human figure, of course.” And there was this too, as she once said in a long interview: “clay was a wonderful material to be stuck in, because you could find your way, your own way. There was no one to tell us what to do.”

That the work refuses to conform to any prefabricated theory or transmit any single message does not in any way imply that it lacks meaning. Rather, like Frey’s way of finding shapes with her hands, the meaning of her work is embedded within physical presence. I am thinking of the nearly six-foot sculpture she calls Mrs. National Geographic (1977–78), after Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, a woman credited with many accomplishments, among them making certain her husband had the working conditions he needed to conduct his world-altering experiments. As the daughter of the founder of National Geographic, she was an heiress of a great fortune, which she put to good uses, and no doubt too, in Viola’s mind, this figure was heir to the forceful presence the magazine had in Frey’s childhood, when, along with her father, she would pour over the glossy pages of photographs and maps, preserved in the bound volume in the local library. With photographs of exotic places and people, this publication opened doors to larger worlds, at a time when the world she occupied seemed small and confined.

The statue is colored brown, as if just taken from the earth, inspired, as she once said, by the irrigation ditches on the farm where she was raised. Yet it has an aura of a great cultural antiquity too, as if freshly arisen from an archaeological dig, bearing a message from a time when female bodies radiated divine power, with the ability not only to give birth, but to rule.

Perhaps because they were among the first human creations, emerging magically from earth and fire, the association between ceramics and spiritual power is very old. I am thinking of the earthenware vessel preserved from over four thousand years ago in Gansu, China, that is decorated with the likeness of a shaman. And of course, the countless very early figurines depicting the Great Mother about which Marija Gimbutas has written, work with which Frey was well familiar, objects that have retained their numinosity over millennia. As John Berger writes, “appearances are oracular, they go beyond … they insinuate further than the discrete phenomena they represent.” Can, then, the wide and startled eyes on the faces of some of Frey’s male figures be the look of celebrants responding to the wonders that have been revealed to them?

Still, as strong and confident as are Hubbard’s posture and her smile, this is clearly a modernized great mother. (And not “modern” in the way of Amelia Earhart or Josephine.) Her power has been muted. While that flowered dress and her hat with a wide brim bearing flowers give her the magnetic properties of sensuality, they also conceal her many other formidable capacities. As I study this figure, it seems to me that, like Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. National Geographic is not overly concerned with what she wears. Yet I imagine, too, she knows, as so many wily upper-crust women do, that gracious manners and lovely dresses can accomplish a great deal.

Just as Frey admired Hubbard’s financial independence, she appreciated the strength of women from her grandmother’s generation, including her own grandmother—older women who had worked in factories during the Second World War and farm women. And for her, their dresses had still another effect. In a community with no museums, galleries, or art visible anywhere, the vivid fabric of the dresses the women in her community would wear to church or on various occasions contributed the only beauty that she encountered as a child. Nevertheless, in her work, which is so unfailingly honest, I detect a conflict between the palpable inward strength of these women and the sartorial requirements placed on proper ladies in the 1950s.

Of course, it is not just the clothing we wear but the assumptions and habits of a culture that impose, even if at times artful, artificial and thus constricting roles on us all. The resulting clashes, whether potential or expressed, increase the intensity of Frey’s work, a friction she has not created but accepts with an attitude that ranges from good-natured humor to an irony that at times seems to indicate or even herald the emergence of an inner turmoil verging on chaos or disaster. Here I am thinking of one painting in particular, in which a man in a blue-gray suit is running out an open door into a blackened space, escaping a maelstrom of figurines, miniature women in flowered dresses, male and female nudes, coffee cups, vases, horses, a rooster, a bear, swept up as if in a domestic tornado, while similar knickknacks, having come to life, like the toys in The Nutcracker, encrust and cling to a fallen Greek column, and where, in the midst of the chaos, a woman, with her back to the fleeing man, stands in the center of it all.

I am thinking now of the rusted truck that stood on the farm where Frey spent her childhood, left there so long that not just grass but trees grew up around it, making it a permanent part of the landscape. Her father left old, no longer useful farm tools in the field around the family house. And he too, like Frey, collected things, in his case, radios, which he kept in an old shed while harboring the goal of making them all operable one day. As a result, the farm where they kept animals, and where they tended a vineyard, was littered with discarded things.

She herself was a bricoleuse, a junk collector, in more than one sense. Like gleaners, the men and women who recovered stray bits of wheat after a harvest, portrayed by Millet (or recently in Agnès Varda’s film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse), she rescued and put to use what others had discarded or ignored.

One of my favorites among her pieces is Non-Endangered Beaver (1973), the over three-foot-tall portrait of a beaver who sits on a bricolage consisting of a crudely built wagon with marvelously rendered ceramic likenesses of worn-out rubber wheels, leaves (part of the beaver’s diet), some strange red underwater creature, and a construction of neatly milled and uniform blocks of wood, arranged the way a beaver might compose them to dam a river. In one sense this is clearly a self-portrait—the ultimate bricoleur in the natural world being the beaver. Yet if the title is at first confounding (even if by 1974 the beaver population had resurged), the subtitle, “Beaverjack, Seat of Civilization,” makes us look more closely at those rubber wheels, those buzz-cut blocks of wood; this is a self-portrait, not only of the artist, a bricoleuse too, but of our culture, a bricolage of industry, invention, effort—leading to what? Triumph? Anomie? A good laugh?

Oh, but there is great deal more. In a sense, here, as throughout Frey’s work, we are seeing double or twice. Not only in her double self-portrait, which she says forces the eye to move from one figure to the other, but in images, whether rendered in ceramic or paint or through photography, which inspire a double take. One is compelled to look again, as in the still life rendered in gouache, a pretty pastiche of figurines surrounding a male manikin, until one sees the manikin is holding his penis over a bowl, or the untitled porcelain cup and saucer she fashioned at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres,* in exquisite colors, brilliant swaths of bright orange and blue, with a stunning golden rim and handle, conjuring aristocratic leisure, until, look again, a man in a blue suit appears to be screaming, a red hand above his head in a gesture of alarm. And beyond the unexpected image, the double take is also a double vision. We are seeing an image, but at the same time we are seeing something about the way we see.

Frey’s work is self-reflective, not just in an autobiographical but also in an artistic sense, containing insights into the nature of culture. The process recalls the ouroboros, the dragon that eats its tail, creating an infinite cycle of creation and perception. We make and then, as we see what we have made, we become what we have made. Regarding who we are, the ego is constructed of all we encounter, and this, as Marcel Proust describes in a famous passage in Swann’s Way, includes things. Waking up in a darkened room, not knowing who he is, the narrator is drawn out of “the abyss of not-being” to traverse “centuries of civilization” when he glimpses oil lamps and shirts with turned-down collars, familiar things that allow him to regain “the original components” of his ego.

Like Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, Frey uses styles from popular culture, specifically cartoons. But it would be reductive to say that she simply subverts this mode. Rather, as ironic and witty as her work is, what she creates touches that place in the psyche where preconscious thought and desire fuse with mass-produced images. Perhaps this is why, as she once said, she lost the ability to draw accurate likenesses. Her attention had been diverted elsewhere, to that labile territory between external and inward realms where associations, memories dwell, close neighbors to a wide range of emotions, known and experienced as well as buried and unexamined.

As with this fertile region of the mind, everything she has created seems animated or, at the very least, vital, even the strange “still lifes” that she assembled from flea market finds, not only drawing and painting them in various arrangements but photographing them. The photographs are hard to resist. I find myself staring at them, almost as if at a crime scene, looking for clues. With rounded corners and faded colors, many of them look like very old photographs, taken perhaps from daguerreotypes and colored by hand later, then faded with time. The things in them, when they are not humorous and even at times when they are, seem solemn, far away, lost, sad. Like the inhabitants of a dystopic toy store, the air full of premonitions and dark thoughts. And here, the relationship between loss and objects that Freud outlined in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” seems pertinent, the way we invest things with the attachments we once had to those we have lost.

Frey never returned to Lodi, nor did she connect with her family. Even when in the sixties, after years spent in New York and New Orleans, she returned to California, and during the over forty years while she taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA), she maintained this distance. The story has been repeated often about how her brother came to visit and knocked at a glass door through which he was plainly visible. But Viola never let him in. We can only guess at why she cut her family off so definitively. She was in other ways loyal to her partner and her friends. And perhaps she was able to preserve something from her childhood in the forgotten, rejected figurines, dolls, and toys she collected and portrayed again and again.

The somber and low-key quality of these tableaux form a bold contrast with her monumental work, over 300 large-scale sculptures of men, women, and children, assembled from ceramic molds and covered with bright abstract paintings, which—whether joyful or threatening, wildly funny or, when they are assembled in groups, endlessly fascinating—have a staggering, explosive power. And what is especially satisfying about this work is that it is decidedly not heroic. No bronze generals on horseback need apply. No, it is just us we see. Us or our immediate ancestors, often three times as tall as the artist. Us looming so large that we cannot miss the likeness.

Making the ordinary extraordinary, freely mixing the dressed with the undressed, craft with art, the intimate with the monumental, Viola Frey created no less than an artistic revolution, a reordering of the imagination that even today is still radical and above all, for better or worse, restores us to ourselves.

Susan Griffin
Berkeley, March 2017

*The official manufacturer of porcelain in France, established by Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour in the eighteenth century, where Frey was able to produce work for a period.

References

Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling.
New York: Random House, 1982.

Bodei, Remo. The Life of Things, the Love of Things.
Translated by Murtha Baca. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Pagel, David. “Ahead of the Curve.” In Viola Frey: A Personal Iconography, exh. cat. New York: Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 2015.

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Random House, 1981.

Taragin, Davira S., and Patterson Sims. Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey, exh. cat. New York: Hudson Hills, 2009.