James Melchert, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The great philosopher of the postwar craft movement, James Melchert began his career in Peter Voulkos’s Bay Area circle. Muscle-bound Expressionism was not for him, though. Nor was the slapstick of the Funk movement, although he was friendly with many of the artists involved. Instead, he cultivated his own unique and esoteric sensibility, rich in wordplay, in-jokes, and cerebral puzzles. Listen with Inverted Cup, one of a series of still life works, recalls the more serious side of Dada and Surrealism—Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered Object, or Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow—as well as contemporaneous Conceptual art, such as Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.
While simple enough, it conjures an intense psychological atmosphere, anchored on the unseen volume within the overturned cup, which is fused to the surface of the thick tile. One way to interpret the work (though by no means the only one) is as a visual poem about inaccessibility and imagination: the human ability to put ourselves into spaces only in the mind’s eye.
Listen with Inverted Cup in stoneware with glaze and ceramic decal. Made by James Melchert, 1968, USA.
13" L x 16" W x 4.5" H
33cm L x 40.6cm W x 11.4cm H
SC863
Courtesy of Paul Kotula Projects