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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
From porcelain machine guns to plates commemorating hideous disasters, artist Charles Krafft's grimly satirical work sheds strange light on an age when terror is rattling our teacups. (With a portfolio of 14 photographs.)
May 30, 2002 | Of all the people acquiring guns in 1998 on the black market in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Charles Krafft was probably the only one who turned the illicit weapons into porcelain delftware.
Meeting with arms dealers in Ljubljana's cafes and bars, Krafft made arrangements to borrow Kalashnikovs and AK-47s ("the little black dress of the military industrial complex," he calls the assault rifles) so that he could use them to make plaster slip-molds. He then created meticulously accurate castings of the guns in white porcelain and painted the weapons with flowers, text and other decoration in the traditional delftware blue. The resulting collection of lethal but dainty satire became part of a body of work that provoked Mark Del Vecchio, author of "Postmodern Ceramics," to declare Krafft "one of the USA's most seditious artists [who] plays difficult, uneasy games with content and culture."
At 54, the seditious artist -- also a celebrated painter, writer and scalawag -- has expanded his fine-china arsenal to include Thompson assault rifles, Uzi and Intratech machine pistols, Beretta and Smith & Wesson pistols, 50mm machine gun rounds, switchblade knives and hand grenades. His intention, he says, is to produce "life-size ceramic weaponry so gorgeous and patently functionless that it will bedazzle and confound everyone who sees it."
The lampoonery has terrific resonance at a time when terror threatens at the periphery of everyday life. But Krafft admits to no political or spiritual leanings -- he doesn't suggest that his art is meant to teach a lesson. His interest, as a nonbeliever, he says, is in the power of belief systems to compel people, often very intelligent people, to risk their lives, or at least their reputations, to achieve "some sort of spiritual or political liberation." And while his jocular explorations of human catastrophe may make those who share his dusky sense of humor chortle, they also force the viewer to look at mankind's cruelest, most absurd behavior in a way that penetrates the numbness induced by media overload.
Next, says Krafft, he'd like to make full-size Scud missiles and nuclear bombs in pure white porcelain. Recently he's been consulting with a police firearms investigator who's assisting him in developing a "Man Ray Gun Chess" set to be cast from ammunition.
"I've always wanted the same response, ever since I was a kid, before I was an artist," he says. "I don't want to offend people, but I want to shock them into seeing differently. It has a lot to do with humor; I think that humor's really important to keep you healthy. And in art there doesn't seem to be enough of it.
"For some reason," he continues, "art has to be this earnest, serious, even Freudian, exploration. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that at all. Art that's funny seems to get dismissed just because it is funny. But I've always had a knack and a penchant for going toward humorous irony. I can't control myself, I really can't put the brakes on."
To hell with the brakes, lately Krafft seems to have both feet on the accelerator. After painting on canvas for 20 years, he took brush to porcelain and found himself the center of enormous attention. "The moment I went from easel painting to ceramic painting," Krafft says, "was the moment that the world started to take notice of me."
Krafft now has two one-man shows running concurrently -- one at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, Calif., the other at the Copro/Nason Gallery in Culver City, Calif. His work also has been shown recently in New York and Europe, featured in the New Yorker, Harper's and Artforum and included in several books. Later this summer a volume focused entirely on his art, titled "Villa Delirium," will be published by Last Gasp. Krafft is also a member of that small, elite group of artists whose work has been covered by Mortuary Management magazine -- more about that later.
Like Krafft himself, the odd and winding story of how all this came about and where it's led -- the "Porcelain War Museum," which is what he calls his ongoing ceramic weapons project, is but a recent chapter -- is equal parts strange, refreshing and funny.
The idea for ceramic weaponry grew out of a trip Krafft made in 1995 to Eastern Europe. A grant he'd received enabled him to accompany the Slovenian arts collective NSK and its industrial rock band, Laibach, on the group's "Occupied Europe: NATO" tour.
"I've always found the lowbrow fringe of contemporary pop culture infinitely more fertile than the highfalutin academic mainstream -- I prefer the company of criminals, undertakers and blue-haired ladies," Krafft told Grand Central Art Center director Mike McGee, who's writing the introduction for "Villa Delirium." Later, over coffee near Grand Central, he elaborated. "McGee said I'm one of the most curious people he's ever met," Krafft says, "and I agree I'm very curious -- in the sense of getting curious about something then immersing myself in it until my curiosity has been sated."
