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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"He's thinking I'm going to have him throw it away so I can get my connecting flight to Seattle, which is just about ready to go. But I said, 'I'll do the appeal of seizure.' And for two years I was on them like a fly on shit until they had to give it back to me. I got my congressman, Jim McDermott, involved, I got the ambassador to Slovenia involved, I got the FBI involved and I finally got it returned with a written apology."
Where the U.S. government failed, a toilet factory prevailed in bending Krafft's will. When, in 1999, he was invited to work for two months as an artist-in-residence at Wisconsin's Kohler Company, world's largest manufacturer of porcelain plumbing fixtures, Krafft planned to use the opportunity to continue work on the ceramic weapons. But it was shortly after the Columbine massacre and the company was adamant in nixing Krafft's plans. "So, I was stuck for another object to turn into porcelain."
Undaunted, he visited the nearby town of Sheboygan Falls. "I went into a dime store and they had old, obsolete skateboards on sale. And I thought, 'That's an interesting thing and it'll be a good surface to paint a picture on -- I'll just make porcelain skateboards."
Again, as with the guns, Krafft slip-cast the skateboards and precisely reproduced them. "Everything's porcelain," he tells me. "Even the trucks." In an article Krafft wrote about the project for Juxtapoz magazine he says, "The truck mold is an engineering feat in itself that took me two weeks and two tries to get right. It's six pieces. The decks would often break from the kiln car vibrations -- the cars banged each other as they were pushed into place by forklifts. If that didn't do it, the heat and shrinkage tore them apart in the kiln."
One of the best and goofiest of the bunch features a portrait of Martha Stewart -- in the classic Delft blue. For the board's underside Krafft made an elaborate "M.S." monogram that resembles one of those old, gorgeously tangled ones that the nobility used to have on the doors of their carriages.
"You oughta get Martha to buy that one," I say.
"I tried," Krafft says, "but I never heard from her."
The international attention Krafft's work has attracted hasn't yet translated into anything approximating middle-class income. He still lives an artist's life in the Northwest, watching every dollar, dining on 99 cent tacos at Mexican groceries, sharing his rented ramshackle house with a roommate. He does sell his work occasionally -- the top price is in the $2,000 range, with smaller pieces going for considerably less -- but he's not likely to reach Thomas Kinkade's level of market penetration anytime soon.
One of his most broadly marketable ideas may be Spone, a name he's trademarked, his own twist on traditional bone china. Bone china -- porcelain with milled cow bone mixed into it -- has been around since Josiah Spode II invented it in the 18th century. Krafft's Spone, however, uses human bones. As he explained to Mortuary Management magazine, "Human bone china has been made before by artists for each other, but I want to create an elegant and totally unique memento mori for anyone who wants one."
Krafft's first Spone project was done for the wife of a friend. When the friend, who had been a devotee of the Indian guru Rajneesh, died and was cremated, the man's wife asked Krafft to make something with the ashes. Krafft created two polychrome painted statues of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of Hindu legend. He gave one to the widow and kept the other.
The edginess of Krafft's art has become more prickly as he has moved into themes that are pointedly sociopolitical. He likes theater, to stir things up, and work such as the Disasterware and the Porcelain War Museum ("Been there, smashed that" is the museum's motto) is doing just that.
Consider his pieces that evoke Germany under the Nazis -- the Adolf Hitler teapot, for instance, with two Disneyesque bunnies perched on either side of it; or the tiles depicting a Nazi rally; or his nonceramic series, which uses photos printed on velvet and a Czech crystal bottle etched with a swastika in a biting spoof of one of those gauzy ad campaigns for perfume that are ubiquitous in magazines like Vogue, Elle and Harper's Bazaar.
The idea for the faux perfume campaign, Krafft tells me over dinner, came to him when he was in Sarajevo with NSK. While looking at the bombed-out former Olympic village, collective member Peter Mlakar said, "Ah, the smell of blood and snow. If I could bottle that scent I'd create a new fragrance for the 21st century and call it 'Forgiveness,'" which is the name Krafft has given his specious scent.
"Yes, I've had people get angry about my work," he says. "Some woman called me out because she thought I was making light of the occupation of Holland during World War II. She said, 'Don't you know how the Dutch suffered during World War II. Why are you making fun of that? What would possess you to mock their suffering?' And I said, 'I'm not mocking the suffering of the Dutch. It's a purely decorative dialogue on defense and destruction.'"
