resides in its “interiority”—the life force (élan vital) that emanates from inside some of the first eggs and mounds, and even from inside some of the later biomorphic pieces, where what you see is not necessarily what it is.23 “When I first saw your work [in the early 1960s],” Vija Celmins recalled during a conservation with her longtime friend, “I saw the inside and the outside. Even now there is a hole every now and then to let you peer into the darkness. Even when there is no in to peek into, one feels a space inside.”24 The cup’s bottom, its deepest pocket, isn’t always visible. When I asked Price if an inside/outside dichotomy created by mysterious voids suggesting metaphorical portals to other realms originated here, he responded, “Yes, that could be right. The void is mysterious and female. The cup has an open top but an internal space below that can be closed and hidden. So this could be the source of the mystery, but I hope it’s not that simple.”25 sexy abstraction “We thought it was just a big farce,” Edward Kienholz told Lawrence Weschler, concerning the circumstances surrounding Wallace Berman’s sudden arrest at the Ferus Gallery, just two weeks after his one-person show opened there in 1957. “The cops are so stupid that they couldn’t even find the pornography, if indeed it was pornography and that’s what they were looking for. And damned if [Berman] didn’t get sentenced. . . . It was just a big gigantic fiasco. So Wally went to San Francisco and vowed that he would not come back and live in the city of fallen angels. Which he didn’t for maybe ten years.”26 Well before pornography hit the streets of Hollywood and the back rooms of ranch houses in the San Fernando Valley, Berman was apprehended by the L.A. Vice Squad for a prescient installa-
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Still one of the best discussions of Vitalism in early twentieth-century sculpture is the second chapter of Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York: George Braziller, 1968). “Ken Price in Conversation with Vija Celmins,” Ken Price (Göttingen: Steidl, 2007), 13. Ken Price, “Interview with Douglas Dreishpoon,” 10. Lawrence Weschler, “Interview with Edward Kienholz,” August 12, 1976, Transcript, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977, 148–49.