for my own amusement,” he told Joan Simon in a 1980 Art in America interview, “In my erotic drawings, I’m trying to celebrate a part of life that I really enjoy. They’re private drawings and I don’t care whether or not they’re accepted. They represent a great freedom to me.”34 Eros seeps from representational drawings into more abstract “mounds” and “eggs,” where bud-like capsules occupy cavelike cavities and finger-like tentacles emerge from orifice-like cracks. Eros also graces the “Specimens,” with their budding and biomorphic bodies, voluptuous folds, and burrowed surfaces. Abstraction masks racy content; it infuses the work with joyful emotion, and, at times, an edgy demeanor. The many specimens that Price modeled in clay, and meticulously rendered on paper, embody a strange combination of characters, at once alluring and repulsive, intimate and expansive, rough and smooth, amorphic and geometric [plS. 3, 4, 5, 6]. They are an odd species indeed, something you might discover in the landscape or along some deserted highway, washed up on a sandy beach, or attached, like a barnacle, to the dark underside of an ocean pier. Many share the same metaphorical space as Alberto Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object (1931), an enigmatic sculpture carved from wood, whose spiky, phallic-like form resembles a tribal talisman [Fig. 8]. Like their Surrealist ancestors, whose ranks include Joan Miró’s terra-cotta personages and Jean Arp’s biomorphic concretions, Price’s “Specimens” exist in the rarified world of fetish [Fig. 9]. drawing for printmaking For three months during the fall and winter of 1968–69, Price collaborated with printmakers at the Tamarind Studios to produce a series of ten lithographs. The Tamarind Lithography Workshops, a teaching facility founded in Los Angeles in 1960, was the brainchild of June Wayne, who set out to revive the art of lithography through collaborative projects. By the time
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Joan Simon, “An Interview with Ken Price,” Art in America (January 1980), 102–3.