The present lot was one of ten “units” on view during “Ken Price:
Happy’s Curios”, the artist’s seminal 1978 exhibition at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. Comprising multiple ceramic vessels displayed
in purpose-built cabinets, the units appeared together with two Death
Shrines, two Showcase Windows, various wall hangings, works on
paper, and individual ceramic cups in cases. Happy’s Curios ranged not
only across the museum but farther back across the decade. Those
works exhibited at LACMA represented the core of Price’s six-year
series by the same name, an extended project that encompassed forms
as varied as ceramic tequila cups and Zapotec weavings, drawings and
painted erotic wares—“a bombardment of images and color.”1
“Here’s the Curios Store,” Price noted during a 2004 slide presentation
at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, “but it’s hard to explain
this thing.”2 Bookended by his Geometric Cups of the early 1970s and
80s, singular abstractions produced before and afer Happy’s Curios,
the jocular wares of the “Curios Store” (as he also called it) crowd in
like visitors from a warm and distant country, where Price had been
on sabbatical. “I grew up around Mexican pottery and really liked it
and was impressed by it…I got turned on and thought I would make
a tribute to Mexican pottery in the form of a curios store. It was kind
of a fantasy. It was supposed to be a small store with some billboards
outside, and a storefront window…I fgured it would take me about a
year, maybe two, to make it. It took about six…”3
A passage without apparent end, the fantasy foundered on practical
considerations: “I hadn’t realized that in order to make this thing I would
have to buy a store and build it in.”4 In response, Price packed up the shop
(literally), divided the work into cohesive units for the LACMA exhibition,
then moved east from New Mexico to Massachusetts, where he returned
to focused, individual sculptures. But the view out to sea remained.
Both Maurice Tuchman, former Senior Curator at LACMA, and Douglas
Dreishpoon, Chief Curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, have related
Happy’s Curios to Roden Crater, James Turrell’s ongoing, decadeslong
earthwork in the Arizona desert.5 Ambitious, environmental
installations, both works represent what Tuchman called “a single
overriding win-or-lose gesture.”6 Like Turrell’s crater, Price’s “Store”
rose up from the desert, an elaborate construction of the heart.
1-4 “Ken Price: A Talk with Slides”, Chinati Foundation Newsletter, vol. 10, Oct. 2005, p. 23
5 Douglas Dreishpoon, Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962-2010, exh. cat., The Drawing Center, New York, 2013, p. 39
6 Maurice Tuchman, Ken Price: Happy’s Curios, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, Los Angeles, 1978, p. 5