Volume Gallery is proud to announce This is Not a Plate, an exhibition of the subversive and humorous plates by the late Howard Kottler, opening January 10, 2025, from 5-8 pm at 1709 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60622.
Born in 1930 in Cleveland, Ohio, Howard Kottler would go on to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree at Michigan’s historic Cranbrook Academy of Art under Maija Grotell and a Doctorate in ceramics from Ohio State University. Following a Fulbright grant to study in Finland at the Arabia ceramic factory, Kottler pivoted to embrace readymades and photocollage, techniques favored by Dada and Surrealism. Wielding his unique sense of humor, Kottler found his voice creating visual double entendres on mass-produced porcelain blanks, collaged with rearrangements of clichéd imagery. The artist focused on decal plates from 1966 through the 1980s, producing a limited body of about 250 works, the majority of which are unique.
Kottler was an influential teacher at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1964 until his passing in 1989. He frequently visited the Bay Area and was profoundly influenced by the thriving counterculture of 1960s San Francisco. As a gay man at a time when much of gay culture was still driven underground, he was inspired by the counterculture’s rejection of mainstream society to express his sexuality and sarcastic wit through his work with visual codes and signals.
The craft culture on the West Coast at the time was dominated by expressionism and Funk, as exemplified by Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson. Approaches so far afield from the wry cultural commentary of artists like Warhol—whom he greatly admired—that it propelled Kottler to invent an entirely new visual language to contain his humor, becoming a notably rare artist using the clean, repetitive, and seemingly impersonal sensibilities of Pop within a ceramic context at the time, rankling the studio ceramics community.
Kottler began collaging with commercially available decals onto blank plates in 1966, reinterpreting iconoclastic imagery to take on nationalism, religion, the Western art historical canon, heteronormativity, identity, and desire. He used famous images to create puns and innuendos with astounding wit and visual literacy. Whether cutting away sections, interchanging or repeating parts of the same image, or combining different images, his versions layered meaning and offered coded suggestions. “By strategically altering the manufactured images, he transformed banal reproductions into vehicles for social commentary and satire.”1 Under the guise of innocuous dinnerware, Kottler’s decal plates are rife with anti-establishment sentiments.
Reinterpreting images from the Western imagination, Kottler’s work asks if images that have been proliferated for centuries can be seen anew. Two Leonardo da Vinci paintings, The Last Supper (1498) and Mona Lisa (1503) feature in several of the artist’s plates. The Renaissance paintings were photographed at some point, then silk-screened onto special paper impregnated with low-fire glaze as decals, then purchased, deconstructed, and applied by Kottler, the final product acting as simulacra, many degrees removed from the original. With this mimicry, he is playing a game with the concept of authorship and bringing new life and meaning to these ubiquitous images. Kottler’s Mona Lisas are labeled variously “Leonardo Lisa by Mona da Vinci” and “Leonardo da Vinci by Mona Lisa,” bringing to the fore the question of authorship as images are endlessly replicated. As a gay Jewish man, he may have been interested in the Last Supper as a Passover Seder attended only by men. Kottler may also have been pulling at the same strings that interested Duchamp when the Dadaist drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa in his famously suggestive rendition, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919). Kottler’s redeployment reminds us of da Vinci’s sexuality and speculation about whether the Mona Lisa was the Renaissance man in drag. Kottler was adding to a rich lineage of queering images or drawing attention to their inherent queerness.
Kottler used Abraham Lincoln’s image as a symbol of liberation for gay as well as Black communities, and his use of the President’s iconic image may have been an allusion to historians’ questions about the historical figure’s relationships with men. Kottler’s use of Lincoln is unusually reverent, in contrast, he often used images of the Capitol Building, pistols, and the legs of founding fathers in provocative and phallic positions.
Kottler’s use of wordplay shines in two examples: Sign Language (1984) and What’s in a Name (c. 1970). Sign Language shows a series of hands altered to spell out the title of George Orwell’s prescient science fiction text, 1984, which had recently gained new prominence among anti-war protestors. What’s in a Name, lines up archetypal images of animals as in a children’s book, each mislabeled with a seemingly random word. With this piece, Kottler is stereotyping and misidentifying, potentially a reference to slurs hurled at gay men or to the slipperiness of identifying images as in René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe, 1929).
An image Kottler used in many permutations was Sir Thomas Gainsborough’s eminently recognizable The Blue Boy (1770). Often linked with Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie (1794), as an iconic heterosexual pairing (him in blue, her in pink) Kottler sought to remix this famous duo. He would sometimes pair or double the boys as an image of same-sex partnership, and sometimes emphasize the titular text, “blue,” to draw attention to its additional meaning as gay or pornographic. Adding to the implications, the subject of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy is costumed in elaborate seventeenth-century attire, with ribbons and stockings that may appear feminine to our contemporary eyes.
Howard Kottler’s plates toy with familiar visual signs, shifting the meaning of pervasive images with minor alterations. Trafficking in the language of glossy collectibles, but imbued with humor and narratives of liberation, in many ways, Kottler’s decal plates were ahead of their time.
This is Not a Plate will be on view at Volume Gallery through February 22, 2025.
Photo: PD Rearick, Courtesy Paul Kotula Projects
1 Patricia Failing, Howard Kottler: Face to Face (University of Washington Press, 1995), 71.