Look Alikes

In the late 1960s influential ceramist Howard Kottler (1930-1989) began to experiment with commercial decals and store-bought plates. Kottler altered the decals, often with political intent, by cutting and combining them, then adhering them to cheap white porcelain plates he purchased in bulk. Kottler's apparent rejection of the hand-made object and embrace of the conceptual over the tactile were unique among the revolutionary ceramists of the 1960s and 1970s. Kottler's messages were often as profoundly anti-establishment as his medium. As a Viet Nam war protestor, he cut and rearranged the American flag to create Made in the USA. As a gay man, he changed the couple in Grant Wood's American Gothic into identical males and turned seemingly innocuous images into sexual double entendres. He positioned his work squarely within the rich tradition of wit, irony, appropriation, and gender-bending epitomized by modernist Marcel Duchamp. "Look Alikes" is the first examination of this body of work as a whole, including formal, boxed sets now in museum collections. Over sixty illustrations of the decal plates show the range of Kottler's imagery and the piquancy of his humour.