Mixed Media and Innovation: Bailey’s work often incorporated a variety of materials, including ceramics, metal, and found objects. His ability to blend different media demonstrated a versatility and creativity that influenced many contemporary artists.
Clayton Bailey came of age in small-town Wisconsin in the 1950s, an era that saw the birth of Rock & Roll, Mad Magazine, and an explosion of “Hot Rod” culture. Magazines like Popular Mechanics became required reading for a generation of teens who were obsessed with remixing and rebuilding the plentiful supply of junked 1930s roadsters that sat rusting in junkyards. From a young age, Bailey showed an aptitude for invention and mastered the tools and shop resources that were available to him.
It is no surprise that Bailey found novel ways to incorporate this resourcefulness into his art. When he began teaching in the early 1960s, companies that manufactured ceramic equipment were still rare. Potters often conscripted dough mixers for their clay and cobbled together pottery wheels from old washing machine motors or automobile transmissions. Throughout his career, Clayton Bailey’s love of tinkering with cars fed into his work; he even received a patent in 197x for inventing a novelty mug that sprays water in the user’s face.
Although clay was his passion, it was never enough to hold his sole focus. Even when he was working in clay, he tended to approach it like an inventor. In the late 1960s, he began making kinetic Burping Bowls, grotesque creatures that floated in a fountain of water. Bailey connected these bowls to aquarium pumps, which built pressure under the creature until it was released with a mighty belch before settling back into the water to endlessly repeat the process.
Another early Clayton Bailey innovation was a body of work in latex. The 1960s saw an explosion in the use of latex in fashion, toys, and other industrial uses. Bailey found that he could easily sculpt forms in clay, then cover them with a shell of latex, which could then be painted. His array of latex “critters” like grubs and worms ultimately gave birth to mutants and miscreants, including an entire gang of bikers. Unlike ceramics, latex sculptures had the advantage of being light and easy to ship, but far from archival as they quickly deteriorated and crumbled. None of Clayton Bailey’s works in latex have survived.
As he began creating works that riffed on archaeology, Bailey supplemented his kaolithic creations with an array of electronic gadgets that detected and tested his specimens. Bailey was also drawn to novelty devices and fortune telling machines in pinball arcades. During the “satanic panic” of the 1980s when parents and politicians blamed Dungeons & Dragons and Heavy Metal music for abuse both real and imagined, Bailey created a series of novelty devices that “inoculated” their users against evil. Fight Satan (198x) is a coin operated sculpture of Satan that, when activated, displays burning bibles accompanied by blood-curdling laughter meant to stimulate the production of “psychic antibodies” in the user’s mind.
In 1981, Clayton Bailey revealed a startling new body of metal assemblages to the public at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California. Light years from Bailey’s loose, funky work in clay, his new Robots display the care and craftsmanship of a prize-winning hot rod. Bailey’s machine shop also yielded a host of other novelties. A visit to his studio inevitably included target practice with an arsenal of air-powered Buck Rogers-style Pop Guns that were assembled from assorted tools and yard sale finds. Throughout the rest of his career, he would swing between wildly expressive ceramics and obsessively crafted metal sculptures. This split personality felt perfectly natural to Bailey, who was highly thoughtful about the way to make any material shine.