Collectible Design · Los Angeles
Reading time: 6 minAdam D. Miller’s new work at The Future Perfect abandons the picture for the gouge. The marks are fast, instinctive, almost alphabetical — and they belong to a long tradition of people who made a language because the ordinary ones were closed to them.
There is a shift in Adam D. Miller’s new body of work at The Future Perfect, and it is easy to feel and harder to name.
His earlier ceramics were, broadly, pictorial. Stoneware carrying imagery — Greek mythology, pre-Columbian motifs, heavy metal, horror, comic books, fantasy illustration — worked with a printmaker’s sensibility as much as a potter’s. Surfaces that told you things.
The new pieces do something else. The image recedes and the mark takes over: gestures that appear gouged, etched and dragged rather than painted. Quick, instinctive, and — this is the crucial part — legible. They do not read as decoration. They read as notation. As though the clay were carrying a language rather than a picture.
Miller himself describes the move as one from the autobiographical toward a universal visual language. That is a large claim, and it happens to have a precise precedent — one the work names, and which turns out to explain almost everything about it.
Who Adam D. Miller is, and the thing everyone leaves out
Born in Bellevue, Washington, in 1982, Miller took a BA at the University of California, Sacramento in 2005 and an MFA at Art Center College of Design in 2008. He lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2012 ArtReview named him one of its Future Greats. He is represented by The Future Perfect (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco), Mindy Solomon in Miami, and Le Febvre & Fils in Paris.
And he is the co-founder and director of The Pit, a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles.
That last fact is routinely left out of writing about him, including my own, and it should not be. Because when the language around this work reaches — as it always does — for community, it is not reaching for a mood. Miller has spent years running a room in which other artists get to show. He is not gesturing at community as a theme. He built one, and then he named it after a mosh pit and a firing pit at the same time.
Hold that alongside the work and the marks start to look less like expression and more like address. Someone is talking to somebody.
A.R. Penck, and a language built under surveillance
The reference the work leans on hardest is A.R. Penck, and it repays knowing who he actually was.
Penck — born Ralf Winkler in Dresden in 1939 — spent most of his career in East Germany, refused entry to the official artists’ union, watched by the Stasi, smuggling his paintings west, and finally expatriated in 1980. He is best known for Standart: a system of stick figures, arrows, crosses and signs, deliberately reduced, deliberately crude, and intended as a universal pictographic language — one that could carry meaning across an ideological border where plain speech was dangerous.
He was also, not incidentally, a drummer, playing free improvised music throughout his life.
Now put that beside Miller’s new work: marks that are fast, sign-like, rhythmic, reaching for a language beyond the personal. That is not a stylistic borrowing. It is the same project.
Penck built a sign-system because he could not say things directly. Punk photocopied its flyers because it could not get on the radio. A mark becomes a language precisely when the ordinary channels are closed — and that, far more than any surface resemblance, is the thread running through everything Miller is drawing on.
The lineage in the clay
The other inheritance is closer to home, and Miller comes by it honestly.
Bay Area Funk — Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, working out of Northern California from the late 1950s — did the single most consequential thing that has happened to American ceramics: it broke the vessel. Voulkos tore, gouged, stacked and abused clay until the pot stopped being a pot and started being sculpture. It was irreverent, physical, anti-precious, and it permanently detached ceramics from the tyranny of the well-made object.
Miller took his BA in Sacramento, in the middle of that geography. Whether or not the influence was formal, the permission is unmistakable: the new work’s willingness to let the surface be scored and worried and left rough is Funk’s bequest.
What he adds is tempo. The article’s original instinct was right — the marks have the urgency of D-beat, the relentless, driving punk rhythm that came out of Discharge and never slowed down, and the darker textures of Goth and Industrial. There is a hardcore impatience in these surfaces. They look made fast, and looking fast is not the same as being careless. It is a decision about how much deliberation a feeling can survive.
Funk gave him the freedom to wreck the vessel. Punk gave him the speed. Penck gave him a reason to make the wreckage mean something.
What the work is actually doing
The pieces stand, as the original put it rather beautifully, mid-sentence — and that is the most accurate thing anyone has said about them.
They do not resolve. Each is a fragment of something continuing, which is exactly what you would expect from an artist who has stopped making pictures of things and started making marks toward someone. There is no full stop, because the sentence is not his alone to finish.
And that returns us to the gallery in Los Angeles. An artist who runs a room for other artists is an artist who has thought seriously about what it means to leave space for a reply.
For The Future Perfect, whose entire proposition is work that refuses the border between art and design, Miller is an ideal fit — a maker whose objects are unarguably sculpture and unarguably ceramics and entirely uninterested in which of those is supposed to rank higher.
What stays with me is the roughness. In a market that rewards finish, Miller has produced a body of work that keeps the evidence of the hand that made it, the speed at which it was made, and the pressure behind it. That is a harder thing to sell and a better thing to make.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Adam D. Miller? A Los Angeles-based ceramic artist and gallerist, born in Bellevue, Washington in 1982. He holds a BA from the University of California, Sacramento (2005) and an MFA from Art Center College of Design (2008). He is co-founder and director of The Pit, a contemporary gallery in Los Angeles, and was named one of ArtReview‘s Future Greats in 2012.
Where can you see his work? He is represented by The Future Perfect (Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami) and Le Febvre & Fils (Paris).
What is different about this body of work? Earlier pieces were pictorial, carrying imagery drawn from Greek mythology, pre-Columbian art, heavy metal, horror and comics. The new work moves from image to mark — gestural, gouged, sign-like — reaching for a universal visual language rather than a personal narrative.
Who was A.R. Penck? Born Ralf Winkler in Dresden in 1939, Penck worked in East Germany under Stasi surveillance and developed Standart, a system of stick figures and signs conceived as a universal pictographic language. He was also a free-improvising drummer. He left the GDR in 1980 and died in 2017.
What is Bay Area Funk? A Northern Californian movement from the late 1950s onward — Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Viola Frey — that broke ceramics away from the well-made vessel and established clay as a medium for irreverent, physical sculpture.
What is D-beat? A driving, relentless punk drum rhythm originating with the band Discharge, and the subgenre built around it.
Final thoughts
Penck made a language because he was not allowed to speak. Punk made a language because nobody would let it on the air. Voulkos made a language by taking a pot and destroying it until it could hold something a pot could not.
Adam D. Miller works in that lineage, and he has done the most practical thing available to a person who cares about being heard: when he could not find the room he wanted, he opened one, and called it The Pit.
The marks on these vessels are what that sounds like.
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