ARNESON THE ARTIST

Some artists these days seem to long for a kind of fame that transcends historical renown and the respect of the cognoscenti. They want to be celebrities of the magnitude of rock stars or political radicals and have their works considered for Oscars and Emmys.

For the whole of the modernist epoch creators chanted pious platitudes about the virtues of poverty, chastity and obedience to the bohemian muse and the cheapness of topical notoriety. Their shift toward the bright, cold light of fictive stardom represents a historic watershed. The silver-bearded sage wants to be a sequined tap-dancer, a journalist in a trench coat or a popular martyr.

Actually, it doesn’t happen very often and when it does, the lightning seems to strike in odd places.

Take the case of Robert Arneson, whose cheeky ceramic sculpture is under retrospective review at the Oakland Museum through March 15. He grew up in the little Bay Area community of Benicia, and except for the odd pilgrimage to the Manhattan Mecca, never moved much farther from home than Davis, where he took up a long teaching position.

According to catalogue essayist Neal Benezra, Arneson had a nice middle-class upbringing and early ambitions were like something out of “Peanuts.” He wanted to be a cartoonist. Then he wanted to be a conventional ceramic artist making nice smooth pots, teaching at a local high school and getting reviews in in-group publications like “Craft Horizons.”

Regular guy. Family man. Dedicated and modest. But there was something else. Peter Voulkos came along in the late ‘50s and blasted the ceramic medium away from regular craft work into the area of sculpture. He was denounced by the pot Establishment. Arneson belonged to it, but some streak in him--a sense of justice or intransigence--made him side with the young Turks of the Voulkos gang and it wasn’t long before he himself was making ceramics that were self-contained artworks. A couple of early Voulkos-inspired structures like “Noble Image” are a combination of sensitive coloration and prickly, aggressive form that often characterizes his work.

A weighty rebellion by the petty standards of the subculture, but to an outsider a pure nit-pick. Listen, if it’s art, it’s art. What do I care if it’s made of paint or mud?

In the ‘60s, Arneson began teaching at Davis with such now-noted colleagues as Wayne Thiebaud and William Wiley. Out of this mix evolved an interesting minor local variation on Dada called “Funk.” Arneson produced its masterpiece and its schlocky low point. A ceramic typewriter with keys that are all finger-ends with enameled nails is as witty and unforgettable as Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup. A full-scale toilet complete with droppings has the slob humor of a rebellious 5-year-old or old souvenir-stand joke-ceramics about hillbillies and outhouses.

The stage is set. Arneson’s art will make a career out of satirizing itself and thus the image of talented artists who work outside New York and probably teach to make ends meet. Arneson takes up the self-portrait as a stand-in for the Artist and shows himself as a wigged-out hippie in “California Artist.”

In “Current Event,” the Artist swims against the tide of fashion to elevate ceramics (or plastics or rusty steel) to its proper position in the artistic pantheon, despite the resistance of the yahoos who think only oil paint and bronze are art. (We will not dwell on the implied degree of contempt for the audience contained herein.) Then me and my gang here on campus will make our art and have our shows here in California or Idaho or Texas and if we do not become famous it will be because those snobs in New York will call us provincial. If, of course, they accept our art they are not snobs but persons of taste and insight. The complications of this mode of thought reflect in Arneson’s vision of the Artist as everything from a technical juggler to a clown and an assassination victim, but tricked out with cozy self-justifying rationalizations for every occasion, especially failure.

But then cometh a twist in the plot. In 1981 Arneson was commissioned to do a bust of the late San Francisco Mayor George Moscone for the Moscone Convention Center that was opened after the absurd 1978 tragedy in which the mayor and gay Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by a disgruntled former colleague, Dan White. After White was found guilty only on a reduced charge, the city’s gay community rioted at City Hall. Coming in the wake of a ghastly mass suicide and slaughter of 900 members of the San Francisco-originated People’s Temple in Guyana, the events seemed like some atrocious travesty of the city’s liberal reputation.

When Arneson’s bust of Moscone was unveiled, it set off a new, front-page fuss. There might have been trouble even over the affectionate but caricatured monumental polychromed head. What really offended the guardians of the public weal were overt allusions to the mayor’s assassination inscribed in the base. The sculpture was rejected but Arneson was compensated by becoming a noted art martyr.

Was the art the victim of its own self-proclaimed “innocence,” or was it asking for it? Judging strictly by the trajectory of its stylistic development, the art was both victim and perpetrator.

Gorgeously crafted, sensitively colored and wittily acted as the self-portraits are, they have dreadful shortcomings. By choosing his own image as the stand-in for the Artist, Arneson makes the work appear strictly autobiographical and confuses his send-up of artistic egotism with personal egotism and the work comes out as an expression of the worst kind of grossed-out narcissism and poisonous self-loathing. The standard rationalization that they are mere humor just doesn’t wash. They are just too big for humor, too imposing for a gag.

Their extension into portraits of other artists doesn’t help. After the lethal satire Arneson has leveled against the image of the provincial artist, his images of famous figures like Picasso, Pollock and Bacon come across loaded with rivalry, envy and romantic adulation.

Arneson’s art is so completely in the thrall of art it is a wonder any human content seeps out. Significantly, virtually the only Post-Funk image of woman in the show is that of a Mona Lisa next to a green George Washington. Art and money and fame.

There are moments when you just want to walk away from this stuff in disgust, but something keeps our thoughts trained on it. The robustness and energy of the sensibility are incredible, but more than that is the way Arneson painfully captures a modern personality type. There are echoes here of Philip Roth’s self-devouring autobiographical heroes or even any man in the street who wants to think of himself as a radical individualist contradictorily dedicated to an untroubled life. That sets up internal tensions that drive the individual within himself and result in the classic, repugnant modern egoist who combines idiosyncrasy with irresolution. Fuse the double heroes of Joyce’s “Ulysses” and it’s a mess. The populist Leopold Bloom and the elitist Stephen Dedalus in a single body.

Arneson dramatizes the dilemma by causing his effigies to resemble Roman portrait busts with their overtones of dignity, selflessness and dedication to duty.

There is no question that a talent like Arneson’s would ideally be better off in the public arena than in his image of the involuting playpen of the art world. The Moscone portrait throbs with a kind of natural extroversion that suffocates in the self-portraits.

But we saw what happened when Arneson went public.

Ah! The gentle reader may expect at this point to scan some standard cant about how it all society’s fault.

No. After seeing the way Arneson’s art courts failure and misinterpretation, there is enough folly to go around.

Artists have to make up their minds, too. If you are gonna live in the world, you gotta live in the world.

Meantime, Arneson’s art took a new direction. He has been making anti-war and anti-nuclear images. Skulls singed like giant cinders lie on black crosses as chilling memento mori. Helmeted soldiers with nuclear-phallus missile noses have the satirical edge of the old “Dr. Strangelove.”

The work doesn’t seem self-involved. The work seems to be about the outside world.

And, well, being against war, that’s safe isn’t it?