The bawdy, hard-hitting art of Robert Arneson

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‘This compelling book’ gives a full picture of a complex artist, says David McCarthy

A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson by Jonathan Fineberg

Art historian Jonathan Fineberg declares the art of Robert Arneson to be a ‘troublesome subject’ in this lavishly illustrated monograph. Indeed, the drawing reproduced on the book’s cover depicts the sculptor grimacing while poking a finger into his eye, hard. So hard in fact that one is stunned to notice that amidst the dense swirls of line and colour blood is flowing from the socket. Playing on the ideas of artists’ sight and insight, the self-portrait offers a warning: follow artists at your own risk for you may not like where they take you.          

Arneson (1930–92) is hardly unknown among post-Second World War American artists.  His life-long struggle was to have clay treated as a serious fine-art material, not just the medium of hobbyists and crafts persons. His interests in bawdy humour, the role of the artist in society, and nuclear war constitute an important part of the national culture. Still, he remains somewhat underappreciated, largely because the humour can be misread as juvenile. This says more about American critics, curators, and historians, who have sometimes had difficulty separating Puritanism from high modernism, as though humour itself might not also be profoundly disturbing when it confronts consumer culture, politics, gender, sexuality, war, and mortality. 

As for many men and women of his generation, Arneson’s introduction to visual culture came through cartoons and comic strips.  He commenced his training in commercial art with the idea of becoming a cartoonist and illustrator, but soon concluded that his talent might not be sufficient to support himself and so switched to ceramics and crafts with the idea of becoming a high-school teacher.  Yet the interest in satire would shape his career, as it did those of his contemporaries, Peter Saul and H.C. Westermann. It helped Arneson channel an adversarial, aggressive and even angry sensibility (both visual and verbal), while providing an elastic formal sensibility of distortion and exaggeration that might be developed across an entire career.  Just as importantly, it licensed him to treat fine art as a target for withering humour.

Throughout the 1960s he had a major hand in developing the Funk sensibility associated with a small cohort of artists in and around San Francisco. Scatological, grotesque, and profane, it provided a counterweight to the more cerebral, and simplified, approaches of minimalism and conceptualism concurrently popular.  It also helped further the abstract expressionist emphasis on gesture by tying it to figuration.  The result was a powerful hybrid that acknowledged the formal innovations of modernism and grounded them within an expressionist emphasis on artists as witnesses to their times. A series of trophies, toilets, bottles, bricks, buildings, and teapots consolidated his reputation on the West Coast, and eventually led to interest in New York.

Fineberg rightly notes that subjectivity remained the central theme in Arneson’s work.   Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he often portrayed himself.  As a cook, he likened the kiln to the chef’s oven; he ridiculed modern artists’ audacity in thinking their works might last millennia; as clown or nut, he celebrated and lampooned the artist’s status as misunderstood outsider; as a cool, denim-wearing hipster, he embodied a national caricature of Californians as empty-headed narcissists. In a sense, he was targeting the postmodern construct of the self as an endless series of roles, each socially defined.

With a diagnosis of cancer in 1975, he added to this list that of medical patient.  Those portraits addressing his illness constitute a deeply moving consideration of vulnerability, and ultimately mortality.  They also indicate that the humour, caricature, anger, and satire were part of a much more comprehensive, and not so easily codified, sensibility.  In the end, Arneson was a cranky humanist. He dared to say out loud what too often remained the province of private conversation – if spoken at all – within a culture more attuned to surface affect than to deep connection. With this compelling book, we can finally take the measure of the man.

A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson  by Jonathan Fineberg is published by University of California Press. 270 pp.  200 colour/32 mono illus, £41.95, $60.00.  ISBN: 978-0-520-27383-2