There’s something about touching the clay and . . . “click” . . . there’s my thumbprint. I have now recorded my existence in the mud, and I can fire it and it’s gonna last forever. . . . But you still rely on the gods because you’re never sure what it’s gonna look like when you open the kiln door.
Robert Arneson, in Chris Felver, California Clay in the Rockies (San Francisco: Kanopy Streaming & MVD Entertainment Group, 1983), video.
When he started on the faculty at the University of California, Davis, in 1962, Robert Arneson was given Temporary Building Number Nine—known on campus as TB9—to start a ceramics program at the school. His proposition was to treat ceramics, which had otherwise been considered craft, like fine art. He recruited artists for the program, and TB9, the unassuming corrugated metal building on the isolated campus, soon became legendary. As his student Richard Shaw recalled, “the place was radiating energy. . . . What was going on in TB9 was like a rushing locomotive.”1 Arneson made his own work in TB9 alongside his students, creating an active studio atmosphere rather than a conventional classroom. “I don’t want too much dogma. But I do . . . want to see some action,” the artist said of his teaching style.2 It was an experimental and permissive environment that combined locker-room humor full of sexual and scatological references with serious treatment of material and exploration of human psychology.
The Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, California, started in 1962 when the health department denied Adeliza McHugh’s business application to sell homemade almond nougat candy from a small house downtown; she opened an art gallery instead. Though she had no formal art training, McHugh recognized the energy in the art departments at local colleges and universities, looking to faculty at Sacramento State University and the University of California, Davis, for inspiring work.1 In 1964 she invited Robert Arneson to show at the gallery. He gave her a few works, doubtful that anything would sell, but McHugh returned in a few weeks with a check and a request for more work.2 The Candy Store gave many UC Davis artists their first shows, and McHugh became a catalyst in advancing funk art—a movement named by art historian Peter Selz, who described it as “largely a matter of attitude.”3 Funk artists used deliberately crude techniques and materials to rebel against elitism and the concept of taste within the art world.4 And McHugh’s passion for such nonconformist works turned many sweet-toothed shoppers into art collectors.5
Maija Peeples-Bright, interview with Lawrence Campling, “From Nougat to Art,” excerpt from Candy Store Film Project, video, 3:04 minutes, posted February 24, 2012, available at youtube.com/watch?v=elOasKqIyrU. ↩︎
Hilarie Faberman, Fired at Davis: Figurative Ceramic Sculpture (Stanford, CA: Cantor Center for Visual Arts, 2005), 4. ↩︎
Peter Selz, in Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “The Candy Store Gallery,” West By Midwest, June 20, 2020, available at mcachicago.org/Publications/Websites/West-By-Midwest/Stories/The-Candy-Store-Gallery. ↩︎
Jonathan Fineberg, A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 40. ↩︎
Gladys Nilsson, interview with Lawrence Campling, “Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson Talk About the Candy Store Galley,” excerpt from Candy Store Film Project, video, 3:58 minutes, posted July 11, 2012, available at youtube.com/watch?v=bVG1h_b4qNY. ↩︎
In 1981 Robert Arneson was selected by the San Francisco Arts Commission to create a memorial bust of the city’s late mayor, George Moscone, who was shot and killed on November 17, 1978, alongside its first openly gay elected official, Supervisor Harvey Milk. However, when the sculpture, Portrait of George (1981), was unveiled, the public decried it for the graffiti-like inscriptions, the blood, the bullets, and the outline of Moscone’s slain body depicted on its pedestal, and then-mayor Diane Feinstein rejected it.1 Art critic Thomas Albright, an advocate of Arneson, wrote: “It is a work that actually prompted a broad segment of the public to think and debate, as distinct from the mildly approving but basically indifferent reaction to the more innocuous sort of embellishments generally found in public edifices.”2 The controversy marked a turn in Arneson’s work from self-portraiture to darker and aggressively political subject matter and deepened the artist’s skepticism toward the public’s understanding of his work. The following year, he created a series of five caricatured portraits of Milk. Dramatic gestures, satirical language, and cartoonish symbols chronicle the events of Milk’s brutal assassination at the hand of fellow supervisor Dan White, who only days before the shooting had resigned in opposition to the enactment of a gay civil rights bill.
Funk John (1963), a dirty white stoneware toilet with bright ooze swelling out the tank and red ceramic turds, was Robert Arneson’s first ceramic toilet. Pushing the boundaries of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain (1917; replica 1964, Tate Modern), Arneson declared his presence in the work through finger-pinched and pushed clay. The piece was a kind of manifesto for Arneson: “I had finally arrived at a piece of work that stood firmly on its ground. . . . It was vulgar. I was vulgar.”1 Like Duchamp’s Fountain, Funk John was removed from its first exhibition and eventually destroyed (one of his students bought the piece, and her husband smashed it to pieces). Between 1963 and 1966, Arneson made a series of toilet-themed works, including stoneware, sketches, a painting, and a lithograph, many of which included writing and graffiti-like imagery—as in the large eye on Untitled (Urinal) (ca. 1963)—that became prevalent in his work.
Jonathan Fineberg, A Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 54. ↩︎
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