The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 30
Conquistador, from the series Reclamation (1995) is
the one example in the exhibition but happily also
one of the series’ masterworks. The subject, a Spanish
soldier from an army that destroyed much of the preColumbian civilization, links back to the Pre-Columbus
figures, an interesting dialogue that places victor
Robert Arneson, Doggie Bob, 1982.
and vanquished in this show in the same space.
We leave Lucero’s three-ring circus and make a slight
turn towards the Freak Show. A dramatic moment when
entering the Hootkins' home is being greeted by Doggie
Bob (1982), a large dog with a man’s head surrounded
by a generous array of feces. The head is a self-portrait
of a major figure in twentieth-century American ceramic
sculpture, the poet of scatology, Robert Arneson.
One can be amused, bemused, or for me just a little
drawn into the horror of the situation. One of the most
frightening films of my childhood was The Fly, the 1958
black-and-white American gothic horror film directed by
Kurt Neumann, in which a man, in an attempt at body
transportation, becomes attached to the head of a fly.
Arneson in the late 1950s and 1960s shifted the contextual
relationship between ceramics and contemporary sculpture
(Peter Voulkos did it for the vessel which is by choice not
a thread followed in the Hootkin collection). Arneson
took the ceramic figure out of the display cabinet and
into the art arena making work that was deliberately
confrontational, and like the dog, not well house trained.
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Arneson’s first incendiary device. He lobbed it into a public
exhibition, an invitational survey of work by California
sculptors on the rooftop gallery of Kaiser Industries in
1963. It was a toilet with red painted fingernails on the
toilet seat, drawings of breasts on the reservoir and strange
turd-like excretions generously oozing everywhere.
By the time we get to Doggie Bob, Arneson had been
doing a series of self-portraits, which have become his
most sought after works. In the “doggie” series Arneson
often appears to be mournful or pensive, some have
described it as a reaction to being undervalued as an artist
because he worked in clay, hence the turds. What he
was saying in the most literal way was that the art world
treated ceramics as…well, you can complete the sentence.
New York critics savaged Arneson in 1981 when he
was included in Ceramics Sculpture: Six Artists at the
Whitney Museum of Art for being a shallow maker of
one-liners. Stung by the view of his art, Arneson came
back with a new, to ugher body of work that dealt with
more potent issues: the threat of nuclear holocaust,
the dangers of the military industrial complex, and
The subject of scatology is key to Arneson’s aesthetic.
racial discrimination. This allowed his humor, which
Funk John (1963, since destroyed) is considered to be
remained, to turn grotesque and blackly sardonic.