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. 28 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.