August 22, 2003

GALLERIES BY MARGARET HAWKINS

Mark Twain observed that "everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

This philosophy might be applied to Robert Arneson's approach to his sculpture, which can take any subject and make it funny just by rendering it in clay. It's the human imperfections of the subject, often the artist himself, and the idea that art should be serious that make it humorous.

"Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson" at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago presents 75 sculptural works by Arneson. Almost all are maquettes, small works made in preparation for larger works or just as three-dimensional studies to explore ideas that were never realized in a more finished form.

'BIG IDEA: THE MAQUETTES OF ROBERT ARNESON' *Through Sept. 14 *Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 5550 S. Greenwood *(773) 702-0176

Working in California in the 1960s through the 1990s, Arneson became a leading figure in the West Coast ceramics movement. His early career coincided with a national mood marked by irreverence for institutional traditions. This irreverence toward art-world traditions and a disinclination to take himself too seriously allowed Arneson to reinvent the medium of ceramic sculpture by melding it with painting, drawing, portraiture, caricature and even political cartoon. Best known for his controversial commissioned portrait of San Francisco's murdered mayor George Moscone, Arneson mostly focused on more personal subjects and produced a body of work that looks like highly evolved cartoons in clay.

Often the sculptor's subject was himself and the details of his own life. A couple of early maquettes that depict his suburban tract house are wittily titled "The Palace at 4 a.m." in ironic homage to a more serious work by Alberto Giacometti. To see such a subject rendered in clay, and glazed in bright California colors, is to experience a bit of mind-bending nostalgia for the funky old days of hippie-influenced art. The wobbly walls of the house and the lumpy car parked out front both parody and celebrate the more mundane details of middle-class life.

Often Arneson links himself to the classical tradition, placing his own bearded balding head on a column as if in heroic commemoration. Usually, though, the heroism ends there; the head sports a cigar and a pair of shades and wears more of a smirk than a pensive pout. These self-portraits suggest a sense of irony about the importance of the artist in the modern world and this artist's own place in the art world.

Some of the funniest works are portraits of famous artists in sculptural takeoffs on their own styles. Here Arneson's sense of irony goes well with his lumpy informality. These portraits both poke fun at the seriousness of art and earnestly memorialize such art world icons as Jackson Pollock, whose paint-splattered boots mimic his paintings, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, whose violently distorted human figures end up just looking goofy when Arneson gets through with them.

One whole series is just a witty exploration of how water can be represented by glazed clay. Swimmers in pools, the artist's own sinking head or in one case a simple splash show Arneson's most playful side. Here the humor isn't about anything expect the pleasure of creative play, of making an illusion of wetness out of material that is its opposite.

In one especially self-mocking but ingenious series of works, the artist sculpts himself as Ol' Bob, a mangy dog with Arneson's head and ubiquitous cigar, shown posed in various characteristic canine positions. He scratches, loafs around and leaves scatological remains nearby. Perhaps meant to be self-critical, Ol' Bob manages to be both pathetic and cute, and the series is highly endearing.

This is an exhibit of small pleasures, and one of them is seeing how the artist's mind works. Rather than looking at the big finished product, we are treated to a rougher cut. Like listening to the stops and starts of a concert rehearsal rather than the perfected performance, seeing these maquettes allows a glimpse into the creative process.

One work stands out from all of this. At the end of his life, Arneson was diagnosed with bladder cancer for which he received two rounds of chemotherapy. Two self-portraits, Chemo I and Chemo II, represent this last stage of his life. Chemo I, though it shows a ravaged man, still has a bit of humor left in it, but in the last self-portrait, all humor is gone. Here pain and disease distort that handsome, cocky face. Arneson's last self-portrait is an unflinching look at his own mortality and all the more shocking after such a light-hearted tour through his earlier life. Still, on balance, we have to see him as a humorist as much as an artist, a social satirist who placed himself firmly at the center of his own spoofs.

Margaret Hawkins is a local free-lance critic.