ROBERT ARNESON- THE CONTROVERSIAL CERAMIST TALKS ABOUT ART CRITICS, ART POLITICS, THE TROUBLE WITH SAN FRANCISCO-- AND ALL THOSE HEADS.
 

IF LIFE COULD IMITATE ART, IN A SWITCH ON THE OLD ADAGE, IT
couldn't have picked a better subject than Robert Arneson.
   His artistic career began when he was a teenager in Benicia, then still a sleepy little railroad town. Arneson created comic strips starring super heroes who saved the world and won high school football games against all odds.
   Now, at fifty-seven, Arneson has defied all the odds of the mercurial art world and has become a superstar with his bold, startling many would say disturbing porcelain sculptures (and, to a lesser extent, with his paintings). His works fetch six figure prices and are on display at virtually every important contemporary art museum in America. Arneson has become the Puck of ceramists: for the past quarter century his pieces have alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) delighted, outraged and shocked their viewers. To paraphrase noted art critic Hilton Kramer, Arneson has achieved a public that might damn or praise his work, but not ignore it.
   Not bad for a guy who got a D in his first ceramics class at the College of Marin? He went on to receive a degree in art education at Oakland's California College of Arts and Crafts in 1953, but he never expected to be anything other than a high school teacher. Arneson taught for a few years, and because pottery was part of the curriculum, he began learning the craft. Although he eventually became a competent potter at San Jose State, Arneson says his work was "well turned, but dead."
   In the late fifties, Arneson forever changed his opinion about ceramics. His eyes were opened wide by the pioneering work of Peter Voulkos, whose huge, often sexual images were shaking up the ceramics establishment. Arneson began to break with what he calls the "pottery skill mentality," exploring a much wilder, spontaneous vision. In 1961, "after a few beers," he threw what became his first famous and important work; a clay beer bottle with a porcelain cap titled No Deposit, No Return. In 1962 he accepted an art teaching job at UC Davis, one he's held ever since, and became the nucleus of a group of other like thinking "crazies," as he calls his colleagues there.
   In 1963, he exhibited one of his seminal works, Funk John--a toilet with stark sexual and scatological overtones whose impact immediately put him on the map. Along with his Davis colleagues, Arneson began rejecting abstract expressionism and evolving a style that came to be known as funk art, the most dynamic force in the California art scene until the late sixties.
   "The thing I've always been interested in as an artist is the thing the establishment says you can't do--mix humor with fine art," he says. "Of course I was always in limbo--the fine artists never considered ceramists to be fine artists, and the ceramists didn't want to have anything to do with me.
The late San Francisco Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright said of Arneson, "Through the sixties, the influence of his ceramic art was immense. At a time when the integration of painting and sculpture was a major preoccupation among artists, Arneson showed a way to make objects that achieved an original and ingratiating fusion of the two." That "objectivity" took a new turn, starting in the early seventies when Arneson began creating huge sculptures of heads atop tall pedestals covered with all sorts of graffiti--whimsical, silly, political, and personal. Sometimes he depicted his friends and other artists he admired; more often, the busts were various versions of himself. "I'm my own cheapest model," he laughs. Whether they were of him as a Greek god with a cigar in his mouth, a surrealistic clown with a giant red ear or a grisly victim of nuclear holocaust, the busts were all riveting, as were the messages on the pedestals.
   He created his most famous and controversial bust in 1981, when he was asked by the San Francisco Art Commission to commemorate assassinated Mayor George Moscone in a work to be displayed in the lobby of the newly opened Moscone Center. The piece never made it past opening week. The bust's pedestal included an orange Twinkle, the line "Oh, Danny Boy" (a reference to Dan White), a gun and bloodstained bullet holes. Mayor Feinstein had the pedestal draped, which only fanned the fires of press attention. Eventually, the commission rejected the piece, and Arneson bought it back and resold it for $10,000 more than the original $37,000 commission fee.
   Today Arneson, who recovered from an eight year bout with cancer in 1983, says he's never felt better. He's constantly thinking about new pieces and working every day in his Benicia studio, which adjoins the house and garden he shares with his second wife, sculptor Sandra Shannonhouse, and their year old daughter.
San Francisco Focus sent Contributing Editor Ken Kelley to Benicia to talk with Arneson. Here's his report:
   "We met as he was walking out the door to eat lunch at his favorite hangout, Mabel's, a neon-bedecked re-creation of a funky forties diner that serves huge portions of everything. He ordered a hamburger--'I'm an American artist. I like American food.'
   "After lunch, we went back to his studio. I felt Lilliputian inside it; towering works-in-progress were everywhere, including a gargantuan head of Jackson Pollock on the floor. The place had all the wonderful smells and sounds (drilling, sawing) of a working artist's studio. We stepped out into the garden, joined at times by two huge dogs and Arneson's daughter.
   "Arneson has a Hemingwayesque face, which you'd never be able to tell from his self-sculpture, and a low voice. He's quite droll, especially when he's being self-deprecating or talking about the pretensions of the eastern and European art worlds. I've found that it's difficult to get many artists to talk about the content of their work--the 'If you don't get it, don't ask' attitude. And I knew that Arneson doesn't like giving interviews and has given few over the years. But everything clicked somehow, and here's the result:"
   SF FOCUS: Let's talk about your most famous--some would say infamous-commission, the bust of George Moscone you did in 1981 for the Moscone Center. The center's opening was totally overshadowed by the furor surrounding your bust of the late mayor --specifically the messages you put on its pedestal.  How did the fireworks start?
  ARNESON: Tom Albright had seen what I was up to. He'd seen my piece, and he saw that the pedestal was draped. I told the Art Commission guy, if you drape that pedestal, you're just going to call attention to it--anything you hide, you're going to call attention to.
 SF FOCUS: Didn't Gina Moscone, George's widow, insist on it being draped?
   ARNESON: Not at all. Mayor Feinstein wanted it. I talked to Gina just before the opening. I told her, I don't think you should participate in this unveiling of my piece, because it's gonna bring back memories for you that will not be happy ones, because I've told the whole story-of your husband's life and his murder-on the pedestal.
  SF FOCUS: What did Mrs. Moscone say?
   ARNESON: It was too late. The mayor, like all Roman rulers, brings out the widow to cement her power base. It's never failed to work in the last 2500 years. Since recorded history, it's always been a useful tactic, to build a political base.
 SF FOCUS: Had Mrs. Moscone seen the work in progress?
   ARNESON: Gina had been over at the studio; she saw my work. I'd asked her to submit some words for me to put on the pedestal, some personal things from her husband. She came over one time, and she saw some other statements of mine on the pedestal, like "Oh, Danny Boy." SF FOCUS: From the Irish ballad.
  ARNESON: Right. She asked me, What does "Oh, Danny Boy" mean? I said, You remember the song--I sang a couple of bars for her. She didn't put two and two together, what Danny boy was all about, and I thought, am I supposed to tell her? She's the widow. Am I supposed to tell her, Hey that's the guy who killed your old man? Gina liked the bust, though; she told me that.
  SF FOCUS: Curious, somehow, because you showed Moscone in a typical politician's pose, grinning into the universe
  ARNESON: Yeah, crooked teeth and all. A lot of people were upset because I depicted him as a politician--"on"-and others were upset because I showed him with crooked teeth. But Gina thought my bust of George was marvelous-she used that word.
   SF FOCUS: What about members of the Art Commission, who had commissioned the work in the first place? Did they see it in advance?
   ARNESON: Well, in my proposal, the pedestal was blank, but I was to work'in harmony with the Art Commission, and they would monitor my work periodically. A member of the commission came to my studio pretty regularly, the only one who gave a damn. He took pictures and showed them at Art Commission meetings.
   But nothing was handled well. The Art Commission was not an art commission--it was Dianne Feinstein's personal fiefdom. [long pause] It should have all been done differently.
  SF FOCUS: Shortly after the dust cleared, you did a ceramic piece modeled after Mayor Feinstein. You called it China Doll.
   The catalogue from your recent show describes the piece as "a porcelain princess, drained of all color, emotion and feelings." Do you feel that way about Dianne?
  ARNESON: At the time, obviously I did.
SF FOCUS: Still feel that way?
   ARNESON: I don't feel anything about her now, but right then I had my passions, of course. I found out that she was a very shrewd political being.
  SF FOCUS: You sound quite bitter about the whole thing. And you fought back with your art?
   ARNESON: I did a number of works. I did myself as an old dog in the doghouse --Portrait of the Artist ~s a Clever Old Dog. I did about four sculptures of myself as a dog. But also that dog had to do with Dylan Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
   SF FOCUS: Did you feel any loss of innocence over the incident--you've always said that you're in love with the concept of innocence.
  ARNESON: What I felt, what I was amazed by, was all the attention it got. All the press. The headline on the front page of the Chronicle for three days running. I guess there was nothing else going on in the world, so they had to worry about this dumb bust of Moscone. It's a pretty insignificant event when you think about the whole world. I thought, Maybe I should address some more significant issues if I have this kind of podium. What can I say to the world? Can the artist say anything to the world? One asks oneself these questions.
SF FOCUS: So what did oneself reply?
  ARNESON: I made a change in my work. The universal issue of nuclear holocaust, I dealt with that for a period of time. That came out of a sense that I now had a platform, and that what I did would be universally received. Or at least seen --I had access, and my work wouldn't be lost in the shuffle, because I'm a famous artist. Or maybe infamous artist.
   SF FOCUS: You mean that, at the very least, you had a new-found public attention--
   ARNESON: The best part of the whole thing was the message that you don't have to be too sophisticated to get to my work. I'm accessible. It's not "art world" art.
SF FOCUS: What is the art world? ARNESON: There is it, or what is it? SF FOCUS: Both.
   ARNESON: [laughs] Well, it's somewhere back east, geographically.
  SF FOCUS: Let's talk about that "somewhere" for a minute--specifically New York. Two weeks after the Moscone flap, you and several other artists from California had an exhibition at the Whitney Museum. New York Times critic Hilton Framer, who had once waxed ecstatic about your work, did an about-face with this show.
 ARNESON: He attacked me viciously.
   SF FOCUS: He called your work the mark of a mind too easily pleased with its own jokes ... we see a kind of moral smugness in the artist's oversized self-portraits ... a gruesome combination of bluster, fractiousness and exhibitionism." What made him turn against your work?
   ARNESON: It makes you wonder. Obviously there were two things going on a reappraisal, he saw my work again and didn't like it. Or it might have been the nature of the Whitney show--it might have been too overwhelmed, because sometimes my worry doesn't ride well with works of other artists. And I think Framer was not prepared to accept it because of his bias, which is western European.
   SF FOCUS: He said you were part of the "spiritual impoverishment" that California art represents--
  ARNESON: Yeah, like there's great spiritual inspiration in New York? I don't think California is impoverished. New Yorkers think that New York is it. Framer thinks, as lots of New York art critics do, that America is European. My God, in a couple of years, whites in America will be a minority. SF FOCUS: Along with art critics?
  ARNESON: [laughs] No comment. America is a country with great vitality, and minds like Hilton Framer just don't like it. They want French and German stability.

 SF FOCUS: You answered Kramer back in your own fashion with a sculpture, California Artist--
   ARNESON: It was a sculpture of myself in a Levi's jacket, unbuttoned down the middle with hair sticking out and my belly sticking out, and I have my shades on, and the entire chamber of my head is glazed in Catalina blue--for Catalina Island--and there's a marijuana plant growing up the pedestal. I had a smug look on my face, posing like some of my art friends in LA used to pose for newspapers. The macho poseur.
   SF FOCUS: Is there something about California artists that--
  ARNESON: California bothers New York. We're just too ahead of everything here. I mean, they're the ones who put Reagan in office, I'm sure, but we're the ones who breed 'em. [laughs] Nixon, Reagan-we're doin' our country in somethin' awful out here, aren't we? Herbert Hoover. The Republican Party needs California that's for sure. It's a remarkable state.
  I read Kramer's criticism, and I tried to see that "California artist," and it was obviously me, but I was having to stand for the entire intellectual California scene. I don't know where he's coming from, but he edits the New Criterion now, and if you read that, their whole attitude is just --well, anti-Communist, that's about all I can figure out.
  I must say I read what Kramer had to say about me in the Times with great attention--I couldn't believe that the New York Times spent so many column inches attacking me.
   SF FOCUS: Even if Kramer sees you as a California artist, your work is certainly known around the country. Tom Albright once wrote about you: "Throughout the sixties, the influence of Arneson's ceramic art was immense, and it spread from beyond the Bay Area. 'Hotter' than the pop soft sculpture and 'cooler' than abstract expressionist ceramic sculpture, Arneson's work [combined the] rebellious iconoclasm and hip humor that characterized the contemporary mood of America. "
   ARNESON: That's quite a mouthful--I miss Tom dearly. He spent a lot of time looking at my work. His death was a great loss to the world.
  But to answer your question, I was into heat and passion. And cooler than the abstract expressionists because there was content in what I was doing, and that's always.., troublesome. SF FOCUS: What do you mean? ARNESON: Well, it's form plus. Meaning. And that meaning is sometimes subversive. Sometimes it's not totally comprehended by the maker and the viewer, [laughs] but it’s in there.
  I try to approach everything with arms wide-open and stretched out. You don't just wanna be cool, totally formal, you want a work that's accessible. And you can see the humorous elements of my work, and that's always intriguing. Unless you're an art critic, and then you're always offended because you think someone's insulting you. Humor is always a problem in art.
 SF FOCUS: You think your humor is misunderstood?
   ARNESON: A lot. Humor is a problem. It's been so since the Greek times-people take it personally. Tragedy, they don't take it personally, they take it in the general context of the society. It's odd. You can be silly-that's acceptable. Try and be humorous, and it's like, what’s this guy trying: to do, this sonofabitch? So-called sophisticated people, such as art critics, feel so offended by humor--it's somehow beneath them, or it's about them.
   SF FOCUS: I take it that, other than Tom Albright, art critics are not your favorite people--
   ARNESON: What's truly curious to me is the attitude of art critics like Kenneth Baker from the Chronicle--they hired him to replace Albright. Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous! Baker's attitude is that artists have no power to change anything, so therefore it's a useless activity. So I think, okay, we'll just plod along and someday we'll just self-ignite! [laughs]
I try to think that artists who don't think the way the Kenneth Bakers of the world do can create a body of work that can say something. I spent three years doing a body of work about the potential nuclear holocaust. I'm not doing it at the moment, because I don't want to become single-focused, but I did spend three years doing nothing but that-SF FOCUS: To wake people up?
   ARNESON: That, and I wanted to make a statement. I've always been a political artist, and I think my work always has something to say. But I never want to be typecast. I don't want to be locked into anything. But I think all the works I'm doing will be more sharply focused than other works. Some will be narrower, some will be broader. All of them will deal with the human condition, and with an imagery that is readable and delves into the American consciousness--that means my existence. That's what I mean when I say I'm doing American art.
   SF FOCUS: Do you think all art ought to be morally responsible? Should it try to raise social consciousness?
   ARNESON: I can't speak for all artists, but I think the nature of art is to raise your consciousness. And therefore, it can't help but raise your sense of morality, because it's raising your sensitivity. If you're an artist who deals more literally and more figuratively, as I do, with real subject matter, then you have an opportunity to do more. But many artists feel that to be "pure" with their work, they should be removed of any degree of responsibility. I feel the opposite, of course.
 SF FOCUS: Why?
  ARNESON: I'm not French! [laughs] My art is consciously self-portraiture; I want to put as much of me into my work as it will tolerate.
   SF FOCUS: Let's talk a bit about you. Stepping back to your early years-when did you first start drawing?
   ARNESON: I must have been three or four.  My father was an accomplished draftsman, and he showed me how to do it. I spent all my summers drawing.
   SF FOCUS: When did you fall in love with drawing comic books?
  ARNESON: As a teenager. I was a problem student. I drew comic books quite extensively--thirty and forty pages of comics. All of them were involved with a football hero--I thought of myself as a football scholar. So I drew stories of adventure, where the superhero saves the game at the last second. SF FOCUS: Vicarious victories?
   ARNESON: Yes, that was it. I played the game, but I was not nearly as good as the character I drew.
   SF FOCUS: You made your first buck at the Benicia Herald--
   ARNESON: Yeah, two dollars a strip. I'd have done it for free. To see something you've done published, that was a kick. Two dollars could have been two thousand.
   SF FOCUS: You got a D in ceramics when you first studied it at College of Marin. Later you referred to your ceramic works as "well-turned, but dead."  ARNESON: It was dead stuff. "Ohio State" pottery. The idea was to make something "correct," so it looked like it came from a machine.
   SF FOCUS: What changed your mind about ceramics--that it could be real art?
   ARNESON: I saw [ceramic sculptor] Pete Voulkos' stuff. That would have been in 1957 or so. I was amazed by his work. It wasn't craft; his stuff just stood there and screamed at you.
   SF FOCUS: Wasn't he the first to insist that his work was, in fact, sculpture?
  ARNESON: The word "sculpture" was never used, as I recall. They were "vessels," a many-layered word. Vessels carry many spiritual things in them. Going back to ancient Egypt, the vessels carry your soul aloft; everything was put in a boat like shape. I saw Pete's work as messages. They had implications of containment. They weren't trying to be symbolic figures--they were direct spiritual actions between the clay and the craft of throwing it, using ancient pottery skills. The interaction, a life-and-death interplay, subjugation. It changed my life.
   SF FOCUS: Your first "important" work came in 1961--the famous beer bottle with the ceramic cap, No Deposit, No Return. Did you see that as a big breakthrough at the time?
   ARNESON: Nah! It was a hot day at the California State Fair, and me and some friends were demonstrating pottery, and we'd had a lot of beer and we got wild. We started making plates, then ceramic food to go on them. God, we just had a ball, making beer bottles.
  SF FOCUS: Jasper Johns became famous early on for doing sculptures of beer cans--
   ARNESON: This was before Jasper. We didn't know it was art--we were just goofing off. You've gotta goof off in art, you gotta play. In any intellectual activity, you've gotta have the space to just play, whether you're a philosopher or writer, just take those dumb risks without anybody being on your case. So you don't have to prove anything, but maybe you'll discover something.
  And, as an artist, you have to constantly question yourself and trust yourself. It 6 okay if part of you is dumb, part of you is smart, part of you is silly, part of you is a great wit, part of you is intellectual--all parts you want to put into the hopper and make a good brew.
   SF FOCUS: We know you like a good brew. But how about soup? I have a feeling you'd have given the Campbell's soup cans a bit different twist than Andy Warhol did.
   ARNESON: I never accepted his soup cans. Andy Warhol was a media person. I don't think artists were looking at Warhol in terms of an aesthetic. He did bring forth the world of advertising, and many artists started looking through magazines and paying attention to the ads. I certainly did. I went through the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, tore out pages that looked interesting, worked from them. Some of my best toilets came from the Sears catalogue. [laughs]
  I looked on everything as a product, not knowing I was also making a profit. You get outsmarted by the art world, in the end.
 SF FOCUS: How so?
 ARNESON: Art is a commodity.
  SF FOCUS: And in your case, often a commode-as in your Funk John. Was that done on a hunch? You've said that even you were jolted by it when it came out of the oven.
  ARNESON: Yeah, you make something on a hunch, and then you're overwhelmed when it's better than you'd conceived it in your mind. I would imagine it's like being a composer who's writing with all these different instruments and suddenly--boom! You've put it all down on paper, but then you get to hear the sonofabitch.
   SF FOCUS: Funk John is now in the funk grave--it was smashed to pieces. What's the story behind that?
 ARNESON: The owner destroyed it through psychotic vengeance. He made his wife do it before he left her. The wife had bought it, and he bought her a sledgehammer to destroy it, to prove her love for him. She took pictures of the shards. At least I have those. [laughs] SF FOCUS: Sometimes, you've said, a piece backfires on you in the kiln. One of your famous rescues from the oven is the bust of yourself done in 1966. It split down the middle in the kiln; you put it back together and inserted a bunch of marbles in the slit and titled it self-portrait of the Artist Losing His Marbles. Did you feel you were losing your marbles when you saw the first results?
   ARNESON: I was awfully depressed. I felt, I'm working this thing to death, and it's just getting worse and worse and it's cracking and it's self-destructing and this could lead to suicide. But it taught me perseverance. You go on from there. Take the difficulties and exploit them. That's why, though, I prefer ceramics. Because there's always that chance. Potters always call the kiln the "kill god." The element of chance takes over and you're no longer in control.
  SF FOCUS: But, speaking of control, aren't you playing God a little with all the heads you've created?
   ARNESON: [laughs] Yes, all artists are playing God. All artists are creators, after all. You have to believe you have the power, that you are the Supreme Being, with things you create.
   SF FOCUS: You began your series of self-portraiture in the early seventies. In fact, between 1971 and 1972 you did eighteen self-portraits in clay. How did that start?
   ARNESON: I don't know. I was going through a lot of changes when I started doing myself. I was going through a separation, then a divorce. The whole gamut of emotions ran through me. One could see oneself in the mirror of self-pity, self-righteousness, self-everything, and it became gradually self-self, selfishly so. [laughs]
  And you use yourself as a character actor for portraying parts. The works are not necessarily all about me, but since I'm cheap, as a model, I use me. [laughs] I can study myself in the mirror and capture gesture.
  I'm still doing heads--my God, it's almost eighteen years now--not exclusively, but my predominant body of work seems to be head sculptures of others and myself. Even in my drawings, paintings, ceramics, bronze, paper--all heads. It's absurd. [laughs]
  SF FOCUS: Among your head sculptures are Picasso, Duchamp--caricatures of your own heroes?
   ARNESON: Absolutely. I'm not making fun of'em, though most people assume I am. I'm instilling a bit of humor into them, and my own sense of love for their work. I'm probably making love to them, that way.
   SF FOCUS: You do admire many of your fellow artists, which brings me to a statement you once made. You said an artist should be just "one of the boys," contrary to the whole elitist notion of art ARNESON: God, that sounds awful now, doesn't it. Macho-hang-out-withthe-boys-drinking-beer· I don't know what I was saying when I said that, because artists are elitists. I'm an artist, I'm not "one of the boys," I'm not on a softball team and I don't hang out at the pool hall. You wanna look regular, but you're not.
  C'mon, you know that, Ken. If you're a writer, if you're an intellectual, you basically just--don't belong. [pauses] I never felt that I belonged, anywhere. I probably didn't think that I wanted to belong. I was too busy doing what I wanted to do, and I had to be able to see through things.
  To be an artist, in the broadest sense of the word, you have to be truthful to yourself, and be able to see. So therefore, you can't be a joiner. Once you join, you're no longer free. An artist has to be an individual, to be constantly fresh.
 SF FOCUS: What about fresh young artists? Are art schools turning out fresh kids with fresh ideas these days?
  ARNESON: I don't teach in an art school per se, mine is just part of a curriculum of a general humanities degree at UC Davis. But I went to the San Francisco Art Institute a couple of months ago to get an honorary degree, and I looked at the students' work. It was very impressive.
SF FOCUS: What is it about teaching that interests you?
   ARNESON: I can see the beauty of a constant reawakening. But there's the downside-twenty-year-old kids who try to be all sophisticated and all that. It can be fashionably contrived, and some of them are smarter SF FOCUS: Than you?
  ARNESON: Yup. In some sense of things. Some of them have been everywhere. Students are amazing. Some are geese out there waiting to be fed, you know. And some have already flown.
SF FOCUS: Anne Walker, a prominent local gallery owner and former director of the San Francisco Museum of Me Art, has said that when students from the Bay Area graduate from art schools, they're sort of all dressed up with no place to go, whereas in New York; Europe, there's a nourishing climate young artists.
   ARNESON: Europe is a different thing altogether--the countries and even the cities sponsor art facilities, they give art grants, they rent art studios to encourage young artists to continue their art. The city of Amsterdam must have five hundred studios that they've rented out to artists, cheap.
  As far as New York--it's hard. I know a lot of young artists there, and costs are outrageously expensive, and finding a space to work is getting impossible. You have to move farther and farther out you're not in Manhattan anymore, you're in Brooklyn or over in Jersey.
  But it's important to be able to see art. And New York has world-class museums.
SF FOCUS: But getting back to what Anne Walker said about there being no nourishing climate in the Bay Area--is that true?
  ARNESON: From what I understand, most of the artists south of Market Street will be evicted in the next couple of years, when they start to develop the naval facilities for the USS Missouri. And so you have this flourishing South of Market scene--where are they gonna go?
   SF FOCUS: Tell me.
ARNESON: Probably move over to the East Bay, Emeryville, North Oakland, wherever they can find enough space to create. It's a damn shame.
   SF FOCUS: If you had some say in the matter, what would you do? Should there be a reincarnation of the WPA, which under Roosevelt gave artists a salary and an outlet to create their works, some of which are now classics?
  ARNESON: That wouldn't hurt. That could work very well for young people. It would keep them off welfare, and certainly our cities could use the talent of young artists. Even the public schools don't have artists anymore--at one time, artists worked in public schools, teaching art. Now there are none. It's a tragedy. We're trying so hard to keep up with the Russians, you know, so therefore we have to cut down on the so-called frills-music, art, literature--and just pursue the sciences.
  And there are other ways. Cities could have artists on their staff for their visual programs; cities could encourage live-in situations for artists to be a part of the community. Now artists find spaces when the rent is cheap, and then when the community economy starts to pick up, the artists are out on their ear. The artists are always the first ones to get kicked out, because rents go sky high. Inspiration doesn't directly correlate into invitation-invitation to stay in the place you've helped make a creative community.
SF FOCUS: Getting back to Anne Walker, she has sharply criticized the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year she even led a picket line protesting what she called the "hidebound" philosophy of the museum. Is hers a valid criticism?
   ARNESON: She was on the board; she has hands-on experience. I don't; I keep a distance from that. They have three works of mine--for my thirty years of work. That's one for every decade. [laughs]
  SF FOCUS: But how is the museum doing?
ARNESON: Well, they could do better. SF FOCUS: How?
   ARNESON: Well, first, they don't have the size to exhibit what they do have. So you can't expect to go there and see anything new. And they have to build up their tutorial staff so they can be involved in more original exhibitions. But right now it's a very small, very parochial kind of place. It's not a first-class museum. Even on the West Coast, it wouldn't be considered a first-class museum. Los Angeles, of course, is now moving real rapidly. They've built two new complexes, and they're building a couple more. That will never happen in San Francisco, on that scale.
  SF FOCUS: So does that mean San Francisco is taking a back seat to Los Angeles--we just can't compete?
   ARNESON: San Francisco is a little town. Seven hundred thousand people. It's not the fine arts center of the West. We can't compete on the same scale as the big-bucks guys. What's bad about it is that the resources are not up to par- so difficult to survive as an artist in California.
SF FOCUS: Whose fault is that?
   ARNESON: The West itself. We're still a frontier. We're new, we're not established, we don't have a sense of ourselves yet.
   SF FOCUS: As you travel around, is there anything that excites you about contemporary art?
   ARNESON: There is a return to figurative art, and that excites me. And I think there's more content in sculpture and painting, and that excites me, since I've always had a bias toward content. It's exciting to me, because for so long, art seemed so just--decorative. Now there's more guts involved, which I love. Scott Donahue, with whom I worked at UC Davis, does wonderful figurative work. Tony Natsoulas is another. What's interesting to me is that there's an upsurgence in the work of clay. Clay is a difficult thing to work with. It has a mind of its own, and to master it is a real achievement, lemme tell you.
SF FOCUS: Whose work do you buy?
   ARNESON: I'm not a collector, but I have bought a few works of art. A lot from my friends whose work I admire. I buy them straight from the gallery; I don't swing any special deals.
   SF FOCUS: Do you have any of your own works in your house on display?
   ARNESON: None. I don't care to look at my own work-
SF FOCUS: Why?
  ARNESON: I dunno--probably because I'd want to work on it some more. [laughs] It'd be too dangerous. I'd find something wrong with it and start to do it all over again. Whereas, if I'd bought it, I'd leave it alone. [laughs]
   SF FOCUS: Socially, what's your life like? Do you hang out with lots of other artists?
   ARNESON: Artists don't hang out. I'm socially surrounded by artists. That's about the extent of my social life--going to artists' parties, picnics, and dinners.
SF FOCUS: When writers hang out with other writers, often there's all sorts of competition and dumb fights. Same thing in the artists' circle?
   ARNESON: Writers work in isolation, and they never talk, so when they finally get together they gotta go at it. Artists aren't isolated like that. You don't work in silence. You don't work, work, work and then finally get published and suddenly you're out there. When you're an artist, your work is constantly visible.
   SF FOCUS: What's the greatest joy you have in your work?
   ARNESON: Doing it. Getting the idea in your head, playing with the clay and turning it into something real.
   SF FOCUS: What have been the worst disappointments in your art career?
   ARNESON: Well [pauses] I've probably washed them out of my mind. They were early in my career, workin' real hard for a competitive show and thinking you'd got it and having it rejected, and you know it's good.
  I know in my early period where something I'd worked on for months that I knew was great was rejected by an "eminent" juror--that's a heartbreak. Takes you awhile to analyze it--you wonder, is it in the work, or is it out of taste for the moment, and if it is, you should maybe set aside what you're doing for the moment and just keep it to yourself.
   SF FOCUS: The question of taste is a curious one. Who decides what's "in" and what's "out" in the art world?
  ARNESON: The curators of art museums, for one, who are influenced by collectors. So you have one collector who is buying everything--there are people in the world now doing that, you know--just buying up everything. A guy will come in and say to a dealer, I'm buying up everything you have for sale by this particular artist. Then he controls the market, doesn't he? He controls everything right off the rack. Then he can set the price of the next sale of the particular artist. And the curators take great note of this activity.
   SF FOCUS: It sounds more than a little like the Wall Street madness--prices skyrocketing on speculative items. The $40 million Van Gogh bought by a Japanese consortium, for instance. And recently, a Giacometti sold for $63.63 million--
  ARNESON: That might be someone who really loves Giacometti, and after all, there will be no new ones. And if I had that kind of dough to throw away, I'd buy one, too. They're breathtaking.
   SF FOCUS: Do you think your stuff will ever sell for that kind of money?
   ARNESON: [laughs] In my time, I don't think so. After my time, I don't care. It probably will, now that I think about it. But three or four million probably won't mean much by the time I die. And I think that I can honestly speculate that somewhere down the road it actually will.
   SF FOCUS: Getting back to the present, if you were given commissions, how would you to do busts of the following people: Ronald Reagan, first.
ARNESON: I'd do him as a TV set. For the pedestal, I'd go to his old film scripts --lots of resource material there. [laughs] SF FOCUS: George Bush? ARNESON: I wouldn't bother. SF FOCUS: Gary Hart?
ARNESON: I'd probably make him out of rubber. [laughs] SF FOCUS: Herb Caen?
   ARNESON: Sort of the late thirties, white shoes, spats--Herb would be a difficult one.
SF FOCUS: Edward Teller?
   ARNESON: I've used his name once or twice on some of my skulls, so I've sort of made my statement about him.
   SF FOCUS: Let me jump totally out of context for a moment--to graffiti. I don't mean the kids who just spray-paint the names of their gangs on the wall, but the ones who create whole murals overnight. Mayor Feinstein makes sure they're erased, in a public display of civic disapproval--
   ARNESON: I love good graffiti. People who are good at it have a wonderful flair for it, individual marks, and something about making your mark and having it seen in public is quite fascinating. But then, everybody wants their property all clean and decent. The New York subways did get a little bit out of hand, because they tried to organize the graffiti, too well organized, and they didn't know when to quit. Too much of a good thing. But I think we can air ours out a little bit more.
   SF FOCUS: Are you volunteering your own front wall in Benicia for an airing out, then?
  ARNESON: Hell, no. I don't want someone coming around and graffitiing my house. [laughs] I like it done more secretively--inside toilet bowls, things like that, places where you can really get all sorts of wonderful poems.
SF FOCUS: These graffiti artists have at least one thing in common with you they like to take risks. You've said that's a major theme in your life. Are you still doing it?
   ARNESON: I like to think that I'm still on the cutting edge of something. My work doesn't really change. The subject matter, the content, you vary it. I always look for things that are provocative.
   SF FOCUS: What's provocative these days?
   ARNESON: I'm interested in American myth. People and events. And if I haven't done them, I don't talk about them, so don't even try to get me to talk about them, because if you do, then you don't do them.
SF FOCUS: Please, just a hint.
   ARNESON: Well, I've been doing a lot of work about Jackson Pollock. For about two years--various states of his life and death. As a myth, it's so interesting, and I'm not sure I can verbalize it. But he has such an interesting face. And an interesting person psychologically, and an interesting artist, an extraordinarily interesting artist. So that's three good pluses.
  SF FOCUS: Are we going to see any more self-portraiture --more "Bob sculptures," as you call them--from you?
   ARNESON: Oh, I'm sure. There's more there. It's an interesting thing--I just need to reflect a bit more before I start the next one.
   SF FOCUS: You were quoted in the papers earlier this year during the opening of your Oakland Museum exhibition as saying, "No more Bobs."
  ARNESON: I know. I lied. It sounded good saying it, but I was just being a repentant naughty boy--"I promise I'11 never do it again." [laughs]
   SF FOCUS: If you had to design your own bust, with pedestal, for your grave site--this is strictly hypothetical--what would it look like? What would it say?
   ARNESON: I'd be horizontal, and I'd have a big smokestack coming out of my crotch. [laughs]
  SF FOCUS: Symbolizing the smoking nature of your art.
ARNESON: That's right.
SF FOCUS: And the pedestal?
   ARNESON: No pedestal--just a slab. In the Egyptian style. I've written about it, but the fact of doing it is pretty morbid. I was going to have to incorporate my own ashes, and that's pretty hard to do. I have to have an assistant to help carry out the project. So I can't do it--I think it's against the law, and the last thing I need before I go to heaven is to get anyone else in trouble on earth. [laughs] I guess the only solution is, I'll just live forever.