Robert Arneson Me, Myself and I

May 5 - July 21, 2000

Robert Arneson began his artistic career as a sports cartoonist for a small newspaper in his hometown of Benicia, California in the early 1950's. Though he shelved this profession to pursue an academic form of arts training, Arneson managed to maintain a certain irreverence the cartoonist has toward depicting reality while respecting the power of humor as conveyed through line and gesture.

After completing an MFA program in ceramics at Mills College in the late 1950's, Arneson gained critical attention in the context of the Bay Area "funk" movement with his eviscerated ceramic sculptures of subjects ranging from beer and soda bottles to typewriters, toilets and telephones. Though Arneson was known to have, in some manner, perceived virtually all of his works as self-portraits it was not until a 1965 work Self-Portrait of the Artist Losing His Marbles that he directly involved his own image and laid down the foundation for the format that would later become the core of his oeuvre.

In the early 1970's, Arneson began using the motif of a Greco-Roman bust while supplanting his own head as the ostensible subject, and maintained this format throughout the remainder of his career until the year of his death from cancer in 1992. This exhibition selects self-portrait sculptures from various periods throughout the 1970's and 80's.

Using the self-portrait as universal stand-in, Arneson doesn't merely portray an expression he finds its basis and its cause, be it psychological, sociological, political or personal. By virtue of a single constant (Arneson's face) one is able to experience an expression in a richer context than one would if that expression were revealed by an unfamiliar face. His gestures often invite the viewer to mimic them and to experience, and know them from his standpoint.