Robert Arneson: Alice Street Revisited
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
November 12 – December 15, 2000
Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
November 12 – December 15, 2000
Robert Arneson’s body of "Alice Street" works on view at The Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis, includes the monumental sculpture The Palace at 9 a.m., two large paintings Alice Blue and Alice House Billboard: Corner of L Street and Alice, as well as numerous drawings, studies and sketches. Each work uses as its point of departure the image of the artist’s former track house, located at the corner of Alice and L streets in Davis, California where Robert Arneson resided in the years between 1962 – 1976. Ranging in tone from reverent to ironic, the "Alice Street" works are as art-historically and socially probing, as they are engaged with the particulars of place and time from which they emerge. They challenge art-historical conventions and presciently foreshadow later art movements, in which the house as a symbol of the "American Dream" is thoroughly deconstructed as an American icon.
Robert Arneson’s interest in playing with perspective and the house icon achieves perhaps its most complex exploration in the monumental sculpture, The Palace at 9 a.m., which he made in 1974 as a remake of his original "Alice House" sculpture Big Alice, 1967. However, The Palace at 9 a.m, became a much more elaborated version of its original, and its title is thought to be a play on Giacometti’s surrealist dreamscape The Palace at 4 a.m.
The intentionally child-like, direct, and vernacular handling of the clay in The Palace at 9 a.m., with its scatological and primal allusions, heightens both the playful and serious impact of the piece. Exaggeration of perspective, both through Robert Arneson’s placement of the piece at a calculated height, and also more noticeably through the angles of the roof-line and street sign, achieve a cartoon-like presence for the work that Robert Arneson poignantly pits against its primal references to mark-making and shelter. Shrubs, bushes, trees, dog tracks, dog excrement, wood chips, piles of garbage, the family van, a basketball hoop, and other evidence of habitation, are all sculpted expressively as part of the great model. The house and its surroundings are marked with drippy, washy vivid pinks, greens, blues, and yellows, achieving both a true sense of likeness to the house, and a cartoon-like aura. The artist’s actual handprint appears across a front window as a "mark of the self", a haptic signature, not unlike the prehistoric hand prints found in caves as evidence of those who once inhabited a particular site. With this handprint, and other marks ranging from footprints to patterned imprints, Robert Arneson reconnects the enterprise of sculpture with the ritual of the quotidian, replacing the sculpted bust on the pedestal with an archeological investigation of domestic space and time.
Robert Arneson’s polemic humor continues in works such as Fort Alice, which go even further in their mockery of the enterprise of homeownership and domestic life. But Robert Arneson’s irony and humor is tempered with equal doses of self-investigation, and even with an overt display of affection for his own house, its life, and certainly the enterprise of art-making to which he turned over both his house and his life energy. Alice Blue, plays with associations of the color blue with royalty and divinity, linking them to ideas of the track home, the American dream, the nuclear family, and the content and meaning of art and art history while Alice House Billboard: Corner of Alice and L, created between 1967-68, carries forward Robert Arneson’s challenge to the painted canvas and its conventions, through its play with perspective and its unraveling of the idea of the house and the framed painting as icons of civility. Trapezoidal in shape, the billboard-like painting presents a view of 1303 Alice complete with a sunny blue sky, family van parked in the driveway, and a rainbow which traces the entire eave of the roof. The rainbow, with its references to both the 1960’s counterculture and to the myth of the "American Dream" as a "Somewhere over the Rainbow," functions as a comic double-entendre, rooting the painting in the culture of its time.
Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu
