see Arneson’s Self-Portraits
ROBERT ARNESON (American, 1930-1992) was the Father of the Funk Art movement of the 1960’s. His work was labelled as confrontational, immature, naughty, irreverent, sardonic, or edgy. It feels to me like a prankser stomping on the foot of notions of high art, and winking and smirking with us at this conceited conception of the role or prestige of “the artist.” He taught ceramics at U.C. Davis while I was there, and fellow students boasted what a great professor he was, and how I absolutely had to take as many classes as I could get into with him. I was never particularly interested in sculpture, and I was only at the campus for a year and didn’t manage to get into his classes before he retired, and then he passed away from liver cancer a short year later. But his presence was everywhere, most especially with the five Egg Head sculptures that began appearing all over campus the year after he died. In 1997 a group of us fellow graduates of Davis trekked to see his exhibit Self-Reflections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and I saw there that humor, self-deprecation, sarcasm, and visual puns could be art. But his self-portraits of his cancer and chemotherapy treatments were some of the most affecting reflections of mortality and deterioration of the body I’d experienced.
Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:
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