Playfulness in Modern Art
By Valerie Andrews
A founding father of “Funk,” Robert Arneson led a Bay Area art movement in the 1960s, exploring the absurdity of everyday objects. He is known for sculpting a scatological toilet, a tired toaster, a twisted teapot, a surreal typewriter, and endless models of his own head, usually thumbing his nose at authority.
Arneson was among the first to view ceramics as something other than the usual cups and bowls. His work—whimsical, outrageous, challenging—was recently featured at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. In a short film made for the museum (below), Arneson shows off a massive ceramic model of his house on Alice Street in Davis, CA—nearly eight feet of hand-built, glazed ceramic clay. For him home was a place to let your hair down and let your imagination roam.
Flirting with Pop Art, he produced a series of iconic Seven-up bottles, then went on to sculpt household appliances with breasts and penises. By the 1970s, the crude humor of “funk” evolved into sophisticated visual puns and Arneson began to poke fun at society’s foibles. His later works protest racial inequality and nuclear proliferation. He died in 1992, leaving a legacy of ribald social commentary—and sea of self-portraits, showing the artist as the brunt of his own outrageous humor.
How did Arneson become an artist? He started drawing at age 6, and soon began producing his own comic books. In 1981, he spoke with artist Maddy Jones, about the evolution of his career—and his early fascination with cartoons.
“I’m sure I was projecting myself in various heroic characterizations,” he said. “I would spend the entire summer emulating the comics, the funny papers. I looked at them in two ways. One was storyline. One that I thought had a good continuous story that kept you involved…like Captain Easy. Then there was the artistic level, the drawing. I was starting to find a certain style I thought was really very good. Al Capp…had a terrific linear strength in his drawings. The other one who I emulated was Milton Caniff, who drew Terry and the Pirates.”
While still in high school, Arneson made cartoons for his hometown paper, the Benicia Mariner.
“Even then, I thought Matisse was very weird. My high school art teacher tried to tell me that Matisse was good art. ‘Boy, you’ve been warped by the university,’ I thought. Because I really was into cartooning and drawing, I always assumed I wasn’t an artist. I was on the borderline of another, low-grade kind of thing.”
At Mills College, Arneson discovered his love of clay. “My graduate show was just a hodge-podge of everything. I was making coiled absurdities and loopy-doopy things that were nothing, mostly decorative, nothing massive or heroic.”
In the summer, Arneson started sculpting wine bottles and took them to Gump’s Gallery in San Francisco. “I made 100 wine bottles out of stoneware. I think they only sold for five dollars.”
When he got a job teaching at the University of California at Davis (along with Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley) “it was, in a way, like the Medicis deciding that they were going to sponsor me as an artist. I made considerably more money (and) I made about twenty ceramic trophies…a trophy to my finger, a trophy to my foot, a trophy to my hand, and then they got scatological, a trophy to sex.”
This led him to a playful re-examination of the utilitarian role of ceramics in Western culture—and to his breakthrough piece—a ceramic toilet known as the “Funk John.”
Arneson remembers: “I cut myself loose and let every scatological notation from my mind flow freely across the surface of that toilet I was making. This was 1963. And God, it came out fantastic. I had a very small kiln at Davis at the time, so I had to make it in about four parts and then I had to assemble it together, glue it and whatnot. Naturally I had a few turds in there which were beautifully rendered ceramic emblems. There’s something about turds and clay that have to do with toilet training anyway. So I did these beautiful turds, and then I bisqued it, and threw in some low-fire color for emphasis, reds and oranges. Then I glued that thing together. It was vulgar. But it was also a very important piece, much more important than any beer bottle I could possibly make.”
How was this sculpture— a shrine to the sort of bathroom humor fetishized by Mad magazine—be received?
“I took that piece in my van down to the Kaiser Building in Oakland, and it was on the roof garden, the seventeenth floor. I had arranged for a large number of concrete blocks to be delivered to the site because I had this vision about my toilet: because it had contents, turds inside and everything, that might be a problem. Therefore the bowl had to be displayed above eye level because I didn’t want to offend anybody.”
A group of Girl Scouts came to the roof garden on a field trip. “I thought, this would be the ultimate test: you don’t want to offend the Girl Scouts. They crawled around and looked at it. They all had a good time. They all proceeded then to climb up on the pedestal and look down inside, and they knew what they were going to find. They all went “Oooooooo,” laughed and screamed and were delighted because they found the turds they knew they would find at the bottom of the toilet.”
That night, Arneson got a phone call from the curator. “Bob,” he said, “we’re in serious trouble down here. You’ve got to get this toilet off this roof.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not the piece I picked.”
Knowing he’d just created something really good, Arneson pressed for a better explanation.
“Well, Bob,” the curator said, “I had to take that piece down because the Vice President of Kaiser Industries came through last night and was looking over the show. And when he came to your toilet sitting up there on the pedestal, he said, “God damn, no fucking artist is going to attack American capitalism in this manner. Take that thing out of here right now.”
“That blew my mind,” Arneson confessed. “I didn’t even know what American capitalism was about….there was no title, other than ‘John.'”
Next, a colleague challenged Arneson to create a urinal with breasts. This image (“Herinal” — again inspired by a pun) was considered so edgy and controversial the gallery kept it in the basement behind a locked door. If you really wanted to see this work, you had to ask the guard to take you down in the elevator and open the room. Arneson himself wondered if his sense of play had gone too far and many deemed this a “nasty piece of work.” Nonetheless the “Herinal” had a therapeutic effect.
After the show opened, Arneson got a letter from a psychiatrist who had taken a suicidal patient to see the sculpture. When he caught sight of the urinal, the patient broke out in laughter, his body shaking from head to toe.
“I think we’ve cured him,” the doctor later wrote to Arneson. “Thank you very much.”
Karla Knight: Imaginary Worlds
For 20 years, Karla Knight has been creating blueprints of an alien civilization—with operating instructions written in a strange but wonderfully plausible alphabet. This month, she has her first museum survey, Karla Knight: Navigator, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT. On view until May 8, are alphabets embroidered or painted on weathered grain sacks, and ledger books filled with images of spaceships that have both a humorous and other worldly quality.
Where did these images come from? Play was the genesis. When Knight’s son Henry was around 4, she invited him into her studio, and over time, they produced a body of work she would call “Aliens & Objects.” Mother and son worked side-by-side, their material spread out on the floor, drawing on repurposed file-folders, with Henry rendering his favorite subject—aliens with big eyes and heads and spindly arms and legs in magic marker—and Karla overlaying organic shapes in fleshy-brown oil paint. Words and symbols became part of this exchange as Henry grew older and began to read.
“When you watch kids enter the world of written languages, it’s fascinating,” she recalled. “They start making their letters and then mess them up and make them their own. Watching my son do this, I thought, ‘Why can’t I make up my own language?’ I put some of my son’s writing in my journal, and then I started to make up some letters around it. I don’t hear the language in my head yet, but I have dreamed in it. It’s become a full-fledged language to me — I’ll just sit there at night and write in it like it’s English.”
Knight’s earlier work dealt with morphing landscapes inspired by her childhood in the Hudson Valley. Yet out of that innocent and playful collaboration with Henry came a constellation of UFOs and what appears to be blueprints from another universe. “I do feel like I’m a bridge between worlds,” she said. “That has always felt like my earthly job.”
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Knight lived in Manhattan, supporting her painting as a book indexer. In the 1980s, she began working with lists of words—typed out onto notecards on an antique typewriter. This led to her series, Super Eye Vision. Under the colorful header “MUTANT MISGIVINGS,” are thirty two-word entries: Sense Organ, Foolish Copy, Prickly Tail, Nerve Niche, Broad Stump, Hairy Trap, Living Jelly, and so on. Later she would move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and find inspiration in the desert landscape and start experimenting with ethereal shapes.
Critics have compared Knight to two women artists attuned to the paranormal and the occult—the Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint, who fused modernism with images that came to her in seances, and Agnes Pelton, the “Desert Transcendentalist” who painted luminous portals and apparitions.
Seeing Af Klint’s show The Spiritual in Art, in Chicago in 1987 was liberating for Knight: “I love that she didn’t want her work seen for years — she felt ahead of her time and she was aware of the time it would take for people to even be able to comprehend her work. Her art strikes a very deep chord with me, and I think it does in most people that have seen it. People want something more than what they can see or understand.”
Yes, we do love a mystery. We are also hungry for the imaginal, the whimsical—the kind of art that invites us to indulge in our own forms of creative play. Knight’s work is an opportunity to enter this “what if?” space. She doesn’t present us with a set of recognizable images —- the equivalent of “visual facts”— she entices us to consider other forms of life, to enter a dialogue with another galaxy.
Her alphabet resembles ancient hieroglyphics and the characters feel oddly familiar, as though they hold the secret to our own evolution. Yet her spaceships are also a tesseract—a tear in time—suggesting that we each have a doppleganger in a parallel universe. You can’t decode Knight’s paintings, you just have to let go and trust your imagination. You might view them as a fragment of some forgotten memory—or a hint of what’s to come. In Knight’s work there is that sense that we’re connected to some distant galaxy. (If you can’t afford a seat on the next space shuttle, you can order your own museum catalogue for Navigator here.)
Below, detail from Fleet 2 and Orbit by Karla Knight, courtesy of the artist and the Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York.
Where does this otherworldly vision come from? Like Arneson, Knight knew she was an artist at the age of 6. In addition, she grew up in a household that was steeped in the occult and open to the notion of life on other planets. “My father wrote books, many of them for children, on science and history and astronomy as well as poltergeists and ghosts and UFOs,” she said, “He had books about psychic phenomena and mediums and the history of UFOs in his library, as well as classical texts. On Easter or Thanksgiving, we would have séances in which we would use the Ouija board. Paranormal was normal for us.”
Her grandfather, Ralph Knight, was an editor and contributor to the Saturday Evening Post. But he was also a transcendentalist and author of Learning to Talk to the World Beyond (1969) where he describes how to conduct a dialogue with deceased loved ones. He also hosted seances and had no trouble moving between two worlds.
In 1984, Knight’s father died from a cerebral aneurysm. She then made a series of oil paintings on wood panels—surreal landscapes inspired by her childhood in the Hudson River Valley. The eye does not rest on the water or the trees but on free-floating orbs of light. Curator Amy Smith-Stewart writes perceptively of the artist’s evolution at this point—describing “The Farmer” (below) with three planetary bodies — or souls — beaming down from a nocturnal sky filled with sparkling stars.
“Is it Knight’s father? An alien spacecraft?” she asks,” A portal or conduit to other realms? Inside her father’s fastidious book UFOs: A Pictorial History from Antiquity to the Present (1979) are dozens of grainy black-and-white images of unidentified flying objects caught all over the world. But one, in particular, captured the day after Christmas 1978 by a Mexico City newspaper photographer, bears a striking resemblance to Knight’s orbs. It could also be what psychoanalyst Carl Jung described, when recounting a childhood anxiety dream, as a tiny ball at a great distance.”
Though Knight has been working with these themes for more than four decades, her work has finally struck a chord. Perhaps because we have lost so many people to a stealth pandemic, or because the uncertainty of this world has prompted us to consider what it will be like to wake up in the next. Either way, Knight shows us how to navigate these liminal spaces, with humor and a touch of grace.
Learn more about Knight’s inner world in this lively interview at the Westport, CT Public Library with The New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast.
Valerie Andrews is the founding editor of Reinventing Home.
The author thanks Russ McClure for background on the work of Robert Arneson, and Amy Smith-Stewart and Emily Devoe of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for their kind assistance covering the Karla Knight exhibit.
Recommended reading: Robert Arneson: Self Reflections and Karla Knight: Navigator.
