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The most robust-looking character in the exhibition is Robert Arneson, 51, whose favorite subject is his own head, blown up to more than Roman proportions and subjected to various odd indignities. In Splat, 1978, it has taken a bucketful of liquid white clay full in the face, like a vaudevillian copping a pie; a disembodied brown finger wipes the gunk away from his right eye socket. Arneson's mocking self-monuments are carried through with vast gusto and panache, and his technical resources seem limitless; besides, his formal ambitions are clear enough, below the funky surface. Even so, his work has a way of wandering off into a pointless anecdotalism, as with his tabletop sculpture of a tract home he once lived in, entitled—in a maladroit homage to Giacometti—The Palace at 9 A.M., 1974.
From such Californians, one learns that funk is fun. But no antidote has yet been found to the bite of the state's most annoying insect, the California Cute-Fly, which gathers in swarms at art schools and among the hills of Marin County. Quaintness, a whiff of sinsemilla, weaknesses of the bone structure, a pervasive reek of the petted ego—such are the main signs of this gnat's attack, coupled with the hermetic babblings which, on that coastal paradise of the half-blown mind, stand in for Imagination.
At its worst, the creature's sting produces mutants: witness the work of David Gilhooly, 38. Gilhooly does pottery frogs; rafts of them, dressed up as Mao Tse Toad, posing as the Gautama Buddha or smothering—deep social commentary, this—beneath piles of super market produce. This kind of sensibility, which surfaces in the weaker patches of Arneson's work as well, is meant to be disarmingly ironical.
Of course, its effect is the reverse of irony; one cannot have irony without rigor. Instead, it turns into the defensive chumminess that is one of the hallmarks of provincial art—the trade unionism of the In joke. Such longueurs threaten but do not overwhelm the effort to improve coast-to-coast cultural communication. This show is well worth seeing; and it will do a lot to dispel the faint condescension which, in some quarters, still clings to mere clay. —By Robert Hughes