Architectural historian Simon Sadler is struck by the artistic investment that Arneson poured into “the exceedingly ordinary house” (shown here in The Palace at 9 a.m.) in a regular college town in “the least feted region of California.” (Nelson Gallery courtesy photo)
Excerpt from ‘At Home with Robert Arneson’
The Palace’s celebration of ordinary life recalled the genre and realist practices of the 17th and 19th centuries: If you want to know what is universal about the human experience, such art showed us, don’t worry about the dome of heaven or the far horizon, but start, like Jan Vermeer, with the simple ballet of pouring water or opening a letter near a window.
It’s not quite that straightforward however. Inevitably, as Arneson makes a monument out of his ordinary house, his house stops being ordinary. It becomes a major work of art that deserves the best possible housing it can have — an art museum — and so Arneson makes it possible for us to now savor the irony of encasing a model of an ordinary house within a museum.
Had his life not been cut short by cancer in 1992, he would have savored too, one suspects, the irony of Davis becoming somewhere “special,” and not just the pleasant town, just that bit too far from the San Francisco Bay, that provided Arneson with the background to the Alice series.
In 1974, Arneson vividly explored ordinariness. Three decades later, giddy from rising house prices while declaring its opposition to sprawl, Davis would become enthralled to a studiedordinariness, wanting to remain an ordinary town, framing itself — like Vermeer framing the opening of a letter — such that it is no longer an ordinary Central Valley town, but a town that sees its Central Valley ordinariness as quite special. (In the words of my auto mechanic in neighboring Woodland, “Davis is weird.”)
To make The Palace at 9 a.m. now, with the same meanings, would be impossible. Such a house as this is currently worth in excess of half a million dollars (even without Arneson ceramics in it). Arneson’s darker allusions — of the house as real-estate collateral — are unexpectedly reemerging.
This excerpt is from the “You See Catalog.” Those interested in the full 108-page catalog, priced at $25, can purchase it at the Nelson Gallery, order by phone through Katrina Wong at (530) 752-8500, or online at the UC Davis Bookstore.