Of Serendipity and a Secret Sauce

Of Serendipity and a Secret Sauce

By Peter Plagens

 

On the occasion of the opening of the Manetti Shrem Museum in November 2016, artist, art critic and novelist Peter Plagens wrote this essay illuminating the maverick spirit of the artists and teachers who founded UC Davis’s art department.

One hundred years from this time would anybody change their minds
And find out one thing or two about life
But people are always talking
You know they're always talking
Everybody's so wrong that I know it's gonna work out right
Nobody knows what kind of trouble we're in
Nobody seems to think it all might happen again

                        —The Byrds, “One Hundred Years,” 1968

While absolutely everybody might not have been so wrong about what happened in art at UC Davis in the halcyon days of 1958–1972, the famous New York art critic Harold Rosenberg certainly was. Admittedly, Rosenberg wasn’t writing specifically about the Art Department at UC Davis in his essay, “Where to Begin,” in the March, 1967 issue of Encounter magazine; he was damning the American university in general as a place where students might encounter and, heavens forefend, be taught art.

In the first place, Rosenberg said, the university turns art into a “teachable subject,” thereby (he implied) putting it into a cookie-cutter form that denies art’s essential subjectivity and mysteriousness. The university also suffers from a “lack of knowledge of the creative situation and misinterpretation of the content of existing art”—meaning that a regional college campus can never equal a few square blocks of downtown Manhattan filled with lofts and bars and spit ‘n’ argue clubs, and professors are insufficiently up to date on urban grit and the most recent gallery exhibitions. Moreover, universities suffer from “physical dispersion,” which is another way of saying that artists’ ghettos in big cities (well, one big city on the Hudson River in particular) are the only places where legitimate art-making and discussion about art can take place. Finally, Rosenberg argued, universities promote a “diffusion of thought, attention and effort.” Translation: Art students at a university have to put up with classes in science, literature, and the other arts that make them more culturally literate than the typical downtown paint-stained dauber.

UC Davis, c. 1958–1972 rather put the lie to Rosenberg’s assertions. Art there was an eminently teachable subject (witness the illustrious list of artists UC Davis ushered into the art world), albeit not in the syllabus-besotted mode common in most universities, then and now. There was no ignorance about the “creative situation” or the content of current art among the UC Davis art faculty, who were, if anything, more creative and more attuned to the sub-woofer vibes in current art than was Harold Rosenberg himself in 1967. “Physical dispersion”—in UC Davis’s case being 75 miles from San Francisco’s art scene, 350 miles from L.A.’s, and a cross-country flight from New York’s—was actually a big benefit to faculty and students: No pressure to keep in step with fashion, and no expectation that a big-time gallery show would be the kind of break for which artists in the main American art metropoli are always yearning. And as for the canard of “diffusion of thought,” UC Davis was way ahead of the curve on artists drawing on other disciplines and—perhaps more important—turning to materials not usually common to art, in order to make their work.

As Brenda Richardson, former curator at the University Art Museum in Berkeley and one of the most knowledgeable people around on the heyday of Bay Area art, said to me in conversation, “Davis was an eccentric little place where the art faculty did whatever it wanted and students were treated as fellow artists.”

Obviously, faculty members doing whatever they want is only going to work with the right faculty members, and UC Davis was the beneficiary of its first art department chairman, Richard Nelson, and his talent (there’s no other word for it) in picking artist-teachers. For its first 40 years or so, the school was the epitome of a “cow college” (it was officially titled the University of California Farm School Program), before opening a School of Letters and Science in 1951. A year later, Davis started a Department of Philosophy and Fine Arts, and finally, in 1958, when it was declared a full-fledged university in the UC system, it opened a standalone art department headed by Nelson.

Trained initially in engineering, medicine, and music, Nelson eventually became a painter and, crucially, one with an unusually open pedagogic vision. He hired (listed here in alphabetical, not chronological, order):

• The irreverent ceramist Robert Arneson—originally under the aegis of the Home Economics Department because clay could be construed to have something to do with dishes and plates.
• John Baxter: Originally an “extension” instructor (they’re called adjuncts today), Baxter taught for a short while in the Laboratory for Research in the Fine Arts and Museology.
• Roy De Forest, Funk painter extraordinaire.
• Jane Garritson, a member of UC Davis’s first master’s-degree class in art and, in 1963, the first woman hired by the department.
• Sculptor Tio Giambruni, author of big, bold abstractions in metal and founder of the school’s foundry. (UC Davis was and is a research university with an emphasis on materials, and Nelson worked this circumstance to a T in getting funds for his faculty’s projects.)
• Ruth Horsting, a sculptor in the Postwar existentialist vein of Germaine Richier and Lynn Chadwick, who stayed only five years before devoting herself to yoga.
• Ralph Johnson, a painter who, after helping out by teaching sculpture, became a witty assemblagist with a passion for chairs.
• “Bay Area figuration”-style painter Roland Petersen, who could really—as an artist-friend of mine likes to say—“move it around.”
• Manuel Neri, the painter/sculptor who succeeded the most at manifesting “Bay Area figuration” in sculpture.
• The department’s printmaker Daniel Shapiro, who also slid in through the Home Economics portal.
• Wayne Thiebaud, the Pop-and-beyond figurative painter par excellence; legend has it that Nelson persuaded him to come over to Davis from a community college by pointing to a big campus tree and promising Thiebaud a roll of canvas the diameter of its trunk.
• William T. Wiley, drawer, painter, assemblagist, unstoppable punster and, written up in ARTNews magazine in May, 1968 as the “Metaphysical Funk Monk,” probably the most imitated—by students all over the country—UC Davis artist.

Two things should be readily confessed here. The first is that out in the big, cruel art world (even relatively communal San Francisco’s), all the faculty artists weren’t equal. Murderer’s Row at UC Davis comprised Arneson (he of the infamous George Moscone ceramic bust), De Forest, Neri, Thiebaud and Wiley. Not a little resentment flowed toward Thiebaud, owing to his having spent a pre-Davis leave of absence in New York chumming with the likes of Willem de Kooning and, albeit later, latching on with the blue-chip Manhattan dealer, Allan Stone. Differing teaching philosophies—from Thiebaud’s and Petersen’s almost Beaux-Arts emphases on close looking, working from the model, and technically orthodox painting, all the way over to Wiley’s hang-loose, anything-can-be-art-if-you-see-it-right attitude—also caused tension. As the Director of this Museum remarked to me, everything during the heyday of art at UC Davis “was not all giggles and smiles.”

The second glaring aspect of the soil from which grew Out Our Way (reverse-engineered, as it were, from Wiley’s pun, “outer weigh”) is the almost total absence of women on the faculty (just two of the ten artists included here), and the literally total lack of non-white teachers. I won’t invoke the usual retroactive defenses of such a state (that was then, this is now; walk a mile in Richard Nelson’s shoes; the available pool of women and minority artists for faculty slots at Davis 50 to 60 years ago), save to note that we’re now able to look back on it through the successive lenses of social progress, from improvement in equal opportunity employment rules, Feminism in art (back then called The Women’s Movement), especially in California, to a greatly expanded presence of Black, Latino and Asian-American artists in the studio-to-gallery-to-museum pipeline of contemporary art. Davis’s roster of sideburned, mustachioed professors wearing Levi’s and blue chambray work shirts was probably even a bit progressive for its time.

The 1958-1972 efflorescence of art at UC Davis was not, of course, the first great institutional “moment” in the teaching of art and of the nurturing—through the patronage of salaried teaching jobs—of artists on a faculty. The Bauhaus in Weimar Germany before the Nazis shut it down springs most readily to mind. But the Bauhaus ran under an official philosophy of the equality of painting, sculpture, architecture, industrial design, fabric design, and what we tend to call the “crafts,” all radiating like the spokes on a wheel from the hub of the Bauhaus’s Basic Course, the great-granddaddy of every art school’s current Design 101a class. Davis’s department had no unifying philosophy unless “do your own thing” can be labeled as such.

Black Mountain College (1933-1957) in North Carolina is similar in certain ways to UC Davis’s art department during its zenith: geographic removal from big cities, faculty hired equally for their talents as artists as for their teaching résumés, and a relative permissiveness, however constrained by the surrounding mores of the pre-civil rights mid-South. It was even a kind of flip side to Davis’s ethos of making the liberal arts part of an artist’s education; at Black Mountain (as the college’s archival website proclaims) “the arts are central to the experience of learning” (about, it’s implied) the liberal arts as a whole. But Black Mountain granted no degrees.

The closest to UC Davis’s accomplishment in the outside-the-box teaching of art might be Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at what is now Fresno State University, in 1971, after an introduction as a single class in 1970. The FAP, however, aimed to rectify a particular shortcoming of art worlds both academic and commercial: the underrepresentation, to the point of dismissal, of women artists. Davis, to invoke the title of Joan Didion’s novel and the grammatically incorrect golf instruction, aspired only to “play it as it lays” and allow art to bubble up from students and faculty in whatever manner.

Since about the mid-1970s (by my very informal reckoning) various rocket-to-stardom university art departments and a few art schools have been perceived—and touted—as new Bauhauses and Black Mountains, if not successors to UC Davis at its peak. That kind of regard has been based almost entirely on the fame of the teaching staffs and the career successes of their graduates. While the latter is nothing to sneeze at, it arises more out of attitudinal tips and gallery connections. (I have been driven to say that these days M.F.A. stands for “My Fat Address book.”)

The why and wherefore of UC Davis’s art apex is, in the end, alchemically mysterious. Several people looking back on those days speak of a “secret sauce” at Davis and wonder what the recipe was. I’ve listed some of the ingredients, such as Davis turning Harold Rosenberg’s alleged drawbacks of the university as a locus for art into virtues, and Richard Nelson’s ability to put together a faculty that—despite its differences—worked well enough as a whole to jell into some kind of right-side-of-the-brain cohesiveness. Also important was the fact that, as art historian John FitzGibbon wrote in “Sacramento!,” an essay published in the November-December 1971 issue of Art in America, “...fear for one’s reputation is at a world-minimum in Northern California.” This feeling of being comfortable in one’s own artistic skin was partly a byproduct of as—Brenda Richardson observes—“most of the artists not having a prayer of [profitable] commercial representation.”

Several artists teaching at Davis finally did obtain the kind of gallery-to-museum traction that most artists, at some level, want.  After all, the pleasure of making objets-d’art aside, who wants to sing to an empty house, or write novels for a bureau drawer? At Davis, though, cooking and drinking and fishing with one’s colleagues largely took the place of seeing one’s name up in lights.

Does anybody think that the laid-back but intense, laissez-faire but competitive, skill-nonchalance but with a premium on inventiveness art-department moment “all might happen again” at Davis? Probably not. But not because the art department has declined—and certainly not because a beautiful, brand-new Museum with first-rate works of art viewable by students right on campus is somehow a negative. It’s simply that the odds against a reprise stem from a change in the times, where the rough charm of Funk is lost in a world of HD video, Photoshop, 3D printing and spectacular installation “interventions,” where full-time tenure-track teaching jobs are handed out only after layers of vetting that would be difficult for a military intelligence officer, let alone a professor of ceramics, to pass, and where “accountability” is no longer a matter of handshake trust but must be documented in mounds of “outcomes assessment” forms. Tuition, capital costs, and scores of new administrators render the tolerances of higher education’s grinding wheels much fine—especially in the humanities and the arts, where the postgraduate occupational benefits are more indirect. The tendency in academe these days is to turn everything into powder.

The surprise of renaissances, though, is that their causes can be seen clearly only in retrospect. With the opening of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on the campus of the University of California at Davis, another “moment” could well be at hand. The unspoken motto of UC Davis has always been that anything’s possible.

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Peter Plagens is an American artist, art critic, and novelist based in New York City. He is known for his long-standing contributions to Artforum and Newsweek, and for what critics have called a remarkably consistent, five-decade-long body of abstract formalist painting. He is the author of Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-70.