CHARLES ARNOLDI : THEORY

Film by Eric Minh Swenson.

Chuck Arnoldi: The Natural
Essay by Dave Hickey, 2008
 
“It’s something how the life will fall as to how the heart is tossed.”
—John Stewart, songwriter (1939–2008)
 
As my grandmother would say whenever the occasion presented itself, “It’s not right, but it’s so.” So, even though Charles Arnoldi, today, is a mature and profoundly innovative artist at the zenith of a thirty-year career, to the Venice Beach artists with whom his life and career has always been associated, he is still “the kid”—the d’Artagnan of the Venice Musketeers, prone to spontaneous acts of profound innocence, generosity, enthusiasm and aesthetic impropriety. He shares with them a passion for the material world and a commitment to unflagging studio production; he shares their comfort level with the business of the art business and with the insouciance of California social life. But he’s still “the kid.” Like Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and Billy Al Bengston he is a refugee from the flat banality of the American Middle West, from the concrete grids of streets called Elm and Jefferson punctuated with Circle K’s and hardware stores. Like them, he came to Los Angeles to be a commercial artist and fell among evil companions.
 
Worse even than being “the kid,” however, Arnoldi is also “a natural,” has always been “a natural,” has always been told that he was, in fact, “a natural.” As Robert Rauschenberg (who should know) once explained to him, once you are regarded as “a natural,” no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you struggle and sacrifice, people will always think it’s easy for you. And, in a sense it is, since work is not labor. “Naturals,”  Rauschenberg told me once, have “smart bodies, smart hands and smart eyes.” This, however, doesn’t mean that they don’t have smart minds, as well. It just means you can’t sort out the fields of intuition after the fact. “We used to call that talent,” Bob said, “but that’s too positive a word these days.” Henry James said much the same thing when he observed that ideas are the food of art, which, in “the art of ideas,” remains mostly undigested.

So “naturals” resign themselves to silence. Other artists get credit for their thought and dedication, “naturals” get credit for their facility, the bête noire of artists like Arnoldi, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, George Condo and Rauschenberg himself. Damned by presumption of facility, the art of “naturals” defies pedagogy and is resisted by pedagogues. The mind and body working together resists the analysis of the mind alone, and in an art world where pedagogy reigns, the clearest, cleanest work is routinely overlooked. One can “learn” things from Damien Hirst. What one learns from Charles Arnoldi is that he can do it, and you can’t. Or, even more dangerously, in the eyes of other artists: he did it and you didn’t.
 
My best example of this phenomenon comes from the years 1981 to 1992, during which Arnoldi made an evolving series of 192 Chainsaw painting-drawing-sculptures created by laminating stacks of plywood—some painted, some not—into thick rectangles, then cutting away lines and spaces with a chainsaw, using the tool as a draughtsman might use an oil stick but also as a sculptor might use a chisel, revealing the patterned layers of wood beneath with every stroke. Sometimes the chainsaw cut through to the wall. Sometimes it just drew. Sometimes Arnoldi painted before cutting. Sometimes Arnoldi painted afterwards in blobs and gestures. All of these works were at once brutal and magically elegant. The artists who saw them, including the artists with whom I saw them, were without exception stunned. They were admiring at first of Arnoldi’s fiat, then almost immediately they were jealous, then mad as hell, then crazy with self-reproach. Arnoldi had thought of it; they hadn’t, and this idea, which was exhaustive in its ruthless simplicity and outrageous in its consequent complexity, had been done. There was nothing to add, nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to learn and no avenue in or out......."

For more info on Eric Minh Swenson visit his website at thuvanarts.com. His art films can be seen at thuvanarts.com/take1

Eric Minh Swenson also covers the international art scene and his writings and photo essays can be seen at Huffington Post Arts : http://m.huffpost.com/us/author/eric-...