“You See” gathers the work of five faculty who were instrumental in making a name for the UC Davis Art Department in the 60s and 70s – an anomalously avant-garde core of teachers at a rural school, then chiefly noted for its veterinary and agricultural programs. The group – Manuel Neri, Roy DeForest, William T. Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Arneson – created idiosyncratic work largely independent of the dominant art fashions of the time. They raised the fumes of glazes, plasters, oils and thinners alongside the university's antiseptic tang of formaldehyde and the methane emissions of cattle.

Full disclosure: I recently graduated from the MFA program at UC Davis. I went to the exhibit to acquaint myself better with some of the history piled up invisibly in the air I was ignorantly traversing, in the circuit between studio and classroom. What follows are some impressions of the work on display.

MANUEL NERI
Neri has several lifesize bronze sculptures in the show, human figures in various states of elision – two sets of legs, with torsos cut off in the middle; another figure that rises to the shoulders before the head and arms (which seem to have been upraised) are lopped off; another figure that makes it more or less to its extremities, though the whole body seems charred, burnt. A triangular shape is affixed to the back of this one’s head, suggesting a flattened Egyptian headdress.

All the surfaces are gouged at, scraped away, textures and wounds that appear to come from a process of subtraction. The whittling is very different from the whittling of Giacometti; in Giacometti’s case, there was something incorporeal about the approach, reducing the forms to essences or – failing that – to shadows. Neri’s gougings seem less about essence than violence, but perhaps this is a projection of my own skepticism toward classical beauty. Neri’s bodies are classical bodies – the fact that they’re truncated actually reinforces this – and the classicism begs an erosion to make it modern, current. Whether that erosion derives from the assault of time or the artist’s hand seems immaterial. In this context Neri has performed pre-emptive sculpture. Which is in step with the impatience of the now.

ROY DEFOREST
Deforest has an abstract painting with a figurative title, and several drawings done in his playful, mark-besotted style: hermetic cartoons with obscure intimations of story or myth, sunday funnies whose punchlines are private jokes. His trademark scrawly dogs are in most of the images, but two kennels in particular stand out.

“Red Dog” has a group of hounds in a scraggled landscape, where a hanged man and a chopped-off leg are strung up in a tree: William Steig does Goya’s “Disasters of War.” The dogs here seem entirely non-mystical, one mildly curious at the hanged man, snout up and tongue lolling, the rest of the group entirely oblivious, snarled in marks that seem an extrapolation of mange. A nearby untitled silkscreen, on the other hand, seems entirely devoted to the canine mystical: the central dog is riveted all over with open eyes, unblinking along his flanks and even spilling out into the space around his body, where open lines sometimes corral them into further doggish shapes. The main dog’s “normal” eye – the one that’s properly in his head – is ejecting a comet or cloud, and his shadow (scored over with red and green lines, and with an unblinking eye of its own) seems as alive as its solid “master.”

WILLIAM T. WILEY
Of Wiley’s work, the pieces that use the rhetoric of maps are the most alluring. He has a wonderful, worried line that throws up topography in its wake. In the print “Unititled (Self Portrait as Mr. Nobody),” the landscape formed by his scribbling is somewhat flattened out, with no set horizon, so it undulates a bit, convexities and cancavities swapping places – as if it were a blanket thrown over a dimly understood shape. The hole in the center of this “blanket” is an empty outline of Wiley’s body, and at the blanket’s edges there is a scattered hemorrhage of words and puns (“universeotease,” “there’s always room for Miss Understanding”).

Even more suggestive is the lithograph “Hide as a State of Mind,” which is more explicitly maplike, coastal space receding from water in a torn patchwork of gentle earth tones. Cryptic remarks at the margins (“God only knows what we were expecting”) fail to aid any navigation; the word “Hide” lurches up from a plateau like a geologic formation. If there were a map whose function was to direct you toward getting lost, it would look something like this.

WAYNE THIEBAUD
Thiebaud continues to teach at UC Davis on an emeritus basis. I had the pleasure of taking a lecture course of his, which was organized as a leisurely tour of a quietly articulate person’s pressing enthusiasms. His work is here represented through the kind of formalized edibles that, in a happy pop-art misunderstanding, made him famous: an array of lollipops in color aquatint, an etched breakfast (eggs sunny side up), pastel birthday cakes that extend the disk-play of the lollipops into a more vertical, columnar space. His formalist interest in shapes is perhaps most naked in a pastel of a hand-stapler which, through the attention paid to reflective surfaces, to the interplay of straight and curved edges, seems to shed its utilitarian origins an become a piece of modernist sculpture.

His most delicious pieces in the exhibit are two small paintings, one of a cup of coffee and one of a basket of lemons set next to a basket of oranges, worked over with that gliding, liquid stroke that seems to turn the paint into frosting. Does the phrase “austere hedonism” make sense? Probably not – but there’s a fertile whiplash between the humble subject matter and the sensual pleasure invested in its depiction. It’s a hedonism without the gratuitous overabundance of decadence, at least – the objects are isolated, set against their luminous blue shadows (as if cast against a field of warming snow). What doesn’t come across in the catalog reproductions is how sculpted the negative space is – those congealations of white and cream and just-barely beige, rising from the canvas so that the coffee cup and fruit baskets seem to be impressed into their pillowy surface. The negative space is as enticing as the ostensible subjects – edible space.

Rounding off the selection of his work is one of his forced-perspective San Francisco streetscapes – sliding the eye down the vertiginous drop as if the eye were feet and the street were ice – and a small, lovely portrait of a woman, done in pastel, that deviates a bit from his known manner. His usual authoritative outlines (marking edges hard in electric colors that read as figments of reflected light) are present in the shoulders of the woman, but once the face is reached, the outlines disappear, and her expression resides in a foggier scumble of tones. I was reminded of a remark Thiebaud made in his lecture class, about Vermeer – how hard it is to find the edges of his subjects when you look for them.

ROBERT ARNESON
The dominant personality in the show is Arneson, and not just because the most imposing piece belongs to him – “The Palace at 9 a.m.” – a glazed earthenware portrait of his Davis house, 118 inches across, assembled in glazed sections puzzled together like courses of a gigantic, glistening buffet. It’s equally impossible to avoid the direct address of “A Hollow Gesture,” a lithograph of Arneson’s face five or so times its actual size, sticking his tongue out at you. The image is incredibly solid, though it’s built up on layers of very free, slashing marks (the marks are loose and unrestrained enough that he slips a whole doodle of another man into his left cheek, and you barely notice). The protuberant tongue is almost shockingly expressive; there’s a surprising dearth of expressive tongues in the history of visual art. There are myriad expressive hands, eyes, feet, mouths – even expressive knees – but the tongue is strangely reticent (one exception perhaps being Blake’s “Ghost of a Flea”). In “A Hollow Gesture” the tongue is a muscle as obstinate as a fist.

Equally aggressive in its own way is “A Monolith for J.P.’s Final Drive,” a black bronze slab that tells the story of Jackson Pollack’s automotive smash-up. On the top of one side of the mound, Pollack is at the wheel with his two passengers, the car foreshortened in the manner of a bas-relief; on the other side the car is flipped, the tires thrusting skyward like the legs of a dead dog laid flat on its back. It’s a kind of no-bullshit memorial, where instead of carved angels we have gossiping devils at the base, running commentary on the wreck, stopping just short of a Jack Chick “HAW! HAW!”

But a winning belligerence wasn’t his only mode. His “With Full Force” is a real mysterioso object, a porcelain brick with Arneson’s name stamped on the front side, and a collaged porcelain figurine and overturned container affixed to the top surface. The back side of the brick is open, revealing a weird diorama inside the hollowed brick itself, laid out like a secret cave or backstage lacuna. Liquid from the tipped container up top leaks through, collecting in a pitcher labeled “GIZ.” Looking on is a cluster of grapes formed into a leering face. The window into this self-named brick reveals an id that isn’t just bristling and combative – it’s also irreducibly strange.

CONCLUSION
So what’s the common thread between all this work? Curator Renny Pritikin teases out some connections in his catalog essay, without pushing it too far. Certain tics or sentiments do seem to travel, though never across the work of the entire faculty. There’s an evident interest in the fallibility of the body – though this leaves Thiebaud out. There’s an ease with a sort of cartoonishness – though this leaves Neri out. The overlapping commonalities amount to fragmentary magpie echoes, or sympathetic vibrations. A tune overheard and then carried somewhere else. If there’s something they all shared, it’s a surface accessibility, a lack of pretension – but this was an attitude and not an ethic, or an ideology. They were a “school” in only the most literal sense. And for about a decade, that was more than enough.