Everyday Whimsy

The exhibit “Tré Arenz: One of Us – A Retrospective” at Women & Their Work is everything a memorial exhibit should be: funny and sad, warm and heartbreaking. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Tré herself.

Last year I was shocked to hear Tré had died. Part of it was that she was only 49, but she was also someone I admired and liked very much, a member of my community, one of our best. Tré lived here for nearly 20 years and was deeply connected to Austin through her work as an artist and art teacher. She was the kind of person who would make time to be friendly to you, no matter who you were or how busy she was. Despite her impressive accomplishments – having work in more than 100 exhibitions and receiving prestigious awards and grants from such institutions as the Connemara Conservancy Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation – she was warm and utterly unpretentious. She would keep you in stitches with her absurd sense of humor – and her jokes were never mean, ever, never at anyone’s expense. She was always supportive of her fellow artists. Her actions, as much as her art, reflected her mindfulness.

Her down-to-earth warmth is reflected in her choice of medium: ceramic. Highly tactile, physically made of earth, ceramic has possibilities limited only by imagination. Functional and decorative, tough and fragile, it can be a container for our use, a shield against the environment, a sculpture for our thoughts.

In Tré’s hands that timeless material became a vehicle for her considerable intellect and creativity, and her sense of humor. At home with the absurd, she created artworks – referred to in W&TW’s lovely exhibition catalog as “second-generation figurative funk” – that make you laugh, even when you’re not certain why. The disarming humor is rendered all the sweeter by a quiet pointedness to it.

Tré’s artwork frequently features the imagery of toys, of play, as you can see at Women & Their Work. Near the entrance is the work Whoa!, a collaboration with Amie McNeel that has a toy-like ceramic horse head mounted on a wheel-like sculptural form. Resembling some fantastic farm implement, the piece suggests playfulness and the wheel of life. Elsewhere in the gallery stand the equally playful Pony Boy (Hat Stand), a sculpture of a toy horse-head on a stick, with a twisted blue and white bridle; Pony, a yellow and blue toy horse; and Toys (Airplane, Car, Tugboat), with sculpted toys mounted on metal brackets. The humor in these works is enhanced by their stubby weight – what airplane shaped like that would ever move? Still, not everything is played strictly for laughs; the glazed ceramic and steel She-Car has the pendulous breasts of the Roman she-wolf dangling beneath a cartoon car. This ultimate boy-toy forms a pointed commentary.

Everyone who knew Tré knows how important dogs were to her, and they find their way into many a piece: Bernadette of Lourdes, an upright, multiple-breasted, dog-headed idol; Idol (GodDog), a sculpted, gilded dog on a shelf looking at a framed photographic portrait of a dog; Voyeur, another dog gazing from a framed photo at a sculpture of a large-breasted dog on all fours before it. The reference is clearly to the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, but riding on its back is a sculpted teddy bear, poking fun at the scene’s intensity and adding to the sense of cartoonish kinkiness. One of the most endearing works in the entire exhibit is King Hoot, which portrays a chubby reclining dog, his legs extended froglike behind him and a crown atop his head.

The charm of the corpulent figure is evident in a number of the figurative works on display. Big Shot, a Buddha-bodied figure with glazed, red high heels and a clown head, holds her hands sTrétched outward in shooting position. Her body, in contrast to the head and heels, is of coarse brown clay. The contrast in texture between the brown, earthy areas and shiny, glazed parts seems designed to focus attention on a concept. Sameness – Weight, made in 1995, consists of a chubby childlike body suspended on the wall in defiance of its obvious heaviness. Wasn’t 1995 the year that we were all reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Certainly Tré was an intellectually lively individual who would have been analyzing things in this way. It is hard to write about her work without referring to spirituality and philosophy on some level.

Her Sameness series is rooted in a recognition of what humans have in common and our tendency to exaggerate the perception of differences. In her work Sameness, being exhibited at the Austin Museum of Art in conjunction with W&TW’s retrospective, Arenz has taken large black-and-white photographs of people’s faces and put striped patterns across them. There are males and females of diverse ages and ethnic backgrounds, and yet this point is made, metaphorically, by the stripes: These people have something very powerful in common. A table in the center of the room holds a group of fantastic blue-and-white-striped ceramic heads, all facing outward. Beside each head is a teacup, striped just like the heads, elevated from craft status into the realm of fine art.

At Women & Their Work, a group of blue-and-white-striped ceramic heads, mounted on similarly striped brooms and supporting bases, make up Sameness – Distractions. The bodies of the figures are strictly utilitarian; the purpose of their being is work, a repetitive task. But they all have something else on their minds. Atop each head rests some small sculpted object: an empty vessel, a crown, a clown hat, a knife, a horse, a car, an apple poised William Tell-style. Although the faces appear identical, with extended viewing different emotional states emerge. Each wears an expression related conceptually to the object on its head: The crown rests atop a two-faced head (perhaps a commentary on the nature of power and politics), the knife atop an angry head, the horse above a happy head, and so on. Repetition and differences: a curious union speaking of a fundamental truth in the human experience.

The stripes can also refer to prison, as in Sameness – Prison, which features a tiny blue-and-white-striped sink containing a bunch of sculpted ceramic footballs. Is the tiny sink the prison here, or is it the stereotype of masculine cultural identity represented by the footballs?

Sinks and toilets likely came to be part of Tré’s work through her Arts/Industry Program residency at the Kohler factory in 1999. These most common of objects are in keeping with Tré’s focus on the everyday and on whimsy, but in her hands they transcend their normal meaning. In Think Tank, two heads top a toilet tank, in this case separated from its base (or divorced from its true function). The side of one head is concave to accommodate the curve of the other. This piece is one of the most pointed examples of social critique seen within the artist’s work. By contrast, Comfort – Flock portrays a group of striped, glazed duckies quite a bit too big for their brilliant yellow sink.

W&TW and AMOA have done well in honoring this artist. Their staffs knew Tré and have created a fitting remembrance of her. She leaves behind many dear friends and family members who sorely miss her. It would be hard to have known her and not considered her a friend. But despite the sense of loss I share with many, I know Tré made us all richer for having been here. Thank you, Tré, for having been everything you were.

June 9, 1953-May 7, 2003.

“Tré Arenz: Sameness” is on display through May 23 at Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, 823 Congress. For more information, visit www.amoa.org.

This article appears in March 5 • 2004.