I think art should be more and more amoral, a realm of exploration. Especially in school, if you could just get that idea across to people, it just means a whole threshold of getting into art, or the aesthetic experience, or awareness. Just give people a chance to go into it and really flesh out a lot of things and feel themselves in it.
William T. Wiley, in Brenda Richardson, “I Am My Own Enigma,” in Wizdum (Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1971), 10.
William T. Wiley moved from Washington to California to study at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), where he received an MFA in 1962. Though abstract painting was the foundation of his art curriculum in the late 1950s, he was captivated by San Francisco’s bohemian Beat movement—with artists like Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Wally Hedrick—and readings of Zen Buddhism. A creator of paintings, drawings, assemblage, and sculpture as well as film, music, and performance, Wiley became a kind of “guru of freedom to artists,”1 which often meant “transgress[ing] the boundaries of polite taste.”2 He painted on unstretched canvases, incorporating them with salvage yard finds to form crude assemblages; for Enigma Doggy (1966), an early assemblage now in the Museum’s collection, Wiley rolled up an abstract painting, wrapping it with tape and attaching it by a chain to a painting of a cartoon dog vomiting.3 In 1968—after a period of travel and artistic self-doubt, during which he momentarily stopped making art—Wiley started making small-scale watercolors, challenging formalism at a time when monumental minimalist sculpture dominated the art world. Wiley brought his informal approach to artmaking to his classrooms at the University of California, Davis; often breaking into folk songs and playing the harmonica in class, he impressed a sense of boundless humor and experimentation upon his students.4
Rene di Rosa, Local Color: The di Rosa Collection of Contemporary California Art (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), 182. ↩︎
Joann Moser, “What’s It All Mean?” in What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect (Berkeley: University of California Press; and Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009), 24. ↩︎
Joann Moser, “What’s It All Mean?” in What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect (Berkeley: University of California Press; and Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009), 24. ↩︎
Richard L. Nelson, in conversation with William T. Wiley, Manuel Neri, and Wayne Thiebaud, “You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Art Faculty,” Mondavi Center, University of California, Davis, November 13, 2007, video, 58:06 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=cIg8urzesPs. ↩︎
In 1967 William T. Wiley sent an envelope of dust from his studio to mail artist Ray Johnson, asking him to make a sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art using dust collected from the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Johnson replied amusingly that he had instead eaten the dust.) Wiley then sent an envelope of dust from his studio to artist Terry Fox in Paris, asking him to exchange it for dust from the Egyptian galleries at the Louvre.1 Through theatrical events, an extensive use of wordplay, and propositions such as his “dust exchange,” Wiley continued the conceptual legacy of Dada—where collaboration, play, and chance are integral to the work.2 Like the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp in particular, Wiley manipulates the rules of language for poetic and political possibilities. In his series of playable pinball machines—made from original 1964 Gottlieb North Star pinball machines given to the artist by a game collector—Punball Machine (2008) is a “global warning” about global warming with texts like “the eye scabs are melting.”
Joann Moser, “What’s It All Mean?” in What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect (Berkeley: University of California Press; and Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009), 30. ↩︎
Hilton Kramer, “Wiley of the West: ‘Dude Ranch Dada,’” New York Times, May 16, 1971, available at nytimes.com/1971/05/16/archives/wiley-of-the-west-dude-ranch-dada.html. ↩︎
Born in 1937 in Bedford, Indiana, William T. Wiley moved with his family around 1947 to Richland, Washington. His father was a labor foreman at the nearby Hanford Site, which was built as part of the 1943 Manhattan Project to house the world’s first plutonium reactor. As the artist recalled, “Richland is one of the most polluted places on the planet,” but at that time the atomic bomb was the town’s source of pride.1 The local school team was called the Bombers, its emblem a mushroom cloud. Richland had an ominous presence in the artist’s youth that has permeated his work throughout his career. By the 1980s, environmental degradation had become a dominant theme. In Wiley’s painting Gineric D.B.L. (Part A) (1989), colorful abstract markings make up a central sphere—a chaotic pattern of churning ocean and atmospheric whorls that Wiley says represents the earth.2 Around the earth are the artist’s distinctive symbols like the ampersand and hourglass, graphite scrawl, and cryptic texts like “Say so long to the elephants.” Despite its turmoil, geometric lines divide the space of the canvas, containing erratic scribble within a system reminiscent of scientific or musical notation.
William T. Wiley, interview with Heather Green at Wiley’s studio in Woodacre, California, for a SJMA podcast on the occasion of De-Natured: Works from the Anderson Collection, recorded 2007, video, 5:40 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=TezROqgqtaQ. ↩︎
Ann M. Wolfe, untitled essay in Selections: San José Museum of Art Permanent Collection, ed. Susan Landauer (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2004), 242. ↩︎
As a young boy, William T. Wiley would lie on the floor listening to radio shows and drawing what he was hearing. This practice of artmaking in response to the world around him has continued throughout his life: “When a story or an incident hits me hard enough, I have to do something about it or I want to do something about it. The injustices sometimes feel so overwhelming . . . but I can’t not do it.”1 Tantrum Art La Grande (2001) was made in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Dense layers of notations—including the ampersand, treble clef, yin-yang symbol, cosmic icons, even Mickey Mouse—and Wiley’s wordplay overwhelm the canvas with a sense of chaos. Its multiplicity visually embodies the text the artist wrote on the canvas: “September 11, the day the earth stood still and went faster.”
William T. Wiley, at the book signing for What’s It All Mean, Sylvia White Gallery, Ventura, California, May 28, 2010, video, 3:07 minutes, available at vimeo.com/12186017. ↩︎
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