Art, Commemoration and Controversy in San Francisco

Robert Arneson (1930-1992)

Portrait of George (Moscone), 1981 

(7′-10″ x 29″) Image via cometogether.com

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk.  That event is one of those “do you remember what you were doing when you heard” moments for me.   I lived in San Francisco at the time and had seen Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk just a few weeks before  at a Preservation Hall Jazz Band concert in Golden Gate Park.  Mayor Moscone was quite a favorite of us young liberal folks in the city at the time, and Milk had recently made history as the first openly gay person to be elected to a public office.  The future seemed quite rosy in San Francisco in 1978.  That night I walked down to City Hall plaza and held a candle along with thousands of other people.  The killer was a former City Supervisor, Dan White, who was trying to get his job back (he had resigned).  Moscone,  reportedly at the urging of Milk, refused.  White snuck into a basement window of City Hall and gunned the two men down in their offices.  Less than a year later, on the eve of Harvey Milk’s birthday, White was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter (a surprisingly light conviction)  based on what has come to be known as the  “Twinkie defense.”  He claimed that he was so depressed as the result of a junk food diet he was not competent at the time of the shootings.  Rioting ensued at City Hall Plaza when the verdict was announced.  San Francisco’s acting mayor at the time,who would go on to serve two more terms, was Dianne Feinstein, now senior U.S. Senator from California.  

Milk has been wonderfully memorialized and immortalized in the film starring Sean Penn. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/)  In the early years of the AIDS crisis, one of Harvey Milk’s aides, Cleve Jones, used the annual memorial march that took place every November 27 to call attention to the lack of government acknowledgement of the disease that was killing so many gay men.  From this activism emerged another memorial – the NAMES project, popularly known as the AIDS quilt.  So Milk’s legacy and his memorialization has given rise to an enormous and inventive memorial tradition.  Squares from the quilt travel around the country.  In fact there are some in New Hampshire this month to commemorate World AIDS Day on December 1. (http://www.aidsquilt.org/)

 The Aids Quilt, 1986, Washington, DC

George Moscone’s legacy will always be attached to Harvey Milk.  But there was also an interesting controversy surrounding a sculpture that was commissioned to honor the Mayor’s memory.   In 1981 the George R. Moscone Convention Center was ready to open.  The city’s Art Commission chose ceramic artist Robert Arneson to create a memorial bust of Moscone. Arneson was a longtime art professor at UC Davis and was a leading proponent of “Funk Art” which basically took the function out of ceramics and incorporated everyday objects into the work.  It was socially conscious, yet often irreverent, humorous and sometimes confrontational. 

 

Arneson’s bust depicted a caricature-like portrait of the mayor, as the Commission expected.  But its five foot ceramic pedestal was festooned with bullet holes, the words “Bang Bang Bang,” “and Harvey Milk too,” an image of a Twinkie and other graffiti-like images and text that refered to Moscone’s death and the resulting controversy surrounding the near-exoneration of his killer. The Art Commission asked Arneson to make some changes.  He refused and the sculpture was returned to him.  Today a much more conventional bronze sculpture in the Moscone Center honors the slain Mayor.