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Chris Unterseher was born in Portland, OR in 1943. David (Gilhooly) describes him as "a surfer from Santa Barbara" who came to Davis in 1965 after receiving his B. A. from San Francisco State University. Oddly enough, both he and David lived in Santa Barbara County at the same time, knew some of the same people at Santa Ynez High, but never met until they were both at Davis and shared a studio space.
Some of the first things that Chris made at Davis were The Boy Scout and National Geographic plates, tea trays and sculptures. These were glaze-painted and sculpted scenes with captions or explanations stamped into the wet clay. The scenes were chosen from National Geographics Magazines and The Boy Scout Manual. Chris eventually used a plate mould because throwing plates can be tedious and "if-y" especially with a wide rim that serves as a sort of frame and a place to stamp text. He was then able to concentrate his effort into the actual creative part of making the scenes. The use of the plate form as a blank canvas would eventually inspire Robert Arneson's use of this same form complete with stamped captions.
While scanning David's slides of Chris' work, I found an
8.5" x 9.5" 
piece
of paper in David's Unterseher folder. David found it in the
garbage of their shared studio space at Davis. (To David, anything in the
garbage or a dumpster is fair game.) The list has 3 columns; plates, trays
and sculpture with references to The National Geographic Magazine that the
subject matter for each of the listed pieces came from. Found in that same
garbage with this list was a sculpture of a man taking a picture that Chris
had also thrown away. David took that out of the garbage as well and stuck
a frog on it. Chris later made a print of this piece in print class.
Chris graduated Davis and left to teach at the University of Cincinnati in 1968. The university had a mould making facility and while there, Chris created a series of multiple sculptures still using whiteware. He'd make the piece, make a mould of it, and then turn out about a dozen or so. These were mundane everyday items with a self portrait somehow incorportated into it. The Unterseher String Dispenser, The Unterseher Planter, and The Unterseher Bookends were some of the examples of that period. While Chris' work had always been very finely crafted with well drawn elements they were now scaled down as if to concentrate the intention of the artist.
In 1970, Chris was in Reno, Nevada, teaching at The University of Nevada. His work went through a further refining with the use of porcelain. Pieces were now futher scaled down, often with off-scale elements emphasizing certain aspects of of the piece. Many of the pieces were matchstick or toothpick holders.
Most
of the material I've seen on the work of Chris Unterseher talks about the
souvenir aspect of his pieces. How he makes the cheap, kitschy nature of
souvenirs more precious by very finely crafting porcelain, working in small
scale and using muted colors; sort of the "anti-souvenir". Or
how he's making fun of souvenirs. Or how Funk really is souvenirs.
Imagine going on vacation to a place where everything is connected
in some way to say, steel guitars. You go there for total immersion
because 
you
like them and want to find out more about them. Everything else is the same
as here, but steel guitars flavor every aspect of this place. Even if you're
not a musician or composer of steel guitar music, you print the music, or
build the guitars, or cook food while listening to steel guitars. The architecture
is dictated by steel guitar accoustics. This is an alternate universe
where everything is the same as here, but it's based on steel guitars.
Finally, when you get home, you realize that you're glad to be home because you aren't interested in only steel guitars, but it was fun to visit and maybe you'll go back. And the souvenirs you brought home remind you of a great vacation and you show them to the people that weren't with you so they can see a condensed and edited version of your experience.
A souvenir is an object that distills a place and/or event. It acts as a sort of talisman that transports you back to a time and place. It concentrates a feeling of what it was like to experience a place and the things in it. But it also communicates your experience to people who don't know about, say, a place based on steel guitars and were never even interested before.
Chris gets interested
in a subject and experiences it by "going on vacation".
Once there, he researches and looks
and reads and listens and whatever else. He comes home for brief forays,
maybe with a souvenir or two and revisits and finds out a little more. He
continues this process until he knows all he wants to or is interested in
something else. But when he really comes home from his vacation, he has
a set of souvenirs to show you where he's been.
Chris "has come home" and is now back in The Bay Area of California, living, teaching and working.
Created 26 January 2008