Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version

Artist Michael Arcega's Many-liners | Claire Light

He doesn’t seem interested in jokes as a way at the truth so much as jokes as an interesting structure. I think funny takes more than truth. It has to be mean. It has to hurt. But Mike says, “It also has to change directions. You have to be going one way and kind of believe in it and all of a sudden you’re turned around and you’re somewhere else.”

Or you turn around more than once. “This is called Tanks A Lot and it’s over three hundred little tanks crawling out of holes to do a toilet occupation. A toilet’s typically occupied or available. It’s also called Tanks A Lot: Colon-ize, like colon.” That’s four puns in one installation.

Below the joke surface there’s more obfuscation: “This map shows the Manila galleon route starting here in Acapulco. And in this text box I kind of made up my own language. I wanted to reclaim . . . to kind of go back in from a colonized perspective. In this whole project I’m pretending to be the dominant. I’m reinserting myself back in here by making up my own gibberish that really only I understand because it’s a combination of Latin, English, Spanish, Tagalog.”

He’s unapologetic about the fact that you’d have to be Filipino—and classically educated, and think like Mike Arcega—to be able to read his made-up texts. He knows that no audience is going to get all of the levels in his work, and claims that it doesn’t bother him.

“I’ve been doing a lot of talks. I used to be a little bit more enigmatic about it, ‘cause it’s like, ‘You’re supposed to get it.’ And that never happened. So I gave up. I have all these layers that I do for myself. It’s important to me. That’s one thing I think art needs to do is have a reward, whether it be an aesthetic reward, conceptual reward, informational tidbits here and there . . . especially if you’re putting it out for public viewing, it needs to be interesting, it needs to give something back."

His “reward” is the spoonful of sugar so sweet, it makes some of the bitterest medicine in the Bay Area go down without a peep. Racism, American imperialism, personal violence, machismo, social chaos, poverty, immigration—all the hot button words dance around every piece. And yet random people can read a short description of his work on the internet and love him. He rewards any level of attention. You get four hundred points just for filling in your name correctly.

And maybe that’s the secret to one of the more surprising things about Mike, which is that he appeals to, and is liked by, everyone. He’s fun.

“A lot of my work stems from childhood fantasies. Things that little boys want. War-type things. Making guns and trying to shoot each other. The Conquistadork kinda stems out of the desire to make a cardboard-box-duct-tape boat and go out in it. Now that I’m more skilled in building I can make these really elaborate, engineered, detailed objects, that I could never have done in the past. So in a way it’s like a stunted adolescence.”

His work also slides easily into both ethnic and white contexts. Mike himself slides easily from one context to another. He doesn’t trash-talk movements or schools of thought, and, while more outspokenly political in his work than most of his peers, he doesn’t take controversial public stands. If he demanded we pull out of Iraq he might be obnoxious. But sending toy tanks in to occupy a toilet? I hate the phrase “gentle humor” but that is a joke at its most painless. » next page »

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