Mary Fuller McChesney is a sculptor and a writer. At age 93, she has written extensively about the arts, and her sculptures exist in parks and institutions around the Bay Area. I was first introduced to her art by Paul Elmore, who has a number of her sculptures at his Marshall home and who promised one day to introduce us. Aside from the dozens of works of art that cover her Sonoma Mountain property, it was the strength and cadence of her voice that immediately excited me.
Editor’s note: There is explicit language in this article.
Charles: You began your career as a writer.
Mary: I wrote an article for the first issue of Phil Leider’s new magazine [Current]—an anti-Christo piece called “What’s in the Package? Is Christo Javacheff all Wrapped Up?” Good title.
Charles: Your comment on the low Running Fence was that he “couldn’t get it up.”
Mary: He was an amazingly arrogant guy and he sued me for libel for that article. To get libel insurance, you had to publish three issues of a magazine. So they didn’t have it. Leider was absolutely frantic, “My god, it’s already out there. Now they are going to sue me.”
I said, ‘That’s fantastic! I’m looking forward to it. Tell those lawyers to call me!’ And they did and I said, ‘I can’t wait, man. I’ve got a new outfit from the Salvation Army. Wait’ll ya hear I what I’ve got to tell. It’ll be a surprise.’
I mean the lawsuit was based on something like I said they had a color T.V. and they only had black and white. When the lawyer told me that, I said, ‘You guys are really too fuckin’ much, man. Wait till we get to court, kiddos. This is going to be a laugh riot.’ And that was the end of that. They were just a bunch of bullies, really.
Charles: What was your objection to the Running Fence?
Mary: That it was a con-job, a big theatrical show. It was presented as serious art, when it was just European bullshit. It was another example about how Europeans think of Americans: that we are a bunch of idiots. They really do. European artists have nothing but contempt for us—especially when we’re good. And every once and a while, we’re really good, and they don’t like that a damn bit because they’re supposed to be the leaders, right? We’re supposed to be know-nothings, the local jerks. We’re not supposed to be smart or talented.
Charles: How did you become a sculptor?
Mary: I graduated from high school in Stockton. In those days, believe it or not, California was number one for education. I had already done over a semester of U.C. work in high school. I got a scholarship to Cal. There were eight of us philosophy majors, two women and the rest of them were guys—mainly L.A. guys, very bright.
My mother said, when I got the scholarship (which were very generous back then), that it might be a good idea to learn how to type. We laugh about it now, but I’m very glad I did. I learned how to type and do shorthand. And then it was off to Berkeley, which was marvelous in those days. It still is, I think.
Charles: So how then from philosophy to art?
Mary: I was studying logic with a guy name Marhenke. The further we got into it, the more we read that famous book, “Principia Mathematica,” by Whitehead and Russell, trying to see if there is a correlation between the mathematical principles that humanoid ape has developed and the perception of reality and the use of language of that humanoid ape. There isn’t much, and what that means is our perceptive abilities are really quite narrow.
What makes us different is speech, more than anything else. The moment we could talk—and we talk, talk, talk, haha!—we could develop complex patterns, and off we went. Anyway, this inability to connect the philosophy and perception and language was making me go bananas. And this was not a lightweight bananas; this was a totally locked-up-type bananas. So I thought, ‘It is about time I did something with my hands.’ If I did something with my little paws, I might become more realistic.
Charles: It was about developing a more immediate connection with reality?
Mary: Yeah. I said, ‘I’m a philosophy major, I’m going crazy, what can I do?’ One guy said, ‘Why don’t you try that potter who is next to the railroad tracks?’ I lucked out. I walked in and here was this marvelous guy, William Bragdon. He was fab. I told him my story, and he said, “Okay, I got about three other sickies here, so you might as well join us.’
There were about five or six of us, and we made everything: clays and glazes. Bill Bragdon was an artist himself, sort of. Well, he’s quite famous: the California Faience Company. Who was it? [Beniamino] Bufano—they were firing his sculptures there at the time, pouring glazes over and then firing the drips. They were kind of grand. Haven’t seen them in ages.
Charles: So you just apprenticed. You didn’t go to art school?
Mary: Art school? They were ridiculous. I mean, come on, guys. They were filled with pompous irrationality. They didn’t really get it, because most of them didn’t really do it. I mean I met Bill de Koonig, who taught at the California School of Fine Arts at the same time as Mac [her husband, the painter Robert P. McChesney], but that was much later.
Charles: I see Willem de Koonig quotes on placards sprinkled around your property.
Mary: Oh, we went out to Bill de Koonig’s place in Springs. He bought it from an artist, whose name I don’t remember. You don’t remember once you’re 90, which is kind of a relief, actually. Anyway, he lived out in the Hamptons. So we went out to see this house he was building. It was crazy. He had so much money. Anyway, he was a little guy and he was building it for somebody 6’4.” He kept having people build a huge fireplace and then would get upset with it, have it torn out and built again.
Charles: Anne Porter [the poet Anne Channing Porter] told me he used to say to her, ‘Anne, if I wasn’t a hypochondriac, I’d be sick as a dog.’
Mary: He wasn’t kidding. He was really crazy.
Charles: She also told me that he gave a lecture at Southampton College at the end of which some earnest young men—for some reason writers, I think—asked him, ‘Well you’re a successful artist and we want to be successful,’ blah blah. And Bill just looked at those young men and said, ‘Well, I’m very talented.’
Charles: Did he influence your style?
Mary: More than anything, it was a year Mac and I spent in Mexico. Pre-Colombian art inspired me much more than anything contemporary. The museums in Mexico were amazing. At that time, I was writing, not sculpting, but art was everywhere there. The art had a relationship to the people in a way that it was losing in this country. We’ve lost it. The reason they have it more is that there was greater integration. In the small villages—not Mexico City, of course—there weren’t class separations like here. People did different kinds of work, but without this heavy attribution of superiority of one kind over another.
There was a stronger line between their lives and their aesthetic. And they didn’t compete in the nasty way gringos do. Not to say they didn’t compete, and even be very macho, but it was very good-natured.
Charles: How did the art world change over your career? I mean the money goes crazy by the ’70s.
Mary: Yeah, that changed quite a bit. Mac had a couple of shows in New York and Doug MacAgy [a leading post-war American curator] said to him, ‘This is the last of you guys. Your number’s up.’ Mac said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘This is it. You’re through.’
He meant pop [art]. It was the Warhol gang. What hasn’t been so well published was the amount of money behind those people—not talkin’ nickels and dimes. This was also the beginning of a technology boom: the computer crap was starting. And tech money loved pop. Also, they didn’t like the older artists, these old guys, who were egocentric, hot dogs, stars.
Charles: Well, you get what you have today: art as a service. The artist becomes a customer-service representative who is figuring out what the client and market want. It is worth pointing out that Warhol came from the commercial world: he was an illustrator. And he said, ‘Good business is the best art.’
Mary: Not only did he say that, but he represented the great majority of that younger group of guys. They do think that way. Of course, it isn’t that simple-minded, either. Many of them are very talented in what they do. They see it as art, and in a certain sense, I think they’re right.
Charles: All of this forced lightness and superficiality in our culture is extremely political in the sense of convincing people that politics don’t exist or aren’t important. What about your politics? I mentioned Anne Porter; she and her husband were both disinherited at one point. He even put a letter in the New York Times calling for donations to the Trotsky Defense Fund.
Mary: My mother was friends with Pat Brown and was that style Democrat. When she retired from one profession, Pat asked her, ‘Well, do you want to be the mayor of Stockton or the head of the hospital?’ She took the hospital, and stayed there for decades.
How’d I get political? Well, everybody was. I grew up in the valley, in Live Oak, which is under the freeway now, and the dominant group out there was Italian. And they were socialists. That isn’t what they would say—they didn’t talk socialist/communist—but that was the meaning of what they were after: a level of cooperation and support for one another. It was socialist.
And I started reading George Bernard Shaw; someone gave me “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Communism.” Well, when I was in high school in Stockton, god, they grouped children by I.Q. then. So the children of wealthy and educated people, who did better on those ridiculous tests, were in the top group, and I was in that group even though we didn’t have money then. They asked what everyone did with their summer and someone would say, ‘Went to Paris with my father.’ When it came to me, I said, ‘I became a communist this summer.’
Charles: Haha! Was everyone aghast?
Mary: Guess what? They tried to expel me! I was up for expulsion. My mother came down with her upper-class English accent and said, ‘How dare you? She is so brilliant!’ Then they proposed that I say I was not really a communist, and I said, Why should I do that? That’s bullshit. And were those people really going to expel me? It is amazing how far it all got.
What I learned was that you can take ‘em! They sit on boards, they have this title—whatever, they are just Jane and Bill and Tom and Frank. Humanoid apes. Not intimidating at all!
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Charles: You mentioned something about elder abuse
Mary: Elder abuse is everywhere these days. I got involved in some nonsense trying to sell this house. I gotta tell you, it isn’t the law that rules, it’s the lawyers—and they are a bunch of crooks… Very well-paid crooks.
Charles: So you are putting out a book?
Mary: Well, I’m working on something, but I’ve published a lot already. I’ve got a heart problem that is kinda major. The cardiologist said, “Well, we got the machines in there.’ I mean I got a lot of machines in me. And I said, ‘What’s the prognosis?’ He said, ‘If you’re careful and do la-la-la it will be about six months or so.’
Charles: Six months until when?
Mary: Till I’m toast! Off to the happy hunting ground. Bye-bye!