“Does your dog bite?”
(Portrait of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau)
Ceramic
1998
32″ x 22″ x 16″
Permanent Collection: The Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA

Details

Tony feels more sentimental about the bust of Peter Sellers (representing Inspector Clouseau) than he does about any of the others in the series. When Tony was growing up, he saw all the Pink Panther movies and “fell in love with them,” and also feels a kinship with Clouseau’s bumbling and clumsy manner “that gets him in all kinds of trouble” despite the investigator’s good intentions. In keeping with the placement of visual prompts, Tony inserts objects in the hands of the inspector to reveal his traits. Typical for his line of work, Clouseau holds a magnifying glass in one hand, but a mysterious pink glove is flaunted in the other. Its presence would seem peculiar and out of place if one didn’t know the storyline: Clouseau’s nemesis, the Pink Panther, always leaves behind a pink glove at the robberies he has committed. The title for the sculpture, Does Your Dog Bite ?, refers to a funny bit from one of the plots: “the inspector asks a person if his dog bites and is told no, but when he goes to pet the dog, the dog bites him. Clouseau asks the man about this discrepancy, and the man responds, that is not my dog.”