Funk art

Funk art emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s as a deliberately irreverent answer to the austerity of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The label was applied by the curator Peter Selz and codified by his 1967 exhibition "Funk" at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, which brought national attention to a loose circle of California artists. At its center was glazed ceramic sculpture - above all Robert Arneson's bawdy, crudely modeled objects that dragged pottery into the fine-art world - alongside found-object assemblage, painted junk, cartoons, and personal mythology. As Selz wrote, Funk is hot rather than cool, committed rather than disengaged, bizarre rather than formal: it takes pleasure in nonsense, the ungainly, and the bodily. Anchored at UC Davis and promoted by the Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, it made California ceramics a serious American art form.

Defining characteristics

• Glazed ceramic sculpture: chunky, hand-modeled, lumpy, and deliberately unrefined
• Bawdy, bodily content: sexual organs, excrement, food, and the artist's own body
• Found objects and junk assemblage, from toilets to trophies to painted bric-a-brac
• Cartoonish figuration and personal mythology instead of abstraction
• Humor, irony, and irreverence as the governing attitude
• Bright, tactile glazes celebrating the craft materials fine art had shunned

Key figures

• Robert Arneson (1930-1992) — Ceramist whose bawdy sculpture founded Funk's clay strand (Typewriter, 1965)
• Peter Voulkos (1924-2002) — Ceramics teacher at Berkeley whose expressionist clay broke pottery from craft
• Roy De Forest (1930-2007) — Painter of cartoonish personal mythologies crowded with animals and color
• David Gilhooly (1943-2013) — Arneson's student, creator of glazed frog and food worlds

Example works

• Typewriter — Robert Arneson (1965)
• Fountain — Robert Arneson (1961-1962)

Sources

• Funk art - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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