The Funk Art Movement & Beyond Craft
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The Funk Art Movement & Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection Submitted by Michelle Levi, Mint Museum Docent, 2014 The Funk art movement originated in Northern California. Many Funk artists were previously painters that were associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement in the 1950s. The Beatnik culture with its alternative and underground lifestyle was the perfect environment surrounding artists associated with the California Funk style.1 The Funk art movement of the 1960s contrasted from the Beat funk art of the decade preceding it. Funk artists of the 1950s wanted to incorporate ideals from literature, philosophy as well as art and music. Later, in the 1960’s, Funk art evolved as a reaction to Abstract Expressionists.2 San Francisco in the 1960s was dominated by free thinking and anti-war youth activists. Funk artists of the 1960s influenced by the political activism and anti-establishment mentality of the Bay Area began creating work combining painting and sculpture. The movement’s name was borrowed from jazz; a musical term “funky” describing something as quirky or sensuous. 3 The word “funk” also had negative connotations as it refers to a foul odor. In 1967 Funk, the exhibition curated by Peter Selz at The University of California, Berkeley brought national recognition to the movement for the first time.4 The exhibition included ceramics as well as found object assemblages and featured the work of Arlo Acton, Bob Anderson, Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Mowry Baden, Jerrold Ballaine, Sue Bitney, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Roy De Forest, William Geis, David Gilhooly, Mel Henderson, Robert Hudson, Manuel Neri, Harold Paris, Don Potts, Kenneth Price, Peter Saul, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley and Franklin Williams. “Funk art is hot rather than cool; it is committed rather than disengaged; it is bizarre rather than formal; it is sensuous; and frequently it is quite ugly and ungainly.”5 Peter Selz describes the attitude of Funk art as irreverent and compares Funk objects to Dada objects. Unlike Dada which set out to attack moral hypocrisy, Funk art’s focus is of a highly personal nature. In the exhibit’s catalogue, Selz points out the obvious: Funk art takes pleasure in exemplifying nonsense. Selz also acknowledges the role Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns have played influencing the Funk artists in their use of common objects and ordinary subject matter. Funk assemblage uses items that were thrown out as garbage. The use of discarded items emphasizes Funk art’s disengagement with consumer culture. 6 Absurd styles and inappropriate themes were employed by the Funk artists to poke fun at the serious art world as well as themselves. Ceramic works play a major role in the Funk art movement. This new concept of non-functional ceramics, however, did not originate with the Funk art movement. The influence started a decade earlier with Peter Voulkos and John Mason whose ceramic pieces were exploring new paths with traditional pottery. “By the 1960s Voulkos and Mason had moved clay to new places, difficult to categorize except as three dimensional Abstract Expressionist sculptures.”7 In Northern California, Robert Arneson is credited with starting the ceramic art movement within Funk art. Arneson created ceramic sculpture using everyday objects such as his piece Typewriter (1965) that was included in the Funk exhibit. Arneson’s ceramic pieces have been compared to Pop art. Although similar at times, Arneson’s ceramic sculptures are different because he has developed self-contained objects as ideas .8 An example of his use of objects as ideas are the terra-cotta bricks. Using the brick, Arneson speaks to the history of ceramics and ceramic process. In the 1970s he began creating portrait heads that have now become his signature work. His portrait heads also reflect ideas. “Encompassing emotions or actions, the heads convey relatively abstract themes through an explicit, familiar reality-the Arneson visage.”9 Teaching at The University of California, Davis from 1962-1991, Arneson influenced many ceramic artists. Among his students were Clayton Bailey and David Gilhooly. Both Bailey and Gilhooly contributed to helping create the Funk movement. Using quirky themes to create visual stories, these artists were changing the landscape of the ceramic world.10 David Gilhooly’s work uses objects and animals. His frog world sculptures create a narrative. At first they seem childish and humorous, however, his work is described in the catalogue for the Whitney exhibit Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists as revealing an emphasis on humanistic concern for social responsibility. Five ceramic artists with connections to the Funk art movement are included in Beyond Craft: Decorative Arts from the Leatrice S. and Melvin B. Eagle Collection. They include Robert Arneson, Peter Voulkos, David Gilhooly, Ken Price and Richard Shaw. These artists along with the others featured in this exhibit include works in ceramics, glass, jewelry, textiles and wood. The dynamic approach that these artists and all the artists featured in this exhibit have employed in manipulating materials is showcased through their work featured in this exhibit from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Peter Voulkos established California as the center of avant-garde ceramic art. His experience at Black Mountain College and his subsequent visit with the Action Painters in New York City influenced his work towards a new way of thinking about ceramics. “The liberating attitudes of Abstract Expressionism affected his ceramics…in surface decoration and in sheer size and articulation of form.”11 John Mason, a student of Voulkos at Otis College of Art and Design, created works like Torque Vessel by assembling clay into column like shapes. By adding surface design, Mason was evoking a sculptural presence. Ken Price, also a student of Voulkos, initially explored surface design with plate, jar and cup forms. Price left Los Angeles to study traditional ceramics and glaze techniques on the East coast. Upon returning to Los Angeles a year later, his work evolved and has been described as having “…unique sculptural expression…that today makes a decided contribution to American sculpture.”12 Price’s SAG and MORFO works were created using layers of glazes that were then sanded down to create patterns. Stephen De Staebler who studied theology before turning to art is yet another student influenced by Peter Voulkos now teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. De Staebler uses the human figure to ultimately examine the human condition. Figure Column I and Standing Figure with Segmented Knee are made in bronze and stoneware, materials the artist turned to after clay to create sculptures with greater height and stability. Viola Frey, a Professor of Art at the California College of Arts and Crafts, experimented with techniques in clay that enabled her to create larger than life human figures in clay that are her trademark. At Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and Design, Ralph Baccera has taught three separate generations of ceramicists. Baccera’s pieces are precise and controlled. Known for exquisite patterns and sculptural shapes, Baccera’s ceramic works are in keeping with ceramic traditions of utility. Adrian Saxe, a student of Baccera also uses the history of ceramics as inspiration. Using the concept of vessels, Saxe combines stoneware, earthenware and porcelain in his ceramic works. All of these artists working in clay had the opportunity to thrive in this academic studio environment. There was a true collaboration of artists as teachers and students. “It was through the classroom dynamic that a new attitude could develop which questioned the conventions of traditional forms and validated alternative approaches to using material.”14 The Beyond Craft exhibit presents a collection of studio crafts employing new methods and exploration of materials. This is a consistent theme found in the wood work of Wendell Castle’s Lecturn, the textiles of Olga De Amaral, Therman Statom’s work in glass and Earl Pardon’s studio jewelry. Over the course of four decades, through skilled techniques and the tendency to disregard the hierarchies between creative disciplines, the artists represented in the Eagle’s collection have succeeded in moving beyond the traditional conventions of craft and toward establishing new benchmarks for studio craft. End Notes 1. “Funk Art” last modified September 3, 2014 , http://www.arthistory.about.com/od/moderarthistory/a/Funk-Art-Art-History-101-Basics.htm 2. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980 (California: University of California Press, 1985),82. 3. Peter Selz, Funk (California: University of California Press, 1967), 3. 4. Albright, Art in San Francisco, 86. 5. Selz, Funk, 3. 6. Scott A. Shields, “California Funk”, Ceramics Monthly 56.9 (2008): 39. 7. Elaine Levin, The History of American Ceramics (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1988), 207. 8. Marshall and Foley, Ceramic Sculpture, 24. 9. Marshall and Foley, Ceramic Sculpture, 25. 10. Marshall and Foley, Ceramic Sculpture, 28. 11. Marshall and Foley, Ceramic Sculpture, 13. 12. Marshall and Foley, Ceramic Sculpture, 20. 13. Marshall and Foley, Ceramic Sculpture, 11 .