Funk Art

About

Funk grew up around San Francisco from the late 1950s, as artists in the Beat milieu made rough assemblages from junk and found objects. Bruce Conner wrapped nylon stockings, wax and debris around furniture and mannequin parts, and Wallace Berman and Jess worked with collage and private mythologies. In Los Angeles, Edward Kienholz built grim tableaux such as The Illegal Operation (1962).

The name was fixed by the exhibition Funk, organised by Peter Selz at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. By then it meant a jokey, handmade, deliberately tasteless look, set against the polish of New York Minimalism and Pop. Ceramics were central. Robert Arneson, who taught at the University of California, Davis, made glazed toilets and grinning self-portrait busts, David Gilhooly modelled armies of frogs, and Clayton Bailey invented comic creatures. Roy De Forest painted dotted, dreamlike dogs, and Peter Saul's lurid cartoon paintings shared the spirit.