Funk Art vs Lowbrow (Pop Surrealism)
ファンク・アート / ローブロウ
Funk Art comes from Postwar American Art and Lowbrow (Pop Surrealism) from Illustration Styles. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Funk Art
A movement in ceramics and sculpture around the San Francisco Bay Area that deliberately soiled good taste and the authority of abstraction alike. Garish colour, bodily humour and the wilful misuse of craft materials laugh at the hierarchy of art itself. An early precedent for treating coarseness as a strategy.
Lowbrow (Pop Surrealism)
Painting from outside the museum, schooled on hot rods, comics, tattoos and B movies. It renders pop memory in exacting oil technique, and Juxtapoz magazine gave it a home under the name Pop Surrealism.
| Funk Art | Lowbrow (Pop Surrealism) | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1960s–1970s | 1979– |
| Family | Postwar American Art | Illustration Styles |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Garish glaze colours / Bodily, off-colour motifs / Craft materials deliberately misused / Finishes that keep their handmade roughness | Pop-culture iconography / Precise classical technique / Uneasy humor / Street-born heraldry |
| Best used for | Merchandise, ceramics and product ranges for brands that would rather be funny and physical than tasteful, in food, drink and nightlife · Art direction for youth and counterculture work, where an aggressively unrefined finish signals independence from corporate polish | Artwork for record labels, skate brands and tattoo shops · Covers for shows or books that reject museum politeness outright |
| Type | Hand-pushed uneven lettering, left slumped and never cleanly typeset | Sign-painter and comic lettering rendered as carefully as the art |
| Composition | One lumpen object shot frontally, filling the frame, with nothing composed around it | A central face with the surround filled by emblem-like motifs |
| Material | Bright running glazes over bare clay, with drips, thumbprints and firing accidents kept | Oil gloss and smooth gradation, brushwork sanded away |
| Caution | Aiming only at vulgarity and making it rough removes the base, which is the knowing misuse of craft materials, and the result reads as merely careless. | Picking creepy subject matter while skipping the rendering craft turns the work into doodling that only wants to shock. |