Funk Art vs Neo-Dada
ファンク・アート / ネオ・ダダ
Both sit in Postwar American Art, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. 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.
Neo-Dada
A postwar current that answered the inwardness of Abstract Expressionism by bringing household objects, printed matter and taxidermy onto the picture, working in the gap between art and life. It inherited Dada's gestures while making the materials of consumer society into structural components. The branching point immediately before Pop art.
| Funk Art | Neo-Dada | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1960s–1970s | 1953–1965 |
| Family | Postwar American Art | Postwar American Art |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Garish glaze colours / Bodily, off-colour motifs / Craft materials deliberately misused / Finishes that keep their handmade roughness | Ready-made objects brought onto the picture / Printed matter transferred by silkscreen / Forms halfway between painting and object / Traces of erasing, layering and soiling |
| 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 | Record sleeves, zines and event graphics that need to look assembled out of the world rather than designed from nothing · Campaigns built from found print, where the receipts, newsprint and packaging keep their own history as part of the message |
| Type | Hand-pushed uneven lettering, left slumped and never cleanly typeset | Mixed sizes and mixed faces from whatever was to hand, some stencilled, some torn out of existing print. |
| Composition | One lumpen object shot frontally, filling the frame, with nothing composed around it | No grid: a horizontal collage in which one three-dimensional object breaks the picture plane and pulls the eye off axis. |
| Material | Bright running glazes over bare clay, with drips, thumbprints and firing accidents kept | Silkscreened newsprint over smeared paint, registration deliberately out, erasures left visible. |
| 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. | Pasting readymades alone never shows why they were chosen, and it becomes a shelf of knickknacks. Arranging it tidily strips the dirt and scale the work depends on, and leaves clean decoration. |