Compose styles
Rather than blending styles toward a middle, this gives them roles. The first one carries the structure, the next comes in as the accent, and anything after that shows up in a single detail. Where they fight each other, it says so before you start.
How to divide the work
- Composition
- Follow Funk Art: One lumpen object shot frontally, filling the frame, with nothing composed around it
- Type
- Set in Funk Art's manner (Hand-pushed uneven lettering, left slumped and never cleanly typeset), and let Neo-Dada's lettering (Mixed sizes and mixed faces from whatever was to hand, some stencilled, some torn out of existing print) appear only where you want the eye to catch.
- Material
- Ground in Funk Art's material (Bright running glazes over bare clay, with drips, thumbprints and firing accidents kept); bring in exactly one thing from Neo-Dada (Silkscreened newsprint over smeared paint, registration deliberately out, erasures left visible).
- Colour
- Build on #e6e0c8, #85ab7a, #15120a and admit one accent from #d7d5c7, #bb6308, #181a24.
Where they fight
- Funk Art and Neo-Dada both belong to Postwar American Art, so the difference is small. Push the roles further apart than feels comfortable.
Caution
- Funk Art 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.
- Neo-Dada 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.
Image prompt
Produce four original images that take their structure from Funk Art (style, 1960s–1970s) and their accent from Neo-Dada (style, 1953–1965). ## What to make Make the kind of thing Funk Art exists for: merchandise, ceramics and product ranges for brands that would rather be funny and physical than tasteful, in food, drink and nightlife, or art direction for youth and counterculture work, where an aggressively unrefined finish signals independence from corporate polish. Choose one subject and hold it across all four. ## Structure comes from Funk Art - Garish glaze colours - Bodily, off-colour motifs - Craft materials deliberately misused - Finishes that keep their handmade roughness Composition: One lumpen object shot frontally, filling the frame, with nothing composed around it. Type and lettering: Hand-pushed uneven lettering, left slumped and never cleanly typeset. ## Accent comes from Neo-Dada, used sparingly - Ready-made objects brought onto the picture - Printed matter transferred by silkscreen - Forms halfway between painting and object - Traces of erasing, layering and soiling Let one material quality come from it: Silkscreened newsprint over smeared paint, registration deliberately out, erasures left visible. ## Colour and feeling Build the ground on #e6e0c8, carry the structure in #85ab7a and #15120a, and let a single accent come from #bb6308. These are read off real works, so a direction rather than a fixed palette. Feeling to carry: play, rebellion, exhilaration, technique. ## Where they fight - Funk Art and Neo-Dada both belong to Postwar American Art, so the difference is small. Push the roles further apart than feels comfortable. ## What goes wrong - Funk Art: 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. - Neo-Dada: 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. ## Across the four Keep the roles fixed in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows what this pairing can do rather than four versions of one picture. ## Constraints - Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work. - Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work. - Produce original compositions in the general period languages described above.
Related entries
- Funk Art 1960s–1970s / Style / Postwar American 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 1953–1965 / Style / Postwar American Art
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.
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