Funk Art
ファンク・アート / 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.
Garish glaze colours / Bodily, off-colour motifs / Craft materials deliberately misused / Finishes that keep their handmade roughness
Dictionary entry
- 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
- Type
- Lettering pushed by hand, slumped, uneven, glazed on or modelled in, never a cleanly typeset line.
- Composition
- One lumpen object shot frontally and filling the frame, with nothing composed around it.
- Material
- Bright running glazes over visible clay, with drips, thumbprints and firing accidents kept rather than corrected.
- Caution
- Making the roughness neat: a controlled imperfection reads as one more kind of taste, and the joke, which is aimed at taste, stops working.
- Further study
- The 1967 Funk exhibition in Berkeley / The change in the standing of ceramics / Its relation to the West Coast counterculture