Highfalutin taste, the exclusiveness of art history, the total abstraction beloved by post-World War II art critics in New York City: These were prime targets for counterculture artists on the West Coast who poked fun at it all. Poking art in the eye, you might say.
An exuberant exhibition, “Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture,” currently on view at Seattle Art Museum, captures the lively irreverence of this art while critiquing and augmenting the story of “funk art,” which is typically told with a focus on the white, male, California-based artists who emphasized lowbrow humor and everyday references.
In her first major exhibition curated entirely for SAM, Carrie Dedon, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, has enlarged our understanding of funk art. She’s done so by mining the permanent collection to highlight its strong holdings of ceramics and paintings created by women, artists of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and artists with local ties, including Pacific Northwest legends Fay Jones, Gaylen Hansen, Howard Kottler and Patti Warashina. Kottler’s and Warashina’s connection with funk art is well established, but it’s a revelation to see Hansen and Jones in this context, which amplifies the surreal weirdness of their paintings.
In another revelatory move, Dedon has unearthed some rarely seen or never-before-seen works such as Viola Frey’s “Untitled Family Group,” which, at over 6 feet tall, is a testament to how ceramists were pushing the boundaries of what the medium could do.
Dedon has also included recent works by artists who wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as funk artists but whose work clearly shares some of the same DNA.
This back-and-forth through time and space underscores that funk art was never really a self-proclaimed movement. Instead, it was a set of artistic practices that were identified and named funk art by Peter Selz, who curated an exhibition titled “Funk” in 1967 for the art museum at the University of California, Berkeley. Art that was considered “funky” was funny, unconventional, sometimes messy and often based on the mundanities of real life or the quirks of popular culture.
Dedon has taken advantage of this “non-movement” looseness to focus on the attitudes and aesthetics of countercultural approaches, resulting in a cohesive exhibition that barely contains the jubilant, clever and audacious individualism throughout.
Here are five individual works that especially hum with energetic stories about themselves, the history of funk art and broader ideas about art and craft.
“Airstream Turkey,” 1969, by Patti Warashina
Seven early ceramic works by the illustrious Warashina are sprinkled into the show like charming, peculiar gemstones. The iconic “Airstream Turkey” is on view in all of its shiny, witty glory. The visually punning sculpture was created shortly after Warashina made a huge shift from making low-luster, utilitarian objects (like pots and bowls) to creating low-function, high-gloss objects. But the biggest change was the infusion of her quirky sense of humor.
The loaflike masses of clay she’d been experimenting with made Warashina think of a cooked turkey while the Airstream form sneaked in after seeing one of those sleek campers parked near her home day after day. From there, we can cook up other associations with different icons of American family life, from road trips to Thanksgiving dinners. Perhaps these references to domesticity and freedom were part of Warashina’s increasing criticism of the male-dominated atmosphere of ceramics studios of the time.
“Pool with Splash,” 1977, by Robert Arneson
Like Warashina and others, Bay Area artist Arneson liked to mess around with the relationship between form and function, an ongoing debate within ceramics with its lineage of well-crafted, useful items. Funk artists pushed back against the assumption that ceramics had to have a utilitarian purpose in contrast with other sculptural mediums like marble or bronze.
“Pool with Splash” sprawls across the floor as a glistening, nonfunctional swimming spot. Not only did Arneson create the whole thing out of ceramic tiles, a typical pool construction material, he could also have been joking about the minimalist movement’s penchant for taking prefabricated industrial materials and laying them directly on the floor of art spaces, eliminating pedestals and other fine art signifiers.
“Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas,” 1985, by Robert Colescott
Painter Colescott also mined art history for his humorous works while composing biting commentaries on racism. As one of the light-skinned sons of a Creole family, he claimed his identity as a Black American in contrast to his brother who considered himself white, leading to a longstanding familial divide. Starting in the mid-1960s, he made boldly energetic paintings that skewered racial stereotypes, often recasting canonical works of art with a rowdy crew of people of color.
In “Les Demoiselles d’Alabama: Vestidas,” Colescott riffs on Picasso’s famous abstraction of nude prostitutes with faces inspired by African masks, a painting rife with colonialist attitudes about eroticism and primitivism. In contrast to Picasso’s original and Colescott’s own nude version (“des Nudas”), this painting presents the five figures as dressed (“Vestidas”) but still revealing ample amounts of differently toned flesh. And of course Colescott has labeled these young women as hailing from Alabama, relocating the narrative from Europe to the American South, with all of its racial history.
Textile and clothing installation, 1980s-present, by Xenobia Bailey
This exhibition within an exhibition is a glorious display of work (not owned by SAM) by Bailey, whose crocheted dresses, headpieces and Barbie-sized furniture prove that high-spirited color, evident hand-craftedness and playful joy are alive and well.
Bailey, who now lives and works in Philadelphia and New York, was born in Seattle and studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. Her art, which she refers to as “Funktional Design,” is infused with vibrant color, rhythmic repetition and identity-affirming references to African American home life and African heritage, inspired by the funk music of the late 1960s and ‘70s.
The large gallery vibrates with vitality, from its indigo blue walls to the gorgeous, full-sized, hand-crocheted tent to the small “Lifestyle Vignettes,” which feature Black Barbie dolls wearing groovy crocheted outfits and lounging on crocheted chairs and rugs. One hopes that a generous donor will step up so that SAM can procure some work by this phenomenal artist.
“Jesus in a Crowd (after Ensor),” 1991, by Jeffry Mitchell
The much-loved Mitchell, who worked in his hometown of Seattle for years before moving to Portland, is represented in the show as a second-generation funk artist, although he refers to himself as a “gay folk artist.” Now mostly known for his lumpily charming ceramics, such as the wonderful “Hello, Hello,” which cheerfully greets us as we enter the exhibition, Mitchell has worked in a variety of other media as well.
In the large plaster and papier-mâché installation titled “Jesus in a Crowd (after Ensor),” Mitchell draws on his ever-present wit and former Catholicism for his take on James Ensor’s late 19th-century painting “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889,” which hides the figure of Jesus among the lurid chaos of a Mardi Gras parade. In contrast, you can’t miss Mitchell’s Jesus, who is front and center wearing a red-and-white striped sweater. He extends out into the gallery space with cartoonishly long arms, with puffy palms facing up to reveal stigmata wounds. Behind him, hundreds of plaster clown faces peer at us, with expression-filled eyes and swollen, protruding tongues. The blank-eyed, mouthless and legless Jesus appears impotent and vulnerable. It’s an alarming, comical and touching work of art.
The entire “Poke in the Eye” exhibition is filled with moments like this, when the initial reaction of amusement opens up layers of thoughtfulness, sincerity, even poignancy. It’s a show that asks us to look again at SAM’s permanent collection and the nature of art itself, with our sense of humor engaged and our eyes wide open.
