Up with Funk

The San Francisco Bay Area, home of the topless cafe, nitty-gritty sound and the Haight-Ashbury hippie heaven, has now produced its own sculpture.

Its name: funk art, which is defined by Berkeley's University Art Museum Director Peter Selz as being "hot rather than cool, committed rather than disengaged, bizarre rather than formal, sensuous and frequently quite ugly." The spirit behind it? "A go-to-hell attitude," says Selz, that typifies Bay Area artists because they have been "so totally rejected, or at least ignored."

But no longer. Last week a show of funk art at the Berkeley museum drew thousands of the curious, intrigued by reports that funk art is also often more than a little obscene. Robert Arneson's vaguely phallic telephone, with LOVER spelled out on its dial, is merely suggestive, but William Morehouse's The Colony had a fatherly security guard blushing furiously as he confided to a female gallerygoer that "some people say those round things are supposed to be female organs."

But for all its promise of scandal, much of funk turned out to be merely cheerfully bizarre. Sue Bitney's Family Portrait, a rainbow-hued collection of triangular, circular and arched abstract forms made of painted wood, stuffed canvas and hairy cloth, looked like a creative child's garden of playthings. Kenneth Price's egg-shaped ceramic, glossily glazed in sea blue, sunny yellow and golfing green, beguiled the eye with its nonobjective purity.

The biggest splash of the week, in the end, was provided by one of Berkeley's star exhibitors, Sculptor Peter Voulkos, 43, known as the "daddy of funk." The San Francisco Art Commission voted to adorn the Municipal Hall of Justice with a 24-ft.-high piece of Voulkos sculpture, but the chosen piece hardly looked funky at all. Says Voulkos, "It's pretty open. There's no literal connotation in it." It simply looked like a shiny bronze-and-aluminum convocation of happy-go-lucky boa constrictors, and could be Fernand Leger on a three-dimensional spree. After all, by Peter Selz's definition, a work of art designed on request for a city hall can't possibly be funky, since the public has neither rejected the artist nor ignored him.

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