Wrapping together art-historical revisionism and kid-friendly displays, the Seattle Art Museum’s new exhibition, “Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture,” flashes back to artistic rebellions of the 1960s and ‘70s associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Funk art, and Northwest studio ceramics. Each group is well known for harboring its own gang of cultural heretics, but this ambitious show illustrates their shared objectives and visual techniques.
Bruce Nauman’s 1985 sculpture, Double Poke in the Eye II, depicting two human heads outlined in neon inspired the title and format of the exhibition. A student of Robert Arneson and William Wiley at the University of California at Davis, Nauman was involved with the nucleus of so-called Funk art, the region’s most widely publicized art-historical category of the 1960s. Although the Funk roster doesn’t typically include Nauman’s work, the sculpture’s motorized neon fingers poking at the eyes signal the goals of Funk’s aesthetic iconoclasm.
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Funk is a pivot point for curator Carrie Dedon, who has split the exhibition into five thematic galleries. The first displays a Funk icon, Arneson’s John with Art (1964), a lumpy, stoneware toilet sculpture with ceramic excrement in the bowl and gestural splashes of color on the tank. Situating their work somewhere between neo-Dada and Pop Art’s poke at the high-art citadel, Arneson and his colleagues shamelessly embraced amateurish craftsmanship, in-jokes, put-ons and quirky narratives. John with Art, one of Arneson’s first “mature” works, illustrates basic visual tenants of Bay Area ceramic Funk—cartoonish figurative form, vernacular subject matter, adolescent humor, and a provocative disrespect for aesthetic dogma.
Alongside Arneson’s toilet are works by Seattle ceramist Howard Kottler (1930–1989), who, along with University of Washington colleague Patti Warashina, were initially classified as northern exemplars of Funk, albeit a formally “clean” variant of the Bay Area’s production. These local renegades, who shared the Californians’ taste for visual puns and irreverent disregard for tradition, serve as this show’s conceptual lynchpin.
Kottler began his career at Ohio State University, where the ceramics program was centered on glaze technology and Asian traditions. After he earned a rare PhD degree in ceramics and began teaching at the University of Washington, he gradually abandoned his earlier conservative production in favor of more flamboyant forms, blatant eroticism, lush metallic glazes and punned titles. Impressed by Arneson’s irreverence, Kottler made frequent travels to San Francisco, immersing himself in the city’s gay culture. Starting in 1966, he began creating editions of manufactured white plates decorated with the satirical decal collages for which he is best known. Among the hobby-shop decals he sabotaged were those representing well-known works of art. Inspired by Warhol’s appropriated media images, he decided to “see if small changes in the art-work decals could forever change the way we see these pictures,” as he once put it.
Examples of Kottler’s 1972 “American Gothicware” series, plates decorated with decals based on Grant Wood’s infamous American Gothic painting of a glum farm couple, are included in the show’s introductory display. The farmers become a convincing same-sex couple in Look Alikes, where the farmer’s wife’s head is replaced with that of the farmer. In Silent White Majority, the couple has white faces and no mouths; the same figures appear in whiteface with mouths in American Minstrels. Each plate has its own soft, leather envelope and the set is packaged in an elegantly crafted wooden box, with as much attention lavished on the packaging as the product.
Kottler’s plates overlap chronologically, if not formally, with Bay Area Funk, but the most challenging grouping of his work dates from the late 1980s. Mounted on a mirrored pedestal in the center of the first gallery are a series of glittering self-portrait sculptures executed as elegant parodies of classical Cubism. Here Kottler references his gay identity with flat silhouettes, shadows and faceted reflections, dissolving physicality in optical illusions. With the exception of one title, Kottler Posing as a Cubist (1987), viewers would be unlikely to experience these sculptures as portraits, but they are readily accessible as send-ups of high modernism.
Another poke at Cubist masters, Robert Colescott’s Les Demioselles d’Alabama: Vestidas (1985), is mounted nearby. During the early years of his career Colescott lived in Seattle and Portland, where his first solo exhibition was held in 1963. Colescott’s cartoonish figures and parodic appropriation of renowned artworks, the show argues, are recognized here for the first time as aligned with the West Coast’s countercultural aesthetic, a genre associated almost exclusively with the work of white artists.
The exhibition continues with examples of craft techniques employed to skewer craft traditions, ranging from Arneson’s 12-foot ceramic swimming pool to Washington jeweler Ken Cory’s silver and brass belt buckle embellished with a service-station logo. Patti Warashina’s sculptures are installed in the next two galleries devoted to visual humor and figuration. Warashina rarely invokes art historical categories when speaking about her art, instead offering accounts of technical developments and biographical stories. She explains, for example, that the inspiration for her Airstream Turkey (1969), a perennial audience favorite in Seattle, came when she began working with a slab form resembling a loaf of bread. An Airstream trailer parked near her house, she noticed, was also shaped like a loaf of bread. “It just kinda came to mind,” she says. “I like things that are not quite right. Kind of loony. I guess I see the world that way.” Also on display is her 1966 Faucet Pot, where explicit female between-the-legs anatomy is framed with on-off faucets. Warashina places Faucet Pot within her shift at the time from “a very conservative period to an anti-art rebellion I kind of liked.”
The gallery devoted to figuration, according to the curator, represents West Coast artists who “daringly went against the grain and depicted human figures when celebrated East Coast artists abandoned figuration.” (Perhaps major Pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann, Mel Ramos, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol don’t count as “celebrated.”) Contemporary artists are included here, among them Seattle and Portland ceramist Jeffry Mitchell, who is represented by a mind-blowing multimedia installation, the 12-foot-long Jesus in a Crowd (after Ensor), from 1991. An admirer of Kottler’s appropriations, Mitchell reimagines a famed James Ensor painting as a tableau with a stuffed puppet standing in for Christ, surrounded by a crowd represented by small globs of papier mâché inscribed with tiny faces. “Jesus is super clown-like. It’s ridiculous,” Mitchell explains, “but I don’t mean [the puppet] to be merely comical. His sort of hollow, oval eyes and mouth are not unlike a sort of Greek mask of tragedy, that kind of hollow horror. So he’s holding out his arms. He’s showing his pierced hands…. The focus is on a kind of helplessness.”
The show’s final gallery introduces Seattle to a sample of recent work by celebrated textile artist Xenobia Bailey, who describes herself as “a practitioner of the evolution of the Aesthetic of Funk in the African-American life style.” Bailey’s crocheted headpieces, full-scale tents, and vibrant wall mandalas evoke the roots of Funk in the decorative resourcefulness of black homemakers and the merger of blues and soul in Black music. The sampling of Bailey’s work tells us that the jubilant formal talent on view, unlike other iterations of Funk, needs no business with pokes in the eye.