August 28, 2023
Art work by David Gilhooly / Courtesy the artist / Museum of Arts and Design
Clay proves to be terrifically funny stuff in “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture,” an invigorating exhibition of fifty-odd works at the Museum of Arts and Design, through Aug. 27. With pieces including brightly colored piles of dog dung, a telephone-cum-sex toy, and a frog balancing bagels and doughnuts on its head (by David Gilhooly, pictured above), the guest curator Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy presents the largely untold legacy of this medium as deployed by mischief-makers who puncture the artificial hierarchies of high and low art, while taking on racism, sexism, and other American plagues. The show begins in the nineteen-sixties, with the makers of Funk ceramics, a loose band of West Coast outliers that included Robert Arneson (a self-reflexive goofball) and the mighty Patti Warashina, whose “Pitter-Podder” (1968) giddily discombobulates the female form. The younger generations are less bawdy but no less sly. Genesis Belanger’s perverse luxury products (a gift box of facial features) seduce and repulse, while Woody De Othello’s wit is darker, more complex. (Note the fate of his absent caller in 2021’s “Still on Hold”: no one’s answering.) Also on view is a problematic portrait bust of a Black man—from Arneson’s “Black Series” (1988-89)—a representation of a racial stereotype, placed on a pedestal so that it’s met face to face. Here, art history isn’t merely the sum of humanity’s highest expressions; it is a whole story from which we must not look away.
