Peter Selz (25 page)

The debate about the term
Funk
, its specific meaning and relationship to a regional art, continues. Harold Paris claimed the honor of naming Funk. Artist Sonia Rapoport reports that Harold, seeking her help, called her when he was writing an article on the subject for
Art in America
and admitted that he needed a name for the new movement. She went to her dictionary and somehow arrived at the word
funk;
when she read him the jazz-related definition, Harold said, “That's it!”
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One of the artists in the show, and another who should have been, also speak to the term and in doing so provide some insight into what Selz and his colleagues were thinking as they prepared this spectacularly nonmainstream effort. William T. Wiley and Wally Hedrick (whose absence from the exhibition was a noteworthy oversight), in comments separated by thirty years, provided the same definition of Funk. In a 1974 interview, Hedrick answered the big question with a specific example. According to him, Funk would describe the peculiar practice of his
eccentric former wife, artist Jay DeFeo, of storing her dirty underwear in the refrigerator:

 

When I first got to know Jay DeFeo, I'd go over to her house and talk. One day when she'd gone to the john or someplace, I began looking for something to eat. I went to the refrigerator and opened it up—and all of her old underwear was in it. It was a couple years' supply. The refrigerator was off, probably hadn't run in ten years, and she never washed her clothes. And so—instead of putting it somewhere else or throwing it away when she finally took off her underwear—she'd just stick it in the refrigerator. . . . Funky, but I also think she's obsessed with being that way.
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At a dinner at the Selz residence early in 2009, Bill Wiley cited exactly the same example.
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Wally Hedrick also provides insight into one of the controversial aspects of the Funk art exhibition. Many of the artists, despite the recognition that the invented catch-all term conferred, objected to it, Hedrick chief among them:

 

Yeah, I think Selz was just trying to give us a working term. . . . And he has given the artists a style. [But] the artist's job is to do the work. The museum person should be accurate and check his facts, try to get them straight. So, the artist sits around and says, “That guy isn't doing his job—right?—as well as he could.” And this is what I guess maddened the people I talked to, it [the show and term] gets international recognition, and it's all based on an inaccuracy. Here's a reputable guy who is now known internationally for something that's a fraud. I personally don't care, but a lot of people are upset about it.
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Harold Paris provided a much less angry response and a more evocatively descriptive view of the phenomenon in his “Sweet Land of Funk” article for
Art in America:

 

The artist here [San Francisco Bay Area] is aware that no one really sees his work, and no one really supports his work. So, in effect, he says “Funk.” But also he is free. There is less pressure to “make it.” The casual, irreverent, insincere California atmosphere, with its absurd elements— weather, clothes, “skinny-dipping,” hobby craft, sun-drenched mentality, Doggie Diner, perfumed toilet tissue, do-it-yourself—all this drives the artist's vision inward. This is the Land of Funk. . . . Idiosyncratic,
eccentric, its doctrine amoral. . . . In essence “a groove to stick your finger down your throat and see what comes up.” This is funk.
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In its rhythmical cadence and random listing of arbitrary characteristics, this description reads very much like a Beat-era poem. Indeed, the attitudinal connections between these artists and poets and jazz musicians characterized the creative community of the Bay Area, where there was, above all, the intersection of art and politics. This is what Peter was looking for and found in California.

Curator Connie Lewallen, describing the unusual situation at Berkeley in the 1960s, outlines the cultural framework that not only distinguished Selz's new environment but also pointed in the direction the new museum was to take.
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Berkeley, more than any other location, brought the antiestablishment forces at work in America together in a university-based protest counterculture that is generally regarded as without precedent in this country. The major social and political issues of the day took hold in and around the Berkeley campus, providing a focal point for debate and action, a kind of mirror to contemporary American social change. The broader context, Lewallen points out, was the Vietnam War, which “defined the consciousness of the late 1960s and 1970s. . . . The fulcrum of protest against inequality at home and the war abroad was the University of California, the scene not only of countless antiwar demonstrations but also of the Free Speech Movement, the 1969 third-world student organization strike, which met with violent police action, and conflicts over People's Park.”
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Within this volatile atmosphere, the University Art Museum demonstrated, from its earliest years, a commitment to radical, politically engaged new art. It was in Peter Selz's nature to pick up the activist cause immediately upon arrival (in fact, he claims that confrontational politics were part of his attraction to the Berkeley job), and he did so looking to the Bay Area assemblage movement on which the
Funk
show was based. Lewallen called it Selz's “eponymous 1967 exhibition,” pointing to the characteristic use of found objects and urban debris that was suggestive of decay. Sexual and political overtones characterized the work of the Beat-era literary and art underground, which provided the foundation for the decade's cultural “upheavals” and the emergence of a new avantgarde. Lewallen's
claim that the art museum was one of the major sites to recognize and bring to public view radical changes in the visual arts does not seem overstated.
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In a surprising contradiction, however, Selz says that making such sweeping claims for Funk as a series of illustrations of the times is over-reaching, that assigning such historical importance to cultural events puts at risk full appreciation of other aspects of the moment. In the case of the
Funk
show and the admittedly varied works on display, he insists that he and his colleagues—Freudenheim, Richardson, and Rannells— had no large goals in mind. They were interested simply in recognizing what they saw as a regional manifestation of the larger assemblage movement. And beyond the often-present politics and social commentary, Selz wanted to acknowledge the humor and appreciation of the absurd that the art he called Funk owed to Dada. “We did not think this was an Important Art Movement, but we saw it largely as a fun thing to do in keeping with the work itself. I had a great deal of fun organizing the show, installing it in the old Powerhouse, and writing about it to conclude with a quote from King Ubu.”
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Despite this disclaimer regarding art-historical intentions, Selz now describes Bay Area Funk as the last significant regional movement in America.
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The appropriateness of the term in the visual arts context is neatly presented by cultural historian Richard Cándida Smith: “[The term]
funk
suggested the use of rough and dirty materials, along with a lack of concern for a fine surface. As in jazz, the term primarily indicated a mental framework in which immediate response to the performative possibilities of materials took precedence over theory . . . funk became closely associated with the use of found objects and the assemblage tradition.”
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Art historian Sophie Dannenmüller takes a slightly different point of view in terms of Funk as an art phenomenon with a particular relationship to assemblage. She sees Funk art and California assemblage as two distinct movements, converging in the work of certain artists at specific times. For her, Funk is above all a uniquely Bay Area expression of an aesthetic attitude, one that encompasses assemblage but is not restricted to a single medium (as was assemblage). Politics may be present, but it remains peripheral to the “movement's” core identity, which is
a “countercultural and anticonformist [not just
non
conformist] aesthetic attitude.”
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The importance of Selz's
Funk
exhibition, according to Dannenmüller, was that it introduced the art world to that specifically Northern Californian aesthetic. (Even France learned of it, through a 1970 article in the magazine
L'Œil
by art critic José Pierre.)

It may be that the
Funk
show, with its sly irreverence, playful humor, and sociopolitical commentary, was closest to Peter's own sensibilities, even though the preceding kinetic exhibition was internationally more significant. Funk represented the bohemian ideal of unfettered creative freedom. In its sexual forms and imagery, it reflected aspects of the libertine lifestyle that so attracted Peter and in which, through his friendship with artists, notably Harold Paris, he became an enthusiastic participant. In California Peter learned that one could do more than just make a living in art; one could actually
live
art.

In many respects Peter and Harold—along with Pete Voulkos—were regarded as the bohemian triumvirate of the UC Berkeley art faculty. Many of their colleagues and students saw them as exemplars of the fully liberated California lifestyle, which included sexual freedom. Peter sees those years as a period of “amorous relationships,” usually sequential and occasionally leading to short-lived matrimony. Yet there was another side to that social culture, produced and driven by a bohemian/ hippie ideal focused on sexual adventurism and homegrown orgies.

Harold Paris's widow, Deborah (Debby), was both a witness to and a participant in the life and times. She remembers the erotic life that her former husband and Peter pursued as being a keystone of their close friendship. On select nights in 1972, Harold's vast studio on Oakland's Market Street attracted both artists (including UC faculty) and (mostly graduate) students. She characterized the behavior of the group in which they moved as awash in a kind of ingenuous sexual opportunism. “The Free Love Movement wasn't started by Harold and Peter,” she observed; her impression, rather, was that a much younger group took the lead and Peter and Harold simply “took advantage” and followed.
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When Debby met Harold, she was an art student, with a job binding slides for the art history department in the work/study program. They married in March 1972, but, she said, it “wasn't much fun living with
someone who was out screwing that often, reveling in it.” However, she understood that it was part of the times, and certainly the place, for many counterculture artists. And she admits that she was drawn into it herself: “Peter and Harold led; I reluctantly followed.”
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Looking back, she describes these activities as sources for her husband's sexual imagery; and she is “glad that I didn't miss these parties and the other strange events that Harold put on (and my part in it all).” Her account is only one voice, but it does suggest that the social freedoms of the day created a world that was exciting, colorful, and, for some, troubling.

In the wake of the Free Speech and Free Love movements, the atmosphere at Berkeley was charged with an inebriating sense of change and opportunity. One art history undergraduate, Terri Cohn, recalls the laissez-faire campus ambience of the early 1970s as being in stark contrast to the present: “Smoking in lecture halls, people going barefoot everywhere, dogs in the classroom.”
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Terri studied with Herschel Chipp, whom she describes as “an inspiring and very supportive professor”—whereas Selz (who was then on sabbatical) had a “complicated reputation,” as a consequence of which she was “a bit afraid of taking a class from him.” She recalls rumors about the parties and wild behavior, but she also describes Berkeley as liberated and experimental in many areas, sexual self-discovery being a primary one. “The sexuality of the time was pervasive, yet from my position now in the twenty-first century, and as a curator and art school professor, it seems like it was somehow a more innocent
zeitgeist
.” In those days, as she points out, many students had their “going-naked period.”
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For many, sensuality and (heightened) authentic sensation were part of the overriding spirit of the times, as it had been for Selz's Die Brücke painters cavorting nude in the German forests and on lakeside beaches with models and mistresses, as well as wives and assorted children, in tow. A Utopian modernist/primitivist fantasy was being imitated, however incompletely, in the hippie redoubt of California.

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At Berkeley, a major part of the director's responsibility was building the collection. This was new for Peter, who had been responsible only
for exhibitions of modern painting and sculpture at MoMA. Part of what attracted him to Berkeley was the opportunity to become more involved with collecting, and although the incentive million-dollar annual acquisition budget never materialized, he was determined to make the new museum among the best of any college or university campus. Selz describes the University Art Museum's permanent collection when he arrived as having “very, very little to start with . . . a large collection of stuff which the university had accepted over the years. Much of it totally uninteresting.” He described this disappointing accumulation of objects not even with faint praise: “There was everything from a Rembrandt to a Cimabue in the basement, and the Cimabue was some kind of nineteenth-century worm-eaten copy . . . made in Florence. So we had to sift through . . . and we did find a number of nice things like the Bierstadt and the big Leutze. But most of the stuff was really not acceptable, and some . . . is still in the basement, rotting away.”
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