Peter Selz

by Paul J. Karlstrom

  Well, in a few days he showed up, and he was so friendly. . . . He looked at what I had and asked me if I would be interested in being in the show. I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t even know there was a [kinetic art] movement. . . . And then . . . Time magazine did an article [on the show] . . . and my phone started ringing off the hook. I was in many other kinetic shows, but never such a pioneering group as the one Peter brought here.26

  In a similar way, the Funk show helped define Selz’s career at UAM, and was certainly at least as important for the local scene. But exactly what was Funk? How was it identified as a distinct phenomenon, and how were the artists selected? Selz found this important question difficult to answer.

  Well, I don’t know. In the catalogue to the show I wrote that Funk can’t really be defined. When you see it, you know it. But it was a kind of art which was totally irreverent, an art that was loud—I said “unashamed”—in a way that relates to Dada and was very different from the Pop Art. It also came out of the Slant Step show that Bill Wiley and Bruce Nauman had been involved with slightly earlier [1966]. . . . I knew Harold [Paris], I knew Bruce [Conner], I knew Pete [Voulkos]— and I met Wiley, Bob Hudson, and Arlo Acton. And then the ceramic people like [Robert] Arneson and [David] Gilhooly. All of a sudden it seemed to me there was a close relationship [among them] in this kind of art. A casual, irreverent . . . art, art which dealt with bodily functions . . . biomorphic art which was sloppy rather than formal.27

  Selz thinks of Jeremy Anderson as “sort of the daddy” of Funk, but looking back, he singled out Wiley and Arneson as the leading exponents. He goes on to say, “There were dozens of people in Berkeley, Davis, San Francisco, and up in Marin County who were doing this kind of work.” Along with his staff—assistant director Tom Freudenheim and curators Brenda Richardson and Susan Rannells—Selz went to “a great many studios,” and together they picked twenty-seven artists who they felt represented the “movement.” Selz would not use the term movement today for funk, even though his exhibition implied some cohesiveness. The artists surely did not feel they were part of a movement; in fact, they resisted the idea. Selz now, if not then, is very much aware of the limitations of the term in regard to individual artists and works.

  “With all its color and . . . irreverence,” Selz recalled, “it seemed like a marvelous show, [which] put its finger on a certain pulse of this land of funk . . . this bohemian kind of art.”28 It had a somewhat mixed response, however. The public “loved it, almost as much as they loved the kinetic show. They thought it was a delight. . . . That was a popular response. The art critical response was slightly different: Artforum tore it to pieces. Artforum [founded in San Francisco, then moved to Los Angeles] had moved from California to New York and was taken over by the Greenberg contingent, so they hated it. But in general the response was very, very positive.”29

  From the moment of his arrival in Berkeley, Selz had been interested in the “totally different . . . local kind of thing” he observed in the art being made in Northern California. He and his museum colleagues, as well as some of the artists themselves, soon began talking about the idea that became the Funk show. And Peter says it was at his suggestion that his best artist friend and UC Berkeley colleague, Harold Paris, had published an essay on the subject in Art in America a month before the show opened.30 Selz was attuned to what was original in reflecting a peculiarly Californian sensibility, and the selection of artists presents a similar attitude and aesthetic: much of the work looks the same. Among the artists, Selz particularly admired one: Bruce Conner. In his opinion, in fact, Conner was possibly the most important artist working in California, from the standpoint of pure creative originality and power of statement. And there was an even more fundamental quality that Selz believed Conner shared with another of his favorites, despite the great differences in their work:

  The reason I think Mark Rothko is such a great painter is because of the internal look—his are all emotional paintings. They are paintings of the soul. I think there is a tremendous distinction between this kind of internalized abstraction and what Greenberg called color field painting, which is nothing but color design on a flat plane. It has nothing to do with the human soul. . . . Well, form and style don’t matter when I see quality that I respond to. In 1960 I saw this child in a black box by Bruce [Conner]. And I had never seen anything like it. It was true that Rauschenberg was doing assemblages in New York. But, wonderful as they were, they didn’t have quite the power of Bruce’s work.31

  On other occasions Peter has invoked these two names together as representing what he looks for when thinking of greatness. Although he may not put it as directly in connection with Conner, there is no question that the shared quality is a spiritual search for the soul through art. This is the quality that Selz has consistently sought, beginning with his study of German Expressionism, throughout his long career. And when he encounters the work that exhibits these expressionist qualities, he does his best to encourage the artist and promote his or her work.

  Several of the artists in the Funk show received this preferential attention, but none more than Bruce Conner (see Fig. 23). Even Harold Paris and Pete Voulkos did not seem to ignite Selz’s passion to the same degree.32 But in a phone conversation a year before he died in July 2008, Conner was unexpectedly withholding—one might even say ungrateful—in his comments.33 Then again, he was notoriously difficult to work with, especially in the later years, marked as they were by a long illness that limited his activity, and he seemed to blame almost every part of the art world—and virtually every individual—for his perceived lack of success. This despite the critical acclaim he received almost from the beginning of his career and to which Peter contributed. Selz would certainly agree with the judgment of curator Peter Boswell, who, comparing Conner favorably to Rauschenberg and Warhol, suggested that the San Franciscan “will eventually be recognized as one of—perhaps the—most important West Coast artist of his time.”34

  Conner did reluctantly allow that Selz was “a great supporter. But I’d rather not say more.”35 His main complaint, in general but in this case clearly directed at Peter, was that the support he’d received had little influence on sales. He further claimed that he’d had no income for the past five years. Peter was understandably disappointed by this criticism, but he also understood that Bruce was in a sense a perpetual outsider, challenging the art establishment and especially the market, despite his being represented by devoted dealers such as San Francisco’s Paule Anglim. In particular, Paula Kirkeby remembers Bruce as a unique artistic force. She thinks of him not only as the artist she represented but as her mentor. “It was, above all, Bruce’s spirituality and the Jewish mystical Kabbalah”—they were for her the “key” to Bruce. Paula admired that Bruce’s interests were based, but not slavishly dependent, on Eastern philosophy. Among art professionals in the Bay Area who understood Bruce in this respect were Peter Selz and de Young Museum curator Tom Garver. Peter especially “got it,” and Bruce recognized and appreciated that fact. Kirkeby thinks of Bruce and Selz, and Garver, as connected by mutual understanding.36 Selz’s opinion of Conner’s importance remains unchanged. Furthermore, his presence in the Funk show was essential: “More than the other artists, many of whose work did not go much deeper than a blasé surface irreverence, Conner was profoundly engaging the major issues of the human condition.”37

  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!”38 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 t
hey 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.39

  At a dinner at the Selz residence early in 2009, Bill Wiley cited exactly the same example.40

  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.41

  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.42

  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.43 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.”44

  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.45

  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.”46 Despite this disclaimer regarding art-historical intentions, Selz now describes Bay Area Funk as the last significant regional movement in America.47

  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.”48

  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 nonconformist] aesthetic attitude.”49 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. Ma
ny 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.50

  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.”51 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.