Funk is an art movement that is often associated with the Bay Area, where artists like Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly, and Maija Peeples-Bright began creating ceramic works in the 1960s that were colorful, crude, and full of sophomoric humor. Funk was unleashed on the world in 1967 when curator Peter Selz opened an exhibition of the same name at the Berkeley Art Museum. Although most of the artists chafed at being labeled as Funk, the name stuck. In short order, ceramic artists across the country began sneaking bad puns and metallic luster into their work in equal measures.
While it is true that Funk drew much of its star power from the Bay Area, Clayton Bailey was arguably the first artist to discover Funk’s signature elements while he was still a student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Caterpillar with Flying Buttresses (1961) is an enigmatic object—a long brown slab of salt-fired clay with squishy indentations along the sides that, if you squint hard enough, bear a resemblance to the flying buttresses found on Gothic cathedrals. Bailey’s Caterpillar is like nothing that came before it—lacking in any sense of the “life and lift” that potter Bernard Leach insisted was fundamental to ceramics. Although others, notably including Peter Voulkos, were exploring similar terrain, Clayton Bailey was the first to wedge Funk’s humor and absurdity into his clay.
Clayton Bailey received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1962 and moved his family to Saint Louis. By that time, Bailey had seen slides of Arneson’s work, and he began incorporating brightly-colored hobby glazes into his work. In 1963, Arneson produced his first sculptural toilet, which was quickly followed Clayton Bailey’s Nite Pots, a series of tall urinals bedecked with a pair of brightly-colored lips as their orifice. The implication of sanitary ware with hints of oral sex sent midwestern audiences and critics into a tizzy.
Throughout his career, Clayton Bailey was a voracious participant in the emerging discipline of Mail Art. He corresponded frequently with artists across the country, swapping slides and gossip through letters festooned with collages, drawings, and rubber-stamped imagery. He followed Robert Arneson’s development, but also hoarded images from Arneson’s students like Chris Unterseher and David Gilhooly. This correspondence, along with his growing status in the Midwest, secured Bailey a gig as Arneson’s sabbatical replacement at University of California-Davis in 1967.
After teaching in Davis, Bailey moved his family to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where his mentor Francis Coelho was building a highly experimental art program. During his year teaching in Vermillion, Bailey organized a Funk Art Festival in 1968 that featured Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, and David and Maija Zack. They made flights of ceramic police helicopters and rows of gaudy ceramic cowboy boots to welcome the artists. Upon their arrival, Maija Zack supervised the painting of the university armored car with psychedelic beasts, and together the artists produced a two-hour television interview and performance in which they discuss the stuffed animals borrowed from the University’s natural history collection.
When Coelho was fired for his unconventional brand of leadership, Clayton Bailey moved his family to California for good. Never ones to follow a conventional path, the Baileys moved into an abandoned diner in Crockett, California. In Crockett, Bailey began spreading his wings. During his time in Crockett, Bailey’s work was selected for the touring exhibition Objects U.S.A., which was accompanied by an hour-long documentary on network TV. With These Hands, which also featured Toshiko Takaezu, Paul Soldner, and Peter Voulkos, devoted ample time to Bailey’s eccentricities like marching around Crockett playing the bagpipe and putting on a musical puppet show with his family.
Typically, Clayton Bailey chose to forge his own path. Even though he is rightly regarded as a Funk innovator, Bailey decided to co-found the Nut Art movement with his neighbor and close friend Roy DeForest. Nut Art was more expansive than Funk, including the fantasy worlds of David Gilhooly, Maija Peeples-Bright and Peter VandenBerge, but also a range of painters, pranksters and postal artists who combined conceptual art with humor. Whether labeled as Funk, Nut, or beyond classification, Bailey used humor to teach, to entertain, to shock, and on occasion, to raise consciousness.