Funky Figurines

No Victorian parlor was complete without its whatnot crammed with porcelain curios and bric-a-brac. Potters of that day found an endless market for glossy, sentimental figures of puppies, kittens, grazing sheep and cows (sometimes used as milk pitchers). Today the ceramic gimcrack is coming back, this time destined as much for museums as for the coffee table, and in a radically different form. The current crop of gewgaws is more likely to be an eight-foot alligator, a toothbrush, or a bathroom scale with a few human toes still left in place.

Most of the new works are by California artists who practice a particularly virulent form of pop art known as "funk," the aim of which seems to be to put on everything and everyone in sight. Mentor of the group is San Francisco Sculptor Peter Voulkos, now 44, who a decade ago at Los Angeles' Otis Art Institute introduced a whole generation of art students to ceramics. Among his disciples was Berkeley's James Melchert, 37, who today turns out baffling ceramic figurines molded like coffee mugs, Mickey Mouse heads or crumpled rags; they are to be used as "players" on a six-foot-square, diamond-patterned board in mystical, Melchert-invented games that the spectator is supposed to play against himself. When Melchert had an exhibition recently at Boston's Obelisk Gallery, faculty members at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where even the computers play games, found his work so diverting that they convinced M.I.T. it should buy one of the sets, for more than $1,000.

Specimens & Offerings. In San Francisco, Robert Arneson, 37, started out making pornographic telephones incorporating both male and female genitalia and typewriters with keyboards of secretaries' red-nailed fingers. He has since graduated to relatively clean flowerpots and realistic, 8-ft.-long clay models of his ranch house at 1303 Alice Street. Australian-born Margaret Dodd has created a rococo ceramic line of miniature cars, ranging from a Volkswagen microbus to a 1937 La Salle. David Gilhooly, 25, molds dyspeptic hippos, crocodiles and warthogs that possess much of the pudgy charm of their 6-ft. 5-in. 250-lb. creator.

The feats of California's kooky clay molders are even beginning to be idolized abroad. Los Angeles' Kenneth Price, 33, last month displayed six tiny, ovoid forms at London's Kasmin gallery that won raves even from critics who did not know quite what to call them. "It seems impossible to describe them without vulgarizing them," said the Manchester Guardian. "They could be puddings, breasts, biological specimens--but they could also be offerings to some ultrasophisticated deity." Trying to read the riddle of his abstract, Shmoo-shaped objects is really a waste of time and effort, Price says. Their true secret, he feels, lies in their iridescent dragonfly-wing colors. These are achieved by spraying on 20 thin coats of high quality lacquer, which, he proudly points out, is the same method used on the West Coast for first-rate hotrod jobs.

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