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Humor is central to our experience of the world. Humor helps us build social bonds, release tension, and navigate difficult situations. In times of unrest, humor can be an entertaining way to escape reality. It also offers a surreptitious avenue to confront change and challenge the status quo. Humor, like art, presents an alternative means of expressing criticism that can’t socially, or sometimes legally, be expressed otherwise.
Historically, art has employed humor at the most (in)opportune times. In the face of war, tumult, and cultural change, artists have often reveled in the ridiculous. Marcel Duchamp’s infamous readymade sculptures emerged during the First World War. Conceptual Art, with its text-based puns and tongue-in-cheek intellectualism, took hold in the 1960s amidst the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. The works in this exhibition demonstrate how artists in recent years have used humor to explore identity, social injustice, and the absurdity of modern life. By subverting expectations through surprising materials, challenging the notion of fine art, and using humor to create space for taboo subjects, these artists show the power of tackling serious topics with levity. |
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NATALIE BAXTER
XAVIER CHA CHRISTY CHAN CAROLINE WELLS CHANDLER ALEJANDRO DIAZ LESLIE FRIEDMAN KUPERUS/MILLER JOIRI MINAYA MARTA RODRIGUEZ MALECK & ASHLEY TEAMER MISS PUSSYCAT LAUREN RUTH DANYA SMITH |
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I enjoy humor a lot and in the art world I’m considered a great repository of jokes and funny stories, but if I were trying for humor the works would be very different. I think when there’s humor it’s as a result of something else, and I think when I say something else that I’m trying to get beneath the veneer of the world and trying to understand the world. Humor, like art, is amorphous and subjective. From Buddha to Freud to internet memes, humor and laughter, the visceral uncontrolled reaction it elicits, is central to human experience across diverse cultures and geographies. In response, thinkers, cultural practitioners, and scientists alike have endeavored to understand what makes something funny. The consensus is: there is no consensus. Our sense of humor is shaped by our surroundings and evolves as our circumstances change. A shared sense of humor implies a common worldview. At its best, humor brings people together. At its worst, humor can normalize exclusionary behaviors, such as racism and sexism, under the guise of having fun.
Though the artists in this exhibition use humor in their work, their work isn’t necessarily funny. Many of the works leverage humor’s subjectivity and cultural contingency to rupture societal norms. Joiri Minaya’s postcard series critiques colonialism and capitalism through the manipulation of traditional tourist souvenirs. Some of the artists disrupt cultural expectations rooted in literary and cinematic genres, such as Xavier Cha’s playful and disturbing reimagination of science fiction films. Natalie Baxter’s incongruous banners and limp fabric guns reference the art historical legacy of caricature and illustrate the genre’s role in the activist tendencies of humor-based contemporary art. Media and performance art lend themselves especially well to explorations of Vaudevillian slapstick and physical comedy as seen in the work of Kuperus & Miller. The Humor Research Lab (HuRL) defines humor as a careful choreography of norm violations that is ultimately safe, mediated, and benign. This explains why you may laugh when a friend takes a fall, so long as they’re not hurt very badly. Whether the humorous violations in this exhibition are benign enough to be funny will depend on your personal experience and perspective. If an artwork makes you snicker, snort, chortle, or guffaw is not always the point, but a perfectly wonderful reaction. |