From the Peloponnesian
Wars to the Black Death and the War in Iraq, in dire times
laughter has always been the best revenge. There have always
been subjects that were simply too stunning to manage in
any other way; situations sublime in their overwhelming terror,
as Kant would have it. Laughter dislodges pieties, sabotages
power and short-circuits rote response. Comedy trips up expectations.
It has always been so: Think of the god Dionysus in Aristophanes’ The
Frogs, fretting because he has to row a boat and his ass
is sore, when he crosses the infernal Acherusian lake on
his way to the underworld; think of any "man walks into
a bar" joke you’ve ever heard; consider Freud’s
response when the Nazis promised him safe passage out of
Austria in return for a statement swearing he hadn’t
been mistreated. "To Whom It May Concern,” he
wrote, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.
Sigmund Freud.”1
For more than half a century, most
art was inadequate to the task of responding to the Holocaust.
Then in 1986 Art Spiegelman reinvented the comics. His two
volume graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale was sufficiently twisted,
disjunctive, multifarious and immediate to tell the tale not only of the horror
itself, but of its generational fallout. Maus was accessible to all ages and
idiomatic to a generation raised on MAD Magazine, which taught a naive and self-congratulatory
postwar nation the uses of irony. Irony dismantles taboos about what you can
say and how you can say it. It exposes the fictions that prop up power, and it
does so by stating the opposite of what it means. "What? Me Worry?" the
motto of MAD’s vacuous, all-American cover boy, Alfred E. Newman, stood
for all the lies sustaining the suburban dream in the age of segregation, the
Atomic Bomb, and what Dwight D. Eisenhower named the "military-industrial
complex."
In the visual arts, irony has routinely been a means by
which to dismantle distinctions between high and low, art
and life. This was particularly true in the Soviet
Bloc, where irony in its many manifestations was the only way for an artist
to achieve an authentic voice impervious to the babble of
bureaucracy. There were
some Soviet-born artists, such as Ilya Kabakov, who did not permit their ironic
strategies to altogether mask their yearning for deeper, more humanistic significance.
There were American artists, like Ida Applebroog, who braided irony with intimacy.
But, in general, irony as it has been practiced in art and popular culture
in the last half-century has been a distancing device. Unless
you want to be taken
for a born-again or a talk show host, forget about wearing your heart, let
alone your principles, anywhere visible.
In the fallout from the twin attacks on the World Trade
Center towers, irony has become so ubiquitous in this country
that it is the language of choice
from the boardroom to The Daily Show. It has become America’s version
of a chador. To be ironic is to wear the contemporary reality of doubt meant
to warn off any
possibility of emotion or conviction.
So about five years ago, Spiegelman began integrating into
his lectures around the country a sly proposal for a neo-sincerity
movement. "Neo-sincerity," as
he defines it, is "sincerity built on a thorough grounding in irony,
but that allows one to actually make a statement about what one believes
in."2
This may not be altogether serious (Spiegelman confesses that he can’t
tell the difference between serious and funny), and this exhibition doesn’t
make any claims to an actual movement in art. But at this moment of emergency
in the world, there certainly appears to be a hunger for the comic relief
of personal conviction. Freud defined a "tendentious" (as opposed
to "innocent")
humor that could overcome prohibitions against life (sex) and death (aggression).
In an age in which sentiment is an embarrassment and sex and aggression
are at once lionized and feared, comedy has the ability to deal smartly
with all three
by cutting through conventions to expose the core of actual feeling and
belief. It tames the terror of confrontation with what is most primitive,
pleasurable
and real.
You don’t need the journalists’ creed of three facts and a
deadline make a trend to notice how thoroughly strategies of buffoonery
and sincerity
have invaded literature. Young writers like Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon,
Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides have taken on subjects
such as
a parent’s early death, the Turkish invasions, the Holocaust and
terrorism with comedy which, however schooled in irony, hasn’t
the least intention of obfuscating feeling.
For a visual artist like Walid Raad, humor is both tool
and payoff. It permits him to appropriate the post-modern
suspicion of verifiable reality
in order
to create a loony kind of order from the chaos that the Lebanese Civil
Wars made
of his country and adolescence. He created a fictional foundation,
The Atlas Group, to archive documents and tapes pertaining
to the history
of those
wars, thus facilitating deadpan slips between fiction and anally retentive
factoid.3
The multiple The Missing Lebanese Wars. Water Slid comes from a group
of works that chronicle the contradictory notes of a group of war historians.
They would
meet at the racetrack to bet on the discrepancies between when horses
finished
and when photographers snapped the finish - often bribing the photographers
so that history would prove their individual positions.
This is a multi-generational show. There is, in fact, nothing
neo or new about artists who approach cosmic subjects through
comedy. The
differences are in
attitude and critical mass. Nancy Spero, whose defecating helicopters
were
a mother’s
response to the Vietnam War, turns 80 this year. Thornton Dial, who grew up black
and illiterate in Alabama, is 76. He’s a painter who can find the joke
in the way different colored skin turns ordinary people into Frankensteins in
their own country. Paul Zaloom, at 54, has taken liberties with the Middle Eastern "Karagoz" shadow
puppet play in The Mother of All Enemies, a comic epic that tangles
the web of interlocking hatreds and stereotypes currently at play
in the world. His hero,
a queer-secular humanist-Quaker-agnostic Syrian, makes frenzied attempts
to outwit everyone who would take issue with any part of his identity,
including Homeland
Security, Al Qaeda, and the Statue of Liberty.
The second part of the title of this exhibition, “The Difference Between
the Comic and the Cosmic is a Single Letter,” comes from something that
the Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote about the Russian dramatist
Nikolai Gogol. In the context of the "comic" and the "cosmic," he
said, Gogol’s writing, "gives one the sensation of something ludicrous
and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner."4 This
would be an apt description of the work of artist David Hammons, who transposes
the ephemera of city streets, particularly the streets of Harlem, into incongruous
art events. In 1993 he sold snowballs (the punch line: they melted). He has made
art out of chicken wings (poor people’s food, both real and
stereotypical), turned basketball nets into monuments and made
drawings on the walls of a London
gallery by bouncing dirty basketballs against them. Here he elevates
into planar sculpture the kind of hooded sweatshirt that would
make many a gallery-goer lock
the car if it were encountered in an unfamiliar neighborhood. His
art about being black in America is wily and poetic, and the joke
is on the viewer who gets it.
Spiegelman pretty much put paid to notions of where comics
fit into our culture. So I’ve included here David Rees, 33, who, in Dada tradition, bent found
art and the internet to his purpose. The improbable juxtaposition of his outraged
responses to the War on Terror’s bombing sprees and the
inane corporate clip art workers who mouth them, punched air
into the prevalent patriotic fervor
after September 11 and touched a nerve on the internet.
Art occurs in places more astonishing than the term "outsider
art" makes
room for. One recent Christmas, a friend gave me a pack of Wdeck playing
cards, each card depicting a different version of President
George W. Bush in drag.
The cards punned on the US Military’s “Most Wanted” playing
cards from Iraq. Wdeck was sold over the internet
as a novelty, but its composition was complex, collaged and
surreal. It turned out to be created by an artist,
Matt Forderer, who didn’t consider it his real work,
though that too is complex, collaged and surreal.
"I am sincere. I am sincere. I am sincere," the all-American Kilroy
and the gypsy whore who could become a virgin on demand swear to one another
in Tennessee Williams’ 1953 play, Camino Real. A thing like that will give
sincerity a bad name. But humor, as the comedian John Cleese once said, "frees
people up to have new thoughts."5 There are more than 22 artists in this
show: William Anthony, Ida Applebroog, Hideaki Ariizumi, Tamy Ben-Tor, Paul Chan,
Michael Combs, Thornton Dial, Matt Forderer, Regina Gilligan, David Hammons,
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Peter Land, William McClelland and Alex Melamid, Laura
Nova, Walid Raad, David Rees, the Serbian group Skart, Nancy Spero, Art Spiegelman,
Marie Watt, Olav Westphalen, and Paul Zaloom. It’s
a fraction of what there could be, but their range, guile
and passion go far toward making the point:
artists are at their most subversive when they amuse and
appall.
Amei Wallach, 2006
1. The Freud and Aristophanes examples come from John Morreall,
"Humor in the Holocaust: Its Critical, Cohesive, and Coping
Functions." Paper
presented at 1997 Annual Scholar’s Conference, posted
at http://www.holocaust-trc.org/holocaust_humor.htm.
2. Quoted in Calvin Reid, "Art Spiegelman and Françoise
Mouly: Literature of Comics," Publishers Weekly,
Oct. 16, 2000.
3. The Atlas Group is no longer fictional.
4. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol ([1944] New York,1961),
142.
5. Quoted as an exchange between John Cleese and psychoanalyst
Jennifer Johns in synopsis of Humour and Psychoanalysis conference,
London:
Freud Museum,
Nov. 5, 1994, posted at http://www.freud.org.uk/Humour.htm
apexart’s exhibitions and public programs
are supported in part by The Peter Norton Family Foundation,
Altria Group,
Inc., The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and with public
funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs,
and the New York State Council on the Arts. This exhibition
received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
with the generous support of The September 11th Fund, the
Experimental Television Center Presentation Funds program
supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, and
CEC ArtsLink. |
