A Serious Guide to Funny Art. Adams, Henry. “A Serious Look at Funny Faces.” Smithsonian. com 8 June 2012. Web. Shavin, Naomi. “Awkward Family Photos Is Playing in Peoria.” Smithsonian.com 24 Sept. 2015. Web. Jones, Jonathan. “Marc Quinn’s Giant Baby Sculpture Infantilises Art.” 21 Jan 2013 The Guardian. Web. Shrigley, David. David Shrigley: Brain Activity. London: Hayward Gallery, 2011. Print. Mizota, Sharon. “It’s OK for Serious Art to Be Funny.” Los Angeles Times 15 Aug. 2010, Art sec. Web. Hudson, Judith. “Mika Rottenberg.” BOMB 133 Fall 2010. Art: Interview. Print.
colophon Text selection, image editing and graphic design by Lee Yan Shun in New York, NY. Typeset in Bodoni 72 and Futura. Reference Adams, Henry. “A Serious Look at Funny Faces.” Smithsonian.com 8 June 2012. Web. Shavin, Naomi. “Awkward Family Photos Is Playing in Peoria.” Smithsonian.com 24 Sept. 2015. Web. Jones, Jonathan. “Marc Quinn’s Giant Baby Sculpture Infantilises Art.” 21 Jan 2013 The Guardian. Web. Shrigley, David. David Shrigley: Brain Activity. London: Hayward Gallery, 2011. Print. Mizota, Sharon. “It’s OK for Serious Art to Be Funny.” Los Angeles Times 15 Aug. 2010, Art sec. Web. Hudson, Judith. “Mika Rottenberg.” BOMB 133 Fall 2010. Art: Interview. Print. Graphic Architectural Project Columbia GSAPP. Spring 2016. All rights reserved.
the serious guide to funny art
The word “caricature,” which fuses the words carico (“to load”) and caricare (“to exaggerate.)
caricature
A Serious Look at Funny Faces by Henry Adams
It was not entirely a laughing matter to tour the recent exhibition Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While not an overwhelmingly large show (comprising 160 items), it covered the entire history of caricature from the Italian Renaissance to the present, providing an excellent survey of the
subject. Jokes from a century or more ago can be quite difficult to understand. To grasp why they’re funny is often hard work. Fortunately, the show has a well-written catalog by its curators, Constance McPhee and Nadine Orenstein, which led me smoothly through the
challenging material. Of all the catalogues I’ve acquired lately, this one has been the most fun to read. At once erudite and entertaining, it lays out a wonderfully succinct and enjoyable account of a seemingly esoteric subject. The modern art of caricature—that is, the art of drawing funny faces that are often distorted portraits of actual people—traces its roots back to Leonardo da Vinci, although we don’t know whether Leonardo’s “caricatures” of handsome and ugly heads were intended to be funny or were made as quasi-scientific investigations of the deforming effects of age, and of the forces that generate these deformations. The word “caricature,” which fuses the words carico (“to load”) and caricare (“to exaggerate), was first used in the 1590s by the Carracci brothers, Agostino and Annibale, to apply to pen drawings of distorted human heads—generally shown in profile and arranged in rows to show a progression. Caricature in the modern sense seems to have been created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. He was apparently the first to create satirical drawings of recognizable people. Interestingly, he seems to have somehow turned this art into a backhanded form of flattery, similar to the celebrity roasts of today. Being important enough to satirize was proof of one’s importance. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the art form developed as a curious mix of the crude and obvious, and the obscure and arcane. At one level, it reduces the language of visual expression to its most uncultured elements, and certain devices seem to be repeated almost endlessly: exaggerated faces, processions of funny-looking people, people with faces like animals, and a good deal of bathroom humor. An early print by Eugene Delacroix ridicules censorship of the press by reactionary monarchists
with a representation of the famous horse race at Longchamps being run by crayfish carrying a surreal set of riders. One crayfish carries a sugar loaf (le pain de sucre), which represents a censor named Marie-Joseph Pain; another carries a chair (la chaise), which stands for the censor La Chaize. Why are they riding crayfish? Because they are mounts “perfectly suited to these men who never rose to any heights and usually walked backward,” according to a long explanatory text accompanying the image, published April 4, 1822, in the leftist newspaper Le Miroir. Careful study of the print reveals that nearly every element contains a pun or political allusion. The unfinished Arc de Triomphe in the background stands for the liberal ideology that the censors were trying to displace.
the serious guide to funny art
“Caring about these people and wanting them gone at the same time sets the stage for a lot of what happens in life”
photography
Awkward Family Photos Is Playing in Peoria By Naomi Shavin
Adriana Yoguvich’s fame was of dubious distinction. When the 38-year-old woman showed up at an exhibition displaying a pantheon of regrettable snapshots, portraits and other photographic bloopers, “it was like a celebrity showed up,” said Mike Bender, one of two founders behind AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.
Bender and cofounder Doug Chernack created the website in 2009, inviting applicants motivated by narcissism, catharsis or just a healthy sense of humor to send in embarrassing photos. The site went viral within a week. Soon came merchandise—books, cards, posters, T-shirts, games and calendars.
Finally in 2014, the collection moved from Internet sensation to museums, with a traveling exhibition that has graced the galleries of such esteemed venues as the California Heritage Museum, Middlebury College and the Southampton Arts Center in New York. In Peoria, the museum will complement the exhibit on September 27 with a guest lecture on the evolutionary history of family tension and awkwardness, featuring Knox College professor of psychology Frank McAndrew. The lecture covers family dynamicss, or what’s going on subconsciously when family members bring out the awkward, the weird and even the worst in each other. As museum curator Kristan McKinsey puts it, “How [families] really work compared to how they are supposed to work.”
your relatives you don’t have in anyone else. At the same time, those are the people who are your fiercest competition for attention from parents, for resources. “Caring about these people and wanting them gone at the same time sets the stage for a lot of what happens in life,” he says. “We have a very strong tendency to hold grudges” and because family members are in your life forever, “these grudges can pile up and create some hard feelings.” “We always delight in laughing at other people’s stupidity, but that’s not all this is about. … The educational takeaway is both thinking about family dynamics and relationships and also [learning to focus on] what’s going to be in the shot.” Each exhibition of the collection has been unique, a word that comes up not infrequently as a euphemism to describe the photographs themselves. In Santa Monica, for instance, a local news station covered Adriana Yugovich’s visit to see the exhibition, and she ultimately made an appearance on the “Queen Latifa” show, dressed up and posed like her old photo. McAndrew, however, argues that all families are awkward, period: “I think some families are better at the PR end of managing the image they put out in the world, but dig a little ... ”
“One thing that makes your relatives different from everyone in the world is that you share genes with them,” says McAndrew. “You have a stake in
the serious guide to funny art
“An artwork is like a time machine. It’s the only thing that can carry emotions through time”
sculpture Marc Quinn’s giant baby sculpture infantilises art by Jonathan Jones
Marc Quinn had a triumph last summer. His statue of Alison Lapper, installed on the Fouth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2005, was recreated for the opening ceremony of the London Paralympics.
methods of contemporary British art with generous injections of political correctness and heroic sentiment to create some of the shallowest art of our time. His art is as soulful as a coalition audit.
But did the audience applaud the work of art or its message? Quinn has fused the conceptual
Now he’s done it again, this time in Singapore. The Gardens by the Bay in Singapore have just
unveiled Planet, a giant white sculpture by Quinn of his baby son that seems to float above the ground. Babies! Paternal love! How can you fault it? Easy. No problem faulting this. Good feeling is not the same thing as good art. I am delighted that Quinn is soppy about his son, but see no reason why he should share this on such a colossal scale. Art that flaunts its content in an immediately readable way risks vacuity. Shouldn’t there be some ambiguity, even profundity, in art? The appeal of Quinn, I assume, is that he takes on big, bold subjects with visceral directness. In the first place, there was Self, his self-portrait in frozen blood. This is still his most interesting work, a gory reduction of portraiture to organic essentials. It might have led somewhere darkand original – but instead, it gave birth to manipulative mass-attention-seeking non-masterpieces, such as his portraits of Kate Moss. “The two sculptures are really about the same thing: why we do, or do not, find a person
beautiful,” he said. Art should challenge us. How does Quinn’s giant floating baby do that? Everyone can see what it is – a bland cocktail of awe and empathy. Quinn says the sculpture plays on weight (it is made of heavy metal) and the illusion of weightlessness. He talks the talk, but his sculpture does not walk the walk. I don’t believe anyone sees this as being about weight, mass or forces. That’s how we experience real sculpture by Richard Serra or Barnett Newman. All we see when we look at Quinn’s baby is “iconic” content. He effaces the art in art, in a way that makes his simple images accessible to busy people. His real stroke of genius in Trafalgar Square back in 2005 was to create an image that drivers passing by could respond to. He makes art you can enjoy from your car. Indeed, he makes art you do not need to see. His icons are so reductive, they just stimulate chatter instead of sustained looking. He is an artist for the information age, because his art is pure information. The trouble is, it’s the interference, white noise and static that makes art interesting. Quinn has clinically cleansed all that poetic mess. He is lethally efficient in his pursuit of the banal.
the serious guide to funny art
“I feel like I’m taken far more seriously than I should be anyway”
illustration David Shrigley
Interview by Dave Eggers David Shrigley’s line drawings take a darkly sardonic mirror to his everyday thoughts, decisions and problems, so that a typical refrain goes something like: ‘What does your future hold? Arthritis.’ Two decades of similarly tragicomic art – from his signature, scratchy loose-leaf drawings to surreal photos and even
the occasional taxidermied object, such as a dog waving a placard that says, ‘I’m Dead’ – are about to go on display at the Hayward for Shrigley’s first museum survey, ‘Brain Activity’.
Dave Eggers ‘You’ve said before that when you’re drawing, you’re taking on a role. That is, that there’s a persona, almost, that you’ve generated who is behind your work. But I wonder how you get to the place where you create. The drawings, at their best, I think, have a desperateness to them that I like to assume you’re only reaching after drinking heavily, or being depressed, or being alone at 4 am.’ David Shrigley ‘Well, I’m quite disciplined and always totally sober. There’s a specific amount of caffeine and sugar and nutrition to get stuff done – you get to your forties and realize you’ve got to eat stuff otherwise you get really grumpy. There’s a certain zone that you get into that you’re kind of almost not really thinking anymore, but it just feels like it’s all pouring out of you like water out of a jug. But it’s not necessarily any good. Sometimes it’s terrible. So yeah, I do have those moments, but if I had a glass of wine, that’s it, game over. I’m going upstairs to watch CSI: Miami.’ DE ‘I think, though, that the viewer gets the experience that you *are* having fun, DS ‘I know a lot of people still don’t see my work as serious, because it’s funny. But then again, I’ve come to realise that the opposite of seriousness is not humour. The opposite of seriousness is incompetence. It’s somebody who isn’t really engaged with what they’re doing. And the opposite of humour is maybe sadness.’ DE ‘The art world does tend to attract a very self-serious type of person. I noticed that when I was in art school myself, and then when I worked at an art gallery. I tend to think that there’s a fear of acknowledging the inherent absurdity of, say, sticking a urinal on a plinth and calling it art. Duchamp knew it was absurd, and very funny, but I’ve been around a lot of art-world people who treat Duchamp with great seriousness, when that’s sort of the opposite of his purpose as an artist. It’s as if to crack a smile would be to diminish the importance of the work. DS ‘For me, humour is kind of volatile. I don’t think you’d ever judge a writer any differently according to the humour in their work, but they do that with fine artists. Quite obviously I don’t really agree with that.’ DE ‘It’s a weird no-humour zone, right? But it’s a strange thing to remove humour completely from all visual art, but it has been removed from 95 per cent of it, as if humour was some
very tangential or superfluous part of the human experience as opposed to being very central.’ DS ‘I agree. The odd thing for me is that I am kind of a real cartoonist, as well as being a real fine artist, in the sense that my work is filed under humour in the bookshop, sometimes as well as being filed under art. And also a lot of people who look at the work think I’m just one of those comicbook type dudes. Which is nice, but I’ve got a foot in either camp, as it were. To be honest, in terms of the way my work is received, I feel like I’m taken far more seriously than I should be anyway.’ DE ‘In your last few books, though, there’s a real clear mix of the outright funny stuff and there’s a lot of stuff that’s I think much more pained and political. Humour that I like comes from a place of anger, exasperation. I was re-reading a lot of Vonnegut recently, and then I was looking through your drawings and there was a similar sense of humour — a very dark humour that comes from a place of frustration, of wanting better for humanity.’ DS ‘Well, I suppose it’s a cathartic thing. It enables you to say what you want to say, and vent your anger about just the lunatic, idiot world we live in. I think I’m a much saner person because I’m able to make work about how horrible people are, and how unacceptable it is that they are so horrible and how unacceptable it is that people accept how horrible these people are. I kind of assume that’s a given for everybody, that everybody feels that there are aspects of contemporary life in an advanced capitalist society that are really unacceptable, but what can we do to change it? Make stupid drawings I suppose.’ DE ‘Let’s talk about art school. Was your work accepted in school? Were you encouraged? I would think we were studying art at the same time, and because I came from the cartoon world, I wasn’t made very welcome.’ DS ‘My experience of art school in Glasgow, where I studied, was that in the end, people
didn’t really get what I did. I think that they thought I was doing something inappropriate, or maybe that I wasn’t a serious artist. I left with quite a poor mark, the kind of mark you get for turning up. I didn’t get the mark that you get if you’re actually talented. So when I left I was pretty pissed off with the establishment as I saw it, which was basically my teachers at art school. But I’m not really angry with them, I just think they didn’t really know anything about art. But I was really quite arrogant, anyway, I felt that I knew better than they did. That’s why I made the real decision to become a cartoonist, I suppose, because it was quite a gesture, a games of fine art as I saw it.’ DE ‘And that interaction with the world of fine art is important in your stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your originals in a gallery, come to think of it. Do you think that the book medium sort of gets around some of the exclusivity that’s inherent in the art world?’ DS ‘I think it does. Everybody knows how to read a book, but not everybody knows how to walk around an art gallery. When you’re in Chelsea in New York, when you’re walking around Phillips auction house, it’s an intimidating experience for people who might like art, but don’t feel very welcomed there. Whereas, if you take a book off of a bookshelf in a bookstore then obviously you know what to do with it. You’re not really sure whether you should smile or laugh in the art gallery, or whether you’re allowed to rub your chin, or scratch your head, or whatever. For the likes of my sister, for example, she wouldn’t feel very comfortable at some fancy gallery in New York, and wouldn’t really know what to do. She’d sort of look around and look at her watch and fiddle with her Blackberry. But books are accessible.’ DE ‘But galleries are part of it for you.’ DS ‘I guess, because that’s what pays my mortgage. That’s why I don’t have to teach at the art school, because the original drawings sell and I don’t have to have a job. I think I’d rather be judged by a book than some exhibitions. But if I never had any exhibitions and just made books, I probably wouldn’t make any sculptures.’ DE ‘How long have you been doing the sculptures?’ DS ‘Ever since I was at art school. I’ve been making some ceramics in my studio, like casts and primitive moulds but then glazed. I make ceramics because it’s a bit crafty and it sort of seems to fit somehow aesthetically with my graphic work. And ceramics are somehow a little bit unsophisticated, which I sort of feel is my style.’
the serious guide to funny art
“Humor is just a way to help digest things”
video installation It’s OK for Serious Art to be Funny Sharon Mizota
Stored in a secure facility in the Cayman Islands, Mika Rottenberg’s new sculpture will be sold in shares to collectors who have never seen it in person. The only public image of the work features a smiling New York art dealer, Mary Boone, holding the precious object: a raggedy cube made of raw latex, rotting lettuce and tins of blush.
Whether you think this arrangement is brilliant or ridiculous probably depends on how you feel about the contemporary art market. Rottenberg, named one of the 10 most promising New York artists by New York magazine in 2007, is interested in the mysterious mechanisms by which art’s value is created. “Something that could look like nothing
could be worth millions of dollars,” she says. “I think that’s fascinating.” Her video installation “Squeeze,” currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, imagines the production of the ungainly art object as a somewhat magical process. Combining footage of real workers in the lettuce and rubber industries with staged shots of claustrophobic spaces in which women perform repetitive but seemingly unrelated tasks -- mashing, scraping, massaging -- the piece engages serious issues of labor, gender and globalization. It is also surprisingly funny. In one sequence, field laborers insert their arms into holes in the ground; miraculously, the arms emerge in a room where they are massaged by another set of women. Nearby, the naked rear ends of other workers protrude through openings in a wall, cooled by sprays of mist. The show is one of several current exhibitions that use humor to raise questions about the relationship -- whether estranged or entangled -- between art and everyday life. John Baldessari’s wry twists on artistic convention are a recurring theme in his retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hugh Brown’s imitations of works by famous artists are on view at Robert Berman Gallery and video artist Ryan Trecartin’s latest media-addled vignettes recently arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Pacific Design Center gallery. Rottenberg, 34, insists she is not trying to make fun of Boone or any of the workers and performers who participate in her videos. “Humor is just a way to help digest things,” says Rottenberg, who uses it to deal with what she sees as harsh realities beyond her control. “It’s like either I’m going to cry or I’m going to laugh.” No stranger himself to the thoughtful side of funny, Baldessari, 79, has been gently turning artistic
and popular culture on its head since the 1960s. “The humor found in Baldessari’s work stems from the way in which he calls attention to absurdities that already exist,” writes LACMA curator Leslie Jones in an e-mail. One example is the painting “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell” from 196668, in which Baldessari simply transposed a found text onto a canvas. The text offers advice on which colors and subjects artists should use to maximize sales of their work. “Baldessari highlights the illogical notion that paintings of bulls or roosters will sell better than paintings of cows,” writes Jones. “That’s funny to us, but the person who wrote it was probably dead serious.” While the painting exposes the ridiculousness of the original text, it also marks a boundary between those who know and those who don’t.
“even the smallest part of the work has these little tensions”
video installation BOMB: Artists in Conversation Interview by Judith Hudson
Video-installation artist Mika Rottenberg creates mini-factories, farms, and tableaux, which produce products variously made by tremendously fat, tall, muscled, long-haired or long-fingernailed women. Women, who in their own lives commodify their eccentricities, are, in Rottenberg’s films, featured as “bearers of production.” Every detail and
orthodoxy is taken to its extremes, turned upside down. You smell the flowers and sweat; you hear the sounds of breathing, nails tapping, sweat sizzling, milk hitting tin; you feel the breezes, and the squeezing of flesh, its bursting out of constraints. Yet Rottenberg treats the superabundance with such normalcy it makes me laugh.
Judith Hudson To me, imagination is the most private and revealing aspect of a person. It’s what attracts me to your work. You submerge people in your imagination. I feel as if you seduce the viewer with unconscious sympathies, like fetishism or caged energies. Mika Rottenberg Right, things that tap into everyone’s subconscious memory. We’re pretty similar in our cores, more or less. I have to tap deeper into this psychological vein, so then I can drag people with me. It’s not just visual; it’s energetic. It’s about trying to locate feeling that has no shape. The whole thing is meant to fail on some level because you can’t give shape to abstract emotions, sensations, memories, and smells. JH How do your ideas germinate? They seem to spin out exponentially, reminding me of James Joyce transforming the unconscious into art. You must feel things very deeply—but I sense that when you’re working, you have to be in complete control of your feelings, so you can organize all this chaos. MR “Spinning” is a really good metaphor. I start the process by finding the core—it can be a sound or a smell or a texture . . . JH You actually start with something that simple? MR Yeah, for me, even the smallest part of the work has these little tensions. So if I put a core detail in, say, the itch you feel in your nose when you are allergic to something, I then create a structure where you can throw in more details and spin those around. It starts from that feeling that doesn’t quite manifest. Then it becomes a search for what manifests this thing that can never quite be manifested. I want to create this structure to fence these abstract sensations in, to give them shape and materiality. For example, in doing yoga, you put yourself into this rigid structure to liberate yourself. Otherwise you’d just get lost. JH When you build the structure, whether it’s a factory or a farm, you must have more than a germ? MR There’s a moment when I think, I have to be brave and just start building something. I know I’m probably going to panic, because I will forget why I’ve built this huge construction without even knowing exactly what I will do with it. Another starting point is me “falling in love” with a “talent”—usually someone I meet online, for example, Raqui from Dough. I saw her on the website largeincharge.com and knew I wanted to work with her. The structure for
the video was built to fit her big presence. JH Do you introduce more elements once you’re rolling? MR I reduce elements. I start with something insane, something that’s impossible to make. First, it’s like diving in and throwing a lot of stuff out, designing a crazy structure that’s physically powerful and impossible and has way too many elements and way too many loose parts. Then I start working with a small team: for example, in the last piece, I worked with Katrin Altekamp and Quentin Conybeare on set engineering, and with Mahyad Tousi on cinematography. I’m constantly refining rather than adding. It’s like automatic writing. Then I go back and find the core logic. I go from being child to critic to child. First you let it all go, then you step back. JH Because you want to remain open to any experience that’s going to happen? MR When it first happens, it’s not about filtering anything; it’s putting words and shapes on paper. There’s no way I’ll start with a thing and have it end up to be what I started with. It’s about starting, about putting myself in a situation where I feel squeezed, contracted. JH You work with contradictions. A squeeze seems sexy, and you depict it as visually sensual, but it’s also oppressive. There’s this duality. MR There’s a plurality to desire that ranges from being liberating to being oppressive, and its power is not always in your control. Or maybe it’s a constant negotiation between controlling it and releasing it. JH It seems to be a big element of your work, this liberation through confinement. You place your performers, all of whom have distinct physical features, in architecturally confining structures. Do you have a goal in mind?
MR I try to create a structure that will allow me creative freedom, but will still be bound to a logic. It’s like inventing a new kind of logic. The goal is very set. I know I want a tongue to flick, a shelf to move, lettuce to get shoveled up. There’s a linearity, but with room between for accidents or providence. JH I want to hear more about tongues and lettuce. Let’s talk about your most recent pieces in order of their making: Mary’s Cherries (2004), Tropical Breeze (2004), Dough (2005– 06), Cheese (2008), and Squeeze (2010) There’s a ritualistic cherry popping in Mary’s Cherries. Women pedal bicycles that power lights that grow Mary’s bright-red fingernails that are then clipped and dropped through a hole one story down to Barbara. Barbara massages and flattens them, then drops them into another room where the big-breasted Rock Rose forms them into maraschino cherries, aka Mary’s Cherries.
MR I read a story about a woman who had a rare blood type and decided to quit her job and sell her blood. Her body grows its own stuff and she sells it. That idea morphed with a drawing of mine that showed a conveyor belt with fingernails and maraschino cherries. In Mary’s Cherries I created a fiction to explain how maraschino cherries, a real product, are made. I wanted to make a system powered by gravity, therefore a vertical structure.
JH What was the core and starting point for Tropical Breeze? MR The action of sweating and, in this case, a horizontal movement. I wanted to create a sort of clock: a person works, takes a certain amount of time to create sweat, then there is a measurement of how much you sweat. The goal is set. I chose to make the truck the factory because of its horizontal structure. I also wanted to make the product as it’s delivered, so it’s always fresh.