The Laughing Paintbrush
Is there
really no major current, no predominant style, are there really no
recurrent themes in contemporary art? Do we really live in an "era of
diversity"? Forget about romanticism, minimalism, postmodernism. The
poker-faced earnestness of twentieth century art is being firmly debunked
in a flood of fun, believes Ben Lewis, and he explains why humor is
the new ism of today.
Maurizio
Cattelan, La nona ora, 1999
Courtesy
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris-Miami
Nowadays
I can't seem to keep a straight face when I look at contemporary art.
Every time I go to a gallery, there is something that brings a smile to my
face, makes me emit an embarrassingly loud chuckle or occasionally produce
an involuntary snort of derision. It all started one day in the early
nineties, when I literally and metaphorically turned a corner in an
exhibition portentously titled Apocalypse,
and there was Maurizio
Cattelan's Pope
Struck by a Meteorite, a lifelike waxwork three-dimensional
cartoon that made a joke of the certainties of religion. I think that was
the first time I guffawed in a gallery. Soon I felt surrounded by
permanent hilarity at fairs and biennales - I saw hyperreal sculptures of
monkeys vomiting in disgust, pigs tattooed with Walt
Disney characters and the Louis
Vuitton logo, tribal African figurines clutching McDonald's
burgers and photographs of men with French fries stuffed up their nose or
lying down on watermelons.
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Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculptures,
1997
Centre Pompidou
Collection, Paris, © VBK, Wien, 2006
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People often say that there is no common theme, no dominant
style in contemporary art. Instead, we are told, we live in a
postmodernist era of diversity. Artists work across all media - taking
photographs, using readymades, producing drawings, sculptures, and
paintings, and going for walks (strollology
is the technical term). Painters are simultaneously figurative and
abstract. They may work in neo-expressionist, photorealist, or pop modes
and follow Kippenbergerian
or Tuymans-esque
models. The conceptual artists take photographs and the photographers make
conceptual art. Our theory is that there is no single theory, the
theorists say. But what, I ask you, do the following artists - all
well-known - have in common: Maurizio Cattelan, Fischli
& Weiss, Jeff
Koons, Felix
Gonzalez Torres, Wim Delvoye, Bruce
Nauman, Doug
Fishbone, the Chapman
Brothers, Martin Kippenberger, Duane
Hanson, Claes Oldenburg,
and Erwin Wurm?
Erwin
Wurm, Carrying Edelbert Köb (Be nice to your curator), 2006
Photo:
MUMOK/ Beatrix Fiala, © VBK, Wien, 2006
Answer:
they've all made hilarious works of art. Call me an old-fashioned disciple
of Woelfflin,
but I believe that every age inevitably has its own style… mannerism,
romanticism, neoclassicism… and today Humor is the new ism. The word
"ironist" already exists, so why not coin Ironism? Or Sarcism. Or perhaps
we can change the ism, after all we've had so many, to an asm, and just
have plain old Sarcasm. And when the era of laughable art is followed by
one obsessed with sex, we can have the subsequent term of…..
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Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Blue),
1994-2000(Jeff Koons
Courtesy of
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica
Photo
Douglas M. Parker Studio, Los Angeles
Never has so much art been so funny. This is not just a
question of art-ertainment. We are at a historically humorous juncture in
the evolution of our culture, and consequently, if we start to look at
contemporary art from the perspective of comedy, its apparent pluralism
begins to cohere. The poker-faced earnestness of twentieth century art is
being firmly debunked in a flood of fun which began in the 1990s, when
gags about art's pretensions multiplied like mirrored stainless steel
rabbits. Felix Gonzalez Torres' arrangements of foil-wrapped sweets are
generally regarded as moving pieces about sharing, but I believe they are
also comic masterpieces. He lampoons the heavy metal plates of Carl
Andre's floor sculptures with his rectangle of silver-wrapped sweets.
And when Torres poured a pile of candies into a corner formed by two
gallery walls, he satirized the phenomenology of the "actions" that
underpinned the molten lead thrown by conceptual Rambo Richard
Serra into the same type of location. I can't look at Jeff Koons'
balloon dog without thinking gigglingly of the spiritual aura that is
meant to surround the super-smooth curved forms of Henry
Moore and Anish
Kapoor. Damien Hirst
also has a product line which mocks the vanities of art - the cigarette
butts, piled high in enormous ashtrays, cynically placed on office tables
in over-sized vitrines or carefully displayed in cabinets like a
geological typology. Just as Manzoni
canned his own shit, Damien presents his fag ends as comic symbols of the
myth of the artist, and, unlike Manzoni, who presumably produced all his Merda
D'Artista himself, Damien probably got his assistants to smoke his
cancer sticks for him.
Claes
Oldenburg, Mistos (Match Cover), 1992
Vall
d'Hebron, Barcelona
Photo
Attilio Maranzano
© Claes
Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen
The
twentieth century is dotted with prototypes for this phenomenon. The first
was Duchamp's Fountain,
an urinal, conceived by the artist as work of art that galleries would
refuse to exhibit. No such luck! Duchamp's scatological readymade had no
successors for half a century, until Piero Manzoni canned his own turds. Warhol's
piss
paintings surely belong to the same tradition.
But humor takes
many different forms - irony, derision, ridicule, satire, parody, sarcasm,
slapstick, not to mention the more general areas of mirth and wit. As we
attempt to define the unifying Zeitgeist of contemporary art, we should be
careful to delineate the different types of humor employed by artists
today.
Claes Oldenburg opened up the avenue of a kind of comedy far
from a critique of modernist myths. His pop sculptures drew on the humor
that can be obtained from exaggeration (make a claim that's large enough,
and people will laugh - right now you are probably wondering if this
article's ambitious thesis is meant seriously). He monumentalized the
mundane (the giant matchsticks) or created oversized 3-D cartoons (the
knotted gun outside the United Nations).
Belgian Marcel
Broodthaers came up with a third kind of visual wit, relabeling cows
as automobile brands and parodying the monochrome with his rectangles of
inky purple and black mussel shells, the remains of a delicious Belgian
national dish.
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