Celebrating humour in art this Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Why so serious? This is a question often aimed at art – and for fair reason. Much has been turgidly written about aesthetic choices that, outside the silos of art, seem inconsequential. Art itself however, is not always interested in such pedantry. For as long as artists have been mark-making, they’ve embraced levity as a weapon with a wink, an idea we’re celebrating this week with a curation inspired by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (26th of March – 20th of April).
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp played his infamous prank on the art world: getting a factory-made urinal to be declared fine art. In Australia, contemporary artists like Richard Bell have used humour to upend our stereotypes of Aboriginal art. There’s an argument to be made that pop art, surrealism and appropriation art are, at heart, exercises in being funny.
Anne Marie Hall – ‘Untitled (Chickens)’
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Eric Thake – ‘Horsham Sale Yards: She’s a beautiful pig boys, all meat and no pertaters’ |
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Michael Leunig – ‘LIVE HUMAN…’
These days, there can be little to laugh about; all the more reason to crack jokes. Subversive, disarming, smart, alleviating, uniting – humour, told with care and inventiveness – is a salve in trying times. When art comes knocking, why not ask “who’s there”?
Philippe Le Miere – ‘The Carhill Expressway’
You enter a gallery. Visitors, hushed and solemn, circle a work of art — it’s one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans. A giggle escapes your lips. Here we all are treating a can as reverential — is it what Warhol would have wanted? Acknowledging comedy is not to belittle something’s importance, it is to find joy in its presupposition. Laughing as David Hockney observes, “clears the lungs”. It’s a radical act to accept that life can be cruel, absurd and unjust, yet still find room for levity — better yet, wall space.
