Humour in Contemporary Art

Although it has been an almost ubiquitous discourse from ancient times to the present, satirists and critics do not agree on a single definition of satire. A synthetic definition of satire could be reached through a critical survey of its various definitions. Accordingly, satire is a discursive practice in a Foucauldian sense to which four elements, with varying degrees, are essential: attack or aggression, laughter or humor, play, and judgment. Defining satire as a Foucauldian discourse allows the critical analysis of its interactions with other discourses within respective power structures. Therefore, a general discursive model of satire is deduced according to which the discourse of satire not only shapes, but is also shaped by, five major discourses—namely discourses of economy, politics, morality, patriarchy, as well as learning and knowledge—through their negotiations and transactions within specific epistemes.

For many years, Israeli culture recoiled from dealing with the Holocaust from a humorous or satirical perspective. The perception was that a humorous approach might threaten the sanctity of its memory, or evoke feelings of disrespect towards the subject and hurt Holocaust survivors' feelings. But, from the 1990s, a new unofficial path of commemoration has been taking shape. Texts that combine the Holocaust with humour, satire, and parody are a major aspect of it, but this remains controversial. Often, Holocaust humour is perceived as part of a dangerous process that normalizes Nazism and Hitler. In opposition to these ideas, author Steir-Livny claims that in Israel, a unique post-traumatic society where the trauma lives as an integral part of the present, Holocaust humour in Hebrew functions as an important defence mechanism. The book argues that Holocaust humour, satire, and parody rebel against the way this trauma affects Israeli society in the present by challenging and deconstructing the fear. Is It Ok to Laugh About It? shows that paradoxically, Holocaust humour also strengthens the dominance of the trauma in the present by inserting it even more into everyday life and popular culture. Thus, Holocaust humour, satire, and parody in Israel are a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they function as an attempt to fight the acting out of the trauma in Israeli society but, on the other, they strengthen certain elements of it. There is a contradictory process of dissociation and assimilation occurring at the same time, which attests to the dominance of the trauma in the Jewish-Israelis' identity. This innovative and intriguing analysis will challenge the borders of Holocaust research and commemoration.

Today’s idea of humor compels a psychological reading, but Russian Formalism, which practiced replacing “psychology” with “structure,” offers an alternative. Viktor Shklovsky’s “Toward a Theory of the Comic” analyzes the problem “geometrically,” showing that the structure of jokes [anekdoty] does not guarantee humor, e.g. when the same constructions are found in Dostoyevsky. Elsewhere, Shklovsky writes about puns, defining them as “the intersection of two semantic [. . .] planes on the same sign (word).” Nothing is said about humor. Puns needn’t necessarily be humorous.
Hence the question: does humor nest in certain structures, and do they remain humorous when not “funny?” In ancient medicine, humor denoted the four bodily fluids, after which it evolved to mean something comic as when one is whimsical having indulged in one of the four humors instead of keeping them in balance—the condition of physical and mental health. But whimsicality and the comic are not tantamount. Thus the Formalist Evgeniia Zhurbina explained the deliberately disjointed composition of the often not-so-witty Soviet feuilletons as a remnant of the play of wit that historically characterized this genre.
This is also true of Shklovsky’s writing, famous for its unpredictable switches between various themes. These texts read as witty, but often they are not “funny” (e.g. “Third Factory”). So are they still humorous? Does humor depend on the comic? These are the questions the paper raises.

I post this as a historiographic document.  This may well be the first writing in English about Heri Dono.  It was written as an exhibition review, about this unknown artist, during his first solo exhibition in Jakarta in 1988. He had not had many visitors to the exhibition and sold little to nothing. After the article was published on a Friday morning, many collectors came to see it during its last hours. And so an amazing career was on its way. It is a huge honour (and a fun one) to have known Heri for so long.
I found this article no longer in the JP's online archives at the artist's website: http://heridono.com/tag/the-jakarta-post/

This essay analyzes a body of work by the British artist Keith Arnatt (1930–2008) in order to reconsider established narratives of Conceptual art more generally. It demonstrates how Arnatt, who was a major proponent of Conceptual art in Britain, employed formal characteristics and theoretical references typical of Anglo-American conceptualism of the period as strategies to tackle the blind spots and inconsistencies within these practices, especially by infusing his work with humor that was often morbid and in some cases even scatological.
Many of Arnatt’s text- and photo-based works from the late 1960s and early 1970s address the conditions of art and of being an artist. Like many of his colleagues, Arnatt drew upon theoretical models such as linguistic philosophy. Yet he employed these references not in order to intellectualize and ennoble his art, but rather to call its fundamental assumptions into question. In a radical turn against the identification of art with higher intellectual activity, he even presented pieces and proposals that took feces and the human metabolism as their subject matter. These relatively unknown works, which have rarely been exhibited or studied, push Arnatt’s critical tendency to the extreme.
Drawing on theories of humor by Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Kuno Fischer, and others, this essay argues that Arnatt’s work emerges as a serious and forceful critique of the idealist undercurrents of some conceptualist practices, a criticism that sometimes takes the form of what Fischer refers to as the "playful judgment" of the joke.

CAL Seminars

Doug Fishbone
Making Things Happen - From Idea to Exhibition

1 May 2018, 5.30-7 at 288 New Cross Road

Doug Fishbone will inform and entertain you in discussing how he has developed and implemented strategies for navigating the artworld.

Fishbone is an American artist living in London. He took the MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths (2003). His practice travels across artforms. Fishbone’s film and conceptual performance work is influenced by stand-up comedy. He is interested in cultural relativity and perception.

His 2010 film project ‘Elmina’, made collaboratively in Ghana was shown at Tate Britain and was nominated for an African Movie Academy Award in Nigeria. He curated ‘Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf’, a bespoke art/crazy golf course, featuring some of the UK’s leading artists, at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and also in 2015 collaborated with the Dulwich Picture Gallery on a solo project.

Other recent works include a series of guided bus tours in Aberdeen for the Look Again Festival (2016), and riverboat performances that were commissioned for the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival in 2013 and 2014.

Website
http://www.dougfishbone.com/en/home

Le seul consensus autour de la poésie féminine contemporaine est celui d’une grande diversité. Sur le plan thématique et formel, autant que du point de vue de l’origine des poètes, il semble difficile de réunir sous un paradigme unique les œuvres écrites par des femmes. C’est également l’un des aspects que soulignent l’ensemble des ouvrages consacrés à l’humour : le terme renvoie à des phénomènes si différents qu’il est presque impossible de le réduire à une définition qui recouvre l’ensemble de ses manifestations. 
C’est pourtant précisément en raison de cette difficulté définitionnelle que l’humour constitue un prisme de choix pour parcourir la poésie féminine contemporaine. Par nature protéiforme, l’humour est « transgenre » ; il subvertit l’ordre social et les instances de pouvoir réel ou symbolique, mais remet aussi en question les identités génériques et sexuelles. Rien d’étonnant à ce que les femmes poètes y voient une arme pour s’attaquer aux idées reçues et aux métaphores figées, notamment celles qui prétendent définir l’identité féminine.
Mettant en adéquation ce qui se passe sur le plan de l’énonciation, de la réception, de la rhétorique et de la prosodie, l’humour est donc envisagé comme une modalité d’écriture, c’est-à-dire un ensemble de formes traduisant un positionnement particulier. Cette posture, qu’elle prenne le nom d’irrévérence, d’incongruité ou de décalage, témoigne à la fois des liens complexes que les femmes entretiennent avec la tradition poétique et des stratégies qu’elles ont développées pour y parvenir, dans lesquelles se dessine une même volonté, en explorant les lieux communs et les espaces de consensus, de redessiner les contours de la poésie contemporaine.

Mots-clés : poésie, femmes, humour, wit, satire, ironie, parodie, réécriture, genre

The only consensus around the question of contemporary women poetry is that of its diversity: the themes and forms of the poems written by women are almost as varied as the origins of the poets themselves. Diversity is also one of the aspects underlined by most of the publications on the subject of humour. The term applies to so many phenomena that it is virtually impossible to reduce it to a final definition. 
Yet it is precisely because humour is so difficult to define that it constitutes a particularly appropriate prism to approach contemporary women poetry. Humour is by essence “transgender”. It subverts social order as well as instances of real or symbolical power, and challenges sexual and generic identities. Unsurprisingly, women poets have seen it as a choice weapon to attack received opinions and stereotypes, especially when those aim at defining femininity.
Humour should therefore be considered as a form of writing, or rather a set of forms, expressing a specific positioning and operating on the level of enunciation, reception, rhetoric and prosody. This posture, which can be interpreted as irreverence, incongruity or difference, testifies of the complex ties women have established with the poetic tradition. But to do so, women have also developed strategies which enable them to explore common knowledge and accepted truths, and thus redefine the contours of contemporary poetry.

Keywords: poetry, women, humour, wit, satire, irony, parody, rewriting, gender

The ethical, legal and social aspects of science and technology have been explored from a number of perspectives, including materially through art and design. The proposed paper will discuss how ELSA research on climate change may benefit from ironic, critical and sometimes outrageous art and design manifestations of our climate present and potential futures. Debates on ethics of climate change often involves a deontological “thou shalt not” approach, while the ironical and humorous scenarios presented by artists and designers may represent an alternative, more palatable approach aimed at a different audience. The author proposes that ELSA scholars may successfully use such scenarios as tools for thinking and in engagement exercises.