Funny peculiar Should modern art make you laugh?
The inaugural show at the new Fire Station gallery thinks it can. Alastair Sooke takes a look around
Contemporary art is not normally celebrated for its capacity to make people laugh – unless, that is, as the butt of the joke.
“The emperor’s new clothes.” “My five-year-old could have done that.” We’ve all heard similar put-downs aimed at the latest Turner Prize.
“In the minds of some, contemporary art is still a joke,” agrees Margot Heller, director of the South London Gallery in Camberwell. “People love to ridicule contemporary art: it’s part of the cultural fabric of this country.”
The thing is, anyone engaging with the history of modern and
contemporary art will quickly recognise that humour has been a vital strategy for avant-garde artists for more than a century.
This is the subject of the forthcoming exhibition Knock Knock: Humour in
Contemporary Art, which will inaugurate the SLG’S new £4million annexe, the Fire Station, in a Grade Ii-listed, 19th-century building across the road from the main gallery. The show shares its name with one of the works on display, a black-and-white poster designed in 1975 by the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, depicting a closed door rapped by two words in block capitals: “KNOCK KNOCK”.
Lichtenstein was one of many Pop artists who injected highfalutin modern art with a much-needed jolt of humour during the Sixties: famously, he turned to comic books as a source for his witty paintings. Much of Andy Warhol’s output, meanwhile, can be thought of as a kind of subtly smirking tease. And the Swedish-born American sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who is also associated with Pop Art, built humour into the blueprint of his approach. Many of his sculptures blow up everyday objects to a ridiculous scale: squidgy hamburgers dominate entire rooms, while gigantic clothes pegs and lipsticks swell to the size of buildings.
“My earliest contemporary art memory,” says Heller, “is seeing Oldenburg’s giant hamburger at the Tate. It stuck in my mind as being the funniest, most joyous thing.”
The South London Gallery mainly champions work by living artists, so the show isn’t a full-scale historical survey. If it was then it would probably start with the Dadaists, whose nihilist, shocking jokes registered revulsion at the First World War.
Another important instigator was the elegant French conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who infamously submitted a porcelain urinal, signed and dated “Rmutt 1917”, as an artwork to an exhibition in New York. Titled
Fountain, Duchamp’s notorious ready-made was, almost literally, the “fountainhead” for a certain style of cheeky, insouciant art that endured throughout the 20th century and
beyond. The conceptual artists of the Sixties and Seventies – whose linguistic work often took the form of memorable one-liners – owed a debt to Duchamp. Likewise, the British provocateur Martin Creed, who won the 2001 Turner Prize for his singleroom installation Work No227: The
Lights Going on and Off. Creed will be represented in Knock Knock by a row of six cactuses in terracotta pots, each larger than the last.
Creed isn’t the only living British artist with a funny bone – not a surprise given that, in this country, we pride ourselves on our robust tradition of knockabout, irreverent humour, and finely tuned sense of irony. Indeed, some of our most famous living artists also happen to be the most amusing: Grayson Perry – now, arguably, more celebrated for his quick, subversive wit than for his pots – is the quintessential example, but the supremely sardonic David Shrigley is hugely popular, too.
Many of the artists associated with the YBA movement during the Nineties cultivated a strain of salty, down-to-earth humour in their work: think of Sarah Lucas’s innuendo-drenched fried eggs, or the blackly comic provocations of the Chapman brothers, whose
work often veers, self-consciously, into the grotesque.
Perhaps they were channelling a profane spirit in British art, which has been present since at least the time of Hogarth and the visceral political caricaturists of the 18th century. Equally, maybe they had one eye on international artists such as the playful Austrian Franz West, who will be the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern next year, or the La-based Paul Mccarthy, who is renowned for his scatological work (think: fart jokes, rather than Wildean bons mots). For all that, the truth remains that a lot of “funny” art is unlikely to elicit a cathartic belly-laugh: several Surrealists, for instance, went all-out for zany, outlandish humour – but who has genuinely chuckled before a painting by Dali or Magritte? As Heller points out, “Some of the worst
art is art that is trying to be funny.”
Many of Picasso’s bodily distortions, mangling his subjects into twisted, balloon-dog configurations, are clearly designed to amuse – but, today, they muster raised eyebrows rather than uproarious laughter.
Yet, for the British conceptual artist Ryan Gander, who curated Knock
Knock alongside Heller, this isn’t necessarily a problem. “There are lots of different types of humour,” he tells me. “Droll humour, where you roll your eyes, is still humour, but it doesn’t make you laugh. Then there’s irony, slapstick, satirical humour, burlesque. The amazing thing about humour is that it’s universal. It’s a common denominator of what it is to be human.”
This, says Gander, is why artists feel compelled to use humour in their work – even though funny art is often written off as frivolous and lowbrow. “People are sometimes sceptical of art because it’s an elitist activity,” he explains. “But the good thing about humour is that it’s a great leveller. Art with humour becomes instantly accessible.”
‘Oldenburg’s giant hamburger stuck in my mind as being the funniest, most joyous thing’