Why did the artist cross the road?
To see from the other side.
This is a brief history of humour in art.
Humour is central to many of the art movements of the past 100 years.
Humour, like art, allows us to enter the furthest reaches of the imagination to explore fantasy and the absurd.
This is the artist Bas Jan Ader doing Buster Keaton's act
and here he is falling off a roof.
Ouch.
Here's Buster Keaton's act
and here's me doing it.
Ader was inspired by Keaton's ability to reveal the tension between comic incident and tragic fate.
Art and comedy allows to ask big questions about the status quo and accepted realities.
Duchamp, the Dadaist, came up with a big one when he asked, what is art?
He wasn’t frightened of a little toilet humour when he needed to make a highbrow point
to the lowest common denominator.
Here's a Dada readymade.
A surrealist joke.
Incidentally that wasn’t a picture of a pipe saying that the picture wasn’t of a pipe, but it was
a picture of a picture of a pipe saying that the picture wasn’t of a pipe.
A contemporary sculpture.
A Fluxus happening.
Art is a playground, a performance. A place where anything can be said
anything can be thought. Icons can be graffitied and politicians excoriated.
Artists like doing this.
In 1916 the Dada art movement responded to the carnage of the First World War with absurdist humour
mocking a western culture that sanctified war.
Here's a collage by the Dada artist, Hannah Hoch.
Isn't it the ultimate act of transgression to make a joke of death?
In 1940, the leader of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton
came up with a term to describe this kind of humour.
He called it black humour.
He said humour can be a way of coping with the most tragic of circumstances.
There is nothing that intelligent humour cannot resolve in gales of laughter, not even the void.
Here is some black humour.
Over the years, artists have used humour to explore the role of the individual in relation to…
authority
the boom in mass production
politics
everyday life.
For women artists, humour has been a form of rebellion against male power structures.
Here are the Guerrilla Girls.
They wear monkey suits.
Sometimes, artists use humour to laugh at themselves
they need to.
Andre Breton said humour was the mortal enemy of sentimentality.
Both art and humour help us face the one true certainty of life together.
To tell a good joke in art, you need to face reality head on.
Thanks David.