Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art

The human condition has been the subject of comedy for thousands of years, from ancient Greek theater to daily comic strip. In the past five to ten years, however, humor has turned up with increasing frequency in contemporary art, perhaps satisfying an urgent need among artists and audiences alike to reflect upon the absurdity of daily existence. In the midst of contentious political arena, artists have been injecting a healthy dose of humor into their work, utilizing the leveling power of comedy to break down barriers between formality and familiarity. Contemporary art of this nature demonstrates how humor mediates our opinions and perceptions, from advertising to political campaigns. Artists employ both the strategies of comedy and its popular forms such as parody and satire, slapstick, and practical jokes to establish an immediate rapport with their viewers, who intuitively understand the codified language of humor. The right delivery and timing, crucial to the conveyance of jokes, can maximize the impact of this kind of art.

Situation Comedy presents more than forty works - a selection of video and sound installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs - by younger as well as more established contemporary artists. The exhibition directly engages the viewers, encouraging laughter in museum environments that are too often considered sacrosanct, authoritarian, and austere.

The artists' approaches range from slapstick farce of Danish artist Peter Land's video performances to the hilarious incongruity created by artist Gillian Wearing in her photo-based work. In various other mediums, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and Scottish artist David Shrigley use verbal and visual jokes to thwart our elevated expectations of art and its cultural significance, while American artists Richard Prince and John Waters employ gags, quips, and shenanigans to mirror the prejudices of contemporary society as they thumb their noses at the art world. Adopting formats ranging from signage and program schedules to advertisements, American artists Kay Rosen and Erika Rothenberg and British artist Bob and Roberta Smith replace usual information found in these contexts with irreverent aphorisms, wordplay, and puns.

Manipulations of preexisting media - particularly movies and television - provide artists with ready-made opportunities to generate humorous situations. Among the works that explore this ambiguous territory are videos by German artist Christian Jankowski and American artists Michael Smith and Joshua White. The former documents his public interactions with such offbeat figures as televangelists and magicians, while the latter play with pseudo documentaries and sales pitches. The exhibition includes several younger artists such as Laura Nova, whose installation (featuring a stage) invites viewers to draw upon his or her own sense of comedic delivery, and Dana Schutz, whose paintings of uncontrollable sneezes are pure slapstick articulated with adolescent glee for the distasteful.