The Last Laugh

Earl Lu Gallery's new exhibition looks at the funny side of video art today

Tuesday, 30 December 2003



 

Eight international artists take a humorous dig at everyday life at the latest exhibition organised by Earl Lu Gallery at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts. Entitled The Last Laugh: Humour in Contemporary Video Art, the video exhibition examines the notion of humour through the works of American, European and Asian artists; the works illustrate how intended meanings are sometimes subverted and displaced, and how humour arises as a result.

The video works in The Last Laugh engage with the notion of challenging established expectations in our everyday lives and further reveal these discrepancies as the source of humour. The exhibition also explores how humour can be considered the quintessential postmodern sensation, in an age where all sensations and emotions have been deconstructed and reduced to political, social and structural constructs. It features the thought-provoking works of internationally-established artists such as Fischli and Weiss (Switzerland), Gelatin (Austria), Christian Jankowski (Germany), KYTV (Singapore), Saverio Lucariello (Italy), P.F.F.R. (USA), kAI (Singapore) and Michael Shaowanasai (Thailand).

Through parody, satire and ridicule, the artists highlight the humour in everyday life, and in some cases, everyday objects. For instance, in kAI’s I can’t dig so I lick, the artist is documented licking a signboard advertising a McDonald’s McFlurry. This work reflects upon the prevalence of media advertising in our daily lives in a light-hearted and humorous way. Some works blur the boundaries between reality and make-believe: for instance, the work Telemystic, which was shown at the 48th Venice Biennale, features the artist Christian Jankowski calling several television-fortune-tellers and speaking to them on ‘live’ television about his work, asking them to prophesise as to what he should do for his work to be successful.

The Last Laugh is a multi-faceted exhibition. Its universal subject matter will appeal to all, while at the same time engaging with pertinent and significant notions in contemporary art practices.

The exhibition preview will be held on Thursday, 8 January, from 7pm-9pm at Earl Lu Gallery.

INTERVIEWS with the curator, Dr Eugene Tan, and selected artists can be arranged.

     
  Participating Artists  
     
  1. Peter Fischli & David Weiss  
  2. GELATIN  
  3. Christian Jankowski  
  4. kAI  
  5. K.Y.T.V.  
  6. Saverio Lucariello  
  7. P.F.F.R.  
  8. Michael Shaowanasai  
  9. Ye Shufang  
     


 

     
  Curator  
     
  Dr Eugene Tan, Director, Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts  
     


 

     
  Exhibition Sponsors  
     
  LEE FOUNDATION  
  INSTITUTO ITALIANO DI CULTURA  
     


 

Event Information  
Title The Last Laugh: Humour in Contemporary Video Art
Exhibition Preview 8 January 2004, 7pm - 9pm
Exhibition Period 9 January – 8 February 2004
Venue Earl Lu Gallery I & II
LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts
90 Goodman Road
Viewing Hours 10am – 6pm, open daily
Curator’s Note

A new joke operates almost as an event of universal interest. It is passed on from one person to another just like the news of the latest conquest. Even prominent men who consider it worthwhile relating how they attained fame, what cities and countries they have seen, and with what celebrated persons they have consorted, do not disdain to dwell in their autobiographies upon this and that excellent joke they have heard.

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud noted almost a hundred years ago that the significance of humour in our daily lives cannot be overstated. That observation is perhaps even more pertinent today. In an age of post-structuralism and postmodernism, where sensations and emotions have been deconstructed and reduced to political, social and structural constructs, laughter or humour remains the only ‘authentic’ sensation. It is one of the few sensations which women can supposedly enjoy without guilt, as it is not derived from male desire. As the feminist theorist Annie Leclerc wrote in 1974: ‘Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter; to laugh is to live profoundly.’ In the same book, Parole de femme (Woman’s Word), Leclerc posited that the sensation of laughter is the antipode of male sexual desire, which inevitably ends up being manifested as violence, annihilation and extinction. In contrast, the sensual pleasure derived from laughter is pure, it is without memory and desire, it is pure pleasure, it is of the moment.

In fact, it can even be posited that humour is the quintessential postmodern sensation. For while there are many variations of humour, such as irony, mockery and ridicule, the similarity they all share is their relationship to meaning. As Freud argued, wit – which he equated with humour – arises primarily from the discovery of hidden similarities. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, meanwhile, wrote that laughter is malicious – as belonging to the ‘devil’s domain.’ Positing that the angels’ power resided in uncontested meaning, and the devil’s from the subverting of meaning, humour derives from ‘things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things.’ This subversion of supposedly established truths and meaning is one of the fundamental precepts of postmodernity, where the notion of truth has itself become questioned and where nothing is as it seems.

It is this notion of challenging the expectations of our everyday lives that the works of the artists in this exhibition engage with and from which the source of the humour in these works derives. What the video works illustrate is the way in which intended meanings are subverted and displaced, and how humour arises as a result. This functions through the use of parody, satire and ridicule within the works in the exhibition.

Christian Jankowski is one of the most important artists to deal with humour. Humour arises in his work from confusing the boundaries between reality and the realms of the make-believe, mystical and the imaginary. In The Hunt, the artist parodies the notion of hunting for one’s subsistence in modern society, while in The Matrix Effect, Jankowski ‘reversed’ the age of several well-known contemporary artists who exhibited in the Matrix series of exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. This resulted in seven-year-old versions of Janine Antoni, John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and others, each proffering his or her view on contemporary art. Meanwhile, in Telemystic, which was shown at the 48th Venice Biennale, Jankowski calls several television-fortune-tellers and speaks to them on ‘live’ television about his work, asking them to prophesise as to what he should do for his work to be successful. Jankowski’s works therefore blur the boundaries between reality and make-believe, often with humorous results.

In Gelatin’s Naked Cleaning, the artists go about their daily chores naked except for their high-heel shoes, subverting the expected perception of household cleaning. While in True Love IV which was made at the Kwangju Biennial in 2002, the artists constructed a 20-foot high rocket which they planned to go to Venus with. In this work, even though we know that the project was ultimately bound to fail, humour arises from the effort involved in the scale and complexity of this absurd undertaking. Saverio Lucariello’s videos, meanwhile, involve the performance of simple short repetitive tasks using common objects. His clown-like persona and enigmatic actions explore the conventions and effects of theatrical melodrama, with amusing results.

In kAI’s I can’t dig so I lick, the artist is documented licking a signboard advertising a McDonald’s McFlurry. This work reflects upon the prevalence of media advertising in our daily lives in a light-hearted and humorous way. KYTV’s Lykra Lykra, meanwhile, is a comedy of errors involving three professionals who share a secret fetish.

P.F.F.R’s The Kid’s Show was originally made as a pilot for an American television network, but was unsurprisingly rejected. Parodying popular children’s programmes such as Sesame Street, one segment consists of a puppet similar to the Cookie Monster which goes round New York enraging doormen, while in another, a child interviews adults coming out of a public restroom, asking questions such as ‘did you have a good time in there?’ and ‘did everything come out alright?’.

Michael Shaowanasai’s Eastern Wind and Dragon Tales are the first two parts of his still to be completed Artist of the Moment trilogy, which is a fictitious documentary series about a superstar Asian contemporary artist. Showanasai’s work parodies and ridicules the obsession with celebrities in our society, an obsession that is often taken to absurd extremes. Fischli and Weiss’s The Way Things Go, meanwhile, illustrates how humour arises not only from unexpected human behaviour but also from the novel and unexpected ways in which objects and materials are manipulated. Humour here arises from the surprising ways in which the artists have ingeniously created a chain of events using everyday objects and detritus.

The exhibition therefore explores the serious side of humour. It examines the basis behind the one sensation that keeps us amused and sane in our everyday lives.