Curatorial Statement
Exhibition Checklist
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Curatorial Statement
Holly Brown in Cathy C. Cook's film 'Bust Up'
One of my favorite moments in art history is when Roadrunner, to evade Wile E. Coyote, paints a deft illusion of a tunnel opening in the side of a mountain and then neatly escapes through it. Wile E. Coyote, of course, slams into it because for him, it's just paint; he doesn't get the joke. This scenario nicely illustrates the difference between wit and humor - Roadrunner's cerebral ingenuity is supremely witty, while Wile E. Coyote's painful corporeal blunder is humorous.
Wit and humor are both common, if largely unacknowledged, strategies employed by many visual artists. If they remain outside the realm of serious critical inquiry, they do so because of their uncomfortable proximity to seemingly lowbrow forms of popular entertainment like cartoons. Yet wit and humor are among the most profoundly subversive critical tools we have. Comedy and tragedy share much of the same subject matter, but comedy offers a sort of redemption: a chance to get the joke. Comedy's playfulness, incongruity, displacement, transgression, exaggeration and conflation seduces us into insights that peremptory certainties cannot. Situations and events become polysemous (a polite word that semioticians use to describe meaning that's been sleeping around); we can no longer be Saussure that for each signifier there is an inseparably adherent signified. We are entertained even as we are enlightened.
Humor and wit are at once aggressive and ingratiating. Their aggressiveness runs from assertion to assault, stopping somewhat short of outright assassination. Ingratiation may follow from the pleasure they provide, or from the adoption of strategies such as the affectation of innocence and naïveté or of a self-deprecatory position that tricks us into a complacent, half attentive condescension. Through charm and subterfuge, they gain permission to reveal that which would normally be repressed or hidden.
In visual art, wit and humor flourish in anti-heroic and aleatoric modes of production such as mannerism, surrealism, dada, fluxus, assemblage, pop and some conceptual art. It tends not to be a force in art that embodies notions of purity, the sublime, or rigorous theoretical rhetoric; for example, Romanticism, abstract expressionism, constructivism, minimalism and some conceptual art. However, it is the function of humor and wit to at least play with the rules. Black humor, which André Breton called "the mortal enemy of sentimentality", breaks them all heartlessly.
As comfortable as I am in black humor's house, I enjoy visiting the room where sheer silliness lolls exuberantly on a divan, the salon where androgyne puns smoke their cigars, and the long, cool hallway where irony regards itself in the mirror with a certain hauteur, then winks at its reflection before joining satire and parody at the poker table. In out-of-the-way corners, I steal the occasional glimpse into an uncanny closet. The atmosphere is one of duplicity, disguise and disjunction, exaggeration and transgression; but over all, one of pleasure. In Zone of Risibility, the artists' works reflect this range.
Andy Yoder's 'Side Chair'
Andy Yoder's small works on paper are visual puns that play on the similarity between forms and structures, ignoring their differences in scale and function, as in his depiction of a necktie and a waterfall side by side. Yoder is primarily a sculptor, but possesses wit in any medium. His Side Chair is a reproduction in brass of an unremarkable and inexpensive piece of furniture, the artistic counterpart of the domestic plastic-slipcovered furniture that is for display only.
Mixing the categories of high and low is also a characteristic of the work of Amelia Costigan, Carrie Moyer, Linda Ganjian, Wendy Hirschberg, Nicole Awai and Ken Butler. Like Yoder, Costigan reverses the status of a lowly object through its straightforward representation and inclusion in an art context. In Costigan's Trash Gallery, the objects never quite transcend their humble origins. The artist finds bits of trash near her studio, makes them the subject of small-as-life watercolors and frames them, but they never make it off the floor. They accumulate, like the debris they depict, in odd corners and out of the way places.
Linda Ganjian, Wendy Hirschberg, and Ken Butler all use found and ready made, "non- art" objects to make their sculptures. In Ganjian's work titled Art Making Fantasies, size counts. Tiny tongue-in-cheek imaginary artworks are painted in fingernail polish and presented as "slides" of the artist's work. The miniaturization of grandiose plans for public sculpture and large installations such as Cat Toy Gallery ridicules the myth of the masterpiece.
Wendy Hirschberg references cars in her sculptures that make witty use of various bits and bobs of detritus and hardware, combining them in ways that recollect the honored pasttime of tinkering with the old Chevy. The nonfunctionality of the vehicles is symptomatic of the disfunctionality of the automobile as an American icon. These works have an endearingly offhand, animated quality that belies the careful craftmanship behind them.
Surprisingly functional are the hybridized musical instruments that Ken Butler makes from every day objects. Some of them, like a snow shovel, are clearly the progeny of Duchampian readymades. Butler performs on his creations, which are mostly variations of string instruments. In his work, distinctions between high and low as well as musician and artist are elided.
Carrie Moyer and Nicole Awai both employ irony in their adoption of forms of popular culture. The cult of hippie individualism is satirized in Monday Painter, Moyer's painting of an artist/earth mama. The figure is surrounded by popular culture motifs of the 60's and 70's and stands in front of a many-breasted backdrop that recalls Betsy Damon's Two Thousand Year Old Woman. To the figure's left is a parade of pans of rising bread. Though Moyer's hippie chick brandishes a paintbrush, she is consumed by her role as nurturer and the only concession made her by the professed liberation of her era is that she is allowed to be a Monday rather than a Sunday painter.
In the painting Barbie Joins the Limbo Dancer on Vacation and Becomes the Ideal Spectator, Nicole Awai makes an ironic quotation of a debased art form from her native Trinidad: the carvings in wood and copper produced there for the tourist trade. The fiction of Barbie's "authentic" experience as a tourist is paralleled by her unreal body. Barbie stars as a symbolic stand-in for the colonial matron and consumer of the picturesque, the "cultural" interloper in the "natural" landscape.
We see another sort of interloper in Guy Richards Smit's large photocopied piece called Daddy's Sorry, which depicts paternalism as literally patched together and greatly enlarged from the minuscule original, trying to convince us with its overblown pathos that this time, Daddy really is sorry. Of course we know that, as loudly as he may protest his contrition, Daddy is only ever sorry until the next time. The use of irony requires the anticipation of an audience who will understand that you do not mean to be taken at face value. In his video Prauheim, the Sadistic German Collector, Smit pushes the boundaries as far as they will go. With both black humor and irony, Smit convincingly portrays the reprehensible Prauheim, who suavely and confidently makes the most appalling of revelations about his personal and professional life. In its original performance at Greene Naftali Gallery, some audience members weren't entirely sure whether or not they were listening to an actual collector.
Irony abounds in Brian Dewan's parody of the educational film strip format. In Before the White Man Came, the propagandistic voiceover is paired with deadpan graphic depictions of the edenic state of affairs in an unspecified locale before the arrival of the white man and the unmitigated despoilation left in his wake. Daddy may have a lot to apologize for, but it's not all his fault. In the end, the excessive claims of the blaming rhetoric are inflated to the bursting point by Dewan's imagery until they collapse.
The artificiality of the separation of culture and nature is a subject of Daniel Mirer's photo series called Indifferent West. In the photographs, Mirer shows the ironic impossibility of any reconciliation between the myth and reality of the American west. Moments when this clash is most apparent are framed and removed to be displayed as a collection of evidence of this hopeless muddle. In the photo Butch Cassidy's Water World, not only is there no vestige of Butch Cassidy (whose connection to water theme parks is that they are both cultural constructs fancifully identified with natural forces) but the water itself is a piece of wishful thinking.
A nature/culture dichotomy is also in evidence in Michael Ballou's short films, which utilize cultural constructs whose indeterminate state between animate and inanimate existence invoke the uncanny. His unheimlich manoeuvres make us laugh in recognition of this overlapping of the cultural and the natural. Let Them Do It shows puppets being manipulated into constructing their own storage shelf. In his film Reversible Suit, a lightweight protective suit is elegantly choreographed by the wind down a busy sidewalk. Pedestrians acknowledge its presence by carefully stepping around it while avoiding looking at it directly; in other words, by treating it as an honorary fellow traveler, with the same respect for space and privacy. The film's action is reversed, focusing our attention even more closely on that which would normally pass unnoticed.
The works of Maria Demarse and Su Chen Wang feature amalgam creatures. In Demarse's cut out drawing and watercolor on paper, demonic looking animal/human hybrids occupy the strange society of House and Church. Demarse draws inspiration from the quirky associations and graphic devices of childhood and combines them with concerns about masquerade. In Demarse's world, the innocent and the macabre coexist and bunnies possess both cute fluffy tails and guns as a matter of course. Wang's etching Child reveals the complex and contradictory nature of childhood's mixture of guilelessness and amorality through her compassionately humorous use of the grotesque.
David Scher's elegantly grotesque drawings demonstrate a black humored appreciation for the failures, absurdities and humiliations of everyday life. In black humor there are no taboos and no subject funnier than death, unless it's the bombastic impulse to create enduring works that seek to claim a measure of immortality for their creator. The modest scale and means of Scher's work allow him a prolific and flexible output.
The potentially disgusting and grotesque is given a different spin in Fly, Brian Mukerjee's close up view of a fly's epicurean enjoyment of the sticky, oil-slicked surface of a painting, gently satirizing the artist's own enjoyment of texture (as evidenced in his smaller collage work). A sensual aesthetic governs Byron Kim's Belly Painting. Working within a minimalist vocabulary, Kim allows subtle humor to creep into this flesh-toned painting that utilizes one of Crayola's multi-cultural crayon palette. He balances the ungovernability of the corporeal with his control of the paint and format and allows the painting to sag pregnantly outward even while obeying the stricture of the grid.
Control - or rather, the lack of it - is the focus of Cathy Cook's film Bust Up. It was titled when its star, transvestite performer Holly Brown, overheard the filmmaker's discussion of whether a particular scene should be shot from the waist up or the bust up. Holly, proud of her 40" man-made bust, shouted, "Bust up!". However, the title also aptly describes the broken conventions that comprise both the form and the content of this film. Performance and editing are multilayered; Cook uses compulsive repetition to reveal the repressed, and Brown undergoes a dizzying metamorphosis of characters from frighteningly proper hostess to homicidal maniac, who all seem to be manifestations of the same identity.
This is humor's purpose, and wit's design: that we be allowed, for a moment, a glimpse beneath the surface, a chance to turn the tables, to savor rather than explain life's incongruities, and to experience a bit of unexpected pleasure; and in the moment of comedic truth, to recognize and transcend the things which daily oppress us. I thank the artists in this show for making that possible.
Exhibition Checklist
All dimensions are in inches, height x width x depth. Unless otherwise noted, works are from the collection of the artist. Prices available upon request.
Nicole Awai
Barbie Joins the Limbo Dancer on Vacation and Becomes the Ideal Spectator, 1996
Acrylic on wood relief and floatation device, 24 x 76
Ken Butler
Cowboy Boot Violin, 1997
Assemblage, 24 x 8 x 3
Violin Case Cello, 1994
Assemblage, 49 x 11 x 7
Amelia Costigan
M&M Grid I, 1997
Watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 ½ x 11
M&M/Tic Tac Grid II, 1998
Watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 3/4 x 9 3/4
M&M Grid III, 1998
Watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 1/4 x 11 1/4
M&M Grid II, 1998
Watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 1/4 x 10 1/4
Trash Gallery, 1997
Watercolor on paper and frames, installation dimensions variable
Blue Monument, 1995
Mixed media and ring box, 2 x 2 3/4
Amelia Costigan
Dove Box, 1995
Mixed media and ring box, 2 x 2 3/4
Gold Commute, 1995
Mixed media and ring box, 2 x 2 3/4
Maria Demarse
The Date, 1998
Oil pastel and pencil on wood, 12 3/8 x 12 1/4
The Affair, 1998
Pencil on paper, 14 x 11
Bunny and Victim, 1998
Ink on paper, 11 x 14
Bee Pudding, 1998
Pencil on paper, 13 x 11
Happy Houses and Church, 1998
Mixed media on paper, 23 x 50 (Houses) and 12 x 18 (Church)
Brian Dewan
Untitled drawings
Ink on paper, dimensions variable
Linda Ganjian
Art-Making Fantasies, 1998
Nail polish on paper in slide mounts, labels, dowels and glue
dimensions variable
Wendy Hirschberg
Stalemate, 1998
Aluminum, rubber, wood, and scrap metals, 60 x 60 x 66
Drive-by, 1998
Sheet metal, rubber, and fiberglass, 3 x 3 x 4
Front Seat Back, 1998
Threaded rods, aluminum, and wire, 8 x 8 x 11
Reservations, 1998
Sheet metal, threaded rods, and screen wire, 11 x 26 x 13 1/2
Byron Kim
Belly Painting (white), 1992
Encaustic on linen on panel, 10 x 8 x 4
Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery
Daniel Mirer
Four photographs from the series Indifferent West
Parked Car Painted Background, 1998
Wagon Monkey Bars, 1998
King World Water Park, 1998
C-prints, each 20 x 20
Carrie Moyer
Yin-Yang Disco Ball, 1998
Acrylic, sequins, fabric on canvas, 30 x 36
with mixed media installation
Brian Mukerjee
Fly, 1998
Mixed media, 37 x 30
Untitled collages
Mixed media on paper, dimensions variable
David Scher
Untitled drawings and photographs, 1983-98
Mixed media on paper and photographs, dimensions variable
Courtesy Jack Tilton Gallery
Guy Richards Smit
Daddy's Sorry, 1997
Photocopy from acrylic and ink on paper, 76 x 96
Seven works on paper:
I'm not a faithless opportunist, 1998
Blue Sweating Head, 1998
I Have Come For The Artist With The Soul Of A Shopkeeper, 1998
Clock Watcher, 1997
Thank You For Looking At My Work, 1998
I'm Worth All Your Time, 1999
I Went Too Far, 1998
Watercolor, gouache and ink on paper, dimensions variable
Su Chen Wang
Children, 1997
Etching, 30 x 22 1/4
Andy Yoder
Side Chair, 1995
Cast brass, 37 x 19 x 19
Pill Holder, 1993
Porcelain, 4 x 4 x 4
Dustpan Holder, 1993
Porcelain, 12 x 24 x 15
Five Untitled Drawings, 1997-98
Watercolor and pastel on paper, each 14 1/4 x 17 1/8
Video Program:
Michael Ballou:Let Them Do It, 1997, 3:23 min.
Michael Ballou:Bunny Shroud, 1994, 3:27 min.
Michael Ballou:Mr. Big Pants, 1997, 3:40 min.
Michael Ballou:Reversible Suit, 1998, 3:15 min.
Cathy C. Cook:Mother Nature, 1996, 4:53 min.
Linda Ganjian:Hand Dances, 1998, 9:13 min.
Brian Dewan:Before the White Man Came, 1994, 13:37 min.
Guy Richards Smit:Prauheim, the Sadistic German Collector, 18:07 min.
Cathy C. Cook:Bust Up, 1989, 7 min.
Brian Dewan:Deuteronomy, 10:54 min.
Cathy C. Cook:Ass Dance, 1988, 35 sec.
The Rotunda Gallery is a project of BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture (formerly The Fund for the Borough of Brooklyn.) The Gallery is grateful to the Chase Manhattan Foundation, Con Edison, the Independence Community Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs with support from the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President and the Brooklyn Delegation to the New York City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Institute for Museum Services, and the Friends of the Rotunda Gallery for their support of the Education Program.
Gallery Location
LOCATION: 33 Clinton Street in Downtown Brooklyn
PHONE: 718-875-4047
HOURS: Tuesday-Friday / noon-5pm
Saturday / 11am-4pm
SUBWAY: A, C trains to High Street
2, 3, 4, 5 trains to Borough Hall
February 4 to March 27, 1999
Carrie Cooperider, guest curator