February 4 - March 27, 1999
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.
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. Exhibiting artists include: Nicole Awai, Ken Butler, Amelia Costigan, Maria Demarse, Brian Dewan, Linda Ganjian, Wendy Hirschberg, Byron Kim, Daniel Mirer, Carrie Moyer, Brian Mukerjee, David Scher, Guy Richards Smit, Su Chen Wang, and Andy Yoder.
Zone of Risibility was organized by guest curator, Carrie Cooperider.