Yoshua Okon's Octopus

From Hammer Museum: We were invited behind-the-scenes at the shoot for Yoshua Okon's latest video Octopus. The piece, shot on location at a Los Angeles Home Depot store, explores the relationships among Guatemalan day laborers who at home fought on opposite sides of the Guatemalan civil war, yet here in the U.S. are working side-by-side in their efforts to find employment. The work was produced during Okon's residency with the Hammer. He explains more about the work in this video. (Run time: 8 minutes) 


From Humor As Art: YOSHUA OKON talks about the HUMOR in his art piece OCTOPUS. This is a rare view into how an artist constructively uses HUMOR in art to convey messages. But not only that to stir up other emotions outside of laughter. FANTASTIC!!!!

Tokyo-based author and translator Matt Alt has a post up today on Altjapan about the history of anthropomorphizing tsunamis in Japan.
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Boston Typewriter Orchestra

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is a group of human beings who organize sound to create rhythmic patterns using typewriters.  I had the opportunity to interview them this past month.

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The Artists Joke by Jennifer Higgie

The Artists Joke by Jennifer Higgie


featuring texts by Andy Warhol, Dave Hickey, Henri Bergson, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and others.

Below is a review of The Artist's Joke written by Megan Milks:

The standard postmodern claim about popular culture is that its emergence dissolved the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow culture. If highbrow is emblemized by, say, avant-garde visual art and lowbrow is emblemized by, say, screwball comedies, then it’s no wonder that the early 20th century ushered in a domino set of art movements fueled by any of multiples strains of humor, beginning with the Dadaists in 1916. What is surprising is that so little of 20th-century art criticism has focused on humor in art.

This paucity of critical interest in the comedic is not limited to art criticism; I’ve noticed it with regard to experimental literature, most of which, in its linguistic and formal play, is quite obviously invested in expressing a sense of humor. Yet, when a university class discusses, for instance, Gertrude Stein’s circuitous repetitions, to describe how funny her use of language is seems somehow absolutely trifling; a discussion James Joyce’s behemoth wit in Ulysses seems beside the point when there are 800 pages of unfamiliar allusions to get through; Walter Abish’s alphabetical picaresque, Eunoia, becomes immediately intimidating only because no one reads it out loud (what a riot!).

For whatever reason, a divide remains: we tend to see the avant-garde as lofty and anemic of humor, and we tend to see humor as somehow beneath Great Art. This, despite the numerous jokes that tattoo the walls of the most preeminent art museums. Duchamp’s urinal is a joke, for instance. More so than many other artists’ jokes, its punch line is recognized as the joke that it is. We might laugh out loud at his smirk to the institution; we might chuckle at the absurdities of the Dadaists, the audacity of Fluxus and Pop and the contemporary culture jamming they have inspired, and yet, art is still seen as Very Serious. No laughing in the museum, please.

The Artist’s Joke, an anthology of diverse writings on the intersection of humor and art, seeks to challenge that perception. In fact, from the dozens of writings excerpted here, it looks like numerous folks have already challenged that perception; to read them here collected together, it seems obvious that a study of the artist’s joke has been a long time coming, and that it is absolutely essential to a study of 20th-century art.

Edited and with an introduction by Australian art critic Jennifer Higgie, The Artist’s Joke begins with Henri Bergson’s essay, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” from 1900 and moves vaguely chronologically from there, with excerpts from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) and Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Duchamp’s Anthology of Black Humour (1940) and the Guerrilla Girls’ The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1988, from the poster of the same name), among many, many others.

The anthology is organized into four sections that cover, respectively, the period from 1900 to 1940, which saw Dadaism and Surrealism emerge as rejections of bourgeois reason and rationality; the ‘50s and ‘60s, which saw the Fluxus and Pop Art movements use humor to poke fun at consumer culture; the ‘70s through the early ‘90s, which saw a rise of feminist artists using satire and wit to disrupt authority; and the mid-‘90s to the present, which has seen a number of diverse and expansive approaches to using humor in art. Perhaps unusual for a book on art, it is almost all text; even its few visual complements are textual, full-page blowups of excerpted passages. But, of course, this is a book collecting writings about humor in art, and as such it’s not that interested in presenting the art itself.

The texts included cover a wide range of forms and content. Andrea Fraser’s “Official Welcome” monologue is a script; there are a few interview excerpts, notably with Zurich-based artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss; a prose poem by Picasso; a short work of dark fabulist fiction by British novelist and painter Leonora Carrington; an excerpt from an unpublished scatological film script by Nathaniel Mellors; a short comic essay by David Sedaris; and an analysis of L.A. laughter in Ed Ruscha’s work by Peter Schjeldahl. That, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. But, then, the iceberg might be just a wee bit mammoth, in a problematic way.

With 50 texts in only 225 pages, the average number of pages per text is four and a half. As one might imagine, many of the texts included have been sliced and diced. If the entries seem truncated, well, they are. Helene Cixous’s landmark essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”, for example, has been cut from 19 to three pages, and the majority of everything else is a two- to five-page excerpt from a longer piece. Consequently, the book feels more like a sampler than a full-on anthology, as though you’re previewing the mp3s before buying them. Moreover, there’s very little supporting commentary to bind all of the works together. We get a seven-page introduction, and then we’re off to whirl through 50 excerpted texts with no further context offered.

I’m grateful that Higgie managed to put all of these wide-ranging writers and artists in one place, grouped together appropriately and umbrellaed under a hugely fascinating, under-discussed theme, but I’m always one to prefer lengthier, less choppy excerpts, each introduced by biographical and/or critical context. This is a minor complaint, however, considering that Higgie accomplished the great feat of collecting Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, and Freud all in one place, and managed to evoke some laughter while she was at it.

Pointing out creativity's goofy side - Boston Globe Article

Pointing out creativity's goofy side

By Ken Johnson, Globe Staff | July 17, 2007

In 1982, Joe Gibbons was a patient at McLean Hospital -- the psychiatric hospital in Belmont -- where he'd elected to go as an alternative to prison for various petty crimes. While there, he typed a letter of complaint to the governor of Massachusetts on a paper place mat from the hospital cafeteria.

"The management is utterly irrational," he wrote in part. "They will not let us use narcotics or stimulant-type drugs here. Mr. Governor, this is the 1980s! The world is falling apart all around us. Not being able to participate in its deterioration only alienates us further. Nor will they allow us to drink away our problems, as if solace could not be found in a bottle. Where they get their weird ideas I do not know."

Evidently Gibbons did not post his missive because it is now framed and on view in a delightfully amusing exhibition called "Pull My Finger" at Allston Skirt Gallery . Curated by Boston artist Joe Zane , who, along with Gibbons, teaches art at MIT, the show offers a fine opportunity to ponder just what it is about hu morous contemporary art that makes it so funny.

Although its title could lead you to assume otherwise, the exhibition is not an exercise in juvenile scatology. It does feature a Pop-style text painting by Carl Ostendarp in which exuberant cartoon letters spell "iffffpfp ," which might be read as mimicking the sound that would customarily punctuate the old "pull my finger" routine. But Ostendarp's painting, in rich hues of cherry red and bubblegum pink, has a formal elegance and sensuous craft that belies its dumb surface impact.

The show's spirit inclines less toward slapstick than a kind of hyper-sophisticated goofiness. In a four-part work by David Robbins , a publicity headshot of Jerry Lewis -- drinking from a mug with his own caricatured mug printed on it -- is flanked by framed pieces of black paper. The work's title, "The Sphinx," links two kinds of enigma: that of the comedian whose public persona hides his true inner self (assuming there is one), and that of the Minimalist monochrome, whose blankness might or might not conceal some inner meaning.

Tony Matelli's painted bronze, doll-size "Vegetable Man" also productively meditates on art and kitsch. The figure of a man composed of asparagus, string beans, a carrot, a cucumber, and other vegetables, it resembles a novelty item you could buy at a county fair. But it also alludes to the 16th-century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo , who created fantastic portraits of people composed of vegetables, and it mischievously comments on the interplay of illusionism, abstraction, and physical materials that has animated modern art from Manet to Koons.

Humor in art almost always entails a surprising relationship between form and content. Jason Schiedel has set up a television on its side so that it plays a video of a rapidly scrolling suburban landscape at a near vertical angle. In it, the little figure of a flailing man careens at a frightening speed over the ground as though falling down the face of an endless cliff. This is somehow hilariously funny , like a scene in a Buster Keaton movie .

Humor is also often found in works that view the world from a seemingly naive perspective. Michael Smith , who is best known as a preternaturally gifted comic performer, video artist, and conceptualist, here presents cheerfully wacky, faux-naive cartoon diagrams in which it seems he's trying to comprehend various fundamental systems. In one, he associates the bodily actions of eating, digesting, and walking with the more abstract or industrial categories of receiving, storage, and distribution.

The one piece in the show that lacks a comically revelatory interplay of form and concept is a papier-mâché puppet made by collaborators John Bell and Isaac Bell . It's a sweet representation of the devil, but it needs a puppeteer to bring it to life.

If you have time, it's worth watching a 45-minute video from 1985 in which the late, great monologist Spalding Gray interviews the aforementioned Joe Gibbons. You will learn the origin of a photograph on view elsewhere in the show in which Gibbons poses with a painting by Richard Diebenkorn . Under the aegis of an organization of his own creation called the Art Liberation Front and the influence of a considerable quantity of champagne, Gibbons had "liberated" the painting from an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California in 1977. It's a funny story.

Ken Johnson can be reached at Kejohnson@globe.com

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