Installation image of “Smile” and “Camuflage” by Kasia Fudakowski at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s La Jolla location, 2015 (photo by Pablo Mason)
LOS ANGELES — There’s nothing funny about art. Writing art criticism is a serious endeavor. But at some point, the performance of professionalism in the art world just started to feel like one big joke, and I began noticing a crossover between the art and comedy worlds. Artists, like stand-up comics, were poking fun at their audiences and the artist and the comedian were both in on the joke that is life’s absurdities. Today, more performing artists especially are employing tropes of stand-up comedy — observational humor, deadpan, surreal, improvisation, insult, dark humor, wit/word play, and the catchall ‘alt comedy’ — either playing off of these tropes or deconstructing them altogether.
Artist Kasia Fudakowski, for instance, is more interested in the philosophy of comedy than making audiences laugh out loud. In “Smile” (2011), which was recently included in the show Laugh In: Art, Comedy, Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the artist deconstructs a typical stand-up comedy act, considers the affective nature of laughter and physical act of smiling, while also pseudo-mock performing her own art jokes. The performance begins with her strolling onto the stage, putting on a brick-camouflaged shirt — perhaps a reference to the brick wall backdrop of many “concrete” comedy clubs — and soon grabs the mic and starts her “set.”
Read the essay on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/199493/performance-artists-use-stand-up-tropes-but-not-for-laughs/
Special thanks to Roni Ginach for working with me through artistic questions relating to psychoanalytic theory, performance art, and comedy.
