It has been a long time now since the Futurists and Dadaists questioned the serious conscience of Art and, since that time, humour has been sidelined in artistic exploration to the extent that the idea being more important than the image has metamorphosed into the serious idea is now more important than the image.
In the mid and late sixties, artists like myself explored the vaste and intriguing world of the Absurd in an attempt, like Duchamp, the Futurists’ Theatre and Post Russian Revolutionary writers like Kharms, to undermine the capitalist stronghold that is product-based Art. We travelled through Destructive Art, Happenings, Concrete Poetry and Spontaneous events to champion the meaningless and to question art’s pseudo rational legacy.
Unfortunately, like the later destructive art of Punk Music, the capitalist establishment, hell-bent on profit over taste, hijacked the absurd and made Surrealism and Conceptual Art an acceptable face of artistic commodity. They have both now become one of the mainstays of contemporary art and have taken on a seriousness that we sixties artists would never have dreamt of.
It is with this background that I am now trying to exhume the buried michievous nature of Art, to make it humorous and accessible again. Humour communicates with everyone in that laughter is a universal language created initially to undermine an unjustifiably serious context. When will the work of the Mighty Boosh or Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer become as seriously considered as the absurdist champion which is Waiting For Godot.
So the campaign is now on to reinvent Absurdism and the meaningless nature of art. Join if you dare and we’ll laugh all the way to the abyss!


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