Currently reading: Gillian Whiteley – JUNK: Art and the Politics of Trash (Part 4)
Chapter 4: The Comedy of Waste: A Load of British Rubbish
Counterworlds and Mirth – The term counterworlds comes from Roland Barthes’ Redeeming Laughter (p.207); an upside down world.
“For centuries, art has employed humour as a political tool” – Lawrence Alloway. In Junk Culture (1981) Lawrence Alloway comments on the ludicrous nature of waste. “The ‘comedy of waste’ occurs in the oscillation between its drawing our attention to its commonality and familiarity and simultaneously, to its strangeness. (p.80)
“Artists have injected a wide range of forms of humour – including irony and slapstick – to break down barriers of taste, question authority and encourage laughter in the museum environment.” – Judith Olch Richards see also Dominic Molon & Michael Rooks – Situation Comedy: Humour in recent art (NY, ICI, 2005) (p.78)
Simon Critchley asserts that humour has strong connections to place (returns us to physicality) but also to locality; to specific and circumscribed ethos. (p.81)
“The comic transcends the reality of the ordinary, everyday existence.” – John Berger (p.83)
Michael Billig talks about the social hierarchy of humour in Laughter & Ridicule, p.74) (p.84) Billig identifies 3 paradoxes of humour: Universality and particularity; Social and antisocial aspects; Mysterious resistance to analysis and easily understandable. (p.85)
Whitely cites Sigmund Freud’s proposition that jokes are inherently social but express the unconscious desires and secret limitations of the individual (The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious). Freud identified the comic with the objet trouvé as something found. “The joke is made, comedy is found – in persons above all, and only by extensions in objects, situations and the like.” (ibid p.175) (p.84-5)
In Industrial Dereliction, Getting Wasted and More British Rubbish, Whiteley notes that the 1980s heralded the return of the object and emergence of a young generation of artists and ‘New British Sculpture.’ Cited artists include Richard Wentwiorth, Bill Woodrow, Tony Cragg, Cornelia Parker, Hew Locke, Brian Griffiths and Noble & Webster. (p.98-9)
Whitely asserts; “Like art, humour is open to multiplicity of readings depending on hermeneutics and the subjectivity of its audience.” (p.84)
