No Kidding

“To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.”

[Charlie Chaplin]

The group exhibition “No Kidding” was sparked by contemplation of the dual nature of humor and its ability to relieve pain, if only momentarily. The use of humor is characterized by an inherent tension: humor often preserves power structures, reproduced stereotypes and even prejudice, but at the same time—it is also a form of rebellion, offering freedom from social constraints and from reality via pleasure and amusement. As a tool for social criticism, humor can cross the lines, turn the “obvious” around, and point out all that is flawed and distorted, especially in times of uncertainty, difficulty, and distress.

The featured artworks address the identity of the exhibiting artists as well as social issues they confront in their everyday lives. Through emotional and material excess and the blurring of normative social boundaries, the humor in these works acts as a coping mechanism and a balm for pain. According to Henri Bergson, the basic condition for the creation of the comic effect is “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.”^[1] The suspension of emotion, which occurs in the comic moment, is generated by a temporary alienation from reality, which allows a change of perspective. The participating artists employ various comic and artistic devices, such as ironic reversal, self-humor, and defamiliarization, to create a different gaze at the commonplace and familiar. The humor arising from the works is bittersweet, unsettled, and dark on occasion. The diverse humorous expressions, including nonsense, parody, and grotesque, serve as a kind of resistance movement: a rebellion against real or imaginary authority, and even against the existential absurdity of life.

^[1] Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic [1900], trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2005), p. 3.