Feeling for art world's elusive funny bone
Comic works can miss mark
Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
Sunday, June 9, 2002

Why does humor so often fail in contemporary art?

Many comic works provoke a laugh on first viewing but quickly show themselves to be no more than mummified punch lines. Some of In other cases, the comic aspects of an artwork may succeed because they are not immediately obvious. Take Andy Warhol's early "Dance Diagram" paintings, which purport literally to transcribe on canvas footwork patterns from old dance manuals. (Two are showing in "Andy Warhol Retrospective" at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, through Aug. 16.) Some of their early viewers recognized the "Dance Diagrams" as satires of Clement Greenberg's then-current doctrine that flatness was a mark of seriousness in contemporary painting. But other comic implications of the "Dance Diagrams" are still emerging. Warhol's pop had been a rejoinder to the machismo of Abstract Expressionism, and the "Dance Diagrams" may refer to Jackson Pollock's legendary "dance" around the floorbound canvas on which he dripped paint. Ed Harris reminded us how it was done in the movie "Pollock."

Nothing can guarantee the success of humor in contemporary art, but the key to its difficulty probably lies with modernism's ur-comedian, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp (1887-1968) has been blamed for many things. But give him credit for opening a vein of humor in modern art that no one before him had seen or acknowledged. In what became a notorious and foundational gesture, Duchamp in 1917 upended a urinal, titled it "Fountain," signed it with a fictitious name and declared it a work of sculpture. ("Fountain" was not the first "readymade," but it remains the most scandalous.) An editioned replica of the lost "original" "Fountain," authorized by the artist late in his life, appeared in "Dreaming With Open Eyes: Dada and Surrealist Art From the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection," earlier this spring at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

On the face of it, "Fountain" was a puerile prank, yet art historians and critics continue to debate its implications. "Fountain" can still give a consoling laugh to those looking for proof that modern art is a vast conspiracy of people kidding themselves about what things mean. But part of the object's wit was to point up the fact that art in the modern era -- if not at all times -- is made by the behavior of many people besides the artist.

In a world of accelerating travel and communication, Duchamp intuited, the whole contemporary landscape of objects and beliefs may impinge on what an artist does. This puts the modern artist in a position of essentially comic vulnerability and opportunity, always in danger of being outflanked by an audience or an interpretive context he has not considered. Here too stands revealed the essential ingredient of humor in modern art: the artist's uncertain distance from what he puts forward as his work. Duchamp submitted the "original" "Fountain" to the First Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which he helped plan. He anticipated that it would embarrass the organizers' promise to show every work submitted, and it did. They rejected "Fountain," unable to believe that anyone could seriously intend such a thing as an artwork.

More than 80 years later, Stanford University art historian Wanda Corn showed how such an intention might have been possible, even in 1917. In her book "The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935," Corn writes of "Fountain" that Duchamp's "choice of a urinal was a brilliant act of cross-cultural investigation, that of a French visitor researching American-style modernity. Indeed, 'Fountain' may be the most Eurocentric reading of the New World since 16th century Europeans represented it as a Garden of Eden peopled by idealized natives of great athletic prowess and handsome physique." Duchamp's choice to live in New York added cultural distance to the detachment that, by all accounts, was his by nature. The durability of Duchamp's seemingly throwaway art gestures holds a critical clue to why humor so rarely succeeds in contemporary art.

When we are too sure where an artist stands with respect to his work's humor, we are likely to find that the work lacks staying power. Consider the famous ceramic self-portrait "California Artist" (1984) by Arneson (1930-1992). Arneson portrays himself as a sculpture bust on a chipped stucco pedestal next to which a marijuana plant sprouts. He wears only a denim jacket over his paunchy torso and confronts the spectator sporting lensless shades that reveal him to be an empty shell, literally an airhead. The piece is fine ridicule of the East Coast art establishment's image of the California artist as a juvenile hedonist. But the craft finesse that gives the work rhetorical force also locks it into a comic posture that cannot stay funny for long. Jokes do not make good monuments, as even Claes Oldenburg discovered when he began to turn his brilliantly funny sketches for public sculpture into the real thing.

The potential for memorable comic art lies now with the posture of the artist: temperamental, philosophical, political. For that reason most of the memorably funny art around now is conceptual. Happily, the Bay Area is something of a hotbed of comic conceptualism. Slow-burn conceptual humor takes various forms in two current shows: Charles Goldman (a San Francisco native now in New York) at Traywick Gallery in Berkeley (through Saturday) and Guy Overfelt at Linc Real Art in San Francisco (through June 30). Another example, "Over" (1999) by John Hoppin, was recently shown -- or posted -- at Southern Exposure. Here it is in its entirety: "This experience is now over and has left you completely unchanged.