We can all agree that Paul McCarthy’s “butt plug” sculpture is funny. Provocative, yes, but really just fucking funny. The work is called Tree and been shown in public from Paris to Los Angeles, but really it’s a big fucking butt joke that was put at the Place Vendôme in the French capital and caused a stir because, well, it was a butt plug placed in front of some 19th century buildings. It’s an old story now, but it always needs to be brought up when we have conversations surrounding an almost taboo subject of whether art can be funny and critically successful at the same time. Mostly I don’t care what critics say, but history books do, so that is why we need to have this conversation in the first place.
Of all the topics I wanted to tackle at the beginning of the year, I wasn’t really thinking about being funny. Or art being funny, I should say, because sure, I know art can be funny but what do we do with laughter and satire in the arts? We usually just describe it as such and move on. Comedy and satire struggles when it comes to being considered real art, which is why comedic actors and actresses don’t win major acting awards and a good comedy better be dark humor in order to get critical attention. We have a hard time with laughter when we go into, say, a museum. It’s like laughing isn’t allowed. Yes, you can smile, and if you are on a date you can pretend to know more about the art than you actually do, but you will feel out of place if you laugh. This is tested by science.
Shit talk, now this is a different subject. That art world excels at this, perhaps has even mastered it. Everyone has an opinion about what they don’t like, what isn’t good, what will never be good, what is overrated, over-appreciated and you hear it, read it, see it. Shit talk can be funny. I’m pretty sure the best art accounts tend to just be shit talk meets gossip meets more shit talk, so much so that when those accounts tell you what you like you are shocked because you only know them for what they despise. We are a confused group. I’ve always thought it was much harder to talk about the things you love and like than the things you don’t. It’s really hard to be positive and have opinions of liking rather than opinions of disgust and overall malaise. That may not be connected to the “can art be funny and taken serious” topic, but it’s worth noting as we look ahead.
I asked a friend/gallerist during Art Basel Miami Beach last month if she thought selling “funny” or “overtly ironically humorously topical” work was difficult and she confirmed my suspicion that absurd works that pushed the boundaries of normal decorum were a better sell than “one liner work.” We weren’t talking about Beeple’s work at Basel, which was neither funny, good, ironic, serious, etc (see, easy to hate on things), but more of work in the vein of Kunath, Shrigley, McCarthy, Juliano-Villani, Wasted Rita, to name a few. Those are collected names who command attention, and are humor-irony-forward, and for the most part, are taken seriously.
There are two shows of note that got me on this subject so early in the year, one being Trey Abdella’s Cold Front at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, and Paco Pomet’s Planet Circus opening at Richard Heller Gallery (and can’t help to thing that Pomet is citing Monty Python’s Flying Circus for his title, as I know he is fan). Both artists are satirists in their own way. Abdella is the cinematic antagonist, creating incredibly vivid and bizarre moments with hyperreal authenticity. Pomet is like a Disney animator with a subtle sinister political commentary. What I admire with both is that there are a multitude of ways of looking at the work, from technical skill to what the joke could be. And in the case of these two shows, a joke is implied in the title.
For Abdella, painting strange is a means to explore what is anxious. He’s a cultural observer, and in this show, he is working in the vein of where “ceremony, tradition, and commercialization intersect within the visual language of winter.” Maybe it’s just me, but a couple lovingly skating together where underneath the ice below them is a lifeless body is macabre and very much of the moment. It’s dark, a reflection of the times we live in where pleasure and leisure seem at odds with the horrors around us. A couple enjoying a date while death is just below them. It’s hard not to think about the murder in Minnesota, these horrific events that we are confronted with and living in each day whilst a TikTok real with a review of the best street tacos in San Diego comes right after. It’s a conflicting balance that often doesn’t equate. But Abdella’s satire works here, and the work is technically stunning. He is pushing mediums, pushing us into something absurd. He has found a way to paint and assemble the ways in which we hold a secret, both familial and familiar.
Paco has long been working in this space, the classical painter who elongates and stretches the imagination. You almost are looking at a normal, tranquil scene, but within the details, he is pressing upon the viewer both political and social satire. The gallery calls his style a use of humor as a critical strategy, and perhaps that is the point of this entire thought exercise. How can the artist use humor to showcase a thoughtful and poignant but not saccharine or too much of a punchline. A few years ago, Paco noted “I happen to like realism precisely because I tend to be very observant, even though I’m more critical with reality. As a result, I think the humor in some of my work has somehow turned more bitter and caustic.” But oddly, with this show, I see an evolution.
That seems to be a central point in many of the works I have been looking at in recent years that deal with humor. They come from an almost exhausted, bitter place, which is quite easy to justify. What I do like about both of these artists is that I feel like there is a polarity between the personal and the universal, but humor is the bridge that connects it all.
I know we started this with a butt plug. Which is collectively funny. But it continues to bring up a conversation that I want to explore more this year, which is how humor is being used in art and how we can embrace satire. It feels like totalitarianism makes even satire difficult, because it sometimes feels out of touch. Satire is being used on every single reel that sometimes you desperately want something genuine. So I get this push and pull.
But right now, Abdella and Pomet are two of the best at painting and assembling humor into their practice, both serious and silly. This is where we start the conversation…
Text by Evan Pricco
Above image is Paul McCarthy’s Tree in Paris
