Serious Review – Headstands, Bananas, and a Dog Watching Porn Reveal the Silly Side of Photography | art

AAn exhibition of conceptual photography with a sense of humor? seriously? Sprüth Mager’s new group show with that title makes its case over four floors crowded with still and moving images of clowns, costumes, Star Wars figurines, dogs watching porn, colorless cheeseburgers, and performers running on top of a milk carton.

I’m engrossed by one of the newest works in the show, Martine Syms’ She Mad: The Non-Hero, a conceptual TikTok inspired by Lil Nas It’s a scathing satire of social media norms that debunks ideas about success.

I was snapped out of that thought by the noise of screaming. But I Didn’t Step on the Joke Button is Louise Lawler’s seven-minute 1972-1981 audio work Birdcalls, in which she denounces sexism in the art world by shouting out the names of 28 famous white male artists in the style of various bird calls. The idea is to present nature as a deception, in the same way that art history is merely a form of power. It’s also so silly that you can’t help but smile.

Lawler is part of a group of artists associated here with 1970s-1990s feminism and conceptualism, a kind of confrontational and provocative humor that targets female stereotypes in media and advertising. Androgynous Sarah Lucas brazenly bites a banana. A collection of Cindy Sherman’s works that sharply satirizes female stereotypes found in cinema and the media. The colorful 2018 work shows four heavily coiffed figures wearing colorful tulle gowns, looking at the camera with something between a smile and a frown. They appear to be sitting in the sea, a dissonance that makes the strange image even stranger. In another photo, Birgitte Jørgensen wears a 3D oven-shaped “housewives apron.” Their visual puns are a revolt against stifling gender norms and they work.

It’s great when artists don’t take themselves too seriously. Feminists were willing to make themselves look ridiculous to show that social rules and repressed sexual desires were farcical. Other artists also adopt this strategy, depicting the body as a ridiculous plastic form that can be absurd and obscene. Bruce Nauman pulls his mouth and stretches it into strange, goofy shapes. In his L’Empereur series, German photographer Thomas Ruff walks around a room, wearing brown and yellow clothing to match a dark color scheme. As he slid and dove between the chairs and the standing lamp, it was a slapstick moment for an artist not usually known for his cheer.

A group of artists find humor in objects and assemblies, such as Thomas Demand with his clever image of a slipper stuck under a door. One wall is filled with mundane, corny pictures of a vacuum cleaner, a slice of bread, or a bucket—humor is subjective, to be sure, but it’s about as fun as a root canal.

The show starts to get angry when it starts mimicking other works of art – Ruff reenacts Fishley/Weiss, Jonathan Monk nods to Lawler, John Waters sends in Gorski. But the jokes don’t really work unless you get the art history references in. It’s easier to laugh at Anita Grzeskowska’s parody of Sherman – which plays out in A Room with Sherman – – it’s a caricature, a satire twisted into a satire.

Conceptual art is often silly, so it doesn’t take much to turn its bombast and conceit into a joke. William Wegman’s experiment has the best line in the show: the first two images are captioned “as a headstand experiment.” The second says: “Everything has been turned upside down.” One of the famous works in the exhibition is the late British artist Keith Arnatt’s poignant 1969 performance photograph “Self-Burial,” a series of nine images in which the artist slowly sinks into a hole he has dug and eventually disappears into the ground. The images were broadcast on German television in 1969 for a few seconds every evening without explanation, which must have been disturbing. If the idea of ​​an artist disappearing appealed to many viewers, the last laugh is on us, because ultimately Earth is where we are all headed.

The biggest laughs come thanks to John Smith’s 12-minute video, which was shot on a 16mm lens in 1976 and given room to itself here. In The Girl Chewing Gum, a voice shouts directions to the action taking place on a London street, but the director is actually a narrator, describing the movements of unwitting bystanders with increasingly imaginative relish. It’s funny, but also eerily prescient in its anticipation of fake news and false narratives.

The problem with this show is that humor is subjective, cultural, and temporary, and many of the gags here wouldn’t elicit laughter today. There are a few additions that I couldn’t figure out at all: how Carrie Mae Weems’ photo of a set of salt and pepper shakers worked for me.

Ironically, “Serious” is less about laughter than it is about humor as a tool to challenge policies and values. Through playfulness and wit, conceptual artists pushed photography beyond documentary to a less stable, more experimental place. But can conceptual art make you laugh? Maybe not.