Comedy in Crises

Concentrating on the interstice between micro and macro histories that reflect contemporary political issues, Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ work is clearly bound to issues of temporality and memory. Despite widespread acknowledgement that artist’s work avoids association with any singular genre, the humorous dimensions of Tsivopoulos’ output remain overlooked. With an aim to understand the impetus behind humour within his practice, Uroš Čvoro and Chrisoula Lionis interview Stefanos Tsivopoulos about the relationship between temporality, memory and the politics of recognition in the sly forms of humour that puncture the artist’s works.

This chapter circles around a joke made in … No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky—a CD ROM artwork by Suzanne Treister in 1999—in which the titular character attempts to time travel to the Holocaust in order to save her grandparents but mistakenly arrives on the set of Schindler’s List in 1993. In this joke, Treister points to the potency of Spielberg’s representation in the 1990s imaginary, such that it would supplant memory of the Holocaust itself—or, indeed, impede time travel. Gillian Rose’s 1995 essay ‘Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and Representation’ characterises Schindler’s List in terms of ‘Holocaust Piety’, a tendency she observed in 1990s representations of the Holocaust that sought to render it a moral imperative rather than an historical event. The stakes in such an approach for Rose are clear: posing that the Holocaust was emblematic for the breakdown history, rather than continuous with it, delegitimised its aesthetic representation, thus diminishing the possibilities for overcoming its legacy. By following the humorous exploits of Rosalind Brodsky—the protagonist in … No Other Symptoms and also Treister’s alter ego—this chapter contends that the work offers a model for an unsentimental engagement with the Holocaust that situates it within representation and in history.

Anastasia Murney interviews renowned Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, focusing on her characteristic employment of science fiction tropes and aesthetic conventions with reference to her video trilogy: Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012) and In The Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016). Navigating the relationship between humour and speculative futures, this conversation explores how Sansour’s use of humour relates to shared cultural and national signifiers, issues of gender and collective identity and a re-imagining of Palestine’s past and its future.

A particular matrix of Western photography of Palestine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that photographers often produced images for multiple markets. These photographic practices were broad, ranging from popular images focusing on well-known biblical themes to scholarly imaging practices that aimed to highlight the Biblical past in disciplines like archaeology and anthropology. The interaction between imaging for scholars and for the general public was grounded in various modes of biblical narrative that bridged the distance between home audiences in the West. The net result was to make the far off ‘Holy Land’ familiar through ‘biblified’ imaging tropes within a subtext of colonial control. In considering the historical modes by which images were appended for publication Zananiri’s practice asks whether the problematic histories of Western photographic production can be remedied through artistic intervention. Zananiri’s work intervenes in these black-and-white images to question how humour can unsettle, reduce, or even negate the colonial baggage these images carry.

This chapter argues that comedy in art needs more nuanced, academic attention. It posits that humour is not necessarily transformative and that funny artworks should not be superficially compared as a genre. Instead, it is argued that a play space for the ‘seriousness’ of the artworld is first needed for artwork jokes to be more effective; to provoke debate and make change. It uses an interdisciplinary approach, traversing feminism, authorship theories, art history and comedy studies to consider authorial dissidence as one form of creating a play space which allows for the appreciation of seriously funny art. It uses a series of artistic case studies, ranging from the early twentieth century to date, which all straddle the inside and out of the capitalist, Euro-American, patriarchal artworld via their incongruous authorships, such as pseudonyms or anonymity. They are thus discussed as artworld jesters who poke fun at the ‘court’, their liminal positions serve as unique perspectives from which to analyse the agency of critical humour in art, contributing to this emerging scholarship.

Historically, the Welsh language has been used divisively when defining Welsh identity. For many native non-Welsh speakers within Wales, this has generated a feeling of exclusion from the national narrative. Questioning how Anglo-Welsh identity is presented and problematised, Jones’s artistic practice employs humour in a personal and a self-critical way. Jones argues that in political and artistic contexts humour is fundamentality about ‘heterotopic friction’, where multiple heterogeneous frames of utterances create conflict, rub up against or graft onto one another. Jones’s performances employ heterotopic friction to amplify how imagined sites encounter the actual in order to reveal a plurality of propositions that challenge dominant concepts of cultural identity.

Discussing issues including indigeneity, authenticity and art market demands, Eugenia Flynn’s interview with leading Australian artist Richard Bell positions the work of artist within Indigenous paradigms. Informed by Bell’s claim of being an ‘activist masquerading an artist’, Flynn’s interview uncovers how ontological and axiological praxes of communal responsibility are demonstrated in Bell’s work, where humour is weaponised to challenge issues including colonialism, capitalism and racism.

Internationally acclaimed Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa has a long trajectory of working with the collective memory of multiple generations in Latin America who were raised within repressive, authoritarian regimes or suffered their ongoing consequences. Centring on several works and exhibitions such as No-History’s Library (2010–2019), Altered Views (2019) and Sindemia (2021), Alkisti Efthymiou’s interview with Jarpa focuses on the artist’s lasting engagement with archival materials and the ways—often humorous, ironic or ludic—in which they are animated and manipulated in her decolonial practice.

Humour was used as a weapon in Brazilian art during the military dictatorship (1964–1985) and today it continues to encourage social awareness and anonymous cultural participation that challenges government practices. Tracing the legacy and ongoing impact of humour in Brazilian art, Carvalho argues that shifts in artistic practices (particularly in relation to the archive) have continued to play a subversive role in a time of political unrest. Drawing discussion around the work of artists Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio, Paulo Bruscky, Cao Guimarães, Regina Silveira and Adriana Varella, Carvalho assesses how and why humour has recently been used as a weapon against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, as an intervention against political corruption, and as a form of protest against the erosion of LGBTQIA+ and indigenous rights.

Since January 1, 2019, over 430 mass shootings occurred in the United States. Vigils, temporary memorials and social media hashtags attempt to comfort the public against the threat of violence in the age of mass shootings. However, what about those that turn to laughter and humour in response to violence? How can we critique violence using parodic devices, rather than ‘thoughts and prayers’? Responding to these questions, Altomonte considers how artists use parody and humour to inform the public about the increase in gun-related violence in America. Focusing on works by WhIsBe and Mitchell Gaudet, Altomonte considers how each piece operates as a conversational device used to enact social change. Focusing on interactive installations that invite viewer-participants to consider a future where tactical gear is required for students (WhIsBe), or call upon carnival aesthetics to participants shoot silhouettes of bodies while avoiding fleeing children (Gaudet), Altomonte investigates how these works encourage participants to contemplate the line between parody and reality, whilst operating as sobering critiques of the mass shooting epidemic in the United States.

In Italy, the rise of radical narratives in public discourse has coincided with the popularisation of nationalist and exclusionary ideas which have been promoted by mainstream far-right parties with the support of neo-fascist organisations over the last decade. Matteo Salvini, the former Deputy Prime Minister (2018–2019), and Giorgia Meloni, the current Prime Minister (elected in 2022), have become the main spokespersons for an Italian far-right which showcases authoritarian and exclusionary attitudes that are spread chiefly via social media. At the same time, far-right propaganda and politics have also been met with creative opposition and civic dissent which uses humour and satire. Street artworks by artists such as Beast, TvBoy, Random Guy, Ex-Voto and many others have appeared on the walls of several Italian cities and challenged the main actors on the Italian political scene by becoming powerful tools of visual critique in the public space. While many of these works have engendered reactions such as censorship or vandalisation, they have nevertheless contributed to highlighting and amplifying the disruptive potential of civic dissent expressed through public art and humour. Analysing works by these arttists, this chapter investigates the potential of street art and creative protest to stimulate resistance through political action, and to raise social awareness by providing critical perspectives for collective debate in times of global crisis.