The Self Is a Funny Thing: A Critique of Humour and the Self in Art

Abstract

A concern with one’s personal appearance and sense of self and the resulting performance and communicability of this self is particularly relevant today. States of alienation that are present in the experience of electronic social media are analogous amplifications of those experienced in non-virtual contexts. Overcoming electronically amplified states of alienation is important for contemporary life and art-making because it is a direct pathway toward improved communication, self-knowledge and individual freedom. My recent visual art practice reveals that humour has a direct effect on alienated states of the self. Central to the phenomenon of the subject is the way humour engages with the objective and non-objective qualities of self. Through cross-disciplinary visual, theoretical and art-historical research, I address the question how does humour in contemporary art confront, critique and dissolve self-conscious states of alienation? My visual practice and associated research also address the way we modify and construct selves in order to deal with public and private spaces, such as the art museum and the artist’s studio. Towards this aim, my approach to this project has been to develop my visual art practice through studio experimentation and public exhibition. These exhibitions and events (broadly titled Expanded Portraits) have occurred in tandem with an art-historical case study of key works by German visual artist Martin Kippenberger. Working through the methods involved in producing and presenting Expanded Portraits and analysing Kippenberger’s self-portrait paintings and Peter sculptures, I make a conceptual link between Bergson’s theory of the comic and Hegel’s concept of alienation. Both theories describe similar visual and conceptual phenomena where people appear or are thought of as things and things as people. The subject/object relationship is superimposed onto the artist/artwork discourse and discussed as a form of what David Goldblatt (1993) refers to as ventriloqual exchange. These discursive processes, central to how I make art, extend to involve groups of agents, collaborators, assistants, writers and audiences. This inter-subjective activity is also a means of constructing and maintaining our own works in progress, our selves. These processes have been important ways to expand the conceptual complexity of my interdisciplinary art and a way of linking historically discrete projects in my practice under the one overarching visual approach.