The Joke Explained - Gallery essay for Pascale Giorgi's Worst Hits @ Goolugatup Heathcote
Does a good joke have to be explained? Most people would answer no. Does a good artwork have to be explained? Most people, depending on taste, would answer yes, no, or maybe. But what about humorous art? Does a joke that is an artwork have to be explained? Most people would not be able to answer this question.
The most successful humourist in contemporary art is probably still David Shrigley. In every big gallery you can find his crude sculptures and badly drawn cartoons, and while his works sometimes make me laugh, I have never read a convincing explanation. Are his works popular for their joke-value alone? Is it because they appeal to the public’s perception that contemporary art is pretentious? Can there be anything to say about his works beyond ha ha? In a sloppy three-circle diagram on an A4 page, Shrigley summed up the entire discourse surrounding humorous art: those who get it, those who don’t, and those who know there’s nothing to get. To have the latter disposition is what the Buddhists call enlightenment, but I am still trapped in the stone. Even if there is nothing to get, I want to make sure.
Most humorous art, I admit, requires no explanation. We love to laugh. We love to get things. We love to make fun of authority figures. We love to say, yes! I know that from memes, I know that from politics, and yes, I too remember my childhood. But humorous art is at its most interesting when it takes a step back, when the artist builds a colourbond fence between form, content and joke. The most humorous art is often the art that I don’t get.
In Pascale Giorgi’s retrospective show Worst Hits, one notices an evolution of both craft and jestivity running through her ceramics, from the inclusive jestivity of the eggplant jug, where the joke is gotten by all, to the selective jestivity of the Re-Store platters, where the joke is gettable to only those who live in North Perth; to the final tier of exclusive jestivity, where the joke is invisible, existing solely as an inside joke between the artist and herself. In Perth, there are many artists dealing in the first two tiers of jestivity, but as far as the third tier goes, Pascale has only two contemporaries: Dave Attwood, and my humorous neighbour Chips Jarell.
The joke of an exclusive jest is revealed not through form but explanation, provoking not laughter, but comprehension: “ah, I see”. In more immediate forms of comedy, eg. stand-up or dinner party conversation, an exclusive jest is merely a bad joke. One never believes their jest is exclusive until they are met with dead silence. Therefore, exclusive jestivity works best in mediated forms such as visual art, where silence and not getting it are the norm. As Peter Schvendahl writes, “looking at art is like, ‘Here are the answers. What were the questions?’” It is best if the viewer does their own detective work; no one wants a joke explained against their will, but if it's alright with you, I will anyway.
I could tell you about the Spaghetti Mansions of Nollamara, where the splendors of Roman antiquity turn kitsch against the Midland brick, but this is just selective jestivity - if you live in Perth, you already get it. Rather, I was asked to explain the jest behind the artist’s bust of Livia Druisilla, wife of emperor Augustus. What at first looks to be something stolen from the Vatican, signifying nothing particularly humorous, the work is actually an exclusive jest. In the words of the artist, it is based on “a shitty work I made in art school where I photoshopped ancient Roman busts to look more like me.” Ah, I see - yet this explanation raises even more questions. Why Mrs. Drusilla? What is the connection between Pascale Giorgi and Augustus’s wife?
The joke is still unexplained, but perhaps I can photoshop myself onto Giorgi for a moment and explain with a memory from my own life. In art school I too made a series of questionable works in which I photoshopped the faces of me and my friends onto the members of One Direction, however, because my computer skills were so good, everyone who looked at my screen prints didn’t notice any joke - they just thought I was a mildly pathetic 28 year old man who really loved One Direction, and even if I had been invited to explain, I wouldn’t have had a convincing explanation. “Why?” Because its fun. Because it makes me smile. Because it feels right and it feels so good. Perhaps this is a good enough reason to make humorous art. Sometimes to get something is to know there is nothing to get.