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Come to DeCordova and laugh at art! Lighten Up: Art with a Sense of Humor is a national group thematic exhibition that explores the use of humor in American contemporary art. The show will include hilarious paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, digital art, video art, and multi-media installations by 16 artists/artist teams.
Lighten Up is focused on artists who consistently employ humor as an overt, rather than a subtle or veiled, strategy in their work. The types of humor represented in Lighten Up include visual and verbal puns, satire, camp, irony, jokes at the expense of contemporary art and art history, the absurd, the bawdy, the unexpected, and the utterly ridiculous. While humor -- often laugh-out-loud humor -- pervades the artistic sensibilities presented in Lighten Up, it does not thoroughly circumscribe the meaning of the artworks. Humor is not valued as an end in itself, but as a means to afford access to a myriad of contemporary issues. By using humor, artists can break down a viewer's resistance, perform an end-run around reason, and create a receptive emotional climate for the delivery of impassioned, provocative, or subversive messages. Themes addressed by the artists in Lighten Up dovetail with many of the serious concerns of contemporary art theory and practice: gender, the body, feminism, personal and cultural identity, geopolitics, art historical revisionism, mass culture and consumerism, rampant technology, and the role of the artist.
Participating artists include established figures, long known for their commitment to humor as a vital means of contemporary expression, as well as emerging artists. Lighten Up includes work by Karl Baden, Teddy Dibble, Karin Giusti, Philip Knell, Cary Leibowitz/Candyass, Christopher " Lucky" Leone, Heidi Marston, Todd McKie, Pat Oleszko, Tom Otterness, Erika Rothenberg, Jeff Smith (CEO of American Emergency Safety Co.), Peter Thibeault, Jeffu Warmouth, William Wegman, and the artist teams of Steve Aishman and Heidi Marston, and Lev and Emre Yilmaz.
Lighten Up is organized by the DeCordova curatorial team of Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Nick Capasso, George Fifield, and Gillian Nagler, and is accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue; the publication has been generously funded by The Lois and Richard England Family Foundation. DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park is funded in part by the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency which also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Statement by the Curators:
Lighten Up is devoted to the overt use of humor in contemporary art, humor that is brash, bold, up-front, and actually funny.
Humor has been an important strategy for artists throughout history. This is especially true during the last few decades when the aesthetic floodgates have opened to myriad approaches to form, style, subject, and content. This prevailing climate of pluralism has been welcoming to jokesters and tricksters of all stripes. But humor in the visual arts today is dominated by subtle, even mercurial, types of wit based on clever irony, veiled meanings, and inside jokes. The artworks in this exhibition are different. They are made to provoke laughter, not knowing smirks. In Lighten Up, humor is meant to embrace, not exclude. Humor is used as a vehicle to widen audiences, to get viewers to let down their guard, and allow people to laugh with, rather than at, contemporary art. Of course, not everyone will find everything in the show humorous, and most viewers will disagree on whether any particular artwork is a gut-buster or a real groaner. Herein lies the challenge of creating humorous art, as well as the challenge of organizing exhibitions that purport to be funny.
The 16 artists and artist teams in Lighten Up rely on a number of types of overt humor: satire, self-deprecation, visual and verbal puns, black humor, the unexpected, the bawdy, the irreverent, and the ridiculous. But as funny as all this seems, these are works of art -- not just jokes. On the formal and aesthetic level, this is evident in the high level of craft and mastery of media displayed by each of the artists. The artworks in Lighten Up tend to be colorful, bold, graphic, and in all ways visually attention-grabbing, Moreover, on the level of content, the meaning in these works goes well beyond the overtly funny surface messages. By using humor, the artists break down a viewer's resistance perform an end-run around conscious critical (and often dismissive) faculties, and create a receptive emotional climate for the delivery of impassioned, provocative, or subversive messages. These dovetail with many of the serious concerns of contemporary art theory and practice: gender, the body, feminism, personal and cultural identity and stereotyping, geopolitics, religion, art historical revisionism, mass culture and consumerism, rampant technology, power and powerlessness, alienation, and the role of the artist.
The exhibition catalogue for Lighten Up: Art with a Sense of Humor was funded in part by a generous grant from The Lois and Richard England Family Foundation.
Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Senior Curator; Nick Capasso, Curator; George Fifield, Curator of Media Arts; Gillian Nagler, Curatorial Fellow
©2004 by Jeff "Jeffu" Warmouth |
