The Trick in the Smile.Artium Collection
02 October 2015 – 28 August 2016
Artium Museum
South Gallery
Frantzia 24,
01002 Vitoria – Gasteiz
945 20 90 23
www.artium.org
The exhibition is about the use of humour and its extensive semantic family in contemporary art as a way to gain further insight into the Artium Collection and, by extension, into our context: the place and time in which we live.
The Collection has been presented many times over recent years with a focus on various aspects of the complexity of our society. These approaches dealt with socially critical political readings, reflections on individual and collective identities, the analysis of formal aspects or interpretations of different artistic trends. All these artistic movements have included, in a more or less explicit manner, approaches using wit and humour that incongruously or unexpectedly question and discuss this reality and encounters with them have led to complicity and smiles. On this occasion, we have aimed to highlight all these nuances that comprise an intentionally comical, scandalous or ironic view of reality and to map the tools of the different strategies and practices within the Collection’s own context.
Based on this perspective, the most common terms that are used to analyse and describe the works in the Collection have been reviewed and only a very few include such words as “humour”, “laughter”, “funny”… Nonetheless, the term “irony” is one of the most common to be assigned to these assessments. Others from this same semantic family can be found with more difficulty: satire, cynicism, parody, radical, absurd, grotesque, sardonic, crude, witty… Contemporary art undoubtedly shares with humour a distant and complex view of reality. Its increased use in art seems to respond to the essentially absurd outlook to which progress seems to be leading us. The end of utopias, of great speeches – whether ideological or religious – and the constant presence of uncertainty provide the perfect context, for lack of arguments, in order to develop ironic attitudes, the presence of incongruity and absurdity, through which to interpret reality.
In most cases, art is not interested in humour for humour’s sake, but in its ability to tackle problems, deal with the ridiculous or absurd aspects of life, while simultaneously empowering the viewer to demystify the preconceived conventions and ideas we have about reality. The Trick in the Smile invites us to appreciate the division produced by humour and irony, resources that multiply perspectives on usually complex issues to address and that, alongside wit and laughter, carry with them a certain amount of profundity.
It has not been easy to determine and suggest a shared story about what humour or laughter implies. Breton, like Freud, defined it as the negation of reality, a splendid affirmation of the pleasure principle. Other theories locate the origins of humour in incongruity (B. Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kant…), in a feeling of superiority over other people’s misfortune (H. Bergson) or in the release of repressed energy (Freud, Lacan…). From a sociological point of view, based on the experimentation of humour, it could be said that all humans share this homo ludens condition, although social behaviour, values and norms will decisively affect how it occurs and how humour is understood.