Comedy in Crises: Weaponising Humour in Contemporary Art

ISBN-13: 9783031189609 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 248 str.

Chrisoula Lionis

Opis

Comedy in Crises provides a novel contribution to an emerging comedy studies field, offering a fresh approach and understanding toward both the motivation and reception of humour in diverse contemporary art contexts. Drawing together research by artists, theorists, curators, and historians from around the world (from Palestine, to Greece, Brazil, and Indigenous Australia), it provides new insight into how humour is weaponised in contemporary art – focusing on its role in negotiating complex cultural identities, the expectations of art markets, the impact of historical legacies, as well as its role in bolstering cultural resilience. In so doing, this book explores a vital, yet under-explored, aspect of contemporary art. Over the last decade, we have witnessed an overwhelming emphasis on experiences of precarity and emergency in contemporary art discourse, reflecting a popular view that the decade following the outbreak of the global financial crisis has been marked by an intersection of constant crises (refugee crisis, sovereign debt crisis, environmental disaster, COVID). Comedy in Crises offers innovative analysis of the relationship between this context and the growing use of humour by artists from around the world, making clear the vital role of laughter in mediating the collective trauma that takes shape today in a period of protracted crisis.

Spis treści

1 Laughing in an Emergency: Weaponising Humour in Contemporary Art.- 

Fictional Pasts, Experimental Futures: Humour, Art and Temporality.- 

2 Humour, Critical Inversion and the ‘Age of Commemoration’: An Interview with Stefanos Tsivopoulos.- 

3 “And a More Offensive Spectacle I Cannot Recall”: Humour in …No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky (1999) by Suzanne Treister.- 

4 Humour, Collective Identities and Speculative Futures: An Interview with Larissa Sansour.- 

Towards an Art Historical Humour: Art Markets and Art Historical Legacies.- 

5 Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus: A Comic Anti-Monument.- 

6 After Salzmann: Thoughts on Humour, Erasure, Photography and Palestine.- 

7 The Significance of Authorial ‘Play Spaces’ for Seriously Funny Art.- 

Outsiders Out, and Insiders In: Humour, Art and Identity.- 

8 Humour as Heterotopic Friction.- 

9 Making "Funny" Art During the Greek Crisis... so what?.- 

10 Positioning Humour within Indigenous Paradigms: An Interview with Richard Bell .- 

11 Tragedies Interrupted: An Interview with Voluspa Jarpa.- 

A Turn to the Right: Humour and Spectres of Violence.- 

12 Art as Archive: Subversive Humour and Authenticity in Brazilian art.- 

13 Thoughts and Prayers: Laughter and Parody in Post-Columbine America.- 

14 Is Art a Means for Resistance in Times of Global Crisis? Public Art, Humour and De-Fictionalization of Far-Right Narratives in Today’s Italy.- 

    

O autorze

Chrisoula Lionis is a writer and cultural producer based between Athens, Greece, and Manchester, UK. She is author of Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (2016/2022), Co-Director of pedagogical platform Artists for Artists, and Research Fellow on AHRC project Understanding Displacement Aesthetics at the University of Manchester.   

Blurb

Comedy in Crises provides a novel contribution to an emerging comedy studies field, offering a fresh approach and understanding toward both the motivation and reception of humour in diverse contemporary art contexts. Drawing together research by artists, theorists, curators, and historians from around the world (from Palestine, to Greece, Brazil, and Indigenous Australia), it provides new insight into how humour is weaponised in contemporary art – focusing on its role in negotiating complex cultural identities, the expectations of art markets, the impact of historical legacies, as well as its role in bolstering cultural resilience. In so doing, this book explores a vital, yet under-explored, aspect of contemporary art. Over the last decade, we have witnessed an overwhelming emphasis on experiences of precarity and emergency in contemporary art discourse, reflecting a popular view that the decade following the outbreak of the global financial crisis has been marked by an intersection of constant crises (refugee crisis, sovereign debt crisis, environmental disaster, COVID). Comedy in Crises offers innovative analysis of the relationship between this context and the growing use of humour by artists from around the world, making clear the vital role of laughter in mediating the collective trauma that takes shape today in a period of protracted crisis.

Chrisoula Lionis is a writer and cultural producer based between Athens, Greece, and Manchester, UK. She is author of Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (2016/2022), Co-Director of pedagogical platform Artists for Artists, and Research Fellow on AHRC project Understanding Displacement Aesthetics at the University of Manchester.