Art Gets Funny

By Erik Wenzel

Humor is the most interesting avenue being explored in art today. There has always been satire and caricature, but not humor so much. I can look at Hogarth's work and appreciate it as a work of satire, but I don't look at Hogarth and start laughing. I really like Hogarth, but I just can't laugh at him the way I do when I laugh at David Shrigley, or The Simpsons. But then I think about Hogarth's title, "The Father of English Art," and his masterpiece about how great English beef is -- now that is funny. Just as with Hogarth, the kind of humor in art today definitely comes from its environment; it starts by entertaining us. Especially when it is speaking in an analogous medium like video art. An artist is as much a member of contemporary culture as anyone else is. Perhaps more, as artists are extremely conscious of it and involved with it. It is one thing to be extremely critical of pop culture and to try and live outside of it, but to engage in a dialogue with it as Christian Jankowski does is a much more interesting venture.

One of the great uses of humor is that it allows one to approach and critique things from a unique angle, and, through its indirectness, paradoxically, to deal with issues in contemporary culture in a direct way. Christian Jankowski makes funny videos that talk about these things all at the same time. The videos are at once serious and extremely hilarious, coexisting as autonomous works of art and as self-examinations. In his The Holy Artwork, Jankowski collaborated with Harvest Fellowship Church to create a video that deals with the sanctity of contemporary art.

As pastor Peter Spencer begins speaking to the congregation, Jankowski comes up to the front of the church where he unexpectedly falls down. The congregation is startled, especially when the pastor proceeds to deliver his message while Jankowski lies on the floor, incapacitated. Pastor Spencer speaks, not only of the religious underpinnings of art, but also the workings of what is taking place before the viewers' eyes. Beginning with the jerky motion of the camera held by the artist, the point of view changes when he falls down. We are taken aback as he falls out of the picture suddenly. The video cuts to a steady studio camera and Pastor Spencer explains that what we are watching is a sermon in a religious context, a television program at home, and a piece of art in a gallery setting, simultaneously.

It seems common to make a piece in which the very medium itself is laid bare, where the breakdown of the suspension of disbelief occurs, but in The Holy Artwork, this disbelief comes when the video breaks down. We cannot believe what we are seeing. Depending on who's watching it, it is either hilarious, serious, or sacrilegious. Wow, a Holy Trinity of art. It is pure comic genius to see the corpselike Jankowski lying on the stage, DV camera loosely held, as the Praise Team performs a generic love song to God. Having grown up in a church much like the one where the "Holy Work of Art" takes place, I am especially touched and conscious of that play, or rather that tug of war, between the serious and the joke. I'm not sure how I feel -- am I laughing at it for its comic elements, or in a derisive way? And what of the message of context the Pastor gives? He speaks to his congregation about looking at art in a multidimensional way, but he speaks to us who view it as a piece of art, and that art is a sacred thing. It wasn't that long ago that the line Matisse says to Picasso in the film Surviving Picasso was a mantra for me: "Ah, but we do pray. When we are painting we are praying." When work like this can bring up so many issues at once, it truly is a miracle.

This video is a discourse on art; it deals with emerging issues of context head on, at once discussing them, but being an example as well. It is a document of a religious gathering and a piece of religion itself. It is a work of humor, and, by far, the most entertaining and fulfilling thing I've seen in a long time. It is all this at once. Let us pray:

"Father, we want "The Holy Artwork" to make people in the church understand the value of contemporary art and we pray that this artwork, this Holy Artwork, will be a bridge between art, religion, and television." Amen.

Illustration by Erik Wenzel.

Video still from "The Holy Artwork" (2001) by Christian Jankowski. Courtesy of Michele Maccarone, Inc.