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Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts
Incongruous. When Art Makes Us Laugh
October 8, 2011 - January 15, 2012
Art is serious stuff, its ideal is beauty. But laughter deforms the human face, it is a weapon of diabolical seduction; it is a menace to decorum; it bursts out unrestrainedly and threatens the cohesion of the world. Historically, then, art and laughter, art and humour, art and comedy, art and irony do not make good bedfellows. They are fundamentally incongruous.
However, there are certain niche areas in art where laughter can exist: in the grotesque, pastiches and caricature. In the twentieth century humour developed into a fantastic tool that artists could use for subversive purposes, which they could employ within the art system or could level at the norms and conventions, morality, balance and order of society. Incongruity is the theme that runs through the exhibition and the principle that has generated laughter down the ages and across all the continents.
Every age has developed its own nuances of the absurd or the comic within the context of the dominant culture, whether seventeenth-century Holland's "festive scenes" or the post-Tienanmen era of stereotyped laughing figures produced by Chinese artists. Continuity can also be seen in the expression of the moods of the spirit (and thus also laughter) from Charles Le Brun to Arnulf Rainer, passing by the grotesquely distorted heads of Messerschmidt.
Historically, depiction of the bizarre through deformation and humour provides artists with a perfect pretext for exploring vulgarity and offers them a means to evade the pursuit of beauty. All medias – painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, photography, video, installations, language (written and recorded texts) – are gathered together for this vast panorama of laughter in the history of art.