Interview with Olav Westphalen
Sunday 10 of July
How did you come across humour and how did it become a relevant topic in your artistic practice?
I don’t think I started at any particular point in time. I always was attracted to comedy and cartoons and I started drawing cartoons as a teenager. That was actually my first job in any creative capacity. I was publishing comic strips and cartoons and working for satire newspapers. I did that while I studied art.
How do you deal with the fact you are operating both in the world of art and that of cartoons and comedy with practices which have much in common?
I play with crossing the boundaries, but you have to be very aware about how you do it and what you do, because the same drawing might mean one thing in the art world and a different thing in the other context. One danger is taking one thing from the world of comedy or satire or critical humour and bringing it into the world of art as it is. I find that really boring. I always think that – on the top of some critical, philosophical or challenging content- it also needs to somehow have an interesting relationship to the art world that it is entering. In a way the comedic works that I do in the art world are always tensioning the frame they are in and trying to avoid being neutralised by that frame. It’s also important not to be funny all the time, because once you are the funny artist it’s kind of over. You are known as the artist who bites people or something.
You have named your workshop “Deadpan”. Could you explain the relevance of this type of humour for you and how it relates to the history of art?
Initially a lot of comical propositions in Contemporary art were delivered with what a comedian calls a “deadpan” attitude. By a large the art world still demands or expects an attitude of seriousness and reverence because of its social status in culture. So there has been a pressure on the artists to deliver work in a very dry deadpan form even though sometimes they were quite funny and silly. However, I’m not talking about deadpan as in a comedy routine where the joke ends with a punch line anyway. I’m talking about the kind of attitude where it’s never quite clear whether the artist is standing where the audience is standing, or who the target of the joke is, or whether it’s really a joke or just a badly told anecdote.
Could you give us some examples?
There are a lot of jokers in the art world who prefer to deliver it very very seriously. I’m thinking about Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp. A large part of Duchamp’s work consists of refreshing silly word puns, but they were received in a context of monkish withdrawal from the art world and a silence of 30 years and an alchemical endeavour. There was an aura of both mystery and discipline and holiness around these works, which are actually quite silly. At that time if you wanted to be that kind of artist who makes silly jokes you had to be dressed up as a great philosopher, which doesn’t mean Duchamp wasn’t a great philosopher. But the are philosophers who can’t bother pretending to be a priest.
When does it become fully accepted to be funny in the art world? Is it with Martin Kippenberger and Sigmar Polke?
Kippenberger and Polke would be transitional figures. Initially they were often considered light-weighted or not as serious because they were quite silly, playful, aggressive, satirical in their humour and not so that poetic. There is lot of people like Mary Oppenheimer who have made funny pieces, but there is always a sensuality and a poetry to them which makes them easier for high art. But people like Kippenberger or Polke along with some people in the sixties like John Dinne were doing pretty funny and aggressive stuff. But then suddenly somewhere between the seventies and the eighties it was suddenly OK to be funny in the art world: John Landers, Mike Smith, my own work, there are many examples…
As humour becomes accepted in the art world now, the deadpan attitude would be a way of making it productive again because of its ambivalence?
When you stay in one mode of creation, either pushing an avant-garde idea or a continuous form of political criticism, it ends up becoming ineffectual. With humour you come to similar limits, especially because people understand irony very well nowadays. The suspension of meaning with irony, the moment where you are surprised because the person actually means the opposite of what he’s saying is very short now. Therefore the irritation, the semantic resistance that appears in a satirical approach which wants to take home a worthy and enlightened point has mainly vanished. At least in the West where luckily we are living in situations where you can say pretty much what you want in the art world and in many media. So the question is: what forms could activate a certain topic more thoroughly and force the listener to deal with it in a more prolonged way? In that sense, deadpan works very well because it is the joke without a punch line. Even if the viewer gets that it is a joke he can’t be certain because the performer will not nod to you and say: “yes that’s it”. There is always a certain level of uncertainty.
As an artist who works with humour, do you believe in its alleged ability to transform reality or do you consider it to be a cliché?
On a very simple level laughter is a pretty powerful physiological event. People who laugh a lot suffer less from cancer, heart disease, depression, etc… So yes, if people laughed a lot we would have a different world, we would pay less for healthcare. It also allows for conceptual openness. In the States with the upcoming elections you could feel it in many political questions. You have two political blocks which are incredibly immobile and which are not answering to the problems the country has right now. Creating comedy in those situations at times can be very productive, because you open a question and allow people to look at it differently. But at the same time it can also become very lazy and complacent. In the 90’s there was a huge comedy boom in private televisions, and after that there was a certain level of irony and sarcasm and you could hear it from people who were not funny at all, they just had adjusted to a sarcastic worldview for detaching and pulling out of things. And that is not useful. It is always better to be engaged than disengaged. It is always more interesting to address a certain problem than pretending it is not there or that it doesn’t bother you. But it’s like everything: it can be either very good or it can be devastating. Terrible things are done with humour. There are racist and fascist jokes, but there are funny. You can hate them for its content and it certainly is not my favourite kind of humour -not only because I don’t agree with the content, but it also is too much about conventions and taboo-, but you can’t say that the jokes are bad.
In the workshop you explained how a socioeconomic analysis of the art world could lead to consider it either a joke or a tragedy. Please comment.
Did I say that? (Laughs) Considering how arts functions nowadays, which is very different from how it worked 100 or 50 years ago, if you seriously enter it you have to be honest with yourself, you have to read it as a grotesque endeavour. Because we all got into it with an emancipatory, enlightened, hopeful attitude, wanting to find other conditions of labour, contributing to a deeper understanding, to another way of being in the world, looking for what you make the meaning of your live, what you think it is about in the end. Once you are in the art world you realize it is the least regulated industry there is, there is neither protection nor safety, it is purely a Wild West economy. You come with all these ideas and then you end up in a business which looks more like rum smuggling than anything else. It is a completely deregulated vicious market. You have to understand that it is something very contradictory and once you have understood it you might find tragic and stop performing or find it funny and be amused by it. And let’s face it; it still is more interesting that many other things.
On the other hand, the function of art has changed; artists don’t need to provide powerful shared imagery of important events because there are much better techniques for that. And one of the responses from the avant-garde was moving art to other areas of activity and maybe making it indistinguishable from life and changing it. On a profound philosophical level you could say the cluster of movements we all inherited upon has really not worked so well in that sense. That is also grotesque. I’m not saying it heroic, it is not about some Sisyphus rolling a rock up the mountain. It is important precisely because it provides an aspect of absurdity and futility you have to take into account.
Some people link humour and religion because they both might be reactions in front of something we can’t understand
If you speak about organized religion, which in Europe at least for the last thousand years meant some kind of well organized and accepted accumulation of power, more often than not humour takes the form of the court jester, the instigator, the provocateur, the subversive clown. The most obvious relationship between the church and comedy is opposition from a weaker position, a weaker position which uses humour as weapon in the absence of an actual efficient weapon. However, I also believe it is a more benign and interesting weapon than throwing bombs. I think humour itself has a spiritual component in religions like Zen which embrace paradox with either tragic or comical irreconcilable contradictions. When you look at the koans,they are jokes. I’m not an expert in world religions but I would say Christianity is low on that scale. Martin Luther was known to be a jovial guy cracking jokes, but at that moment he was trying to revolutionize a very calcified system he was in. I have come across jokes about the church, priests, bigotry, God and Jesus very often, but I haven’t encountered much religious humour.
Do you have a favourite koan?
Yes, I’m not a huge reader of them but I like one. A monk comes to the shore of a river and he finds a woman crying bitterly. He asks: “Why are you crying about?” and she answers: “My child has just drowned”. Then he gets his stick and he beats over the head of the woman really hard. “That will give you something to cry about”.
That is a really dark sense of humour. In the workshop you also defined humour as linking things which are not supposed to be related. That also is a very traditional definition of poetry.
Absolutely. The traditional joke about a man coming to a bar, etc., is not that interesting as art. But the construct of two concepts which have to be forced together or tricked to be together in an elegant connection or a pun is interesting. There are two concepts which are contradictory and then they suddenly shift. On the most elemental sense that moment is akin to poetry because it is the moment when meanings are afloat. You suddenly experience a liberty, not from language, but you see the crack, you realize your own potential, it allows rehearsing some measure of autonomy. At that moment two conventional and convincing concepts which make us cling to reality bump into each other and make us laugh. One of the wonderful things that poetry can do is using language against conventions and rules. Not by saying something we have never heard before but by saying it in ways which force us to think about it from a different perspective.