Search what's on

Advanced

  • Laughing in a Foreign Language

  • Until Apr 13
    • Recommended
  • This event has finished
  • The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 8XZ
  • The Hayward

    'Artist's Dilemma', 1997. Courtesy The Artist, 2007. Photography Naranja, 2007

  • By Tony Pearson

    Posted: Mon Feb 4

  • If you have the sense of humour of a little old lady, a puerile high-school dickwad or an earnest social sciences graduate you’ll find much to satisfy it at the Hayward’s 30-artist collection of practical jokes and political objections, ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’. Little wall-mounted joke machines; clown shoes, a spilt bucket of white paint and giant animal costumes; a clown going through a jungle in an endless Sisyphean loop; the small Japanese cast of a short film whose script is limited to trade marks and clichés – ‘SAPPORO, SASHIMI, SAYONARA TOKYO, HELLO KITTY, SARIN GAS!’ Ha ha!

    On the other hand, if you share my sense of humour, which is adult but by no means exotic, you will be greatly angered by how the exhibition takes the sacred name of comedy in vain and by the absence of any meaningful belly-laughs. At least the Chapmans are here, but it’s not their gruesomely hilarious stuff, it’s their soberly beautiful Hogarth improvements.

    The only artist to make me laugh was Kalup Linzy, whose no-fi Ebonic soap-opera pastiches ‘Conversations wit de Churen’ (I think ‘churen’ might mean genitals) feature vocally pitch-shifted caricatures in a farcical social satire. A quote of Linzy in the catalogue reveals a comic sensitivity absent from most of the other work here: ‘The use of the contemporary device known as the telephone places emphasis on the language that is the centre of my work.’ Language is the centre of all humour. If it weren’t so nasty, I could tell you an archetypically racist joke whose obnoxious funniness demonstrates English comedy’s central endeavour; to analyse and unpick language and thus find truth and promote mutual understanding. I’m not making this up: it comes from Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, ie the horse’s mouth.

    I object to a line in the wall-mounted introduction relating to politically incorrect humour: ‘We laugh when we know we shouldn’t.’ I don’t think we know anything about it when we laugh at something, least of all whether our laughter is right or wrong. Laughing is instinctive, as is being funny. Comedians can’t help being funny, it pours out of them, usually driven by rage and directed in the form of satire against whatever unquantifiable entity has caused that rage. Man’s inhumanity to man, the meaninglessness of existence, can-openers… In art it’s the same, humour is a naturally occurring by-product of the act of engaging with humanity that is necessary in art-making; it makes a polemical point and also expresses the artist’s personality.

    What we see at the Hayward is not so much comedy, as practical jokes and political protest with a humorous tinge. There are a lot of pieces about immigration, which is a good thing of course, but it’s earnest stuff that feels forced. A description of Kalup Linzy in the catalogue demonstrates a misconception about his humour. He ‘uses humour to deal with such highly-charged topics as gender, race, class, human relationships and art world politics’, it says. No! It should be the other way around! He uses those ‘highly charged topics’ to be funny!

    The wordlessly comical sculptor-in-time, Roman Signer, is showing right now and if you feel as disappointed as I did by the lack of humour at the Hayward I suggest you go there afterwards. The Swiss artist may not like that the term slapstick is applied to his ‘actions,’ but there is a deadpan quality to the way they convey existential angst, mankind’s smallness in nature and the absurdity of things that marks Signer as a true comedian with all the melancholy and deep human insight that the job entails.

    A robotic self-guiding lawnmower wheels itself among 15 ineffectually obstructive metal chairs on the grand parquet floor of Hauser & Wirth’s former bank on Piccadilly. I see the electric automaton as the artist himself, condemned to wander around, bumping into things, until his battery runs out and he returns to his charger only for the meaningless journey to begin again in an hour or so.

    Signer talks about his touching empathy with machines in the feature-length film ‘Signers Koffer’, a smooth road-movie style compilation of nearly all of his ‘actions’ from the ’70s on. Documentations of his often life-threatening experiments with rockets, explosions and water are intercut with peaceful footage of the Swiss countryside shot from his beloved three-wheeled Piaggio van and interview snippets in which he says things like : ‘I get an idea, make a construction, then nature does the work. I like it when things don’t go according to plan. Nature manifests itself even when [the action] doesn’t work.’ Cut to him walking to the middle of a frozen lake, where he falls through the ice and scrabbles to escape. He isn’t going to make it. Smiling with the admission of failure, the artist says something to the cameraman who stops filming and, we assume, rescues him. It is particularly funny because Signer’s futile scrabbling is not just slapstick, it is a pathetic attempt to avoid death. You can’t beat nature, however hard you try; and the more you try, the funnier you appear.

Add your comment to this listing

2 comments

  1. Posted by Arthur Craig on 20 Mar 2008 12:50

    Totally without humour, unfunny, tedious and juvenile

    Report this comment as inappropriate
  2. Posted by Sandra on 25 Feb 2008 22:28

    In my opinion, this exhibition was extremely disappointing and quite frankly awful. If you expect humour what the title suggests you will be disappointed. Only the Japanese short film mentioned in the article above got me laughing but not because it was clever or had interesting twists but just because it was so stupid. Other than that there are paintings and displays that just do not make much sense or are even disgusting to look at. There are so many good exhibitions in London. Save your time and money for those.

    Report this comment as inappropriate

Have your say






Advertisement

  • Details

  • The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London, SE1 8XZ
    , UK
    Geo: 51.506877, -0.117532
  • 0871 663 2519
  • Category: Art museums & institutions
  • Times: Daily 10am-6pm, Fri until 10pm. For 2 for 1 offer see www.timeout.com/2for1
  • Tube: Waterloo

  • Map

Date of the day

huetron

I'm a graphic designer from Australia and enjoying what it has to offer. I enjoy meeting new people and discovering the better qualities in the...

Expedia.co.uk logo
hotels in London
Great travel deals
Travel Supermarket
Flights to London
Hotels in London
London Car Hire
Venere.com
London hotel deals
hotel.info
Guest reviews of London hotels
Hotels.com
hotels in London

More ways to enjoy Time Out