I’m back in Vancouver with my family for the holiday season and have spent a ridiculous amount of time eating decadent food and drinking way too much. Which is not a bad way to spend the holiday, really. I finally had a day on my own yesterday, after a week of family obligations with Cait’s and then my family and used it to have delicious Vancouver sushi, visit with an old friend, play Guitar Hero III (someone else’s copy, sadly) and see Juno (which definitely lived up to the hype for me – I can’t not find Michael Cera adorably eccentric, plus the whole soundtrack was pretty much The Moldy Peaches, who I haven’t listened to since 2005 and had totally forgotten about how smitten I am with them).
Other than that, I haven’t been doing anything productive lately. I don’t feel guilty about it yet, but I know I will soon. I have a proposed budget to make that I’ve been avoiding for a while and my goal is to get it done before I return to Toronto. Still got one week.
_____________________________________________________________
The one semi-productive thing I’ve done is start reading the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art book The Artist’s Joke. It’s the first one in the series I’ve read and I’m really enjoying it. The articles/essays in it are the perfect length for holiday reading, plus each academic article is alternated with a story or personal essay or poem that is legitimately funny in some way. So I find myself intrigued/enlightened and then chuckling aloud by turns.
For instance, there’s an essay by Freud (“Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” from 1905) that critically examines how humour works and explores the idea of jokes making us confused and then illuminated in rapid succession, which is then followed by a morbid story by Leonora Carrington about a debutante who makes a hyena go in her place to a ball being held in her honour. Apparently Carrington is still alive and working as a painter, making images that seem in keeping with her fantastic story:
Leonora Carrington, Bird Bath (1978)
Then Kristine Stiles has this great essay on “Fluxus Performance and Humour” from 1995 where she notes that “Goofing-off requires developing a fine-tuned sense of what it means to pause long enough and distance oneself far enough from worldly objects and events to recognize their illusory dimension and thereby reinvest the world with wonder.” I’ve always had a soft spot for art and literature that uses some aspect of magical realism in a funny and absurdist way and I think her essay totally nails why that approach works. I’d never thought about how humour might actually be the last tactic we have in order to have some level of critical objectivity in the “postmodern” world.
Recent Comments