BCC Intro Philosophy & Logic
Eric Gerlach
12/6/2010
LECTURE ON HUMOR AND ART
Philosophy can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important things. Humor and Art are two ways of using one’s insights from Philosophy to do this. Humor and art are of course ancient, but modern art and humor are very advanced. Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting against society and Victorian strict discipline of children, showing the contradictions of authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent upon our position in the situation.
HUMOR AS SKEPTICISM
Two early American masters of humor are Ambrose Bierce and Groucho Marx, both of whom were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times (Bierce to the Civil War, and the Marx Brothers to WWI).
Ambrose Bierce: (1842-1914?) His Devil’s Dictionary was an early rebellious attack on society.
A San Franciscan (since 1866), he wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both sides (Union and Confederacy) then disappeared in Mexico seeking the revolution. He had a brilliant gift with pointing out how we are all selfish and ignorant (one-sided judgments) with humor, attacking the politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary (1906 ‘Cynic’s Word Book’):
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hashish: there is no definition of this word. No one knows what this word means.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
The Marx Brothers (comedians of the 20s and 30s) were early absurdists, formative for US comedy. Groucho Marx was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and judgment, very much like Bierce:
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this. Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
MODERN ART AS SKEPTICISM
With WWI and modern warfare, there were new human horrors on previously unseen levels. Similar to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the horrors of WWI brought great disillusionment with reason, science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture. Here in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the Vietnam War. WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before, and for this is often called the first modern war. Oil became the fuel of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps (and after WWI, the Middle East was carved up by European powers as the source of oil). This was the beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.
Newspapers all became mouthpieces of the government in times of war. To European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of reason. The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise, particularly in Philosophy departments. The students and others came together to doubt and be skeptical of the powers that be on a level that had a new intensity (fueled on Nietzsche, Marx and others).
Modern art and humor start from this point. They shatter and destroy, ‘ripping’ on the powers that be and the truths we are told by authorities. Modern art and humor put things out of joint, not resolving contradictions but bringing them explicitly out, possibly more than any culture yet. They help to simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.
DADA: “guerilla warfare against the Establishment”
During WWI (1915-1917) young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in Zurich, Switzerland. They shared an opposition to the war and traditional values. To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’. They found these terms to be hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning: European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a farce. Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the ‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.
Some of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a beer parlor run by Hugo Ball. Jazz music was the new rage, violating old traditional standards. Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they found the word dada: ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’. They decided that this word fit the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich. The parlor became the first home and center. Much art that was brutal and bizarre appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.
Dada’s two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity. Their brutalism, being obscene (sex, swearing, being intoxicated, making no sense on purpose) spoke against society, violating cultural norms using absurdity and obscenity (much like later Hunter S. Thompson, South Park).
Simultaneity is the occurrence of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance polarized against making the whole coherent. Collage involves using many different types of media blended together to create (the Dadaists were famous for using newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time). Simultaneity and collage in the hands of the Dadaists were used to portray disconnected life, impossible to know as a complete and finished system. This is both a celebration and a protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world. The Dadaists invented an impressive set of ‘new’ art forms, including abstract sound poems, abstract (mechanical) music, found art (garbage collage), simultaneous poetry (the reading of many poems at once), and abstract painting.
Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement began and quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole world. Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global, includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA. The Beatniks and Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology as a major source.
Great DADA Moments & Quotes:
In one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’. He then started to recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing siren.
In April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in Cologne, France. Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden sculpture with an axe chained to it. A sign invited anyone who wished to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture. In a Paris exhibit of Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30 high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30 intimacies.” The exhibit itself was a Dada performance. Breton munched matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands. These performances are early precursors to performance art (which culminated in Situationalism and Fluxus, of which Yoko Ono was a prominent figure).
Huelsenbeck
“It’s a fucked-up foolish world. You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a philosophy for supper. But before you have it ready, the mailman brings you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your housekeeper has come down with the epizootic. You give a startled look at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I know?). That’s life, dear fellow.”
“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”
“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”
Tristan Tzara
The foremost Dada manifesto writer, Tzara was famous for reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances. He was a leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the European scene is considered to have migrated with him.
From Tzara’s Dada Manifestos:
“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”
“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”
“I love you so I swear I do adore you.”
“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs…”
“I am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”
“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very charming.”
“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)
From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922)
“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life.”
“Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.”
“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shaken… Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”
We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi (Zhuang Zi, Second Patriarch of Daoism) was just as Dada as we are.”
Tzara’s invention of the Automism method of Surrealism painters and art long after.
To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”
Surrealism:
Gets its heritage from DADA, but had to develop beyond Nonsense as target. Still hazy in complexity, many things coming together strangely, but now with subtle underlying tensions, often of sex, danger, power, and death underlie the work. Today pop-surrealism is thriving in the Bay, LA & NY.
The surrealist poem Fable of Jarry:
A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.
Conceptual Art is a development from Duchamp and other Dada & Surreal artists. It hit its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s. Now, one cannot go through a museum without seeing much of its influence. Following pieces are from Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art.
Dada Duchamp’s Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity:
A sparkplug that reads ‘for-ever’
Later, after joining the Surrealists, Duchamp wound string through the gallery of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit, connecting everything such that no one could get through the gallery.
Rauschenberg’s contribution to Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of Readymades: postcard that says, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.
Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning Drawing, framed and exhibited as a new work.
Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line length, sold as artwork. Also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’, and his own shit in cans for their weight in gold. He signed people as if they were his art.
Warhol Soup Cans & Marilyn silk screen prints: “a hundred Marilyns are better than one”, soup cans put on shelves like canned goods. Movies ‘Empire’ and ‘Sleep’, as critic Koch said, better to hear about than see.
La Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging furniture around on stage to make noises. He was one of the early performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience members to take down the “fourth wall”.
Simone Forti Fluxus performance: one man try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall.
Morris’ Box with sound of own making: wooden box containing a tape recorder w/ loop.
Nauman read Wittgenstein passage from PI reasoning that ‘A Rose Has no Teeth” can make sense if you include the thorns or a cow in the process of rose regeneration or something else, and so he made a plaque for a tree knowing that the tree slowly grows over the plaque.
Baldessari (1971) has students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art” like students writing as punishment over and over (is this boring?).
Arnatt’s mirror boxes: positive mirror out box next to box-like hole lined with inward mirrors.
Ruppersberg’s Homage to Houdini: set of photographs documenting sinking brick chained in a suitcase of a NY pier (as Godfrey says, ‘Surprisingly, the brick did not escape’).
Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf installed. In a dialogue posted next to the work, the artist claims that the glass of water is, in fact, now an oak tree.
The Nest Group (1978) had a piece called Let’s Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.
Mendieta’s Rape performance: after a woman was raped and killed on campus, she recreated the scene in her apartment with herself as victim and invited friends and associates over (hopefully giving them some kind of warning, though this is not said).
Wilke’s What does this represent? What do YOU represent? A photo of a naked woman surrounded by toy guns, with two phrases above and below.
Almeida’s Inhabited painting: several photos of artist obscuring self with blue paint, then final shot takes glass she has painted and shifts it to peek out from behind it at the viewer.
For great short surreal films, watch Svankmajer.
