Situation Comedy: Humor In Recent Art

Admit it: you've sometimes wanted to laugh at contemporary art. During the past decade, humor has turned up with increasing frequency in galleries and museums, perhaps as an acknowledgment of the urgent need among artists and audiences alike to laugh at the absurdity of daily existence--and the art world itself. Situation Comedy presents more than 60 works--a selection of video and sound installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs--by younger as well as more established artists, including Tom Friedman, Rodney Graham, Christian Jankowski, Laura Nova, William Pope.L, Richard Prince, Kay Rosen, Erika Rothenberg, John Waters and Erwin Wurm. Employing parody, satire, slapstick and practical jokes, they use the leveling power of comedy to break down barriers of taste and to question authority at every turn.