Making Swiss people tell jokes
Nov. 1st, 2007 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHere's a joke:
A man walked into a doctor's waiting room and the room blew down. "I thought you were a waiter", said the man. "I lost patients," said the room.
If you walk into the Swiss Institute in New York over the next week you can have a joke like that (written by me when I was half asleep) whispered into your ear by Piper Marshall or one of the other gallery staff. "The jokes aren't meant to be funny," I told Piper over the phone last week, "I'm more interested in the kind of micro-intimacy built into the situation, the slippage between your status as official gallery staff and that moment when you almost touch a stranger's ear. There's also a slippage between an art gallery and a comedy club, or between the form of a joke and the fact that it doesn't quite make sense or work."
The Spoken Word Exhibition is part of the Performa Biennial, which starts today in New York. I was originally slated by Zach Feuer to do an in-person comedy act -- Bob Newart -- during Performa. But somehow that didn't happen, and instead I've slipped in by the back door: Bob Newart's unfunny jokes (the idea was that he "died daily" onstage) will be chinese-whispered by gallery staff. I don't actually need to be there in person, wearing a curly wig and doing wobbly standup.
The Spoken Word Exhibition is curated by Mathieu Copeland, who included me in his 2006 summer group show at Blow de la Barra in London, The Title as the Curator's Art Piece. The device I came up with then was mechanically-translated texts (very similar to the ones I used for generating lyrics on my Ocky Milk album, heard for instance in this early version of the song Zanzibar) whispered to visitors on request by the gallery staff. This time, Mathieu has extended the technique to all the artists in the show: "The one-week exhibition consists of artworks repeated by the Institute‘s staff," runs the blurb on the Swiss Institute's website. "By leaving the gallery space empty and making works available only on demand, Copeland initiates an exchange between spectators and gallery staff."
I'm delighted that this idea, premiered in my Whispering piece at Blow de la Barra, has, like Adam's rib, been plucked out to provide the entire structure of a show containing work by Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Douglas Coupland, Karl Holmqvist, Maurizio Nannucci, Yoko Ono, Mai-Thu Perret, Emilio Prini, Tomas Vanek, Lawrence Weiner and Ian
Wilson. Of course, the idea overlaps slightly -- just in the technique of getting gallery staff involved in delivering the artwork -- with Tino Sehgal's piece at the 2005 Venice Biennale: the guards in the German pavilion greeted visitors with a bizarre dancing chant ("This is so contemporary!"). Sehgal (who's cunning enough to have found a way to sell nebulous stuff like this) describes his work as "a politicized inquiry into the mutability of modes of production".
I was also influenced by my three months at the Whitney, when I discovered what amazing characters the guards there were, and what an under-used resource. The focus on bad jokes clearly also relates to the Book of Jokes I'm currently writing -- a book I'm pleased to say I've this week actually signed a contract for. I'll be spending some of the advance on a belated trip with Hisae to the 2007 Venice Biennale.
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Since this blog entry is about Swiss people telling jokes, I thought I'd end with a comic song by Mani Matter, the Swiss Georges Brassens. It's about a cigarette dropped on a carpet that ends up burning the whole world to ashes. Above you can hear Matter himself singing it, below are some Swiss kids doing a cover.
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A man walked into a doctor's waiting room and the room blew down. "I thought you were a waiter", said the man. "I lost patients," said the room.
If you walk into the Swiss Institute in New York over the next week you can have a joke like that (written by me when I was half asleep) whispered into your ear by Piper Marshall or one of the other gallery staff. "The jokes aren't meant to be funny," I told Piper over the phone last week, "I'm more interested in the kind of micro-intimacy built into the situation, the slippage between your status as official gallery staff and that moment when you almost touch a stranger's ear. There's also a slippage between an art gallery and a comedy club, or between the form of a joke and the fact that it doesn't quite make sense or work."The Spoken Word Exhibition is part of the Performa Biennial, which starts today in New York. I was originally slated by Zach Feuer to do an in-person comedy act -- Bob Newart -- during Performa. But somehow that didn't happen, and instead I've slipped in by the back door: Bob Newart's unfunny jokes (the idea was that he "died daily" onstage) will be chinese-whispered by gallery staff. I don't actually need to be there in person, wearing a curly wig and doing wobbly standup.
The Spoken Word Exhibition is curated by Mathieu Copeland, who included me in his 2006 summer group show at Blow de la Barra in London, The Title as the Curator's Art Piece. The device I came up with then was mechanically-translated texts (very similar to the ones I used for generating lyrics on my Ocky Milk album, heard for instance in this early version of the song Zanzibar) whispered to visitors on request by the gallery staff. This time, Mathieu has extended the technique to all the artists in the show: "The one-week exhibition consists of artworks repeated by the Institute‘s staff," runs the blurb on the Swiss Institute's website. "By leaving the gallery space empty and making works available only on demand, Copeland initiates an exchange between spectators and gallery staff."
I'm delighted that this idea, premiered in my Whispering piece at Blow de la Barra, has, like Adam's rib, been plucked out to provide the entire structure of a show containing work by Vito Acconci, Robert Barry, James Lee Byars, Douglas Coupland, Karl Holmqvist, Maurizio Nannucci, Yoko Ono, Mai-Thu Perret, Emilio Prini, Tomas Vanek, Lawrence Weiner and Ian
Wilson. Of course, the idea overlaps slightly -- just in the technique of getting gallery staff involved in delivering the artwork -- with Tino Sehgal's piece at the 2005 Venice Biennale: the guards in the German pavilion greeted visitors with a bizarre dancing chant ("This is so contemporary!"). Sehgal (who's cunning enough to have found a way to sell nebulous stuff like this) describes his work as "a politicized inquiry into the mutability of modes of production".I was also influenced by my three months at the Whitney, when I discovered what amazing characters the guards there were, and what an under-used resource. The focus on bad jokes clearly also relates to the Book of Jokes I'm currently writing -- a book I'm pleased to say I've this week actually signed a contract for. I'll be spending some of the advance on a belated trip with Hisae to the 2007 Venice Biennale.
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Since this blog entry is about Swiss people telling jokes, I thought I'd end with a comic song by Mani Matter, the Swiss Georges Brassens. It's about a cigarette dropped on a carpet that ends up burning the whole world to ashes. Above you can hear Matter himself singing it, below are some Swiss kids doing a cover.
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a trail into the deep dark recesses of the woods
Date: 2007-11-02 11:20 am (UTC)