7 days, 7 jokes

[imomus]

A Spoken Word Exhibition at New York's Swiss Institute ends today -- though the Performa Biennial it's part of continues -- so I've just emailed the gallery staff the last of the seven Bob Newart jokes they're being asked to whisper to visitors. Here's the complete set. As happens in Chinese Whispers-type games, these jokes sometimes got garbled in the telling (and they were garbled enough to begin with!). A spy I sent to the gallery told me, for instance, that the three bulls in Friday's joke became, for her, three bows. Mistakes are a way of generating the new... or sometimes just uneasy laughter.



Thursday November 1st
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.

Friday November 2nd
There were three bulls, legging it across a field. One of them was a green bull, one of them a blue bull, and the other had to look in the mirror.

Saturday November 3rd
A mutilator was humiliating in a haystack. "Stop!" cried the resultant children.

Sunday November 4th
A king walked into a McDonalds. "Give me two women," he said to the man behind the counter. "Keep your voice down," said the man, "I'm scared too".

Monday November 5th
"Who's that seedy comedian -- the one who takes his clothes off in the gallery?"
"Acconci?"
"No, Bob Newart."

Tuesday November 6th
There were three black dwarves who lived in a tall white cylindrical house on the cliffs. One stormy night an icy winter gale whipped up and howled. The three dwarves climbed the spiral staircase to bed and switched off the light. Next morning, several hundred bodies were found on the beach. They were lighthouse keepers.

Wednesday November 7th
An English, an Irish and a Scottish pussy cat were asked their favourite prey. "Dumplings," said the Irishman.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The thing is, you can judge a blog on the internet. This is it, this is the blog, it exists here. My art practice can only be experienced in the gallery. If you get a bad impression of it, perhaps the problem is simply that art cannot be squeezed into the format of a blog.

Sure, here on your computer screen it might seem like bad conceptual art, but it's actually rather good performance art. At my Zach Feuer show in 2005 and the Whitney performance in 2006, magic really was in the air (some days more than others, I admit, and probably the Feuer show more than at the Whitney). I'd be happy to admit if it had been terrible (like my AIGA lecture). But it wasn't, it was actually rather brilliant. But you really had to be there.

The internet is the world's worst forum for art and, I'd say, getting worse every day, as art deliberately distinguishes itself from the digital -- that's one of the things it's for now. Not-being-the-internet.

[(Anonymous)]

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: no, I'm not experiencing your art, I'm only reading your riff of it. In which case I'll say you do a very poor job of selling your art. You make it sound like second-grade, second-hand conceptual art that might make even an undergraduate blush. Whispering non sequiturs into people's ears - I'm sure it's been done dozens of times already. Off the top of my head I can already think of sound artist Christina Kubisch who has done something similar. And as for unreliable narrators, it just sounds like 30 years out of date. I think we've all integrated the unreliability of narrators into our conceptualisation of them many years ago. But maybe, as you say, you had to be there.

[(Anonymous)]

Although not to be too negative, I should say the Zach Feuer event sounds like it might have been interesting.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A quick google suggests that Kubisch's work involved electro-magnetic fields and that any whispering was done through headphones, not using a live person who actually speaks into your ear.

But I think the question "Has it been done?" is actually one of the least interesting in art, only marginally less boring than "How long did it take you to do that, then?" The question to ask is "How is it being done?" Notice the difference? "Has it been done?" focuses on the past, and seems to see no merit in anything beyond some kind of pioneering originality. And the trouble with pioneers -- people who plant a flag on the North Pole, for instance -- is that they fail to consider the North Pole a place worthy of exploration. Getting there first -- or dying in the attempt -- is all.

Again, I'd say, think of this not as a winner-takes-all rush into virgin territory, but somebody working in a recently-established genre. And ask the adverbial question: how?

[(Anonymous)]

The "what" and the "how" questions are really not so different as you think, Momus. The ur-question is 'are you doing something interesting?', whether it's developing a new convention or using an old one in an original way. I'm personally not getting the feeling that whispering non sequiturs into people's ears is that interesting - it simply sounds like some sort of generic conceptual work. The non sequitur slogan is such a staple of conceptual art, you almost come to expect it, even if only in the title of the work or something. It might have actually been more surprising to tell an actual stand-up style joke, good or bad. But you sound more like you want to 'fit in' with what the other artists are up to. You want to be part of the glamour, even if you have to partake in its clichés. But it's all subjective I guess. Good luck with your work nonetheless.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Why is it, in your view, conceptual rather than performance work? Having someone whispering something right into your ear is super-sensual. In fact, I've found that gallery staff (in both London and New York) have been very reluctant to do it. Spies sent to both places told me that staff were voicing their whispers and standing back from visitors. The degree of intimacy a whisper imposes on strangers is very challenging for both parties, and (as I was saying last week) breaches the barriers galleries erect between their admin areas and their performance/exhibition spaces.

As for being "part of the glamour", you're dead right. I am totally chuffed to be in a show with heroes like Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, Gustav Metzger, Genesis P. Orridge (who apparently gave an amazingly moving performance the other day relating to the recent death of his partner)...