C.2.1 Holocaust Humour, Jewish Jokes and Contrarian Clowning: The Provocative Art and Mimicry of Erez Israeli

Louis Kaplan, University of Toronto

Dividing his time between Berlin and Tel Aviv, queer artist Erez Israeli (b. 1974) has established himself as a provocative and prolific multi-media force in contemporary art underscored by his Falkenrot Prize exhibition Black Milk at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien last year. Taking up the subject of Holocaust humor as his major transgressive theme, Israeli’s works raise the question of what is acceptable and what is “off-limits.” In this presentation, I am particularly interested in reviewing the subversive humour that permeates his performative photography and how he deploys sly mimicry and “contrarian clowning” to play tricks (and jokes) on the audience’s expectations. This is the most apparent in his brilliant diptych Jewish Joke 1911/Jewish Joke 2019 (The artist as a cover boy) where he mimes the clown figure who arises out of the Jack-in-the-box on the cover of a classic Jewish joke book published by Berlin satirist Alexander Moszkowski.

Israeli’s Holocaust humor relies on historical anachronism mocking the knee-jerk assumption that either clown proffers the banned Hitler salute. Following the strategy of the bouffon, Israeli plays the “subversive clown” who makes fun of his audience given that the original image was created by Lucian Bernhard in 1911 or a generation before the rise of the Nazis. (This also calls for comparison with Anselm Kiefer’s infamous series, Occupations/Heroic Symbols (1969/1974)). A similar strategy is at the core of his queer Jewish miming of the nude photographs of German naturist Hans Suren’s Man and Sun (1936) that glorify the Aryan body. Here, Israeli’s miming functions as a critical rebuff of Nazi racism and its vicious propaganda regarding the degenerate male Jewish body. Finally, Israeli’s image-text installation Jokes (Brno, 2019) continues his fascination with Holocaust humour and confronts us again to raise the question of the limits of laughter.

C.2.2 For Example: Ramps and Other Objects

Atanas Bozdarov, Visual Artist

Here I propose to present my practice that, rooted in my lived experience with a physical disability, takes my relationship with the built environment as a starting point for investigating “access." By incorporating sculpture and graphic design, my work is concerned with exploring the intended function, use, and uselessness of art and design objects to reveal unseen conditions of disability and design. Deploying strategies of humour, absurdity and play, this presentation asks how the localized failure of artist-designed forms can draw attention to failures of access within larger systems. Sara Ahmed has written that we notice things when they fail — when they don’t fit, when they break. My recent work organizes itself around forms of failure: structural failure, failure of personal mobility devices and failure in disability culture and arts scholarship.

A series of cane tips made from charcoal and wax crayon mimic the functional rubber ones; used as drawing tools, they break under pressure and recreate moments in my life when my cane shaft has broken through the rubber tips, producing a moment of risk. Drawing attention to the lack of representation in disability culture within art discourse, I produced a book titled Accessibility to mimic the Whitechapel series Documents of Contemporary Art: its blank pages representing the scholastic void. Finally, humorous structures resembling access ramps borrow strategies from critical design to display the failures of access and accessibility. Overall this body of work uses the tactics of uselessness, absurdity, humor and incompletion to partially translate the tension of a discourse that speaks about access, without actually providing it.

C.2.3 Laughing Matters 2

Jessica Winton, Independent Artist and Scholar

Could humour be considered as a quantum vector to collectively activate constituent power? Humour has a cognitive structure that is the same in every adult, and yet a unique creation in the mind each person. Humour is capable of spreading synchronically and is quite possibly the result of quantum non-locality. If a humourous artwork can have influence beyond its conventional first-person audience, then the question of effectivity could be massive. Be that as it may, if involvement in every activity implicates a multiplicity of actants, is power situated at the sub-atomic level? With the humility implied by that possibility, this presentation speculates on concepts that support the unceasing emergence of creativity as the best case scenario for expanding our common ground.

C.2.4 Being Odd, But Not All That Funny

Andrew Testa, Memorial University of Newfoundland

In my practice, I explore the speculative conversations that exist between myself and the other-than-human, a stone in this instance. In such conversations there is a need to alter one’s human understanding of time, an often futile attempt, into the geological time from which a stone exists within. To converse with a stone, for me, is to wait with a stone, to slow one’s thinking to that of a stone’s, and to exist in a paused loop of interaction with the time from which it comes. It is to be so still that one becomes unnoticed while noticing what is all around. But this conversation often falls to ‘who cares?’ Such speculative thoughts are often too far-fetched for dialogue that exists beyond the gallery, the conference, and the university. So how does one engage in conversation with not only a stone, but with the communities I take part in? I decided, perhaps not by choice, that being ‘odd’ was a good place to start. Odd in the sense of; dressing ‘like’ a stone to blend in with the stones, to become ‘unnoticed’ while at the same time drawing attention to myself from those who may be around. In this oddness, I hope to encourage questions by peeking other’s interest who may catch a glimpse of my performative process. By being odd (but not all that funny), I hope to invite the ‘whats’ and ‘whys’ of those around me.