Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281237 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Synopsis
Ever since Freud's "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious" appeared in 1905, humour both light and dark has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling or liberating element in art. "The Artist's Joke" surveys the rich and diverse uses of humour by avant-garde and contemporary artists, from Dada, Surrealism and Pop to Bruce Nauman's sinister clowns and twisted puns; Richard Prince's joke paintings; art ambushed by feminist wit from the 1920s to the present; the serenely uncanny in Mike Kelley's installations and the visibly grotesque in Paul McCarthy's; and the strangely comic scenarios of artists as various as Maurizio Cattelan, Andrea Fraser, Raymond Pettibon and David Shrigley. Artists' writings are accompanied and contextualized by the work of critics and thinkers including Freud, Bergson, Helene Cixous, Slavoj Zizek, Jorg Heiser, Jo Anna Isaak and Ralph Rugoff. Jennifer Higgie is the coeditor of "Frieze" magazine. This title is published as part of the "Documents of Contemporary Art" series.