Dead Serious

Opening: Saturday, Oct 24: 4–8 PM

Site: 120710

Oct 24 – Dec 12

People have been trying to figure out why we laugh forever. We laugh at surprise, absurdity, embarrassment, recognition, bad behavior, things that don’t belong together, things that go wrong, and sometimes because everything has gotten so ridiculous there’s nothing else to do.

Artists have been working with this stuff forever too. Dada, Duchamp, Surrealism, satire, camp, conceptual art, performance—artists have used jokes, absurdity, irony, bad taste, play, and plain old stupidity to mess with expectations, challenge authority, deal with difficult subjects, and make us see things differently.

And right now feels like a particularly good time for it. The world is pretty ridiculous. A sense of humor may be one of the more useful things we have for getting through it.