Art jokes and art

Unless you are an art connoisseur, modern twentieth-century art is marked by its incomprehensibility. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fact that laymen shake their heads at art is seen as a matter of course. Within the art world, the incomprehensibility of art is no longer viewed as a deficit but greeted as actual proof of its sophistication, magnificence and aura.

This uncoupling of art from general horizons of comprehensibility has two main causes. First of all, as in other fields of production in our society, art has been affected by the historical process of functional differentiation. In the modern age, the unity of knowledge and culture disintegrated into cultures of experts who furthered specialization and hence an even greater loss of general comprehensibility. Moreover, the so greatly lamented incomprehensibility of modern art is based on a misconception: the belief that in earlier times art was comprehensible to everyone. This misconception stems from confusing the ability to recognize the objects represented in artworks with the ability to recognize what constitutes the artistic quality of a work. The pseudo expertise of many who - in a religious allegory, for instance - were still able to recognize that naked women were depicted in it, ended with abstract art, at the very latest; and people had first to come to terms with this apparent loss of competence.

In other words, what was new in twentieth-century art was not that an artwork could only be grasped by those who had studied art extensively and acquired knowledge of its contexts - for this had always been the case. What was new was that the exclusiveness of art's accessibility had become so very obvious, as also the necessity of making an active effort to understand it.

The disappearance of modern art's representational function led to the emergence of a parallel countermovement in which this development was reflected in countless depictions of non-representational artworks: newspapers and magazines were literally flooded by art jokes. And although at first glance, this new flood of images served to justify and defend the experiences indignant viewers were having with modern art, it simultaneously had the unintended side effect of disseminating modern art via mass media, of introducing art into the daily life of whole sections of the population who had no interest in art, and thus made it a quite normal phenomenon. In re-examining the history of images, abstract paintings and art cartoons can be seen as mutually dependent, parallel phenomena; it is in their split that the movement to differentiate the concept of the image becomes evident.

While jokes about art were constantly involved in depicting non-representational art, a reciprocal phenomenon occurred in modern art: it adopted the rhetorical device of the punch line. In disassociating itself from the requirements of craftsmanship, there was a shift in efforts toward the field of concept creation - one in which art itself reflects its respective historical state. And this temporary clever move within the arena of solutions for problems immanent to art became a central means of achieving a fashionable, momentary success. Under the circumstances of a general acceleration, such a spontaneous success - when it crossed a certain threshold of media attention - automatically led to its art-historical canonization. The contemporary history of such new art might be pointedly described as the immediate recording of a relay race, from one very successful punch line to the next.

The punch-line nature of modern art has caused it to have more in common with jokes. Simultaneously, the joke has lost its image of being banal and low, or at least this has been the case ever since Sigmund Freud recognized the joke - alongside the dream - as one of the main ways in which unconscious inner processes manifest themselves. The attempt to degrade art through jokes has been accompanied by the joke being upgraded by science and art. Today anyone grappling to appreciate or defend a work of concept art might on occasion say: "It does indeed have a good punch line." The so spiteful argument often used by conservative lowbrows against modern art, i.e. that it is just a joke, is essentially true and positive if you leave out the small word "just". For what is modern about art ultimately involves it having a good punch line like a good joke - through the invention of a metaphorical device, a truth comes to light which would otherwise have remained concealed by conventions.

In retrospect, a convergence between art and art jokes can be identified which was unintended by both: art jokes once aspired to convey non-comprehension but, despite themselves, turned into a medium for disseminating and comprehending modern art - they had all too well understood art's negating element in view of what had already been understood. But like jokes, art also allowed itself to become involved in unconscious processes. It became situational and reflexive, shamelessly breaking taboos, evading social norms, adapting itself to rapid modernism until it reached a temporary pointedness in a heightened production of meaning - and thus became just as punch-line oriented as jokes are. It now seems high time to explore and relate art and jokes to each other in their relationship of rejection, differentiation, reflection and penetration.

Wolfgang Pauser