Raymond Lee in Julian Doan’s short film Raspberry (2021)
A few weeks ago, I went to the movies— a rare occurrence for most of us these days. It was an outdoor screening, organized by Rooftop films, at Greenwood Cemetery— a series of shorts on the topic of death and mourning.
The short that struck me the most was Julian Doan’s film Raspberry, also featured at this year’s Sundance Festival. The film is about an Asian family in the US who have just lost their patriarch. I can’t summarize the plot without including a spoiler, as the whole 7-minute film hinges on one surprise element. Suffice to say that it all revolves around the way in which the lead character (the man’s younger son), played by actor Raymond Lee, emotionally processes his father’s departure.
His emotional journey immediately becomes our own journey as viewers. The funerary atmosphere is followed by a surprising twist with a hilarious release, and then again followed again by unbearable sadness. One of the reviewers of the podcast Alternative Ending, in a preamble to an interview with the filmmaker, writes: “At minute 1 my eyes were quickly pooling with water, by minute 2 I had tears streaming down my face, by minute 3 I was laughing, at minute 4 I was laughing through sobs, coming in at minute 5 I was audibly crying and sucking back nose drool, rolling on to minute 6 I was in shock and by the final minute I had a tension headache.”
This almost simultaneous presentation of humor and sadness was one of the strangest juxtapositions I had ever experienced in art making. The contrast was such that I did not know what to make of it at first, but I have been thinking about it ever since — particularly because I feel that in the art world, while we always discuss theory, political perspectives, form, genres, and mediums, we don’t usually speak about emotions.
I called Doan to inquire about the motivation for his film and how he came up with the surprising contrast of humor and sadness. “I’ve been a fan of dark comedy, of black comedies like the Coen Brothers, or Pulp Fiction”, he said, “where death is played out in ways that made me laugh.”
Doan’s father passed away in 2018, an experience that informed the film. During the weeks after his passing, Doan said he noticed that he was finding humor in everyday things, adding, “I often fall on comedy to cope with things. (…) Sometime the most painful stuff makes you laugh because of the disconnect we feel about life when it is so tragic, when we feel it so intensely that we are convulsing with emotions, like this is ridiculous.”
There is a medical term for the phenomenon of uncontrollable episodes of opposite emotions, known as Pseudobulbar Affect or Emotional Incontinence. However, neurological unbalances aside, it is not uncommon to start laughing when confronted with a very sad or traumatic situation— something that we instinctively do as a coping mechanism to avoid engaging with our pain. Such case might be appreciated in this video of this week showing a pediatric doctor from Jacksonville, Florida talking about the overwhelming amount of children’s deaths from Covid. In the video as she is barely beginning to describe how the Delta variant is incredibly infectious and children are getting sick and dying, she simply stops at that point and says, “I can’t do this” and walks away from the camera, in a strange combination of tears and giggles.
Before trying to understand this weird mixture of laughter and tears it might be important to think a bit about the way that art generates strong emotional responses, a topic that has been amply written about. James Elkins’ book Pictures and Tears, for example, is a great work that chronicles and reflects on the way in which artworks move us. As Elkins himself points out in his book, in contemporary art these kind of emotional outbursts are rather absent.
Indeed, we have a complicated relationship with feelings in art making today. Our intellectual standards for great artworks, the emotional detachment that is likely the inheritance from Conceptual art and the sense that using raw emotions in the creative process is an unwieldy approach, and not conducive to producing a rigorous piece of art, makes most professional artists steer clear from them. Furthermore, both humor and sadness are difficult emotions to incorporate successfully, for different reasons. Artworks that are humorous can be often dismissed as superficial, unless if the irony or sarcasm in them is easily readable. And in terms of sadness, there may be few worse things than making an artwork that is accused of sentimentality. Anger, in the form of confrontation, and political protest are much more common and resorted-to. Even less common than overt emotions in art are those juxtapositions like the one in Raspberry.
However, in the visual arts there are instances where humor and sadness successfully coexist. More specifically, there are works that have a charge of sadness enveloped in a container of humor. I think of at least three artists whose work sometimes fall into that category.
The first is Mike Kelley. When I worked at the MCA Chicago in the 90s, we often had his work Craft Morphology Chart from 1991 on view. It is a series of folding card tables where various sock puppets are laid out, like in operating tables.
Mike Kelley, Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991. MCA Chicago.
The sock puppets are of course hilarious and absurd in the contemporary art museum context, and they appear to embody Kelley’s signature insolence and juvenile humor. Yet there is a profound sadness about them— the sadness of the old, abandoned toy, made even more stark amidst the clinical light of the art gallery. The installation exudes an existential angst about the innocence that we have left behind along with our childhood. I had a similar feeling emerge while walking inside Mobile Homestead, the perfect replica of Kelley’s childhood home situated outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit.
The second artist I thought about is Michael Smith. Smith has been well-known since the 1980s, among other things for the creation of his eponymous persona Mike, an earnest but rather clueless artist who is trying to make it in the art world. Smith’s character— an alter-ego that is himself— becomes quite endearing to us through this self-deprecation, a common comedic strategy. I recall a video where Mike prints exhibition invitation cards with the names of famous artists printed next to his own, as a wishful thinking strategy. Mike’s failed efforts at stardom are ones that every young —and not so young— artist can identify with, and the emotional charge that comes with rejection and disappointment. He appears to be an artist keenly aware of his own real or perceived flaws, and he exploits them in his work. Another famous series he has been making for several years includes a group photo of himself with the students of the classes he is teaching. The high school-yearbook style series, placed in the context of a museum, has an absurd humor like the sock monkeys, in but observing the progression of time in the photographs makes one eventually think about decay, seeing Smith getting older year by year while the students in the pictures are always different but of the exact same age of the previous group.
Michael Smith, Sears Class Portrait series, class of 1999
And the third artist I thought about is Nina Katchadourian. Nina is an artist who has humor naturally embedded in her everyday self and in her life- and her work is largely a reflection of that daily experiencing of humor in the world. In general, her work borders on the absurd and the hilarious observation, which is never just a one-liner, (great humor is never merely a one-liner), invites reflections on a whole gamut of subjects.
In 2016 she shared with me a link to a video she was finishing, titled The Recarcassing Ceremony, concerning a ritual that she invented as a child growing up, using a collection of dozens of Playmobil figures that she collected and who she had developed not just names but elaborate biographies.
The Recarcassing Ceremony shows the artist at her most autobiographic, the most vulnerable, the most endearing and the most moving. More specifically, in this work the component of longing and loss contrasted with the humorous component help increase the impact of the work.
Nina Katchadourian, production still for The Recarcassing Ceremony, 2016. Photo credit: Catharine Clark Gallery
In a text about this video she writes:
“With a project as personal as the The Recarcassing Ceremony (…) I needed to find a way to make this Playmobil game that I played with my brother as a kid into something that other people might care about. The video has all the elements of a total art disaster: childhood story, family story, sad plot, happy ending, and miniature people. But I think that piece is ultimately one of the most serious pieces I’ve ever made. It’s about death and how we contend with it as kids. It’s about having aging parents. It’s probably the only piece I’ve made where people sometimes leave the room laughing and crying. I was worried it was going to be hard to find a way of opening it up to bigger questions.”
Mexican writer Julio Torri once wrote: “melancholy is the complementary color of irony”. And I believe this to be true in more than one way.
The disarming quality of some humorous works, followed by the infusion of a melancholy reflection, can open the door to a meaningful experience, which is something that characterizes the works that I have recently mentioned. But also, humor is a complementary masking force for those artists who are ailing inside. The late actor and comedian Robin Williams, who famously committed suicide, once said: “I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it is like to feel absolutely worthless, and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that”.
And lastly, perhaps, this unexpected marriage of emotions might also be a way to make sense of the messy set of ideas that the previous emotion in an artwork has triggered. As Doan told me in our conversation, “it’s about finding closure.”