The Guest List for a Joke
How cognitive complicity operates in art.
This text is based on preparatory notes for a workshop about pedagogy, humor and social practice that will be presented this Friday at Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.
After a recent exchange I had with art historian Serge Guilbaut who jokingly told me that this column is a series of “philosophical letters”, I was inspired to read Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, or Letters on the English, which are divertimentos on various cultural and social topics. In one of them, the philosopher touches on the subject of the English comedy, writing toward the end of his letter: “But true comedy is the speaking picture of the follies and ridiculous foibles of a nation; so that he only is able to judge of the painting who is perfectly acquainted with the people it represents.”
Incidentally, Voltaire writes these lines right around the time of the appearance in London of what might have been the very first modern political cartoon (a work by William Hogarth). But what I like about Voltaire’s definition, as I have been trying for many years to make sense of what it is exactly that I am trying to accomplish when I use humor as a tool in my writings, performances and drawings, was something that Voltaire does not explicitly say but that it is implied in his definition: establish cognitive complicity.
The use of the term “complicity” in the context of contemporary art is hardly new, which is why I add a qualifier. In her 2005 book “Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity” Johanna Drucker makes an astute assessment of the work of the period, roughly of the art which emerged in the 1990s. Speaking of the work of artists like Gregory Crewdson, Drucker uses the term to describe how artists had embraced aspects of mass culture, putting them less as “oppositional critics” and more as acknowledged participants of contemporary culture: as Drucker puts it, “in the place of this diffidence and disdain, a distinct mood of engaged, expressive affectivity has come into play.”
Aside from the fact that this combative neo-culture war era we are living in (post Me Too, BLM and Trans-rights movements) could not feel more different than the one Drucker was writing about (oh, the long-gone, benign innocence of the 90s), the kind of complicity I am describing is a more evergreen concept— something that in my view lies at the core of every art community, and in fact, of any social group that bonds through a common language.
I first experienced a basic form of cognitive complicity in my family. My father, Luis Ignacio Helguera Soiné, took upon himself at the age of 15 or so to create a family newsletter in the playful form of a single-page newspaper. He titled it “El Rayo” (“The Thunder”). During those years (late 1930s) he could only resort to my grandfather’s Underwood typewriter and would use carbon paper to make extra copies. Because you can only make about two copies this way, he would have to re-type the newsletter three or four times each week, and sometimes even more as the demand for the newsletter grew amidst the extended family. He dutifully continued producing El Rayo for many years, until he became a young adult.
Most importantly, the stories were informative but entertaining, and often funny (the sense of humor is in the Helguera family DNA). We are lucky to have kept virtually all the copies of El Rayo; reading them one can get an accurate chronicle of what was happening in the family on any particular week. Mostly the news items were fairly routine information (headlines such as “They Traveled to Lagos de Moreno”, or “They Celebrated their Wedding Anniversary”) although El Rayo also marked landmark moments in the family which included weddings, births and deaths. This publication serves as testament of the enormity of what is forgotten in family histories, primarily because it is the small, forgettable things that eventually give substance to the whole.
At the end of the newsletter my father always included cartoons. He was a very able draftsman, a talent that he never sought to pursue formally. His jokes were drawn from then contemporaneous) 1940s-style humor (think of the gags in Chick Young’s Blondie), which, 80 years later, might feel too ingenue to contemporary readers. In the 1980s, when my dad reinitiated El Rayo for my sisters (then studying in the US), he asked me to take over the cartoon section, which I gladly did.
El Rayo might have partially accounted for the fact that my siblings and I also made our own zines and magazines. My brother and my sister created a short-lived publication titled “El Cuervo y la Paloma” (“The Raven and the Dove”), and I created “Revista I” (“I” after our dog Igor) and a Marvel-style comic series featuring “Señor Igor y Zorry”, an intrepid detective duo of a dog and a fox. I also used discarded photographs that the family had taken and used them to create “fotonovelas” (“historias con corazón”).
The readership of these domestic publications was strictly internal: that is, my siblings and sometimes my parents. The references, storylines and language were so specific to our own experiences and anecdotes that it would have been hard for anyone else to appreciate them.
While we might not need anything other than mere anecdotal experience to know it, over the years, several clinical psychology studies have proved how humor is an important social bonding tool. You might have experienced it in school, in the friendships you developed with those who became good friends: you develop code names, shorthand references and gestures that are normally incomprehensible to others (my daughter does the same today). It is that exclusivity of meaning that makes the code special and strengthens social bonds. One of my best friends in high school, Luis Padua—who is now a famous TV anchor in Monterrey, Mexico— was an infinite source of jokes , rituals, and wild ideas. He invented something that a small circle of our friends participated in, titled “poesía borracha” (drunken poetry), generally stream-of-consciousness writing at times surreal and ridiculous. We still speak to each other using that language whenever we meet.
And this is how this interestingly connects with the art practice: art is also a language of complicity; a complex set of codes that, like humor but not necessarily in that guise, offers new meanings to those familiar with those codes. This may account for two problems we usually have in art history: one is to properly contextualize non-Eurocentric art practices, which involves understanding the cultural references that informed those artists. Because those references are alien to the foreign scholar, they revert to dominant paradigms and standards to evaluate those histories. This is an issue that a group of art historians, led by James Elkins, sought to address in the book The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and Its Alternatives. As Elkins explains it, the project was an attempt to counter the book Art Since 1900, written by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alan Bois, Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh, which had received criticisms for its Eurocentric perspective. Elkins’ project drew on research in 76 countries.
The second problem is that complicit art language, by definition, can’t be entirely communicated to an external (i.e. non-complicit) viewer. This is one of the greatest challenges I experienced as educator: one can detect that there is an intricate system of references amidst a generation of artists, a movement, or a collective, but these are not apparent, or meaningful, to those of us who did not live in that period. I became particularly appreciative of that phenomenon when I worked in a show of Fluxus a bit more than a decade ago. I realized how several gestures, small phrases and rituals that Fluxus artists observed were very important to them but were something sometimes untranslatable that the average viewer would miss. As uninvited or latecomer guests to the party, we can appreciate the irreverence, the eccentricity, the anti-establishment spirit of Fluxus, but we miss many key references that make their works so significant.
Related to this, those external to those conversations and not versed in understanding those codes conclude that their exclusion is deliberate, thus generating conspiracy theories. I see such phenomenon in Mexico with an art critic who is sort of an equivalent of Alex Jones for the art world—a critic that I will not dignify by mentioning her name here, but who is well-known in the local scene. She has built a successful mini cult by creating conspiratorial explanations about contemporary art, denouncing it as a giant fraud. She leads a confederacy of dunces who believe that Dark Money runs the swamp of art. She provides aid and comfort to resentful artists who can blame their lack of professional achievements to this imaginary evil global scheme. This resentment often leads them to dismiss practically any artist who receives critical attention as proof that they part of that conspiracy. I have been fascinated for years with her (to the dismay of some of my friends, who think she should just be ignored) and once I even wrote her a public letter, arguing among other things, that using the art market to understand contemporary art is like trying to explain marine biology through the cruise industry.
But in a way, this critic and her followers are not entirely wrong: they instinctively perceive the interconnectedness of the artworld’s discourse and, frustrated that they can’t access the codes that constitute that complicity, they opt to explain it as something with nefarious (i.e.. financial profit) purpose. They miss what one of my favorite satirists, Juvenal, once wrote: “All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.” The price in this case not being monetary, but the intellectual investment to engage in the conversation.
Monetary need, however (for example, museum’s need to bring crowds to see art shows) might be what prevents us to fully acknowledge that art is not merely about sensorial pleasure, but also about intellectual engagement. Instead we present art as something that can be universally enjoyed and accessed by everyone, but omit to acknowledge the intellectual investment that needs to be developed to attain such enjoyment— one needs to learn the codes that are being used. You cannot fully understand a country if you have not lived in it; you can hardly master a language until you have spoken it in its living context. Understanding outside of direct experience is, in the view of many modern philosophers and educators such as the pragmatists, not true understanding: rather, we need to understand the world as something inseparable from agency.
And this is the place where humor can build cognitive complicities or, conversely, reveal their absence. I encountered it directly once when I was invited by a curator at an art foundation to give one of my stand-up comedy performance lectures to a group of funders. When I arrived in the room, the space had a feeling of a stern board meeting —not a single smile anywhere. I did start my number, and right away I noticed that every single joke I was attempting was totally falling flat. This went on through the whole performance, to the point that I started simply disassociating without paying attention that the room was in total silence. In the end I was met with only polite applause. I later realized that the group was constituted mostly by finance people, none of which knew anything about contemporary art and thus all my inside jokes about the art world were totally incomprehensible to them. It was a perfect example of the impossibility to do comedy when the audience is all of outsiders. Or the other way around: sometimes, the comedian is the one who is not in the RSVP list.
Love this
wonderful read