The Outsider, Art and Humour

Paul Clements

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000057706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

This cross-disciplinary book, situated on the periphery of culture, employs humour to better comprehend the arts, the outsider and exclusion, illuminating the ever-changing social landscape, the vagaries of taste and limits of political correctness.

Each chapter deals with specific themes and approaches – from the construct of outsider and complexity of humour, to Outsider Art and spaces – using various theoretical and analytical methods. Paul Clements draws on humour, especially from visual arts and culture (and to a lesser extent literature, film, music and performance), as a tool of ridicule, amongst other discourses, employed by the powerful but also as a weapon to satirize them. These ambiguous representations vary depending on context, often assimilated then reinterpreted in a game of authenticity that is poignant in a world of facsimile and 'fake news'. The humour styles of a range of artists are highlighted to reveal the fluidity and diversity of meaning which challenges expectations and at its best offers resistance and, crucially, a voice for the marginal.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, fine art, humour studies and visual culture.

1 Introduction

Humour includes certain people, as represented by the term ‘in-joke’, and excludes others who may be the butt of the joke, or don’t ‘get it’. It is a wide-ranging, ambiguous phenomenon that is highly contextual and relative to time and place. There are parallels with the arts, which concern particular understandings of cultural knowledge, creativity, taste, morality and political correctness. Hilarity can be zany in one situation, tragic or malicious in another as humour plays with fixed conceptualizations and discombobulates reality. It is an affront to expectations and mechanical mannerisms, a stone in the shoe, a fly in the ointment, a turd on the table. The joker encodes wit into the ‘text’ to engage the audience, which interprets it variously; and key to this is how and to what extent these two processes configure, as meaning is never fixed or finite.

An example that introduces this process in light of the shifting sands of interpretation is the narrative surrounding a piece of street art that revisits an old canard. The graffiti BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT may be a timeworn joke and you can buy the t-shirt, but there has been a recent reincarnation of this on the streets of south-west London (see Fig 1.1).

This play on words includes a pun on the word ‘Bill’ and a comic take on the genre of desperate graffiti traditionally employed to highlight social injustice, often by those excluded and without power or influence. It is an absurd skit on those serving a prison sentence, particularly as the offence concerns the criminal prosecution and pursuit of those posting bills and presumably graffiti on the walls, not exactly endangering the public.

In the late 1970s ‘George Davis is innocent’ was a graffiti slogan found in several places in the UK; for example, painted on a wall in Salmon Lane, east London, and outside Headingley cricket ground in Leeds. This coincided with protesters draping banners over St Paul’s Cathedral and crashing a car into the gates of Buckingham Palace in London, even digging up the cricket pitch to grab media attention about the conviction of Davis, an armed robber convicted for stealing the payroll of the London Electricity Board in 1975. Later the punk band Sham 69 wrote a track entitled George Davis is Innocent (1978) condemning the wrongful incarceration of Davis.

As Matthew Engel writing in the Financial Times (2011) surmised:

It was a case with multiple layers of irony, the most significant being that while Mr Davis was almost certainly innocent of the crime in question, he was not the most respectable gent in London. In the year after his release he was caught red-handed robbing a bank and got 15 years … There were no appeals.

Figure 1.1 BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT, 2018, graffiti, stencil on brick. Sydney Street, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018.

All these different events, understandings and interpretations influence the joke and show the mutability and creativity of humour. What adds another dimension to this old pun on a name is that this recent incarnation of Bill Posters is situated on the wall of a disused public toilet, highlighted by the sign GENTLEMEN, offering ironic possibilities regarding class, gender and lavatorial misconduct. It reframes Bill (and the joke) in relation to sexually motivated cottaging charges, which offers a homophobic slur on his character and lifestyle. I have passed this disused bog house many times on the number 49 bus and have mused over this unsigned graffiti next to the Royal Brompton Hospital¹. Humour in general exposes much about the diversity of culture and taste as well as word play, ridicule of social norms and subtleties of meaning. This book takes humour as a methodology to better understand culture and the arts, which reveals much about the outsider and exclusion.

Unlike this public graffiti, ‘art jokes’ tend to be for the initiated and purposely exclusive, which retains the elitist DNA of the canon and classification of art. The art joke may revolve around parody of a specific style or an ironic comment on something topical within cultured circles, however elliptical. It may be a plea by the artist for acceptance into relevant art worlds which can be very calculated, aspirational and unctuous. Humorous reference to Pablo Picasso, James Joyce or Terry Riley is a cry for inclusion into their worlds and corresponding accrual of status.

1 BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT graffiti derived from the same stencil has been daubed underneath the sign for the adjacent ladies toilet, which presents another set of possibilities.

Alternatively, humour can debunk this type of cringe-worthy cultural practice by attacking the exclusivity of the arts and the associated pomp, even hubris, rather than calculating how to use humour for social or career advantage. Often it escapes control due to its spontaneity, ability to morph and contextual character. People get into the mood when amused and may express themselves without due care and laugh heartily at something that is unintentionally amusing. One key aspect of the anarchic character and infectious congeniality of humour is that it catches people off-guard.

Some people manipulate humour and utilize it for their own ends precisely because it is endearing to others, whether professional stand-up comics or boorish networkers who mimic its effects in line with their own career agendas. Not unsurprisingly, humour is more successful when practised by someone who can make people laugh. Such is the skill of the comic. It concerns timing and craft (and control), which is mediated socially and communicated through shifting ideas which can be tenuous and trans-rational². Then there is the thorny issue of political correctness as humour can be cruel and mock us all, which is a recurring theme throughout the book.

Sometimes a supercilious and arrogant attitude of superiority directs humour, whereby it bullies and seeks victims, employed in a manner to belittle the excluded. It can, in effect, manipulate social norms and behaviour, particularly in authoritarian societies, by disparaging those victims of the regime as political pariahs, whether individuals, groups or whole communities (although there was much secretive, ironic humour in the former Soviet Union which acted as a counterpoint). So when Joseph Stalin laughs we all laugh, a scenario repeated ad infinitum in the workplace when the boss expects applause. Also, laughter is part of the defensive armoury of survival, epitomized by excluded Jewish entertainers in Nazi Germany.

Democratic societies may experience hegemonic shifts in relation to values but there is tolerance of difference; although, ironically, political correctness can expose degrees of intolerance. Humour is amorphous, rebellious and countercultural, which liberalism just about tolerates, as expounded by the great British satirists of the 18th and 19th centuries (for example, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson), who dared to attack the monarchy, prime minister and other powerful people in a manner that is still controversial today. This is a prescient warning that liberal democracy, which in the developed world appears threatened by a renewed racist and right-wing populism, may not be as ‘free’ as it appears, particularly the acceptability of scatological caricatures of the powerful.

Humour is a key cultural mannerism that offers an insight into society and its cultural conventions, values and taboos, as well as wider ideological issues. It draws an audience into dialogue in a variety of ways which relate to the various possibilities of meaning, as well as the contradictions and incongruities witnessed in everyday situations. For example, imagine a spoof scenario at a football match whereby the number on the back of the players’ shirts has been replaced by differing amounts of money (£2,000,000 or $50,000,000). This might reinforce the notion that footballers are chattels and create a titter in the stadium, even discussion about the commodification of the game and ticket prices. Or envisage going shopping and encountering semi-naked retail staff painted fluorescent blue – and wearing fish hats, banners and tails – while decrying plastic pollution in the oceans. It would stimulate discussion about the health of our planet and wider ecological affairs.

2 An example of trans-rationality is Bob Hope’s famous quip, ‘I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin’ (cited in Palmer 1987), which is thought-provoking, absurd and appears nonsensical. It does not fit the usual model of rational experience or understanding.

Incongruity is well exemplified by the surrealist artist René Magritte in his painting Golconda (1953), which portrays businessmen dressed in typical bourgeois attire (bowler hat, suit and overcoat) either raining down from the sky, levitating or hovering, set into a typical image of suburbia (see Fig 1.2). This satirical and absurd scenario conjures up the tyrannical posturing of Tristan Tzara who wore similar attire for Dada events (Williams cited in Brill 2010: 99) and George Grosz’s caricatures of haute bourgeois German financiers and their wives.

Magritte chose the title Golconda, which was an Indian city of enormous wealth at the centre of the mining industry, presumably as a surreal satire on global capitalism. But interpretation is open as the men in bowler hats could embody a new design of raindrop, highlight a fast-track evaporation to heaven or represent the end of the world as the houses seem empty. There is something disturbing about the uniformity of the men and the absence of women, which could be a satire on the gendered canon of art history or nature of capitalism. Magritte was obsessed with bowler hats, using them in many of his paintings, and in this image the men appear anonymous, isolated and lacking individuality, offering a critique on the uniformity of city financiers. Today the businessmen in the painting would be on their mobile phones and equally oblivious of those around them. However, this critical interpretation of wealth, individualization and power is radically altered due to the surreality and absurdity of the image.

Figure 1.2 Golconda, 1953, René Magritte, oil on canvas, 80 x 100.3cm. Paul Hester photographer. The Menil Collection, Houston.

In contrast to this hypothesizing, an alternative understanding concerns the influence of the three years Magritte spent working in a wallpaper factory as a poster and advertising designer, which gives a very different edge to the painting. It is not surreal irony but real experience that has influenced this particular text. Moreover, the image and irony has come full circle as you can buy designer Magritte wallpaper for real and virtual wallpaper for laptops and I-phones (including images of Golconda). René Magritte the wallpaper designer and surrealist has been commodified, reinterpreted in a world of art that appears dominated by markets that are instrumental in promoting capitalism, with its poster boy the artist entrepreneur.

Yet more irony is that Magritte anticipated the appropriation of his art as he titled his famous image of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (1928–9), with the strapline ‘Ceci n’est une pipe’ (‘this is not a pipe’). Michel Foucault (1982a) paid homage to Magritte and his visual critique of language and thought. He also constructed a discourse of heterotopia (Foucault 1967) which describes both a real and imagined space that inverts understanding and challenges people to ‘think outside the box’³.

Whereas the BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT graffiti has created a heterotopian bus stop space to ponder on an imaginary pun, Golconda is a representation of a real place that challenges our notions of reality as it is imaginary. It is an awkward and inconsistent idea that is disturbing, both compatible and incompatible with reality, which appeals because it appears real but rejects the material and empirical. This is a heterotopian space that disturbs mundane reality through different layers of meaning, rather than a completely imaginary ‘nowhere’ that does not exist (utopia) or an unpleasant, dysfunctional imagined or real place (dystopia), although these conceptualizations overlap. Golconda refers to an actual place, however abstracted, an incongruous heterotopian fantasy that critiques perception, meaning and visual language, creating a rupture between language, thought and real things.

Magritte’s work is both familiar and strange, where the rational foundations of reality have been fragmented, which shatters common sense. He was a contrary character and did not want to be (or called) an artist and marginalized himself as a thinker rebelling against existence (Gablik 1985: 9). He chose this outsider position and, like a comic, used his art to challenge our perceptions of the world, exemplifying ‘outsideness’ (Bakhtin 1990), which understanding is beyond each individual’s consciousness.

Golconda can be understood in the carnivalesque tradition as a transgressive image that ridicules the powerful and conformity. The original proponent of this concept, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), whilst researching into medieval European carnival, acknowledged the cruel lives of ordinary folk eking out a miserable living in order to survive in a harsh and grossly unfair world. In response to this, his notion of carnival humour targeted self-important, supercilious and boorish characters, with laughter utilized as a conduit for satirical attacks on mainstream values, structural injustices and hypocrites who uphold certain moral standards from a position of privilege. Humour thereby permits the ‘common people’ an authentic form of recourse, a temporary relief from the overbearing control of their superiors, laughing at their religious and feudal masters and hooting at death and hell. It also suited Bakhtin’s romantic need for justice as he had his own problems with the Soviet system and the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst undergoing his research. He was sentenced without trial, allegedly for practising Christianity, and exiled to Siberia for ten years, later reduced to six. He understood exclusion and banishment first-hand.

3 This hackneyed strapline suggests that people who employ it want to be perceived as different, hence the irony of employing such terminology. Moreover, it displays the reduction of language to sound bites and the logic of advertising, branding and the marketplace, which irony may have appealed to Magritte’s sense of humour.

Bakhtin maintained that the ability to laugh at the most fearsome aspects of life revitalizes both individual and community, which can be cathartic, playful and dangerously transgressive. Also, that the discourse of inequality requires humour as a counterbalance, which offers hope rather than fear and pessimism, an expressive and creative voice of optimism. The superior use of humour through a need for the powerful to control the powerless is an example of the appropriation of the levelling mechanics of humour that offset the inequalities of life. Ideally humour is a tactic employed by the powerless to balance these social inequalities, which rehumanizes society scarred by centuries of privilege and corrupted by the metric of capitalism. In reality, humour is employed in a much more anarchic fashion, which can be far from ideal or controllable.

An association of visual humour with marginality is a key focus of this book. This includes how humour about individual outsiders and excluded groups shapes a distinct understanding of the world, which is additional to representations by those who portray their marginality through the arts. We tend to think of social inclusion and exclusion in binary terms, each the opposite of the other, but whilst inclusion into a college may resonate into the wider community, inclusion into a monastery may mean exclusion from the wider community, showing a mutable and contextual character. These complex notions of marginality signify a range of issues, from poverty to lack of opportunity and health, which embrace aspects of diversity (whether variables of class, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality), including those removed from society and housed in prison or asylum, as well as artists, radicals and others who adopt alternative lifestyles.

There are a range of citizens wary and critical of established culture who choose marginality, a sentiment that echoes the joke that exclusion in hell would be preferable to inclusion into heaven as there would be more interesting people and fun. But whether hell escapes the excruciating torture and burning sensations associated is a moot point. So the avoidance of those overly networked and smug characters who allegedly manage to manoeuvre themselves into heaven pales into insignificance.

The term ‘outsider’ incorporates romantic modernist understandings alongside postmodern meanings associated with the rise of identity politics and issues related to relative thinking, representation, self-definition and lifestyle choices. It is a subjective and variable individual construct associated with writers, artists, misfits and bohemians, unlike the more logical terms of exclusion and structural processes derived from poverty, racism, ill-health or lack of educational and career opportunities. Notwithstanding thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Approaches to Humour and Laughter
• 3. The Construct of Outsider: Media Labelling, ‘Othering’ and Excluded Minds
• 4. The Construct of Outsider: Identity, the Body and Representation
• 5. Humorous Representations of the Outsider: Hybridity, Utility and the Carnivalesque
• 6. Representations of Humour by Marginal Artists
• 7. Creative Outsider Spaces and Dark Heterotopias
• 8. Transgression, Spectacle and Political Correctness
• 9. Afterthoughts
• Bibliography
• Index