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The Humours

Tara Heffernan
Eyeline 88
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The Humours is an exhibition that engagingly explores comedic discourse in art. Innovatively articulating the ways in which humour manifests and the devices through which it is articulated, the exhibition features recurrent references to stand-up comedy, but also word play and the natural emergence of conversational humour.

One of the first works encountered is Bad Timing(2017) by Barbara Cleveland, a new work commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Formerly known as Brown Council, the Sydney-based collective recently changed their title to the name of a fictional 1970s-era artist of their invention. Within their practice, they re-enact the fabricated performances of this character, as though performing a homage. With an origin story seemingly posited to justify a practice based on anachronism, Barbara Cleveland’s work is a pastiche of tropes of second-wave feminist performance art. Bad Timing serves as a pertinent example of this methodology. The single-channel video depicts various members of the collective apathetically performing tropes of comedy, from slapstick antics to hack stand-up routines, sometimes dressed in a clown wig or red nose, repeatedly asking ‘Is this funny?’ On the adjacent wall, notes from Barbara Cleveland’s journal are displayed. Contrary to the typical authoritarian rhetoric of avant-garde manifestos, these pages articulate a manifesto of bad timing, which is interpreted as a ‘feminist tactic’ that ‘disrupts’, ‘negates’ and ‘challenges’ production.1 Echoing much early literature on performance art, the foundational suggestion is that embracing failure subverts capitalistic motivations and traditional aesthetic conventions. However, the rhetoric of awkwardness, or failure, as a subject of creative exploration has long preoccupied mainstream comedy, and often that of white men: the films of Woody Allen, or programs like Seinfeld (1989-1998), Peep Show(2003-2015)

Barbara Cleveland, Bad timing,2017

Barbara Cleveland, Bad timing,2017. Details, installation views, Monash University Museum of Art, October 2017. Photographs Andrew Curtis. Courtesy Monash University Museum of Art.

Barbara Cleveland, Notes for bad timing,2017

Barbara Cleveland, Notes for bad timing,2017.Details, installation views, Monash University Museum of Art, October 2017. Photographs Andrew Curtis. Courtesy Monash University Museum of Art.