The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes About life and death and other tuppenny aches
Samuel Beckett after Sébastien Champfort1
Paul Mumme’s performance-based photographic and video works commonly show a figure in a suit, dour and downcast, performing an action that is taken out of the ordinary in order to emphasise its futility, an action such as pulling on a rope affixed firmly to the ground, or attempting to sweep up a rubbish tip. These actions would seem pathological if they were not so patently allegories of the flaws in human hopes and aspirations. Commenting on his own work, Paul Mumme states that his artistic alter-ego is typically ‘engaged in some sort of Sisyphean task with Keaton-esque deadpan’. It is a seemingly straightforward set of references but it gives us a great deal to ponder. In the most lucid and influential texts on the matter, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the human lot to that of Sisyphus who was condemned eternally to haul a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down again. Paul Mumme’s work plays out a silent and mute world in which every game is an endgame.
The short video loop Earth Mover (2006) is one of the most visually concise renditions of the Sisyphean predicament that one will find. The artist, back bowed, legs tensed, features himself tugging at a rope that is firmly lodged within the soil. The suitedness of the figure is important, for it allows the artist to sidestep connotations of his individual agency toward a generic persona that becomes a nameless avatar for one and all. But always comedic: like Charlie Chaplain with... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Here We Go, 2009. C-type print, 76 x 61cm. Courtesy the artist.
Still Life, 2007. Giclee print, 76 x 61cm. Courtesy the artist.
