“How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!”
—Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 19001
Humor performs many functions, chief among them is to ease emotional tension. Yet if we are to accept that emotions exist on a spectrum, it is also easy to detect slippages between emotional states—between high spirits and despair, for instance—given that they are relational and corresponding, and part of the same emotive range. Presumably, most people experience giggles turning to sobs—or vice versa—at least once in life. The ambivalence of humor and what it elicits is considered in After Laughter Comes Tears, the current group exhibition at Mudam in Luxembourg, its title borrowed from the 1964 R&B single of the same name by Wendy Rene. In her song, Rene croons about soured romance and holding back tears when a man disappoints her. At Mudam, the title is adapted to attest to the use of humor as a means of coping with or comprehending larger societal pain, and, to an extent, questioning whether humor is enough to genuinely abate existential anxieties.
The breadth of After Laughter is wide. It includes thirty-four artists whose contributions illuminate various aspects of the curatorial framing, and the exhibition is dedicated to several themes at once. It is in one instance concerned with bridging a perceived gap between the worlds of performance and institutional exhibition-making, citing the latter context as lacking an adequate infrastructure through which to center ephemeral artworks in museum display. Although performance is defined broadly here—there is a program of live interventions, including the self-care therapeutics in Taus Makhacheva’s ASMR Spa (2019) in which visitors are invited to receive facial treatments while listening to whispered ASMR triggers, but also sculptural installations and video works that are conceived of as “performative objects”—there is an especial concentration on European traditions of theatre and staging. This includes an aesthetic and dramaturgical strategy of segmenting the display into four acts, plus a prologue and an epilogue, punctuated by an audiovisual transition that seems designed to evoke intermission. It is a clever way of dealing with the limits of space—the exhibition is spread across two galleries, with a small selection of artworks, mostly live performance, occupying the central Great Hall—not to mention that art objects are quite often inanimate. For the sake of changing-over four acts, the works stationed between fewer rooms require a type of activation. Yet despite the curatorial intention to “expand the definition of performance”2 within the boundaries of the traditional art museum, this framing still assimilates more experimental forms of performative gesture into the familiar structure of classical theatre, containing them within the logic of narrative arcs that develop sequentially.
The other main conceptual strand explores collective disillusionment under the conditions of late-stage capitalism, as well as the brand of sardonic millennial humor that arises from this impotent anger. For this, the exhibition depends on a kind of wry pop whimsy that flirts with both political satire and serious abjection. The Parents’ Room (2021) by Diego Marcon—part of Act One, entitled “Sick, Sad World”—is a brief but looping video that perfectly demonstrates this sinister camp. The work begins, almost imperceptibly thanks to Marcon’s seamless editing, with the gentle trills of a blackbird alighting on a windowsill. Backed by an orchestral accompaniment and the bird’s melodic twittering, a family of four narrates the circumstances of their murder-suicide through song. Close-up shots of individual faces reveal their flesh to be made of rubbery silicone, irregularly applied to the skin of the live actors beneath, rendering them like life-size puppets that are at once human and not. The uncanny effect of their costuming also exaggerates the tensions at work in the perturbing yet sentimental ballad, which seeks to fold together distinct theatrical and cinematic conventions in order to pervert them.
Elsewhere, Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated (2002) screens as part of the same act. The work splices together thousands of momentary clips of CNN reporters uttering single words to form one highly personal monologue that tests the friction between the intimate experience of an individual and the broader world events that individuals apprehend. Some of the most striking moments are when the correspondents pause to draw breath, interjecting sudden breaks into the stream of words, and the audience is reminded of diaphragm exercises used by actors before projecting their voices onstage. These pauses in delivery indeed emphasize the performance of news media as something akin to other theatrical genres, calling attention to the possibility of stories and invention in broadcasting. As well, CNN recalls a period of extreme Islamophobia that has led unquestionably to the present political moment, and urges the viewer to consider how fictionalized narratives, misinformation, and partisan politics posed as objective fact (published through the ostensibly nonfiction genre of television journalism) can be deadly. Although the work was conceived of and produced within the early years of the American “War on Terror,” Fast’s observations in the early aughts bear heavily on the current geopolitical climate.
Masks, avatars, and prostheses are conceptual fascinations shared by several artists in the exhibition. In Act Two—ominously titled “Crisis mode: on,” but apropos what particular crisis remains undefined—the uncanny surfaces again, most notably in Kate Cooper’s Symptom Machine (2014–19). Here, the meticulous detail of CG animation exposes the uncomfortable artifice of rendered images; minor details like tear ducts and flyaway strands of hair might be visible, but the intellect still refuses to accept this representation as fleshy, embodied matter. The figures in Cooper’s works are attractive, white and feminine (they are referred to as “surrogate” performers in the exhibition literature), their features undoubtedly adopted from the surfeit of contemporary advertising which still promotes an unattainable ideal of racialized whiteness as the objective standard of beauty. These ideals are quickly distorted or cast into doubt in the three videos that form Symptom Machine, as the characters gradually become sick, bruised, and bloodied, or else undergo bizarre body modifications (one feminine avatar wears a translucent suit that inflates and deflates at random to simulate a stereotypically masculine brawn, making absurdist comedy of another gendered cliché). In effect, Cooper emphasizes physical limits, which establish room for thinking alternatively about differently abled and sick bodies, as well as forms of care.
Lukáš Hofmann’s Long story short (2023) is the first of the live performance program, and it begins with a blade slicing through a taut skein of fabric mounted on a standing support. First limbs, then faces, then full bodies emerge, as though passing between realms through a membrane, but the action is also a reminder of framing and representation. What follows descends quickly into abjection, in which any humorous expression is acerbically cynical. The piece is further dramatized by a series of provocative musical numbers sung a cappella. Most of Hofmann’s compositions are developed from a lexicon of possible performative gestures, which in Long story short are executed like manic, impulsive spasms. One performer is prone to spitting on the floor, while another bursts into abrupt and frantic speeches. At some point, a pair ascend the building’s very grand staircase, and proceed to spill water onto the slippery marble flooring below. In another memorable tableau, a scowling performer takes a blow torch to an ice sculpture in the shape of an ear, fondling it with one hand and melting it with the other, while the remaining ensemble press their bodies against a glass balustrade, pulling faces and streaking its polished surface. What makes Hofmann’s staging particularly exciting is the mingling of audience and cast, and, given the seemingly unpredictable actions of the latter, one is never sure what boundaries between spectator and performer might be crossed.
Act Three, “Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera (Heaven helps those who help themselves),” extends a focus on the body to a twisted rhetoric of self-care, and one which uncovers the confining conditions of beauty ideals and consumerist solutions to betterment. Some works emphasize the promotion of individualist routines for correction and optimization, like fitness and autoeroticism, but it is Mika Rottenberg’s Dough (2006) which stands out as the most interesting challenge to the wellness paradigm. In claustrophobic factory rooms, several women sit or stand at stations along the production line for an enormous, slightly sickening length of raw dough. They finger the substance, perspire and sneeze on it, feeding the gooey matter through small gaps in the walls and floor to their fellow workers. Rottenberg is guided by Marxian concepts of labor and the feminine human body, using a genre she has dubbed “social surrealism,” in which she examines the resonances and discordances between organic (bodily) and industrial processes, drawing parallels in Dough between manufacturing and digestion/excretion. The work also features actors whose physical traits tend to fall outside normative categories, and whose characteristics begin to be curiously reflected in the malleable and nauseating bread mixture.
“Tears dry on their own” is the name of the fourth and final act, a sentiment courtesy of Amy Winehouse that suggests an ostensible resolve, a determined bucking-up. Reliquary (for and after Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in loving memory) (2022) by Jesse Darling is displayed here, and its stillness hums quietly with a different kind of energy than that of the louder and more prominent works. The installation is an homage of sorts, made in a similar fashion of collecting and assemblage that Gonzalez-Torres practiced in his own art; it is also a tender token of love for a lost friend. The work features two side-by-side vitrines three-quarters full of ephemera and leftover fragments from the late artist’s career, giving prominence to discarded material as a means of conjuring a life. It is a potpourri of an archive, which includes much of the printed matter and addenda belonging to many of Torres’ exhibitions, torn to pieces. Only a handful of the larger fragments offer any legible insight to the vitrines’ contents; the bulk is a confetti of shredded paper. Not far from this tribute, and in decidedly brazen contrast, is the exhibition’s shouted epilogue, a group of hanging banners: material fragments of Chris Korda’s anti-natalist activism between 1995 and 1996 under her own Church of Euthanasia. The messaging is loud and clear: humans are the lone source of the planet’s imminent destruction, its already devastated ecosystems, which not only owes to humanity’s contemptible economic structures, its corrupt and tyrannical politicians, its perpetual recourse to warfare and desolation, but also to the bare fact that human tendencies skew toward greed and corruption. Korda’s provocative and ironic, possibly cultish campaigning endorses critical thinking even at its most inanely camp. Yet it is perhaps nowhere more clear than with the inclusion of statements like “EAT A QUEER FETUS FOR JESUS” and “SAVE THE PLANET KILL YOURSELF” that this exhibition does not aspire to provide an easy out or a cathartic resolution.
Humor in After Laughter is cynical and heavy, and whatever chortling it generates would likely be of the manic and uncertain variety. The audience is not invited to be amused, at least not entirely, but affected, since humor is not activated for its own sake, but as a reaction to the world’s entangled and ongoing crises.3 Yet while dark forms of humor anchor the exhibition conceptually, the scope of its organization is very wide, given that capitalism writ large is the central antagonist. Certainly, individual works, even clusters of works, have been thoughtfully selected and speak well to many of the exhibition’s sub-themes: the cynicism of internet culture, crises of care, and rampant individualism. But throughout there is a lingering impression that the various conceptual threads run in parallel, rather than productively weave together to support and draw out a cohesive subject matter, and that performance and theatre as artistic categories are somewhat collapsed. What it is about the devices of theatre precisely, more than performance broadly, that make it a suitable format by which to examine some of the proposed leitmotifs is left under-explored, even if the two dramatic forms pose an interesting challenge to the stuffier paradigms of museum display. Nevertheless, and in spite of the challenges that accompany such a comprehensive topic, After Laughter Comes Tears is true to its name, rightly identifying a shared, pervasive, and anxious emotional register that both captures and is a consequence of the severe realities of contemporary political and social life.
at Mudam – The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg
until January 7, 2024
Sarah Messerschmidt is a writer interested in art, literatures, and critical theory, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to the (moving) image. She is based in Berlin.