Jennifer Higgie: The Artist’s Joke – Extract of every significant text on humour by philosophers
John Welchman: Black Sphinx – Black humour in art
Simon Critchley: On Humour, Humour Noir
Freud: Jokes and their relation to the unconscious – Economies in psychic expenditure. Thermodynamic and theory of psychodynamic of humour and comics. Hardly refers to irony (saying one thing but clearly meaning another).
Youtube: Man stalked by rutting stag. Freud argues we identify with the plight of the man, mentally mimic (Ideational Mimisis). In the process of identifying we prepare ourselves in advanced to expend mental energy to perceive mental trauma. (cathexis).
Irony: Post-modernism required insider knowledge. Exists on level of discursive meaning.
Comedy is the product of the preconscious. Jokes are one of the most social means of achieving economy in psychic expenditure. We rarely remember dreams and rarely remember very good jokes. Jokes will reoccur in a different situation. Jokes are made at the expense of something/ somebody told to another. Listener/ viewer completes the joke.
Oscar Wilde: All bad poetry is sincere.
Andre Breton: Pope of surrealism. Coined the phrase Black Humour. It is the enemy of all sentimentality.
How do jokes open onto the unconscious?
Repression. The unconscious mind is a zone, unfathomable zone of psyche, full of psychic materials that we force to repress because we cannot confront it. Consumed by violence, aggression, erotic, primary narcissism. Jokes about things we repress and object. Repressed can return in negative ways. Jokes allow us to return repressed psychic matters. Cathartically. Social, collectively cathartic. If something was presented in conventional first order discourse, would be too painful to confront. Manipulating language. Language is outside. The unsaid is constitutive of what we are.
Jokes are micro narratives.
Paul McCarthy
The return of the real: Post-Modernism repressed the real, the abject.
Marc Quinn: Shit
Jeff Koons; Fabricated images.
Koppenberger: Hospitalised.
Exhibition: Martin get in the corner, you should be ashamed of yourself.
My Fine Art Practice (W101) 