Slapstick! The Art of Comedy 28 February to 25 May 2014 Contents

L
ENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

Art Education programme

Guided Tours

Duration 1 hour, costs € 3,-, exclusive admission, German only

Every Sunday, 4 pm

Flashlight Guided Tour in English, Czech, and BKS (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian)
Every 1st Saturday in a month at 4 pm
Duration 30 Min, € 2,- plus admission fee

Guided tour for deafs with sign language interpreter
Every 1st Saturday in a month at 4 pm
Admission and guided tour free for deafs

Exhibition Booklet Texts

PrologUE

The exhibition puts contemporary artists in the context of slapstick silents from the early days of cinematic history. Slapstick comedy exploits the build-up of expectations, of their calculated disappointment and delayed payoff. Contemporary artists are hot on the heels of these great masters to the extent that they take up slapstick’s cultural codes, translate them into their own modes of expression and play with quotations, motifs and concepts.

The underlying motivation is to undercut the well established idea of the artist as hero.

The risk the artist must be prepared to take is to expose herself/himself to ridicule, while the reward is insight into the extremely vulnerable and precarious human existence. The celebration of failure is imbued with special charm against the background of today’s society of perfectionism and high achievement.

This booklet, which has been prepared by the LENTOS Art Education Department, provides information on all works and film shown in the exhibition, grouped together in sections that coincide with the chapters of the exhibition. It is designed to provide assistance for your own personal approach to the works of art and film.

Louis Lumière (1864–1948)

L’Arroseur Arrosé [The Sprinkler Sprinkled]

0:49 Min. | Silent film directed by Louis Lumière, France, 1895

L’Arroseur arrosé is one of the silent films first screened by means of the Cinématographe at the Grand Café in Paris in 1895: A gardener is watering his plants. A mischievous boy cuts off the water flow by stepping on the hose. He then releases the blockage, causing the water to spray the gardener from head to toe. The boy is discovered, pursued, caught and given a sound spanking. The film already contains such characteristic slapstick elements as the play with the audience’s expectations, the chase and the spanking.

Crash-Boom-Bang
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

Samuel Beckett

Stan Laurel (1890–1965) & Oliver Hardy (1892–1957)

Helpmates

Clip 1:08 Min. | Silent film directed by James Parrott and Hal Roach, USA, 1932

“When the cat’s away the mice will play.” Mindful of the old saying, Ollie throws a wild party in the absence of his wife. He wakes up in the morning surrounded by absolute chaos. To restore some semblance of order, he calls Stan over to give him a hand. From there things rapidly go downhill. In the end, the house burns down and it would be hard to think of anything that makes Ollie’s misery more complete.

The destruction of one’s home has a long tradition in slapstick. The home is a key symbol of civic order, which was prized especially highly in the early 20th century. Maybe the “schadenfreude” experienced at someone else’s loss of their home deflects from the fear of losing it oneself.

Peter Land

B. 1966 in Aarhus, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark

Springtime (Forår), 2010
A pile of bricks and an arm reaching out of it – that’s all there is. Who has been buried underneath and how this came to pass remains an open question. It may be divined what it must feel like to be weighed down by a pile of bricks. However, in combination with the title, which may be translated as “springtime” or as “relaunch”, the gesture has heroic overtones: “A pile of bricks? Is that all? It would take more to subdue me!” Failure and another beginning from scratch as if this was inevitable is a motif that runs like a red thread through Peter Land’s art.

The artist first attracted international attention in the 1990s with videos in which he depicted himself in highly unenviable situations: as an entertainer who was so drunk he kept falling off his bar stool or as a clumsy striptease dancer, who thrashes about in a frenzy to rid himself of his clothing.

The laughter that these pitiful and embarrassing activities strive to excite, in which the artist seems completely to disregard his own dignity and sense of shame, sticks in the audience’s throats. Vicarious embarrassment, even though it is by definition shame felt on behalf of someone else, also strikes close to home.
PIE FIGHT
Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.

Stan Laurel

Stan Laurel (1890–1965) & Oliver Hardy (1892–1957)

The Battle of the Century

Clip 2:57 Min. | Silent film by Clyde Bruckman, USA, 1927

Two men, one career. Between the early 1920s and 1951 Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made more than 100 films together. The mess they regularly got each other into was made of the stuff of everyday life. Each had a clear-cut part in the comedy act: pompous Ollie believes himself to be much the smarter of the two but is hounded by misfortune and takes a great deal of punishment one way or another; Stan’s childlike naivety, so infuriating to Ollie, seems to make him immune against attacks of any kind.

The Battle of the Century is among their first short films; it is also one of their most acclaimed. When Stan fails to win the prize money in a boxing bout, Ollie takes out insurance on his partner to improve their finances. However, when a pie delivery man comes to grief on the banana peel instead of Stan, who it had been cunningly planted for, a battle ensues that soon involves the entire street.

Alexej Koschkarow

B. 1972 in Minsk, Belarurs, lives in New York City

Pie fight, 2003

13 Min.
Are you one of those people who sometimes feel the urge to lob a cream pie into someone’s face or beat them about the head with a feather filled pillow?

The zest for pie fights or pillow fights, which has accompanied some of us since childhood, is perhaps indicative of our longing for a spot of carefree chaos in an overregulated world. Alexej Koshkarov realised this childhood dream and invited thirty unsuspecting, elegantly clad friends to the premises of the Düsseldorf Artists’ Association Malkasten. He had laid on an ample stock of cream pies – 1600 lbs of the stuff – and filmed his guests as they set to with gusto until, covered in whipped cream from head to toe, they ”themselves more or less resembled living sculptures.” In his subversive works Koshkarov typically plays with situations that are totally unforeseen by the participants.


Vincent Olinet

B. 1981 in Lyon, France, lives in Brussels, Belgium and Singapore

Pies, 2007
Opulent, rich in calories, cloying: adjectives like these probably occur to you at the sight of these twenty cakes that seem to be well past their best-before date. They are extremely unlikely to make anyone’s mouths water. Chances are that people will feel repelled by their garish artificiality.

It is two emotions in particular that the artist wants to evoke in us: “I like to make shiny, colourful art pieces that appeal to our dreams and urges but actually deal with decay or disillusion.“ Vincent Olinet’s works seem to come from a fairy story world that has to make do without happy endings. “Nothing is only black or white, and it’s important for me to show the two sides of a coin,“ says the artist, who as a child wanted to be a film director and as an adolescent a cartoonist before it occurred to him that art enabled him to realise both these dreams.

BananA PEEL
Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
The High Sign

Clip 0:33 Min. | Film by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline, USA, 1921

Before the banana morphed into an indispensable slapstick prop, it was known as a “menace for the populace.” After the banana’s first appearance in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century the fruit quickly established itself as a popular snack. In the absence of “trash cans,” banana peels, like most other garbage, usually ended up on the sidewalk. Made extra slippery by rot, peels became a public nuisance, making newspapers in the 1880s issue warnings of the threat they constituted. Comedian Billy Watson was the first in 1900 or so to exploit the banana peel as a prop in his stage shows. He was followed on film by Harold Lloyd, who premiered a peel related gag in 1917. In The High Sign Keaton adds a twist to the repertoire that had already become standard by his time: making the audience anticipate the seemingly inevitable, he ambles up to a banana peel only NOT to step on it. The smile on the faces of his cinema audiences is due to their appreciation of how the expectation they were led to form is deliberately disappointed.
Wilfredo Prieto

B. 1978 in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, lives in Barcelona, Spain

Grasa, Jabón y Plátano, 2006 [Fat, Soap and banana]
What you get is what is stated in the title. Eschewing philosophically inclined titles and, most of all, “Untitled“, which leaves the viewer entirely clueless, the Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto likes to name his works after what is depicted in them. In this case the title is simply Fat, soap and banana. Are you supposed to think that the three components combined make you slip and fall three times as fast as each component on its own? It certainly evokes pictures of that sort before the observer’s inner eye. It’s almost impossible not to imagine the consequences that an accidental step on this arrangement would produce.Prieto’s works usually consist of mundane everyday objects whose arrangement he does not seem to devote a great deal of attention to, as is demonstrated for instance by twelve chess boards displaying twelve different check-mate positions or by two stones in a pool of blood. The finishing touches needed to complete the works are supplied by the observers, in whose heads the required stories begin to form.

CHAIN reaction
Equilibrium is at its most beautiful shortly before it collapses.

Fischli/Weiss

Robert Elfgen

B. 1972 in Wesseling, lives in Cologne and Berlin, Germany

der rock aber nicht den hut [the jacket but not the hat], 2011
Sixteen black and white full-length portraits of the artist are placed side by side against an airbrushed silver background, in a way that makes one think of bricolage, a collage of a miscellany of objects, some of which are found, others improvised and a third group that is rendered with a great deal of attention to technical detail. The artist wears a suit. The hat mentioned in the title is conspicuously absent. An old song that used to be sung by journeymen carpenters when they were on the road mentioned by Elfgen contains the line “we may waste our jackets on drink, but not our hats”. Elfgen trained as a carpenter before he enrolled as a student in Rosemarie Trockel’s master class. One of Elfgen’s dominant themes is the relationship between individual, environment and society, which gives rise to his utopian idea of hopeful failure. It is in keeping with this idea that the present work is reminiscent of a domino race or some other chain reaction. Like Jeppe Hein, Elfgen loves to involve his audiences. In 2007 he arranged for young people to have their own venues in Wuppertal’s urban space where they were free to do their own thing. In this spirit: Take the stage! Make the most of that forward momentum!

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977)

Modern Times

Clip 2 Min. | Film by Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1936

British-born Charlie Chaplin is considered to be the twentieth century’s most influential comedians. The “tramp” is the creation he is best known for. Chaplin’s tramp has impeccable manners and his signature costume includes a bowler hat, trousers much too large for his short stature and a toothbrush moustache.

Modern Times tackles the consequences of industrialisation and capitalism head on. In the clip selected here Chaplin the tramp is an assembly line worker. His repetitive job consists in tightening a particular screw and he keeps repeating the monotonous hand movement even after the machine has stopped. He finds it difficult to keep up with the speed of the assembly line and when its speed increases, he loses his rhythm and soon gets caught up in the wheels and cogs of the machinery, a tragicomic chain reaction. Later in the film he is sacked and lands in prison for a spell; he escapes, falls in love with a female tramp (played by Chaplin’s then wife, Paulette Goddard), who is a dancer and a singer in a bar, where Chaplin first tries his hand at waitering and then as a singer.

Fischli/Weiss

B. 1952, lives in Zürich / b. 1946 in Zürich, died. 2012 ibid.

Der Lauf der Dinge [The Way Things Go], 1987

31 Min.
The Way Things Go, a huge success with visitors of documenta 8, is arguably the most famous work by the Swiss artist duo Fischli/Weiss. Peter Fischli and David Weiss worked together as a team between 1979 and 2012 in a great variety of media. Typical of their work is their wry sense of humour. “In this work, everyday objects roll, fall or flow to form a miraculous chain reaction.” This is how Hans-Ulrich Obrist described The Way Things Go, one of his great favourites, in an art magazine.

The chain reaction, in which each event causes the next, was filmed in a storage depot. The camera remains trained on the successive events as they unfold, causing viewers at each stage to wonder anxiously whether the process can possibly continue.


A CORNER SITUATION
Marcel Duchamp

B. 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, died 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Replica of Door, 11 rue Larrey, (Orig. 1927)
Door, 11 rue Larrey was made by a carpenter according to Duchamp’s specifications. This constitutes a wry comment on authorship – the artist is not necessarily the one who physically creates the object – and as a latecomer to the artist’s series of readymades it allowed Duchamp to develop the idea. The door is an everyday object but its context elevates it to a work of art. It served its everyday purpose in Duchamp’s studio at the address indicated by the title.

The door can be made to swing to and fro between two door frames that are set at an angle to each other; by doing so, it makes Alfred de Musset’s remark invalid that “a door must necessarily be either open or shut.” If you want to block one door frame you must necessarily leave the other open. In 1963 the door was removed from Duchamp’s studio and exhibited as a work of art in its own right.

rabbit chase
Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
The High Sign

Clip 1:13 Min. | Film by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline, USA, 1921

Buster Keaton, the lowly employee of a shooting gallery, is hired as a hit man by a gang of “blood-thirsty bandits“, the Blinking Buzzards. At the same time he accepts a contract as bodyguard to August Nicklenurser, the very man, it turns out, he has been hired to kill. Soon a chase through the house of the potential victim ensues. Nicklenurser had secretly installed several trap doors and revolving doors to help him get away from the Blinking Buzzards if and when the need arose. That physical comedy is always dependent on certain spatial arrangements becomes evident in an exemplary manner in this legendary scene.

PHYSICAL COMEDY
Think slow, act fast.

Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
The Cameraman

Clip 3 Min. | Silent film by Edward Sedgwick, USA, 1928

In The Cameraman Buster Keaton is Luke Shannon, a ferrotype photographer. Ferrotypes were easily affordable photographs and a standard feature of fairs and fairground entertainment. In this scene Luke arrives at the public swimming pool with Sally (played by Marceline Day), the girl he is in love with. In the locker room he suddenly finds himself sharing a cubicle with another man. In his hurry to escape the claustrophobic conditions he mistakes the other man’s swimming trunks for his own. Rather predictably, they don’t fit. Nor is this the end of his troubles. He dives into the pool and loses the trunks altogether.

Joining the Metro Goldwyn Mayer mega studio was in Buster Keaton’s view the biggest mistake of his life. His acrobatic prowess stood him in good stead when he played the clown; it was useless in parts in which he figured as the romantic hero of the kind the Hollywood industry demanded from him.

Carola Dertnig

B. in Innsbruck, lives in Vienna

Stroller 1, 2008 & byketrouble, 2003

3 Min. and 5:50 Min.

In Carola Dertnig’s series of slapstick videos, True Stories, the artist doubles as a performer. Her focus is on staged moments of failure, usually somewhere in public. Centring mostly on the general perverseness of the inanimate, the plotlines highlight irritation rather than the comic aspect. In many cases they are based on real situations that the artist had to go through. The situation described in detail in Stroller 1 lasted perhaps only for a short moment in real life: a woman cannot get her pram past a barrier on the underground.

In her video byketrouble it is the lack of space in an elevator that is the source of trouble for Dertnig, particularly when an additional person enters the cabin. The camera is positioned in such a way that viewers get to see the scene from above (as in the clip from The Cameraman, where two men try to change into their swimming gear in the constricted space of one cubicle). This is highly effective in rendering the spatial constraint.

Timm Ulrichs

B. 1940 in Berlin, lives in Berlin und Hannover, Germany

Der erste sitzende Stuhl (nach langem Stehen sich zur Ruhe setzend) [The first sitting chair (sitting down for a rest after a long time standing)], 1970
Ulrichs is both an artist and a concrete poet, whose work often consists in visualised words and other language games. These range from his Hautfilm (projected on skin) to concrete poetry, which is writing realised in concrete. In other works, as in the present one, Ulrichs takes things beyond the literal level. He tells an entire story, in this case, the story of a chair (Stuhl) that is fed up with standing upright. This is doubly ironic in German, since the word “Stuhl”, as the artist whose research is often guided by a whimsical humour has discovered, shares the linguistic root of the verb “stehen”, to stand. The rear legs of the chair have been fitted with hinges and can be tilted to a horizontal position. The chair is thus able to sit, like other four-legged creatures. The human being is left standing – the relationship between man and chair has been reversed, unless the human being agrees to rethink the received wisdom about sitting.

John Wood & Paul Harrison

B. 1969, in Hong Kong, China and 1966, England, live in Bristol

Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things), 2001

26:59 Min.

Wood and Harrison have been a team since 1993. In their twenty-six sequentially looped video clips they appear to be engaged in a study of the physical and mental parameters of the world around them. The results are short, slapstick flavoured tragicomedies, featuring characters who look like updated British versions of Estragon and Vladimir from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The bodies of the two actors interact with props such as a watering can or a boat against the backdrop of simply styled rooms. Is it a game? Are the two hooked on playing the part of crash text dummies? Or are they simply in love with special effects?

The clips can certainly be viewed with pleasure. The nature of the smile they are likely to conjure on to the viewer’s faces will depend on whether viewers feel sympathy for the two or whether they are somewhat sadistically inclined. A comic effect that is strongly reminiscent of Buster Keaton: whatever befalls the two performers, you cannot tell from their faces what they make of it.

Bruce McLean

B. 1944 in Glasgow, Scottland

Pose Work for Plinths, 1971
The Scottish painter, sculptor and performance artist studied at the Glasgow School of Art und at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, as it was then called. Early on, McLean developed his subversive and humorous artistic strategies to help him escape from the academicism of the College. He made garbage sculptures or posed as sculptures in the style of Henry Moore, as can be seen in this photo series, which is reminiscent of the physical comedy of slapstick films.

Pose Work for Plinths started life as a performance at the Situation Gallery in London.

Bruce Nauman

B. 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, lives in Galisteo, New Mexico, USA

Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 & No. 2, 1968 & 1969

59:35 Min. and 59:58 Min.

Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 & No. 2, dating from 1968–1969, features Nauman as actor. The artist is seen exploring the borders of the room he is in, which happens to be his studio. As opposed to The Cameraman, the part played by Buster Keaton, Nauman remained himself throughout and braved ridicule in his own person. He was committed to experimenting in great seriousness with video, a new art medium at the time. This is apparent from the variety of camera positions he uses. The title gives away all the action there is, which is designed to show how video works. A special characteristic is the rhythm generated by the noise of the bouncing, which is endlessly repeated on the video loop. In 1968, the year in which Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 was made, Bruce Nauman had his first exhibition in Europe and took part in documenta 4.

TABLE MANNERS
Like all great comedians, he is a philosopher

Kurt Tucholsky about Charles Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977)

The Gold Rush

Clip 2:50 Min. | Film by Charlie Chaplin, 1925, USA

The tramp cannot resist the lure of the Klondike gold rush and moves to Alaska to try his luck. A snowstorm makes him to seek refuge in a hovel, which offers protection against the weather but no food. The tramp cooks his own shoes and makes a meal of them, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, creating at the same time the best-known scene from Gold Rush. The shoes used in the film were, incidentally, made of liquorice.

John Bock

B. 1965 in Gribbohm, lives in Berlin, Germany

Zezziminnegesang, 2006

27:22 Min.

If manners of a sort are still observed in Chaplin’s silent film Gold Rush, if we ignore for a moment what is actually served up, table manners in Zezziminnegesang are an entirely different matter. This makes a comparison of the two a tempting proposition and might lead to a complex dialogue between The Gold Rush and Bock’s Zezziminnegesang on such topics as what is considered edible under certain circumstances and the hidden meaning of certain foodstuffs. Bock, who is often described in the art literature as a post-modern Buster Keaton or as chaplinesque, makes a. o. an attempt in this performance to eat a tin of ravioli with a spoon fastened to the leg of an armchair.

Slapstick QUOTE 1
Laughter is the universal language.

Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971)

Safety Last!

Clip 3 Min. | Silent film by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, USA, 1923

A man dangling from the minute hand of a huge clock near the top of a skyscraper: a scene that wrote film history and gave Harold Lloyd his break as an actor. He had only recently created the role of the prototypical underdog who is regularly overlooked in the non-descript workforce – until his inventiveness, physical fitness and indomitable spirits enable him to turn the tables on those who slight him.

Climbing the façade of a skyscraper, which may itself be regarded as a symbol of the United States on its way up in the world, can also be read as climbing the 28 career ladder. Once the daredevil has made it to the top and has left the danger zone behind – or, in the metaphorical sense, has reached the top rung on the career ladder, he is embraced by the woman he loves.

Lloyd’s talent as a climber was exploited in several films, with Lloyd himself carrying out most of the stunts. When during shooting of a commercial in 1919 a bomb exploded prematurely, Lloyd lost several fingers of his right hand.

The numerous films that quote the clock tower scene include Jackie Chan’s Project A, Back to the Future, and most recently, in 2011, in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.

Gordon Matta-Clark

B. 1943 in New York, USA, died 1978 ibid.

Clockshower, 1973

13:50 Min.

Even though Gordon Matta-Clark, an architect by training, never practised his profession, it remained a key concern in his artistic practice. He became famous for his so-called “building cuts“, which split buildings in halves or excised parts of them.

Another hallmark of Matta-Clark’s work are his puns. The title of the present work, Clockshower, rhymes with “clocktower”. New York’s Clocktower is the location for the action in this video, which consists in the artist washing (in water 29 spouting from the clock hands), shaving and brushing his teeth suspended from the clock, the upper half of his body covered in lather.

With this outrageous stunt Matta-Clark obviously wished to pay homage to Harold Lloyd’s acrobatic tour-de-force in the silent Safety Last! Over and above this, the concern with movement, weight and gravity, which he shared with his friend, the choreographer Trisha Brown, was part of his fascination with architecture, which is so much in evidence in his architectural works.

FIST FIGHT
Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
Steamboat Bill Jr.
Clip 1:11 Min. | Silent film by Charles Reisner, USA, 1928
The fist fight may be regarded as the nucleus that the entire slapstick genre grew from. The term slapstick is borrowed from the “slapstick,” a simple theatrical prop. It is a club-like object that makes a loud smacking sound. The name for a whole genre developed from this device. Why should it be so funny if someone gets a sound beating or receives an accidental blow? Is it “schadenfreude”? Is it the vicarious enjoyment of violent aggression for which there is no place in civilized life?

In Steamboat Bill Jr, Buster Keaton is forced to take part in a fist fight. His father, who wants his son to be seen as “strong,” even forms his hand into a fist and hits his son’s adversary with it. Steamboat Bill Jr, however, is peacefully inclined. He eschewes violence and is finally carried off like a lifeless puppet by his father. There are echoes here of Buster Keaton’s biography. He started performing with his parents when he was only three in a comedy act that was eventually called “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged.” In it, the young boy was thrown by his father against the scenery, into the orchestra pit or even into the audience. His knack of “landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand” earned him the nickname Buster, a term common at the time for a spill or a nasty fall that had the potential to produce injury. He substituted Buster for his two given names, Joseph Francis.

Szymon Kobylarz

B. 1981 in Swietochlowice, lives in Katowice, Poland

Nose Punch Machine, 2007
Do you have it in you to take a seat here? Be careful. This apparatus could end up punching you in the nose. If you turn the crank, the punch arm takes a swing and delivers a blow to the face of the person seated here. Rather practical, don’t you think? You can spare your fist and get the machine to deliver the message.

Cynicism and ridicule play an important role in Szymon Kobylarz’s art, which is by no means limited to Nose Punch Machine. He construed weird objects of (potential) use in self-defence, caricaturing the civil defence classes taught at Polish schools during the Cold War. For Nose Punch Machine Kobylarz drew his inspiration from a drawing by Roland Topor (1938–1997), a French artist, actor and writer made famous by his satirical, surrealist graphic art and texts.

SisyphUs
Sometimes making something leads to nothing and sometimes making nothing leads to something.

Francis Alÿs

Billy Bevan (1887–1957)

Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies

Clip 2:43 Min. | Silent film by Sennett Mack, USA, 1925

What bad luck! Billy Bevan, a pioneering Australian star of the silent film, only ever wanted to push his own car home. He fails to notice that, in a weird chain reaction, he gets to move not only his own “tin Lizzie”, as the Ford Model T was popularly called, but many other cars as well. The comedian looks like a latter-day Sisyphus as he pushes a long column of cars uphill. Soon they all end up at the bottom of a steep hill as a tangled heap of wrecks .

Like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Oliver Hardy, Billy Bevan began performing onstage as a child. He was discovered by the boss of Keystone Studios, Mack Sennett, who was known as the innovator of slapstick film. In Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies Billy Bevan is partnered by Scottish comedian Andy Clyde. The Clyde/Bevan duo was famous for its breathless, absurd slapstick comedies. The arrival of sound sadly put an end to Bevan’s career.

Francis Alÿs

B. 1959 in Antwerpen, Belgium, lives in Mexico City

Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing) – Ice, Mexico D.F., 1997

4:59 Min.

In 1987, Francis Alÿs, having left behind his formal training as an architect, relocated to Mexico City to devote himself to work as an artist, which included the so-called paseos (Spanish for “stroll”). One such stroll in the sprawling metropolis resulted in Paradox of Praxis 1, in which the artist pushes a large block of ice through the city streets for nine hours until it has completely dissolved. What is this all about? An activity that leads to nothing, as suggested by the title? The absurdity of his action is plain for all to see but what moves us is its unspectacular, mundane and clownesque character.

Calling the notion of artistic authorship and authenticity into doubt is a typical concern for Alÿs, who in his works conjures up the Sisyphus myth and the characters of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

VW Beetle, 2003

3:12 Min.

In Wolfsburg Alÿs pushed a red VW Beetle through the city. After World War II, the first VW Beetles left the assembly lines in the German auto city. In 1974 Volkswagen shifted the Beetle’s production to Puebla in Mexico, where it continued until 2003.

The point of Alÿs’s performance was that the VW Beetle he was pushing through the streets of Wolfburg had not been built there. It was one of the last Beetles to be built in Puebla and was specially imported by Alÿs for his performance. This is a reversal of trade routes as we know them.

Rodney Graham

B. 1949 in Matsqui, lives in Vancouver, Canada

Vexation Island, 1997

9 Min.
In a grand cinematic gesture, Graham commissioned a team of PR professionals to produce Vexation Island, with the result that the editing and the seductive colours of the film would be hard to improve on.

A man with a head wound lies prostrate on a beach. Costume and parrot are reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe. The man, played by the artist, awakes, scrambles to his feet, and gives a palm tree a shake to obtain food. He is hit on the head by a coconut, falls to the ground and again lies prostrate on the beach.

It is obvious what links this sequence to slapstick comedy: the protagonist’s fecklessness makes the audience laugh. Like a latter-day Sisyphus or an obsessive-compulsive neurotic he cannot help shaking the palm tree. There is no way out. A characteristic element in Graham’s work is the motif of repetition, which betrays the artist’s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. For Freud, obsessive-compulsive repetition was one of the key symptoms of neurosis.

Slapstick quote 2
Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
Steamboat Bill Jr.
Clip 1:28 Min. | Silent film by Charles Reisner, USA, 1928
“The man who never laughed”: this was one of the most common descriptions of Buster Keaton, whose deadpan expression was indeed part of his stock in trade. Another characteristic were his acrobatic stunts. One of his most famous stunts, which features in several films, goes as follows. A house façade tilts towards Buster, threatening to squash him to death. He survives unhurt because he happens to stand in a spot left unscathed by the aperture of a window in the façade. In Steamboat Bill Jr. it is a storm that causes the collapse of the building. Today, the film is considered to be one of Buster Keaton’s best. What prevented it from becoming a box office success at the time was probably the story, which has tragic overtones. Steamboat Bill senior and the father of the girl the son is in love are both opposed to their relationship, and the recurring disputes between the fathers and between Steamboat Bill senior and junior were felt to be out of place in what was supposed to be a slapstick comedy.


Steve McQueen

B. 1969 in London, England, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Deadpan, 1997

4:03 Min.

The artist and filmmaker takes a strong interest in the cinema’s pictorial language as it evolved over time, especially in the language of the slapstick silent films. Deadpan paraphrases directly the famous scene from Steamboat Bill Jr featuring the collapse of the house. Stuntman Buster Keaton’s deadpan expression is matched to perfection by McQueen. The scene is repeated several times, filmed under a different angle each time. Like many of Steve McQueen’s films, Deadpan is remarkable for its reduced pictorial language. Its presentation in space and projection covering the entire wall are crucial. They are the precondition for viewers to be drawn into the film and for its physical experience.

McQueen started his career as a Young British Artist and was made famous overnight by his early films. In 1997 he took part in documenta X and two years later he was awarded the Turner Prize. Deadpan was screened at the exhibition that accompanied the prize. In 2009 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. The feature films Hunger and Shame have contributed to his fame. His third feature film, 12 Years a Slave, received nine nominations for this year’s Academy Awards.

UNATTACHED TO ANY OF THE CHAPTERS
Jeppe Hein

B. 1974 in Copenhagen, Denmark, lives in Berlin, Germany

Modified Social Bench # Q, # 7, # P, 2005–2008
Items of seating furniture designed by Jeppe Hein are to be found throughout the exhibition. They invite visitors to enter into a relationship with them; when that has been achieved they help Hein’s artworks develop their full potential.

Try out the benches yourself! This is as effective a shortcut as any to a hilarious personal experience of the world of slapstick.

Texts: Nina Kirsch, Dunja Schneider, Stella Rollig, Uta Ruhkamp

Press Images
Press Images available for download at www.lentos.at.



3. Vincent Olinet

Abricotine Vanilline, 2007

Courtesy Gallery Laurent Godin

1. Safety Last, 1923

Still

Directors: Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, Producer: Hal Roach, USA
© Harold Lloyd Entertainment



2. Peter Land

Springtime (Forår), 2010

Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner

5. Alexej Koschkarow

Pie fight, 2003

© Alexej Koschkarow /

Bildrecht, Vienna 2014

4. Wilfredo Prieto

Grasa, Jabón y Plátano, 2006

Collection Jesús Villasante

Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona



6. Szymon Kobylarz

Nose Punch Machine (Fressenpolierer), 2007

© Marek Kruszewski, Courtesy ZAK BRANICKA Berlin

8. Jeppe Hein

Modified Social Bench #P, 2008

Courtesy Johann König, Berlin and 303 Gallery, New York

9. Francis Alÿs

Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997

Courtesy Francis Alÿs and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich

7. Modern Times, 1936

Still

Director: Charles Chaplin, USA
© Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved

10. Carola Dertnig

Stroller 1, 2008

Courtesy Carola Dertnig

11. Steamboat Bill Jr., 1928

Still

Silent film by Charles Reisner, USA









12.-16. SLAPSTICK! The Art of Comedy

Exhibition view

LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

Photo: maschekS., 2014

LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, A-4021 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1

Tel: +43 (0)732.7070-3600 Fax: +43 (0)732.7070-3604 www.lentos.at

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