When humour becomes painful
by Felicity Lunn, Heike Munder, Slavoj Žižek, Vito Acconci, John Bock, Olaf Breuning, Martin Kippenberger
"From Dada to Fluxus and Conceptual art to the 1990s, humour is often at the heart of art as much as a visual strategy as an intellectual process. Based on an exhibition, this anthology does not try to illustrate the grotesque, the satirical, or the comic, but to separate the mechanisms of humour. Since Freud, humour is generally envisaged as a manifestation of the unconscious, like a kind of negotiation with repressed elements or collective fears. It is this subversive and social role of humour that is the subject of enquiry by artists such as Vito Acconci, Anna & Bernhard Blume, John Bock, Olaf Breuning, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Fischli & Weiss, Martin Kippenberger, Peter Land, Piero Manzoni, John Miller, Bruce Nauman, Martin Parr, Sigmar Polke and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder"--Publisher.