Art and Comedy - Mark Durden
- Submitting institution
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University of South Wales / Prifysgol De Cymru
: A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Output identifier
- 4846384
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- extended curatorial project
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Screen Media
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Art & Comedy (A&C) is an extended curatorial project, initiated by artists Mark Durden and David Campbell, exploring the comedic impulse in contemporary art. From the intellectual constructs of irony to the performative characteristics of deadpan or slapstick, the research expands a shared interest in the use of comic effect as an artistic strategy, and aims to map out new and expanded thematic distinctions of comedy and its applications.
Comedy, like art, typically involves an awareness of the possibility of reading a scenario in two different ways, creating a division in comprehension and the co-existence of parallel ideas. This transgressive characteristic of putting two disparate and opposing ideas together is understood in the first iteration of the research through the exhibition title Double Act; this duality is further emphasized by the expansive, simultaneous staging of twinned thematic exhibitions at Bluecoat Liverpool (2016) and MAC Belfast (2016).
Durden and Campbell’s curatorial focus explored implicit and explicit ideas of comedy, positioning laughter as an important part of our engagement with art. Maurice Doherty’s commissioned neon, I Slept With The Curator To Get This Show (2016), epitomizes A&C’s artistic vision. Continuing the legacy of Duchamp’s readymades, it underlines a key thesis of the project: the joke always has a healthy disrespect for structures and categories.
The topical investigation of comedy was further extended in The Double Act publication broadening a comedic reading of Duchamp, and applying theories of comedy by Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Bergson and Simon Critchley in thematic readings of the work in the exhibitions. A variant configuration of the exhibition for Centro des Artes Contemporaneas allowed Durden and Campbell to re-focus the curation on “the absurdity of the everyday”, introducing new artists and new works that drew attention to “the laughable enigma of ordinary life.”
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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