The Outsider, Art and Humour 0367468220, 9780367468224

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The Outsider, Art and Humour

This cross-disciplinary book, situated on the periphery of culture, employs humour to better comprehend the arts, the outsider and exclusion, illuminating the ever-changing social landscape, the vagaries of taste and limits of political correctness. Each chapter deals with specific themes and approaches – from the construct of outsider and complexity of humour, to Outsider Art and spaces – using various theoretical and analytical methods. Paul Clements draws on humour, especially from visual arts and culture (and to a lesser extent literature, film, music and performance), as a tool of ridicule, amongst other discourses, employed by the powerful but also as a weapon to satirize them. These ambiguous representations vary depending on context, often assimilated then reinterpreted in a game of authenticity that is poignant in a world of facsimile and ‘fake news’. The humour styles of a range of artists are highlighted to reveal the fluidity and diversity of meaning which challenges expectations and at its best offers resistance and, crucially, a voice for the marginal. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, fine art, humour studies and visual culture. Paul Clements is Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of The Creative Underground: Art, Politics and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2017) and Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature, and the Beat Movement (Routledge, 2013). Cover image credit: Marek Kolasinski, Millennium Bridge Greetings, 2018, Ben Wilson, gumpic (paint on chewing gum), 6 x 3cms, Millennium Bridge, London. Photograph by Paul Clements.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations Phaedra Shanbaum Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture Edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts Attraction Images Edited by Anna Schober Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies Edited by Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters, and Trevor Pinch Contemporary Art and Disability Studies Edited by Alice Wexler and John Derby The Outsider, Art and Humour Paul Clements The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria Social Critique and an Artistic Movement Charlotte Bank The Iconology of Abstraction Non-Figurative Images and the Modern World Edited by Krešimir Purgar Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art Edited by Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

The Outsider, Art and Humour

Paul Clements

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Paul Clements to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Clements, Paul, 1959- author. Title: The outsider, art and humour / Paul Clements. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019058866 (print) | LCCN 2019058867 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367468224 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003031369 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Difference (Philosophy) in art. | Other (Philosophy) in art. | Arts, Modern--Themes, motives. | Wit and humor in art. | Wit and humor--Social aspects. Classification: LCC NX650.D54 C59 2020 (print) | LCC NX650.D54 (ebook) | DDC 700.9/04--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058866 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058867 ISBN: 978-0-367-46822-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03136-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

To those without a sense of humour

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

viii x

1

Introduction

1

2

Approaches to Humour and Laughter

13

3

The Construct of Outsider: Media Labelling, ‘Othering’ and Excluded Minds

44

4

The Construct of Outsider: Identity, the Body and Representation

61

5

Humorous Representations of the Outsider: Hybridity, Utility and the Carnivalesque

81

6

Representations of Humour by Marginal Artists

109

7

Creative Outsider Spaces and Dark Heterotopias

142

8

Transgression, Spectacle and Political Correctness

163

9

Afterthoughts

184

Bibliography Index

186 201

Figures

1.1 BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT, 2018, graffiti, stencil on brick. Sydney Street, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018 1.2 Golconda, 1953, René Magritte, oil on canvas, 80 x 100.3cm. Paul Hester photographer. The Menil Collection, Houston 2.1 Basquiat Mural, 2017, Banksy, paint on concrete. Golden Lane, Barbican, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2017 2.2 The Little Pastry Cook, 1922/3, Chaïm Soutine, oil on canvas, 73 x 54cm. Musée Orangerie, Paris 2.3 Flux-Smile-Machine, 1970, George Maciunas, printed photograph and label on plastic box, 9.3 x 12 x 3.2cm. Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA 2.4 WARS R US, n.d. mural, paint on brick. Kensal Road, London. Photo by Paul Clements, 2018 2.5 Escaping Criticism, 1874, Pere Borrell del Caso, oil on canvas, 72 x 62cm, Collection of the Banco de España, Madrid 4.1 STOP MAKING STUPID Artists FAMOUS, n.d. graffiti, stencil on board, Mile End Road, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018 4.2 Kartenspieler (Card Players), 1920, Otto Dix, drypoint on copperplate paper, 33 x 28.4cm paper. The George Economou Collection, Athens 5.1 Entartete Musik, signed by Hans Ziegler, programme cover for the exhibition at Düsseldorf, 1938. Wiener Library, London 5.2 Busker, 2018, outside the cathedral, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Photo by Paul Clements 2018 5.3 The Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559/60, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 118 x 164cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 6.1 Mr Razewitz,1950, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, crayon drawing, 21x 28cm. Gallerie Brockstedt, Hamburg, Germany 6.2 Shrine with Headlamps, 1955–63, Tressa Prisbrey, detail of Bottle Village 1972, Simi Valley, California. Photo by Seymour Rosen, 1972. Rosen/ SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments 6.3 Careful You Don’t Become That Sad Old Queen, 2007, Jim Bloom, mixed media on cardboard, 48 x 47cm. Outsider Folk Art Gallery/Jim Bloom 2018 6.4 Mae Rose, Ruadh and Danielle, Millennium Bridge Greetings, 2018, Ben Wilson, gumpic (paint on chewing gum), 6 x 3cm. Photo by Paul Clements 2018 6.5 Bonsai Liberation Front, 2011, Elfo, site-specific spray paint on building, near Verona, Italy. Photograph by Elfo 2011

2 4 25 37 39 41 42 65 73 90 91 103 124

126 128 130 131

Figures 7.1 Béla Kun Memorial, 1986, Imre Varga, cut sheet metal, Szoborpark, Budapest. Photo by Paul Clements 2010 7.2 The gravestone of Patrick Caulfield, 2005, Highgate Cemetery, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018 7.3 Millie and Christine McCoy, 1867, photograph by Eisenmann. Wikimedia Commons/Wellcome Trust 7.4 Dinner Time on F Wing, 1996, Paul Clements, oil on board, Museum of London 7.5 Diet for Health and Strength, 1988, name withheld. Personal letter and dictated menu. Private correspondence 8.1 Hangman’s Field, 2018, Matthew Nightingale, mixed media, 122 x 82cm. Koestler Trust/Matthew Nightingale 8.2 Hangman’s Field, detail of the scaffold 8.3 Extinction Rebellion Protestival, April 16, 2019, Waterloo Bridge, London. Photo by Paul Clements

ix 149 153 156 159 161 168 169 177

Acknowledgements

Golconda, painting by René Magritte, 1953. Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston. The Little Pastry Cook, painting by Chaïm Soutine, 1922/3. Courtesy of the Musée Orangerie, Paris. Flux-Smile-Machine, photograph and label on plastic box by George Maciunas, 1970. Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA. Escaping Criticism, painting by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874. Courtesy of the Banco de España, Madrid. Kartenspieler/Card Players, drypoint etching on copper plate by Otto Dix, 1920. Courtesy of The George Economou Collection, Athens. Entartete Musik, programme cover for the exhibition at the Art Palace, Düsseldorf, 1939. Courtesy of the Wiener Library, London. The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559/60. Courtesy of Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Bonsai Liberation Front, site-specific spray paint on building by Elfo, 2011. Courtesy of Elfo. Mr Razewitz, crayon drawing by Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, 1950. Courtesy of Gallerie Brockstedt, Hamburg. Shrine with Headlamps, memorial by Tressa Prisbrey, 1955/63, Simi Valley, CA. Photograph by Seymour Rosen. Courtesy of Seymour Rosen and SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), Kohler, WI. Careful You Don’t Become That Sad Old Queen, painting by Jim Bloom, 2007. Courtesy of Jim Bloom and Outsider Folk Art Gallery, Reading, PA. Millie and Christine McCoy, photograph by Eisenmann, 1867. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Wellcome Trust, London. Hangman’s Field, painting by Matthew Nightingale, 2018. Courtesy of Matthew Nightingale and Koestler Trust, London.

Thanks to Katie Armstrong, Jim Bloom, Christine Borel, Fiona Curran, Richard Dabb, Isabella Donadio, Elfo, Annalise Flynn, Jo Farb Hernandez, Diane Hill, Torsten Jugi, Florian Kugler, Howard Leather, John Maizels, Cristina Martín Arcos, Caroline May, Matthew Nightingale, Seymour Rosen, Uta Schnell, Kara Thoreson, Isabella Vitti, Amelia Walker and Ben Wilson.

1

Introduction

Humour includes certain people, as represented by the term ‘in-joke’, and excludes others who may be the butt of the joke, or don’t ‘get it’. It is a wide-ranging, ambiguous phenomenon that is highly contextual and relative to time and place. There are parallels with the arts, which concern particular understandings of cultural knowledge, creativity, taste, morality and political correctness. Hilarity can be zany in one situation, tragic or malicious in another as humour plays with fixed conceptualizations and discombobulates reality. It is an affront to expectations and mechanical mannerisms, a stone in the shoe, a fly in the ointment, a turd on the table. The joker encodes wit into the ‘text’ to engage the audience, which interprets it variously; and key to this is how and to what extent these two processes configure, as meaning is never fixed or finite. An example that introduces this process in light of the shifting sands of interpretation is the narrative surrounding a piece of street art that revisits an old canard. The graffiti BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT may be a timeworn joke and you can buy the t-shirt, but there has been a recent reincarnation of this on the streets of south-west London (see Fig 1.1). This play on words includes a pun on the word ‘Bill’ and a comic take on the genre of desperate graffiti traditionally employed to highlight social injustice, often by those excluded and without power or influence. It is an absurd skit on those serving a prison sentence, particularly as the offence concerns the criminal prosecution and pursuit of those posting bills and presumably graffiti on the walls, not exactly endangering the public. In the late 1970s ‘George Davis is innocent’ was a graffiti slogan found in several places in the UK; for example, painted on a wall in Salmon Lane, east London, and outside Headingley cricket ground in Leeds. This coincided with protesters draping banners over St Paul’s Cathedral and crashing a car into the gates of Buckingham Palace in London, even digging up the cricket pitch to grab media attention about the conviction of Davis, an armed robber convicted for stealing the payroll of the London Electricity Board in 1975. Later the punk band Sham 69 wrote a track entitled George Davis is Innocent (1978) condemning the wrongful incarceration of Davis. As Matthew Engel writing in the Financial Times (2011) surmised: It was a case with multiple layers of irony, the most significant being that while Mr Davis was almost certainly innocent of the crime in question, he was not the most respectable gent in London. In the year after his release he was caught red-handed robbing a bank and got 15 years … There were no appeals.

2

Introduction

Figure 1.1 BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT, 2018, graffiti, stencil on brick. Sydney Street, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018.

All these different events, understandings and interpretations influence the joke and show the mutability and creativity of humour. What adds another dimension to this old pun on a name is that this recent incarnation of Bill Posters is situated on the wall of a disused public toilet, highlighted by the sign GENTLEMEN, offering ironic possibilities regarding class, gender and lavatorial misconduct. It reframes Bill (and the joke) in relation to sexually motivated cottaging charges, which offers a homophobic slur on his character and lifestyle. I have passed this disused bog house many times on the number 49 bus and have mused over this unsigned graffiti next to the Royal Brompton Hospital1. Humour in general exposes much about the diversity of culture and taste as well as word play, ridicule of social norms and subtleties of meaning. This book takes humour as a methodology to better understand culture and the arts, which reveals much about the outsider and exclusion. Unlike this public graffiti, ‘art jokes’ tend to be for the initiated and purposely exclusive, which retains the elitist DNA of the canon and classification of art. The art joke may revolve around parody of a specific style or an ironic comment on something topical within cultured circles, however elliptical. It may be a plea by the artist for acceptance into relevant art worlds which can be very calculated, aspirational and unctuous. 1

BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT graffiti derived from the same stencil has been daubed underneath the sign for the adjacent ladies toilet, which presents another set of possibilities.

Introduction 3 Humorous reference to Pablo Picasso, James Joyce or Terry Riley is a cry for inclusion into their worlds and corresponding accrual of status. Alternatively, humour can debunk this type of cringe-worthy cultural practice by attacking the exclusivity of the arts and the associated pomp, even hubris, rather than calculating how to use humour for social or career advantage. Often it escapes control due to its spontaneity, ability to morph and contextual character. People get into the mood when amused and may express themselves without due care and laugh heartily at something that is unintentionally amusing. One key aspect of the anarchic character and infectious congeniality of humour is that it catches people off-guard. Some people manipulate humour and utilize it for their own ends precisely because it is endearing to others, whether professional stand-up comics or boorish networkers who mimic its effects in line with their own career agendas. Not unsurprisingly, humour is more successful when practised by someone who can make people laugh. Such is the skill of the comic. It concerns timing and craft (and control), which is mediated socially and communicated through shifting ideas which can be tenuous and trans-rational2. Then there is the thorny issue of political correctness as humour can be cruel and mock us all, which is a recurring theme throughout the book. Sometimes a supercilious and arrogant attitude of superiority directs humour, whereby it bullies and seeks victims, employed in a manner to belittle the excluded. It can, in effect, manipulate social norms and behaviour, particularly in authoritarian societies, by disparaging those victims of the regime as political pariahs, whether individuals, groups or whole communities (although there was much secretive, ironic humour in the former Soviet Union which acted as a counterpoint). So when Joseph Stalin laughs we all laugh, a scenario repeated ad infinitum in the workplace when the boss expects applause. Also, laughter is part of the defensive armoury of survival, epitomized by excluded Jewish entertainers in Nazi Germany. Democratic societies may experience hegemonic shifts in relation to values but there is tolerance of difference; although, ironically, political correctness can expose degrees of intolerance. Humour is amorphous, rebellious and countercultural, which liberalism just about tolerates, as expounded by the great British satirists of the 18th and 19th centuries (for example, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson), who dared to attack the monarchy, prime minister and other powerful people in a manner that is still controversial today. This is a prescient warning that liberal democracy, which in the developed world appears threatened by a renewed racist and right-wing populism, may not be as ‘free’ as it appears, particularly the acceptability of scatological caricatures of the powerful. Humour is a key cultural mannerism that offers an insight into society and its cultural conventions, values and taboos, as well as wider ideological issues. It draws an audience into dialogue in a variety of ways which relate to the various possibilities of meaning, as well as the contradictions and incongruities witnessed in everyday situations. For example, imagine a spoof scenario at a football match whereby the number on the back of the players’ shirts has been replaced by differing amounts of money (£2,000,000 or $50,000,000). This might reinforce the notion that footballers are chattels and create a titter in the stadium, even discussion about the commodification of the game and ticket 2

An example of trans-rationality is Bob Hope’s famous quip, ‘I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin’ (cited in Palmer 1987), which is thought-provoking, absurd and appears nonsensical. It does not fit the usual model of rational experience or understanding.

4

Introduction

prices. Or envisage going shopping and encountering semi-naked retail staff painted fluorescent blue – and wearing fish hats, banners and tails – while decrying plastic pollution in the oceans. It would stimulate discussion about the health of our planet and wider ecological affairs. Incongruity is well exemplified by the surrealist artist René Magritte in his painting Golconda (1953), which portrays businessmen dressed in typical bourgeois attire (bowler hat, suit and overcoat) either raining down from the sky, levitating or hovering, set into a typical image of suburbia (see Fig 1.2). This satirical and absurd scenario conjures up the tyrannical posturing of Tristan Tzara who wore similar attire for Dada events (Williams cited in Brill 2010: 99) and George Grosz’s caricatures of haute bourgeois German financiers and their wives. Magritte chose the title Golconda, which was an Indian city of enormous wealth at the centre of the mining industry, presumably as a surreal satire on global capitalism. But interpretation is open as the men in bowler hats could embody a new design of raindrop, highlight a fast-track evaporation to heaven or represent the end of the world as the houses seem empty. There is something disturbing about the uniformity of the men and the absence of women, which could be a satire on the gendered canon of art history or nature of capitalism. Magritte was obsessed with bowler hats, using them in many of his paintings, and in this image the men

Figure 1.2 Golconda, 1953, René Magritte, oil on canvas, 80 x 100.3cm. Paul Hester photographer. The Menil Collection, Houston.

Introduction 5 appear anonymous, isolated and lacking individuality, offering a critique on the uniformity of city financiers. Today the businessmen in the painting would be on their mobile phones and equally oblivious of those around them. However, this critical interpretation of wealth, individualization and power is radically altered due to the surreality and absurdity of the image. In contrast to this hypothesizing, an alternative understanding concerns the influence of the three years Magritte spent working in a wallpaper factory as a poster and advertising designer, which gives a very different edge to the painting. It is not surreal irony but real experience that has influenced this particular text. Moreover, the image and irony has come full circle as you can buy designer Magritte wallpaper for real and virtual wallpaper for laptops and I-phones (including images of Golconda). René Magritte the wallpaper designer and surrealist has been commodified, reinterpreted in a world of art that appears dominated by markets that are instrumental in promoting capitalism, with its poster boy the artist entrepreneur. Yet more irony is that Magritte anticipated the appropriation of his art as he titled his famous image of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (1928–9), with the strapline ‘Ceci n’est une pipe’ (‘this is not a pipe’). Michel Foucault (1982a) paid homage to Magritte and his visual critique of language and thought. He also constructed a discourse of heterotopia (Foucault 1967) which describes both a real and imagined space that inverts understanding and challenges people to ‘think outside the box’3. Whereas the BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT graffiti has created a heterotopian bus stop space to ponder on an imaginary pun, Golconda is a representation of a real place that challenges our notions of reality as it is imaginary. It is an awkward and inconsistent idea that is disturbing, both compatible and incompatible with reality, which appeals because it appears real but rejects the material and empirical. This is a heterotopian space that disturbs mundane reality through different layers of meaning, rather than a completely imaginary ‘nowhere’ that does not exist (utopia) or an unpleasant, dysfunctional imagined or real place (dystopia), although these conceptualizations overlap. Golconda refers to an actual place, however abstracted, an incongruous heterotopian fantasy that critiques perception, meaning and visual language, creating a rupture between language, thought and real things. Magritte’s work is both familiar and strange, where the rational foundations of reality have been fragmented, which shatters common sense. He was a contrary character and did not want to be (or called) an artist and marginalized himself as a thinker rebelling against existence (Gablik 1985: 9). He chose this outsider position and, like a comic, used his art to challenge our perceptions of the world, exemplifying ‘outsideness’ (Bakhtin 1990), which understanding is beyond each individual’s consciousness. Golconda can be understood in the carnivalesque tradition as a transgressive image that ridicules the powerful and conformity. The original proponent of this concept, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), whilst researching into medieval European carnival, acknowledged the cruel lives of ordinary folk eking out a miserable living in order to survive in a harsh and grossly unfair world. In response to this, his notion of carnival humour targeted self-important, supercilious and boorish characters, with laughter utilized as a 3

This hackneyed strapline suggests that people who employ it want to be perceived as different, hence the irony of employing such terminology. Moreover, it displays the reduction of language to sound bites and the logic of advertising, branding and the marketplace, which irony may have appealed to Magritte’s sense of humour.

6

Introduction

conduit for satirical attacks on mainstream values, structural injustices and hypocrites who uphold certain moral standards from a position of privilege. Humour thereby permits the ‘common people’ an authentic form of recourse, a temporary relief from the overbearing control of their superiors, laughing at their religious and feudal masters and hooting at death and hell. It also suited Bakhtin’s romantic need for justice as he had his own problems with the Soviet system and the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst undergoing his research. He was sentenced without trial, allegedly for practising Christianity, and exiled to Siberia for ten years, later reduced to six. He understood exclusion and banishment first-hand. Bakhtin maintained that the ability to laugh at the most fearsome aspects of life revitalizes both individual and community, which can be cathartic, playful and dangerously transgressive. Also, that the discourse of inequality requires humour as a counterbalance, which offers hope rather than fear and pessimism, an expressive and creative voice of optimism. The superior use of humour through a need for the powerful to control the powerless is an example of the appropriation of the levelling mechanics of humour that offset the inequalities of life. Ideally humour is a tactic employed by the powerless to balance these social inequalities, which rehumanizes society scarred by centuries of privilege and corrupted by the metric of capitalism. In reality, humour is employed in a much more anarchic fashion, which can be far from ideal or controllable. An association of visual humour with marginality is a key focus of this book. This includes how humour about individual outsiders and excluded groups shapes a distinct understanding of the world, which is additional to representations by those who portray their marginality through the arts. We tend to think of social inclusion and exclusion in binary terms, each the opposite of the other, but whilst inclusion into a college may resonate into the wider community, inclusion into a monastery may mean exclusion from the wider community, showing a mutable and contextual character. These complex notions of marginality signify a range of issues, from poverty to lack of opportunity and health, which embrace aspects of diversity (whether variables of class, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexuality), including those removed from society and housed in prison or asylum, as well as artists, radicals and others who adopt alternative lifestyles. There are a range of citizens wary and critical of established culture who choose marginality, a sentiment that echoes the joke that exclusion in hell would be preferable to inclusion into heaven as there would be more interesting people and fun. But whether hell escapes the excruciating torture and burning sensations associated is a moot point. So the avoidance of those overly networked and smug characters who allegedly manage to manoeuvre themselves into heaven pales into insignificance. The term ‘outsider’ incorporates romantic modernist understandings alongside postmodern meanings associated with the rise of identity politics and issues related to relative thinking, representation, self-definition and lifestyle choices. It is a subjective and variable individual construct associated with writers, artists, misfits and bohemians, unlike the more logical terms of exclusion and structural processes derived from poverty, racism, ill-health or lack of educational and career opportunities. Notwithstanding this, social exclusion is also ambiguous and was a term first employed by European policymakers in the 1980s in lieu of poverty, precisely because there is a greater range of definitional variables, some of which are difficult to define and empirically substantiate (Room 1995). European governments wanted to move away

Introduction 7 from the language of poverty, which a cynic might suggest was purposeful in order to obfuscate the increasing material inequalities. In support of the discourse of exclusion, it allows greater acknowledgement of poverty as a broader concept that recognizes the scope of diversity and minority rights issues. Humour creates commonality and inclusion within groups, which offers a form of membership and difference from the rest. The excluded may be regarded as clowns or feared as dangerous ‘others’, but their marginality is part of a social process and identification that bring together like-minded people and strengthen bonds within the group. This concerns both those excluded by the joke (for example, a racist joke about Mexicans may bring together those who identify as Mexican through a sense of patriotism and victimhood) and the included characters who are laughing at the excluded (for example, those displaying superiority and racism towards Mexicans, which may help to bond them). Humour demarcates and excludes, which is part of the process of delineating dissimilarity, whereas ‘getting’ the joke, like ‘getting’ art, is symbolic inclusion that proffers distinction and entry into specific understandings, values, networks and social worlds. The triangulation of art, humour and exclusion constructs particular trajectories that are not without ambiguity. These are explored through various visual arts formats, including some literary, musical and performative examples. Ultimately, humour expresses our humanity and the complex mutable character of culture, which like art in its broadest manifestation offers multiple understandings and creates new meanings. There are power issues lurking beneath humour, whether on an everyday level within a particular social group or as a reaction to the norm and social expectations. Because humour cements relationships and formulates cleavages between individuals and within groups it is as though it has its own spirit, just beyond human control. But this has never prevented individuals and communities from trying to utilize humour for their own specific agendas under the illusion that they can control and determine meaning. Alternatively, a world without humour parallels one without play and without art, one full of hard-nosed aspiration, boorishness and arrogance without respite. Notwithstanding this exclusionary detour, humour is a release and helps to mollify everyday stress, hence its relationship with catharsis as people have a ‘mad’ half-hour infected with the giggles and are unable to control themselves in a sober manner. This position of relief contrasts with the notion of incongruity, which term refers to humour that is zany and surreal. These two concepts alongside superiority and play are the four major theoretical pillars of humour (Morreall 1987a), which shows its creativity, adaptability, ambiguity and power. Humour is intentional and unintentional, awkward and obvious, ambivalent and anarchic, and it is employed in all sorts of ways. Despite various patterns, there is no obvious overall rationale as it is polyvalent with meanings mutable. This characteristic of humour was not lost on me when during my research I met an old friend. We were listening to The Who and singing along with the classic ballad Behind Blue Eyes (1971). After the line ‘Nobody knows what it’s like to feel those feelings’, Roger Daltrey shouts out the phrase ‘Like I do!’ It is incongruent and we started to spit the words out, impersonating the singer and talking about his white tasselled shirt, ‘cod piece’ and long curly hair (primped and preened for performance), laughing more and more. I am unsure whether we were laughing at Daltrey or with him, but it was a cathartic moment and we playfully explored the ever-more bizarre idea of ‘Like I do’,

8

Introduction

pronounced ‘lack-a-doo’, as a UK tribe living in Bognor Regis. This moment had crystallized superiority, incongruity, relief and play; but also how the academic and theoretical approaches that I had been researching often lacked an ontological grounding and did not appear to stitch together the nuanced, fleeting, catalytic and anarchic properties of humour. On another day we would not have found this expression, anything about Daltrey or the song remotely amusing. Humour has autonomy and concerns the pleasurable and cruel communication of ideas and experience where laughter is a form of fun and beauty, however grotesque and ugly. In relation to marginality, humour may be a political tool of counter-hegemony and concern mimicry, mockery, subversion and the communication of resistance, as the Bill Posters graffiti suggests, properties that are of key interest to this account. Art has moved from historical record, realistic representation and clear social function to a modern conceptual and abstract phenomenon valued aesthetically (art for art’s sake) and concerned with the autonomy and identity of artists as well as their patrons. Like humour it is a form of social communication that allows us to broach taboo subjects and acts as a safety valve which aids personal health (Palmer 1994: 57–67). The arts express and communicate our ideas as they entertain, educate and enlighten. Ideally there are wider socio-political associations as art and humour can rehumanize a cynical materialistic world of cold, calculating individuals, which idea appears very utopian. There are functional rationales, both positive and negative, revealing a range of ethical issues. Here, for example, ‘humour for humour’s sake’ reflects an amoral position focusing on the quality and structure of the joke and the beauty of the text, whether visual slapstick or verbal pun, and the creative thinking that underpins it. Equally, the arts and humour are political vehicles that employ irony and satire, which is a far from disinterested process and is possibly unavoidable as the aesthetics of humour are expressed within social situations and for people in a world of injustice and inequality. So humour as a social practice, however much a feature of everyday life, requires degrees of cognition that may have ethical and political dimensions and offers positive as well as negative representations of people. Ideally it helps to right discrimination and the arrogance of power, however anarchic and risky this may be. Due to its ambiguous and unstable character, humour has been neglected as a social practice, both as an academic and research subject as well as a means for understanding a range of social, cultural and political processes. Humour, like art, can be evaluated in terms of its contribution to the cultural turn (Hall 1997a), a notion that recognizes the importance of culture as a relatively autonomous variable, which is steeped in the relationship between language, meaning and reality. It underpinned 1960s counterculture and multiculturalism, also the change from group identities and dissent to a more individualized (and de-individualized) focus on lifestyle, self-management and the self. The age of revolution may appear to remain in the 20th century, but dissenters, deviants, the marginalized and disgruntled still have at their disposal cultural rather than overtly political means, tactical rather than openly resistant processes and practices epitomized by caricaturists and activist-artists. Since the 1970s – when the UK, US and other ‘developed’ countries witnessed their most financially egalitarian societies (Piketty 2014) – there has been a vast increase in wealth inequality; with the caveat that the rights of certain minorities are in the main better respected, which appears to be an unfortunate trade off of rights for money and status. Nevertheless, outsiders loom large, whether rag picker, transsexual, beggar, schizophrenic, criminal or bohemian artist. How they are creatively and

Introduction 9 humorously represented, and how the marginal construct humorous art forms, is central to this narrative, as are the shifting sands of outsiderdom and exclusion. Minorities may have been assimilated to some extent into mainstream practices, but at a cost with regard to autonomy and cultural tradition. Similarly, despite the spread of art and diversity, the global contemporary art markets have consolidated hegemony within Euro-American cultural metropolises. The commercial art world has elided with critical artistic enquiry (Dohmen 2016), offering quasi-colonial systems which impact on marginalized artists and minority cultures trying to negotiate their identities through contemporary art4. A key concept for this book is cultural recuperation. Recuperation originally referred to the recovery process after an illness, and here it concerns the normalizing ‘recovery’ and assimilation of peripheral culture by the mainstream on its terms, offering acceptability, status and inclusion. Humour and its performance can be playful, a game of chess, tag or ‘dare’, which is readily assimilated to support established practices. For example, radical Boalian drama techniques which originally concerned the inclusion and empowerment of marginal communities in Brazil have been co-opted and utilized by business managers to better control and exploit their workers to promote the brand. Moreover, satire shifts back and forth from supporting racist jibes against immigrants and jokes about the unemployed as workshy to reactions against this and belittling the pompous and powerful. There is no fixed position, so humour is the cultural weapon of the dispossessed and foil to privilege, but also the tool of the powerful; hence its ambiguity, which is possibly its saving grace, especially with regard to the legality of grotesque satire. Recuperation normalizes radical culture, hence the co-option of avant-garde practices and concepts into adverts and commodities that are reconfigured into a ‘safe’ aesthetic paradigm that is hegemonic and supportive of established culture. Much of this concerns the reconfiguration of the arts as a cultural industry and the construction of creative or smart cities with entrepreneurial and technological hubs that drive the metric of aesthetic capitalism cleansed of radical purpose. In extremis, this ‘society of spectacle’ (Debord 1995 [1967]) is a dystopian, self-interested world where we are either successful aspirational entrepreneurs, chic bohemians or socially excluded pariahs. Recuperation absorbs meanings into existing socio-cultural and political norms, institutional structures and language. It washes out the radical and ‘dirty’ ideas with the intention of constructing a safe, clean understanding rather than one that challenges the established system and those who benefit from it. This is an ongoing game of representation, which has become ever-more complex and unstable, with the role of art and humour altering accordingly, hence the ambiguity and inconsistency of meaning. Nonetheless, marginal and avant-garde artists continue to ridicule the establishment, the overly serious and precious world of art and its key players. Ironically, ‘lowbrow’ marginal culture, which signifies difference and ‘otherness’, has attracted a ‘highbrow’ audience as it appears to offer authenticity for elite art consumers. That this ‘authentic’ 4

The opening up of art markets in, especially, Russia and China has to a large extent added to this process with nouveau riche billionaires keen to purchase modern art (allegedly to launder their wealth). For example, Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea FC, is now owner of a modern art collection and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, which is run by his ex-wife Dasha Zhukova (see www.garagemca.org/en/about).

10

Introduction

art does not fit into or develop through traditional art educational systems and cultural institutions suggests by implication that ‘highbrow’ culture and its structures are inauthentic to some degree. This monograph initially focuses on the ‘othering’ of individuals and social groups through art and how humorous art both reveals marginality and expresses it. Theoretical approaches to humour are applied to a range of visual cultures and other cultural expression, and the complex constructs of outsider and social exclusion are detailed. There is interrogation of superior racist depictions of the outsider and their social utility as well as how marginal artists use humour, particularly in dark, heterotopian spaces, with conjecture regarding transgression, political correctness and activist-art spectacle. The book details a range of humorous art, expressive outsider heterotopias and the problematic issue of comic morality. It takes a cross-disciplinary art historical, psychosocial, sociological, historical and cultural studies approach, developing humour as a method to understand the arts, the outsider and exclusion, and how they articulate in different contexts and spaces. It recognizes the limitations of psychological and biographical understandings and engages with hypothetical socio-cultural, historical and political texts. There is broad definition of the labels ‘art’ and ‘artist’ in this book, which are situated as inclusive phenomena that bridge a range of visual, oral and written texts as well as musical, filmic and performed cultures. Marginal Art and marginal artists are terms employed to cover a wide gamut of outsider, folk, self-taught, visionary art forms and creative producers. Likewise the term outsider in the title and book has a broad definition, unlike its specific use in the genre of ‘Outsider Art’. Another issue is the use of the term bourgeois, which represents the perceived conventional, individualistic and materialistic values of members of the middle-class elite. I will now give a brief overview of the contents of the book. Chapter 2 explores a range of approaches to humour, its complexity and scope; with some analysis of the free play of ideas, transgression and political correctness, illustrating its ambiguous character. There is evaluation of the major theories of humour, alongside issues of controlled interpretation and the artist’s joke, the inversion of meaning and symbolic exchange. An overview of socio-cultural theories related to taste shows how humour refers to distinction and the changing notions of legitimacy, authenticity and dissonance. Some political and ethical analysis is undertaken that delves into humour in autocratic societies, illustrated through a range of jokes. Finally, different types and styles of humour are applied to examples from the visual arts to highlight the fluidity of meaning, including reference to work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Banksy, Chaïm Soutine and George Maciunas. Chapter 3 explores the multifaceted, mediated and self-styled construct of individual outsider. A range of theoretical positions instructs representation, including issues of labelling as well as the language of securitization, media panic and the terms of madness. This derivation is likened to and contrasted with the powerful discourse of social exclusion. There is some reflection on liberal governance and exclusion naturalizing social inequalities and the process of ‘othering’, with reference to notions of anomie, alienation and cultural capital. A focus on the ambiguities of middle-class identity helps to situate authenticity and privilege. There is a brief foray into representational practices surrounding creative madness, which references the production of art by those with excluded minds.

Introduction

11

Chapter 4 ruminates on the shifting sands of outsider identity, symbolic marking and the institutional effects on marginal artists. It employs a range of theories on the performance of identity and its articulation, a focus on the excluded body and grotesque ‘other’. This includes the visual representation of persons of restricted growth (‘dwarfs’) and disabled war veterans. Identification with outsiderdom and the maverick artist is set out alongside mainstream art worlds and the notion of ‘outsider hip’, which articulates self-defined postmodern identity. Conceptually, there is some initial description of hyper-individualism, carnivalesque practices and transgression by the urban stranger and outsideness to enable understanding beyond individual consciousness and identity. In Chapter 5 the negative and reactionary social utility of humour is set out through hybrid theoretical articulations that explore its everyday socio-political function. There are examples of racist humour from popular culture, including the TV cartoon Tom and Jerry and the film Borat, and the negative utility of art and humour is exposed with reference to Hitler’s infamous Entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art) and Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music). Besides racism, there is a focus on madness expressed through humour that aids stigma and mortifies the self, reinforcing social hierarchies. In contrast, humour is used by excluded groups as a means of survival, as detailed through examples of homelessness, incarceration and war zones. Chaos theory helps to explain the process of humour and the absurdity of carnivalesque as applied to Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, which employs outsideness, dialogical ideas and people’s laughter. Other examples of carnivalesque include skimmingtons and Punch and Judy shows. In contrast to exploring humorous representations of the outsider, the focus in Chapter 6 is on outsider humour expressed through the visual arts and literature. Three models of the art of the excluded – Outsider Art, Welfare Art and Savant Art – are detailed and critically evaluated with hypothetical understanding as to why marginal art forms appeal to ‘highbrow’ collectors. There are practical examples of humorous Marginal Art from Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Grandma Prisbrey, Jim Bloom, Ben Wilson and others, with reference to the artist’s joke and mainstream artists. A cameo of outsider literature is added specifically in relation to the depiction of marginal lifestyles to showcase the humour of well-known writers, including Charles Bukowski and Ken Kesey, alongside lesser-known writers. Concepts of outsider space that emplace alterity and the notion of heterotopia are discussed in Chapter 7. It offers a liminal spatial understanding employing examples of street art, the flash mob, political demonstrations, wasteland sculptures and architectural installations. Outsider heterotopian space is detailed with particular examples that refer to carnival time and spirit, urbanity and the public sphere. Four cases studies of heterotopias that exude dark humour and countercultural thinking are explored in some detail. These are art theme parks, the cemetery, the freak show and prison. A more theoretically orientated investigation into humorous transgression, spectacle and its recuperation is undertaken in Chapter 8, which explores political correctness as well as resistance and comic (im)morality. A critical evaluation of dialogism and effigy protests is detailed, as is the historical recuperation of carnivalesque leisure practices and gendered art. Activist-art is detailed as clownish spectacle with radical issues explored in relation to critical thinking and the articulation of identity. These humorous events offer incongruity and spectacle with examples employed, including The Clandestine Insurgent

12

Introduction

Rebel Clown Army. The extent to which humour is delineated socially and through critical discourses of political correctness is evaluated in relation to strategies of normalization and identity. Spectacle offers a critique of society and political correctness evaluated in relation to offence, self-censorship, normalization and diverse identities. Chapter 9 offers some final thoughts on this broad body of work.

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Approaches to Humour and Laughter

Humour is far from straightforward so relevant psychosocial, cultural and political ideas and practices are introduced, as well as humorous typologies and their properties to illustrate its scope. There is an initial analysis of taste categories and political correctness as well as a focus on context, transgression and exclusion. A brief mapping of relevant conceptualizations of humour includes the free play of ideas (Freud), the role of the fool or clown (Palmer), the joker as facilitator (Boal), political and moral ambiguities (Eagleton) and its legitimacy (Watson). Many aspects of humour are set out, including the major theories (Morreall), the importance of disruptive play (Rancière), symbolic exchange (Asa Berger), the inverted meanings it produces and people’s laughter (Bakhtin). There is recognition of the complexity of humour (Dina Sciama), issues of controlled interpretation (Sontag), comic categories (Schneegans) and the artist’s joke (Higgie). There has been a lack of scholarly attention to humour so a general overview of sociological understandings is offered (Kuipers). An initial evaluation of outsiders Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy situates the artist’s joke in relation to street art and the ambiguity of meaning. There is theoretical discussion related to taste, symbolic resources and privilege (Bourdieu), authenticity through omnivorous and eclectic personal consumption (Peterson & Kern), as well as comedy in relation to class and its performance (Friedman), with reference to dissonant cultural profiles (Lahire). A political and ethical analysis of humour is undertaken in relation to morality (Carroll), its use in autocratic societies (Benton), official laughter (Skradol), resistance to oppression (Sorensen), the multiplicity of meanings and freedom of expression (Mulkay) and reactionary processes (Critchley). These notions are interspersed with and illustrated through a range of jokes. Notions of parody, pun, paradox, wit, irony, satire and dark humour are applied to visual culture to highlight the fluidity of meaning. These include street art, the portraiture of Chaïm Soutine, counterculture of George Maciunas, Trompe L’oeil of Pere Borrell del Caso, and grotesque vases of Grayson Perry.

Some General Background There is a distinct difference between laughter and humour, however much they are associated. The former is a physical concept that: denotes a combination of bodily events, including the spasmodic expulsion of air from the lungs, accompanying sounds, characteristic facial distortions, and in heavy laughter the shaking of the whole body (Morreall 1987a: 4). So laughter is a response (involuntary and semi-voluntary) to a stimulus (for example, to tickling or inhaling laughing gas), therefore not dependent on humour, which is a

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Approaches to Humour and Laughter

mental quality and state that relates to an action or text (visual, written or oral) that often excites and stimulates amusement but not always laughter. It is both conceptual and perceptual and we may suppress laughter or refuse to respond to humour. For example, if someone in a work situation cracks a joke about the boss who then enters the room, those present may try not to look at each other in case they giggle (aware of the danger that this may result in gales of uncontrollable laughter), behaviour that acknowledges its infectiousness. Humour can be aesthetic, political, zany, clever cognitive wordplay, angry and spiteful (or a combination of these), and there are arguments concerning whether humour is an emotion and the extent to which it is a response to both deep psychological issues and specific social circumstances. Sigmund Freud (1960 [1905]) explored the joke, which he acknowledged is open ended and permits a kind of judgement free from the usual constraints of language and communication. Humour brings taboos, hidden ideas and social anxieties to the surface and reveals the theoretical workings of the unconscious, which can be aggressive and cruel as well as an avenue for creative freedom. Freud maintained that the comic is playful and requires brevity (and timing) to catch the moment and stressed the importance of technique and the purpose of jokes in relation to psychosocial processes. The joke gives us pleasure, offering fantasy, escape and free play to our unconscious thoughts (ideas which can be consciously rejected or ignored), where the pleasure principle overrides the reality principle. Irony, in particular, involves the discrepancy between saying one thing and doing another, which requires subtlety. As a social practice, humour like art has an everyday and marginal quality. It is embodied by the Fool, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, emplaced in medieval carnival through the ‘Feast of Fools’, or by a clown in the circus, all of whom inhabit liminal social spaces both inside and outside acceptable social practices. Jerry Palmer, taking an historical perspective, recognized that comic performance from the earliest global records (whether in Europe, China or Egypt) highlighted the universality of ‘domestic fool’ or ‘court jester’ roles. These characters enjoyed much freedom and licence to challenge their superiors through humour (albeit in highly iniquitous, autocratic and monastic societies), which was a unique privilege. Their humorous and obscene jibes would not be considered offensive because, by definition, the fool or jester is funny. Palmer used the word clown (however much he railed against Eurocentric terminology) as an umbrella term to differentiate those whose role is comedic and employ humour to make wider social and political statements, as shown later in regard to activist-artists (see Chapter 8). In tribal societies, for example amongst the Amerindians, the Pueblo clown is involved in extreme ritual acts of transgression in what is otherwise a highly conservative culture where casual bodily contact is unusual (Palmer 1994: 27). This includes grabbing genitals, pretending to masturbate and simulating intercourse, not unlike the lewd Dionysian and Saturnalian events that occurred in Greek and Roman forums. The Pueblo clown’s penchant for biting the head off a live mouse or disembowelling dogs was re-enacted (possibly unconsciously) by Ozzy Osbourne, lead singer of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, whose outrageous live stage act in 1982 included biting the head off a bat (Anderson 2012). Humour entertains, shocks, ridicules and bullies; it is a means of self-expression and captures the zany and incongruous nature of life and its narratives. Palmer (1994: 43) described how the European church in the Middle Ages distinguished between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ fools, the former to describe those mentally deficient in some way (who, incidentally, were touched by God and beyond reproach) and the latter

Approaches to Humour and Laughter

15

counterfeit characters who acted the fool in carnival. However, the church permitted carnival as a time for people to let off steam, therefore emphasizing the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable social practices outside of carnival time. There are various heterotopian spaces where alternative norms of behaviour and values encourage creative, madcap and dark humour. The Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal (1995) employed the notion of the joker in a different capacity, as someone who co-ordinates applied drama through forum theatre and ensures its smooth running. The joker is the facilitator who creates the conditions for participatory play amongst those ‘spect-actors’ involved in order to tackle oppression without imposing his or her ideas, whilst encouraging an understanding of the complexity involved. Drama thereby challenges in a critically reflexive, informative manner, acting as a socio-political instrument of change and encouraging alternative thinking, crucial to agitprop and activist-art practices (Clements 2017a: 171). Notwithstanding this, Terry Eagleton (2003) lamented the highly subjective postmodern and post-structural times we are living in and the related loss of objectivity and ability to critique. He championed critical moral and political discourse with a need for systematic reflection on our assumptions, indispensable for an enlightened and progressive society, which humour can catalyse. Also, he bemoaned the puritanical character of those dour accounts of humour in academic books (Eagleton 2019: x) that dehumanize readers. Using characteristic wit, he exposed its moral grounding: The puritan mistakes pleasure for frivolity because he mistakes seriousness for solemnity. Pleasure falls outside the realm of knowledge, and thus is dangerously anarchic … to study pleasure would be like chemically analysing champagne rather than drinking the stuff. The puritan does not see that pleasure and seriousness are related in this sense: that finding out how life can become more pleasant for more people is a serious business. Traditionally, it is known as moral discourse. But ‘political’ discourse would do just as well (Eagleton 2003: 5). The big picture that Eagleton offers affirms the importance of humour for understanding psychosocial and political realities and moral ambiguities (Eagleton 2019), as the arts do. Art and humour share a similar concern for understanding or ‘getting it’, which delineates exclusivity through requisite cultural knowledge (or language). For example, this may concern a complex visual pun, or something that is ethereal or whimsical, naive, aggressive or excruciating, maybe not even that amusing. Our response to this complex web of possibilities will vary according to an array of individual, psychological and socio-cultural factors, including mood. Exclusion from the joke is an experience we have all had to work through, sometimes the result of absurdity or vindictiveness, the latter especially if we are the butt of humour. First there is an association of humour with the outsider as the object of the joke; and, second, the joker who may feel excluded employs humour in response to this, possibly aimed at the exclusionary system that has constructed marginality, or as a means of ingratiation to enable joining the in-crowd. Cate Watson (2015) has argued that, traditionally, humour has not been considered a suitable research area in the social sciences, which reveals a fear of not being taken seriously academically. She maintained that humour is a legitimate methodology for the social sciences and explored issues regarding its political and functional effects. Following her lead, I use humour as a methodology to better understand the ‘arts’ and culture in relation to outsiderdom, social exclusion and excluded spaces.

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Watson focused on humorous research as well as the marginalization of academics who engage with humour. She opined that colleagues in the humanities, especially literature and history, are treated differently in recognition that humour tells us much about the human condition, whilst sociologists purposely treat the subject seriously so that they are taken seriously. Humour therefore appears to devalue sincere intent and the creative endeavour involved, a rationale that resonates with the delegitimization of art. Watson cited both Erving Goffman and Thorsten Veblen as examples of sociologists who have faced criticism, accused of writing outside academic parameters by touching on aspects of humour. There are three possible explanations for this situation, according to John Morreall, which refer to the power of reason and circumscribed knowledge. These are: that humour is hostile and hence unethical; that it is linked to the absurd and hence irrational; and that it is non-serious and hence irresponsible (Morreall cited in Watson 2015: 408). Watson circumnavigated this paradox of methodology (whereby writing humorously is deemed trivial, which necessitates writing seriously about humour) by writing as seriously as possible, but ironically. Her closing remark about the state of academics is testimony to the taboo character of humour: ‘the life blood drains out of us and we form the great academic army of the not quite dead yet, but looking more and more that way’ (Watson 2015: 418)1. In the visual arts the ‘art joke’ convention concerns laughing with the artist and his or her attempt at burlesque or parody (in reference to the canon), which shows that the viewer ‘gets’ it and understands the symbolic allusion to other art, rather than laughing at the art because it is hackneyed or badly crafted. The joke is in the narrative, language, timing and rapport with the cultured viewer, which, as Sontag (2009) warned with regard to the visual arts, need not be overly analysed and interpreted as it spoils our spontaneous reaction to it.

Theories of Humour and its Scope There are a number of authors who have cited theoretical constructs to explain humour (Carroll 2014; Dina Sciama 2016; Klein 2007; Morreall 1987b), which are useful for understanding the art of humour and the scope of humorous art. John Morreall (1987b; cited in Kuipers 2008 and Carroll 2014) referred to traditional theories of laughter and humour as a template for classification, which he divided into three overlapping categories. First, Superiority Theory, which explains the way that the powerful in society employ humour to maintain their position by preying on the vulnerabilities and misfortunes of those less fortunate. Practical jokes often fall into this category as they are aimed at bullying the powerless, as does humour that is racist, sexist, homophobic or cruel, aimed at stupidity, disability or ‘body’ issues. Laughing at those perceived as inferior has a spurious pedigree and arises due to the traditionally negative perception of deformity, weakness, humiliation and suffering. Gilles Deleuze (2004) suggested that irony also has a superior angle as the person who understands the joke has acquired the requisite knowledge, which contrasts with those who have not. There are similarities with the arts more generally, which can require specific cultural capital, knowledge and experience of culture. And there are different contexts of humour to consider, which gives superiority a changeable quality. 1

This appears to be a variation of Arthur Smith’s observation that ‘the living are just the dead on holiday’ (cited in Clements 2017a: 153).

Approaches to Humour and Laughter

17

Second, Relief (or Release) Theory draws on the Socratic notion of drama as a cathartic experience to release emotional stress and psychic tension. Correspondingly, laughing as a de-stressor reinvigorates us. We feel better about ourselves and more amenable to fitting into society and accepting the problems we encounter after we have released pentup frustration. Nonetheless, this may not always apply to humour, especially if it takes half an hour to understand the joke. Third, Incongruity Theory is an imprecise concept that emphasizes the absurdity of ideas or experiences by encompassing the unexpected. It also employs rhetorical devices including parody, irony and satire, in contrast to an ordered or patterned world, so it has transrational, countercultural and resistant possibilities. It catches us unawares and expresses creative ideas that have become key to avant-garde and activist-art practices. In addition to these three conceptions of humour, Morreall (2009) added Play Theory and seeking enjoyment as a fourth, which has a long pedigree and corresponds to Freud’s (1960) pleasure principle. Noël Carroll (2014: 42–3) noted the striking association between play, laughter and humour as they are common to leisure and relaxation, which in the main are situated outside legitimate work time and practices. Nevertheless, notions of play depend upon some degree of autonomy and, like leisure, they are co-opted by utilitarian motives and work practices (see Clements 2017a: Chapter 7). Leisure is status-placing (Baudrillard 1998) and humour has the capacity to charm people and enable the smooth progression of business, careers and networking opportunities. Jacques Rancière, who explored the political character of aesthetics in relation to regimes of identification, explained that the different representations of art are disturbed by humour and free play as these challenge the distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004a: 32). Literally, it makes nonsense out of sense, whether satirical cartoons, Dada sound poems or Surrealist imagery. But this does not prevent the formulation of new regimes of identification and classification, Notwithstanding this, it gives temporary space to free art from conservative function and discursive constraints. Morreall (2009) and Carroll (2014) included a fifth Dispositional Theory based on the work of Jerrold Levinson (1998), which concerns our pleasure expressing ourselves through humour and observing others laugh, which is closely allied to playfulness. It appreciates that humour has autonomy and is not merely a conduit for instrumental concerns, as watching others enjoying themselves elicits a pleasurable reaction that in turn induces laughter. This is very different, for example, from superiority, which by definition reveals power dynamics, and relief, which is instrumental for the individual’s well-being and the process of de-stressing. Superiority might single out the excluded outsider for rough treatment, whilst incongruity could highlight unusual behaviour as its focus is on the bizarre and unexpected. One problem with the dispositional approach revolves around whether the reasons for laughter in the group concern something that the observer may find objectionable, which destroys the ambience. Eagleton (2019) sounded a note of caution regarding humour theories; besides much crossover they have definite limits. Moreover, incongruity refers to what we laugh at whilst superiority, relief and play relate to why we do it. He argued that superiority is implausible as humour ‘may be less an exercise of power than the contestation of it’ (Eagleton 2019: 40– 1), possibly highlighting greater civility and optimism. But he concurred with Deleuze that irony and incongruity more widely can be employed as a mild form of superiority. In terms of non-verbal communication, representations of humour and laughter can be ambiguous, as represented by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503/4). Her faint smile, or half-smile, expresses ambivalence, which gives the impression of smiling,

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Approaches to Humour and Laughter

however disdainfully, with the viewer unsure whether she is amused. Moreover, some people control their outward response and facial expression, thereby stifling laughter (as in the earlier example when the boss who is the object of humour enters the office), whilst others wear a permanent grin which may be an affectation that masks a character who lacks humour. In contrast, the dry humourist may hide outward signs of laughter, typified by certain comics including the American Jack Benny, and, in the UK, Les Dawson and Jack Dee. Arthur Asa Berger (1996) has suggested that humour is a sophisticated system of symbolic exchange that has become more politicized, however ambiguous, as it can aid group solidarity, and thereby avoid conflict, but also challenge power and perpetuate stereotypes. Humour mimics and exacerbates everyday reality and its inequalities, whether appropriated for superior or resistant intention, established or progressive concerns. The position that laughter ‘acts as a social corrective restraining social deviancy’ (Eagleton 2019: 41) offers a conservative and hegemonic function. Ideally it supports the underdog, offering justice and romance, part of the armoury of the excluded, which has a power that exceeds the hegemonic use of humour. But humour debunks everything and everyone in its own anarchic manner, which, as Eagleton suggested, undermines the utopian notion that laughter is a foil to privilege. Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) maintained that satire that intends to harm is not part of the ideal collective carnival culture, where carnivalesque humour is the antidote to a heartless superiority (Eagleton 2019: 43). Laughter when employed by those who are powerless is ‘tactical’ revenge on those people who have suppressed, bullied and exploited them, which offers an obvious political dimension (de Certeau 1984). In contrast, an example of superiority that intended to exclude modern artists and musicians was the use of ridicule by the Nazi regime in Germany. The Entartete Kunst exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ (Institute of Archaeology 1937) and Entartete Musik exhibition of ‘degenerate music’ (Art Palace 1939) were the culmination of this process (see Chapter 5). Arguably, just as National Socialism is a perversion of an egalitarian and democratic socialism, the superior use of satire and ridicule so beloved of autocratic societies is a perversion of humour, which at its worst creates ‘unlaughter’2. Satire is best aimed at the powerful and privileged to unsettle hegemony rather than to reinforce it through the degradation of the marginalized. Sheri Klein (2007: 10) suggested that Incongruity Theory is the basis of all humour, citing the 16th/17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who maintained that the key relationship was between laughter and the unexpected. Lidia Dina Sciama (2016) concurred that paradoxes, contradictions, incongruities and nonsense help determine the framework for humour. These expose a range of cultural processes and practices, which demands a broad inter-disciplinary approach to fully garner its positive psychosocial, emotional and intellectual effects. Although superiority itself may make people uncomfortable and is far from politically correct, people enjoy other people’s woes, whether reactions to practical jokes or ridicule. Hence the popularity of the satirical magazine Private Eye in the UK, which goads people to laugh at the expense of successful public (and not so public) figures when unmasked as hypocrites and imposters (typically high-profile politicians, journalists and corporate types). Critically, humour is complex and mutable, with different theoretical positions generally appearing wooden and artificial. This offers a useful parallel with art theory and codes of 2

Unlaughter acknowledges that humour is attempting to transgress moral boundaries and is in bad taste.

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interpretation offered by art critics. Susan Sontag (2009 [1964]) argued that interpretation in the arts is in the main reactionary, which stifles and poisons our sensibilities, and added that ‘interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art’ (Sontag, 2009: 7). This spoils our sensibilities and creative interaction with art, an understanding that can be applied to humour. Sontag argued for a direct sensory experience, an honesty of engagement whereby we hear, touch, feel and see, although this possibly ignores the complexity of both art and humour and the extent to which they can be an ideological contrivance and means to an end, rather than spontaneous engagement. Samuel Schmidt differentiated between two particular elements of humour. First, comedy, which refers to the unexpected and creates a ridiculous situation (slipping on a banana skin); second, the social function of laughter, which may be a convoluted construction of relations, cohesion and unity (Schmidt 2014: 27–9). Such utility may include one group at the expense of another to reinforce or counter hegemony – whether, for example, concerning gender, national or racial superiority – in contrast to the subtle, unexpected and naive character of incongruity. Dave Saunders (1997) detailed the utility of humour for commerce and advertising, which varied from straightforward to strange humour, hyperbole, pun and unexpected, even cruel, visual narratives. Another template of humour utilizes three overlapping comic categories (Schneegans cited in Bakhtin 1984: 304): the clownish and slapstick, which is direct, naive and devoid of anger; burlesque, which is negation through exaggeration, parody and a narrow meaning that degrades ‘highbrow’ practices and assumptions; and the grotesque, involving extreme body imagery using harsh caricature and satire, often incongruous and offensive. Slapstick refers to innocent, unsophisticated and usually visual humour with much absurdity, as practised by the circus clown. It was typified by the foolish naive antics of Stan Laurel playing off his comic partner Oliver Hardy in early Hollywood films. Burlesque associated with cabaret and parody in literary and dramatic work is more exclusive, with particular knowledge vital to comprehend the ‘humour style’ (Kuipers 2015) and ‘art joke’ (Higgie 2007). In the visual arts a classic example of parody involves the Mona Lisa. Besides relatively recent appropriation by Michael Basquiat’s Boone (1983), it was co-opted in the 19th century by Eugène Bataillee with his jokily entitled La Jaconde Fumant la Pipe (Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe (1887)). Michel Duchamp’s Dadaist take-off entitled L.H.O.O.Q (1919) featured the Mona Lisa with a moustache, which the artist referred to as a readymade rather than a masterpiece. Grotesque humour is the staple of carnivalesque and gallows humour, enacted in demonstration, carnival and street theatre. It is employed by avant-garde artists and satirical political cartoonists who take humour to its limits in respect of taste and acceptability (see Clements 2017a: 121–2). The Roman Saturnalia is a case in point, a festival that was held in mid-winter leading to the Winter Solstice. There was much lewdness and reversal of role (typical of later medieval carnival), which included men parading around the forum with massive dildos tied to their waists and feigning the sodomy of young boys, to ridicule certain pompous members of the Senate and their sexual peccadilloes. Carroll (2014: 48) has suggested that humour is a conversational lubricant (and tool for networking), with most laughter a social mannerism rather than reaction to humour. People laughing can encourage more laughter (as recognized by the Dispositional Theory), hence the use of laugh tracks (canned laughter) on certain television sit-coms to manipulate this, although ‘fake’ laughter can grate and have the opposite effect on the audience.

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Superiority may not be funny for another person or in another context, and often it appears nasty and arrogant. For example, a humble valet who opens a wardrobe and finds a wasp’s nest and is then stung would be far from amusing for the recipient, but possibly funny for the smug archbishop whose advice not to open the door because of the predominance of wasps in the bedroom had been ignored. In contrast to this superiority, the valet opening his bedroom wardrobe to find a blow-up sex doll may be amusing, embarrassing or disturbing for each party. As a comedy narrative, the second incongruous scenario is funnier as the lowly valet has rumbled the powerful archbishop and his saucy secret. But it is overly idealistic to expect the audience always to take the side of the dispossessed or less fortunate character. Superior humour accordingly requires a similar superiority in the audience, often displayed through pompous nationalistic, sexist and racist narratives. This can be observed by watching the antics of the crowd at a football match who may single out a particular player or official for prolonged abuse in a very cruel fashion using some choice language. Morreall (2009) suggested two features of laughter. First, that we are caught off-guard and cannot easily adjust, and, second, that this psychological shift is pleasant unless awkwardly embarrassing (which obviously depends upon context). Furthermore, as Carroll (2014: 84) added: Comic laughter in concert with like-minded and like-feeling revellers confirms, reinforces, and celebrates our membership in a community defined by our infectious laughter, our de facto acknowledgement … of our converging norms. Humour and laughter function inclusively to acknowledge communality. This may refer to established thinking or alternative scenarios, which can either reinforce normality and membership of specific social worlds and communities or challenge these. It rebels against but also reaffirms the established order and status quo, which ambivalence is possibly necessary as some degree of legitimacy helps ease pressure to censure risqué comedy. Political correctness became fashionable in 1980s Europe and the US as protection for minorities and the vulnerable, which challenged hegemonic thinking and included legislation. In the UK the New Labour government passed the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006), which made it an offence to incite racial or religious intolerance. This includes the use of threatening words, written material, visual displays and behaviour that stir up hatred. Although political correctness has become hegemonic, humour operates to criticize this position as denying free speech and difference. In some cases this has reinforced sexism, racism and homophobia as political correctness annoys people through a dogmatic righteousness, which becomes a target for satire. It shows the shifting sands of inclusion and exclusion, with established culture co-opting humorous expressions of marginality. Take two jokes that concern feminism set within a common narrative framework. First: How many feminists does it take to tile a bathroom? I don’t know. How many feminists does it take to tile a bathroom? WHO’S ASKING! Second: How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? I don’t know. How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? It depends how thinly you slice them.

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The first joke stereotypes and excludes feminists as bossy and aggressive, and is therefore supportive of traditional hegemonic norms. The second laughs at men, therefore is supportive of feminism or feminist superiority and challenges mainstream norms, although ‘slicing men’ is absurdist. Possibly the second joke is in response to the first and may instigate further jokes about feminists. The joke, as Samuel Schmidt (2014: 34) reflected, is a logical incongruence (or non-rationality) that ignores rules and social conventions, distorting reality and thereby providing comical escape. In contrast to incongruous but pretty harmless jokes, there are brutal and highly offensive pornographic and gendered jokes that reflect male superiority, which is of another magnitude. These were the staple of certain stand-up working-class comics in the 1970s and 1980s (for example, in the UK, Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning, then later Chubby Brown). The following joke is intentionally offensive and challenges political correctness by objectifying women in extremis: What’s the definition of a perfect woman? A. She’s three feet tall, has a round hole for a mouth and her head is flat, so you can put a pint glass on it. B. The sports model has pull-back ears and her teeth fold in. C. The economy model fucks all evening and at midnight turns into a roast beef sandwich and a six-pack. (cited in Mulkay 1988: 136) Even a joke so obviously odious offers other interpretations regarding incongruity and stereotyping of male attitudes to women, for example, which ‘mansplaining’ offers avenues for further moral criticism of the joke. Galdi et al. (2014) researched the conduct of men between the ages of 18–48 and their reaction to the objectification of women in the media in relation to the likelihood of harassment. It appeared to demonstrate, in the media effects tradition, how exposure to different types of media (television shows, adverts and film) influences behaviour. Three different types of clip were shown: one scene objectified women, another showed powerful women in a professional environment and in another the scenes highlighted the elimination of humans. The men then rated how they would react to certain situations and interacted with a computerized female through jokes. The results indicated that those men exposed to objectifying material were more likely to engage in behaviour linked to sexual coercion and harassment. A caveat is that media effects are complex and controversial as it is very difficult to isolate contributing variables and therefore prove causality. George Gerbner’s (1998) notion of cultivation, especially by repetitive consumption of images and ideas through internet or televisual media, possibly better recognizes how persistent long-term exposure to violent or sexualized material can have a negative impact. Humour research has tended to focus on the positive rather than negative aspects of humour, although there is ambiguity regarding the perception of working-class humour, which is frequently deemed politically incorrect and offensive, hence its exclusion. Salvatore Attardo (2010) has argued that, because working-class humour represents workingclass values, which are significantly antagonistic towards those bourgeois values that have forged politically correct regimes, it is inaccurately represented in mass-mediated formats

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and toned down. Established revulsion towards aspects of working-class humour picks up on the ambiguities and differences between traditionally ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ (or popular) cultural norms. Bakhtin’s (1994) notion of popular folk culture and carnivalesque ‘people’s laughter’ included the graphic and grotesque besmirching of the powerful. During medieval carnival the landed gentry and religious dignitaries were ridiculed using choice earthy language and performative texts that were far from politically correct3. He claimed that carnivalesque humour is immersed in a primeval communism that arose from the ‘common’ people below, rather than being imposed by the privileged from above, with everyone involved. This notion of ‘people’s laughter’ constructs the common folk in popular terms and in opposition to aficionados whose ‘highbrow’ humour is steeped in education and knowledge, displaying distinction (Bourdieu 1984; Friedman 2014; Gattrell 2006: 191), a group that probably includes Private Eye readers. Terry Eagleton (2019; 101–3) situated humour historically in class, where gentlemen at odds with the ‘lower orders’ expressed their status through refined genteel titters, sneering at raucous plebeian belly-laughs and peasant buffoonery. This conjures up Henri Bergson’s (1980 [1911]) understanding of humour as conceptual and the pre-eminence of the mind over the senses, but also the performance of distinction related to social status (Bourdieu 1984). In the UK a class divide surrounding humour was commonplace during the 18th century, which highlighted an enlightened and civilized culture as apart from the common culture (Gattrell 2006), however much this male elite may have enjoyed more ‘earthy’ humour behind closed doors (and sexual favours from the chamber maid). For Michael Mulkay (1988: 153): there is a direct correspondence between humour and social structure. Joking takes place because the organized patterns of social life themselves involve contradictions, oppositions and incongruities which find expression through the medium of humorous discourse. Jokes arise out of the inequalities of social structure, where racial, sexual and gendered humour operates to reproduce these, but also to question them. Humour reflects and reinforces the contradictions of humanity as it creates and dissolves tensions, conforms to and critiques existing systems, hence its Janus-like character. Nonetheless, it is easy to denigrate the weak and vulnerable but far more difficult to hold those with power to account and to poke fun at them. Libel claims are an obvious avenue for retaining the existing iniquities and reinforcing hegemony, which the rich and powerful can afford to pursue. Private Eye has fought multiple defamation cases since its inception in 1961 and has relied on its readers for cash support to defend itself in the courts and uphold freedom of speech. There are superior jokes in all countries that reinforce specific notions of nationalism, which are racist (typically in England towards the Irish, Welsh or Scottish; in the US towards the Mexicans; and in Germany towards the Poles). A racist nationalist joke focuses on derogatory representations of stupidity. For example:

3

Whether those ridiculed took it in good faith is debatable. It reveals Bakhtin’s romanticized attitude towards the peasantry.

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Paddy was working at the fish plant in Cork when he accidentally cut off all 10 of his fingers. He went to the emergency room in Cork’s hospital. The doctor looked at Paddy and said: ‘Let’s be avin’ da fingers and I’ll see what oi can do.’ Paddy said, ‘Oi haven’t got da fingers.’ ‘Whadda ya mean you haven’t got da fingers? Lord Tunderin’ Jesus … We’s got microsurgery and all kinds of incredible techniques. I could have put dem back on and made you like new! Why didn’t ya bring da fingers?!?’ And Paddy said: ‘How da fock was I s’pose to pick them up?’ (www.jokelibrary.net/nationalities/Irish2.html#fingers) This is a good example of hybridity (see Chapter 5). The notion of a fingerless hand not being able to pick up severed fingers is incongruous and funny, it catches us off guard. But it is also a conduit for promoting superiority and racism through stupidity, so the joke blends these different aspects of humour. Political ‘incorrectness’, as previously outlined regarding ‘lowbrow’ working-class comics, utilizes class difference, racism, sexism and crude sexualized language which challenges ‘highbrow’ bourgeois decorum of clever word play, parody or pun, reconfirming class differences. However, it is not that straightforward because ‘lowbrow’ humour challenges such division of humour into acceptable and unacceptable practices, and people may laugh at crudities when they think they should not. Moreover, the antiliberal language of working-class humour is ambiguous as it is suffused with ‘dirty’ negative connotations regarding the baseness and phoniness of ‘highbrow’ culture alongside more positive romantic ideals of an unaffected no-nonsense salt of the earth working-class culture that offers authenticity. Historically this latter point has entrapped middle-class culture as its independence has been caught between a desire to relate to the authenticity and egalitarianism of the working class whilst aspiring to the elite status of the aristocracy (Stallybrass & White 1986: 199 (see Chapter 8)). Nevertheless, there is an abusive line of insult comedy used by comics who attack members of the audience in cruel and embarrassing ways which is disturbing to watch. This type of comedy in the UK – epitomized by Frankie Boyle, Ricky Gervais and Jerry Sadowitz – was derived from the ‘roast’. Here one person in the audience is singled out, usually somebody of importance, which originally was deemed an honour and inoffensive. Now insult comedy literally roasts the individual, who is shamed in front of the audience through highly offensive personal insults that is challenging to witness.

Humour: Omnivorous Taste, Class and Distinction In contrast to abusive and superior insult comedy, art humour tends to be educated, bourgeois and concerns cultural capital and intricate knowledge of the field. It may or may not be funny, but shows the ability of the audience to ‘get it’ and display this. A good example is a very simple joke on the time-honoured theme of crossing the road that reveals the social perception of an artist: Why did the artist cross the road? To see from the other side. (Dzarma cited in Sperling & Sperling 2014: 91–2)

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Jennifer Higgie (2007) documented the artist’s joke and concurred that there has been a lack of scholarly attention to humour in art, although it has had an enormous influence on creative practices and ideas. Humour has tended towards conceptuality and parody, which understanding requires education into culture and the canons of art. Arguably this is a partial consideration and, although art institutions (and markets) nominate and dominate taste, humour is more wide-ranging and offers the viewer much scope for invention and interpretation. There is possible tension between the artist’s need for an audience and the audience’s need to be party to a select understanding, which contrivance may undermine spontaneous reaction and revisits Sontag’s (2009) criticism of controlled interpretation. Giselinde Kuipers, in her research into jokes, was concerned with three socio-cultural aspects of humour. First, communication and what constitutes pleasant and unpleasant discourse; second, social and ethical boundaries as well as their transgression; and, last, issues of style and taste, which express class, however much they draw upon a variety of other factors. In typically anarchic fashion there is much agency and individual taste displayed through humour, which does not strictly adhere to expectations and cannot be socially determined, however much taste functions to include and exclude. As Kuipers maintained: Taste, just like humor, is felt to be something extremely personal and spontaneous, but also serves as a way of establishing whether or not people are on the same ‘wavelength’ (Kuipers 2015: 12). Taste in both art and humour reinforces and challenges particular mannerisms which help to construct individual and social identity, beyond stereotyped ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ patterns of consumption. Kuipers (2008) set out mutually constitutive and overlapping sociological understandings of humour that are a useful template for this book. First, functionalism, as expressed by the anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1940), refers to conformist utility, whereas conflict through resistance to the norm offers a very different approach to understanding humour. The former is conservative and legitimate and the latter a challenging, awkward, even countercultural manifestation that offers criticism, as expressed through carnivalesque social practices. This direct experience (or phenomenological approach), as employed by Bakhtin (1984) in regard to carnival, offers a worldview for perceiving society and appreciates humour as a radical space for freedom and resistance. Second, symbolic interactionism exemplifies Erving Goffman’s (1959) approach to the social as inherently performative, which recognizes that the role of humour and the construction of meaning refer to the importance of social relations and interactions. Third, an historical-comparative approach that understands humour through an appraisal across time and space. Kuipers (2015), with reference to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) conceptualization of taste, reiterated the importance of class, but found that in the Netherlands, where she undertook her research, it wasn’t as important as in the UK (and in France), which is a more obviously hierarchical society4. Besides issues of class, variables of age, gender, nationality, ethnicity and disability are important determinants of humour and affect understanding, which is complex and diverse. She highlighted ‘humour styles’ (humour specific to certain socio-cultural groups), which invokes notions of ‘highbrow’ culture and the spectre of people employing humour to showcase their knowledge and distinction. The 4

Nonetheless, all societies have class distinctions, even those that profess to be classless.

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relationship between art and exclusion also requires consideration of the transgressive and darker character of humour, which is navigated by using an eclectic mix of these approaches. An interesting case in the public sphere that highlights some of these artistic ambiguities and approaches to humour involves Banksy’s Basquiat Mural (2017), which coincided with the Basquiat Boom for Real exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London (Basquiat 2017/8) and was situated on a street outside the gallery (see Fig 2.1). The exhibition combined a postmodern mix of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ culture, with Banksy’s graffiti narrative offering commentary and dialogue showing how new ideas can be developed through humour, which can be a complex process with layers of meaning. I asked a random group of American third-year degree-level students studying in London how they understood the Basquiat Mural. One said that it concerned terrorism as the ‘Basquiat’ effigy was being body searched, whilst another suggested that the ghost figure had stolen the crown which the police were searching for. A third student figured that the scene concerned racial tensions and a police stop-and-search of an African American guy. The fourth was anxious about the stop-and-search, mainly because she didn’t understand why the ‘Basquiat’ effigy had been arrested. No one had heard of Banksy, Basquiat or the Barbican Art Gallery and nobody thought the image was particularly humorous or ironic. It highlights both the exclusivity of art and humour (particularly art humour), as well as the contextual character of culture.

Figure 2.1 Basquiat Mural, 2017, Banksy, paint on concrete. Golden Lane, Barbican, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2017.

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For those without the relevant cultural codes and knowledge of art, the mural refers to current social issues and practices (terrorism, racism, theft and police harassment). To the cognoscenti this is Banksy’s parodic take on Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982), painted by the renowned American street artist-cum-celebrity Jean-Michel Basquiat. Britain’s most successful street artist posted some background explanation on his Instagram account: Major new Basquiat Show opens at the Barbican – a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls (Banksy, cited in Slawson 2017). More irony concerned the guard in a high-visibility yellow jacket ensuring the graffiti was not defaced, as though the official gallery institution had co-opted the street outside. Nicola Slawson reckoned that the graffiti mocked the exhibition as Basquiat was formerly a street artist in New York; alternatively it helped to promote the exhibition, Basquiat and Banksy, one former art outsider now the darling of the art world paying homage to another. An Instagram post by Banksy stated: Portrait of Basquiat being welcomed by the Metropolitan Police – an (unofficial) collaboration with the new Basquiat show (cited in Slawson 2017). The theme, wit and style of the image is typically Banksy, who often portrays police officers in his work with irony intended. Basquiat died of an overdose at 27, the mythical age of pop star death and pantheon (the 27 Club) that includes Kurt Cobain, Richie Edwards, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse. His work now sells for astronomical figures, so any association with him has to enhance Banksy’s reputation (whose work also sells for inflated prices). The exhibition itself was ‘outsider hip’ (Clements 2009), including rooms on ‘beat bop’ and the punk ‘scene’ in 1980s New York, giving the perception that the city was teeming with ‘creatives’, bohemians, poseurs, entrepreneurs and adventure capitalists. Here ‘outsider’ is a badge that promotes bourgeois individualism and distinction with an edge (see Chapter 4). Basquiat’s collage and painting Boone (1983) was displayed in the exhibition. It is a defiled blue-tinted image of the Mona Lisa with bright red lipstick and a black eye, an art joke that takes its place in a long line of humorous takes on Leonardo da Vinci’s original painting, as previously iterated. Basquiat was half-Haitian and half-Puerto Rican and living in New York, although, as his biography attests: He was a street kid, true, a teen runaway who had slept on benches in Tompkins Square Park, but he was also a handsome privileged boy from a Park Slope brownstone who had gone to private school, followed by a stint at City-As-School, a destination for gifted children. Although he didn’t have a formal art education, he and his mother had been frequenting museums since he was a toddler (Laing 2017). Basquiat was versed in the contents of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, so his outsiderdom arguably is steeped in his ethnicity rather than education and class, a teen runaway who performed his ‘black’ identity at wealthy parties to white buyers, not exactly excluded from society, relevant art worlds and networks.

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Banksy is a white outsider artist using humour to gain ‘hipness’ points by commenting upon Basquiat, which can be perceived as yet another example of white culture appropriating black street art, enacted spatially through its co-option into the legitimate gallery system5. However much the artist or community tries to control representation of the art displayed, it is manipulated by the curation of the exhibition. A good example has been the traditional display of Primitive and Ethnic Art in ethnographic museums, with the voice of those involved in creating the art conspicuously absent. Henrietta Lidchi (1997) outlined the politics of exhibiting as a discourse that taps into and reveals systems of representation. Exhibitions of ‘other’ cultures historically were selectively constructed and controlled by white academics and curators (usually male) who excluded indigenous artists from art galleries. This form of cultural imperialism, the appropriation of meanings and artists, shares similarities with the exhibition of Welfare Art and other marginal art forms (see Chapter 6). These contrived ethnographic exhibitions help us to understand the realities of social inclusion and exclusion in the world of art, and humour can illuminate the processes underpinning social inequalities and cultural anxieties. Bourdieu recognized taste as a social strategy reinforcing status, class and education. His argument was that the privileged realize distinction through their established cultural resources by employing ‘highbrow’ knowledge and social etiquette. This ‘naturalized’ storage of legitimate cultural capital concerns a complex coded system that requires the accumulation and reaffirmation of specific taste and its activation in the real world. Therefore, cultural capital is triggered through social interaction between people in relation to taste and depends on its expression (Bourdieu 1984: 503–19). But the problem with this theory of specific ‘highbrow’ cultural capital determining social status and class is the increasing de-differentiation of cultural forms and the emergence of the cultural omnivore (Peterson & Kern 1996) who consumes a distinct range of cultural forms across classifications. Whereas individual distinction traditionally referred to knowledge of ‘highbrow’ culture, it is now tied up with diversity, authenticity and specific personal taste. Will Atkinson (2011) has argued that this thesis, which attempts to demonstrate postmodernism initiated by the 1960s counterculture (epitomized by Pop Art), is speculative as the statistical research undertaken is spurious and offers no real evidence for this. Bennett et al. (2009), whilst arguing that Bourdieu’s research is outdated, reconfigured his ideas for contemporary Britain beyond class considerations to include the effects of gender, age and ethnicity in the formulation of individual and group tastes, which process is complex and contradictory. There is greater individuality and degrees of omnivorism which incorporate a range of legitimate ‘highbrow’ culture with non-legitimate ‘lowbrow’ personal repertoires. This eclectic embrace of cultural formats that shows tolerance towards other values offers a unique individualized pattern of reflective consumption. It obfuscates and reconfigures Bourdieu’s scheme of culture and the extent to which ‘highbrow’ knowledge remains the pinnacle of legitimate distinction. Omnivorousness in this respect is an aesthetic disposition pursued by the self-assured who 5

Basquiat’s incendiary Obnoxious Liberals (1982) epitomizes his anti-establishment stance, an edgy painting with symbolic reference to the victims of capitalism, embodied by an African American in chains, which contrasts with the two privileged white American liberals wearing ten-gallon hats.

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extend their non-legitimate knowledge, which is displayed as a form of expertise and sophistication (Lizardo & Skiles 2012: 265–6). It is a new snobbery that concerns a wider quantity and quality of knowledge than traditional ‘highbrow’ culture, offering greater individualization and authenticity. Sam Friedman (2011), who researched the consumption of British comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, concluded that there was a propensity to ‘cultural homelessness’ from those used to consuming ‘highbrow’ culture and displaying its investment whilst also utilizing ‘lowbrow’ comedy, as they lacked identification with the latter and the underlying values expressed. He evaluated the consumption of humour theoretically by employing the notion of cultural omnivore, whereby educated dilettantes consume a variety of culture including edgy ‘popular’ humour to express their individual taste. But Friedman later re-emphasized Bourdieu’s understanding as a result of his research into the consumption of humour through interviews with audiences: By far the most powerful of these taste distinctions separates those with high cultural capital resources, who prefer ‘highbrow’ comedy, from those with low resources, who prefer ‘lowbrow’ comedy and have not heard of most ‘highbrow’ comedy (Friedman 2014: 162). Friedman suggested that the notion of the cultural omnivore was a partial understanding as he found that specific humour was employed by the educated middle classes to create symbolic boundaries, typically performed through a disinterested embodied role (often perceived as aloofness) which remained central to bourgeois identity. Yet he maintained there is so much comedy that cultural categories have become amorphous, with greater space for individual taste. Heike Munder, in recognition of the ambiguous and destabilizing properties of humour, acknowledged that: The most intelligent form of humour is subversive – that of the ‘snipers’ – and here infiltration occurs from within the ranks, affirmatively, not in citing revolutions, but incurring subtle, incremental changes instead (Munder 2005: 13). But active involvement in subversive and avant-garde culture counters the creation of distance from ourselves and others, the traditional disinterested display and strategy of ‘highbrow’ culture that embodies the judgement of taste where the performance of laughter activates distinction. As with the adage ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it’ (co-opted as a pop song by The Fun Boy Three with Bananarama (1982)), the privileged have performed humour in a non-ostentatious manner to exhibit powers of discrimination which proffer social cachet and reaffirm class stereotypes. So although cultural omnivores are able to utilize a greater individual range and flexibility of taste, unlike univores who consume uniform types of ‘highbrow’ or ‘popular’ cultural capital, it is how it is performed that revisits the Bourdieusian schema of cultural confidence and assurance6.

6

A caveat is that the display of distinction and performance of ‘highbrow’ humour may have altered in line with greater ambiguity regarding individual mannerisms.

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Jacques Rancière (2004b) criticized Bourdieu for setting out hierarchies of taste in relation to class and power and its reproduction through inheritance, as his model reinforces these hierarchies. Nonetheless, aesthetic theory is a ‘regime’ for the identification of art, just as superiority theory is a ‘regime’ for the identification of power through humour, which may reinforce class differences and their reproduction. However, clarity is scuppered as the corresponding conduct hypothetically instilled by deference and imitation that leads to distinction and the outcome creates an unpredictable cocktail when compounded with anarchic and ambiguous humour. It includes faux-deference, mimicry and parody with much resistance to legitimacy, which turns culture on its head and challenges power. Bernard Lahire (2008) replaced the notion of omnivorous taste with dissonance steeped in the wider notion of cultural lifestyle and self-distinction, as each individual has a personalized cultural profile, which displays flexibility about a range of cultural formats. This eclectic variety of individual preferences that reflect postmodern sensibilities adds to the notion that omnivorous patterns of cultural interests have replaced univorous ones, but his focus was on how it creates greater internal, as well as social, tension. Lahire’s conception of social reality as an admixture of legitimate and non-legitimate cultural practices generates differing amounts of disharmony (Lahire 2008: 172). There is a clash between different beliefs, ideas and values embedded in each person’s cultural preferences, both internally (intra-individual) and between people (inter-individual), highlighting tensions between structure and agency (2008: 185–6). Dissonance here is literally a lack of harmony within the individual or between people resulting from discordant cultural preferences and lifestyles, where the individual’s internal hierarchy of culture internalizes the wider tensions created by social stratification and taste. It is an admixture of ‘highbrow’ notions of distinction as aesthetic distancing through detachment and a subjective ‘lowbrow’ immersion in culture (Bourdieu 1984: 34), as expressed by Friedman (2011) through the term ‘cultural homelessness’, resulting in the consumption of selective ‘lowbrow’ culture that the individual does not particularly relate to. This ‘enlightened’ eclecticism concerns a highly nuanced individualized notion of distinction and authenticity trapped between ‘naturalized’ structural processes of legitimate taste and individual agency7. In general, there appears to be a lack of consistency (and definition) regarding the highly nuanced character of humour that is able to capture its relationship to taste, both politically correct ideal and incorrect reality, positive or negative tone, radical or reactionary practice. Humour theorized may be a univorous ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’ expression of class or an omnivorous mix across taste categories reflecting individualized palettes, however much this re-articulates taste and creates dissonant cultural profiles internally and between those within specific social groups. Moreover, we giggle when we know that we should not, exposing an anarchy which can be infectious, and we laugh when we are not supposed to or do not laugh when we

7

Roughly speaking, a palette of omnivorous taste across cultures offers individual cachet however much distinction has traditionally related to structural determinants of taste invested in ‘highbrow’ formats. The notion of ‘authenticity-insecurity’ is introduced later (see Chapter 6) as it offers an understanding as to why those with ‘highbrow’ taste have a need for ‘enlightened eclecticism’ to shore up authenticity through the consumption of Marginal Art.

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are not fully aware of the joke. This understanding can quickly change when we grasp a fuller meaning of the situation, highlighting a contextual and changeable reality. Humour is a powerful social, cultural and political tool, although there is always a degree of ambiguity regarding meaning or morality and how this functions in practice.

The Ethical, Political and Functional Aspects of Humour There are different contexts and value systems underwriting humour which help to explain its ambiguous character. For example, during the Middle Ages in Europe, Aristotle and Christ represented very different attitudes towards humour. Aristotle had decreed that laughter was a distinctive and vital aspect of humanity, whereas Christians condemned humour because Christ had never been described as laughing in the Bible (Palmer 1994: 44), a literal fundamentalism that has plagued all religions ever since. Established religion was satirized in a sketch about the Spanish Inquisition from the television programme Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A clip from the script gives an impression: Reg (Graham Chapman): Trouble at mill. Lady Mountback (Carol Cleveland): Oh no – what kind of trouble? Reg: One on’t cross beams gone owt askew on treddle. Lady Mountback: Pardon? Reg: One on’t cross beams gone owt askew on treddle. Lady Mountback: I don’t understand what you’re saying. Reg: (slightly irritated and with exaggeratedly clear accent) One of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treddle. Lady Mountback: Well, what on earth does that mean? Reg: I don’t know – Mr. Wentworth just told me to come in here and say that there was trouble at the mill, that’s all. I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. (JARRING CHORD) (The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain [Michael Palin] enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles [Terry Jones] has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang [Terry Gilliam] is just Cardinal Fang.) Cardinal Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise … surprise and fear … fear and surprise … Our two weapons are fear and surprise … and ruthless efficiency … Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency … and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope …. Our four … no … Amongst our weapons … Amongst our weaponry … are such elements as fear, surprise … I’ll come in again. (Exit and exeunt) Reg: I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. (JARRING CHORD) (The cardinals burst in) Cardinal Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – Oh damn! (To Cardinal Biggles) I can’t say it – you’ll have to say it. Cardinal Biggles: What? Cardinal Ximinez: You’ll have to say the bit about ‘Our chief weapons are …’

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Cardinal Biggles: (rather horrified) I couldn’t do that … (Ximinez bundles the cardinals outside again) Reg: I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. (JARRING CHORD) (The cardinals enter) (Monty Python’s Flying Circus 1970) The scene appears haphazard and chaotic with much incongruity, but it is not without social and political relevance. It ridicules the Catholic Church hierarchy and its history of zealotry and torture, which can be resituated as child abuse today. But there is a mercurial naivety associated with incongruity, however much the theme of the sketch refers to serious ethical concerns. An important function of humour is to rehearse and reform social norms in relation to new values, a performative expression of diverse and changing ethical conventions. Carroll (2014: 89–105) explained this moral maze of humour through its three constituent parts: comic ethicism, which rails against immoral or politically incorrect humour; comic immoralism that champions ethical transgression, which can be refreshing in moderation and grotesque in extremis; and comic amoralism, where the quality of the joke matters far more than ethical considerations. The moralist utilizes humour progressively, contrasting with the immoralist who employs humour negatively with the intention of harming specific individuals and social groups (emphasizing homophobic, sexist and racist commentary, mental and physical disability and other forms of exclusion). These positions can be compared to an amoralist stance, which maintains that humour is beyond good and evil with a right to exist for its own sake, a form of humour for humour’s sake paralleling art for art’s sake. Comic moralism may appear politically correct but, however much this is preached and pursued, laughter has the ability to subvert the best of intentions. It is unlikely that there are many people who have never laughed at a politically incorrect scenario. The amoralist’s response to someone taking offence at a joke may be ‘I was only joking …’, so there are issues regarding the intention of the joker and the context within which the joke is told. Carroll (2014: 87–91) argued that if jokes that discriminate against minority groups are so harmful, why do those very same communities (lesbian, Jewish or disabled, for example) also make the same jokes about themselves? It is unreal to suggest that this is hegemonic, with minorities brainwashed into taking up traditional positions of inferiority and laughing at themselves in a compliant manner. Possibly they make jokes about themselves because they can, which is a privileged position. Also, humour encompasses carnivalesque practices that subvert power hierarchies which may challenge the discrimination, offering ambivalence and irony. Nonetheless, he surmised that it is still important to take account of whether the joke is intentionally harmful. In contrast, the strongest argument for amoralism straightforwardly concerns diversity as there are different styles and understandings of humour, whereas the moral focus on humour endorses specific attitudes, which is singular and misunderstands the multiplicity of humour and its interpretation (Carroll 2014: 93). However, someone laughing at an objectionable and unacceptable joke can suggest that person shares the underlying values and malicious attitudes, however much the laughter refers to other possibilities. By focusing on morality, immorality and amorality this arguably bypasses the humour, key

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to the amoral argument. Moreover, well-intentioned humour can be as gut-wrenchingly dreadful as malicious humour. Scott Woodcock (2015) alongside Carroll, associated comic amoralism with autonomism, and that the perception of immorality neither contributes positively nor negatively to humour. A key issue is attitude endorsement and the extent to which humour ratifies the sentiment behind the joke and the complex notion of conditionality. What creates humour in any one situation is not altogether clear, a changeability that is dependent upon context. Humour has universal appeal within democratic societies and acts as a cohesive social and political lubricant, however satirical or grotesque. But humour within an autocratic society, where people are less able to express themselves and their views, may take on a more critical character. Gregor Benton (1988) suggested that everyday living under a dictatorship encourages political humour, with the rider that dictatorships produce varying amounts of humour. An example from the former Soviet Union details something of its dark character: Is it true that Comrade Stalin collects political jokes? Yes, but first he collects the people who tell them. (cited in Benton 1988: 37) A typical line of Russian and Eastern Bloc jokes in the Soviet era referred to Radio Erevan (or Yerevan), the international public radio of Armenia. They were known as Armenian Radio jokes (a nationalist and racist slur) and were produced in a question and answer format: Can socialism be established in the Sahara? Yes, socialism can be introduced into the Sahara. But after the first five-year plan the Sahara will have to import sand. (cited in Asa Berger 1996: 17) Is it true that Adam and Eve were the first communists? Probably, yes. They both dressed very sparingly, they had modest requirements toward food, they never had their own house, and on top of all that they believed that they were living in paradise. (www.bratislavaguide.com/radio-yerevan-jokes) These jokes are very much concerned with feelings of powerlessness in light of an overbearingly bureaucratic life, where citizens had limited agency and therefore voiced their political discontent in an appropriately cynical manner. In the spirit of ideological fair play, an incongruous pun about capitalism and the work ethic offers some balance. During the 2017 UK election campaign, Theresa May, then prime minister, continually reiterated the mantra that there isn’t a magic money tree and that money doesn’t grow on trees, which was why she was unable to reverse her unpopular policy of austerity (an old ruse for redistributing wealth back to the rich). So: If money doesn’t grow on trees, why do banks have branches? (www.jokes4us.com)

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Natalia Skradol delved into the subversive logic of totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, where ‘official’ laughter played an important ideological role in maintaining social cohesion. Newspaper reporting of Stalin’s speeches manipulated public laughter by bracketing ‘(laughter)’ into the verbatim citations published. This powerful contrivance is another way of suggesting ‘official’ laughter, in contrast to unofficial spontaneous laughter. Skradol highlighted how humourless Stalin’s remarks were, which was not aided by his monotonous delivery and disability that restricted his arm movements, although it is difficult to assess this as he did not like his speeches recorded on film (Skradol 2009: 30). Laughter was a sign of loyalty akin to audience applause, which is very different to Bakhtin’s (1994) notion that people’s laughter challenges power and helps overcome fear. All of us have been in situations where a powerful character cracks dire jokes and everyone tries hard to at least smile. Skradol (2009: 34–5) opined that the difference between laughter and applause is the extent of spontaneity; laughter is recognized as a ‘natural’ reaction of the body and is therefore sincere, an emotional reaction that precedes intellectual calculation, whereas applause can be staged. But people do fake laughter, as previously suggested, due to their agendas and the realpolitik. Humour may break down barriers irrespective of value systems, therefore much depends upon how the humour is crafted as there is no definitive correlation between humour and value. If the joke is whacky enough it may be funny, irrespective of the negative values underpinning it (a good illustration is the earlier racist joke about the Irishman with the fingerless hand who is unable to pick up severed fingers). Although Benton recognized that political jokes transmit the popular mood, at the time he did not reckon that it altered the political landscape (Benton 1988: 54). In contrast, Majken Jul Sorensen (2008) recognized humour as a non-violent strategy of resistance to oppression, which is the linchpin of avant-garde art ideals and activist-art practices. Sorensen highlighted acts of non-violent humour and resistance through a case study of the Otpor movement in Serbia formed in 1998, which, contrary to Benton’s hypothesis, actually helped bring down the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic, showing the dynamic political effects of humour. He recognized that humour opens people up to new vision ‘and encourages critical reflection about how society is and how we want it to be’ (Sorensen 2008: 170). He asked former members of Optor about activist humour and they recognized that it had altered the general public’s attitude and psychological state, challenging the fear and oppression they previously felt. It offered understanding of the everyday and made conscious hidden thoughts and emotions. There are many socially excluded people who lack a voice, which in the democratic West appears to be on the increase. This is partly as a result of neoliberal economics alongside other variables, including increased racism, nationalism and intolerance. Bakhtin (1984) recognized carnival humour as a counterpoint to naked power as it destroys distance and hierarchy. It plays on inverted meanings and is an expression of disdain by the marginalized towards privilege. This includes ‘mesalliances’ that play on similarities between seemingly dissimilar entities, an exposition that creates funny sense out of nonsense. The drawing together of opposites includes forms of bewilderment and illumination, double entendre (double meanings), punning and wordplay, irony and darker satirical associations. Dina Sciama (2016) focused on anthropological writings about humour from a psychosocial, moral and cognitive viewpoint, which identified it as a form of

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ambiguous communication that is variable, whether concerning delight, fun, hostility, bitterness or arrogance. It constitutes a social sign that functions to cement relationships and interactions between those with similar values, cultural knowledge and understanding. There are varying degrees of antagonism between the joker and person who is the butt of the joke, which compounds the contradictory and paradoxical character of humour. Besides timing, subversive comic skill requires a good understanding of social realities and hierarchies in order to usurp them, where the familiar is defamiliarized and sense becomes nonsense. It provides escape from logical boundaries, which may offer relief and liberation but also, in extremis, symbolizes dysfunctionality and even madness. The subversive character of humour creates disorder and anti-structure (Turner 1982), in contrast to an orderly mentality or society. Positively, humour vacillates between criticism and conformity and can bring about social and political change by highlighting repression in society and offering therapeutic relief that helps to heal rifts between different people and groups. Dina Sciama cited Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1940), who acknowledged that a joking relationship between two people (especially husband and wife) requires the teased party to take no offence in order to avoid trouble and strife in the marriage. Playful teasing therefore functions on a domestic level to vent issues between partners within a socially accepted framework, thereby preventing the issues mounting up in a destructive manner. Here humour is situated in a framework of acceptable disrespect, an institutionalized mechanism for supporting the status quo that offers an escape from the narrow boundaries of logic and social norms, which positively enables freedom but negatively facilitates bullying and bitterness. Clifford Geertz (1973) argued that teasing is a form of social acceptance and legitimates superiority, which notion has limitations and can become abusive. Michael Mulkay (1988) maintained a need for a highly nuanced, contextual and eclectic approach to understanding social meanings in relation to humour. Engagement with humour moves away from singular and coherent understanding to ‘controlled nonsense’, which permits and encourages a multiplicity of meanings. He acknowledged that human actors are interpretive and that a serious, as against humorous, mode of being presents a unitary world of rational and finite possibilities, unlike humour, which encourages a temporary abandonment of the predictable world for one of creative anarchy. New ideas and interpretations encourage playfulness and endless possibility, a capacity to imagine multiple creative realities that encourage exploration and freedom of expression, opening up new vistas for some and causing gross offence to others. Jokes about the Pope or cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad and their censorship are salient here. The limits (and limitations) of ‘acceptable’ culture is a thorny issue and congruent with current fashions, which ebb and flow over time. A useful example from theatre is the restoration comedy The Country Wife, written by William Wycherley in 1675, which was banned in London in 1754 due to what was perceived as a lewd theme peppered with sexualized jokes. It was not performed again in London for 171 years, when the humorous louche themes and puns were again considered funny rather than obscene (Wycherley 2018). Simon Critchley referred to laughter as painful when directed at the socially excluded, as it takes on a reactionary mantle where ‘humour reveals who we would rather not be’ (Critchley 2005: 49), which implies that the ideal social role of humour is to

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balance inequalities. He suggested that humour has a resemblance to philosophy as it permits new perceptions of the world and a need for inclusion. Humour requires a ‘social contract’ between the joke teller and audience, a shared cultural understanding of values and experience. Although the punch line or imagery can create a topsy-turvy fantasy, contradicting convention and reality in an absurdist fashion, it can still promote mainstream or resistant ideologies, which have a variety of applications. Critchley (2002) maintained that the best humour is self-directed and he highlighted the importance of morality in contrast to an immoral superiority, which singles out the vulnerable. Our comprehension of the processes of social inclusion and exclusion relates to the broad possibilities of humour, and key to this is how different typologies of humour operate in practice. This is explained using specific examples of visual culture.

Exclusion and Types of Visual Humour Sheri Klein (2007: 13) has detailed the types of humour associated with the visual arts, which embrace irony, satire, parody, pun, paradox and dark humour. Ironic humour is a metaphor of opposites – to see something from the viewpoint of its antithesis – whilst satire is an extremely militant irony aimed at a moral target and therefore functions as critical analysis. Ironic representation is so absurd that it casts doubt on the claims of the narrative detailed, as intimated by the Stalin joke whereby the dictator both collects political jokes and those who dare tell them. Parody, for example, refers to appropriating and mocking the imagery and styles of famous artists, and highlights ‘highbrow’ knowledge and cultural capital as expressed by burlesque humour. It is a ‘deliberate exaggeration for comic effect … an imitation of something that falls short of the real thing; a travesty’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2003). This is gentle compared to satire, which offers a much darker and angrier expression. It has been ‘defined as the literary expression of the impulse to hurl excrement at your enemies … in the civil guise of correcting their faults’ (Meisel 2015: 173), a mannerism that may appear resistant but can also express superiority. Here ‘exaggeration, or ridicule expose[s] and criticise[s] people’s stupidity or vices particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2003). The ‘hurling of excrement’ evokes the great satirical tradition of the 18th century British caricaturists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, which mantle has been taken up by Steve Bell, Martin Rowson and Gerald Scarfe today. This is well expressed by Scarfe’s Donald Trump – Obscene (2016) cartoon which evokes Gillray’s Midas Transmuting all into Gold Paper (1797), with mouth and anus actively spewing forth gold paper. This dark humour is offensive and extreme in a number of ways, challenging political correctness and ‘good’ taste. Parody is intramural and coded in relation to another art format, whilst satire is extramural and aims to ridicule human vices, therefore in relation to social and moral criteria (Hutcheon 1986). Nonetheless, these are limited definitions as there is much cross-over of meaning (what if parody refers to real life through art, or satire includes a parody of art?), with the term parody employed more widely. A pun, which is ‘a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings’, includes literary, oral, visual and musical formats. It can be cryptic and parodic, unforeseen, complex or

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very simple. A local museum in south London, The Horniman, was advertising its evening events with a large poster on the main road outside with the ledger ‘Horniman at Night’, and on its Facebook page the museum suggested that visitors ‘come experience the Horniman at Night’ (www.en-gb.facebook.com/hornimanmuseumandgardens/). It was taken down in days. Whether the pun on ‘horny man’ was deliberate to attract visitors is another matter as it definitely caught the eye. Robert Garnett (2017: 69) disapproves of critical parody and irony that pervades the contemporary arts and references pre-existing art within an aesthetic bubble without recourse to externalities. It reinforces elitism constructed for a particular ‘ready made’ audience. But debatably there has been a reaction in the past decade away from irony in the arts and towards an inclusive, neo-authentic realism which is direct, including politically and socially engaged activist-art or ‘artivism’ (Milohnic´ 2015). Nonetheless, Garnett questioned whether the puritanical search for authentic artivism is effective in its mission and paraphrased Hal Foster’s quandary that political art is neither original art nor politically effective because, by definition, it is judged as a completely separate category of ‘political art’ (cited in Garnett 2017: 73). Correspondingly, Garnett (2017: 69) surmised in a beery moment that ‘the only art that doesn’t have a public is public art’, which reveals how far art has become removed from the public at large. Art and humour have had an awkward relationship, with very little written about humour in art history until after the Second World War, as people presumably needed cheering up. Nonetheless, in the early 20th century European avant-garde groups employed humour for radical socio-political purposes to shake up the bourgeois establishment, with much of the material beyond the parameters of taste and acceptability. At this point it is worth setting out some initial creative expressions of visual humour that touch on issues of exclusion and ‘art jokes’ as well as wider terms of reference. This random taster of visual culture is cobbled together to emphasize the ambiguous and mutable character of expressive creative humour and lack of definitive meaning. A more focused evaluation of exclusionary themes follows this chapter and shows the mutability of the terms insider, outsider, exclusion and inclusion. Chaïm Soutine was an artist whose portraits of lowly retail, restaurant and hotel workers in 1920s France challenged the traditional focus on aristocrats, politicians, generals and wealthy industrialists. The exhibition Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys (Soutine 2017/8) displayed the ‘invisible’ excluded service workers from an artist who himself was a very poor Lithuanian émigré existing in poverty until he was ‘discovered’. The paintings highlight his expressive paintwork to reveal the individual character of the sitter and sympathy for the under-privileged, which he realized through mimicry, exaggeration, parody and gentle satire. For example, his Head Waiter (1927) portrays an arrogant scornful man with his uniform bellowing out, which gives the appearance of a man wearing a dress; whilst The Little Pastry Cook (1922/3) is a pastiche royal portrait with the lowly ‘piccolo pasticcere’ seated regally with a chef’s hat as his crown (see Fig 2.2). He stares directly at the viewer, challenging him or her to dare suggest he is not of royal blood. The Little Pastry Cook embodies ambiguity as it parodies royal portraiture, challenging elitism and privilege and not unlike the debased ‘king of carnival’ wearing a mock coronet and object of ridicule. His facial features are asymmetrical rather than displaying renaissance perfection, which

Figure 2.2 The Little Pastry Cook, 1922/3, Chaïm Soutine, oil on canvas, 73 x 54cm. Musée Orangerie, Paris.

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also parodies art historical canons. Soutine preferred to paint excluded service personnel rather than those they served. Another portrait, Page Boy at Maxim’s (1927), shows a man dressed in a red uniform with his hand out (the posture of a beggar) at the exclusive and fashionable Parisian restaurant. He has blank, blacked-out eyes as though high on drink or drugs (absinthe or opium), which is a satirical commentary on the demeaning nature of the work and need for escape. Soutine was one of 11 children from a poor Jewish family and he suffered phobias and painful gastric ulcers (Tuchman 1968), a back story that offers outsider credentials. Norman Kleebatt and Kenneth Silver set out three very different models to interpret the artist, which are historically linear (Kleebatt & Silver 1998). First, as a poverty-driven naive and primitive outsider artist who was tangential to modernism, untainted by over-intellectualized aesthetics (although he was a trained artist); second, an insider status forged by his success in France and by collectors who were actively engaged in creating an artistic persona to market his work. He was reclaimed by the market as a master of his art and lauded for continuing the legacy of vernacular portrait painting. Third, and due to his later critical success in the US, he was constructed as a prophet heralding abstract expressionism, as suggested by his loose handling of paint. This mythological position is further supported by his tragic death at the hands of the Nazis in occupied France. These changing representations highlight the recuperation of the outsider artist and his humour, as well as the fragility of categorizations. He remains a hybrid outsiderinsider, or artist without a fixed or clear position, which has a postmodern inflexion that recognizes art as a fluid human and social construction, a representation that ebbs and flows dependent on time, location and context. Moreover, there is no mention of humour in either of the monographs cited above, just use of the term ‘pastiche’, which is a derogatory term employed to highlight that the artist lacks originality and copies other styles that are considered original. This both revisits the problems with humour in relation to serious art (previously discussed) as well as possible changing representations regarding what makes art humorous and why this is the case. After the playful avant-garde flowering of the Italian and Russian Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists during the early part of the 20th century (amongst other groups), there was a re-emphasis on the serious in European art. The Great Depression in the 1930s, the emergent communist and fascist dictatorships in Europe and later the Second World War reimposed gravitas into art. The atrocities inflicted by nuclear bombs and death camps were crystallized by Theodor Adorno’s (1979 [1947]) infamous notion that to write a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric. Humour and irony were ‘rediscovered’ in the 1950s’ neo-Dada works of Claus Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol in the US, and Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi in the UK. It was in part due to the triangulation of art, popular culture and everyday life (Higgie 2007), which started to redirect art history and acknowledge the diversity of ‘other’ art related to class, gender, ethnicity and non-western societies. Also, there was a recognition of ‘other’ marginal Outsider Art worlds associated with community, disability, mental health and criminality. This became a parade during the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was critically reappraised, for example, by the neo-avant-garde Fluxus group (Munder 2005).

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The ambiguous photograph Flux-Smile-Machine (1970) by George Maciunas shows a girl smiling, maintained by somebody behind her appearing to force her mouth open. It is attached to and framed by a blue plastic box. The person’s fingers are positioned in each corner of the girl’s mouth is such a way that she is baring her teeth (see Fig 2.3). This vulgar mouth-pulling contortionism has a lineage that goes back to medieval times and corresponds to the grotesque gargoyles carved into European gothic churches (Rebold Benton 2004: 99–100). She is literally a hostage to humour, as the image of abduction and abuse suggests, which is both disturbing and satirical. Alternatively, she is a machine without feelings or humour, pretending or forced to laugh. Maciunas took up the Dada mantle of anti-art and lack of aesthetic intention, to focus on chance which offers much ambiguity in relation to this affected display of laughter (www.moma.org/collection/ works/131923?locale=en). Fluxus was an experimental group creating radical art from the 1950s and, as the title of Flux-Smile-Machine suggests, Maciunas conceived a dehumanized and alienated reality where art and life require unification. This followed earlier avant-garde thinking related to art as anarchic, libertarian and revolutionary activist discourse. Fluxus was a laboratory (or Fluxamusement Centre) of ideas and happenings, and Maciunas, amongst others, experimented with the concept of machines that interact with audiences, to stress interaction and the critical function of art. Flux-Smile-Machine is a machine that makes the audience smile (Sapper 1998: 141), which questions human agency, technology and resistance. This is reinforced by the artwork itself as the girl is visibly controlled by disembodied machine-like fingers and she can neither resist smiling nor express herself. The control of humans by machines is particularly pertinent in today’s zomboid world of digital phones and artificial intelligence, which, to coin a Fluxus word, contributes to ‘stupidology’ (1998: 147).

Figure 2.3 Flux-Smile-Machine, 1970, George Maciunas, printed photograph and label on plastic box, 9.3 x 12 x 3.2cm. Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.

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Humour aids the re-engagement of art with life, realized through the pithy phrases employed by the Situationists who reduced ideas to one-line gags, co-opting advertising straplines (see Clements 2017a: 132–6). It acts as a playful method of disseminating ideas which are easily accessed offering alternative vistas and viewpoints. Correspondingly with Fluxus art: You remember the joke as it corrosively changes the situations that we encounter everyday. It writes graffiti on habituated conceptions. It functions as a joke timebomb (Sapper 1998: 148). Alongside Maciunas, Fluxus artists included Robert Watts, George Brecht, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, who produced playful works of parody, pun and irony. This included teasing the viewer with film; for example, by utilizing the early credits or front matter and manipulating audience expectations with scratches, tag lines and numbers but never following this up with the anticipated feature film (Aubert 2010). The infamous Wrapping Piece event by Yoko Ono (Yoshimoto 2005: 109), who pushed a pram full of toilet rolls to Trafalgar Square in London (August 3, 1967) in order to wrap up one of Edward Landseer’s statues of a lion, was in the absurdist tradition. Maciunas was an American born into a middle-class Russo-Lithuanian family, steeped in counterculture and resistant art practices who positioned himself as a critical outsider. Unlike some of his Fluxus colleagues (namely Yoko Ono) he has remained enigmatic and on the periphery of the art world and has not been totally assimilated, which chosen position offers another dimension to outsiderdom. Nonetheless, his neo-avant-gardist refusal to distinguish between art and life and his use of art to instigate change through shock and senselessness (Brill 2010), in line with Dada and anti-art thinking, reconfigure incongruity and absurdist humour. He and his colleagues employed shock and humour to try to undermine bourgeois sensibilities and activate the audience, whereby the intended irritation or boredom created by the art was a method to persuade people to take action (2010: 138–41). An example of satirical street art with an active message in London is the WARS R US mural on Kensal Road, which pokes fun at the US and commodity capitalism through a pun. It elides the name of a failing toy shop (Toys ‘R’ Us, which ran up huge debts before going bust and laying off all its workers in 2018) with the sale of military hardware and global warfare. This lays bare the reality of the present capitalist system and US warmongering (see Fig 2.4). It concurs with Naomi Klein’s notion of Disaster Capitalism (2008), which critiques neoliberalism and its total belief in the free market, however much this has been simplified. It is a form of shock therapy driven by a small super-rich elite of ‘winners’ who live in luxury and, like parasites, depend upon an enormous pool of ‘losers’. War is one strategy of ensuring money is recycled back into the corporate pockets of this global elite through the sale of arms, as is the reconstruction work required after war has destroyed precious infrastructure. Another amusing twist is to contrast this image with the feted German photographer Andreas Gursky’s empty photograph TOYS ‘R’ US (1999), of a building with the logo atop and displayed in his exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery (Gursky 2018), a bleak humourless image of technical esteem. In contrast to political satire, the lighter and playful category of wit can be added to Sheri Klein’s list of types of humour, and the ability to make entertaining and incisive

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Figure 2.4 WARS R US, n.d. mural, paint on brick. Kensal Road, London. Photo by Paul Clements, 2018.

commentary which sheds light on a person, event or situation. Wit requires speed, intelligence, timing and invention (astuteness and shrewdness), which may appear to have a ‘highbrow’ basis. Levinson (1998: 563) suggested that it concerns a single concept that applies to two different objects or ideas and awkwardly embraces both. These multiple referential quips can be gently satirical, and ironic. Good examples of wit, as already discussed, are the respective ‘art joke’ retakes of the Mona Lisa by Bataillee, Duchamp and Basquiat. Paradox, like wit, has punning qualities, ‘a seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which when investigated may prove to be well founded or true … a person or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2003). For example, Trompe L’oeil is a method of painting that tricks the eye, a sleight of hand that typically creates an optical illusion thereby offering different meanings and understandings of the reality, which at first appears hidden. Pere Borrell del Caso’s witty Escaping Criticism (1874) is a paradoxical take on the picture frame as it contains a portrait painting but is also used as a doorway of escape which transgresses dimensions (see Fig 2.5). The young boy is startled and appears to want to enter my reality to escape being the subject of a work of art. It is also a pun about ‘escape’ and the artist evading poor reviews, which has elements of irony. Irony employs pun and paradox, which, as already suggested, is a metaphor of contrasting ideas and has become the zeitgeist of postmodernism. The UK artist and ceramicist Grayson Perry exemplifies wit, irony and dark humour through his vases, which from afar may appear to have originated from ancient Greece or Mesopotamia but in some cases show graphic sexual imagery and abuse, details that can only be grasped at close hand (definitely in the case of the myopic). These particular pieces are dark, shocking and taboo, where the use of double meanings for dramatic effect challenges expectations (Perry 2018). Perry has

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Figure 2.5 Escaping Criticism, 1874, Pere Borrell del Caso, oil on canvas, 72 x 62cm, Collection of the Banco de España, Madrid.

been labelled the ‘Pornographic Potter’ in references to his role as judge at the 2018 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, another example of the recuperation of an outsider voice. He complained to the press in his capacity as judge that he was ‘shocked and annoyed by the pettiness of his fellow artists’ (Edwardes & Dex 2018) who had complained of his censorship of sexually explicit material. He in turn retorted that their egos were ‘preposterous’. Not bad for an artist who has utilized sexually shocking tactics to make his name, and for someone with so much ‘ego’ that he has two identities (Grayson and his alter-ego Claire). As the cartoonist Kipper Williams dryly surmised, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition ‘isn’t all about Grayson Perry … Some of it’s about his teddy bear’ (Williams 2018). As can be seen from the theories and typologies explored, humour can be very simple but also very complex, with a mutability that cannot be dictated by any one interpretation, which denies absolute control and offers agency. There are different layers of humorous meaning, which may contradict each other or operate together, with ideas coopted to express different political positions and values, even recuperated into the mainstream. The Situationists (Clements 2017a: 132–6) who operated from 1957–1972 and picked up the mantle of Dada, created the theory of détournement (creating new visual meanings by subverting accepted meanings in revolutionary ways) to challenge the viewer, which is in the tradition of irony and satire. This has become a riposte to advertising in particular, as suggested by the WARS R US graffiti, and the notion of subvertising (subverting adverts) and culture jamming (inverting expected meaning),

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which sees active political processes co-opt imagery (Clements 2011: 25–6). Visual art texts in turn may be recycled and reappropriated by advertising and commodity capitalism, which in effect rinses out the radicality and humour, highlighting the complexity of these cultural processes.

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The Construct of Outsider Media Labelling, ‘Othering’ and Excluded Minds

Chapters 3 and 4 are a pair that set out the construct of outsider and social exclusion, underpinned by various theories which contribute to some initial triangulation with humour and the arts. This chapter focuses on representations of outsider and details the complex, often romanticized and self-styled concept sociologically, culturally, aesthetically and politically. Outsider positions are theoretically shaped by media through labelling (Becker), recognized existentially as something we need to negotiate (Wilson), fashioned by moral panic and youth deviancy (Cohen and Hall) and the language of security (Waever), with representations negotiated by humour illustrated through comic heterotopian spaces (Harrison-Pepper). The relationship between outsiderdom and social exclusion is explored, including issues of self-definition, lack of integration, marginalization, poverty, alienation and madness amongst other discourses. There is some reflection on the political economy, liberal governance and exclusion (Foucault), as well as conceptualizations of social exclusion as naturalizing social inequalities (Levitas), the impact of culture in light of economic disparity (Eagleton) and the power of spatial dynamics to create outsider heterotopias and excluded spaces. There is historical recognition of an ambiguous middle-class identity and cultural imaginary situating the tensions between privilege and authenticity (Stallybrass & White), a changing and insecure liquid modernity that disembeds the ‘other’ (Bauman), where the media manufactures consent to reimpose hegemony and exclusion (Herman & Chomsky). The excluded ‘other’ is shaped by powerlessness reinforced through superior notions of reactionary humour (Critchley), anomie (Durkheim) and alienation (Marx) driven by lack of cultural capital (Bourdieu). There is a brief foray into the representation of freak, prisoner and creative madness, which introduces the category of Outsider Art produced by those with excluded minds, exposing the diverse and overused terms of individualism and ‘genius’. This incorporates the ironic and resistant notion of ‘outsider hip’ (Clements), which proffers countercultural distinction.

Outsiders, Labelling and Moral Panic Much mainstream humour is about staking out and reinforcing accepted values and inequalities, epitomized by superior humour, whether determined by notions of racism, nationalism, gender, sexuality, disability, stupidity, poverty or body image. The construct of outsider is detailed in order to appreciate marginalization and the extent of exclusion through humour and art amongst other conceptualizations. There are differing degrees of exclusion typically related to poverty, dysfunctionality, criminality, disability and poor health, steeped in the philosophy and discourse of modernism with its binary logic of us

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and them, insider and outsider. The outsider is associated with romantic and bohemian concepts of visionary and non-conformist, which helps to construct a highly variable notion. Moreover, postmodern understandings today disrupt classification, presenting opportunities for self-identification and individual ‘regimes of truth’ by collapsing binary distinctions between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ culture, authenticity and inauthenticity, whereby outsiderdom is a mutable even part-time lifestyle choice blending variable positions and displacing fixed modernist conceptualizations. Howard Becker (1991) researched the lifestyles of young Americans in the 1940s and ’50s in his iconic book Outsiders, Study in the Sociology of Deviance. He constructed a behavioural understanding of deviant cultures, which he developed by conducting research into the conduct and habits of young people, specifically in relation to two outsider groups; marijuana users and jazz dance musicians, the latter a subculture which he had experienced first-hand when working as a jazz pianist. His focus on symbolic interaction between people recognized rule-breaking and infraction as social practices that challenge mainstream rules of conduct and the sanctioning of individual offenders. There is a labelling process employed by institutional and media channels to single out particular individuals and social groups as deviant. Becker exposed the deeper ideological issues underpinning social norms that help constitute public opinion and law, which in turn formulate conformist behaviour. Labelling is a process that crystallizes reactions by those he termed moral entrepreneurs – aimed at specific young people amongst other social groups, including ex-prisoners, the mentally ill and asylum seekers – to instigate moral panic in the media. The ‘deviant’ outsiders targeted by moral outcries from the establishment in the UK epitomize the exclusion of specific youth groups: for example, Scuttler and Peaky Blinder gangs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Mods and Rockers subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s; the drug ecstasy in relation to 1990s club cultures; and today ‘postcode’ gangs involved in knife and gun crime, as well as users of Spice and Monkey Dust, which are the latest incarnations of synthetic drugs. Becker suggested that deviance is a scientific and statistical measure in relation to distance from the average. Therefore anyone who, for example, is extremely tall, thin or has unusual marks on the body is deviant. Deviance is also a medical condition or disease expressed by physical and mental disability and illness, although he surmised that what is deemed functional or dysfunctional behaviour due to the labelling of ‘deviant’ is a political act. So deviance is deceptive and arbitrary as powerful gatekeepers determine it through media channels in relation to their value systems, then mobilize sanctions against excluded social groups as though this is a ‘natural’ and consensual process. Labelling by politicians or the media is utilized against the excluded. This is a changeable position most effective in authoritarian societies that outlaw certain people and viewpoints. In democratic societies, outsiders may be tolerated however much they are vilified, whether revolutionary communists, pickpockets, eco-warriors, asylum seekers or those with extreme far-right views. Politics has been reshaped by the manipulation of media images, as embodied by populist politicians such as US President Donald Trump and his mantra of ‘fake news’. Just as politicians vie for media attention through theatricality so do activist-artists who recognize the importance of media spectacle as ‘important sites of political intervention’ (Routledge 2012: 430). Colin Wilson (1997 [1956]) explored the notion of outsider in a more positive philosophical and cultural light. It is an unfortunate position we have to navigate on a creative spiritual journey to rise above the dreariness of everyday life, especially when young. He

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promoted New Existentialism and defined outsiders as those ‘who cannot accept life as it is’ (Wilson 1997: 82) because they aspire to a life of greater intensity and meaning. This romantic self-definition harks back to a genre of outsider writers including Henri Barbusse, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Genet, Herman Hesse and Jean-Paul Sartre. New Existentialism is a mystical and creative revolt against established thinking and social practices, with imagination driving perception. It is optimistic, unlike its existential forebear which was nihilistic. Outsiderdom is therefore an unfortunate step (or rite of passage) that individuals have to undergo in their developmental path to enlightenment and spiritual awakening. This type of maverick, non-materialistic and creative thinking resonated with some of the beat writers and later hippie ideals in the US during the 1950s and ’60s, which took on a political tone and thereby attracted the opprobrium of the media. The beats in particular were fascinated by sleazy low life and exploring multi-culturalism, whether working class, ethnic or bohemian subcultures (Clements 2013: 69–70). There was continuity with the later hippies and their use of mind-altering drugs (LSD), exploration of communal social practices and alternative sexualities, alongside a refusal to support the US administration in its pursuance of the war in Vietnam. Both these youth subcultures endured a backlash against counterculture instigated by moral entrepreneurs, those rule creators and enforcers who promulgate moral outrage and panic (Becker 1991 [1963]: 147)1. Counterculture, in this case the pursuit of a highly individualized, intellectual and nonmaterial cosmology, contrasts with subcultural groupings that have a more collective emphasis, as expressed by working-class outsiders who form gangs. Stan Cohen (2002 [1973]) engaged with British Mods and Rockers, youth subcultures in conflict with a media establishment that had created stereotyped labels to denigrate these groups. It is not without irony that he referred to these youthful rebels as ‘folk devils’ and he chiselled out an understanding of moral panic as the manner in which the media constructs a scare by taking an ordinary event and amplifying it into an extraordinary one. This ‘deviancy amplification spiral’ – established by opinion makers including journalists, newspaper editors and other powerful gatekeepers – elicits an over-reaction from the public. Socially, moral panics fulfil the conservative function of clarifying boundaries of behaviour and they reiterate social expectations, particularly during periods of rapid change, which serve to create a consensus by locating social anxieties. The older, established generation, for example, may recognize young people as the future (therefore a bellwether of the health of the nation) but readily come into conflict with their new ideas, social values and cultural expressions. This parental generation fears replacement although it will depend on the younger generation to pay for its dotage, fuelling ambivalence. Youth culture is a reminder of age diversity, a representation that is both positive whilst at the same time often perceived as negative. Dick Hebdige (1998 [1988]: 30) set out the ambivalence towards young people very simplistically (and stereotypically) as the distinction between youth-as-trouble and youth-as-fun, which appears both interesting and threatening, exotic and savage, reconfiguring the construct of insider and outsider. There are cyclical bouts of moral panic in the media and anxiety towards youth lifestyles, with degrees of recuperation before another exaggerated panic, which acts as a recruiting sergeant for youth subcultures. 1

This backlash became a mainstream political position pursued by the neoliberal right-wing governments of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US from the late 1970s, an ideology that is now firmly entrenched.

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Media panic creating youth-as-trouble folk devils resurfaced after the 2011 riots in London, which was in response to the police shooting and killing of Mark Duggan, a small-time criminal in north London. The Daily Express newspaper on August 9, 2011, showed an image of a young ‘black’ male demonstrator wearing a hoodie and walking past a burning vehicle alongside the strapline ‘flaming morons, thugs, and thieves terrorise Britain’s streets’. The prime minister at the time, David Cameron (2011) was reported making a speech in which he referred to young people in gangs as ‘a major criminal disease that has infected our streets’, ramping up the rhetoric by questioning the reputation and character of inner-city ethnic youth. For others, the demonstrator could be the romantic embodiment of a freedom fighter making clear the disillusionment of youth. Stuart Hall et al. (1978) explained the negative representation of outsider youth in relation to moral panic in the UK from a broadly socio-cultural, historical and political perspective, focusing on ethnicity and criminality. At the time (in the 1970s) there was a scare about muggings which were principally associated with young ‘black’ males. More recently, besides the usual cyclical issues concerning drug use and crime, there has been a panic associated with young Moslem men and global terrorism, as well as one concerning virtual trolls policing social network sites and directing their bile on to unsuspecting young users. Often the notion of dangerous youth and the construction of adolescent exclusion (amongst other social concerns) that result from labelling and moral panic in the media are steeped in stereotypical ‘underclass’ theories, a process that highlights exclusionary social practices. In the UK this has included the banning of young people wearing hoodies in shopping malls as well as the amplification of problems associated with anti-social banning orders (ASBOs) and acceptable behaviour contracts (ABCs). Successive governments have undermined the few safeguards that exist and have continued to impose punitive sanctions on those who fall foul of the law (www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/ human-rights/justice-and-fair-trials/asbos-and-civil-orders). Young people who receive these orders and contracts are excluded in order to protect the public from their behavioural antics, denying their right to communicate with certain characters or to visit specific places. Representationally, news-making practices behind media panics can be an ideological mechanism to bypass dialogue with excluded experiences and the narratives of those accused of misdeeds. The media shapers and gatekeepers who construct moral panics about street muggings and theft rely upon official and authoritative figures whom Hall labelled ‘primary definers’, and they tactically translate their positions into vernacular language for their readers. These shapers give feedback to the primary definers as though it is public opinion, thereby distorting and amplifying the scale of the problem. Social issues obfuscated and entangled with hype and drama, especially the agendas of ‘moral entrepreneurs’, underpin the crusades against particular individuals and social groups. This process has become more sophisticated, driven by the changes brought about by digital technology, with new media offering a variety of voices and positions as well as a plethora of misinformation, which offers ever-more ‘fake news’ in this post-truth era. Due to post-industrialization and globalization there is great uncertainty and discontent in the US and Europe; unlike the optimism of the 1960s, it is a time of anxiety exacerbated by the over-exposure of certain events in the media through 24-hour news and digital media, which whips up a sustained and frenetic storm. Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) are amongst many commentators who have explained the changes that have accompanied a more heterogeneous media resulting from the

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boom in internet technologies since the 1990s. Positively, this has driven the proliferation of niche- and micro-media, which offer a greater multiplicity of voices, alternative experiences, ideologies and meanings. In contrast, Graham Murdock has questioned this scenario and the integration of new media in all social and cultural practices, as it is ensconced in an overly optimistic mediatization theory. The spread of digital communications is central to this discourse, which ignores a critical political economy perspective, and especially how a ‘deep’ global capitalism has intervened in relations between new media and social practices. It ‘ignores the primacy of capitalist economics in shaping the contours of modernity’ (Murdock 2017: 121) that prevents new media offering greater diversity, as global media is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer multinational conglomerates with similar values and ideologies (for example, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft). Their primary interest and message concerns profit-making through branding and consumerism, which is encrypted in the very DNA and algorithms of digital communication, with users packaged as commodities rather than citizens debating in the public sphere. This warps news values and narrative processes, simplifying and personalizing information through tabloid communication and infotainment. Besides salient issues regarding the mediated language of exclusion that refers to labelling (loser, misfit, ‘other’, etc.) there is language that excludes by creating a fear of insecurity, which is captured through the notion of securitization. Ole Waever (1995), with reference to political security, utilized the term to explain the role of ‘speech acts’ that articulate negative representations of certain citizens perceived as a threat to normalcy. The construction of language is far from objective, which is a defining quality of fake news (hyperbole from politicians and ideological media sources that employ terminology to drive home negativity). The security of the general public is affected by speech acts from powerful gatekeepers as the terms of security and insecurity are mutually constituted and operate together, so that mention of security triggers insecurity by association. Labels of asylum seeker, thief, schizophrenic and knife carrier are effective in creating concerns on an emotional level, as speech acts that include these terms reinforce anxieties over immigration, crime, mental health and inner-city youth respectively, reemphasizing stereotype and exclusion rather than challenging perceptions. Arguably these scenarios are an overly pessimistic representation of a world ever more controlled by powerful global media concerns. The spectre of capitalism, whose gatekeepers manipulate digital media and its algorithms to calculate the commoditized citizen, undermines its function as an open democratic platform. Notwithstanding those independent, alternative and minority digital spaces that offer a voice to the marginalized, it highlights the inconsistencies as powerful operators who seek simplification of message and greater homogeneity determine the rigid demarcation of acceptable social practices that denies heterogeneity. Take the case of President Trump, who reconfigured those he perceived as troublesome and hostile to include what he considered ‘losers’. These included the poor, ethnic minorities, those who practise particular religious faiths (especially Islam), ecologists and climate change scientists, left-wing socialists, ‘liberal’ democrats, anyone whose ‘morality’ differs from his, and women who do not want to be violated or patronized by men. In total, the vast majority of Americans. His regime of online Twitter communication and visceral use of superior humour to reinforce stereotypes arguably have only encouraged the violent language employed on extremist hate sites. This process highlights the marginal outsider as a representational notion constructed by the media, however much exclusion is an empirical concept that concerns real people leading real lives.

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The ideological influence of the media and the commodification of culture has created a spectacle (Debord 1995 [1967]) that in turn helps sell more goods and ideas. Yet despite this mediation of spectacle, a romantic and bohemian notion of outsider still prevails in terms of utopian concerns for an alternative world. Traditionally this has been the terrain of alternative cosmologies and cultural practices, populated by artists, philosophers and social misfits alongside dreamers and ne’er-do-wells who make up particular bohemian heterotopias (Clements 2017a: 118–21). Humour can negotiate these differences and bring together outsider and insider perspectives, which process Sally Harrison-Pepper witnessed in the comic street theatre of Washington Square, New York, an urban heterotopia situated outside of theatrical institutions: The inside is what anthropologists often call the dominant worldview of a culture. The outside, on the other hand, is everything the inside is not. It is the shadow (Harrison-Pepper 1994: 340). In which case the outside (and outsider) requires the inside (and insider), a mutually constitutive relationship navigated by humour. Here comedy employs themes that are sites of struggle between different values and conceptualizations of society, which invariably deal with social relations and power, often regarding taboo subjects. Street performance, which traditionally was unlicensed, has been described as ‘oral graffiti’ (Cohen & Greenwood cited in Harrison-Pepper 1994: 341) as it embraces difference that sometimes incites hostility from established culture. Critically, rather than creating social harmony it emphasizes the outsider character of street and marginal art forms and those who express themselves in these spaces.

From Outsider to Social Exclusion: the Power of Discourse and Spatial Dynamics The notion of outsiderdom concerns ‘living an extreme alternative lifestyle with an inability or refusal to conform’ (Clements 2013: 9), in contrast to the networked insider. It is representational with some empirical basis, and the label offers resistance as a romantic reaction to social norms, driven to various degrees by particular ideas and ethical codes. But the outsider as self-defined artist rebel is a very different notion to a structural understanding of the socially excluded as those shut out of society. Victor Turner (1974) recognized exclusion as a temporary structural arrangement within the social system, expressed through (liminal) ritual transgression. The incorporation of acceptable transgression into society expressed, for example, in small-scale tribal societies through temporary rites of passage or carnival festivities, corresponds to specific communities and heterotopian spaces. This contrasts with the unwanted, rebel and liminoid outsider associated with modern urban communities who occupies alternative space. It is a term that describes ‘deviant’ behaviour that is not necessarily temporary, whether drug addiction or criminality, which is unacceptable and exclusionary2. 2

There have been attempts, notably a scheme in Vancouver (Canada) started in 2003, to create inclusive heterotopian areas in the city where addicts can legally inject in supervised clinics without punishment or opprobrium. This is paid for by the city in order to stem the opiate crisis and help wean addicts off harmful drugs (www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/23/va ncouver-supervised-injection-clinic-heroin). Theoretically this is then a temporary liminal space rather than a liminoid heterotopia, showing the contextual character of these terms.

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Michel Foucault (1982b) unpacked the manner in which discourses of liberalism and individualism manipulate and determine established social conduct in western democracies. Here individuals are encouraged through governmental processes that engineer normality to self-manage and adjust themselves according to prescribed custom, a process that socially embeds autonomy and normality. Discourse is an overwhelming concept that refers to a totalizing understanding of the power and knowledge that shape classification in practice, which is wide-ranging in relation to exclusion. Three of the key discourses that ‘persuade’ conformity are moral, medical and legal, which create powerful social definitions of normality. The exclusion of citizens through the commonly used phrase ‘mad, bad or sad’ helps to designate abnormality, where, for example, ‘mad’ refers to medical and legal discourses, ‘bad’ to moral and legal discourses, and ‘sad’ to medical and moral discourses. Foucault’s (1990) investigation into madness centred on the terms of normality and his analysis of criminality situated on the periphery, steeped in powerful exclusionary discourses (Foucault 1977). These are changeable as the power, knowledge and language that formulate classifications alter over time, place and context. Allied to this is his notion of the ‘docile body’ (Foucault 1977) which highlights our lack of agency to determine our identities, whereby liberal governmental and disciplinary mechanisms of power control our ‘normalization’. The excluded individual conforms to these processes and embodies the label, seemingly unable to alter this representation. So individual self-definition does not necessarily alter the terms of exclusion, however much the outsider attempts to engineer this. Discourse offers a structural component to exclusion that differs from the agency associated with outsiderdom. The excluded attract superiority and derision from the socially included, which may appear ‘natural’, and excluded characters may conform to hegemony by disavowing aspects of their identity in order to be included; for example, by making self-deprecating jokes about themselves. Historically the excluded have been subjected to the gaze of doctors, employers and judges amongst others (and earlier in Europe to the gaze of aristocratic landowners and the church hierarchy), whose institutional and symbolic power attempted to mould them into ‘normal’ citizens. For some such a discursive process is paradoxical as it can de-authenticate and adversely affect their reputation, even create friction – as with émigrés returning, as witnessed in African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities through the stereotyped label ‘Uncle Tom’, or in Irish communities through the term ‘Plastic Paddy’. Excluded communities which manifest diverse cultural practices are entrapped by very different discourses and representational contexts. In the past, for example, the mad were considered ‘touched’ by God (therefore spiritual beings), and the disabled were better integrated into communities rather than removed, hence the terms of abnormality and exclusion fluctuate. In contrast, social exclusion can be a badge of honour that offers ‘rebel’ cachet and romantic status which the outsider may crave. What is germane for this book is an understanding of social exclusion as a structural notion that refers to groups and sections of society beyond the control of the individual, where humour is utilized to reinforce normality. The engineering of normalization challenges the individual terms of freedom and offers a compromised agency as the socially excluded are less able to choose their identity. Allied to this are representations of the artist as outsider appearing to exist beyond society, however much this is a romantic and mythical misnomer, who employs creativity to critique ‘normality’,

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creating ambiguity3. The artist is deemed too sensitive to exist within the normal parameters of society, hence abnormal to some degree and an easy object of disdain. Here are a couple of gendered jokes about artists to illustrate this: How many artists does it take to change a light bulb? Ten. One to change it and nine to reassure him how it looks. (www.workjoke.com/artists-jokes.html) An artist hung himself in a modern art gallery. It was three weeks before anyone noticed. (www.ijokes.eu/index.php/joke/category/art) Ruth Levitas (1996) has argued that the terminology of social exclusion exacerbates a lack of engagement, highlighted through the absence of social, cultural and human capital. It ‘naturalizes’ the inequalities inherent within societies dominated by capitalist processes and practices, reinforcing the binary system of winners and losers, rich and poor, good and bad, insiders and outsiders. She presented three discourses of social exclusion: first, concerning the redistribution of resources and understanding in relation to poverty and inequality; second, in relation to an underclass and moral discourse surrounding behavioural delinquency; and, third, in relation to a lack of cohesion, integration and especially inclusion in the labour market. Exclusion from a sociological standpoint considers relational issues and the lack of social integration within a range of fields including education, culture and geography, broadening the sole emphasis on poverty (Room 1995). Society is perceived in terms of status hierarchies, mutual rights and obligations, hence its relationship with concepts of citizenship. The term social exclusion developed in the late 1980s as a European social policy directive and consequence of the huge post-industrial changes brought about by neoliberalism in Europe, very different to the consensual social democratic politics fashionable after the Second World War. It was a defensive reaction by government to the language of poverty, which highlights measurable inequalities. Exclusion is a complex, unstable and multidimensional term that focuses on participation and integration, which is difficult to formulate empirically and denies certain groups access to much-needed welfare due, in particular, to shrinking public services and lack of well-paid jobs with secure contracts (Winlow & Hall 2013). There is an increasing acceptance of and capitulation to social fragmentation by governments from the developed world with a disinclination to integrate marginalized groups into the mainstream, however much they profess to do so. In the UK much of this disregard for the excluded has been exacerbated by austerity since the financial crash of 2008, a convenient excuse for a right-wing government to further ostracize the excluded. Whereas exclusion is a reality for those living at a distance from mainstream ‘normality’, the opposing concept of social inclusion is a more idealized construction which in effect makes cultural difference and plurality problematic (Clements 2007). In the US and 3

There are self-styled groups who crave this outsider representation. For example, in Italian football the ‘ultras’ are hard-core outsider fans who choose this label to re-emphasize that they perceive themselves ‘beyond’ normality due to their reputation for political extremism and hooliganism.

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UK there is an overriding historical narrative associated with the breakdown of consensus steeped in a sentimental perception of the Second World War and the 1950s, which was deemed a mythological golden age of social cohesion and inclusion. This was far from the case for the working class, ethnic minority groups, those with disabilities, different sexualities and resistant youth subcultures. The global drive towards neoliberal systems and the related promotion of an atomized and competitive individualism has witnessed a breakdown of social cohesion, which postmodern panorama of cultural fluidity, social fragmentation and economic insecurity constitutes today’s ‘brave new world’. The socially excluded poor subsisting on limited, insecure and sporadic labour, for example, are a reserve army of labour, which repositions Marxist analysis in relation to capitalist exploitation (Byrne 1999). They are the victims of global economics, a vast pool of ‘losers’ who are an easy target for ridicule. Terry Eagleton (2016) critiqued culture with regard to its function in a neoliberal capitalist society which has no qualms about relegating large chunks of its citizenry to a dystopian never-never land of exclusion and poverty but is hyper-sensitive about not offending their beliefs, itself an avenue for humour. Hence the paradox that we strive for equal respect culturally whilst the massive economic disparities continue to widen, resulting in the growth of food banks and the reality of citizens desperately mustering insufficient welfare benefits. Similarly, Byrne (1999) maintained that it was impossible to address social exclusion through policy directed at the excluded alone, due to the overt dominance of a superclass of international billionaires which has perpetuated wealth inequality on a global scale. As Levitas (1996) has suggested, social exclusion is a contested discourse whereby the language and meanings underpinning it are part of an active political process. Her critique of exclusion was precisely that it had moved away from empirical and ethical issues associated with inequality and poverty towards a representational discourse of marginalizing and blaming the excluded for their dependency. David Byrne referred to this notion as a contemporary version of Protestant morality steeped in the ideology of possessive individualism and guilt, which may be translated into self-directed humour to allay fear and shame. He reconceptualized thinking on exclusion in terms of the ‘excluded (and excluding spaces)’ (Byrne 1999: 127), which is a consequence of postindustrial transition. A spatial focus also accounts for those institutionalized and incarcerated in society (hospital, nursing home, prison and asylum), or driven by need into other heterotopian spaces such as food banks, pawn shops and rough sleeping, which may exacerbate social exclusion. Moreover, there are those who may be asylum seekers, which readily re-emphasizes the excluded individual as unwanted alien rather than romantic artist. Heterotopias concern the disruption of normality, which alterity offers creative expression and humour (see Chapter 7). These alternative ‘othered’ spaces distort and unsettle; they are ambiguous and without precise definition as they appear to have their own dynamics, regulatory codes and languages. The cemetery is possibly the most apt excluded heterotopia, a space for the dead which includes performative epitaphs that yearn for a better world and sometimes revolutionary change, with some graves offering creativity and dry humour (Clements 2017b). For example, one grave in a south London cemetery festooned in Chelsea football paraphernalia included the wry message that ‘there is chocolate in heaven’.

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Heterotopias invert and alter mainstream social practices, as represented by the notion of Bohemia, those often urban enclaves that have an alternative socio-cultural, economic and political orientation. Outsider bohemian spaces have included Covent Garden in 18th century London, the 19th century Paris Commune (and its re-enactment in May 1968), the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the 1960s counterculture, and Christiana in Copenhagen, which remains today (Clements 2017a: 118–21). Spatially there is a distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ architecture within urban space, whether resplendent cathedral or run-down council flat, which corresponds to affluent and slum areas of the city where the ‘other’ resides, which differential encourages ‘mixophobia’ or fear of others (Bauman 2003). The latter term captures the reluctance of certain sections of the middle-class community, who have the means to move home, to reside alongside those different to themselves, a defensive response to class and multiculturalism as well as to the different lifestyles that define a globalized and individualized world. Historically, ‘other’ cultures contrasted with the purity and mythical cleanliness of a divinely inspired bourgeoisie who avoided dirty slum areas. In the past there was an obvious delineation of metropolitan areas into rich and poor, as described by Friedrich Engels in his infamous book about housing conditions in Manchester, Conditions of the Working Class in England (1885). From the late 19th century Charles Booth, a social reformer, researched into The Life and Labour of People in London (1902-03), which was an early example of social cartography, or ‘poverty maps’. He detailed London streets visually, showing where the rich and poor lived using a colour-coded scheme; black for the poorest, dark blue for the very poor and light blue for the poor. He used orange for mixed streets, red for the well-to-do middle classes and yellow for the wealthy upper middle classes and aristocracy. Booth referred pejoratively to the lowest social class as ‘vicious’ and ‘criminal’ and there is debate as to his methodology; allegedly he utilized anecdotal second-hand information from local policemen. His poverty maps detailed excluded urban spaces and criminal heterotopias as set out graphically by Charles Dickens in his classic novel Oliver Twist (1839), which exposed places where juvenile pickpockets lived and worked in Saffron Hill around Farringdon. At the time it was the heart of London’s black market, and ironically the area has been recuperated as Hatton Gardens which is renowned for trading diamonds. Today there are mixed streets, pockets of poverty within more affluent or regenerated areas in London, as well as gated communities that exclude various poor sections of the community altogether. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White qualified the ambiguous and contradictory historical development of middle-class identity and cultural imaginary. It has a heterogeneous status with a ‘disorientating calling of voices from above and below’ and an ‘“eccentric” relationship to such hierarch[y]’ (Stallybrass & White 1986: 149). Symbolically it has been sandwiched between the singular elitism of the aristocracy and collective egalitarianism of the working class and peasantry, trying to create an independent, democratic and ethical voice. Ambiguity is exacerbated by the authentic lure of the city, low-life squalor and penury, which trajectory has captivated certain sections of the middle classes through fascination and desire for the ‘other’. Stallybrass & White (1986: 191–3) have illustrated a psychoanalytical notion of transference as the bourgeois cultural imaginary has been driven by a meritocratic work ethic as against aristocratic entitlement and feelings of disgust for low-life squalor, which accordingly is at odds with a nostalgic desire for

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privilege and the authenticity of the working class. In turn, the cynicism of the working class and aristocracy towards the all-embracing bourgeois work ethic is projected back through reactions against both, hence the ‘eccentric relationship’ and ambivalence of the bourgeoisie towards ‘others’. The resulting ambiguity is embodied through a mixture of conformity and transgression. Also, the excluded ‘other’ that in spatial terms refers to the psychiatric hospital, prison, slum and ghetto (even hell) are spaces the aspirational middle classes despise and fear. Ultimately these places of exclusion are maintained and the ‘properly socialised bourgeois’ avoids contamination and ‘dirt’ through disengagement in order to maintain status, face and a sense of self (Metcalf 1994: 222). There are some choice examples of such dark spaces in art, influenced by binary concepts of good and evil, insider and outsider. Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Gardens of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), an allegory on immorality and the fate of humanity, is a literal depiction of hell that includes graphic scenes of punishment and carnal sin. The avaricious ‘are devoured and immediately expelled from the anus of a theriomorphic creature with a bird’s head (a variety of owl) seated on a type of child’s lavatory stool’ (Prado Museum 2018). Recent work by Ken Currie in his Rictus exhibition (2017) included Krankenhaus (2016), which is a nightmarish depiction of a war hospital. One patient has a red rubber tube inserted into his mouth with the other end of the tube protruding from his genital and anus area, forcibly fed his own excreta. In broad terms there is a balancing act between light and dark which is difficult for the middle classes to surmount. They search for authenticity to validate the fragmentation of traditional identities in relation to who they are as they seek to ‘naturalize’ aspiration, social prestige and power, which differs from the realpolitik of life, the ‘dirty’ exclusionary reality and grubby methods employed by capitalist processes and practices. Besides emplacement, the body is imprinted (and clothed) with class (also ethnicity and gender), although there is greater hybridity and fluidity of appearance than the sartorial stereotypes of old; working-class miner in cloth cap and hobnail boots with wife in her working overalls and clogs, or bourgeois banker in pin-striped suit and bowler hat with wife in silk and furs. A good example of fluidity has been the appropriation of bourgeois clothing by the working class, epitomized in the UK by the Mod subculture in the 1960s. It co-opted sharp Italian suits and designer labels, not as a rebellion against bourgeois taste but to show greater style, a conformist and competitive aspiration that is hegemonic rather than politically radical. In contrast, as detailed in the following chapter, the excluded grotesque body re-establishes the ‘other’ to batter bourgeois sensibilities as captured by specific artists. This has included the 18th century caricaturists James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson in the UK; the angry Dadaesque of the German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz; and the graphic images of Austrian Egon Schiele in the early 20th century. More recently the gross realism of UK artists Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville, alongside the satire of cartoonists Steve Bell, Martin Rowson and Gerald Scarfe, has reimagined the monstrous and ugly body. Whereas the romance of Bohemia and socially cohesive notions of multiculturalism instruct an inclusive global village, Zygmunt Bauman (2003: 119–21) referred to ‘togetherness dismantled’ and the spectre of xenophobia, whereby certain sections of society (especially youth and immigrants) are scapegoated for a rapidly changing world and consequent insecurities of a ‘liquid’ existence. Techniques of ‘othering’ and the demise of community impugn the marginal and dispossessed, where ‘liquid modernity’ expresses the changeable, fractured and individualized character of society.

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Simon Weaver (2013) maintained that negative ‘liquid’ reactions to the ‘other’ latch on to fixed and solid understandings. These multiple projections on to the excluded offer a dystopian and ephemeral reality by disembedding the ‘other’ from community, reflecting the increased anxieties of insiders and the inadequacies of individualized representations and narratives. The stoking up of anxiety, especially by the media, was recognized by Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky (2008) as a way of manufacturing consent. Rather than challenging established assumptions and biases, the media (and new media) too often reinforce prejudice by employing a range of filters. People sift through managed media images and messages shaped by Hall’s ‘primary definers’ and Becker’s ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who construct reconfigured versions of Cohen’s ‘folk devils’ to ‘other’ the socially excluded. Finally, a psychosocial take on inclusion centres on the human need to feel safe by forming groups in order to share feelings of belonging, which tends to be with likeminded characters to the exclusion of others (Nathan DeWall 2013). This conservative take highlights key social motives; a need to belong to groups, to comprehend, appreciate and trust others, but also to control the social environment to some degree, all of which help to enhance individual self-esteem. Ostracism from the group concerns excluding those misfits and difficult characters who may threaten cohesion and solidarity. So superior humour directed at the excluded plays a decisive role in creating ‘otherness’ and difference through stereotyping individuals and groups, which in turn solidifies cohesion within excluded groups. Social exclusion is a contested term with real-life empirical factors readily coalescing and morphing into representations that in turn shape these real factors bridging fact, fiction and representation. There is no consensus about whether the term refers to the literal removal of people from society, a lack of resources, networks and opportunities, or to geographic areas, as it is an empirical and mediated concept. More importantly, it appears unrealistically utopian to address the factors that cause exclusion in order to construct a more inclusive society without addressing the included and those with vast wealth, disproportionate power and excessive opportunity. In contrast, the outsider has a degree of self-determination and self-imaginary in regard to identity.

Anomie, Alienation and Madness: the Excluded ‘Other’ ‘Othering’ is a pejorative and exclusionary social process that excludes and disenfranchises particular groups who represent difference. Correspondingly, because much humour can be reactionary with the ‘powerful laughing at the powerless’ (Critchley 2002: 12), it functions to maintain and support existing injustices and reinforce consensus. There are a number of theoretical concepts that help to determine the excluded ‘other’, which reveals its complexity. The sociological notion of anomie indicates a lack of consensus about values, morality and acceptable social standards, which builds a specific framework that highlights exclusion. There is a mismatch between individual aspiration (and agency) on the one hand and social pressure to conform on the other, which situates individuals as disinterested and lacking regulation. Emile Durkheim (2002 [1897]) employed the term to describe the disparity between individual or smallscale group values and mainstream social standards, which in an extreme form can trigger depression and even suicide as individual aspiration rises beyond any means of achieving this or the possibility of fulfilment. Disillusionment fuels isolation in different spheres of life, which may influence the ability to focus on working or leisure culture,

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family life or relationships. Estrangement creates a disequilibrium between the individual and social with regard to acceptable rules and patterns of conduct, whereby anomic individuals and groups may create their own subcultures and share moral codes, social values and systems contrary to the norm. For example, Hell’s Angels, Outlaws or Bandido biker groups have their own codes of conduct with initiation rites, uniforms and insignia expressing membership and inclusion into the group, which does not conform to mainstream values or necessarily correspond to the law. Body art, for example, whether tattoos, piercings or body modification, is an embodiment of individual and group identities, including membership of gangs and subcultures, although these practices have been recuperated to some degree into mainstream culture. The term anomie shares similarities with the concept of alienation, which exposes the powerlessness of the marginalized isolated from the rest of society. Broadly speaking, alienation concerns the estrangement of people from their potential, each other and humanity, which may refer to the wider effects of capitalism and commodification, the family, education (or lack of it), work, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual orientation or cultural taste. Karl Marx (2007 [1844]) recognized alienation as situated in the dehumanizing labour process and the division of people along class lines, whereby the system of capitalism invalidates needs and desires as the fruits of production do not belong to those workers who create them. Moreover, they become commodities for someone else’s profit, which in effect invalidates their life, its potential and fulfilment. Georg Simmel (2004 [1907]) later critiqued money as objectivising and materializing understanding, which takes away from subjective relations between people and human interaction, restricting our creative capacity. The relationship between material things and technologies dominates human interaction today, arguably generating ever-more isolation and estrangement from ourselves and other people4. Herbert Marcuse (1968: 58) developed this theme and referred to ‘THE CONQUEST OF THE UNHAPPY CONSCIOUSNESS: REPRESSIVE DESUBLIMATION’. He argued that art itself alienates us from the potential of life and social reality as its supposed enlightening properties have been incorporated into established thinking, hence the one-dimensionality of ‘man’. The all-consuming vision that Marcuse presented possibly overplays the recuperative properties of capitalism to reduce the value of art to commodity, but it suggests that the pursuit of art through institutionalized art worlds, rather than offering liberation and possibility, binds it into the very material system that embeds alienation. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) referred to the cultural system in relation to the acquisition of cultural capital, which is a mechanism of inclusion into elite groups and specific class fractions. The process of accruing status distinguishes those educated into the relevant codes of culture from those who are not and risk alienation, although this is a complex and contextual area (as detailed earlier in relation to the cultural omnivore). But cultural competence may encourage superiority or pedantry through boastfulness, a supercilious demeanour that can morph into a highly individualized mannerism beloved of satirists. In extremis, the need to collect and display such detailed knowledge may signal abnormality, obsessiveness and dysfunctionality. The idiosyncratic display of random knowledge conjures up medical conditions including Asperger’s Syndrome on the Autism spectrum.

4

A contrasting hypothesis recognizes that alienation can drive anger and creativity which can enable greater objectivity and insight.

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The freak show, which was created for entertainment, embodied alienation and was popular in the past, vestiges of which still exist (for example, on Coney Island in the US), however much it contradicts political correctness (see Chapter 7). This is a heterotopia where outsiders with obvious physical deformity or difference present themselves as freaks to the audience, where the spectacle represents them within an abnormal discourse (Clements 2006). There have been freakish representations of the ‘other’ in history and literature (examples from the 19th century include the Elephant Man in London and the Hunchback of Notre-Dame in Paris), as well as ghoulish characters from literature such as Frankenstein (Shelley 1818) and Dracula (Stoker 1897). These representations have embraced the grotesque to highlight difference, and they play on the fears of ‘normal’ people. Incarceration in prison or psychiatric hospital concerns exclusion, treatment (or punishment) and hopefully rehabilitation, underpinned by various ideologies. There have been a raft of Hollywood prison movies detailing the harsh reality of regimes and criminal lifestyles, and there is a genre of prison literature by those who have experienced incarceration, as well as popular songs about jail (notably Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues (Cash 1955)). Humorous popular representations include the BBC television sitcom Porridge (Le Frenais & Clement 1974–7), which employed caricatures of prisoners and warders in an ‘us and them’ farce that typified prison in the UK. Alongside criminality, madness is another exclusionary discourse that operates to remove people from society and highlights abnormal conduct. Possibly one of the most renowned images of madness is Hogarth’s depiction of Bedlam (another name for Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane in London). It comes from The Rake’s Progress (1735), a series of eight prints that followed the life and downfall of Tom Rakewell, which name is a pun on the term ‘rake’, slang for a spendthrift and womanizer. The eighth plate, In Bedlam, is the denouement that shows his eventual madness living in the asylum. In this morality tale Hogarth purposely associated madness with immoral living – as depicted by earlier plates regarding fecklessness, drinking, gambling and prostitution – in order to highlight the rake’s unacceptable conduct. There are other graphic depictions of institutions for the insane, including Henry Fuseli’s drawing The Vision of Lazar House (1791–3), Francesco Goya’s oil painting The Madhouse (1812–9) and Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s engraving Das Narrenhaus (1835). Madness has close associations with creativity, and Jean Dubuffet, the pioneer of Art Brut (Raw Art), remonstrated that the creation of art is a pathological process and practice (cited in Maclagan 2009a: 37), therefore symptomatic of mental and emotional abnormality. The artist goes into a delirium, recognized medically as psychosis for schizophrenics or the ‘up’ (a form of relentless hyperactivity) for manic depressives, an often romantic representation that helps construct the individual act of creativity as a ‘naturally’ or ‘divinely’ occurring phenomenon. Roger Cardinal (1972) employed the term Outsider Art, originally defined as produced by psychotic artists without artistic training who make art whilst incarcerated in institutions, to highlight the creative outpourings of the insane (see Chapter 6). He recognized that the historical fascination with madness and creativity was initiated in 18th century Europe as a retort to the ‘Age of Reason’. It highlighted the direct relationship between ‘the collapse of psychic stability with the release of artistic or visionary power … [and] the spurious idea that mental and emotional association are a prerequisite of original creativity’ (Cardinal 2006: 17). The construction of the outsider artist requires such abnormality as this is perceived to signify authenticity as well as romantic modernist ideals related to individual creative genius.

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Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was one of the foremost exponents of the genius-insanity theory and, like other pioneering doctors and professors working in the field of psychiatry (including Charles Hood, Charles Ladame, Auguste Maire, Walter Morgenthaler and Hans Prinzhorn), collected drawings created by the mentally ill (cited in MacGregor 1989: 93). The notion of ‘genius’ has plagued the arts, as has the trope that artists are hypersensitive, obsessive, neurotic and outside of ‘normal’ social discourse. Also within the romanticized mythology of the pure ‘mad artist’ there is often scant acknowledgement of the extent to which ideas are derivative and influenced aesthetically and historically. The original Greek term ‘terata’ defined a deviant and malformed character, which definition elided the separate concepts of behavioural deviancy and physical deformity within a notion of malevolence. It combines discourses of criminality, disability and madness in a very negative fashion. The outsider is represented in a more abstract and romantic fashion through the concepts of visionary, eccentric and outcast (Oxford English Dictionary 2003). The term visionary suggests a powerful individualist who is aided by the supernatural or deity, with imagination and wisdom; although, because they are so different from the norm, such abilities may operate to ostracize visionaries. The term eccentric has an individualized bourgeois derivation in as much as it is often applied to those with a particular social standing as displaying ‘unconventional and slightly strange views or behaviour’ (O. E.D. 2003); whilst being outcast concerns the rejection of an individual by the community or wider society, and again implies ‘otherness’ and excessive individualism, unlike the collective terms of mental illness, madness or lunacy (insanity). Historically the art of the insane has been utilized to attack avant-garde ideas, as expressed in the UK by the front page of the Daily Mirror newspaper on August 9, 1913. Its headline was graphic and to the point: STRANGE PICTURES DRAWN BY INMATES OF ASYLUMS FOR THE INSANE: ARE THEY MORE ARTISTIC THAN THE CUBISTS’ WORK? (cited in MacGregor 1989: 167). However parodic this headline that intended to showcase the art of the insane negatively and besmirch avant-gardism, the work of mentally ill artists has had considerable influence on modern avant-gardists (for example, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka or André Breton), with the myth of Van Gogh an ode to madness. Twentieth-century art movements including Dada utilized craziness as a theme, Surrealism was fascinated with uninhibited creativity and the workings of the subconscious, and Expressionism articulated angst and extreme emotion through violent colouration. Within the field of avantgarde literature, madness influenced the ‘streams of consciousness’ trope, whereby the protagonist’s emotive monologue approximates a crazed rant. The ideological effect of rearticulating exclusion was employed by William Hogarth in his satirical engravings Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751). These prints depicted very different stereotypical representations of the 18th century lower classes in London. Beer Street shows a group of hard-working, ethically responsible and conformist Londoners, whilst Gin Lane portrays the workshy, prostitutes, marginal alcoholics and worthless criminals (Clements 2017a: 150–1). The latter print conforms to Byrne’s (1999) negative criticism that mainstream ideology steeped in the values of Protestant individualism maintains the excluded are to blame for their exclusion and poverty, due to laziness, ignorance and gluttony. Hogarth, who was anti-Catholic and xenophobic (as expressed

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in his paintings The Gate of Calais (1748) and The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750)), employed humour hegemonically to support Protestant bourgeois values of hard work and the Gin Act of 1763 that attempted to control the production of gin through taxation of the poor, which also served to demonize poverty. Likewise, Peter Stallybrass highlighted opposing representations of the marginal from a positive notion of diversity to a negative coagulating mass denied individuality, readily reduced to the identity of ‘other’ and reconfigured as a grotesque ‘spectacle of heterogeneity [that] establishes the homogenizing gaze of the bourgeois spectator’ (Stallybrass 1990: 79). The notion of ‘poverty porn’ (or ‘famine porn’) sums up this voyeuristic process of stereotype and spectacle generated by the mass media to exaggerate and exploit the misery of the marginalized in order to sell their products. A typical endorsement of individualism, however ideological and romantic, concerns the trope of ‘genius’, an ambiguous concept and word often bandied around in the art world to describe originality and associated with the best-produced artistically. The term refers to ‘an exceptionally intelligent person with exceptional intellectual or creative power or natural ability’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2003). It helps crystallize a positive conceptualization of boundless agency and creativity that sets the person apart. Such an individualized representation when applied to outsiderdom conforms to bourgeois notions of eccentricity and distinction, reintroducing class into issues of marginality. Raymond Williams (1983:142–3) concurred that the term genius historically represented the spirit and inspiration associated with quality creative production, a degree of originality and an individual eye for new ideas, which also create opportunities to make money in the art market. Typically it is applied to those ‘artists’ who have explored fresh avenues of expression, an ‘exalted ability’ indicating a very special and creative character from one possessing mere talent (Williams 1963). Ideologically it supports very particular individualized and established canonical discourses that eschew collective and historical influences. Nonetheless, the ‘genius’ of Picasso, for example, owes much to his collection of African Art and his visitations to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris (Meldrum 2006), which re-emphasizes that creativity has a collective derivation and does not occur out of the blue. It is socially constructed and draws on a pool of symbols and previously expressed ideas (creative discourse). That African Art and other ethic art forms were not considered ‘highbrow’ at this time reflects degrees of institutional racism, which also refers to the pejorative treatment of Ethnic and Folk Arts. This helped to obfuscate the collective and non-European influences on Picasso’s ideas. There are chic representations of outsiderdom that refer to the resistant notion of ‘outsider hip’ (Clements 2009), a concept I originally applied to the quirky American rock band Steely Dan, which was steeped in a complex fusion of popular music, jazz and beat culture. It is an attitude embodied by artists and audiences seeking countercultural distinction on the periphery of society, which represents the manifestly creative and resistant ‘other’, offering alternative symbolic knowledge and social cachet. Whilst Bourdieu (1984) concentrated his focus on the educational inculcation of ‘highbrow’ culture as a means of distinction within established society, outsider hip has a more omnivorous disposition (Peterson & Kern 1996). It embraces ‘cool’, a notion that refers to an edgier palette of taste mixing popular, ethnic and avant-garde cultures, and alternative vistas which might include obscurantist Pacific Rim Folk Art, risqué selfpublished European literature, particular South American body art and North African Rai music. This position displays non-conformity and countercultural credentials beyond

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the traditional remit of acceptable cultural taste dictated by hallowed academic institutions as well as the tacky commodified artifice of celebrity that drives mass culture. Also, it offers misrepresentation as this alternative hip attitude of rebellion is recuperated to showcase mainstream aspects of culture, a well-worn sales technique employed with rock and rap stars in order to attract young consumers. There is an awkward contextual relationship between social inclusion and exclusion, which is variable in scope. Just as exclusion and outsiderdom may not be totally negative, inclusionary discourse may not be totally positive, as this joke about inclusion into a negative afterlife suggests: My young brother asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth that most of us go to hell and burn eternally but I didn’t want to upset him (www.near-death.com/resources/jokes.html). Exclusion may refer to authentic criminality, poverty or mental health, whilst outsiderdom may be a mannerism performed by those who are unable or refuse to conform due to their need to self-define as different. The range of theoretical ideas and consequent number of ways of understanding exclusionary discourses and notions of the outsider taps into broader representational issues of identity, language, performance and ideology, which shape the production and consumption of humour and the arts.

4

The Construct of Outsider Identity, the Body and Representation

This chapter further explores the multi-dimensional construct of outsider and initially refers to conceptualizations of identity, essentialism, symbolic marking and performance. It employs a range of theories concerning identity that include framing experience, institutionalization and performativity (Goffman), refusal to conform in the arts (Zolberg) and racially determined mimicry and desire (Fanon). There is a focus on the social pariah, excluded body and grotesque ‘other’, which includes the visual representation of persons of restricted growth, or ‘dwarfs’, and disabled war veterans. Here humorous transgression highlights ambiguity towards the ‘other’ (Stallybrass & White), which incorporates the rejection of disability (Lund). Excluded bodies are detailed in relation to representations of disability and ‘unlaughter’, especially in relation to dwarfism, which challenges renaissance perfection and truth. They are translated by documentary photographers Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson, a statue by Marc Quinn, as well as the satirical work of Otto Dix. There is reference to hypothetical vistas of society that include the urban stranger (Simmel), autonomous nomad (de Certeau) and a collective filtering process of communication that offers mutual influence and interactive dialogue (Pavis). The marginal artist exposes a range of possible representations and identities in relation to mainstream art worlds (Becker), dark matter (Sholette) and the legitimate cultural system (Bourdieu). Whilst the mythological construct of ‘outsider hip’ articulates a self-defined marginal identity, new media offer virtual and changeable representations that construct the outsider artist as romantic and transgressive. Humour relates to outsider identity as it inverts power dynamics and tackles taboo subjects that the excluded can relate to. Conceptually, there is reference to cultural articulation that recognizes shifting postmodern representations (Hall) and outsideness (Bakhtin) resulting from creative practices.

Representation, Identity and its Performance: the Shifting Sands of Meaning and Humour Our identity (which consists of various multiple identities) concerns how we as individuals and groups relate to and embody socially constructed meanings. Attaching ourselves consciously or unconsciously to particular identities helps to formulate who we are, an ongoing psychosocial process that undergirds cultural meaning and offers a variety of scenarios that relate to inclusion, belief, morality and lifestyle. The terms of representation and identity express shifting discourses of meaning and ways of comprehending culture, which alters over time. Whilst identities are discursively constructed at particular institutional and historical sites and in relation to difference and what we are

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not (Hall 2000: 17), the process of inclusion also involves a reaction, often to opposing conceptualizations. We become attached for whatever reason to specific identifications of culture that then become particular fixed ‘truths’ for us, however fleeting or different these are in relation to other people (for example, an intensely personal understanding of nationalism), despite our identities continually being made and therefore changing. Crucially those representations that we can dismiss also play their part in shaping our identity, what we are not and do not want to be. For instance, by choosing the identity of vegetarian this excludes the identity of meat eater, which feeds back to influence the terms of vegetarianism. Often we solidify and justify identity by associating with a fixed or essentialist idea of ‘truth’, commonly associated with historical or biological variables (Woodward 1997). For a vegetarian (which in mainstream western culture was once a marginal position) this could concern ethical arguments about more food for everyone without the wastage of rearing animals for slaughter, thereby increasing the capability of feeding a hungry and expanding world population, an essentialist belief based on logic. For the carnivore there could be an historical essentialism based upon notions of hunter-gatherer roles traditionally performed by ‘man’ thousands of years ago that validates meat eating, however much this imaginary idea is part of a binary classification that divides the terms of identity. Also, biologically we are omnivores therefore meat is perceived to be a part of our ‘natural’ diet, so that vegetarians are deemed ‘unnatural’ regarding eating habits1. To recap, the concept of outsider is a multi-faceted and abstract discourse that vacillates around associations with social outcasts (residing in hospital, prison or asylum), alternative lifestyles (as part of a bohemian subculture), hyper-individualism (inability to relate to people, wider social processes and understandings), displays of self-definition, creativity and resisting mainstream thinking and mores. There are heroic and mythological associations with the maverick who refuses to conform, which covers many socio-cultural possibilities and is the staple of Hollywood anti-hero movies. There is a continuum between these disparate terms and structural exclusionary discourse, which alters according to time, place and context and offers much ambiguity. In pre-modern and early modern societies the average person adopted culturally prescribed and essentialist roles handed down by parents and elders. In our late modern society, non-essentialist conceptualizations offering choice have replaced obligation where self-definition has become a complex, hazardous and solitary operation. In theory it is therefore possible to identify as a white alpha female capitalist on Monday, transgender Buddhist socialist on Tuesday and black vegetarian cyber Celt on Wednesday, which narrative also can be interpreted as a form of superior humour that is class-based, racist, gender- and transgender-phobic. Nevertheless, such extreme antiessentialism questions fixity; but just as essentialism has been critiqued for lacking elasticity and agency, self-definition itself becomes all-pervading and can be criticized for wishful thinking and wilfulness that requires grounding in reality and some degree of objectivity. There are very heated ongoing debates surrounding self-identification in relation to race, gender and sexuality. Correspondingly, there are strong and weak versions of identity (Brubaker & Cooper 2000); a strong identity that is a more durable essentialist collection of multi-identities (fixed in orientation), and a weak identity comprising a range of contextual and fluid 1

There are symbolic parallels with cultural taste where omnivorousness (in contrast to univorousness) concerns balance, which itself becomes ideological.

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multi-identities (mutable in orientation). The first position maintains that we have an individual core identity, the second position that identities are something people use or do, to find out and define what they think they are and want to be (Hall 1990). Both positions rely on a performative quality where we present different aspects of our character through the roles we play in different social situations (Goffman 1959). We might make an ‘identity claim’ which reflects our agency (Hall 2000), as we choose to be different in some aspect of our life (through our taste in music or comedy for instance). This could be part of a subcultural weekend leisure pursuit as a Goth or body builder, in contrast to a hyper-conformist working week wearing a suit in the accounts office. Humour supports identity claims, as established earlier, whether directed negatively at those ‘others’ who portray difference or as a positive means of solidifying those with similar identity claims, however complex and contentious. American sociologist Erving Goffman, who recognized the extent to which we manage and present ourselves to the public, famously referred to an advert of a Vogue model in terms of her props (clothing, stance, facial expression and holding a book in hand to signify intelligence). This he dismissed with the humorous line, ‘but those who trouble to express themselves so appropriately will have very little time left over for reading’ (Goffman 1959: 33). He maintained that everyday social encounters require props and teamwork to support the roles we enact, and we embody this process of staged performance in order to enable our identity. When in social situations we remain in character as in a play, but these dramatic performances end on returning to being an individual in private. Therefore we control our bodies and engage in impression management in order to facilitate social interaction, and humour is one method to achieve this. In outsider heterotopias such as a psychiatric hospital or prison we lose our rights and responsibilities, therefore cease to have the capacity to perform our identities and correspondingly lose our sense of who we are and what we value (Goffman 1991 [1961]). The totalizing control of the institutional world dramatically affects the content of individual and social identities as it stymies our ability to (dis)play different roles, thereby influencing our self-perception and self-esteem which can amplify misconduct. Goffman referred to this inability to perform with relevant props within extreme institutional spaces as the ‘mortification of the self’ and loss of identity. Our bodies therefore have a dual location as they are the property of the individual but also categorized and framed by society. Goffman’s (1974) work on frame analysis offered an interactionist understanding of meaning construction in which the individual’s reality is framed by social relations and the organization of experience. Frames are techniques to structure experience and information which influences people’s perception. With regard to humour, there are issues regarding whether the reality of what is being framed is serious or playful and how this is understood, as there are specific cultural codes and rules encrypted in the meaningmaking process. Goffman accepted that understanding varies individually and collectively in relation to the person, experience and context, as ‘what is play for the golfer is work for the caddy’ (Goffman 1974: 8). The same event has multiple meanings. Social frameworks draw on socially determined rules, both formal and informal, that we apportion to experience and knowledge in order to understand complex phenomena. We calculate possible outcomes from the initial framework of meaning, drawing on experience of what will occur henceforth. Humour exacerbates the variety and mutability of meaning as it discombobulates our understanding of situations, working in the interstices between various expectations and consequences.

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There are concerns about the extent to which the body is managed by the individual to conform to the social order (a continuous and interlinked process of staged performances), which results in people behaving in manufactured, predictable and standardized ways: A character staged in a theatre is not in some ways real, nor does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confident man; but the successful staging of either of these types of false figures involves the use of real techniques – the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations (Goffman 1959: 246–7). Successful performance requires the person to stay in character, a role of staging ourselves that alienates us from our ‘real’ nature and suggests society is full of artifice. We rediscover our ‘real’ selves when we are alone in private, a position that is unpopular amongst anti-essentialists. Goffman’s conceptualization of social control and impression management refers to everyday behaviour and interaction, whereby performance conforms to social expectations and norms, which overemphasizes appearance. But the normalization of behaviour highlights the ‘abnormal’, those who also perform to scripts dictated by society, although they may have little control over themselves and their representation, and may lack self-awareness. Goffman (1991 [1961]) defined mental illness as a social phenomenon and construct rather than an individualized psychological and medical phenomenon. He (1991: 23–72) described the patient in an asylum as an excluded outsider dominated and controlled by the overbearing character of the total institution, which ‘institutionalization’ contributes to the problems of inclusion outside this domain. The asylum frames and structures experience for the inmates, which helps to dissipate their identities as the institutional world imposes ‘disculturation’ and ‘untraining’ on them and they are unable to manage ‘normal’ everyday life. But one way in which inmates in psychiatric hospitals and prisons escape these institutional frameworks and regain a sense of their former selves and identities is through informal communication networks and humour. In contrast, acceptance into an institutional and collective art world (Becker 1982) is like joining a club and requires particular education, networking skills and social acquaintances. Here the safety of the institutionalized art world garners success and certain liberties for the artist. The British art historian Alan Bowness (1990) distilled four circles of recognition which creates a pathway that determines how the modern artist rises to fame. Initially peer recognition leads to critical acclaim and then acknowledgement by the markets and eventually to public approbation and fame. This linear model is appealing but plays down the importance of vital access to key networks and circles2. A longstanding criticism of those who garner ‘success’ is one of privileged access, who you know (alongside self-promotional prowess), as though the quality of the art itself is not of primary importance. It is exacerbated by the intensely competitive character of success in a field that filters out so many possible candidates. This criticism concurs with a piece of situationist graffiti I came across on the Mile End Road in east London which evoked the Fluxus concept of ‘stupidology’ (See Fig 4.1). 2

During the 1980s art boom in the UK, the successful YBAs (Young British Artists) frequented The Colony Room Club in Soho, London, a bohemian heterotopia where they could schmooze. Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, amongst others, were members of this private drinking club originally run by Muriel Belcher. Ideal for networking (Willetts 2010).

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Figure 4.1 STOP MAKING STUPID Artists FAMOUS, n.d. graffiti, stencil on board, Mile End Road, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018.

This stencilled sound bite to ‘STOP MAKING STUPID Artists FAMOUS’ daubed on chipboard expresses the anger of excluded artists towards the institution of art and resentment about perceived corruption resulting from the highly networked nature and somewhat arbitrary process of achievement. Goffman maintained that the role of the total institution is to better manage and control the inmate, assisted by role dispossession, isolation, obedience tests and loss of identity equipment (props), all of which determine the mortification of the self. Moreover, ‘when entrance [into the institution] is voluntary, the recruit has already partially withdrawn from his home world’ (Goffman 1991: 25). As a parallel, successful radical artists are managed and recuperated through voluntary engagement in a system against which they may have been railing, but the loss of identity is of a very different order to the loss of liberty and annihilation of identity in the asylum. Goffman (1991: 47) suggested that mortification concerns how the institution disrupts actions that express our agency and control over the world, including loss of self-determination. Personal conduct in a democratic society requires self-management, where

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‘normality’ binds individuals into a governmental discourse dependant on self-regulation (Foucault 2000a [1978]), unlike the total institution with its enforced disciplinary regime. Other parallels between inmates and artists, however improbable and obscure, include the extent to which their identities are compatible with their self-conceptualization and also how their performed lifestyle and conduct is manufactured to befit the institutional world. For artists this may include an exaggeration of character and biography to ‘sell’ their identity as a brand, because their success requires an unusual and colourful individual persona. Thankfully, this re-articulation of identity and display of individual brand, which appeases art institutions and buyers, avoids the extreme mortification in the asylum. Budding artists may express their zany creative identities or choose to affect a representation of neurosis, obsessiveness, manufacturing degrees of ‘artist craziness’ by acting out difference and ‘otherness’, which position contrasts with those inmates in asylums who have little control over their identities due to exclusionary systems. Vera Zolberg (2010) accepted that marginality in the arts can be a deliberate refusal to conform to artistic conventions in order to save identity (presumably from the art world), which colludes to some extent with the romantic myth that artists exist outside of society. Nonetheless, artists as ‘eccentrics’ or ‘geniuses’ are able to choose their props – for example, a paint-splattered studio and quirky clothes, stylized educated conversation and histrionic mannerisms that display copious amounts of ‘highbrow’ cultural capital – whilst the inmate has been stripped of identity and labelled ‘mad, sad or bad’. More cynically, this ‘artistic craziness’ can be suitably hammed up and performed when appropriate, alongside a keen business manner and sober conduct in order to display the artist as a ‘savvy’ brand acceptable to the market. Success can require the knack of seamlessly performing and flip-flopping from a position of zaniness to serious financial strategy, suggesting contrived ‘authenticity’. An example of this ‘craziness’ was enacted by Tracey Emin through her drunken escapade on a television debate about the 1997 Turner Prize in the UK. It included swearing and angrily pointing at the luminaries from the art world, including writers and art critics Richard Cork, Roger Scruton, David Sylvester and Waldemar Januszczak: Finally Emin, sounding as if she had a mouth full of broken china, finally declared that the group had ‘lost her’. ‘I want to leave. I’ve got to go somewhere. I’m going to leave now. Don’t you understand? I want to be free. Get this f***ing mike off’ (Longrigg 1997). Emin is a canny businesswoman and has been extremely successful earning millions from her artwork, which her ranting on a prestigious television show did nothing to harm3. On the one hand, and like Emin, the artist has to be different – either angry, obsessed, depressed, anxious or wacky – which offers a romantic outsider position; and, on the other hand, more calculating, networked and businesslike in order to garner plaudits from the inside and make money. There is a third position whereby the artist is the victim of the art world and its need to shape and commodify ‘individual creative genius’ as a brand. A criticism of Goffman’s dramaturgical model of performative theory and how our body mediates between the way we see ourselves (personal identity) and how we are seen 3

Emin’s mass-produced trinkets, for example, are sold through auction sites, including tea pots, nude drawings, deck chairs, light pictures and self-portraits (www.invaluable.com/artist/em in-tracey-hfz82vw17i/sold-at-auction-prices). There is much irony regarding her photograph Tracey Emin (2011: Lots 228 & 303), yet another self-portrait of Emin, this time sitting down with her legs apart drawing strewn banknotes into her body.

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by society (social identity) is that it assumes ‘a real and inaccessible self existing outside these [performance] practices – the real identity of the “I”’ (Hetherington 1998: 151), as though this essentialized ‘real’ identity is external to society, which concurs with the myth of the authentic artist and Goffman’s private place where we recover our identity from artifice. In contrast, this anti-essentialist position, as espoused by Judith Butler, recognizes identity as resulting from performance, hence it is ‘constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler 1990: 25). Governments that have employed different forms of social engineering, whether through disciplinary (autocratic) or governmental (liberal) means, have recognized the fluidity of identity and ways to change the conduct and ideology of its citizens. Franz Fanon (1967), in his book Black Skin, White Masks, recognized a racial and colonial aspect to the excluded outsider whereby the performance of marginality masks the extent to which the individual inhabits a role acceptable to the dominant ideology. He employed psychoanalytical techniques to situate the repression of a colonized ‘black’ underclass unable to fit into the norms constructed by white society. There is a transference process whereby those racialized ‘others’ conform to behaviour that the dominant white society would expect by embracing official culture through mimicry, as previously detailed. Such an attempt at operating as an insider then alienates that person from whom he or she really is or might be, as they are not true to their understanding of themselves. This mannerism influences individuals and groups beyond ethnic issues and applies to other identity positions; for example, by masking beliefs about politics, religion, gender, sexual orientation and class. Nonetheless, a black face metaphorically wearing a white mask stands out visually as ‘other’, as do many transgender and physically disabled citizens who suffer discrimination based on appearance. But this conceptualization of transference offers a too straightforward understanding not muddied by individual agency and cultural fluidity. Eugene Metcalf acknowledged how insiders from the mainstream determine outsider artists, which is a symbolic device that helps insiders to know themselves in contrast to those they imagine apart from society, thereby maintaining ‘an acceptable sense of self’ (Metcalf 1994: 222). In contrast, Simon Critchley recognized the therapeutic and critical function of humour to de-familiarize and bring people down to earth, which reveals the reality of the situation. It can refer to the ‘familiar world of shared practices … and how those practices might be transformed’ (Critchley 2002: 16), which creative possibility overcomes divisive and exclusionary thinking. We establish our identity through symbolic marking in relation to others, who we are and are not, an inclusive search employing an inclusionary and exclusionary mechanism. Furthermore, ‘social identities’ produced by society that may appear stereotyped can be differentiated from those ‘personal identities’ that reflect our traits, uniqueness and involve close relationships (to friends, relatives or colleagues), measures which are mutually reconstituted and cannot be distilled down to one process (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). This amalgamation of various performances and narratives stories the self (Finnegan 1996), a construct of representations that help to shape personal and social identities garnered through aspiration, family, education, history, place, culture and conversation. These can be ascribed and inherited, as in an aristocratic title, or achieved through personal accomplishment (Rojek 2005: 88). As Stuart Hall (1990) explained in relation to diasporic communities, our past can be recognized as having a fixed orientation, whereas our future (and how we may alter) is unknown and fluid. Even so, the past, custom and tradition is selective and far from scientific or objective, which Raymond Williams (1963: 308) surmised affects the imaginary transmission and distribution of our common inheritance.

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So the marginal outsider embodies and performs both a fixed understanding of the self (however selective and contrived) as well as a changeable conceptualization that is the result of reflexivity, imagination and choice, which allows us to construct and express our liquid identities and mannerisms through everyday life (Bauman 2003). The more fixed our understanding of identity, possibly the greater its effect – but also inability – to harness change, whilst weaker, fluid and adopted identity positions give us greater manoeuvrability. The authentication of identity beyond stage management requires props and validation to differentiate the ‘real’ marginal artist from imaginary poseur, however defined, which itself is a contorted process. The homeless alcoholic’s claim to authentic exclusion, for example, is supported by sleeping area, cardboard, spoiled clothing and empty bottles of booze; the junky by haggard look, track marks, drug and syringe accessories. Such lifestyles and props of identity help to determine and triangulate specific characteristics, where ‘real’ markers of trauma authenticate claims of exclusion, however mundane these appear. The props also help to construct the language of humour, however unethical, malicious or dark, often in a topsy-turvy and incongruous manner. A simple example is the UK comedian Ken Dodd, who performed with crazy dandelion hair and tickling stick props. He was a brilliant comic performing his alter ego, very much part of his identity. Humour depends on how the body and props are used, identities performed and communicated, with much unpredictability and ambiguity.

Excluded Bodies and Cultural Dialogue Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), in his research into medieval carnival, differentiated the classical body from the grotesque body. The former is an ideal representation that never ages, a display and performance that we revere. It is the ‘high’ renaissance ideal of perfection, as represented by Raphael’s painting The Madonna of the Pinks (1506) or Michelangelo’s sculpture David (1501–4), mythical images beyond the everyday that are serious and humourless aspirations to godliness. In contrast, the grotesque body is changeable and ages, warts and all, which binds us into the real world and away from this divine pedestal. It is ugly and comic, a representation associated with lewd ‘popular’ culture. Bakhtin ideally distinguished between an egalitarian, collective and socially inclusive medieval understanding of carnival culture – which he theorized as a way to help regenerate society and give people back their lives to some degree – and a romantic ‘highbrow’ cultural ideal where imperfection is kept at a distance, offering an elitist, unrealizable and dehumanizing vision (Bakhtin 1984: 26). The grotesque body counters official hierarchical culture and artistic canons as it degrades and debases ‘highbrow’ spiritual ideals with its vulgarity. Human orifices and appendages used for eating, sex, urinating and defecating are the ‘dirty’ earthy sources of humour that are employed to ridicule this aspiration, particularly those pompous entitled characters who think they are better than the rest in some manner. Dirt is ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966: 36), impure and ugly, hence symbolically contrary to traditional ‘highbrow’ European aesthetics and beautiful bodies, as well as bourgeois decorum and social order, therefore subversive and key to transgressive carnivalesque practices. A good historical example from the golden age of satirical cartoons is Richard Newton’s blasphemous attack on King George III. His earthy etching Treason! (1798) is of John Bull (a symbol of the British people) farting at a picture of the then king. Newton shows how dangerous and transgressive ‘dirt’ is, which undermines the establishment and counters hegemony, therefore the need for it to be controlled and curtailed. Fortunately he died soon after this

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etching was published, at the tender age of 21, which saved him from prosecution and no doubt hanging for treason (British Museum 2018; Hislop & Hockenhull 2018: 66–7). The ‘high art’ classical body points upwards to spiritual concerns and an ideal utopian heaven; whilst the grotesque body brings this enlightened yearning down to earth through carnal desire and indulgence (ultimately to hell). A binary relationship prevails (disabled/able bodied; handsome/ugly, etc.) however complex and relative these relationships appear, which fulfils the dual function of classifying acceptable ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ discourse to determine the boundaries of transgressive culture. Peter Stallybrass & Allon White (1986) recognized that transgression reveals much ambiguity, including disgust, fear and desire for the ‘other’, and the contradictions inherent to capitalism; for example, in relation to the alienation of a particular individual resulting from the accumulation of wealth, which induces a fear of those in penury whose integrity obviates and exacerbates this. Petra Kuppers (2014: 43–5), in reference to discourses of disability, emphasized the problematic process of embodiment and enmindment as bodies and minds can appear invisible. This lack of awareness of ‘others’ and empathy towards specific physical shapes and particular thoughts also keep mind and body apart, thereby objectifying our humanity. We perform our identities both consciously and subconsciously, although the comfort of familiarity is challenged when we engage with ‘others’ who do not conform to a ‘naturalized’ construction and projection of normativity with able mind and body. Notwithstanding radical avant-garde possibility and social criticism, grotesque representation has supplied superior humour. In 18th century England there was a humorous correlation of ugliness (related to disability and disfigurement) with imperfection: The cripple’s awkward shuffle; the hunchback’s bent spine; the confusion of the blind; the comically inappropriate responses of the deaf; the stomp-stomp-stomp of a man with a wooden leg – to these and other afflictions laughter was an immediate and almost unquestioned reaction (Dickie 2003: 16). Roger Lund (2005) suggested from his research into 18th century European literature that beauty still embodied harmony, order and truth, which promoted renaissance perfection and godliness, whereas deformity symbolized ugliness, imperfection and satanic wickedness (represented through folklore notions of witches). The disabled have struggled not just with having their bodies (and minds) accepted, but also their characters; as have other minority groups, with self-directed satirical retorts one means through which the disfigured have sought to expunge their ‘evil’. Lund highlighted the British tradition of laughing at physical deformity, whereby ridicule operates to clarify difference and mark out the excluded. The freak alters from an object of fear to one of fun, as epitomized by the ‘dwarf’ in the circus4. He suggested that the ridicule of deformity, ‘authorized … an ideology of form which necessarily dismissed the deformed or the disabled as foreign, transgressive, ugly and inherently worthy of contempt’ (Lund 2005: 111). So the ridiculed may feel compelled to laugh at themselves too, colluding in their exclusion as a means of acceptance. ‘Dwarfs’ are a case study of disability, characters who historically were treated as jesters and mere baubles for the privileged aristocrats, characterized by European court painting. The 4

Dwarf is an offensive term for a person of restricted growth, therefore highlighted in inverted commas.

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printmaker Jacques Callot produced a series of Grotesque Dwarves (1616) which included ‘crippled’, ‘potbellied’ and ‘hunchback’ characters, presenting them as objects of fun5. In contrast, Richard Gibson was a 17th century celebrity ‘dwarf’ and court painter accepted on his abilities (Butchins 2018), whilst Diego Velázquez represented ‘dwarfs’ as human in his infamous Las Meninas (1656) as well as in his series of portraits of jesters for the Spanish court of Philip IV. However sensitive and humanistic, this portrayal was unusual, and ‘othering’ through superior forms of humour continued in popular culture with the emergence of freak shows and circuses in the late 19th century. These shows ‘established and enforced’ bodily norms, although today the exhibition and performance of ‘born freaks’ has given way to ‘self-made’ freaks (Stephens 2005). Such stereotyping was challenged in the latter half of the 20th century by humanistic documentary photographers including the Americans Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson. Arbus normalized the ‘abnormal’ in society whilst abnormalizing the ‘normal’ (Bosworth 2004). She was both voyeuristic and compassionate and inverted hegemony by exploring the ambiguity of representation of both mainstream and peripheral characters. Her early commercial and documentary photography concerned emplaced exclusion, which became more focused on people and individual psychology. She was enamoured by these institutionalized characters and ensconced in alternative street life, capturing images of the homeless, bag ladies, prostitutes, transvestites, naturists, dominatrixes, dwarfs, giants, tattooed faces, topless dancers, muscle men, sword swallowers and circus performers. Two of her most painful images of outsiderdom and exclusion are: The Human Pincushion Ronald C Harrison, NJ (1962), a photograph of a man with large pins inserted into his face, neck, chest and arms; and Backwards Man in his Hotel Room, NYC (1961), which shows a man whose face points in the opposite direction to his feet. Towards the end of her life she became engrossed in her Untitled Project (Arbus 1995) and the portrayal of characters from residential care for those with mental health problems. Her biographer suggested that in her last years she exiled herself from society (Bosworth 2004: 163), which is possibly the effect of engaging full-heartedly with marginal communities and excluded characters. Whether this engagement with exclusion and related alienation had any influence on her suicide is a moot point. Arbus had much influence on Davidson (Bosworth 2004: 231), ten years her junior, who also documented aspects of street life, gang culture, seedy blues bars and civil rights protests. He photographed the Clive Beatty Circus for the Magnum photographic agency in 1958, which included iconic images of Jimmy Armstrong, the ‘dwarf’ white clown. These images portrayed Jimmy humanely and revealed his sad and lonely life of survival in the circus, but they were far from humorous and in the Pierrot clown tradition. Davidson was attracted to Armstrong’s aura of loneliness, anomie and the deep darkness that he communicated (Goldberg 2016: 48). More recently, ‘Young British Artist’ Marc Quinn constructed a giant marble statue of the disabled artist Alison Lapper, entitled Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), which was first displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London (2005–7) then reconstituted as an inflatable and centrepiece for the London Paralympic Games (2012). As Waldemar Januszczak stated on Quinn’s website:

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The tradition of representing ‘dwarfs’ as an object of fun was typified by Walt Disney’s animated film Snow White (1937), utilizing a fairy tale originally published by the brothers Grimm in the 18th century. The seven ‘dwarfs’ (Grumpy, Sneezy, Bashful, Dopey, etc.) were characters purposely created for humorous entertainment.

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[the] giant marble statue of the dysmelic Alison Lapper, rhyming her physical shortenings with the Venus de Milo, must be ranked as one of the most significant sculptural moments in Britain’s post-war art history. What a huge blow was struck for issues of disability by Quinn’s moment of sculptural genius (Januszczak, cited in Quinn 2018). Notwithstanding the humorous exaggeration and immodesty of Januszczak referring to Quinn as ‘genius’, the artist, like Velázquez and Davidson beforehand, was determining a sympathetic representation of disability. Nonetheless, some within the disabled community would have liked such a prestigious commission and emplacement of disability given to a disabled artist or artists (Clements 2006: 334), concurring with the sentiment of Lapper’s biography My Life in My Hands (Lapper 2006). Moreover, just as the politics of exhibiting in relation to ‘primitive’ art has traditionally denied a voice to the ethnic artist (which objectification ‘others’ ethnic culture, as discussed earlier), Quinn’s website reveals the problems with non-disabled artists (and artist curators) controlling representation as they lack knowledge and, in this case, direct experience of disability whilst being keen on self-promotion, the zeitgeist of our times. There was a furore over the casting of Charlie Heaton, a non-disabled actor, in the role of Joseph Merrick in the remake of The Elephant Man by the BBC (Ryan 2018), previously played to critical acclaim by John Hurt (film) and Philip Anglim, Bradley Cooper and David Bowie (theatre). This was exacerbated by the disabled actor Adam Pearson, who has a similar condition to Merrick, accusing the BBC of ableism as he was not given the opportunity to audition for the part (www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/shela gh-fogarty/actor-adam-pearson-criticises-bbc-elephant-man/). Arguably, non-disabled actors mimic, exaggerate and stereotype disability, ignoring the disabled community and its understanding of authentic representation, which operates in an exclusionary fashion. A wonderful riposte to disabled prejudice was cited in Mel Brooks’ spoof film Young Frankenstein (Brooks 1974), where Gene Wilder playing the central role of Frankenstein offers his services to the hunchback Igor (played by Marty Feldman): Frankenstein: I don’t mean to embarrass you, but I’m a rather brilliant surgeon. Perhaps I can help you with that hump? Igor: What hump? Feldman inverts the pomposity of the upper-class surgeon using incongruity, which challenges negative representations of disability. It captures Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideal notion of folk humour as people’s laughter (Bakhtin 1984: 11–14), stressing its ambivalent and utopian character in contrast to negative and superior forms of satire employed by the pompous and privileged. People’s laughter is triumphant but mocking, assertive whilst denying and directed at everyone, including those laughing, a conceptualization that contrasts with ‘the satirist whose laughter is negative … [which] places himself above the object of his mockery’ (1984: 12). Ideally it is situated in a temporary heterotopian space where there is no hierarchy, distinction or barriers between people. Even the grotesque body is employed positively, not as a marginalized individual held up to ridicule but as embodying the human condition. This socially inclusive tactic chooses to lampoon those individuals with authority who cut themselves off from the rest of humanity, living in their own privileged bubbles, which offers a communalistic counterpoint to individualism, hierarchy and established thinking. Otto Dix made visible those disabled veterans who had survived the First World War and signified German defeat, ridiculing Germanic pomp and nationalism. His series of

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prints, including War Cripples (1920) and Card Players (1920), graphically captured the exclusion of a disabled section of predominantly male war veterans (see Fig 4.2)6. Dix was infamous for his harrowing depiction of war casualties, waifs, prostitutes and an assortment of outsiders. These include a wild-eyed ‘black’ drummer in his painting To Beauty (1922) manically playing music, and the grotesque, erotic representation of man and wife in The Ill-Matched Couple (1925). His explicit style ‘shocked and snubbed the bourgeois art lover’ (Spanke 2012: 17) as it appeared to have little sympathy for anyone, which at least was a consistent position. It prevented any notion of heroism so beloved of later Nazi-influenced art and the ultra-nationalist feelings that were starting to stir in 1920s Germany. His art was classified by art historians as a form of New Objectivity steeped in stylized realism and caricature, alongside that of George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter and Georg Schrimpf. The group was labelled the German Verists and the artists utilized figuration to emphasize and capture the horrors of their society. They critiqued bourgeois hypocrisy and pilloried the idiocy of war, revealing the corruption and decadence of the Weimar Republic. Olaf Peters (2012: 34) defined Verism as a modern conception of objectivity that ‘devoted itself to contemporary reality with unrelentingly vicious rigor and, indeed intended to hurt’, which was driven by anger, cynicism and left-wing ideology. The critical portrayal of the excluded adds to the difficulties of satirical representation as this graphic realism is not ‘people’s laughter’ (Bakhtin 1984), as it is dissociated from wider society and a collectivized understanding. Although the satire in Card Players was not employed from a superior or privileged position, it is difficult to look at because it emits the artist’s rage. The urban themes portrayed by the Verists were prefigured by the ideas of German sociologist Georg Simmel, writing at the turn of the 20th century, in relation to the identity of strangers and their reflection of metropolitan experience. He explained the urban outsider as expressing opposing degrees of nearness and distance that are in tension with each other (Simmel 1950: 408), with the ‘non-relation’ between insider and stranger far from positive. Dix had a ‘non-relation’ with the excluded and alienated urban characters living cheek by jowl in their isolated worlds and he may have been spatially close, but he was emotionally and conceptually distant. This is replicated in Card Players, with the three characters far removed from each other despite all having disabilities, sharing a game of cards and a table. Simmel recognized the stranger as an outsider confronting society, a wanderer who brings new qualities to refresh the insider group and who is able to freely express his or her ideas, unlike those insiders who are hamstrung by convention. There are similarities between Simmel’s ‘strangers’ and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) concept of ‘nomads’ who assume a degree of autonomy through distinct everyday patterns of consumption, furtive resistance and cultural poaching. These characters avoid established social practices and patterns of meaning-making, driven by what he termed the scriptural economy that entraps us within orthodoxy. We forgo our agency and ability to navigate culture and cultural spaces, exacerbated by the overbearing bureaucratic system that represses us. Resistance is tactical and aimed at the gatekeepers (or gamekeepers if the analogy of poaching is retained) who help to construct and maintain the established systems. Romanticized conceptualizations of the stranger also segue into Colin Wilson’s (1997 [1956]) existential notion of outsider, embraced by 6

Later in the 1930s Dix was vilified by the Nazi regime as degenerate, personally witnessing social and cultural exclusion.

Figure 4.2 Kartenspieler (Card Players), 1920, Otto Dix, drypoint on copperplate paper, 33 x 28.4cm paper. The George Economou Collection, Athens.

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countless artists who think and feel that their ideas and beliefs are contrary to established practices and that nobody understands them. Strangers and nomads retain some degree of objectivity and distance from society, therefore appear more authentic, and because they shake up social mores and norms they become an outlet for insiders to express their frustration with the debilitating conformity of society. This relates directly to the Verist artist as outsider, as well as to the subject matter of excluded soldiers. Dix was a stranger who, like his artistic colleagues, wanted those established members of society to reflect on their hypocrisy. So he confronted them with garish satirical imagery from his particular ideological position. There is another explanation for this anger. Dix served on the front line for three years in the vile trench warfare as the commander of a machine-gun unit, directing and witnessing mass slaughter of innocent young men advancing towards the German line. He witnessed first-hand the trauma associated with the brutal and callous realities of warfare, an extreme form of alienation resulting from the barbarity of killing without any surety that his acts and commands were ethical (today there is some recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Then, on decommission from the defeated army and still carrying war trauma, he experienced the misery of civilian life, whether casualties of war begging on street corners, the social effects of the 1918 flu epidemic or economic depression. He was put on trial twice in 1923 for ‘disseminating lewd images’ of prostitutes, amongst other themes, which were deemed to threaten public decency, although he was acquitted (Spanke 2012: 19). His exclusion as an artist was compounded in the 1930s by the Nazi regime, which campaigned against his satirical avant-garde modernism and purged his art from the public domain; 260 pieces were confiscated by the authorities (Baucheron & Routex 2013: 72) and 26 pieces displayed in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937 to showcase ‘un-German’ art (Barron 1992: 227–30), as discussed in the following chapter. He was also ridiculed in Shandausstellungen (Exhibitions of Shame), organized by local groups of National Socialists who targeted German Expressionist and Verist art (Peters 2014: 28). His depiction of ‘war cripples’, who had been deserted by their country and denied any reparations for their disfigurement, was given a high profile in the exhibition and elicited much media attention. Ironically Dix was accused of anti-Germanic barbarism, lacking sensitivity and poor choice of subject matter. He was arrested again in 1939 as part of the action against ‘unreliable intellectuals’ and spent a week in prison. Dix painted two controversial portraits: the anti-Semitic Portrait of Dr Fritz Glaser (1921), a lawyer, that accentuates his sloping shoulders, long nose and pallid, shiny skin, suggesting a slippery character; and the homophobic Portrait of the Jeweller Karl Krall (1923), which exposes the ambiguous sexuality and camp nature of the bachelor posing with hands on hips and hourglass shaped body, manicured nails and wry (possibly seductive) smile. Both representations exhibited in the Entartete Kunst exhibition and were employed to prove that Jewishness and homosexuality were ‘un-German’ characteristics and indecent. It is unlikely that he did not intend to highlight these aspects in his sitters, although maybe his focus was also to critique their bourgeois lifestyle, which shows the mutable character of representation. Maybe Dix had subliminally accepted aspects of a budding fascist propaganda or was angered by these minority concerns. Nonetheless, some of his work, and especially Card Players, highlights a form of satire which approximates to ‘unlaughter’ as this representation holds a mirror up to society and challenges perceptions.

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The notion of mutual influence would suggest the disabled can affect representation of the able-bodied and that the relationship is not a one-way determination and control of the aesthetic of the vulnerable by the powerful. Patrice Pavis theorized mutual influence by utilizing Goffman’s theory of performativity and the notion of filtering, which offers a useful understanding of interactive cultural dialogue. He recognized embodied cultural difference, mutual influence and blending through intercultural exchange as the way to understand how diversity can operate positively in theatre, and employed the metaphor of the hourglass to show how ‘a target culture analyses and appropriates a foreign culture’ (Pavis 1992: 5). He acknowledged a mutually constitutive process whereby the sand (representing culture) passes from one end of the hourglass (the ‘foreign’ culture) to the other end (the ‘target’ culture) and as it passes through the narrow neck the target culture puts into place a filtering process that alters the foreign culture, which it also adapts itself to. Cultural interchange affects both cultures in a positive and dynamic fashion, which offers an optimistic albeit romantic conceptualization of multiculturalism, tolerance and mutual dialogue. Cynically, the ‘target’ culture may assimilate the ‘foreign’ culture altogether and thereby refuse any dialogue, to the chagrin of the minority community. To prevent this the disabled ‘foreign’ culture requires visibility, which may not be possible or applicable in everyday life as disability often remains hidden (particularly those with psychological and emotional issues). Moreover, there are new categories of excluded disabled groups being created. Kathryn Hollins (2010) referred to children with cochlear implants as a recent embodiment who are apart from both deaf and hearing groups. Such is the changeable character of exclusion, which is a complex and relative concept.

The Marginal Artist, ‘Hip’ and Virtual Outsider Identities The notion of the marginal artist has become a mythological trope, even glorified by Hollywood – as embodied in Lust for Life (Minnelli 1956), with Kirk Douglas portraying Vincent Van Gogh, a massively talented, tormented and obsessive individual with mental illness. Ironically, as detailed earlier, these psychological disorders help to construct the notion of ‘genius’ and those artists who are perceived as highly individualistic and dysfunctional because of their immense creativity. Howard Becker (1982), in contrast to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of distinction and conflicting theoretical fields, compiled a more descriptive, collective and practical conceptualization for understanding artists, which applies cultural capital and highlights exclusion. Like Bourdieu, he moved away from understanding the psychological state of artists in order to classify them in relation to the wider social and cultural terrain that they operate in, which he crystallized through the term ‘art worlds’. His categorization of ‘integrated professionals’ describes the art worlds of those artists who are fully engaged within the legitimate institutional system, including key service personnel, cultural intermediaries and gatekeepers who support and market them. Success is dependent on social networks and a coterie of agents, managers, promoters and, most importantly, the audience to view and buy artwork. This collective process is vital for the maintenance of the cultural infrastructure (of art museums and galleries) and the status of all involved. He employed the term ‘maverick’ to signal a conventional artist who has chosen to operate on the periphery of the art scene, away from the centre of activity, in order to pursue new ideas and innovations. This may concern lapsed integrated professionals who follow resistant or original practices, expressing their own avant-gardist thinking.

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These artists may flit in and out of legitimate domains and possibly the classification needs reconfiguring due to the demise of the avant-garde (Clements 2017a: 73, 182) and the overwhelming power of cultural institutions and art markets to recuperate mavericks. Although these rebels may choose marginality (Zolberg 2010), access for other would-be artists into rarefied art worlds of integrated professionals is far from inclusive, which leaves the vast majority of artists surplus to requirements. Becker proposed two other marginal categorizations: ‘folk artists’ who work with crafts handed down through the community; and ‘naive artists’ who remain on the periphery and tend to be self-taught. Naive artists include visionaries and outsiders who have little engagement with legitimate art worlds7. His examples included Simon Rodia, Ferdinand Cheval and Grandma Prisbrey, sculptural, three-dimensional artists rather than painterly ones. Nevertheless, he maintained that ‘[d]istinctions between these kinds of art are not distinctions of quality’ (Becker 1982: 270), which is a controversial point of debate in light of the metric of an integrated professional who produces ‘quality’ art work that garners success in a system that indulges a select few art ‘stars’ and excludes the rest. Gregory Sholette (2011) explained this exclusionary discourse through his notion of ‘dark matter’ (appropriated from astrophysics), which refers to hidden cosmic material that is the creative energy and gravity required for the galaxy to cohere. This parallels the arts, where visible and successful artists ‘do not account for all the creative energy they represent’ (Clements 2017a: 98). Referring back to Becker’s notion of art worlds, networks of integrated professionals help to legitimize an elite group of artists. In contrast, a large pool of excluded artists, including many naive and folk artists, produce work that remains hidden from public view and cultural institutions as it is deemed inferior, ballast without which legitimate art worlds would sink without trace. This was expressed brilliantly on a black t-shirt worn by a young girl that I chanced upon in London, which had the pithy logo ‘stars can’t shine without darkness’. The mass of unsuccessful and excluded creators of art (the producers of ‘dark matter’) are vital for the success of the few as they comprise the audience and customers for art and its merchandising, which hierarchical and pyramidal logic befits that of commodity capitalism and competitive celebrity. Bourdieu (1992) distilled notions of exclusion in relation to cultural production by recognizing that those outside the legitimate cultural system, or those who refuse the wealth and status of the established artist, struggle for acceptance and success. Whilst tracing the history of artistic autonomy in 19th century France he referred to the rupture and re-articulation of ‘artists’ from the bourgeoisie who are ‘enslaved by the vulgar concerns of commerce’ (1992: 57). Today this has been refashioned as cool entrepreneurial hipsterdom, obscuring the commodification of culture, as well as recuperating both artist and the notion of the hipster, who in American beat culture of the 1940s and ’50s was a petty criminal and chancer. Identity is never fixed and structural understandings have to factor in individual agency and cultural change, which Stuart Hall (1996) explained through the notion of articulation. Besides the notion of speaking forth (to be articulate), it concerns linkage and connectivity (as between the cab and wagon of an articulated truck), which creates unity by 7

Since Becker constructed these model classifications in the early 1980s there has been much focus on niche marginal markets to accommodate greater diversity, which have in turn created their own art worlds; for example, Maverick Art, Visionary Art, Schizophrenic Art, Psychotic Art, Self-taught Art and Isolate Art.

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‘articulating’ or bringing together different connected elements that can be broken and unmade then reconstructed. In other words: the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions, which is not determined or fixed, and can be re-articulated in different ways because there is no definitive belongingness (Hall 1996: 141). In contrast to Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model that assumes a ‘real’ self existing outside performance, these rearticulated elements of identity are not essentialist or steeped in ‘belongingness’ but constructed through enactment and performance. They coalesce to create individual difference and heterogeneity, which accounts for change, with the construction of identity never fixed or finite. Articulation also refers to the complex and contradictory construction of social practices and ideas which have struggled to produce identity (Grosberg 1986). According to articulation theory, these free-floating elements of identity historically have linked up in different permutations with other social, cultural and political characteristics. This postmodern understanding permits difference and change beyond the confines of binary thinking, encouraging creativity in the co-production of meaning as a ‘pick and mix’ conceptualization, which is neither consistent nor determined. A caveat is that this highly abstract and relative notion of articulation ‘is in danger of losing its reference to material practice and historical conditions’ (Hall 1996: 147), and a grounding in ontological reality. Hypothetically, art worlds should be far more diverse and random. But this fails to account for particular pathways to artistic success, which structural determinants remain relatively unchanged. A caveat is that the use of digital technology, whilst encouraging crowd funding and the direct distribution of products, has not supplanted the gallery/agent system but articulates with the networking process required, amongst other variables. Nonetheless, the shifting sand of postmodern representation has challenged modernist thinking and in turn has collapsed distinctions between authenticity and inauthenticity, inclusion and exclusion, insider and outsider positions of fixed provenance. Nebulous part-time, self-determined, fluid and hybrid networks and meanings have replaced or coexist with more obviously fixed conceptions. So the focus has shifted towards individual self-definition, changing contexts and lifestyle choices, which cover an array of everchanging representations and identities. An example of self-definition is the British potter Grayson Perry, as detailed, who has enacted his multi-personality through alter ego Claire, who wears Bo Peep party frocks with rouged cheeks and exaggerated facial makeup. More recently he has constructed an older secretarial persona wearing owl glasses and a mini skirt. This self-identification appears incongruous, not least because he is a very tall man and performs a highly individualized outsider role (a chosen identity position), displaying originality and distinction. But such a schizoid display does elicit questions of authenticity, especially from cynics, an on-going issue associated with fluid postmodern identities in an overly mediated age. Perry is a brand which David Boyle (2004: 16–22) maintained requires degrees of authenticity as well as difference to enable successful audience and consumer identification. Boyle benchmarked authenticity as an ethical, natural, three-dimensional, simple, un-spun, sustainable, beautiful, rooted and human representation. Claire seriously challenges these classifications, as would be expected from an artist who does things

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differently. Nonetheless, Perry appears serious and does not intend that Claire is an object of fun or irony, however playful8. This hyper-individualism is very different to the performance of a Panto Dame, which traditional role was clearly a satire on gender and poked fun at normativity. Nevertheless, cross-dressing has been both a source of cultural anxiety and humour (Houlbrook 2007), even moral panic. There are similarities between peripheral transvestite and transgendered identities which have moved into the mainstream and have become more visible and acceptable. With regard to identity, the elasticity of outsider definition is exemplified by the late UK art critic Brian Sewell, who sounded very privileged and acted out the aristocracy of distinction. His autobiography, The Complete Outsider Almost Always: Never Quite (Sewell 2019), appears to suggest that a very well-connected art world insider authenticated himself by association with outsiderdom. And not without irony, of course. The outsider as maverick hyper-individualist situated through risqué narrative refers to Sewell’s association with the art forger Eric Hebborn, the spy Anthony Blunt and friendship with a host of British artists (including William Coldstream, Paul Nash and Walter Sickert). This is supplemented by mythology concerning the discovery at 50 years of age that his father was the composer Peter Warlock, who gassed himself months before Sewell’s birth (Cooke 2011). Similarly, Sir Peter Blake, the doyen of British Pop Art, claimed outsider status as an artist when discussing the work of Madge Gill and other outsider artists (Gill 2019). Maybe it is overly cynical to suggest that this need for association with outsiderdom confirms authenticity. The notion of ‘outsider hip’ (Clements 2009) partially captures this anomaly as it expresses values of individual distinction authenticated by residing on the margins of popular and ‘highbrow’ culture, a fluid self-defined identity position to aspire to and perform. It has a history which was formulated by the beatniks in the 1950s, a subcultural fashion that borrowed from modern jazz, poetry, literature, pop art and cool street styles, which influenced the hippie counterculture (and was co-opted by the cultural and media industries (Clements 2013: 165–6)). Outsider hip is embodied through dress, argot, body art and language and other expressions of cultural taste, as practised by cyber-Celt women and fully bearded male hipsters. It is both serious and casual, and in part determined by the variables of fashion, brand and hype. There are also virtual identity positions whereby people choose an outsider avatar, as on the popular website Second Life (www.secondlife.com) launched in 2003, a global community created by its users. It employs three-dimensional modelling to recreate ‘reality’, whereby its residents construct another world and engage in a second life, which includes buying virtual houses using Linden dollars. These have to be purchased with real money, which is an economy now worth millions of dollars. Digital worlds allow people to enact their fantasies and construct whatever role they choose, which permits much licence and a double life (real and virtual) that also can incorporate sinister outsider personas to groom the unsuspecting, encouraging moral panic in the media. New media have affected notions of public and private domains, blurring this binary characterization, with people creating online avatars in a virtual public space from the privacy of their bedrooms. Erika Pearson (2009) referred to this as a highly visible ‘glass bedroom’, a hybrid public/private space where we perform a range of 8

Whether Perry has control over representation is a moot point in relation to criticisms of selfdefinition.

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identities through email, social network sites and blogs. In line with Goffman’s ideas, the worldwide web is therefore a stage where we perform our public identities, however much this is undertaken in private. Engagement with virtuality conjures up the cult film Westworld (Crichton 1973), a hybrid of science fiction and western which concerned a theme park that people visited for entertainment and gratification. It allowed paying guests to enjoy whatever they wanted from a cast of lifelike androids on set. The liberties involved killing and taking sexual pleasure from the androids, who are patched up and decontaminated in a workshop at the end of the day ready for the next eventful exposure to humans. The storyline involved the androids exacting revenge and shooting back at guests with real guns. It is an allegorical critique on humanity and a morality tale about what people will do, given the opportunity; expressing aspects of their identity that may be far from pleasant. The film offers an imaginary taboo outsider status which people may want to emulate if they can escape fear of social opprobrium. This logic resonates with the proliferation of online social network sites, which offer anonymity and identity experimentation, where different aspects of an illicit outsiderdom can be practised, as enacted on the dark web. Although humour is embedded in issues of exclusion – most obviously when employed as superiority and a mechanism to bully vulnerable people and thereby reinforce their exclusion (typically through nationalist, racist, sexist or disablist jokes) – due to its ambivalence it can invert power. This offers a highly unstable cultural phenomenon that can challenge taboo and which comedians navigate through an ambiguous insiderdom. For example, American Margaret Cho, a survivor of sexual abuse who makes humour out of her experiences, indicated that it concerned ‘compassion and experience, rather than talking as an outsider’ (Cho cited in Williams 2017). The idea of the insider joke suggests those who have experienced sexual abuse are privileged as they can make jokes about it and even ‘other’ those unlike themselves, turning normalcy on its head. Possibly it is deemed acceptable by the non-abused as they desire something of them (Metcalf 1994), specifically authenticity. This insider perspective chimes with the adage that only the Irish can tell Irish jokes, which is based upon a specific if not inconsistent moral premise, as detailed by Carroll earlier. It contrasts with the comic amoralism of Australian humorist Jim Jefferies, who reckoned that comedy is about humour and separate to belief. So humour is amoral, neither about ethics nor inclusion, as it is the craft and structure of the joke that is vital. So ‘if it’s really, really offensive it has to be really, really funny’ (Jefferies cited in Williams 2017), as if there is a quid pro quo. Nonetheless, although humour is a crafted, contextual and organic cultural phenomenon, ultimately the audience determines its success and whether it is deemed funny, which offers a collective understanding and some degree of democracy about whether to reject the joke. Mikhail Bakhtin (Haynes 1995: 71–3; Holquist 1990) accepted the need for dialogical grounding in the self-and-other relations (where the ‘other’ is central to our understanding of self), which he recognized as ‘outsideness’. Aesthetics (like humour) is grounded in outsideness, beyond the boundaries of each person’s consciousness that artists bring to light. We identify with the skill of the creator whom we deem ‘another person, experiencing my action … [who] is able to form it artistically (that is, to evaluate it and place it in context) and to finalize it’ (Haynes 1995: 86). Bakhtin failed to differentiate between the creator and audience as he considered them mutually constitutive and crucial to the unity of meaning, which resonates with Sholette’s notion of dark matter with reference to art.

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There is a feedback loop that helps both performer and audience to shape perceptions and experiences, a collusion highlighting the interrelatedness of art and everyday life and, in particular, the mediation of language. Understanding ‘outsideness’ offers a philosophical and pragmatic link between the outsider, art, humour and language within a broad collective ground. Bakhtin referred to ‘outer value’, and how the individual ‘is unified and shaped by cognitive, ethical and aesthetic categories and by the sum total of external, visual and tangible features’ (Bakhtin 1990: 51), beyond individual consciousness. The individual is neither self-sufficient nor necessarily part of a hierarchy, and draws on collective ideas and experiences to understand the world and self in relation to the ‘other’, as ‘we realize that our personal stories are made of other people, just as the world is composed and constructed of the consummated lives of other people’ (Haynes 1995: 85–6). Only through ‘outsideness’ and the dialogue it encourages can value be realized, performed and communicated, which facilitates the co-experience of ‘being’. This ontological experience offers broad knowledge and a double-voiced irony beyond individual perception and creative intention, tapping into collective cultural meanings.

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Humorous Representations of the Outsider Hybridity, Utility and the Carnivalesque

Hybrid conceptualizations of superiority combined with play, incongruity and relief detail the complexity of humour, its socio-cultural and political utility and effect. Examples that highlight hybrid superiority, especially racist stereotype, are taken from ‘popular’ culture, including the TV cartoon Tom and Jerry and film Borat. Similarities between art and humour are detailed with regard to utility, dialogue and identity. The negative utility of art and humour is underlined with reference to Entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art) and Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) in Nazi Germany, which articulated modernist art with upper-class decadence, Semitism and communism in order to humiliate the artists exhibited. This foregrounds a broader foray into the history of ‘blackface’, postcolonial notions of Orientalism (Said), symbolic masks (Fanon), mimicry and ambivalence (Bhabha). An exploration of madness, humour and the arts speculatively applies the mortification of the self and stigma (Goffman), and their triangulation is shown historically in both a positive and negative light. There is an evaluation of the humour of minority and excluded groups as a means to survival, including the representation of Jews in 1920s and ’30s Germany, homelessness in New Zealand, those living in genocidal Bosnian war zones and support for those deemed ugly. In contrast, absurdity and disorder through humour is highlighted by Chaos Theory. In practice, those in mundane jobs utilize humour on an everyday level as a rebellious release (de Certeau), whilst grotesque inversion challenges social and aesthetic order (Babcock), and satire derides a sober bourgeois and Christian identity (Stallybrass & White). Historically, carnival time and its radical collective character (Bakhtin) is applied to Bruegel’s infamous painting The Fight between Carnival and Lent, skimmingtons, Commedia dell’arte and Punch and Judy shows. However much humour is co-opted into dominant thinking, it retains a non-linear, anarchic and ambivalent character.

Hybrid Humour and Superiority Humour supports the status quo but transgresses it, rechannelled and rescripted through various countercultural and resistant mechanisms. One way of better understanding this complex social and political reality blends John Morreall’s overlapping theories of humour (Morreall 2009). Superiority, incongruity and play influence each other, whether in a complementary or oppositional manner, with relief in general operating as an emotional outlet. Superiority is an openly political manifestation of humour, unlike the other theories, and due to its discursive character appropriates humorous social processes and practices to realize its mission. This can, to differing degrees, confirm or resist

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hegemony, although it tends to rely on acceptable pre-conceived understandings. As Simon Critchley (2002: 11) maintained, most humour is pretty reactionary and reinforces social consensus, which picks up on Charles Baudelaire’s understanding that malice involved in humour highlights the ugliness of humanity (cited in Carroll 2014: 9). But there is much anarchy underpinning humour through incongruity and play, which, rather than promoting established ideas and values, sets up counter-narrative and disorder. For example, the incongruous humour underpinning the surrealism of Salvador Dalí or René Magritte is playful and abstract, which can encourage a whimsical titter. However, it can be employed to display symbolic cultural capital in an exclusive, competitive and superior manner (classically during a haute bourgeois dinner-party), or as a confusing mixture of both. Hybrid superior-incongruous humour may be combustible, unintended and far from amusing, which in extremis was witnessed during Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76). Here citizens were attacked by Red Guards and zealous students for wearing bourgeois clothes, surgeons were ridiculed and forced to clean the streets and traditional meanings were inverted. However serious or ridiculous the scenario, it witnessed zealots driving on the left, as against the right-hand side of the road which was customary, to show their ideological commitment. Also, groups of Red Guards stopped cars at traffic light when on green and waved them on when the lights turned red. This counter-hegemonic inversion of cultural meanings and appropriation of carnivalesque was driven by a contrary autocratic ideology, the need to eradicate inequality and sheer bloody-mindedness (Dittmer 1977). Expectations of the future effects of humour are calculated by superiority, in contrast to the open-ended, mercurial and non-linear manifestation of incongruity and play, which reconfigures humour in unexpected ways. There is tension as these qualities evade the power of superiority to fix meanings, undermining its control and intention. This impasse conforms to Umberto Eco’s (1992) notion of never-ending meaning in relation to ‘hermetic drift’ and the openness of interpretation which lacks finality. There are other hybrid manifestations that articulate incongruity and play with degrees of superiority, which, however innocent the humour may appear, may contain traces of deception, bluffing and teasing, particularly in activist-art performance, agitprop and politically influenced humour. Superiority may appear incompatible with self-deprecatory humour (Carroll 2014: 12), although they can combine and operate in myriad ways. For example, this may be manifest in the learnt ability to laugh at yourself, which can be a whimsical mannerism to charm and seduce others, showing superiority in a very subtle fashion. Here is a playful scenario that displays superiority through self-deprecating banter in regard to a cryptic crossword puzzle: Joker: I was stuck on Seven Down, an anagram of WEAR IN SKATED. I thought of WAKEN TREADS, but that didn’t fit; neither did the Gothic DARKE WATERS; nor the rather Latinesque KART JADES EST. When I looked up the answer today I was rather surprised. WANK DEAREST, would you believe it, hahahahhhhh … Cryptic crossword puzzles are difficult and highly intellectualized games that require finesse to finish, copious amounts of education, creativity and cultural capital. So to selfdeprecatingly admit an inability to finish one whilst at the same time showing off an

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ability to play ‘anagrammatic’ games very subtly oozes a superior manner. Moreover, as already suggested, incongruity (and play) are imbued with superior sentiment, as the very cognition of complex knowledge and advanced social (and language) skills shows education and status. An art joke based on an old format highlights this: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? I don’t know. How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A fish. It is a simple, incongruous example that requires a ‘highbrow’ understanding of Surrealism in order to ‘get it’. But maybe this knowledge is not crucial as the incongruity of the answer can carry the humour anyway. Only in a private space outside the public sphere is humour totally disinvested of its superiority, although an individual telling a joke to the mirror could be practising distinction and self-importance for a later date. Although a response-orientated incongruity may appear opposed to an ends-orientated superiority, humour retains an anarchic quality which cannot be totally controlled and put to use. So, for example, the bully employs humour to control and self-seek in a superior manner, but also there may well be an incongruous aspect to this. Noel Carroll (2014: 27) referred to the privileged Roderick Spode (the 7th Earl of Sidcup) who appeared in the comic aristocratic novels of P.G. Wodehouse, a character loosely built around the 1930s British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Wodehouse constructed a superior snobbish character who was an object of humour due to his passion for designing women’s underwear, an incongruous characteristic that undermines the machismo of the fascistic Spode. Another twist to the narrative concerns the suspicion that Wodehouse himself was a fascist sympathizer, even though MI5 has proclaimed his innocence (McCrum 2011). It reminds me of a supercilious and bullying colleague who allegedly collected Nazi memorabilia and uniforms. The jokes revolved around whether he dressed up playfully in bed as Reichsmarschall Herman Göring to impress his wife (presumably with a lion cub by his side). Control freaks are unable to manipulate and direct humour as they might wish through superiority, whilst incongruity cannot best operate through an instrumental rationalized mindset as it destroys its creative and anarchic character (notwithstanding the paradox that those who employ superior humour may lead fragmented and bizarre lives). Superiority marks out the excluded and the contempt shown by specific individuals or groups towards ‘others’, which may even include former selves (for example, those who disavow their working-class background). Nationalism and racism help to situate the ‘other’, as do jokes that focus on the disabled body or mind, sexual orientation or gender stereotypes, whilst practical jokes have an obvious target. But these minority groups may respond by inverting superiority in their favour. Here we take pleasure in lampooning the idiocy of the arrogant with humour employed to counter hegemony. Humour is not always negative and immersed in the metric of superiority. We laugh at happy events (anything related to cute kids and babies), particularly other people laughing and smiling as expressed by the Dispositional Theory of humour and the inclination to laugh and enjoy the ambience created. When baby smiles we all smile, and when we smile baby smiles. Carroll (2014: 8), like many before him, recognized incongruity as the most fruitful and appropriate of all the theories as it has a mutability that undermines stereotypes which

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depend upon fixity (often ‘naturalized’ through an historical or biological determinism). Incongruity can be innocent and evade political motive, although superiority can be built into the anomalies concerned, contributing to racism and exclusion. This is illustrated by the Tom and Jerry cartoon films, created in the 1940s by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, which on first sight appear fun and whacky slapstick. There are a number of repetitive scenarios employed, including one of Mammy Two Shoes screaming and jumping on to a chair afraid of Jerry Mouse, and Tom Cat running headlong into a flatiron with his body literally flattened and shaped by it. These may seem incongruous and innocent, but Mammy Two Shoes extends the tradition of racially stereotyped African American representation in film. Dan Bogle (1994) referred to the stereotypes of the ‘Tom’, ‘Coon’, ‘Mulatto’, ‘Mammy’ and ‘Buck’ used in Hollywood films for superior comic effect. ‘Uncle Tom’ is an unthreatening male appeaser of the dominant ‘white’ culture, with the ‘Coon’ an entertaining object and clown. In contrast, the ‘Buck’ offers a savage, over-sexed and violent character, whilst the tragic ‘Mulatto’ is presented as the unfortunate hybrid outsider often portrayed as fat, ugly and stupid. ‘Mammy’ is a large and cantankerous ‘Aunt Gemima’ associated with the comic ‘Coon’ and the lickspittle ‘Uncle Tom’, a subservient maid wearing a starched, white pinafore.1 Tom Cat is the outsider, loser and villain of the cartoon narrative always outmanoeuvred by Jerry Mouse, so there is an odd incongruence as Jerry always appears the victor (a carnivalesque inversion of the ‘natural’ order of cat killing mouse). Even when it looks like Tom will catch Jerry, Bulldog Spike, who loves mice and hates cats, rescues him, so the joke is always on Tom. Besides the representation of racial (gendered and class) stereotype embodied by Mammy Two Shoes, the cartoon appears to be a playful inversion of superiority. Historical and contextual excuses are commonly employed to situate hegemony and the acceptability of meanings, in this case regarding the representation of race. Notwithstanding the humorous slapstick, what is shocking is that there was still segregation in certain US states at the time the cartoon was first broadcast. The political African American artist Faith Ringgold (2019) created her own versions of Aunt Gemima, notably her story quilt Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983) and the Two Jemimas (1997) quilt. The first recasts Aunt Gemima as a successful businesswoman and heroic matriarch, in opposition to the stereotype of ‘black’ women as tetchy and overweight, whilst the second quilt is a playful iconic celebration of large African American women, each reflecting the artist’s empathy and interest in feminism and black rights. Incongruity may be the dominant understanding of humour but it is contextual and ambiguous, which lack of certainty of meaning makes it ideal to counter normality through playfulness, however much it may articulate superior intent. Also, it may not be funny (for example, living through Mao’s Cultural Revolution), especially if it appears threatening. Gallows humour is an example of this – for example, Steve Martin’s line, ‘First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me’ (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/gallows-humor) – which for those terminally ill or working in palliative care may not be so amusing.

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Categorization by Bogle through racially stereotyped language itself reinforces and perpetuates racism, something that will be argued in relation to outsider artists in the following chapter.

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Another humorous example of hybrid superiority offering ambiguous representations of racism and exclusion is the film Borat (Charles 2007), starring Sacha Baron Cohen who played the eponymous Borat, a Kazakhstani, in a spoof documentary road movie set in the US. It was lambasted as racist and politically incorrect by the Kazakh government, which initially banned the film and the sale of DVDs, even threatening to sue Baron Cohen and block his website. Ironically the government later co-opted the film and employed it as a marketing opportunity for tourism because visas to visit the country had increased tenfold after its box office success (www.bbc.co.uk/newsbea t/article/17826000/kazakhstan-thanks-borat-for-boosting-tourism 2012). The film narrative illustrates the precarious and culturally embedded character of humour, as the forever incongruous Baron Cohen playfully challenges comic morality by revealing American superiority (and arguably revealing a superior manner in the way that he managed to dupe the characters into saying and doing things they later regretted)2. In one scene Borat explores New York, meets a ‘humour coach’ (Pat Haggerty) and asks whether he should make a joke about his mother-in-law as he thinks that represents American humour. Haggerty agrees that this type of joke is very popular in America and if he has one to tell. He has fallen into a carefully laid trap: Borat: I made a sexy time with my mother-in-law. Haggerty: You had sex with your mother-in-law? Borat: Yes. Haggerty: Er … I don’t think Americans would find that funny. Borat displays, however cozen, a calculated incongruous and cross-cultural misunderstanding of humour, which carries sexist and racist intent. He tells an outrageous joke about his brother Bilo who has ‘very funny retardation’ and lives in a cage, which he breaks out of to rape his sister. However politically incorrect this scenario, Haggerty cannot help but laugh, although he explains how wrong it is to laugh at people’s misfortune. Presumably he is laughing at the incongruity of the joke, although this cannot be detached from the crass superior humour denigrating mental disability, race and rape. Borat is animated and gives Haggerty a ‘high five’ hand slap, but it is clear that Haggerty doesn’t quite know what to make of Borat. He then goes on to try to explain the American ‘not joke’, which concerns saying ‘not’ at the end of a sentence to rectify a statement that is obviously incorrect: Haggerty: That suit is black … NOT! [Borat wears a grey suit] Borat purposefully discombobulates the joke sequence and plays power games in the way he places and emphasizes the ‘not’ within the sentence. He attempts the joke over and again but purposely spoils it, either coming in too quietly or too early and eventually he withholds the ‘not’ until after Haggerty has responded to him. This example possibly 2

There were several lawsuits, including one by two American students who gave Borat a lift in their camper van. They revealed unpalatable aspects of their superior manner whilst under the influence of alcohol and in response to Borat’s clever, jokey questions. They did not receive either financial compensation or removal of the scene from the film (www.smh.com.au/enterta inment/borat-has-last-laugh-after-lawsuit-fails-20080121-gdrxmx.html).

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best details the fine margins between something that is funny and something that is cruel. He plays with Haggerty and by purposely destroying the intended joke exaggerates the incongruity of both the joke and situation. The film is risqué and challenges political correctness with some particularly aggressive jokes, which questions ethically flawed humour (Carroll 2014: 103). This highly contentious area of moral transgression – which refers to sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic and disablist humour – has also been reframed as an argument in the mainstream press questioning literalism. Matthew d’Ancona (2017) criticized the removal of politically incorrect humour from television post-millennium in contrast to the need for political correctness in the 1980s, which served to create greater diversity and liberate humour from some of the offensive attitudes of comedians at the time. He argued against self-appointed guardians of taste who have suffocated humour through politically correct zealotry, suggesting that literalism and the loss of a sense of irony ignored that a joke does not necessarily translate into intention. Although he championed the importance of play and incongruity, he failed to fully recognize superior humour, which for a journalist and media gatekeeper in such a powerful position possibly illuminates a blind-spot of liberalism, namely privilege. Nevertheless, comic immorality does challenge extreme puritanism, authoritarianism and a debased ‘political correctness’. John Morreall (2009: 112–5) illustrated how incongruity encourages open-minded, creative and critical thinking and highlighted the inconsistencies between what people say and do. There are virtues associated with humour, including laughing at oneself (which is variable, as the earlier crossword example highlighted), widening perspectives and encouraging diversity, as it offers character-transcendence and complexity. It encourages tolerance, acceptance of ‘others’ and defuses conflict, all of which promote humility and humanity. Coming to terms with human foibles, whether of the self or others, by employing humour is probably an easier process than dealing with anger and threat. Morreall (2009: 130) likened humour to existentialism as it is impossible to understand ‘life’ through reason alone, because this does not account for its ambiguity or non-rationality. However much people attempt to control their lives and those around them through rational discourse and superiority, reality and humour may beg to differ.

Utility of Art and Humour: the Racial Stereotype There are comparisons between art and humour in relation to aesthetic experience and playfulness that has no direct practical utility. It neither concerns gaining and accruing knowledge nor realizing practical outcomes and goals (Morreall 2009: 70). The notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ loosely parallels ‘humour for humour’s sake’, where the enjoyment of both art and humour in extremis expresses jouissance, a blissfulness that fractures ‘safe’ pleasures physically, emotionally and intellectually and evades social control (Barthes 1975). This to some extent underpins the joyfulness that can be created by activist-art events, graffiti, street art and satirical cartoons. There are many other similarities between art and humour in regard to craft, imagination, dialogue, context and surprise, generating multiple points of view. A traditional aesthetic or cultural focus offers a benign understanding of people and human nature that ignores the power, motivation and belief behind the use of art and humour. For example, a joke offered to the boss at work as a sop and means of

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schmoozing and ingratiating oneself may be useful in the future and shows foresight with regard to the politics of social networking and career. It is important to evaluate the utility of art and humour in broader terms. There is much autonomy, however much they function as regimes of identity and representation (Rancière 2004b) and to distinguish those with education, knowledge and social status (Bourdieu 1984). They have a critical function, ‘to bring human beings back from what they have become to what they might be’ (Critchley 2002: 15), and returns us to a common culture and shared practices, which Critchley referred to as ‘messianic power’. Humour earths us as humans and, like the arts, offers cathartic emotional and spiritual possibilities (relief), which can de-stress and detoxify highly charged situations. A key social function of art (and humour) is to help formulate personal and social identities, as explored earlier, shared meanings that help to create bonds between people who have similarities as well as differences. Thomas McEvilley, who investigated art and otherness on a global scale, emphasized these mutually dependent properties: there cannot be self without other; there cannot be other without self. They exist only and always in a secret embrace. They are a mutually dependent, eternally interlinked pair (McEvilley 1992: 147–8). The secret embrace of self and ‘other’ creates fluctuating alliances, which concurs with Bakhtin’s notion of ‘outsideness’ where the transgression of individual boundaries of consciousness allows us to ‘see ourselves and the world with fresh eyes’ (Haynes 1995: 177). Outsideness concerns empathy and the ability to project the self on to someone else’s situation, which is vital to instigate moral action for others (Haynes 2013: 144). The ability to fully comprehend and empathize with the ‘other’ requires dialogue, which affects representation and understanding within a common culture of shared social practices and values, where hierarchies are suspended. This is the foundation of Bakhtin’s notion of carnival time and humour, as depicted later by Bruegel’s The Fight between Carnival and Lent ((1559/60), Fig 5.3). It contrasts with an ideological reconfiguration of exclusion that reinforces superiority. In lay terms this is the difference between laughing with or at the ‘other’, and the extent to which these qualities can be separated. However, satire may induce ‘unlaughter’, as previously iterated, when employed inappropriately in a superior manner targeting the marginal. This contravenes the ideal collective world of people’s laughter that equalizes communities through common experience, which ideally liberates people and gives them back their lives – itself a template for a better world (Bakhtin 1984: 88–9). Michael Mulkay (1988) distinguished between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ humour, the latter referring to the use of humour for serious purposes, possibly to ease difficult social communication and interaction or to besmirch someone publicly. He questioned a ‘unitary default’ reality because humour is so changeable and imaginary, which delineates individual tastes and differences that are relative to context. It can reshape and co-opt new meanings, however crazy, which fold back into our ontological reality and function to create diverse and multiple understandings of the world that can offer playful fun and resistance to established ideas. Representationally, art, like humour, proffers meanings that tap into different mythologies and discourses. Henrietta Lidchi (1997), in relation to museology and the curation of ‘ethnic’ exhibitions, illustrated their representation as a particular set of imaginary

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perceptions and conceptions dependent on ideology, time and context. She combined the aesthetics of exhibiting, which concerns complex semiotic webs of communication and perception, with the politics of exhibiting and the discursive relationship between power and knowledge. There is no clear distinction as these are mutually constitutive and impact on each other, which accounts for a tangled web of representation and much ambiguity. Exhibiting the ‘other’ in ethnographic museums has historically drawn on cod science and anthropology, where the traditional exhibition of ‘primitive peoples’ has facilitated a superior discourse of racist representation. A famous illustration of exhibition racism based on a skewed mythological nationalism and recuperation of collective experience, articulated through superior humour, was the Entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art (Institute of Archaeology 1937)), first shown in Munich on July 19, 1937. It was a violent reaction against modernism and mocked the avant-garde utilizing superiority. The exhibition targeted Abstractionists, Expressionists, Dadaists and Verists, including such luminaries as Jankel Adler, Max Beckman, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Kirchner, Paul Klee, Amedeo Modigliani, Emile Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The exhibition, which toured German cities, consisted of 650 works (confiscated from 32 public museum collections) by 112 artists, of which, surprisingly, only six were Jewish. The popularity of the exhibition is unparalleled, with two million visitors in the first four months in Munich, about 20,000 per day (Barron 1992: 9)3. The Nazis maintained that these degenerate artworks were morally depraved, the result of metropolitan living and the corrupting influence of an incestuous band of upper-class decadents on vulnerable artists (Peters 2014). There is an unlikely precedent to this. When the Salon des Refusés was set up alongside the Paris Salon in 1863, supported by the Academy of Fine Arts and the French government, it exhibited art which had been rejected and deemed unsuitable for the annual Paris Salon exhibition (McGuigan 2009: 56). But there was not the public opprobrium attached as the refusé artists (including Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro) had created new art in what became the avant-garde tradition, and their art was later accepted by and incorporated into the very system they opposed. In contrast, Adolf Hitler and his propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, created the Entartete Kunst exhibition in order to apply Nazi cultural policy, which represented their ideological brand of fascism and showcased their bile. The National Socialists were reactionaries attacking the status quo from a very different position than avant-garde artists, promoting a humourless, sentimental and backward-looking visual language of realism that included regimented domestic scenes alongside ‘heroic’ uniformed soldiers driven by an ultra-nationalist xenophobia. Prior to this, in 1933, the Nazis had set out a five-point manifesto in the Deutscher Kunstbericht (German Art Report) determining Goebbels’ cultural policy (cited in Barron 1992: 13). It defined and highlighted what to do about un-German art, which included the removal of all works of a cosmopolitan or Bolshevik nature from German museum collections; the sacking of all museum directors who had bought un-German art; the elimination of any mention of Marxist or communist artists; no construction of ‘boxlike’ buildings that related to Bauhaus ideas; and, finally, the removal of German public sculptures not approved by the German people. But far from the German people having a voice in all of this, Goebbels gave Professor Adolf Ziegler from the Reichskammer Museum in Munich and his five-man commission 3

In all, 16,000 works of art were considered dangerously modernist and removed from German cultural institutions by the Nazis.

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complete powers to make decisions about what constituted un-German art (Barron 1992: 19). Ziegler and his cronies considered unsuitable any art that was modern, insulted German pride, destroyed natural form, or showed inadequate aesthetic sophistication and manual dexterity. Their ideas reached out to those fellow Nazis who were anti-modern art, anti-communist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic. The Jews were denigrated as the dealers who foisted ‘un-German’ art on to German museums and private buyers (1992: 15). This vile ideological campaign against modernism was particularly aimed at avantgarde, abstract and political art, purposely denigrating the artists by comparing their work to that produced by asylum inmates with mental illness. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, a key Nazi ideologue, co-opted Hans Prinzhorn’s (1922) medical publication about the art of the mentally ill. Prinzhorn had lauded the marginal art created by those attending his psychiatric institution in Heidelberg, which included 5,000 works by 450 patient artists, as helping to better understand them. Schultze-Naumburg’s eventual book, entitled Kunst and Rasse (Art and Race (1928)), compared the avant-garde to ‘mad’ artists, therefore deriding both in order to showcase his fascist ideals and racist theories of degeneracy. In the Entartete Kunst exhibition, racism was manifest by comparing abstract portraits by Modigliani and Schmidt-Rottluff to photographs, allegedly taken by Schultze-Naumburg, which portrayed disabled characters with facial disfigurement, those with an obvious expression of madness or the look of a person with Down’s Syndrome (Barron 1992:12– 13). This crass display of superiority enabled ridicule of both avant-garde ‘un-German’ artists and the disabled. Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon (2018) cited the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloc’s reference to these exhibitions as a ‘concentration camp’ of artists, whilst he himself summed up the exhibitions as a ‘Nazi carnivalesque’, but definitely not in the Bakhtian sense of collective power emanating bottom upwards from the people. Another populist technique of de-authentifying the artists in the exhibition was to label exhibits with phrases including ‘Paid for by the Taxes of the German Working People’, in order to shame museum directors. Other epithets included: ‘Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul’; ‘An Insult to German Womanhood’; ‘The Ideal Cretin and Whore’; and ‘Nature as Seen by Sick Minds’. These patronizing ‘voices of reason’ (Hitler, Goebbels, Ziegler and Schultze-Naumburg) revealed the new hegemony in Nazi Germany (Von Lüttichau 1992: 45–6). The exhibition included a large number of artists and posed as an educational event to legitimate the treatment of excluded minorities. Not only was modern art stigmatized as non-German, but the slur that this was the work of ‘sick’ Jewish and communist minds was intended to stir up ever-more intolerance and hatred towards these groups. For Nazis, individual or collective expressions of creativity were anathema as the function of artists was to promote fascist ideology, and the purpose of art and humour was to denigrate anybody who dared to challenge or oppose this ideology. The Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition, curated by Hans Ziegler, was opened in Düsseldorf (Art Palace 1938) and was an attempt by the Nazis to control musical consumption. It turned on ‘un-German’ music, especially jazz and modern classical music. In the same year Goebbels set out his Ten Principles of German Music Creativity (cited in Dümling 2002: 55), which not unsurprisingly compared ideal ‘pure’ German music with ‘diseased and dirty Jewish music’, symbolized by Gustave Mahler’s expressiveness, Arnold Schoenberg’s atonality and the shifting rhythms of jazz. The programme cover highlighted the superior racial attitude and ideology of the Nazi establishment (see Fig 5.1). The black saxophonist was a caricature of ‘Jonny’ from Ernst Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny strikes up) wearing a Star of

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Figure 5.1 Entartete Musik, signed by Hans Ziegler, programme cover for the exhibition at Düsseldorf, 1938. Wiener Library, London.

David, rather than carnation, in his buttonhole4. Exaggerated facial features were intended to ridicule an African American jazz musician, which racism incorporated anti-Semitism connoted by the prominent Star of David badge, with the ideology of communism possibly symbolized by the overuse of the colour red, although this was a background colour favoured by the Nazis to highlight the swastika on public banners. The saxophonist, a ‘humorous’ hybrid of superiority and playfulness, embodied the loathsome thinking of the Nazi ideologues, a hotchpotch of racial and political smears creating the ‘other’, however much the articulation of all these characteristics is ridiculous. I witnessed the legacy of superior humour through racism and the practice of ‘blackface’ outside one of the holiest shrines of the Catholic faith, the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela (see Fig 5.2), situated at the end of the Camino pilgrimage trail. A jazz guitarist busker, rather than using face paint, wore black stockings over his hands and face and exaggerated his lips, as in the Entartete Musik image. But this patently racist representation is confusing as the busker was playing a list of jazz standards to a reasonably high level, 4

The Nazi regime falsely labelled Krenek Jewish. He, along with other musicians of Jewish ancestry (including Bella Bartok, Berthold Goldsmidt, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weil), fled Nazi Germany for the US.

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Figure 5.2 Busker, 2018, outside the cathedral, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Photo by Paul Clements 2018.

which he performed with gusto as if attracted to the music and culture. There was little notice taken of the musician by the long, overwhelmingly Caucasian line of tourists, which included a smattering of South Americans and Far East Asians, all queuing to visit the cathedral adjacent to his pitch. I watched for some time as the tourists politely ignored his performance, although nobody appeared outraged, as though the racism was embedded in this particular heterotopia5. Theodor Adorno, who criticized the mass production and conception of culture as an industry, controversially related jazz to banality and reactionary anti-democratic forces in society, especially ‘hot music’ that was popular amongst audiences in the 1930s. He claimed that ‘[t]he extent to which jazz has anything to do with genuine black music is highly questionable’ (Adorno 1988-9 [1936]: 52), ridiculing improvisation as commercial ornamentation in a totalizing and condescending fashion. His notion that jazz was formulaic and standardized was an extension of his barb that popular music was an industry 5

The Catholic Church supported General Franco’s Spanish form of fascism in the 1930s (he was born roughly 45 miles away from Santiago in Ferrol). There is much dispute regarding the relationship between the Catholic Church and German Nazi regime, and later canonization of Pope Pius XII who was in situ at the Vatican at the time. At best, the church lacked a critical voice, disapproved of communism and remained blind to racism and the treatment of Jews (Li 2015).

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more concerned with musical recipes for making money than the quality of the music produced. His Eurocentrism was a sign of the times as he was writing in 1936, displaying his inability or refusal to see beyond his own education and understanding that art should enlighten and act as a revolutionary catalyst. He likened elements of jazz to military music and a reason why it would be enjoyed by fascists, presumably because it has a heavy beat, which shows some confusion between strict tempo music and a musical format that plays with rhythm, pushing and dragging the beat6. His denial of jazz (African rhythms and Jewish melodies) shows a lack of engagement with, understanding of and respect for popular and ethnic musical forms. There is a history of ‘blackface’ in theatre and film, with early Hollywood films employing white actors in ‘black’ roles rather than employing African Americans. The racist Ku Klux Klan-inspired Birth of a Nation (1915) used blackface, as did Swing Time (1936) showing Fred Astaire mimicking the tap dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson. The German film The Eternal Jew (1940) was violently anti-Semitic, promoting Nazi propaganda regarding the inferiority, depravity and parasitic character of the Jewish people. It was styled as a documentary promoting the perception that Jews were like a horde of rats, but it was a commercial flop. More successful was Jew Süss (1940), a fictionalized historical film based on the life of Joseph Süss, a Jewish tax collector and financial advisor to the Duke of Stuttgart in the 18th century. Süss was presented as a manipulative and sophisticated man, racially stereotyped through appearance and vocation, who preyed on innocent Aryan girls. The film ends with his suicide by hanging and the expulsion of Jews from the German territory of Württemberg (Culbert 2002). Mickey Rooney famously played a racially stereotyped Japanese character, I.Y Yunioshi, in the film adaptation of Truman Capote’s book Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Edwards 1961). ‘Yellowface’ has become more sophisticated recently, to the chagrin of Asian Americans, with Scarlett Johansson in the postmodern remake of the cult Japanese manga film Ghost in the Shell (Sanders 2017) and Billy Magnussen as a white American in the biopic about the Kung Fu film star Bruce Lee, Birth of the Dragon (Nolfi 2016). The inclusion of a fictional white character, Steve McKee, who acts as a mediator in the film, arguably reduces Lee to a bit part in his own biopic by applying a western gaze to events (Pulver 2016). Racist representations reinforce the ambiguity of humour, which may inform us about socio-cultural norms but challenges shared values, habits and practices (Carroll 2014: 79). Both Entartete Kunst and Entartete Musik were unconcerned with inclusive dialogue but obsessed with the ‘pollution’ of German society. A forerunner of this brutal outlook was Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist who was very influential on the conceptualization of National Socialism and its related cultural policy. He founded the Militant League for German Culture (1928), which created xenophobic and racist policies to construct a ‘pure’ German culture that needed protecting from ‘degenerate’ foreign influences, modernism, communism and Semitic culture, hence the allure of Wagnerian opera steeped in German mythology. The first counterpoint to Entartete Kunst in the UK was the London 1938: Defending Degenerate ‘German’ Art exhibition held at the New Burlington Galleries, which showed the work of major Expressionists (including Franz Marc, Max Pechstein and Wassily 6

Early Dixieland ‘trad’ jazz and Ragtime did, to some extent, adhere to strict tempo, but the swing music of the 1930s, epitomized in Europe by Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club of France, took jazz into the highly syncopated modern era.

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Kandinsky (Wiener Library 2018)). With regard to issues of marginalization, the Inner Worlds Outside exhibition (2006) that toured Madrid (La Fundación ‘La Caixa’), London (Whitechapel Gallery) and Dublin (Irish Museum of Modern Art) was a belated attempt to explode the myths perpetrated by the Entartete Kunst exhibition. It rearticulated and recuperated Modern Art and Outsider Art, reasserting the positive relationship between avant-gardism and Marginal Art whilst emphasizing how both types of art share a modernist focus and expression. The exhibitors were ‘star’ artists from both fields, and included avant-gardists Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, André Masson, Juan Miró, Emil Nolde, Francis Picabia and Egon Schiele. Well-known artists from the Outsider Art world included Henry Darger, Albert Louden, Madge Gill, Martín Ramírez, Friedrich SchröderSonnenstern, Scottie Wilson and Adolf Wölfli. There was great emphasis on individual characteristics rather than collective ideas, thereby highlighting an outsider model of individual ‘deviance and self-engrossment’ (Cardinal 2006: 18) and the maverick artist who craves solitude. Here it is worth applying some postcolonial theory as it adds weight to understanding the process of inclusion and exclusion. Edward Said (1978) applied his concept of ‘orientalism’ to describe how diverse peoples from the East articulated their understanding of the world through western eyes, a mimicry that is discursively constructed. It mirrors to a large extent Franz Fanon’s (1967 [1952]) notion of ‘white masks’ worn by ethnic minorities, symbolizing a form of self-censorship that enabled colonialists to subjugate indigenous people and culture whilst offering them a way into that colonial society. Meanwhile, the white colonialist desires the ‘other’ as he or she is deemed authentic, taboo and unavailable, which maybe offers another dimension to an identification with ‘blackface’ by the busker outside the cathedral at Santiago. Moreover, mimicry from a dominant position and superior in tone echoes bourgeois desire for working-class authenticity. Homi Bhabha expanded on the idea of polarity at the heart of racism by suggesting that Said was reluctant to more fully engage with ambivalence and alterity. He (Bhabha 1994) employed the terminology of ambivalence to expose the ‘forked tongue’ and identity split that the marginal colonized underwent in order to understand and present the perspective of the colonizer as well as express their own authentic culture and individualism. Here mimicry offers a dissonant identity as it highlights inner turmoil and the inability to be included on equal terms with the colonizer, although mockery by the subjugated when utilized in particular ways temporarily inverts power relations. Arguably, the ideas of Said, Fanon and Bhabha throw light on the tactics employed by the marginal. These help to explain why they cannot fully heal the dissonance in their own identities resulting from the clash between hegemonic structural perspectives and their own ‘authentic’ cultural and individual positions. Michel de Certeau (1984) recognized a complex relationship between strategies that manage the marginal outsider and the tactical nous of the ‘other’ to resist this. The marginal employ evasive tactics to prevent co-option and resist the transformative effects of established strategies, and they find little victories in the workplace or through leisure activities to deny assimilation. Humour is a key strategy and social practice through which to negotiate issues encountered by marginal individuals and groups, whether around racism, sexism, homophobia or class, however ambiguous and distorted this may appear to the uninitiated. So there is a range of positive and negative socio-cultural practices and values that emanate from the instrumental rationales associated with art and humour, whether concerning social cohesion,

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stereotype, resistance or taboo. Too often these are negative, cruel and exclusionary, which helps to construct the abnormal ‘other’.

Madness, Art and Humour The association of mental illness with art and humour has a long history, not least in relation to positive therapeutic rationales. Both can be employed diagnostically to reveal or support medical, psychological and therapeutic understandings through the scrutiny of oral or visual patient narratives. Michel Foucault (1998: 335) reasoned that ‘madness has always excluded’, leaving those considered mad as peripheral victims steeped in negative discourses that have shaped misunderstanding, whether religious, magical or pathological (1998: 337). He (Foucault 1971) traced the history and evolution of madness, the response to this within Europe, and how the ‘enlightened’ 18th century ‘Age of Reason’ initiated its removal from society altogether. This instigated a new discourse of madness as an illness (and notions of (in)curability) far removed from the renaissance concept of divine spirit. Nevertheless, in reality the removal and exclusion of the mad from everyday life into psychiatric hospitals and asylums was possibly a patchier and ongoing process, with attitudes towards the insane prior to incarceration far from positive or divine in orientation. Roy Porter researched the history of psychiatry and how the stigma attached to those labelled ‘mad’ alerts society to deviancy and danger, creating ‘otherness’. Apportioning madness or mental illness to the ‘other’ is a powerful exclusionary discourse which is sustained through humour, amongst other mechanisms, often in relation to the visual appearance of madness, ‘“wild men’ with straw in their hair and their clothes threadbare, ripped or fantastical, or sometimes barely a stitch’ (Porter 2002: 64). In the Middle Ages, prior to the ‘Age of Reason’, the discourse of ‘divine madness’ and folly positioned those labelled mad to possess a fiery spirit and in touch with god. Also, there was recognition of a ‘poetic melancholia’ whereby the ‘manic’ creative spark was perceived to accompany periods of depression (and roughly corresponds to manic depression). So the mad suffered powerful creative urges, hence creativity expressed and symbolized madness. Today this terminology offers an ambiguous representation and, as Porter surmised, the medicalization of insanity and the rationalization of madness has helped to ‘undermine … and render … obsolete the old figure of the “witty fool” with his riddling truths and carnivalesque freedoms’ (2002: 76). The incarceration of the mad into asylums and prisons disinvested them of their visibility and creativity, both literally and in terms of representation. It was the burgeoning avant-garde of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that started to coopt madness as an alternative creative response to bourgeois hegemony and the alienating material reality of capitalism, embodied by Vincent Van Gogh’s tragic life. Later, Jean Dubuffet (1949), who championed Art Brut and the work of those excluded in hospital or asylum, reiterated that there was a direct link between art and madness, part of his anticultural and antirational critique of western culture (Couette 2018: 51). As previously acknowledged, Erving Goffman (1991 [1961]) referred to the importance of maintaining a sense of self for psychiatric inmates, which within a total institution requires adjustments due to altered circumstances. He argued that the self is mortified (loses identity) partly through ‘civic apathy’ as it is not taken seriously, cut loose from previous identity positions that have been replaced by identification

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with an institutional regime. Because the rationalization and medicalization of mental illness mortified the patient living an incarcerated lifestyle, which process replaced creative self-expression (the witty fool), there was a feeling of betrayal by those close relatives and friends who had colluded to have the ‘patient’ committed through the false belief that institutionalization would create normality and adjustment. As Goffman acknowledged: one expects [patients] to find alienation and mortification followed by a new set of beliefs about the world and a new way of conceiving of selves … this rebirth does sometimes occur, taking a strong belief in the psychiatric perspective … however; it can illustrate the possibility that in casting off the raiments of the old self – or in having this cover torn away – the person need not seek a new robe and a new audience before which to cower (Goffman 1991: 155). The mortification of the self and lack of control over identity accompanies a very different attitude and morality, a concern for survival within a hostile institutional environment. It affects self-presentation (Goffman 1959), which requires dramatic performances of identity to sustain self-image in public situations. This entails relevant props, externalities that include clothing, hairstyle and comportment. In the asylum the patient is stripped of these markers of identity, replaced by institutional clothing and haircuts, and the mortified self loses contact with former identities – for example, by answering to a surname rather than a Christian name or, in extremis, a number rather than a surname – all of which exacerbate guilt and shame. Goffman recognized three socially constructed notions of stigma associated with shame: First, there are abominations of the body – the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty … inferred from … mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism … unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation and religion (Goffman 1990 [1963]: 14). The drivers of exclusion are inextricably linked, stoked up by the anxieties and moral panics that mainstream society instigates towards marginalized ‘others’. Nonetheless, there are tactics for altering a ‘spoiled’ identity resulting from social stigma, whether through sullenness, denial or humour. Goffman maintained that resistance by the stigmatized included using ingratiating tactics towards the asylum staff and humour and ambivalence towards their own adjustments. He (1990: 162) cited a disabled girl who had lost a leg and used dark incongruous humour to manage her trauma: Questions about how I lost my leg used to annoy me, so I developed a stock answer that kept these people from asking further. ‘I borrowed some money from a loan company and they are holding my leg for security.’ This suggests that humour can generate much agency and creativity for those stigmatized, which empowers them.

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Minority Humour: Exclusion, Ambivalence and Survival Humour in relation to minority cultures may concern issues surrounding national identity, ethnicity, political and cultural beliefs, specific representations and lifestyles that challenge traditional boundaries and the system of inclusion (Kessel 2012: 16). As already established, ‘humour styles’ can operate counterculturally and subversively, as well as in a mainstream hegemonic fashion, constructing and deconstructing identities. They marginalize or incorporate individuals and communities through identification with similarity and difference, showing the changeable processes of inclusion and exclusion. Martina Kessell argued that humour has been a low priority for historians, just as Cate Watson (2015) and Jennifer Higgie (2007) argued it has been for sociologists and art historians respectively, although humour can be applied as a category of social analysis and challenge assumptions concerning cultural practices. As a force of exclusion, humour as used by authoritarian regimes (and some democratically elected governments) is employed in a superior fashion to delegitimize diversity and criticality. But unofficial oral culture can offer resistance, as highlighted earlier through specific jokes in the Soviet Union (Benton 1988) and street art in the former communist Eastern Europe; for example, in Prague (Clements 2017a: 112–3). Resistant jokes are shared by people who have similar views and values, not those part of official networks, therefore counter-hegemonic humour has to be very secretive and exclusive. Kessell (2012: 7) emphasized context with the anecdote that The Great Dictator (Chaplin 1940), a film in which Charlie Chaplin satirized Adolf Hitler, was employed by the US as part of its re-education programme in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich and Nazi ideology, although audience ‘laughter gave way to silence’. This defeated and excluded society was still not ready to laugh at its former leader or its own collective stupidity as it was riddled with hubris. Humour is not always a successful device for negotiating identity, and the silence of post-Nazi Germans was self-reflective and in dawning recognition of the horrific treatment of the excluded and how they were now the marginalized victims. Nonetheless, humour does help to dissolve boundaries and rejig representational positions (Kessell 2012: 16). Peter Jelavich (2012) referred to anti-Semitism in Germany before the First World War, when Jewish entertainers employed self-irony to negotiate their ambivalent social position. But the racist ‘turn’ which followed the German defeat in the Great War morphed comic representations into ‘true’ self-descriptions of Jews within a narrative of exclusion. Self-deprecating humour was a coping mechanism for Jews and an acceptable practice within the minority community, although this representation altered from inclusion to exclusion when taken out into wider Berlin society. The self-mockery of Jewish stereotype is comprehended very differently in a hostile environment emphasizing the contextual character of humour. Jewish entertainers were unsure whether the audience was laughing with the comic in a positive fashion or laughing at the comic Jew. There was also inter-ethnic tension amongst Jewish groups in Berlin in the 1920s, aiding and abetting anti-Semitism: The prevalence of jokes against Eastern European Jews, which made fun of their supposed lack of culture and hygiene, caused great dismay. Indeed, many of the apparently self-deprecatory jokes among Jews were not self-deprecatory in a strict sense: in the German context, they were told by socially and culturally assimilated Jews against the unassimilated Jews, still Yiddish-speaking Jews from the East (Jelavich 2012: 37).

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After the Nazi’s took political control of the country in 1933, Jewish entertainers became a target and negative representations of Jews hegemonic. Comics shied away from lampooning the Weimar Republic (encapsulated by the musical Cabaret, which opened on Broadway in 1966 and was translated into film (Fosse 1972)), and instead offered the audience safe sentimental humour and a sense of security in unstable times. Countercultural satire manifest in the Berlin cabaret and the avant-garde tradition of caricature (by George Grosz, Max Beckman, Otto Dix and the collages of John Heartfield) were lost as humour became superficial, visual and child-like, supporting the budding Nazified ideology. The theory of attitude endorsement suggests that ‘being comically amused by immoral jokes … shows that one endorses the sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, anti-Semitic (etc.) attitudes that the jibes themselves appear to presuppose’ (Carroll 2014: 92). Nonetheless, as Noël Carroll proposed, even a malicious, determined and discursive racist viewpoint offers other interpretations, and humorists were not the architects of Nazism, particularly Jewish comics. Again, humour is awkward and ambiguous, but, in the context of Germany during this historical period, superior humour expressed against the Jews appears difficult to defend as it endorsed a virulent racism, an attitude which morphed into barbarism and the Holocaust. Nevertheless, political correctness does not appear to deter Jewish comedians from tackling this taboo subject, again showing the contextual character of humour7. Whether and to what extent there should be limits to humour and no-go areas of taboo is a difficult judgement to make. First, humour is fleeting, contextual and temporal, therefore alters in terms of offence. Second, however seemingly offensive and immoral, it may open up new awareness, disrupt understanding and social boundaries. Third, political correctness sets itself up for satire often as humbug, when actions do not match the language employed (see Chapter 8). Lewd sexist, homophobic or superior racist jokes aimed at vulnerable people may appear offensive, but how it is received may vary in different situations. The skilled stand-up comic or caricaturist in some contexts may be able to alter representation; for example, a profoundly deaf humorist in relation to jokes about deaf identity. Celebrity African American musician Stevie Wonder encapsulated this talent, allegedly remarking in an interview when asked if he wished he had not been born blind: ‘Hey, it could’ve been much worse – I could have been born black’ (www. reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/194yb9). Moira Marsh alluded to definite taboo areas for comedy and the limits of humour in direct relation to morality, which today includes themes about rape, race and the Prophet Muhammad (Marsh 2014: 127). Positively, jokes about such themes can provoke debate and heated argument as disagreement is an important component of dialogue and the basis of democracy. Unfortunately, not all jokes trigger debate and those who identify negatively with the butt of the joke may only recognize the joker as a powerful bigot displaying superiority, rather than subtly playing with multiple narratives and realities. Bronwyn McGovern (2014), whilst undertaking micro-research into the humour of a homeless man called Brother in Wellington, New Zealand, highlighted the importance of 7

The ironic spirit of the Weimar cabaret was re-enacted by Mel Brooks’ film The Producers (1967), which tackled the sensitive issue of anti-Semitism through bad taste and satire. The narrative concerns two Jewish guys who produce a dreadful Broadway musical as a ruse to make money and clear debts. It is titled Springtime for Hitler, where the atrocious title track of the same name is Hitler’s favourite song sung by an SS storm trooper amongst a dancing chorus line. It included the classic ham-fisted line: ‘don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi Party.’

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his banter and ‘underdog humour’. She indicated how it disrupted established discourses of normalcy and was a coping strategy that helped him manage his life in a positive fashion. Teela Sanders (2004) acknowledged a similar phenomenon in relation to prostitutes who employed humour as an everyday technique for coping with life by distracting them from their working practices, thereby distancing themselves from their bodily actions. McGovern (2014) critiqued the academic discourse of social exclusion for the homeless as it formulated a helpless situation of victim, which denied agency to be playful and humorous. She observed Brother and noted that he answered prying questions from the public with nonsense and humour; for example, parodying work culture by pretending to have a briefcase and setting out for work. This aspect of his character humanized Brother but also challenged his discursive labelling as a homeless outsider, the top-down discursive control of representation, and the commonplace notion of ‘mad, sad or bad’ that pervades the socially excluded and infects the discourse of homelessness. Humour allowed Brother to pre-empt social stigma whilst retaining some degree of dignity and diffusing stereotypical responses to his lifestyle. It permitted him to construct his own persona and autonomy to remake his identity beyond the confined expectations of victim resulting from his excluded outsider existence. In contrast to this, negative representation was crystallized by the local media, which labelled Brother as dysfunctional, criminal, deviant, unclean, antisocial, an alcoholic and drug user. Charles Terry (1997), an ex-prisoner who studied sociology whilst serving his term, recognized humour as a means of managing the gap between a normal and convict identity. The role of prisoner required an unfeeling character as emotional mannerisms and any attempt to reveal a ‘normal’ identity were perceived as weakness, bringing with it difficulties. Influenced by Goffman’s notion of performance, Terry recognized that this role was a means to survival, where humour narratives manifest themselves through selfmockery alongside criticism of the system. This united fellow prisoners into a common resistant identity, play-acting that helped to release stress and reverse their excluded identity in response to a disciplinary institutional world. It bridged the gap between life outside and reality inside the criminal justice system. Another extreme exclusionary scenario of dark humour, described by Uğur Üngör (2015), is its function in war zones during genocide (in Syria and Bosnia). A range of expressive humorous responses are employed as a coping mechanism to create distance from painful memories and reality. This communication encourages bonding and treads on social taboos, operating as an inclusive mechanism strengthening relationships between those involved. Moreover, survival itself depends on acceptance by the group and strong social networks, so that lone wolves struggle to survive. Humour is employed as a protest and criticism of oppression, ideology or a specific regime. Üngör cited a Holocaust survivor who surmised that humour was ‘an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation’ (Viktor Frankl, cited in Üngör 2015: 84). In the siege of Sarajevo, Larisa Kurtovic (2012) observed that there were musical concerts and theatrical performances which, along with dark humour, opened up creative channels and an alternative culture that served to encourage people to assert a positive spirit in defiance of the war. Humour served to delegitimize the oppressors, whether through everyday jokes, caricatures, pithy banners, cabaret or finger-puppet shows. This concurs with my own experience of working in an extreme prison environment where one of my fellow teachers would use his hand puppets to informally entertain staff. Characters from the long-running children’s television programme Sooty and Sweep were recontextualized in ad hoc and whimsical improvised shows involving particular wing

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governors, prison officers and prisoners. In the prison environment, civilian teachers are regarded as outsiders by both prison officers and inmates, repositioning the notion of exclusion away from the obvious association with prisoners. Üngör (2015: 93) noted that there was nothing humorous about people caught up in extreme war situations, which indirectly concurs with Terry’s recognition that certain characters in prison were unable to laugh at their situations. Here the notion of ‘unlaughter’ combats the trivialization of these awful episodes in history. But he concluded that different examples of extreme victimization share similar humorous responses, which helps to overcome fatalism as it encourages an active engagement with the world rather than playing the role of passive victim. One particular discourse of exclusion that dovetails with superior humour is ugliness. Andrei Pop & Mechtild Widrich (2014) suggested that, historically, ugliness has correlations with sin, stupidity, imperfection and non-existence (hiding away), which by contrast implies that beauty is angelic, clever, perfect, successful and existent (highly visible). Far from conforming to homogeneous binary oppositions, ugliness is relative, with much ambiguity, not least because of different tastes about what is beautiful alongside pressure for diversity and heterogeneity that challenges stereotype. Ugliness can be a political category that ridicules the powerful and mainstream perceptions, which acts as a sociocultural counterweight encouraging other viewpoints. Difference also reflects individualism, as expressed by key Gothic writers who fetishized ugliness; for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Shelley 1818) with regard to a simple-minded man-made monster; Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo 1831) and the tragic tale of disfigured Quasimodo confined to the cathedral, enduring public humiliation as a result of his unrequited love of Esmeralda; Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of morality, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson 1886), which involved a schizophrenic doctor who transforms into an ugly killer; and Bram Stoker’s horror story and fantasy Dracula (Stoker 1897), in which a ghostlike man lived by night, biting and sucking the lifeblood out of his victims. Ugliness is ambiguous and contentious, as Pop & Widrich contended, but however much ‘the ugly’ are conceived as more than some piece of detritus, and less than an eternal truth: it is more of the tools by which we organise the world, for better or for worse (Pop & Widrich 2014: 9). Satire and irony offer support for the deformed or disfigured, thereby wielding ‘ugliness’ against the arbiters of taste to counter negative mainstream values. Gretchen Henderson (2014) offered a compelling case for ugliness as a culturally and aesthetically inclusive feature, however much it excluded people socially, through the 18th century formation of Ugly Clubs. The Ugly Face Club of Liverpool, UK, was a heterotopia where the disfigured accrued status through their abnormality. The male club that formed in 1743 was an avenue for socializing, drinking, dining and singing songs amongst ‘friends’ and an early example of disability activism. Some members even exaggerated their ‘abnormalities’ as a counter-hegemonic challenge to traditional notions of beauty. Nonetheless, these agglomerations of facially disfigured characters attempted to ‘deface’ and reposition ugliness, disrupt traditional taste and ridicule sensory prejudice. Visual art has been key in this regard, with Quinten Massys’ depiction of the Ugly Duchess (1513), Jusepe de Ribera’s 17th century disfigured heads, the self-portraits painted by Rembrandt in the late 17th century, and H.R. Pickerill’s images of facial

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deformities resulting from the First World War. These representations were starkly realistic, not parodic, and they offered degrees of respect and acceptance of disability, in marked contrast to the later debasement of the disabled in the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Modernism and especially the avant-garde have embraced the ugly, decadent and grotesque, and have employed the ‘other’ as a method to usurp hegemony and, in particular, bourgeois taste. It was a riposte to the body beautiful and symbolic renaissance connotations of godliness and tainted notions of enlightenment. Modern art from the late 19th century has to be understood against the backdrop of urban squalor resulting from industrialization and, in the early 20th century, the senseless world wars and Great Depression. This alternative position accepts art as ‘dirty’ and everyday, with its socio-political utility beyond superficial beauty and exclusive aesthetic conceptions (Widrich 2014). Ugliness in the extreme was practised in the early 1960s through the ‘actions’ of the Viennese Actionists (Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Herman Nitsch). They incorporated naked and bound bodies, excrement, detritus, food, blood, paint and slaughter into their performances, which elicited visceral reactions from audiences with regard to acceptable taste, not least in relation to the highly gendered content of their ‘actions’. Just like early 20th century avant-garde output, these political actions focused on ideological and ethical issues, not body beautiful (Clements 2017a: 180). Earlier, for Dadaists, it concerned the ‘unbeauty’ of war, class inequality and imperialism; for Surrealists, the liberation of a repressed subconscious, warts and all; and for the Viennese Actionists an upright and conservative Austrian society that had been compliant with Nazism. Here the alternative ‘other’ is employed to question boundaries of acceptable taste and cultural mores. As has been shown, humour contributes to this changeable discourse, both promoting established thinking and values whilst holding a mirror up to them.

Satire and Irony: the Absurd and Carnival Chaos The binary notion of order and chaos is a backdrop for humour (Meisel 2015) whereby stories we construct of the world are comforting vehicles used to transmit structure and a dread of disorder. Here humour mediates our concerns about chaos, which is projected as unwanted change, strife and dissolution. Chaos Theory, with its roots in mathematics and physics, helps explain the effects of humour. The basic premise is that tiny changes in any system have enormous repercussions, encapsulated by the Butterfly Effect which Edward Lorenz (1972) explained by asking: ‘Does the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’ Its hallmarks are sensitive dependence (hence the massive effects), determinism (a causal relationship) and non-linearity (the unexpected and non-rational). These affect predictions and modelling, exemplified by the difficulties in constructing an accurate weather forecast. The minute changes that may go unnoticed today, for example, may derail the prediction for tomorrow, which differences between reality and hypothetical calculation grow exponentially. Chaos Theory attempts to understand the nature of uncertainty in relation to the prediction of short-term events and long-term modelling as empirical reality differs sharply from theoretical expectations (Smith 2007). The notion that insignificant errors and minor alterations within a system have such enormous effects on the future recognizes the power of humour. It is those quirky movements, tiny alterations of language or changes in visual perception that construct the anarchy and incongruity starting with a hint of a smile or titter, which may build up and erupt into gales of laughter.

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Chaos Theory is applicable to other socio-cultural processes, in particular Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 35–7) recognition of the tactics underpinning small and active rebellions that people undertake in the workplace and everyday life more generally, which are often unnoticed but challenge authority and the status quo. These resistant practices are a safety valve of sanity for those lacking a voice and subjugated at work or home. It helps them to endure the established strategies and drudgery of what de Certeau termed the hierarchical scriptural economy. For example, the ‘not joke’, which, as already suggested, requires subtlety and particular timing, may be employed as a retort by a lowly worker to the manager, either stated very quietly out of earshot or added later in front of colleagues when the manager has departed the scene: Manager: Hey guys, listen up! I want you all to put in a little extra to ensure that we complete our target today … Worker: [whispers] Not! These whispered and silent rebellions can mount up and help foment rebellion, even strike action. They are small alterations of everyday texts that are a riposte by those without a voice to established culture. De Certeau labelled this poesis, hidden resistance against mainstream cultural practices and meanings, where incremental changes, often unseen, alter the representation and reality and can result in social unrest. The minor tactics of resistance erupt as though out of the ether, however much these have existed in hidden, unconscious or semi-conscious spaces. Chaos in physics concerns the transformation and transfer of energy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts that, in an isolated system, if energy is transformed or transferred from one state to another some of it is wasted and the system degenerates into a disordered state (Smith 2007). Here physics is a metaphor for society and individual thinking, which has an inclination to creative disorder: Thus, with perfect order … there is a resistance that makes itself felt not only in the realm of experience but in the workshop of the imagination (Meisel 2015: 35). So chaos is a fruitful area for humour as it instigates trans-rationality, discombobulation and disarticulation, thereby allowing a reconfiguration of new ideas. Barbara Babcock employed the term ‘symbolic inversion’ to define anarchic behaviour that inverts, contradicts, abrogates or presents an alternative meaning to cultural codes, values and norms (Babcock 1978: 14). This is the basis of the reversible world of comic incongruity which offers relief and playfulness, a space for creativity in which to try out new roles and ideas. As shown, society requires inversion and mess in order to define and question hegemony and construct other understandings and systems, which suggests there are no limitations to possibilities. Babcock referred to the trickster, clown and transvestite as creating havoc, thereby reminding the rest of society of the arbitrary imposition and boundaries of order that determine inclusion and acceptability. Symbolic inversion challenges expected behaviour, thinking and meaning, an antithesis to order and steeped in confusion. Jokes contain coded messages which, as Mary Douglas (1966) suggested in relation to her anthropological fieldwork with Pacific islanders, counters the formalities and social restraints of everyday life and pollutes it. The joke disorganizes obvious and routinized behaviours, therefore offering confusion and counter-discourse.

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Humour can reconstitute a discourse of freedom as anarchic play in opposition to hierarchy and rationality, therefore creating an antidote to controlled meaning. It suggests that whoever can harness humorous chaos will be powerful, whether democrat, monarch or dictator. Matthias Bruhn (2012: 83–4) acknowledged that political propaganda has capitalized on clearing up such ‘disorder’, recuperating the term through everyday usage, whether in relation to traffic or banking chaos. Hygiene refers to order and a metaphorical new broom to sweep society clean, which ideologically reconfigures mayhem8. Both revolutionary communist and fascist propaganda machines have referred to cleansing the world of chaos, including all opposing ideologies and those who support them. Bruhn indicated that interest in Chaos Theory, and the need to control and harness chaos, challenges and unpicks the symmetry of the canonical arts and science. These represent world order and balance that is emplaced by the architecture of churches, museums, educational institutions, government buildings, factories, military establishments and residential housing estates, even the spatial dynamics of a cemetery. Our understanding and experience of symbolic inversion, chaos and resistance associated with carnivalesque is expressed at demonstrations and festivals, and through a range of avant-garde culture, graphic realism, street art, graffiti and caricature. These heterotopian spaces and texts of ‘freedom’ allow us to let off steam and enjoy ourselves, with an historical lineage that encompasses Roman Saturnalias and medieval carnival in Europe (Bakhtin 1984; 1998). Victor Turner (1982) focused on the temporary suspension of hierarchy and authority in small-scale communities, whereby jokes challenge the notion of structure, creating liminal space and anti-structure. Carnival inversions (beggar as king/king as beggar) are a reconfiguration of power and powerlessness, an enactment of alterity that has an equalizing effect on the community involved. Ordered time from the Christian calendar is juxtaposed with and challenged by anti-time (carnival time) performed during Shrovetide. Role reversals include grotesque masquerade and monstrosity, a parodic representational strategy that expresses a world turned upside down. People’s laughter mocks tradition, hierarchy and authority, which encourages dialogue between different social strata that official culture constrains and is unable to express (Meisel 2015: 124). A double life of official time allied to the drudgery of work and domesticity in everyday life coexists with carnivalesque spirit and anti-culture associated with leisure and festive space. Today this concerns real and virtual lives as people attempt to escape their rationalized work life through fantasy and phantasmagoria, often through identification with an online avatar. Peter Stallybrass & Allon White (1986: 27–37) have maintained that this ambivalent resistance has been recuperated in the main, because by the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe the carnivalesque emplaced in festivals and the medieval marketplace had been neutralized by a rational coffee house culture. This newly controlled space corresponded to the emergence of the bourgeoisie from the shadows of the aristocracy and its controlling gaze, where the market was reordered to express a staid ‘businesslike’ identity and the serious world of capitalism (the appropriate, sensible and practical conditions for commerce). However, historically and prior to bourgeois hegemony, hierarchy inversion associated with carnivalesque practices expressed the contradictory nature of social and aesthetic hierarchies. The ‘world turned upside down’ (as acknowledged earlier through the Tom and Jerry cartoon) was expressed through literature and drama, and visually through woodcuts and prints with obvious reversals: 8

The meaning of ‘hygiene’ is typified by right-wing governments promising to rid business and service organizations of ‘dirty’ bureaucracy to save money, giving the impression that administrators are neither needed nor work hard enough, which is myopic as these organizations cannot function without them.

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the pig butchers the butcher; the ass whips its laden master; the mice chase the cat; the deer and the rabbit pursue the huntsman; the servant rides on a horse followed by the king on foot; the general is inspected by the private; the woman stands with the gun in her arms whilst the husband sits spinning; the wife holds her husband down and beats him (Stallybrass & White 1986: 56–7). Such a ritual expression of a world turned upside down includes a focus on physicality and the grotesque characterization of the lower half of the body and its representation as pleasure, in contrast to the cerebral and ‘pure’ upper half. Dirtiness is embodied in the carnival term Mardi Gras (Fat or Greasy Tuesday), through which the Christian calendar demarcates the socio-cultural space of Shrovetide (representing pleasure and playfulness) from Lent (representing emaciation and abstinence). Stallybrass & White (1986: 187) employed this binary distinction to separate the filthy and playful standards of the peasantry enjoying carnivalesque humour from the emerging ‘hegemonic standards of life’, embodied by the serious and important bourgeois individualist promoting cleanliness and a perception of acceptable conduct in reaction to the ‘dirty’ collective throng. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted carnival chaos and real-life heterotopias in the 16th century employing a comedic figurative style. The Fight between Carnival and Lent reveals the religious polemic between church and tavern (heaven and hell) with much playful entertainment and humour (see Fig 5.3). The official and grimly pious religious culture is spatialized, situated on the right-hand side of the painting (as viewed), whilst the culture of the tavern, festivities and liminal space is situated on the other side of the picture.

Figure 5.3 The Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559/60, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 118 x 164cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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The title of the painting is embodied in the foreground by the central figure of a butcher (indicated by the sheath of knives on his belt) atop a beer barrel (symbolizing carnival). He is an object of ridicule, drunkenly jousting using a skewered head of a pig and sausages, balancing a meat pie on his head with his right foot in a cooking pot. Meanwhile, the devout, emaciated woman with whom he is sparring (representing Lady Lent) is dragged around on a makeshift cart by a monk and a nun watched by pious churchgoers. Bruegel mocks her as she is wearing a basket on her head and holding out a platter of two measly fish to the butcher, as though those practising Lent are parsimonious killjoys and extremely dull (or it could be a satire on the miraculous biblical feeding of the five thousand). It conjures up the mésalliance of fat as joyous fun and thin as serious and miserable, which challenges Christian mores. The drinkers around the tavern watch some sort of performance and there is music playing, which reiterates that the carnival is more entertaining, fun and interesting than religious piety (hell rather than heaven). At the street crossing, a group with disabilities has come out to beg, whilst behind them a piper leads a procession of lepers, further satirizing Lady Lent’s procession. Although the painting contains an air of mundanity, it questions normalcy and who are the marginalized, which offers sophisticated layers of meaning and humour with much incongruity and playfulness. Even though Bruegel appears to deride the parsimonious worshippers more than the Rabelaisian drinkers, because everyone is implicated in the humour, there is no superiority, exclusion or victimhood but a dialogue between the different ideas and communities, with both Lady Lent and the butcher objects of ridicule, epitomizing carnival time. Fools and clowns or ‘others’ on the borderline of inclusion are central to Bruegel’s vision and he employed people’s laughter to pronounce on social problems and injustice (hence the disabled beggars and procession of lepers). There are questions concerning whether humour makes misery and disappointment more bearable, classically enacted through the gallows humour of prisoners awaiting trial and possible death, or whether it promotes a reassessment of society and thereby encourages a political viewpoint to alter the conditions that formulate suffering. Carnival time is a complex heterotopia that creates a second life outside the official one, as virtual lives do today, a public act and performance of festive disorder which may appear all enveloping. In reality it reinforces norms which reappear after carnival as breaking rules only serves to highlight them and make visible the boundaries of acceptable taste and infraction. Subversive carnivalesque practices imagine chaos and utilize irony, satire and ridicule, but are directed at real social practices offering alterity. Order requires carnival disorder as a valve to vent frustration, which encourages ‘outsideness’ and dialogue beyond individual consciousness. As Martin Meisel (2015: 120) maintained, ‘carnival exists first as an actual occasion, second as a class of analogous events, and, finally, as a generalized version of an alternative reality’. So carnival chaos may recognize order as disorder, for example, as represented by utopia and dystopia (2015: 34) as these positions may be much closer to each other than imagined, as utopian ideals are imaginary and contain ‘dystopian’ possibility (Clements 2017a: 18–20). For Bakhtin, this parody of official ‘highbrow’ culture and the inversion of meanings was also an attack on Stalin and the regimented Soviet society from where he came, and a ‘lowbrow’ folk culture that had been reduced to a conformist orthodoxy kowtowing to the regime. His conceptualization of humour as an historical force for change was not only a riposte to Stalinism but also to puritanical Christianity and bourgeois values. Laughter concerned ambivalence based on a material and corporeal ‘lowbrow’ culture, rather than a mysterious spirituality (Lachmann et al. 1988: 125). Lachmann et al.,

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following on from Bakhtin, attributed carnivalesque laughter to a particular world view and ideology directed at higher authority, a shifting social order situated in an ideal resistant and subversive folk culture. However, Stallybrass & White (1986) recognized Bakhtin’s understanding of carnivalesque practices as over-emphasizing the freedoms associated with these rebellious social practices (however fleeting). After all, medieval times were especially harsh, with a low life expectancy and gross inequalities. Gavin Grindon (2004) has suggested that Bakhtin’s parallel between official and unofficial culture and blending of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures suggested carnival was far from revolutionary and easily recuperated. Laughter has a critical function, however limited its effects, as carnival is temporary and therefore sates a utopian longing rather than paves the way for long-term and progressive social change. The powerful Catholic Church recognized this and permitted ‘asinine masses’ during carnival, which parodied the church, its customs and practices with the comic braying of donkeys and mules an accompaniment to the service. These practices befit the Relief Theory of humour as carnival was an opportunity to let off steam, a safety valve and time for enjoyment so as to better put up with the misery of everyday medieval life; therefore supportive of the status quo rather than radical action. Today, engagement with demonstrations, satirical magazines like Private Eye (UK) and Charlie Hebdo (France) or alternative stand-up comedy acts offers a similar social function. Not unsurprisingly, carnival has been recuperated. Brendan Van Son (2011) has detailed a new form of racial segregation in Brazilian carnival, which is mediated through a private ‘bloco’, a term that describes a select party and entourage within carnival that forms around a street band and which is paid for and policed. It tends to be a roped-off area for predominantly affluent ‘non-black’ carnival goers, in blatant disregard of the communal ethos of carnival and free and familiar contact. This ‘embourgeoised’ privatization of the festivities corresponds to the changing political climate in Brazil and a renewed focus on elitism and exclusion9. In the UK the skimmington (and in the US the shivaree) was derived from the earlier medieval European charivari. It was a carnivalesque event enacted from the 17th to early 20th centuries in which particular members of the community were publicly ridiculed and sometimes forcibly ducked under water and pelted with missiles. This was graphically portrayed by William Hogarth’s print Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington (1726). It depicted mayhem in an English village where hen-pecked Hudibras and his overbearing wife are mocked by a rowdy gathering. Hudibras is shown on horseback protesting to the crowd, which he describes as the Devil’s Procession (Hislop & Hockenhull 2018: 48–50). Skimmingtons were unofficial acts of social justice that singled out those characters transgressing gender roles and norms, which included male adulterers and wife-beaters as well as domineering, shrewish women subjugating their husbands. It was punishment for men who abuse and are abused by women, which violates patriarchal norms and befits the topsy-turvy character of carnivalesque. These ‘battered husbands’ were unofficially humiliated in front of the local community and often forced to ride a donkey backwards, holding on to its tail (George 2002)10. Alternatively, from a feminist perspective, this 9

The denouement of this increasing inequality has been the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. 10 If husband and wife were mocked, both would ride the donkey back to back with some of the congregation carrying animal horns to symbolize that the husband had been cuckolded (George 2002: 115).

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ritual can be an acknowledgment ‘of the strength and indomitable spirit of women’ (2002: 119). The cacophony created by people beating out rhythms on pots and pans, alongside others playing whistles, bells and horns, was called ‘rough music’ (Thompson 1991), a term that has symbolic associations with domestic violence. Carnival, with its playful satire and improvised performance, spawned the Commedia dell’arte which developed in Italy in the 16th century. The ‘commedia dell’arte all’improvviso’, or ‘comedy of improvisation’, provided characters and masks for especially the Venice carnival. The masked actors improvised narrative to emphasize a range of stock characters, including the Plague Doctor, Harlequin, Pantalone, Colombine, Pulcinella, Pierrot and Scaramouche. Performances by the small troupe of actors were held every day and enacted on the street or in the piazza. This included the ritual humiliation of the gluttonous Pulcinella, a mean-spirited, disfigured hunchback who represented the universal concern for inadequate male parents who are unable to nurture or feed their family. He is a comic but pathetic character who attracts cruel humour and much irony in relation to male parenting practices. In the 18th and 19th centuries many Pulcinella figures dressed as hunchbacks in white pyjamas during the Verona carnival. They consumed the ritual feast of gnocchi (potato dumplings) situated on Friday (Venerdi Gnoccholare), a dish that is notoriously indigestible and causes severe indigestion, poor sleep and painful excretion (Hyman 2000: 42–6). Eggs were commonplace in carnival (thrown at those ridiculed) and there is symbolic correspondence with the fool. Pulcinella (translated as ‘little chicken’) was the fool hatched from an egg. And there was identification with the grown-up Pulcinella as a cockerel (lustful and vain) or as a cock (a prick), which helps to cement this association (2000: 25). Commedia dell’arte was adapted into British comic theatre from the 17th century, from which developed the Harlequinade (originally mime with stylized dancing to music), replaced in the late 19th century by pantomime. The sad Pierrot, or ‘White’ Clown, became a stalwart of French pantomime (the art of dramatizing silence) and later a metaphor for the modern (Brigstocke 2014: 119), with progressive actors of the late 19th century co-opting the dress and imagery to express their opposition to mainstream ideology. There was defiance as the Pierrot evolved into a modern ironic statement of aesthetic and political intent, both contradictory and ambiguous. This new carnivalesque, which sent up traditional values and representational practices, developed into satirical cabaret performance. Georges Rouault’s Le Clown Blessé (1932) is an ambiguous portrayal of three sad Pierrots under the light of the moon, which is a broader commentary on modernization and change. He used the subject of the clown to embody the outsider and colouration as a vehicle through which to express his emotions and the contradictions of modernity. Pucinella from the Commedia dell’arte and Italian puppetry was reinvented as the glove puppet Mr Punch, who became popular as children’s entertainment in the UK through the Punch and Judy show. This was performed by a puppeteer hidden in a booth with a tiny stage, in theatres and open-air venues, and particularly at seaside resorts. It was first staged in Covent Garden Market piazza in 1662, watched by the celebrity diarist Samuel Pepys (Gatrrell 2006: 46) when this area of London was a bohemian enclave, and today there is a commemorative plaque that marks this occasion (Masters 2012). Mr Punch, like his forebear, is a trickster. He is ugly, with a big, hooked nose, hunchback, spindly legs and squeaky voice, a buffoon and anti-hero. The shows have been deemed politically incorrect as people laugh at his ugliness and deformities, as well as at the rhetoric and brutality aimed at his wife Judy and the baby (Byrom 1972). He

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creates chaos and disorder within the domestic sphere and shows testiness towards other puppet characters (Constable, Crocodile, Doctor and Skeleton). The puppet-master engages the young audience using physical and violent knockabout, stimulating audience participation. The basic storyline is slapstick and centres on the bungling and hapless Mr Punch who fails in his task of babysitting, dropping the baby or putting it through a sausage machine, even hitting the baby with his stick. The Crocodile adds spice to the grotesque narrative of poor child-minding, with Mr Punch struggling to contain the animal and protect the baby from its snapping jaw. A section of Sydney de Hempsey’s script from a 1942 show gives a flavour of the knockabout: Judy: (from below) Oh, Mr Punch. I can’t find the baby anywhere. Punch: Can’t you? There you are, children. I told you that she was a wicked old woman, children. Judy: Oh, Mr Punch. I’ve got him. I have found him in the coal cellar. Punch: Oh, the naughty boy, the naughty boy, the naughty little rascal! Bring him up here, bring him up here, bring him up here. (Re-enter Judy with the baby) Punch: Oh, there he is. Give him to me, give him to me. (They both struggle for the baby) I’ve got him, I’ve got him! (Punch at last gets the baby and Judy falls on to the playboard) Wake up Judy, wake up Judy! Judy, here’s the baby, Judy. (They throw the baby at each other) Judy, you go down and get the tea ready and I’ll look after the baby. Judy: Will you look after the baby, Mr Punch? Punch: Oh yes, I’ll look after the baby. Judy: You won’t hurt the little dear, will you Mr Punch? Punch: Oh no, I won’t hurt the little darling. Judy: Now children, if Mr Punch makes my baby cry, will you call me up at once? (Punch sits on the playboard nursing the baby and sings ‘Hushabye Baby’) Judy: That’s right. Now I’ll go down and get the tea ready. Don’t forget to call me, children. (Exit Judy) (The baby starts crying) Punch: Don’t cry little baby, don’t cry, darling. (Baby still cries) (Punch rolls baby on the playboard) Rolley polley, rolley polley! (Punch throws the baby out among the audience still singing) Hip, pip, poy! Hip, pip, poy! (Re-enter Judy) According to de Hempsey’s script, Judy on her return brandishes a large stick to express her anger at Mr Punch’s fecklessness and mocks his authority in her own version of a skimmington. The Constable intervenes to create order from the chaos that ensues, employing his truncheon to batter whosoever and comically displaying police brutality. Meanwhile Mr Punch kills off members of the cast, re-emphasizing the grotesque character of the show. The denouement sees him counting his dead victims as he lays them out on the tiny stage as the puppeteer employs the Skeleton to represent the ghosts of the dead. They haunt Mr Punch, who is derided by the audience who boo him following a lead from the puppeteer. The focus on audience participation shares similarities with Christmas pantomime in the UK, as it engages young viewers through set role plays. Punch and Judy shows were even banned in the UK by local government (Cornwall Council) for their violence in 2004 (Masters 2012), but nonetheless the shows continue to thrive.

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Ryan Howard (2013) maintained that the Punch and Judy show exported to the US in the late 19th century was political, due to its focus on parenting and a moral narrative that promoted humanity. He stressed that the shows offered much diversity and symbolized unity by engaging the audience in an imaginary world. It is an example of how carnival humour brings people together, whereas ‘highbrow’ comedy requires knowledge and education, an ‘exclusive’ wit that divides (Howard 2013: 116). The show constructs a temporary pop-up heterotopia of carnival time that is anarchic and challenges political correctness.

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Representations of Humour by Marginal Artists

The broad focus of this chapter is to evaluate particular hypothetical constructs of marginal artist and the multidimensional character of this discourse. It revisits notions of resistance from the creative underground with regard to diversity, utopian and avant-garde ideals. This includes graphic realism, the cultural ordinary and ‘authentic’ expression from the margins, the art of those at the edges of society that highlights the tensions between the social and cultural conditions of exclusion and issues of classification. Three overlapping models of marginal art are detailed and evaluated, that of Outsider Art (Dubuffet, Cardinal, Maizels and Wojcik), Welfare Art (Levine and Clements) and Savant Art (Sacks and Pring et al.), which includes criticisms of the discourse of Outsider Art (Ames, Prinz and Dubin). A wider historical overview of carnivalesque places and practices situated in omnivorous taste is further explored, as is how heterogeneity creates degrees of dissonance (Lahire). Outsider Art has become high profile, and those with ‘highbrow’ tastes shore up their authenticity-security through the collection of Marginal Art (Hahl et al.), which is a game of acquiring outsider authenticity. Outsider Art and humorous expression by the marginal is showcased through examples from the visual arts and literature. There are examples of humorous art from: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Grandma Prisbrey, Jim Bloom, Ben Wilson, Slinkachu, Elfo, Frank Bruno and Luis Valdés, with reference to the artist’s joke and mainstream art. Examples of outsider literature is showcased specifically in relation to humorous depictions of excluded lifestyles from well-known beat writers including Charles Bukowski, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, and lesser-known writers including Greg Baxter and Wally Jiagoo. The quirky disabled singer and songwriter Ian Dury adds a disabled perspective to humour and resistance.

Discourses of Creative Outsider Culture: Outsider Art, Welfare Art and Savant Art I have explored particular aspects and discourses of exclusion and marginal creative culture in previous publications. First, The Creative Underground: Art, Politics and Everyday Life (Clements 2017a) took a wide-ranging perspective that focused on aesthetics and politics as expressed through utopian and avant-garde ideas, resistant public art and activist-art practices. These alternative texts from a range of marginal individuals and groups included humour to situate art as an everyday expression of radical diverse voices. It focused on the art manifesto, which is to differing degrees aesthetic and socio-political in orientation, with much rhetorical and performative language. Moreover, the demarcation between serious

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intent and playfulness is not altogether clear, which was highlighted initially by the avant-garde practices of the Italian and Russian Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists. Here, ideally, art merges with everyday life and offers an enchanting utopian post-work scenario that reinvents society, a ‘fantasy’, which can be realized to some extent through the expeditious use of technology. With regard to humour, the ironic denouement of avant-gardism was possibly Piero Manzoni’s neo-Dada Merde d’Artista (1961), cans of human crap which were sold individually for grotesque prices (one sold for €275,000 in 2016). In contrast to this parodic attack on the art world, the marginal artist Nek Chand (2015) created a surreal 13-acre Sculpture Park in Chandigarh, India, in response to his dream of the magical kingdom of Sukrani, in which he constructed its citizens and animals out of a playful range of waste material. Both artists express Mary Douglas’s symbolic understanding that dirt and detritus enable subversive humour which exposes the arbitrariness of meaning (cited in Eagleton 2019: 137), one creating a satirical political imaginary steeped in everyday life from the avant-garde margins and the other constructing visionary Marginal Art. Second, a graphic literary discourse of outsiderdom from a critically resistant workingclass perspective was set out in Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature and the Beat Movement (Clements 2013). It approached beat culture through the notion of the cultural ordinary in the tradition of realist literature and poetry, which explored humorous ‘art as life’ narratives and ‘deviant’ lifestyles associated with living on the margins. Charles Bukowski, whose expressive, succinct poetry and prose helped situate him as an outsider writer, lived a peripheral existence as an alcoholic bum and wandering factotum, employing much humour to situate his ‘loser’ credentials and challenge hegemony. His contribution alongside other beat writers and poets reflected a new wave of often excluded artists living on the edge of sanity, addiction and criminality. This sits within a realist literary tradition of hard-boiled ‘authenticity’ and the existential need to experience hardship and marginality in order to better communicate this through ‘art’. It concurs to some extent with Colin Wilson’s (1997 [1956]) notion of New Existentialism (and his forebears the French Existentialist writers). Inevitably these beat narratives draw on misfortune wrapped up in grotesque playful satire and incongruity. Third, and possibly the most relevant text, The Excluded Terms of Culture (Clements 2006) evaluated the creative production of disabled artists and highlighted the tensions between social and cultural conditions of exclusion. With regard to excluded culture, it distinguished the Outsider Art model, of star marginal artists who produce a genre or canon that mimics ‘highbrow’ processes and practices, from a Welfare Art model predicated on a functional and medicalized conception of artists with mental health problems. It is revisited in this chapter with an additional psychological-medical category of Savant Art, which refers to those artists with autism, particularly Asperger’s Syndrome. The representation of disability has varied from visionary genius to negative spectacle and the abnormalization of specific groups, with disinformation produced by a media dominated by technology and appearance (Debord 1995). This is prescient in today’s climate of fake news, as previously detailed, where media practices exacerbate the iniquities. An example of the problems with ‘outsider’ labels and classifications set out in the article was clarified to some extent through the biographical narrative of Albert Louden. He was a self-taught artist who acquired ‘star’ outsider artist status with a biography of obsessiveness testimony to his compulsive need to paint, and was later championed then rejected by specialist Outsider Art galleries (and later re-appropriated (Windsor 1997;

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Rhodes 2000)). John Windsor has suggested that he was a casualty of Outsider Art orthodoxy precisely because he was not incarcerated and was able to hold down a job as a van driver. Louden actively supported a Marxist ideology and painted in his spare time, but lacked the romantic biography of extreme ‘otherness’ and marginality. Besides which, his interest in his own career badly affected his reputation as it contradicted the ‘authentic’ stereotype of outsider as a dysfunctional narcissist and unambitious artist. Initially, after visiting the Outsider Art exhibition in London (Hayward Gallery 1979), he approached the dealer and collector Victor Musgrave, a doyen of Outsider Art who was enthusiastic about his work. He self-consciously built up his reputation, which included a one-man show in London at the Serpentine Gallery (Louden 1985). Colin Rhodes (2000: 20) explained: At this point Louden found himself subject to the fate of many marginal artists; as he seemingly ‘came in’ from the outside, his old support dwindled, whilst mainstream acceptance failed to materialize … his critics argued conveniently that his interest in his own success was deemed to have adversely affected the quality of his production. This cameo introduces the precariousness of identification classifications and aesthetic regimes, and the unrealistic mythology attached to marginal artists, especially the cachet of the label Outsider Art. At the height of Louden’s success in 1990–91 his work was shown in 13 commercial and 11 public galleries worldwide. But it was Musgrave’s thenwife Monika Kinley, another powerful gatekeeper in the Outsider Art world, who reckoned that his work was too commercial, therefore he was not an outsider artist, and the market dumped him (Windsor 1997). Nonetheless, Louden has been recuperated and now his work is showcased through the Henry Boxer Gallery in London (www.outsiderart.co.uk/artists/albert-louden); the Karl Hammer Gallery in Chicago (www.carlhammergallery.com/artists/albert-louden); and the Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-taught and Outsider Art, much of which resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum. Furthermore he: has exhibited internationally, and his works are held in many public and private collections in Britain and around the world, including the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, and the Collection l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. (www.artnet.com/artists/albert-louden/) Such an extensive list of exhibitions and galleries that populate his curriculum vitae parallels the methods of traditional ‘highbrow’ art promotion and questions the terms of outsiderdom, as does the notion that Louden was ‘discovered’ in 1979 by Victor Musgrave. Whether his success or commercial attitude de-authenticates his art is a point of debate. Outsider Art Outsider Art picks up on particular conceptualizations and hybrid possibilities of ‘outsider’, which is nuanced and far from straightforward1. The Outsider Art model, as 1

For the sake of clarity, the term ‘Outsider Art’ is employed with the initial letter of each word capitalized to signify a specific classification.

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constructed by Roger Cardinal (1972), crystallized the ideas of Jean Dubuffet’s notion of Art Brut (Raw Art), and, like other avant-gardists in the 1940s, he continued to look outside traditional art spaces and bourgeois notions of art. In 1948 he created an archive of art from psychiatric hospitals (Compagne de l’Art Brut), which included photographs and portraits of the artists (aided by the documentary photographer Robert Doisneau2), and original groundbreaking texts about the art of the insane by Walter Morgenthaller, Hans Prinzhorn, Marcel Réja and Jean Vichon. This helped to seed the romantic mythology of Art Brut. Dubuffet pronounced in his dissident and contrary way that this ‘anti-art’ was not created by artists, as these creative producers were unable to follow career paths due to their estrangement from culture (Peiry 2006: 90–1). This bestowed morality and innocence, as well as authenticity, and connoted that their expressive creations were a return to the basic principles that artists had lost, which contrasts with the realpolitik of art worlds and markets3. He baulked at the hegemonic character of ‘high’ art, where canons vie for recognition and original new work (from avant-gardists) is ignored4. He argued that the oeuvre of Art Brut is: work produced by people immune to artistic culture in which there is little or no trace of mimicry (as is invariably the case with intellectuals); so that such creators owe everything … to their own resources rather than to the stereotypes of artistic tradition or fashion. Here we are witness to the artistic operation in its pristine form, something unadulterated, something reinvented from scratch at all stages by its maker, who draws solely upon his private impulses (Dubuffet 1949, cited in Cardinal 1994: 23). However romantic and magical this counter-hegemonic position avowing purity and authenticity, it fails to recognize any possible relationship or communication between legitimate and non-legitimate art worlds or the role of cultural intermediaries, especially gallery managers and artist agents. For example, Dubuffet liaised with marginal artists residing in excluded social spaces, whilst in the UK the St Ives School (Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood and Barbara Hepworth) co-opted the naive Cornish artist and fisherman Alfred Wallis, who was ‘discovered’ in 1928 (www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/ st-ives-school).

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Robert Doisneau was steeped in marginal culture. He, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Willy Ronis were dubbed the French Humanist Photographers (Hamilton 1997). They anchored their work in everyday life and particularly the classe populaire, which broadly concerns the working-class with potentially revolutionary ideas. This included les clochards (tramps and vagrants), embodied by his photograph Monsieur et Madame Garofino (1951), les baquistes (itinerant street performers) and les forains (side-show people). Doisneau’s The Admiral, King of the Tramps, his Queen Germaine and their Jester, the Former Clown Spinelli (1952) focused on les fêtes populaire (fairs and communal celebrations). These photographs offered resistance to hegemony and carnivalesque humour. There is symmetry with the 18th century artist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his discourse of uncultured ‘naturalness’, laid out in his novel Émile (1969 [1762]), whereby children (and those ‘noble savages’ living in tribal societies) are deemed to be repositories of authenticity and spirituality that is corrupted by instrumental bourgeois mannerisms and social practices. Today, new work is appropriated by art markets and cultural institutions more swiftly and extensively, with individual artists transformed into distinctive brands.

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Dubuffet’s bile was directed at the institutionalized art world, its privileged gatekeepers and rich patrons, although revolts against hegemony and tradition are ever vulnerable to assimilation, as was the co-option of the Impressionists by the Salon de Refusés in the late 19th century, or early 20th century avant-garde movements by global art institutions. Cardinal, like Dubuffet, supposed that creations by schizophrenics, visionaries and innocents were ‘outside’ society and its influences, hence his conceptualization of Outsider Art, which notion is illusory, however much the person is removed mentally, physically and spatially from society. He questioned elitism and prejudice in the arts and value judgements that determine cultural standards, implying that the classification of culture conditioned people. This can be situated in Foucauldian notions of discourse and genealogy that act to classify knowledge and determine taste, which is maintained and controlled by powerful social processes and practices. This will to control and its expression replace notions of objectivity and truth, reduced to regimes and fashions (Foucault 2000b: 13). Vera Zolberg defined marginality in the arts as referring to two types of artist. First, the maverick (which owes a debt to Howard Becker (1982)) who: deliberately refuses established artistic conventions, choosing instead to create in ways much more innovative than existing institutional gatekeepers would or could tolerate while still respecting their canon (Zolberg 2010: 100). The second manifestation of marginality does not concern choice but those excluded creators in society – whether the mentally ill, self-taught naive artists or ‘primitive peoples’ – ‘whose commitment is to something different from recognized art forms, yet whose works bear some relation or resemblance to art’ (Zolberg 2010:100). So, marginal artists on the cultural periphery comprise a variety of individuals and groups that embrace those unaware of the art world, those who cannot access it, those who have escaped it or those who despise the cultural system altogether. Cardinal distinguished between ‘normal’ artists who strive for recognition driven by aspiration and ‘outsider’ artists expressing their innermost selves without interest in selling their work or ambition, which offers a romantic binary construction. In reality, niche galleries and markets foster this mysterious and secretive world of Outsider Art, obfuscating instrumental objectives and concerns as they contradict the mythology of financial and career disinterest. Nonetheless, he supposed that the art ‘hankers for integration’ (Cardinal 1972: 35), which recuperation has occurred since the publication of his seminal book Outsider Art. The co-option of the outsider aesthetic regime to mimic ‘highbrow’ art appears a parody of the art world system whereby artistic quality is validated ‘through the exclusive filter of Curriculum Vitae and the support of influential gatekeepers, which enables certain people and disables others’ (Clements 2006: 329). It is a far cry from Dubuffet’s conception of ‘anti-art’. His original thesis, L’Art Brut Prefere aux Arts Culturel (Dubuffet, 1949), revolved around madness, as expressed directly and symbolically through ‘raw’ art, where purity unsullied by material concerns is enhanced by the untrained character of the artist and lack of enculturation. This anti-art position was expressed through the ‘purity’ of Art Brut (untouched by art institutions and markets) that crystallized his overall cosmology of authenticity as resistance. Although Cardinal considered this theme as still prescient, he recognized financial mission creep by the galleries and markets.

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Another salient issue for this book and relevant gatekeepers advocating Marginal or Outsider Art is that it is taken very seriously, which may account for the lack of humour in the genre and in relation to its interpretation (revisiting the symbolic importance of sobriety). The relationship between humourlessness and purity has a long tradition within Christianity in Europe (and religions elsewhere), whereby humour translates for fundamentalists as an art lacking purity and gravitas so cannot be held in such high regard. John Maizels, who was the founding editor of Raw Vision, an international journal that deals specifically with Marginal Art and artists, maintained that the creativity found in Outsider, Folk and Visionary Art was a universal human attribute that opposed ‘the smothering effects of western culture’ (Maizels 1996: 7). This corresponds to a conceptualization of ‘art’ that has been discursively shaped and channelled into narrow categories and definitions by cultural gatekeepers, institutions and art markets. Maizels constructed a guidebook in which, for the purpose of clarity, he divided the art of the excluded into three categories. First, intuitive and Outsider Art (Art Brut), which included the art of the insane displaying degrees of abnormality (for example, Adolf Wölfli, August Natterer, Madge Gill and Johann Hauser). Second, Marginal Art and contemporary Folk Art in Europe, the US and developing world, including artistic expression on the fringes of non-academic art (for example, Howard Finster, Raymond Reynaud, Mario Chicharro and Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern). And, third, visionaries who create their own worlds (for example, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles; Nek Chand’s Sculpture Garden in Chandigarh, India; and Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village in the Simi Valley, California). In reality, the picture is muddy as there is much cross-over between categories and hybridity with mainstream art. Daniel Wojcik (2016) has highlighted how Outsider Art moved in from the margins to the mainstream, spawning a cultural industry and market of its own, however much presented (and promoted) as pure unharnessed creativity. This romantic discourse is a by-product of disaffection towards professional contemporary art considered too businesslike, obscure and inaccessible, as well as devoid of avant-garde idealism (2016: 228). He also made the distinction between Folk Art and Outsider Art, which has been obfuscated possibly for commercial reasons and to expand the market. Folk Art traditionally reflected a more communal practice that was regarded as secondary by contemporary art worlds as it referred to different local, gendered, ethnic and class traditions, even subcultures, rather than a creative format that promoted the individual artist. Outsider Art has represented individual eccentricity, psychosis, obsession and personal vision, often the result of trauma and the expression of febrile psychological conditions, alongside a discourse of art as a medical and therapeutic tool. But rather than romanticizing these artists as ‘pure untrammelled creativity’, Wojcik recognized the influence of ‘vernacular culture, ethnic heritage, and popular culture [which is] central to the understanding of such art’ (2016: 26). It is not forged in a vacuum, as iterated earlier, which realism contrasts with Dubuffet’s romantic notion of Raw Art as uncontaminated by legitimate art worlds. If we accept that many ‘authentic’ outsider artists do not consider themselves artists, have an obsessive need to create and may have little interest in the markets, there is limited scope for self-promotion as representation is shaped, even exploited, by agents, dealers and writers. These cultural intermediaries alongside the collectors have had a free hand, with the artists often reduced to detailing their abnormal biographies so that

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the art can help interpret the traumatic back story. This taps into stereotypical notions of hyper-sensitive inarticulate artists who are impractical and non-materialist, refreshing the mythology of authenticity. It also champions a psychological methodology for understanding art, focusing on the internal machinations of the highly ‘individual’ artist. But there is ambiguity as it has created a market whilst at the same time appearing to counter the commodification of art and the branding of artists through a re-injection of authenticity. To recap, Marginal Art historically related to confined patients and inmates, which, in the main, was of sole interest to doctors and physicians who understood it within a functional medical discourse. The Raw Art and Outsider Art models then constructed the individual marginal artist as pure untrammelled potential with ‘natural’ ability tapping into notions of anti-art and authenticity. That the artist who has spent periods incarcerated is in the main self-taught and has communication issues (the result of traumatic life experiences and psychological and emotional problems) validates the aesthetic and emphasizes exclusion. Critically, there are those who consider Outsider Art ‘a flawed and injurious concept that promotes and perpetuates a dehumanizing conception of art’ (Ames 1994: 153). This line of moral opprobrium shares similarities with the castigation of freak shows for entertainment on Coney Island in the US and elsewhere in the early 20th century, deemed a form of dehumanized exploitation. Jesse Prinz (2017) outlined several salient criticisms in her polemic against the category of Outsider Art; first in relation to its genealogy (with reference to Foucault) and in recognition that the category is a contrived and fabricated tool derived from past events for understanding the present. It exposes regimes of power and control within the art world more generally and the arbitrary alteration of classifications of Marginal Art and artists. The romantic renaissance link between art, creativity, godliness and madness gave way in the 18th and 19th centuries to the medical discourse of mental abnormality and psychosis, as previously detailed. Here art became a signature of illness, as recognized by eminent doctors who started to collect the art of the institutionalized. This automatic expression, perceived as an unselfconscious outpouring, contrasted with the output of trained artists and to some degree pre-empted modernism, expressionism and abstraction. Prinz critiqued Dubuffet’s ‘Raw Art’ for including visionary, self-taught and psychotic art, but excluding naïve and primitive art; and similarly critiqued Cardinal’s notion of Outsider Art, which may have captured the anti-establishment ethos of 1970s counterculture but was blown away by the ‘corporate zeal of the 1980s’ (2017: 258) and the overbearing commodification of art. Outsider Art has moved out of its European and US strongholds to become a global market phenomenon, with a Henry Darger painting auctioned at Christie’s for more than €600,000 (2017: 259)5. Prinz sums up the problems: In each step of this history, the artists in question are ascribed traits that tend to distort their creative achievements: they are diagnosed as irrational, when in fact 5

There is much information today about those who trade in Self-taught, Folk and Outsider Art (galleries, dealers and artists who sell their own work); for example, Betty-Carol Sellen’s source book for the US market, first published in 1993 and now in its third edition (Sellen 2016), which is a who’s who, firmly entrenching categorizations.

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Representations by Marginal Artists their work is often methodical; they are described as charmingly primitive, when they are as socialized as anyone else; they are cheered on for their anticultural stance, when they may not be acting in opposition to anything, much less culture; and they are banished to the outside, when many, in fact, have a considerable degree of integration into mainstream society in general including, in some cases, the art world (Prinz 2017: 260).

So another issue for Prinz regarding the label Outsider Art is that the outsider social aesthetic is incoherent, with some of the key artists institutionalized and diagnosed as psychotic (Adolf Wölfli) whilst others have led ‘normal’ lives (Scottie Wilson as an exsoldier and junk dealer) or have a genetic condition (Judith Scott who has Down’s). Darger is the paradigm example of a psychotic artist who never attempted to sell or show his work, a social outcast who spent periods incarcerated and had a prolific, typically compulsive, output. Cynically, maybe it is the closeness of his character to the outsider stereotype that accounts for his posthumous success. The third issue for Prinz, as already detailed, concerns the binary insider/outsider conceptualization, as these unstable outsider classifications fail to recognize the continuity between related artistic practices and the ‘contamination’ between the two, which coproduces hybrid art. Many (insider) artists have unstable mental and emotional conditions, as well as extreme beliefs6, whilst many outsiders lead commonplace lifestyles without recourse to institutionalization, as illustrated by Albert Louden and Scottie Wilson. It is the untenable ‘aesthetic’ and ideal elevation of the work of outsider artists that Prinz regarded as condescending and infantilizing. This assumes a narrow and negative definition of outsider and contrasts with my own wide-ranging understanding that has ‘cool’ associations as well as resistant properties, which accommodates a degree of romantic licence, self-definition and self-imaginary. There are two issues with Prinz’s position regarding exclusion. The binary discourse discriminates, but it also reveals how the process of exclusion operates and how we construct our identities, still an overbearingly binary process (I am this, therefore not that). Also, however much we live in relative postmodern times, the art market is the metric of capitalism, which itself is a domineering and exclusionary system, re-emphasizing a binary logic notably regarding winner and loser, rich and poor, haves/have nots, etc. So the issue is about addressing the overbearing control of the markets as well as art institutions classifying art into success and failure. Notwithstanding this, Prinz wanted to bring outsiders ‘inside’ as she considered the term to disempower marginal artists. Key here is what they are being included into, presumably material and institutional normality. The majority of those recognized as outsider artists in its ‘purest’ form have passed away and the term today has been co-opted by markets and commoditized, as she detailed in her genealogy7. In contrast Steven Dubin (1997: 37) recognized that ‘marginality can be a burden or an asset’ for artists and a key factor concerns the structural influences of exclusion and the

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For example, the religious obsessions of William Holman Hunt, schizophrenia of Vincent Van Gogh, hallucinations of Edvard Munch or depression of Georgia O’Keefe. This relates tangentially to the distinction between ‘born freak’ and ‘made freak’, which has affected the modern freak show and will be evaluated in the next chapter.

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labelling of outsider, which is apportioned and denies choice rather than a self-chosen marginality that offers a heightened sense of power. The Outsider Art model inverts orthodoxy therefore is part carnivalesque, which can be empowering but also disturbing, and there is a pervading sense of collector voyeurism as artists are determined to a large extent by a history of criminality, schizophrenia, or extreme beliefs and a life that the ‘normal’ art audience maybe wants to peer into. Typically the bourgeois collector desires the authentic marginalized ‘other’, as suggested by Fanon (1967 [1952]) in relation to the indigenous ethnic population subjugated by colonialism, and Stallybrass & White (1986) in relation to the working class. The most powerful influences on Outsider Art are the market, exhibitions and media (scholarly and journalistic material), which has driven this niche interest. Over the years, Raw Vision has championed Marginal Art but has questioned outsider classifications through articles by key writers (including Roger Cardinal, David Maclagan, John Maizels, Lucienne Peiry and Colin Rhodes). Moreover, they have helped to maintain alternative art worlds of marginal and folk artists whilst retaining much integrity, not easy in a field increasingly dominated by market dynamics. Today these classifications are less rigorously defined than when the journal was initially published in 1989 (www.rawvision.com) as there are far less strictures regarding Outsider Art membership. There have been many modifications, with many sub-genres created since Cardinal’s classification in the 1970s, and greater recognition by the public. It has altered from a discourse with a pejorative meaning, where the art symbolically displays mental and emotional problems (with these ‘abnormalities’ revealed by the gaze of medical and aesthetic gatekeepers), to a loosely aligned contemporary genre of Marginal Art. Moreover, the boundaries of marginality have shifted and blurred with the plethora of sub-genres now utilized to promote individual artist brands. Nonetheless, the specific artist behaviours that have underpinned Outsider Art – such as being self-taught, having a self-effacing attitude towards art, and lacking interest in career and monetary reward – remain a marker of authenticity and purity (however much this construct is overly romanticized), in contrast to the fickleness of the art marketplace (however much this may be a stereotypical perception). But ethical benchmarking is asking a lot of the marginal artists involved. Welfare Art In contrast, the Welfare Art model stresses the role of art in the everyday lives of those with emotional and psychological conditions promoted by creative mental health networks and organizations that emphasize social inclusion and showcase social good. This is a small part of the informal ‘dark matter’ of art that remains hidden from the public glare (Sholette 2011). Welfare Art is a social service and therapy for the socially excluded, which helps ameliorate mental health conditions and express the progressive humanity of those organizations which employ artists, art teachers, therapists and other practitioners to engage the excluded with art. It is a normalizing discourse associated especially with medicine and the reconstruction of patients and clients as productive citizens. Hans Prinzhorn’s original book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill (Prinzhorn 1922), showcased the work undertaken in the psychiatric hospital at the University of Heidelberg, where art enabled a better understanding of the patient. But, as shown, Nazi ideologues co-opted this medical discourse, demonstrating the vulnerability of marginal artists to negative representations.

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Judy Levine (1997), focusing on Theatre for the Forgotten, a theatre group working with prisoners, questioned how the need for funding helped to spawn new terminology and a different conceptualization of art. The term Social Service Art has replaced the original notion of Asylum Art, in accordance with the need to fulfil guidelines from funders and patrons under the aegis of philanthropy. Art as a funding category has a normalizing function where the social good of institutions involved and therapeutic models within a medical and care discourse outweigh the importance of the aesthetic and artist intention. Welfare Art (Clements 2006) is a form of charitable but voyeuristic spectacle for the audience, as important cultural institutions, the art market and related gatekeepers have not legitimized the art so it is of little material value, which in turn devalues the aesthetic. A travelling exhibition in the UK entitled Art Works in Mental Health 2002 (County Hall 2002) illustrated this as it treated the artists as mental health patients labelled solely with a surname and number. There was no biographical information given, allegedly due to legal concerns, therefore the exhibition showcased their institutionalized identity. It can be compared to the information panels displaying the work of National Health Service trusts, mental health creative networks and promotional literature about Pfizer Ltd, the corporate sponsor supplying the medicines to help alleviate the conditions of the patient-artists. Welfare Art is a form of community art that is concerned primarily with promoting the institutions and organizations which engage with the health and well-being of their clients through art. The focus is on service and those who help to promote this, rather than on the individual artist, which ties in with bureaucratic funding categories. Cultural classification into individual outsider and communal Welfare Art models appears somewhat arbitrary, and the social cachet for the individual artist gained through the outsider classification is in many ways denied by the welfare model. Nonetheless, these are far from fixed categories, as a patient in a secure hospital may be able to progress from exhibiting in a show promoting mental health and disability welfare to one as a bona fide and unique individual outsider. In the UK the annual showcase of artwork by prisoners exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall in London and supported by the Koestler Trust (a prison arts charity) has a Welfare Art character and structure. We Are All Human (2016), Inside (2017) and I’m Still Here (2018) (www.koestlertrust.org.uk/exhibitions/) were group shows that could be a stepping-stone to greater success for an artist, however unlikely, and a future exhibition in one of the niche outsider galleries8. The Koestler Trust advocates the rights of these excluded communities and, in accordance with the Welfare Art model, hides artist identities beyond Christian names due to legalities, which method still gives the impression that the artists are secondary to the benevolent work of the Trust. Savant Art A third model – of Savant Art – which, loosely defined, corresponds to art produced by those with autistic spectrum disorders who may demonstrate creative abilities far above the average, is crystallized in the UK by the child prodigy Stephen Wiltshire. He was 8

Some of the artists find agents, as I discovered when communicating with a prize-winning artist from the 2018 show.

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diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and has amazing powers of recollection to draw, especially, cityscapes and architecture from memory (Sacks 1991). There are many representations of global urban spaces that he has captured in his particular representational style, which are sold and collected around the world. An art gallery named after him in London’s prestigious area of Mayfair sells his work and takes commissions (www. stephenwiltshire.co.uk/gallery). He has become very successful and was awarded an MBE in 2006 (a prestigious medal for special achievement) and in 2018 had a school named after him (The Stephen Wiltshire Centre). The visionary American ‘outsider’ artist George Widener, who has a similar condition, creates imaginary urbanscapes and employs art as a form of divination (Clements 2017a: 35–7). His panoramic views of the metropolis interspersed with numerological formats, symbols and calculations are literal representations of his faith in numerical systems espousing an alternative belief system. The Megalopolis pieces concern utopian cities of the future where there is harmony and social cohesion, optimism and humanity. His work has depth and complexity and it concurs with cutting-edge contemporary modern art as it is difficult to understand and tangential to consensual thinking (Cardinal 2005). Widener has difficulties speaking and suffers tantrums, arguably communicating better through his art, which he employs to divine a positive future; an understanding that offers an extreme self-obsessed individualism (Cardinal 2009) arguably not so different to mainstream artists. Whilst the drawings of Wiltshire are figurative and realistic, the paintings of Widener have a greater imaginary and conceptual basis. Both express artistic self-absorption, which can be reinterpreted as a satire on humanity, however much the savant’s utopian art has serious intent. Widener is one of the star marginal artists showcased by the Henry Boxer Gallery in London, alongside Stephen Wiltshire (www.outsiderart.co. uk/artists/), although Wiltshire is labelled a savant artist and Widener an outsider artist, which shows the elasticity of classifications. Both Wiltshire and Widener have creative outsider credentials, but there has been experimental scientific research undertaken suggesting that their specific Asperger’s condition is not inherently creative. It has shown that the savant has low levels of ‘intelligence’ and an outstanding memory, which arguably underpins the terms of ‘creativity’ whether in relation to music, visual art, calendar calculations, arithmetic or poetry (Pring et al. 2012). Output by savant artists has been criticized as: mechanical with low levels of expressiveness and emotional involvement … [which] often draws from a restricted range of categories … [although] this is not very different from accomplished artists throughout history (Pring et al. 2012: 46). Pring et al. tested savant artists with autism spectrum disorder and compared this with three other groups: those ‘non-artistically talented’ with autism spectrum disorder; other ‘non-artistically talented’ participants with mild/moderate learning difficulties; and A-level art students. A range of standard verbal, pictorial and colour tests were undertaken – as well as measures of originality, fluency, elaboration and flexibility – in order to gauge creativity scientifically. The researchers concluded that art students were the most creative, but, although savant artists were more original in their creative outputs, no difference was observed in the other measures compared to the other two groups. This research does not belittle the talent of specific savant artists but it does burst the bubble of specialness that underpins the mythology and

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possibly challenges more widely the romantic concept that the excluded have ‘magical’ creative powers that compensate for their difference, which niche art markets are only too happy to exploit.

Marginal Artists, Carnivalesque Practices, Authenticity and Taste There is a range of exclusionary discourses and theoretical constructs that situate the marginal artist and culture. Peter Stallybrass & Allon White (1986) have offered a convincing understanding in relation to psychoanalysis and class. They applied Freudian psychoanalysis to understand the bourgeois hysteria directed at lewd aspects of carnivals and fairs in order to abolish them. Historically: from the seventeenth to the twentieth century … there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life (Stallybrass & White 1986: 176). The bourgeois need to control and censor harmful ‘dirty’ symbols, whether creative products or social practices that revolve around grotesque humour, resurfaced through an individual psychological framework. These ‘unsophisticated’ processes were internalized and morphed into individual hang ups, an admixture of disavowal and appropriation that signalled a hollow victory for bourgeois mores over popular carnival culture and marginal creativity. Also, it offers another account for why excluded criminal and mentally ill characters were removed from their communities and hidden behind the walls of prisons, workhouses and asylums, and the need to cleanse the streets of abnormalities. Consequentially, the creative archives of Marginal Art collected by doctors and consultants were therefore by association the product of dangerous minds and perverse ‘others’. From a gender perspective it was the woman’s body that became the ‘battleground’ in the hysterical bourgeois repression of the grotesque (Stallybrass & White 1986: 184) in relation to sexuality, fantasy and fascination with taboo. However, an ‘earthy’ discourse of grotesque humour re-emerged through modern art and psychoanalysis, a psychic eruption of the ugly and unethical. The carnivalesque reappeared in liminal heterotopian spaces and spatially there was a shift in England of ‘carnival sites’ to coastal resorts (and accompanying bawdy sea-side humour), which became a focus for leisure and integral to the English holiday scene. Similarly, within the city certain neighbourhoods took on the mantle of Bohemia populated by ‘artists’, progressive thinkers and utopians as well as prostitutes, petty thieves, addicts and misfits (Gattrell 2006). Covent Garden was the first realization of a bohemian heterotopia in 18th century London, superseded by Chelsea and Soho. These Creative Quarters (Wedd et al. 2001) have since moved to the East End of London, in the main due to cheaper studio rents. Each major city in Europe has had bohemian neighbourhoods, which Stallybrass & White (1986:190) referred to as the ‘carnivalesque diaspora’. A temporary emplacement of otherness and marginality in postmodern times is no better realized than through pop-up street performances and flash mobs, which explode then vanish into thin air. Another way of understanding the appeal of marginal culture today concerns issues of taste. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) situated culture as a social agent that involves status, bound up in entitlement. Taste reflects social position and class, which since his fieldwork in the 1960s is recognized as intersected by other variables including gender,

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ethnicity and age, which creates a complex and contrasting pattern of individual lifestyle scenarios (Bennett et al. 2009). Developing this theme, Bernard Lahire (2008) researched the dissonant character of taste, which accounts for the variation between individuals who build up heterogeneous stocks of cultural capital related to lifestyle. The cultural omnivore status that is popular today has a less homogeneous pattern of taste, which hybridizes legitimate ‘highbrow’ with aspects of less-legitimate ‘lowbrow’ culture, displaying distinct patterns that create degrees of dissonance, as detailed. Lahire recognized that the less legitimate culture of popular novels, comics, television soaps and Hollywood film becomes an additional risqué representation of distinction, whether related to irony or cult status. Here particular collecting habits and knowledge of quirky popular and marginal culture is a badge of honour to parade in social situations, which displays enlightened eclecticism (Friedman 2014) and outsider hip (Clements 2007). Forms of less legitimate culture have added significance, hence the ongoing attempts by cultural gatekeepers to valorize and legitimize them. Knowledge of the obscure is cultural capital that highlights sophisticated individual taste, which is why the categorization of Outsider Art appeals to the art cognoscenti9. Moreover, it reveals and verifies idealism associated with the ‘authentic misunderstood creative genius’ (Zolberg 2010: 2). Oliver Hahl et al. (2017) explored this interest by ‘highbrow’ art lovers in ‘lowbrow’ art forms. They discovered that these aesthetes and collectors wanted to combat ‘high status denigration’ through public appreciation of ‘lowbrow’ culture to shore up their ‘authenticity-insecurity’. This was because their perception of themselves and by others was that they were less authentic and considerate than ‘lower status actors’ (2017: 829). Untrained and unambitious marginal artists – who are perceived to be the apotheosis of ambitious, networked and savvy insider artists – ooze authenticity, and collecting their art garners social cachet. Marginal Art, whether outsider, folk, visionary, indigenous, ethnic or self-taught, showcases omnivorous taste and collectors not driven so much by social and material rewards but by the integrity of their individual taste. There is concurrence with interest in ‘lowbrow’ earthy humour and issues of resisting acceptable taste. Simon Critchley (2002) related this to the rise of the democratic public sphere and democratization of wit, however much ‘lowbrow’ humour ventures into political incorrectness. Sharing the joke beyond a select few appeals to our collective sense and ability to laugh at ourselves, which collaboration emphasizes not just a form of authenticity but our humanity. Hahl et al. concurred that for many the consumption of a univorous palette of ‘highbrow’ culture did not achieve ‘authenticity-security’. With further scrutiny they recognized that ‘highbrow’ artists and patrons appeared motivated by competition with other elite artists and consumers, critical acclaim and material rewards. It undermined any romantic notion of artistic and material disinterestedness that Bourdieu (1993: 40) noted had enabled ‘highbrow’ consumers historically to distinguish themselves from commercial expediency (as the ‘highbrow’ actor seeks liberation from the ‘vulgar concerns of commerce’ (Bourdieu 1992: 57)). Hahl et al. (2017) concluded that many omnivorous ‘highbrow’ actors and consumers pursued both authenticity and cultural 9

The quality of cultural capital is increased by the legitimization of Outsider Art, which is gatekeepered and has its own niche markets.

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status through the consumption of a specific blend of ‘lowbrow’ and ‘highbrow’ culture. Moreover, that omnivorous taste offers a more authentic way of achieving distinction (Lizardo & Skiles 2012). Besides these complexities and contradictions of taste there are global and financial influences to accommodate. The almost complete imbrication of capitalism into the arts and socio-cultural fabric has brought an ever-greater need to obfuscate material value in order to create the impression that the accumulation of cultural capital through aesthetic taste remains detached from economic considerations. For example, the refashioned concept of the entrepreneurial hipster from its rebellious criminal origins in the 1940s, as alluded to, desperately attempts to obfuscate material ideologies. So, for example, the entrepreneur may import organically grown coffee beans from state-of-the-art techno-farms in Jamaica, which are then shipped by redesigned 19th century wooden sloops to sophisticated coffee shops in the US. This constructs a colourful and exotic global narrative that attempts to detach itself from its commercial grounding within a material framework. And humour is an apt and earthy method to unravel this promotional flannel and pseudo-authenticity that distracts from the profit motive. Outsider Art has been appropriated by prestigious art worlds and markets with the help of high-profile exhibitions in Europe and the US. In the UK, for example, there was an exhibition in London, Beyond Reason. Art and Psychosis. Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (Hayward Gallery 1996-7), which followed two previous exhibitions entitled In Another World: Outsider Art from Europe and America (South Bank Centre 1987) and the earlier Outsider Art (Hayward Gallery 1979 (Clements 2006: 328)). More recently, the Inner Worlds Outside (Whitechapel Gallery 2006) exhibition and The Alternative Guide to the Universe (Hayward Gallery 2013) have showcased Marginal Art, and there are the Pallant House Gallery (Chichester) and Henry Boxer Gallery (London) specializing in this genre of art. Many galleries and museums in the US sell Marginal Art (Sellen 2016), which now has a global span (see the adverts in recent volumes of Raw Vision). Gary Fine underscored how the authenticity and artistic value of Outsider, Folk and Self-taught Art is central to the perception of unfettered creativity. He employed the individualized terms of everyday ‘genius’ to describe how this type of ‘identity art’ has helped to propagate its mythology, which feeds the booming niche art markets that entrepreneurs have forged and the corresponding communities and art worlds associated. Fine referred to this Marginal Art as ‘investment instruments’ (Fine 2004: 16), which are no different to the work sold in other art markets. ‘Outsider’ authenticity requires visiting the artists in situ, to ensure their lifestyles befit the required marginality of their art. This ‘authenticity trip’ verifies the artist’s value, not unlike the ‘street’ qualifications for other excluded groups, notably drug addicts and rough sleepers mentioned earlier. Nonetheless, Fine suggested that value and authenticity are difficult to determine, because: Collectors are told to rely on their own judgements – what moves them – but in a world in which elites are surprisingly insecure about their own taste, this forces a searching for other guarantors of quality (Fine 2004: 284). There is a clash between the marginal artist’s self-definition and identification by the relevant art world of the extent of marginality and whether the art is authentic or

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derivative. The vulnerability of Marginal Art, its financial or aesthetic value due to any perceived whiff of inauthenticity, was detailed earlier in relation to Albert Louden, who admitted an interest in his career, which opposed the strict social aesthetic that then helped construct the outsider artist status. In an interview with John Windsor he bemoaned the performative quality of proving his authentic outsiderdom using dark irony: It isn’t easy being an outsider. Once elected, there are appearances to be kept up: the solitary lifestyle, the nutty habits, the freedom from artistic influences. Above all, indifference to earning money. Scrounging for canvas and paint, going without luxuries such as food and socks, are all part of the life of austerity that one’s public demands. In the end the outsider’s surest way of proving his identity is to be dead (Louden cited in Windsor 1997: 50; Fine 2004: 61). This anecdote from Louden reveals the shallowness of marginal classifications. But whether Outsider Art is a patronizing and voyeuristic classification better described as ‘outsider porn’ is a moot point. What it does offer is a window into the marginal existence and performance of certain artists, which offers an imaginary romance, mystique and representation of authenticity that in reality is a far from easy life. The marginal and ‘othered’ artist has an authenticity that the cultured and educated bourgeoisie may lack and desire, which ‘abnormalities’ contribute towards the insecurity of elite ‘highbrow’ taste.

Marginal Art and Humour Humour is an awkward bedfellow in the very serious world of Marginal Art, with its niche markets that are highly sensitive about how it is perceived. There are anxieties around humour being directed at the artwork and artist in a superior manner, rather than in response to the playfulness or incongruity of the artist. Marginal Art has traditionally had to cope with derogatory and derisive commentary about lack of quality, precisely because its focus is on those artists who live in peripheral social and psychological spaces, neither officially trained nor self-assured about calling themselves artists (Maclagan 1995). Notwithstanding this, there are useful examples of humorous, even grotesque, Marginal Art which challenge this discourse. The work of untrained outsider and folk artist Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (1892–1982), who only began drawing when he was 57 (Kort 2011), is a prime example. His Mr Razewitz (1950) includes the image of a woman showing her backside, presumably as a means to cadge a lift from Mr Razewitz (‘Speedy’), the driver in the background with caricatured ears. The smirk on the woman’s face is mirrored by the road sign and is embellished by the text beneath. This cryptic notification informs the viewer that: I Mr ‘Speedy’ the three times world champion in all the old and new arts of running and chopping II Madam Laneau, the moon-world champion of standing, waiting and loving of the new and the old kind (see Fig 6.1).

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Figure 6.1 Mr Razewitz,1950, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, crayon drawing, 21x 28cm. Gallerie Brockstedt, Hamburg, Germany.

In the drawing, legs are peeping out of the car boot (presumably having been ‘chopped’) and ‘mooning’ possibly refers to Madam Laneau (moon-world champion) merrily displaying her posterior. This is incongruous and surreal, challenging rationality, as Madam Laneau appears alive standing on the road and dead in the car boot. It is useful to cite some of the artist’s biography as the back story may aid representation and situate the grotesque humour. Schröder-Sonnenstern was an emotionally disturbed alcoholic character and petty criminal who spent much of his life in reform school, labour-camp, prison and later asylum (with suspected schizophrenia). He was one of 13 children in what was east Prussia and as a child enjoyed practical jokes. A favourite game was climbing trees and urinating on lovers canoodling in their best attire, which behaviour accelerated his dismissal to reform school at the age of 14. He discovered his comic talent through interaction with the nearby travelling circus and a troupe of performers who taught him small, comic roles (Gorsen 2013: 26). Nonetheless, Schröder-Sonnenstern spent periods in a mental asylum at Allenberg with the diagnosis of ‘adolescent insanity’, an institution from which he escaped on several occasions. When conscripted into the German army during the First World War he protested that as an ex-inmate of an asylum he was not fit to serve. This became apparent as his behaviour and views were deemed to endanger his army colleagues. After a premature release from war service he was referred to a mental institution at

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Neustadt, where he watched artists creating paintings and mocked society by writing poems ridiculing both asylum officials and the state. He took up fortune-telling during the hyper-inflationary period between the wars, calling himself Prophet Eliot 1, and he gave his earnings in the form of sandwiches to the poor. He was later imprisoned for quackery (Williams 1989/90: 16)10. Schröder-Sonnenstern started to draw in his distinctively figurative style after the Second World War. This included highly erotic and intimate portrayals of naked people having sexual intercourse with beasts (grotesque couplings), which are shocking but also humorous as they create a topsy-turvy reality, with obvious carnival (and carnal) associations. His misogyny, disgust for society and extreme erotic obsessions reposition his oeuvre as the work of an outright individualist and narcissist. Nonetheless, Sheldon Williams (1989/90: 18) has recommended that there is much ‘secret irony’ in his sardonic figurations (as in Mr Razewitz), which encourages the viewer to seek meanings, however much these are inaccurate. Humour is acted out through resistance, and he admitted ‘I’m always speaking for the opposition … I get a kick out of taking the piss out of the powers that be’ (Schröder-Sonnenstern, cited in Maclagan 2009b: 53). His fantasious erotic art offers an incongruous carnivalesque world which is laden with a sense of anarchy and rebellion expressed through ridiculous and sexualized narratives. Pamela Kort (2011) reckoned that the aesthetic value of his art is independent of his schizophrenia (for which he was committed three times), and that his work is avant-garde. This is presumably because of his disenchantment with the world and his ranting against poverty, hunger and privilege. Moreover, he was courted by Dubuffet when his star was rising in 1957 and was canny enough to try to exploit the marketing potential of his art, especially regarding his schizophrenia. There are other marginal artists who have employed forms of humour, including the visionary American Tressa Prisbrey (1896–1988), known as Grandma Prisbrey. Her Bottle Village (1955–63) used materials collected from the nearby dump, including discarded bottles, which she utilized to build different houses: a Shothouse, Cleopatra’s Bedroom, a schoolhouse and little chapel. She collected plastic dolls which she dressed in different fabrics and detritus, including clothing coated with ring pulls (from cans) as ornamentation. The village also included Pencil House, which Prisbrey built to house her collection of 17,000 pencils, although she had to keep rebuilding it because each house was too small to contain them (Greenfield 1991). There is something distinctly incongruous and grotesque about her work, possibly epitomized by her Shrine with Headlamps, which consists of a circle of dolls heads severed and skewered on poles around the base of which are old car headlamps (see Fig 6.2), and in the background the wall can be seen to consist of old bottles. Moreover, she beguiled visitors with biographical anecdotes and ‘ad hoc … [narratives] which tended to change and evolve slightly each time she repeated them’ (1991: 46). Prisbrey had a hard life, married at 15 to a man aged 52 who died when she was in her mid-30s, leaving her to support seven children, six of whom predeceased her. The loss of her children is one explanation for her collection of dolls, a surrogate family which were a means of dealing with her grief and loss (Wojcik 2016: 183–91). Such extreme biographical 10 It is not clear how much of this back story is self-biographical and it would be in character if there was some embellishment by the artist. In defence of this, the practice of biographical embellishment is a mainstream mannerism.

Figure 6.2 Shrine with Headlamps, 1955–63, Tressa Prisbrey, detail of Bottle Village 1972, Simi Valley, California. Photo by Seymour Rosen, 1972. Rosen/SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments.

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details create a sad narrative of marginality evoking ‘unlaughter’, but the art work stands alone and conjures up a range of responses, not least one of grotesque weirdness. Dolls have been the staple of many horror movies as they stare at the viewer with happy, unreadable faces, and the shrine not unsurprisingly has a ghostlike quality offering dark humour, incongruity and sadness. Severed heads on poles are reminiscent of medieval European practices employed to showcase criminals who had been beheaded, to warn off the rest of the population from resorting to crime. Prisbrey’s work prefigures some of the explicit work of the Chapman Brothers, the ‘enfant terribles’ of the Young British Artists who created disturbing scale-model figures and mannequins employing ghoulish humour, confirming the continuity between legitimate and marginal art. The playful and incongruous Bottle Village consists of 13 small houses or rooms and other structures, including the shrine above, which were functional and populated spare land adjacent to Prisbrey’s home. This blocked out the sight and smell of a turkey farm and, more importantly, housed her collection of pencils and dolls, as well as emplaced her memories contained in many of the artefacts and objects. Verni Greenfield (1991) suggested that Prisbrey needed to create her village to fulfil an inner vision of communal space. Another marginal self-taught American artist, Jim Bloom (born 1967/8), has created narrative paintings that are witty and ironic. He is an agoraphobic who fears crowds and immersion in them. Bloom had a serious car crash which exacerbated his medical problems, after which he was diagnosed with a spasm-induced muscular disorder (a form of dystonia) in which his body and parts of it move involuntarily. Many of his narratives are self-referential and concern midlife crisis and a same-sex lifestyle, but they go beyond self-referentiality and tap into wider cultural mannerisms (Schira 2012). Careful You Don’t Become That Sad Bloated Old Queen (2007) is a portrait painting (see Fig 6.3), with a cartoonesque balloon comment that elaborates on the title: ‘Careful you don’t become that sad drunken bloated old queen you laughed at.’ This is written on a cardboard cut-out, as is the face and hand holding the glass, giving the painting a comic camp quality, which Bloom employed to break down homophobic barriers. There is a stage tradition of camp humour; for example, from the 1950s the UK comedians Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams and, in the US, the pianist and comedian Liberace broke new ground employing such mannerisms, showcasing greater diversity. Joe Orton, the British playwright, offered humour as a method for audiences to understand homosexuality in his ‘black’ comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), which includes a ‘ménage à trois’ between a brother, his sister and the stranger Mr Sloane. Bloom has painted many tragicomic narratives about alienation, illness, relationship and family issues (Schira 2012: 47) which are darkly ironic, with the execution of his paintwork childlike and in stark contrast to the grotesque commentary. Other titles include Momma had a Baby and its Head Popped Off (2010) and Nancy’s Promise (2007), with the comment that her ‘blow Job would not Come to Pass’. The latter painting of a suburban scene shows a couple hand in hand in front of a row of five detached houses and is painted in a loose, naive manner, with the brushwork and use of figures reminiscent of Chaïm Soutine’s later work (for example, The Return from School (1939)). Ron Schira suggests that these portraits concern sarcasm, ‘cold and angry people who talk behind each other’s back and seemingly have nothing nice to say about anything’. It is the

Figure 6.3 Careful You Don’t Become That Sad Old Queen, 2007, Jim Bloom, mixed media on cardboard, 48 x 47cm. Outsider Folk Art Gallery/Jim Bloom 2018.

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expression of an ‘injured innocent who keeps a sense of humour’ (Schira 2012: 47), a therapeutic use of creativity that helps Bloom to purge his own mental illness and physical problems. Artists working independently outside the mainstream also include ‘chewing gum man’ Ben Wilson, who has created miniature paintings on old, flattened pieces of chewing gum that litter the streets of London. These paintings are a couple of centimetres in diameter and reflect the urban environment they are situated in. It requires originality, skill, patience, discomfort and quirkiness, with the resulting little cameos offering fun and amusement. I caught up with the artist painting greetings for people in London on the Millennium Bridge wearing his high-visibility orange boiler suit. He had turned the bridge into a miniature parody of the Hollywood Hall of Fame. In place of the numerous five-pointed brass stars displaying famous names embedded in the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, he was creating jokey paintings on old pieces of gum dedicated to people he had met whilst working. Whereas the Hollywood Hall of Fame concerns the successful in the cultural industries, Wilson paints gumpics for anyone and situates their names into a colourful background. For example, one of his everyday Millennium Bridge greetings stuck to the ribbed metal flooring celebrated the existence of Mae Rose, Ruadh and Danielle against a backdrop of a fried-egg sun and sausage-shaped tower blocks (see Fig 6.4). He suggested that the gum chewed by those walking the streets is part of the London scene and he was co-opting its meaning and humorously regenerating the environment by recycling it. The Millennium Bridge itself was part of the cultural regeneration of the area, with the adjacent Bankside Power Station converted into Tate Modern in 2000, one of the most visited cultural sites in London. Wilson is in many ways a subversive maverick artist who remains on the periphery of the legitimate art world. He made his reputation carving wood sculptures, walls and huts and creating installations in woodland (Howlett-Jones 1997/8) but also plays the role of English eccentric, as have many comics and artists before him. As he himself recognized, his gumpics are a labour of love and he has to earn a living to enable his street painting, so he sells other creative work in conventional ways. Another playful artist who operates on the streets of London is Slinkachu, who also creates miniature tableaux. He constructs city scenes that combine child’s play with urban reality, which he photographs. The figures are no bigger than those befitting a (00 gauge) model railway. For example, Scavengers is a scene that shows two men carrying a Cheesy Wotsit (a type of corn crisp) and They’re Not Pets Susan shows a father protecting his two daughters with a rifle next to a dead giant bee, which presumably he has shot (Raw Vision 2009/10). Elfo (aka Andrea Bonatti), working in Italy, is a street artist who turned to nature in his own surreal fashion (Manco 2012: 90). Bonsai Liberation Front (n.d.) is rural ‘street art’, which captures incongruity brilliantly (see Fig 6.5). Elfo painted the graffiti ‘Bonsai Liberation Front’ on a dilapidated farm building without a roof from which an overgrown tree was sprouting uncontained. The juxtaposition of a Japanese horticultural word that epitomizes ‘culture’ as smallness and neatness with a large wild tree of ‘nature’, that appears to break free from its ramshackle stone confines, is compounded by politicizing the re-presentation of an exotic Eastern gardening practice.

Figure 6.4 Mae Rose, Ruadh and Danielle, Millennium Bridge Greetings, 2018, Ben Wilson, gumpic (paint on chewing gum), 6 x 3cm. Photo by Paul Clements 2018.

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Figure 6.5 Bonsai Liberation Front, 2011, Elfo, site-specific spray paint on building, near Verona, Italy. Photograph by Elfo 2011.

Frank Bruno, an American visionary artist who has the same name as a famous British boxer, is a visionary who has created modern apocalyptic paintings (in the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch). He does not fit the traditional template of outsider as he was trained as a commercial artist, held down many jobs, and has not suffered incarceration or longterm psychiatric illness. Nonetheless, he is obsessed with his vision of fundamentalist Christianity and saving sinners (Scruton 2017). His Work Hard and Save your Money (1965) consists of a crowd of vile, skeletal figures watching clocks as they push their way along a narrow path into an abyss, expressing the folly of living and the control of working time and money which is Satan’s doing. It is grotesque in its scathing attack on capitalism (Babylon) and a fallen humanity. The socially aware Chilean artist Luis Valdés (aka Don Lucho) created Economy of Resources (2009), which is a satire on social reality for the excluded poor. It is a scaleddown cardboard reconstruction of a house, which is both witty and absorbing (Manco 2012: 238–9). The viewer readily becomes engrossed in the detail that includes cardboard replicas of the artist’s personal artefacts (mugs, clothes, pictures and a skateboard). Moreover, the house is fragile, as are the lives of the poor. Valdés employed disused scrap cardboard that he had found on the streets (excluded material) to highlight the plight of the poor who lack decent housing, which is a global concern. There are selfstyled dwellings made from discarded trash in ‘poblaciones callampas’ ghettos in Chile.

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Cardboard is also a key material for homeless sleepers in the city, as the former Cardboard City in London can attest11. The art of those on the margins offers alternative humorous vistas beyond the serious and romantic notion of authentic Outsider Art, unaffected by the institutionalized world of art and the logic of the market. Jennifer Higgie (2007) documented the artist’s joke in her anthology, and she recognized that little has been written about the role of humour in art, suggesting that the major consideration for this omission (already enunciated in relation to Outsider Art) is that the art therefore is not considered ‘serious’ and lacks requisite status. The Dadaists (and later Situationists) employed humour subversively, which became a common method employed by the burgeoning avant-garde. The new concern for anti-art was a joke on art and, more tellingly, on society. However, this critical anti-art take on society is quickly assimilated, which process was highlighted by Banksy’s performative anti-art shredding spectacle. His self-destructing painting of a Girl with Balloon, which was originally designed as a piece of street art, was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for £1.042 million and the part shredded remains re-titled Love in the Bin (2018). The art critic Jonathan Jones, by his own admission once a severe critic of Banksy’s ‘smug pseudo-radical pranksterism’ (Jones 2007), has now acclaimed this piece as ‘his greatest work’ because ‘he has said something that needs to be said: art is being choked to death by money’ (Jones 2018). His assurance that ‘the market always wins’ (2018), as the shredding event doubled the financial value of the picture, re-emphasizes this pessimistic scenario, as though both he and Banksy have been assimilated too. Bansky, as already mentioned, plays a well-worn game of appearing outside the system, a form of self-defined exclusion within a romantic concept of outsider hip, whilst reaping the benefits of the system. The artwork received lavish media attention that helped to inflate its value. His gesture or ‘prank’ will only serve to cement the commodification of culture, however witty and ironic the action. Far from this symbolizing anti-art, it is reactionary and feeds the system Banksy critiques12. Over the past 100 years or so anti-art practices have been accompanied by greater autonomy, doubt over categorizations and a refusal to conform to expectations (in many ways encapsulated by ‘the shock of the new’ idea underpinning modern art). This has played into the hands of the markets and the fetishization of individual artists as brands, whilst the marginal artist appears to transgress the mainstream and its networks, which appears authentic. But this is a very unstable position to maintain and marginal artists often are forgotten, assimilated as aesthetic commodity or ridiculed as kitsch.

Outsider Literature To supplement these various representations of humour from marginal visual culture it is salient to look briefly at the ‘artist’ as writer – the maverick, misfit and excluded critic who appears to exist outside society. This also befits the mythology of 11 Cardboard City was the vernacular for a heterotopia of the homeless that existed in the middle of a roundabout beside the bridge at Waterloo Station in London. 12 The American artist Ron English bought Banksy’s controversial Slave Labor (Bunting Boy (2012)) for £561,000 at auction in protest at the sale of street art and intended to paint the picture white (www.itv.com/news/2018-11-15/artist-buys-banksy-artwork-for-561-000-and-vow s-to-whitewash-it). Presumably this will be sold on and offered at auction at a later date.

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modernism, which conjures up bohemian imagery of low-life, non-conformity and addiction, as represented by the 19th century writer Charles Baudelaire. Walter Benjamin (2006 [1955-71]), who wrote in the 1930s about Baudelaire, recognized how his notion of urban flâneur described alienation and anomie in relation to the decaying industrial environment. Baudelaire acclaimed the squalor of the city and dirty ‘lowbrow’ urban culture as subversive, opposed as he was to a beautified ‘highbrow’ cultural ideal, which in turn featured in his poetry. Benjamin acknowledged that his own experience of the waste, deprivation and suffering in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s shared much with mid-19th century Paris. The first stanza of Baudelaire’s poem To The Reader illustrates his fascination with ugliness, marginality and decay: Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust torment our bodies and possess our minds, and we sustain our affable remorse the way a beggar nourishes his lice. (from Fleurs du Mal – Baudelaire 1993 [1857]: 13) Similarly, the first verse of his The Little Old Women conjures up a ‘dirty’ alternative reality: In murky corners of old cities where Everything – horror too – is magical, I study, servile to my moods, the odd And charming refuse of humanity (from Fleurs du Mal – Baudelaire 1993 [1857]: 142). Benjamin positioned Baudelaire as a modernist writer discontented with his own class and mainstream society, who focused upon life experience that decays the human soul. This discourse firmly marginalizes and isolates the artist seeking an authentic ‘truth’, formulating the romantic conceptualization of outsider. But Baudelaire was a rather affected bohemian rebel, contemptuous and sexist in manner, who aspired to aristocratic whim, with his understanding of modernism elusive (Berman 2010 [1982]: 133). Karl Marx, in his early writings, maintained that modern civil society ‘does not integrate the individual within its community’ (cited in Mézáros 1986: 69), which concept of individualism is complex and alienating, a situation that correlates with the effects of class and ramifications of capitalism. The commodification of culture and the ambiguities of modernism arguably have alienated the artist by undermining an authentic aesthetic rationale and the search for ‘truth’. So the marginal artist as ‘other’, embodied by Baudelaire, takes on deep significance, as already stressed. A specific discourse of ‘authentic’ culture that I have already explored concerns outsider literature, the poems and narratives of the beat writers which exude much gritty grotesque humour (Clements 2013). Lesser-known beat writers such as Carl Solomon, Neal Cassady and Ray Bremser spent time in prison and psychiatric hospitals living marginal lifestyles, as did better-known luminaries from beat culture, namely William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, who spent time incarcerated. Their seedy depictions of addiction and living on the edge of society, and their narration of a range of low-life experiences, were detailed employing much dark humour, trauma and degrees of detachment (even though they transcribed much personal experience). In contrast to

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realist art, which exposes a ‘life as art’ trope exuding romanticism and authenticity, there is a more traditional French notion of the artist bohemian where the artist lives the life of an artist (‘art as life’) that was championed by Baudelaire13. Low-life bohemianism is unlike the poverty, misery and squalor that Charles Dickens portrayed in his novels, written from the comfort of his home, but concerns artists portraying the hard life they live as outsiders14. Bukowski wrote many fictional narratives through the eyes of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, which was a selective autobiography that exposed his outsider credentials. A focus on squalor, ugliness, alcoholism, poverty, failure in relationships and life as a factotum (the name of his second novel) displayed his hard-boiled realistic approach. There is much observed humour as well as bleakness, and often his narratives employ the comedy double-act routine (Clements 2013: 49). There is a choice comedy sketch from his novel Post Office (Bukowski 1992) where the protagonist (Chinaski) tries to impress his new girlfriend, Joyce, with a stylish oriental ‘love’ meal. He aspires to bourgeois culture by displaying his food knowledge and ability to cook exotic cuisine, exhibiting cultural capital: When Joyce came home that night, I had it on the table, ready. Cooked seaweed mixed with a dash of sea-spider, and piles of little golden, fried-in-butter snails. I took her into the kitchen and showed her the stuff on the table. ‘I’ve cooked this in your honor,’ I said, ‘in dedication of our love.’ ‘What the hell’s that shit?’ she asked. ‘Snails.’ ‘Snails?’ ‘Yes, don’t you realize that for many centuries Orientals have thrived upon this and the like? Let us honor them and honor ourselves. It’s fried in butter.’ Joyce came in and sat down. I started snapping snails into my mouth. ‘God damn, they are good baby! TRY ONE!’ Joyce reached down and forked one into her mouth while looking at the others on her plate. I jammed a big mouthful of delicious seaweed. ‘Good, huh, baby?’ She chewed the snail in her mouth. ‘Fried in golden butter!’ I picked up a few with my hand, tossed them into my mouth. ‘The centuries are on our side, babe. We can’t go wrong!’ She finally swallowed hers. Then examined the others on her plate. ‘They all have tiny assholes! It’s horrible! Horrible!’ ‘What’s horrible about assholes, baby?’ She held a napkin to her mouth. Got up and ran to the bathroom. She began vomiting. I hollered in from the kitchen:

13 The concepts of ‘art as life’ and ‘life as art’ have been explained in detail elsewhere (Clements 2013: 11–41) 14 Dickens did have to contend with penury as a boy and the ignominy of debtor prison as his father was incarcerated in Marshalsea (south London), as detailed in Little Dorritt (1857).

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‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH ASSHOLES, BABY? YOU’VE GOT AN ASSHOLE, I’VE GOT AN ASSHOLE! YOU GO TO THE STORE AND BUY A PORTERHOUSE STEAK, THAT HAD AN ASSHOLE! ASSHOLES COVER THE EARTH! IN A WAY TREES HAVE ASSHOLES BUT YOU CAN’T FIND THEM, THEY JUST DROP THEIR LEAVES. YOUR ASSHOLE, MY ASSHOLE, THE WORLD IS FULL OF BILLIONS OF ASSHOLES, THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE CARWASH BOY HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE JUDGE AND THE MURDERER HAVE ASSHOLES … EVEN PURPLE STICKPIN* HAS AN ASSHOLE!’ ‘Oh stop it! STOP IT!’ She heaved again. Small town. I opened the bottle of sake and had a drink. (Bukowski 1992: 72–4) [*‘Purple Stickpin’ is Chinaski’s rival for Joyce’s affections.] Bukowski employed typical carnivalesque imagery of orifices and the incongruity of eating snails with graphic scatological humour, whilst at the same time ridiculing bourgeois social practices. I imagine the snails were still in their shells, which adds to the incongruity of the scene. He was the perennial joker living on the edge in his seedy east Hollywood flat. Another example of his dry, dark humour concerns Chinaski filling out an application form with the other job seekers at the post office to work as a regular carrier: After swearing us in, the guy told us: ‘All right now, you’ve got a good job. Keep your nose clean and you’ve got the security for the rest of your life.’ Security? You could get security in jail. 3 squares and no rent to pay, no utilities, no income tax, no child support. No license plate fees. No traffic tickets. No drunk driving raps. No losses at the race track. Free medical attention. Comradeship with those with similar interests. Church. Round-eye. Free burial. (Bukowski 1992: 55) Bukowski ironically turns around time in prison as a must-have lifestyle. One of the best portrayals of Chinaski’s marginal and poor alternative lifestyle was documented in Bukowski’s Nut Ward East of Hollywood (Bukowski 1983), a fictionalized short story about his outsider friends in the east Hollywood community. There are three characters that Chinaski invites into his home. First Mad Jimmy, a petty thief whom Bukowski describes in detail: He sat down on my couch and looked up into the full-length mirror behind my chair, tugging at his hat, this way and that. He had two brown paper bags. One contained the usual bottle of port wine. The other he emptied out on the coffee table – knives forks, spoons; little dolls – followed by a metal bird (light blue with broken beak and chipped paint job) and other forms of junk. He peddled the shit – all of it stolen – at the various hippie shops and head shops along Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards – that is, the poor man’s area of these boulevards where I lived, where we all lived … Mad Jimmy thought he was a painter and I thought his paintings were very bad and I told him so. He also thought that my paintings were very bad. It was possible that we were both right … Mad Jimmy was really fucked-up. His eyes, ears and nose were essentially negative. Some wax in canals of left and right ears; mucous

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Representations by Marginal Artists membrane of nose slightly inflamed … his respiratory system: upper borders of left and right lungs – some rales and congestion. When he wasn’t smoking a cigarette he was rolling a joint or sucking at his wine bottle. He had a Systolic 11 and Diastolic 78 giving pulse pressure of 34. He was good with women but his haemoglobin was very low; being 73, no 72 percent. Like the rest of us when he drank he didn’t eat and he liked to drink.

Then there was Maxie: Maxie is going to shut off all the sewers in Los Angeles to help the Cause of the People. Well, it’s a damn nice gesture … I’m all for the people. We’ve been friends a long time. And Izzy Steiner: Izzy was studying to be a Rabbi but he didn’t want to be a Rabbi. All he wanted to do was to eat and grow larger and larger. You would go in for a one minute piss and when you came out your refrigerator was empty (Bukowski 1983: 18–9; 26; 28). In contrast, Jack Kerouac, the poster boy of the beat writers, was a college kid who searched out low life rather than lived it. His short story The Vanishing American Hobo (Kerouac 2018), described the different classes of hobos (down-and-outs), which has a whimsical character: In Holland they don’t allow bums, the same maybe in Copenhagen. But in Paris you can be a bum - in Paris bums are treated with great respect and are rarely refused a few francs. - There are various kinds of classes of bums in Paris, the high-class bum has a dog and baby carriage in which he keeps all his belongings, and that usually consists of old France-Soirs, rags, tin cans, empty bottles, broken dolls. – This bum sometimes has a mistress who follows him and his dog and carriage around. – The lower bums don’t own a thing, they just sit on the banks of the Seine picking their nose at the Eiffel Tower. – The bums in England have English accents, and it makes them seem strange – they don’t understand bums in Germany – America is the motherland of bumdom (Kerouac 2018: 40). The valorization of the ‘bum’ and paean to the global hobo lifestyle, whilst entertaining and gently satirical, does appear slightly inauthentic as Kerouac was an observer who chose to reside temporarily in these communities. Maybe funnier is his creative use of the hyphen after a full stop: ‘. -’. An outsider narrative with authority, wit and integrity was the proto beat Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal (Genet 1965). He wrote graphically about his homosexuality and criminality, living in a twilight world of poverty, pimps, petty criminals, alcoholics, addicts and gamblers, which he discovered in European cities and their prisons during the 1930s. This culture of penury and squalor included much resistance and humour; for example, this passage which recalls one of his many stays in Santé Prison, Paris:

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Guy was the soul of the cell. He was arrested by the police. The following dialogue took place in my presence: ‘You’re the one who did the job on the Rue de Flandre.’ ‘No it wasn’t me.’ ‘It was you the concierge recognizes you.’ ‘It’s someone who looks like me.’ ‘She says his name is Guy.’ ‘It’s someone who looks like me and has the same name.’ ‘She recognizes your clothes.’ ‘He looks like me, has the same name and the same clothes.’ ‘He’s got the same hair.’ ‘He looks like me, has the same name, the same clothes and the same hair.’ ‘They found your finger-prints.’ ‘He looks like me, has the same name, the same clothes, the same hair and the same finger-prints.’ ‘That can’t keep on.’ ‘To the very end.’ ‘It was you who did the job.’ ‘No it wasn’t me.’ (Genet 1965 [1949]: 180) The book is a satire on the traditional ‘European Tour’ (an early form of cultural tourism) which young aristocrats and the rich bourgeoisie undertook to increase their cultural capital for the ‘polite culture’ they would later rejoin. But Genet resided in prisons rather than luxury hotels, engaged in seedy and erotic gay relationships – rather than prim, romantic liaisons – and contended with hunger, sweat and lice rather than exquisite foods, expensive perfumes and lap dogs. Ken Kesey, another key American beat and proto hippie writer, lived with the Merry Pranksters (a group of 14 or so who influenced countercultural taste) at his Californian ranch, and in 1964 they toured the country in his multi-coloured bus called Further, giving out LSD to enlighten America. Further (or Furthur) was a destination that could be reached through changed perception influenced by mindexpanding drugs, ideas that helped instigate the psychedelic hippie era (Faggen 2002). Also at this time there was a reaction to psychiatry, especially the use of drugs and electro-convulsive therapy to control people, as expressed by R.D. Lang and the budding rights movement across the US. Besides Kesey volunteering to test new drugs through a government-sponsored scheme, he worked on the ‘mental’ ward of Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital where he built up empathy for the inmates and their situations with regard to social exclusion and mental and emotional abnormality15. The inmates were trapped, which inspired his classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey 2002 [1962]), fictionally situated in Oregon State Mental Hospital and a paean to individuality and resistance in the face of drugs and ECT used to control patients. Into this excluded community strides the patient protagonist in the story, Randle. P. McMurphy, a rebellious, fun-loving character and the apotheosis of the regimented workaholic who embodies American Dream ideology. He is a con man and 15 Allegedly the CIA had been undergoing hallucinogenic drug tests since the 1950s to develop a means of mind control (Faggen 2002).

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gambler who fakes madness to avoid earning a living, with a litany of arrests to his name for drunkenness, assault and even rape (Faggen 2002). The narrative of McMurphy’s struggle against the system is spoken through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute semi-Native American inmate, who is also feigning madness to escape what he calls ‘the “combine,” which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside world’ (Kesey 2002 [1962]: 250). It is a classic conspiracy theory where the combine works in cahoots with the psychiatric hospital to alter patients on the inside. The ward is controlled by Nurse Ratched (whom Bromden calls the ‘Big Nurse’), a bureaucratic, humourless and officious woman who lacks humanity. Humour is a weapon employed by McMurphy to resist the system and the daily routine of drudgery, and a method to rehumanize the patients in this scary heterotopia. A key passage and caper concerns McMurphy taking a group of inmates on a fishing trip with one of his ‘hooker’ girls and the ward doctor. There should have been two hookers on the trip, referred to as an ‘aunt’ and a ‘widow of a fishermen’, who with the doctor legitimized the day out. The two cars containing the party of patients dressed in institutionalized hospital green uniforms stop at a service station whilst en route to the marina to board the boat, and the doctor orders petrol. McMurphy, ever the mercurial joker, then tells the petrol attendants that the expedition is authorized and governmentsponsored. He maintains that: we ain’t ordinary nuts; we’re every bloody one of us hot off the criminal-insane ward on our way to San Quentin where they got better facilities to handle us. You see that freckle faced kid there? … he’s an insane knife artist that killed three men. The man behind him is known as the Bull Goose Loony, unpredictable as a wild hog. You see that big guy? He’s an Indian and he beat six white men to death with a pick handle when they tried to cheat him trading muskrat hides … (Kesey 2002: 202–3). This grotesque exaggeration and carnivalesque playfulness inverts hierarchy and McMurphy uses this power to convince the attendants, who originally were going to overcharge for the petrol, to send the bill back to the hospital. He uses the cash saved to buy beer. Harding, another patient, acknowledges this strange inversion of power when answering a question from a curious cyclist who wonders if the green uniforms signify a club: No my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind … [He turned to McMurphy]. Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become (Kesey 2002: 204). The inmate party eventually finds The Lark and takes to the sea. The trip is a rehash of carnival, literally a ‘ship of fools’ off to cause mayhem. McMurphy symbolizes playful incongruity and resistance, which can only be a temporary phenomenon as this chaotic anti-power discourse is eventually recuperated in the denouement of the narrative. His rebellion on the ward comes to a head as he physically attacks Nurse Ratched and strips off her uniform. This violence results in punishment and his tragic lobotomy, reducing him to a zombie. This destroys the humour and

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anarchy in the ward, the humanity and optimism of the other patients. Bromden suffocates him with a pillow to end both his life and the collective pain of inmates on the ward, then he escapes the asylum. There is a feminist critique of the power dynamics constructed in the narrative, whereby a male ward is dominated by a deviant earth mother who represents an evil manipulator. She unleashes the violence and depravity of the men that the institution has previously contained (Jewkes 2004: 107–139), giving the impression that she is to blame for the institution and its controlling powers. There is something of Max Weber’s (1992 [1905]) conceptualization of the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy that imprisons everyone in the ward, the product of rationalized power and a metaphor for life. This concentration camp mentality which entraps us can only be diffused by playful resistance and incongruity, but only temporarily. Terry Eagleton (2019: 146) wondered if humour and truth can be reconciled if the facts are so appalling, echoing Theodor Adorno’s blast about the futility of creating art after the barbarism of Auschwitz. But humour is ambivalent and lurks in the background of tragedy with its limitless imagination, waiting to transform the mundane by creating new ideas. The beats lived ‘art as life’, a libertarianism that questioned lifestyle, incorporated sexual experimentation and the consumption of copious amounts of drink and drugs, exuding romanticism and ‘low life’ authenticity as artist bohemians. Julian Brigstocke (2014), in his symbolic excavation of Montmartre in the late 19th century, described how this once-excluded and run-down industrial heterotopia of Paris had been reimagined by bohemians and artists, including Charles Baudelaire, Claude Debussy, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Verlaine and Émile Zola. The Moulin de la Galette (cafe) and Le Chat Noir (nightclub and periodical) captured the new cabaret and carnivalesque spirit of this nascent creative Bohemia. A key character was the Pierrot clown, transformed from traditional French panto-mime, into a bohemian avant-gardist. The artist dressed in black with the Pierrot’s white face (the pallor of moonlight) in order to parody bourgeois fashion as the child of the moon was a marginal and outcast character (2014: 114). The sartorial use of black became de rigueur for the American beats, French existentialists and artists in general, which the Goth subculture later co-opted. There are relatively unknown outsider writers; for example, Wally Jiagoo, whose short story Glass Windows and Glass Ceilings (Jiagoo 2017) described his double life in London working behind a glass panel as a Welfare Benefits Officer and his unrealistic aspirations as a screen writer, hence the title’s reference to glass ceilings. He feels alienated living in south London with his family originally from Mauritius, excluded as a writer because he has not acquired those vital networks in the arts; but also because he remains powerless to help the marginal and destitute neutered by the bureaucratic character of his job: My job is to help those on the breadline, those demonised in society. My other job is to hobnob with upper echelon types, ingratiating myself in the hope of one day making it in the world of TV (Jiagoo 2017: 104). He meets Hattie, an intelligent girl with a higher pedigree than his humble working-class background, who also has a prestigious degree from Cambridge University. They may both be starting out as writers, but she quickly networks with an old college friend and lands a plumb job in a TV production company. He is jealous of her privilege and the

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glass ceiling that frustrates his own ambitions. He rethinks a conversation he had with a male colleague at the benefits office who found it difficult to sympathize with one of his regular clients as she lived such a tragic life, and unfairly accused her of having a chip on her shoulder. He desperately looks up the word ‘Chippy’ in the dictionary, which he recounts with self-deprecating irony: Chippy informal noun British a fish-and-chip shop. a carpenter. adjective (of a person) touchy and defensive, especially on account of having a grievance or sense of inferiority. I take comfort in the fact that I’ve only ever worked one shift frying chips, and that I don’t know how to shape wood. The last point, mind, rings true. (Jiaggo 2017: 112) A writer looking up words is an everyday occurrence and it is self-effacing to admit to such a practice. But he knows what the word means already and either wants to reinforce his inferiority and exclusion or hopes there is another miraculous definition. American novelist Greg Baxter, who has written about loneliness, failed lives, death and self-destruction, described a slightly lateral notion of living exclusion juxtaposed with a sardonic rant against the culture of contemporary visual arts. His short story The Mark of Death (Baxter 2013) concerned a love and death triangle of poverty and exclusion between the author, who is dying, and Sylvia, a schoolteacher who is in love with unemployed Franco, who also is dying. All three visit a modern art gallery where the author finds the art irritating, pessimistic and ‘pointless’ and is overwhelmed by his desire for Sylvia: What is an art exhibition to a man like me? What are those mice on the ceiling to me? What is that ant on the newspaper? I have seen more art in a dried-up bowl of cereal … The art disgusts me. The tourists who are not moving through at top speed are reading long brochures to understand the meaning of the maze created by rails under the ceiling covered by white mice. The brochure argues that it is the scale of the work that creates art from the obvious. Well why stop? Why not simply open a window that overlooks the city and say, Is that big enough? Do you want more? Shall I put a mouse suit on every citizen and make them walk on all fours? Shall I paint the city in the sky above the city? (Baxter 2013: 126–7). This angry rant at modern art and rarefied culture is juxtaposed with his impending death. In the narrative Franco leaves the other two in the cafe of the gallery as Sylvia has fallen for the author and they return to her flat to have sex, whilst Franco commits suicide. Happy story. Nevertheless, it is a damning and bleak indictment of the irrelevance and inauthenticity of art and the pretentiousness of its audience. There are better-known representations of outsider humour in popular music lyrics situated in gritty reality. The disabled poet-songster Ian Dury wrote the song Spasticus Autisticus (Drury 1981) as an angry riposte to attitudes towards disability and charity. His disability, caused by polio as a child, resulted in the left-hand side of his body

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withering, a limp and a gait that singled him out for much bullying. The lines ‘I wibble when I piddle, ’cause my middle is a riddle’ and ‘Widdling, griddling, skittling, diddling, fiddling, diddling, widdling, diddling spasticus’ were deemed offensive and banned by the BBC. But Dury defended his song as it was purposely ironic and ‘completely anti-charity’ (Dury cited in Birch 2010: 234)16 The song was influenced by the film Spartacus (Kubrick 1960), with the title role played by Kirk Douglas. At the end of the film the captured slaves who had rebelled against the might of the Roman Empire one by one shout ‘I’m Spartacus’ as their captors attempt to discover which slave really is Spartacus in order to crucify him. Dury mimics this refrain with an alternative ‘I’m spasticus, spasticus, spasticus autisticus’; the ‘freed slave of the disabled’ as Dury’s school friend Ed Speight eloquently suggested (cited in Birch 2010: 235). Dury wrote the song in response to the United Nations deciding to call 1981 the Year of the Disabled. The banning of the track highlights the dangers of literality, which readily becomes ideological, and the enigma of humour that dissolves the boundaries between the literal, ironic and ridiculous. As Dury reflected: ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ was misunderstood by everybody except spastic people … and a lot of them hated it as well. But a few really understood it. By the people, for the people … it’s a war cry! (cited in Birch 2010: 235–6) Nevertheless, Dury’s black humour in the song was recuperated by the disabled dance company Graeae Theatre Company (and the band Orbital) for the 2012 London Paralympic ceremony. My favourite text by Dury, which is surreal and playful, is the Bus Driver’s Prayer (1992), a version of which witty ditty has been in the public sphere in one form or another since the 1960s and is a punning skit on the Lord’s Prayer. Dury’s dad was a bus driver and in the song he replaces key words of the Lord’s Prayer with geographic areas of London and beyond, which would have been familiar to him. This play on words uses Cockney slang and is pure fun. It starts: Our Farnham who art in Hendon, Harrow be thy name, Thy Kingston Come, thy Wimbledon in Erith as it is in Hendon. And ends: For Thine is the Kingston, the Purley and the Crawley. For Ivor and Ivor, Crouch End.

16 For many disabled people, charitable donations are demeaning because they feel subjected to its logic, which charity undermines their human rights. They feel grateful, as though they should shoulder the blame for their condition (not dissimilar to Protestant notions that the poor are to blame for their penury). In contrast, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 22) states that everyone is entitled to human rights unconditionally.

7

Creative Outsider Spaces and Dark Heterotopias

Concepts of outsider space emplace alterity and offer particular notions of heterotopia, which are explored theoretically and in practice. Outsider heterotopian space concerns and produces a range of alternative symbolic meanings particularly within the urban sphere (Harvey), which is explained and theorized through reference to the differing constructions of heterotopia set out by Foucault and Lefebvre. Other notions of heterotopia (Gandy, Hetherington, Johnson and Soja) help to show the complexity of the term, which is initially applied to the art of the Guerrilla Girls. Historically, the re-imagining of public space has employed irony and satire, as occurred through cabaret in heterotopian Montmartre (Brigstocke) and Berlin, which liberation challenged social expectations and championed marginality as expressed by avant-garde practices. There is reference to recent heterotopias including ‘pop-up’ flash mob and demonstration events, as well as the creative redeployment of detritus on the Emeryville mudflats into temporary junk sculptures, and the architectural creations of Richard Greaves using reclaimed materials. Finally, there are case studies of four heterotopian spaces that exude much dark humour. These include art theme parks, the cemetery, the freak show and prison.

Outsider Heterotopian Space David Harvey (1985) highlighted how the urban environment constitutes a symbolic understanding of time and space, emplacing social, economic and political concerns. Besides the spatialization of capitalism, urban space reflects the marginalization of and differences between particular individuals and social groups. Harvey focused on Paris between 1850–70, and the production of the Paris Commune, which spatialized revolutionary political ideas and struggles. Henri Lefebvre (1991) understood how the sociopolitical production of space is a material environment of unequal social relations of production, hierarchy and difference. He employed the notion of heterotopia as a means of emplacing progressive change for the excluded, a revolutionary trajectory that reflects the collective experiences and rights of the ‘common’ people, and to progress radical causes whilst suspending capitalist ideology (Lefebvre 2003). This political conceptualization differs from the theoretical construction of heterotopia developed by Michel Foucault (1967), who compared utopias that are ideal, hypothetical and fantastical with heterotopias that are real and diverse places of crisis and deviation. Heterotopias include partially imagined understandings and representations that overlap with physical manifestations and which help to constitute each other (as shown earlier by René Magritte’s Golconda (Fig 1.2)). Notwithstanding this, they offer a range of potential meanings of ‘other’ spaces besides those advancing radical political ideologies, sites that encourage people to reassess and re-evaluate social norms.

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Peter Johnson (2012) contemplated the possible derivation of heterotopia as a medical description of tissue that develops in unusual parts of the body and is therefore dislocated. These sites are social and cultural places that challenge and contest normalcy, counter-spaces that include concrete institutions such as prisons, hospitals, public houses, museums, cabaret clubs and theatres; public spaces like the beach, park, street corner or sports stadium; micro-spaces, such as the garden shed, lift, fruit machine or lorry cab; and mutable temporary spaces comprised of the flash mob, demonstration or festival. The term embraces degrees of exclusion and difference, and encompasses variations of outsiderdom. As Johnson concluded: heterotopias are defined as sites which are embedded in aspects and stages of our times and which somehow mirror and at the same time distort, settle or invert other spaces (Johnson 2012: 790). So heterotopias cover a range of possibilities, which typically includes the everyday cultural practices of various groups and individuals. These are places that people can embrace or visit, which may be inconsistent in relation to their function, alter over time and include a cornucopia of abstracted and imaginary understandings. They are often on the periphery of society and challenge, even reclaim, the public sphere through practices that may critique ‘normality’, disturb everyday reality and question hegemony. Graffiti and street art, for example, may fashion heterotopias that pop up overnight with a radical or humorous message (or both), offering an alternative way of looking at some aspect of society. Foucault’s (1967) six principles of heterotopology are both playful and offer much variety and possibility. First, a sacred and forbidden place that in turn refers to individuals in crisis. Second, a marginal space located away from the city centre. Third, a space that is an amalgam of incompatible geographic and socio-cultural possibilities. Fourth, a space linked to the disruption of time (heterochronic space). Fifth, somewhere that has its own language and regulations which are different from the social norm. And, finally, it is a space of illusion that may be resistant or marginal. The co-existent and disruptive character of heterotopia is possibly best represented in concrete terms by the cemetery (Johnson 2012), which offers an illusory and taboo space iterating the incompatibility of life and death, the disruption of time, specific rituals and norms of behaviour. Edward Soja (1996) employed the term ‘third space’ to describe the heterotopian combination of physical and internal representations of space (enmindment in relation to human thinking) and the wide-ranging permutations of these variables that offer endless possibilities and perspectives. Foucault conceived that ‘deviant heterotopias’ exist where ‘individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the average or norm are placed’ (Foucault 1978: 139). They are removed temporarily (or permanently) from the productive system and social order, neither conforming to normative behaviour nor social practices. So, for example, people behave in different ways to expected social norms when at the beach, cemetery or pop festival. Also, these spaces offer deviancy and can act as agents of change which resist hegemony and attract particular attitudes and beliefs. Foucault (1977) referred to the microphysics of power and how it is individualized and embodied, working in different capacities, both temporal and mutable, wrapped up in various discursive patterns of knowledge. It can emanate from below through local

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power relations and their capillary networks, which challenge the hierarchical power systems on which they depend, creating degrees of ambiguity. Here power in an abstract sense cannot be separated from those who exercise it in whatever practical capacity or context (Gordon 2000), and humour, as shown, can be a strategy to challenge it. Outsider heterotopias have their own systems and networks which may be less visible and operate alongside official structures in the same space. So, for example, in prison (or psychiatric hospital) there are networks of inmates, staff and inmates and staff that operate in very different ways from official top-down processes and expectations. They use unofficial, often dark, carnivalesque or gallows humour that coexists alongside the official system and its bureaucratic language, where satire, irony and parody are disguised. As Michel Bakhtin surmised with regard to the tactics of carnivalesque: parodying is the creation of a decrowning double; it is that same ‘world turned inside out’. For this reason parody is ambivalent … Everything has its parody that is, its laughing aspect, for everything is reborn and renewed … In Rome parody was an obligatory aspect of funeral as well as of triumphant laughter … In carnival, parodying was employed very widely, in diverse forms and degrees … It was like an entire system of crooked mirrors elongating, diminishing, distorting in various directions and degrees (Bakhtin 1994: 254–5). Carnivalesque laughter that coexists alongside normative practices offers other understandings and collective representations beyond a singular and specific social reality, which alters power dynamics, as outlined. It helps people deal with crisis and change as it offers various dimensions of perceiving the present reality, cultural codes and social experience. With regard to humour and visual culture, heterotopian spaces offer expressive avenues and alliances, whether materialized through official public art, architecture and theme parks, or through revolutionary epitaphs, political graffiti and countercultural street art. A recent example of parody and altered perspectives created through humour was the re-presentation of traditionally gendered public space. The Guerrilla Girls have continued to create challenging heterotopian space by critiquing maleness with pithy, humorous posters and performances alongside the promotion of other minority causes; in this case a banner above Aldgate East tube station in London close to the Whitechapel Gallery (2016/17) which was holding an exhibition of their work: The Guerrilla Girls asked 383 museums about diversity only 1/4 responded come in and see why. (www.guerrillagirls.com/projects/) The group sent out questionnaires to museums and galleries around Europe and received 100 answers. Those who ignored the request had their names written on to the floor so that visitors could walk on them. Not unsurprisingly, another poster was aimed at US President Donald Trump, renowned for his aggressive and reactionary manner. It was entitled ‘President Trump Announces New Commemorative Months!’. This included a spoof list of what was commemorated against sardonic japes; for example, ‘African American History Month’ was paired with ‘Ku Klux Klan Month’, ‘LGBTQ Pride Month’ with ‘Pray the Gay Away Month’, and ‘Disability Awareness Month’ with ‘Supermodel Month’.

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Kevin Hetherington (1997) examined three particular heterotopian spaces – the Palais Royal during the French Revolution, the masonic lodge in the 18th century and the early factories of the industrial revolution in the UK – as they created a different order and reality that marked them out as ‘other’. The seditious and revolutionary ideas discussed in these spaces offer a very particular political understanding of heterotopia. They are wide-reaching, offering different ways of ordering space and symbolically those minds that resist dominant ideas and cultural mores, creating diverse transgressive meanings. Hetherington referred to these heterotopias as the ‘badlands of modernity’ containing various resistant and ambiguous characteristics that may appear as mundane or extraordinary spaces, which generate a range of socio-political possibilities that lie at the heart of late modernity. A straightforward example of a heterotopia showcasing marginal artists was researched by Andrew Deener (2009) in relation to the boardwalk actors who populate Los Angeles’ Venice Beach, a mile and a half stretch located along the Pacific Ocean that has associations with beat and hippie culture. Self-styled artists perform their identities there, creating a local market for goods, authenticated by their lack of institutionalized backing from curators, art galleries and museums. This perceived ‘otherness’ Deener recognized as ambiguous, as market success requires some negotiation of identity and with those art worlds which they appeared to disavow. Henri Lefebvre (1991) highlighted the social production of space through lived realities, representational meanings and social practices that limit human experience and reproduce injustice. It materializes inequalities that help define who we are, which embraces the struggle of excluded groups and individuals for legitimacy by defining their rights to the city as well as instigating progressive change. Lefebvre suggested that heterotopias allow a temporary suspension of the social norms and material values associated with capitalism and the appropriation of space for radical purpose. They are in tension with rationalized mechanisms and systems as well as unrealizable utopian dreams, highlighting the paradoxical character of urban space. Here satire and irony translate this tension. Julian Brigstocke, taking an historical perspective, related irony to the political reimagining of public space (Montmartre in Paris during the late 19th century), because experiencing the contradictions of a place makes it possible to develop counter understanding. This includes a celebration of anti-tradition and cosmopolitanism, as well as autonomy and the rootedness of feelings for the locality (Brigstocke 2014: 112). Cabaret was established in the late 18th century through urban clubs, where popular and folk culture was employed to parody established literary, dramatic and aesthetic norms. Humour became defiant, satirical and politicized (as signified by the groups of artists operating in Montmartre – Fumistes, Hydropaths and Incoherents), and it embodied an anarchic and carefree attitude to the world. The cabaret tradition specifically expressed carnivalesque, challenging authority and voicing new ‘truths’ and ideas in relation to urban experience, emplaced in Berlin during the upheavals after the First World War. Cabaret club heterotopias foregrounded avantgarde art in which humour challenged boundaries and expectations, whilst it championed non-conformity and marginality, however ambiguous the process. John Saunders (2008) highlighted the mutability of culture and the temporality of public space through a pop-up event in Montreal, Canada, on August 9, 2003, at Le Place des Arts. In a pre-arranged performance, four members of the public opened their umbrellas at 1pm and the amassed crowd proceeded to make quacking noises for a few

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minutes, then they threw small plastic ducks into the nearby fountain and dispersed, conforming to the flash mob convention. These types of performance have an inclusive appearance as they employ public space for social and aesthetic purposes, however fleeting and unexpected, whereby people embody a particular notion of emplaced citizenship through ownership of a temporary heterotopian space. The event was incongruous and absurdist in the avant-garde tradition, challenging notions of normative public behaviour. Virág Molnár (2014), in relation to new uses for urban spaces, recognized the extent to which flash mob ‘urban pranksterism’ reframes our understanding, which provides some insight into the impact of digital media on changing sociability and of urban creativity assimilated by advertisements and political campaigning. Other temporal examples of outsider space include various political and human rights demonstrations across the world; for example, Gay Pride festivals offering much sexual irony and ambivalence, demonstrations concerning gender and worker’s rights and ecological and anti-capitalist marches. One such demonstration in the UK (amongst several in cities across the world) was the Women’s March on London (2017), held on the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency. This event attracted up to 100,000 people in London and emplaced a radical gendered perspective of Trump that highlighted his record of sexist behaviour and machismo, epitomized by his louche treatment of women and advice for men ‘to grab them by the pussy’ (www.bbc.co.uk/news/ uk-38700123). There were some choice placards, including ‘Orange Is The New Twat’, ‘Babes Against The Bullshit’, ‘The Future Is Nasty’ and, my favourite, ‘We Shall Overcomb’. Another placard in a sister demonstration in Manchester, UK, bore the pun ‘Manchester women are revolting’. These ideas are highly contextual and revolve around Trump’s alleged sexual abuse, ‘fake’ orange tan, and hair. Besides demonstrations there are a plethora of temporary outsider heterotopias, including disused buildings for cultural events, roadside memorials and informal performing spaces alongside the beach and pier, as previously detailed. Urban heterotopias may revolve around the demolition of parts of the city and temporary sites for new transport systems, offices, housing or regeneration projects. A playful outsider heterotopia that involved the redeployment of rubbish and detritus is the Emeryville tidal mudflats in California, a location that physically alters shape. The tide deposits materials (flotsam and jetsam) that artists then employed to construct junk sculptures. Bob Sommer (2000) documented and archived the noncommercial sculptures constructed in this space between the 1960s and 1980s. He recounted how Bay Area residents (non-professional, self-taught artists) created sculptures for their own enjoyment that were viewed by an audience of motorists on the nearby highway. No money was made by the artists and there was a collective atmosphere as sculptures embedded in the mud often required many hands to construct. This included informal rules regarding construction techniques, scavenging local materials and refraining from cannibalizing other art work for materials. The golden age of 1970s people’s art on the mudflats eventually gave way to commercial and party political slogans. It was designated a nature reserve by the state of California in the late 1990s after some of the land had been built on, and officials took down what was left of the Emeryville sculptures. In 1981 six large sculptures were erected to dramatize the financing of war by the US government in Central America (Enos 2016). Virtually all the sculptures were demolished the next day, which was possibly due to an orchestrated political backlash. These anonymous sculptures were a satirical commentary on US involvement in Central America; for

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example, the sculpture of a man pointing a rifle at another man holding up a placard with the strapline El Salvador Deaths = $. To cement the carnivalesque atmosphere, there was a large plywood naval ship with the slogan U.S.S. Misery: Resist the War in Central America, reconfiguring the carnivalesque ‘ship of fools’. At the time, more than a quarter of a million commuters passed this counterpublic space daily, many of whom did not take kindly to the political satire and earthy humour of the sculptures; hence the visibility of this oppositional space possibly influenced its eventual conversion into a protected nature reserve. The creative use of space for radical political purposes forges a heterotopian alliance (Gandy 2012), in this case between aesthetics, political messages and ecological harmony. This whimsical sculpture garden, which was erected, washed away and re-erected for over 20 years was an ecosystem that solved the problem of tidal debris. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the protection of the mudflats as a nature reserve, some of this public land was co-opted as corporate and private space, which microcosm expresses the privatization of public assets and the reality of neoliberalism. Another outsider heterotopia also using debris is a hamlet of architectural installations created by Richard Greaves in an isolated area of Beauce Forest in the Quebec countryside. He bought the plot in order to express his living vision and constructed ramshackle buildings from garbage and reclaimed wood from nearby abandoned barns (Rousseau 2003). The installations may look thrown together and fail to conform to modern architectural designs and aesthetics, but they are habitable as well as humorous. For example, The Sugar House has the carnivalesque appearance of a rubbish tip that defies gravity, appearing both uninhabitable and dangerous. Greaves used hay wire, rope and hoists to help give solidity and navigate around the structure: To walk through these buildings is to some extent an athletic endeavour, demanding vigilance and watchfulness: the adventurer must squeeze through narrow halls, find his way into a dark room, keep his balance on an inclined floor, climb an almost vertical stairway, cling onto a rope to hoist himself up to the next floor, or crouch down to get through a door frame (Lombardi & Rousseau 2013: 75). These architectural installations are remote places and their quirky appearance corresponds to the architect who is self-taught, marginal and unbound by architectural etiquette. Greaves emphasized the importance of children as his audience, who play in his fantastical installations: ‘when the children come here, they laugh all the time. That’s my goal, my absolute’ (Greaves, cited in Lombardi & Rousseau 2013: 75). This playful heterotopia celebrates fluidity, asymmetry and distortion, opposing architectural convention and fixity. Besides Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village (1955–63) in California and Nek Chand’s Sculpture Park (2015) in Chandigarh, India, as detailed, visionary heterotopias include Watts Towers in Los Angeles. It consists of three enormous towers (and three smaller ones) made of spare building materials and assorted detritus that took the builder, Simon Rodia, 33 years to complete in his back yard. He gifted his life work to his neighbour when he moved home in 1954. Outsider heterotopias vary from permutations of the real and representational, radical, reactionary and imaginary, offering varying visions. The focus will now shift to four specific heterotopias discussed in relation to art and the use of ironic and grotesque humour that challenges reality and political correctness.

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Art Theme Parks Art theme park heterotopias are a hybrid offspring of amusement parks and open-air museums. The three cases detailed include Szoborpark (Statue Park) on the outskirts of Budapest in Hungary, Grutas Park, outside Vilnius in Lithuania, and Dismaland, which was a temporary heterotopia at Weston-super-Mare in the UK. They offer critical irony and refer to issues of inclusion and exclusion, the first two with regard to communism and Soviet hegemony and the last in relation to global capitalism and American hegemony. Szoborpark was an original ironic riposte to communism, created in 1993 by Ákos Eleőd in response to a competition to dispose of the communist statuary from Budapest after the silent revolution in 1989. The 41 exhibits (statues, busts and bas-reliefs) are situated around a pathway that loops back (like a figure eight, or symbol of infinity) and has an off-shoot which abruptly ends with a brick wall. This incongruity expresses the irony that communism goes nowhere, reflecting the change in political ideology associated with the silent revolution (Clements 2014). The entrance to the park is a neoclassical façade that includes statues of Lenin and Marx, setting the tone. There is kitsch communist memorabilia for sale (including ‘the last breath of communism sealed in a tin’) and the DVD, The Life of an Agent, which is shown in the adjacent exhibition centre. The showing of this training film, which was used by the AVO (Hungarian Secret Police) during the communist era, may create anger and fear in those who were involved during the communist period but can be reinterpreted as ironic infotainment for other tourists (Clements 2018: 54). The park was originally directed at the autocratic communist regime prior to the velvet revolution and free elections in 1990, but it can be reconstrued in light of the failure of post-communist ideologies since then and the commodification of the public sphere (Clements 2018: 66), which offers much ambiguity. A particularly sardonic exhibit is the Béla Kun Memorial (see Fig 7.1), originally commissioned in 1986 by the former communist regime. It ‘celebrates’ the 100th anniversary of the birth of Béla Kun, who was the first communist leader and head of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 (Réthly 2010: 36). He is positioned under a lamppost waving goodbye to the crowd, which is represented by sheet metal cut-outs giving a playful two-dimensional industrial quality to the scene. It is a direct criticism of those killed under the system and a satire on Kun himself, who was excluded from Hungary and ended up a broken man in a Soviet prison, purged by Stalin and executed in Moscow in 1938. There is ambiguity of interpretation as the totalitarian communist regime that had commissioned the piece had satirized itself (Clements 2018), which liberal sentiment is highly unusual and bursts the stereotype of an autocratic communist system that stifles critical voices. During the silent revolution the memorial in Budapest was painted and a clown’s hat with bells placed on Kun’s head (Réthly 2010: 36), exaggerating the hubris of this tragic figure. This representation of carnivalesque scrambles ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ culture, resisting hegemony through satire (Clements 2014: 76). Notwithstanding the ironic tone of the park, there have been criticisms that it is a cemetery of statuary that have been improperly buried, which helps to anaesthetize the past (Williams 2008: 190). This prevents a proper discussion about Hungarian history and the need to critically evaluate it to ensure future freedoms.

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Figure 7.1 Béla Kun Memorial, 1986, Imre Varga, cut sheet metal, Szoborpark, Budapest. Photo by Paul Clements 2010.

Grutas Park, also known as Stalin World, was created on April 1 (April Fool’s Day), 2001, and is of similar ilk to Szoborpark but much larger. It consists of 86 statues, busts and bas-reliefs from Vilnius which were removed from the streets and repositioned around a looping walkway surrounded by trees and a barbed wire fence using fragments recovered from labour camps. There are speakers blasting out retro Soviet marching music along the route, adding to the atmosphere (Williams 2008: 187–8). Like Szoborpark it ridicules the Soviet system and related era in Lithuania, but has a more grotesque representation as there were many ‘political’ fatalities in the country prior to independence in 1990, besides the 60,000 survivors of Stalinist deportations to labour camps still living at the turn of the millennium. Both theme parks ridicule the political capital of former times and are now part of the tourist gaze in both countries. These heterotopias are excluded spaces away from the cities where the statuary originally was situated. As Paul Williams surmised, they have a ‘sense of historical closure … [which] too closely resembles the traits of fascism itself’ (Williams 2008: 192). But as humour was the only means of symbolic resistance against the communist regime, such irony befits the parks. They are unsettling relocated places that on the one hand are ahistorical displays of public statuary randomly removed from former incarnations of two capital cities, dislocated and wrenched from their rightful locations; whilst on the other hand they suggest a space for unwanted communist patrimony, banished and seeking sanctuary. Szoborpark reconfigured the statuary of Budapest to stimulate fresh thinking and make money, which may challenge the past but also questions the present and future of a Hungary gripped by the crony Putinesque regime of Victor Orbán, its longstanding president (Clements 2018). So the park vacillates between processes of radical appropriation and its commercial recuperation, from critique of communism to neoliberal co-option and kitsch.

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There is another layer of meaning concerning how entrepreneurial capitalism, a foundational aspect of the systems that underpin the creation of both parks, has recuperated the previous communist era through spectacle. Ákos Réthly, the director of Szoborpark, created a public-private partnership exploiting state assets through capitalist enterprise (Clements 2014: 81–2), whilst Viliumas Malinauskas, a former collective farm administrator reborn as a canned mushroom entrepreneur, applied his proposal to Grutas Park employing similar public-private ideology (Williams 2008: 187–8). All of which concurs with rebranding the cities of Budapest and Vilnius for business and tourism. Williams (2008: 186) referred to existing representations renewed through re-representation, whilst Howard Feather (2018: 122) has described the process of capitalist co-option as the ‘ping pong of recuperative cycles’. Critically, public-private partnerships can be critiqued as a means of recycling taxpayers’ money back into the private realm, the redistribution of public wealth to the well off. What to do with the patrimony and memory of the communist era has become a thorny problem in Poland, with the far-right nationalists wanting to use the statuary to humiliate the memory of the communist past and left-wing ideology, whilst those socialists on the left seek to use this statuary to educate future generations on Polish history and the dangers of communism. The new nationalist Law and Justice government will create a museum to ridicule the horrors of the era at Podborsko, whilst the Kursk organization wants to remember the past through an educational park at Surmowka (Luxmoore 2018). In contrast, Dismaland was a pop-up theme park set up for five weeks in the summer of 2015, a dystopian playground produced by street artist Banksy. He gathered work from over 50 other artists to lure tourists back to the dilapidated former Tropicana recreational site at the coastal resort of Weston-super-Mare (Zebracki 2017). This heterotopian spectacle was promoted through the official exhibition brochure Dismaland Bemusement Park (using a Gothic font reminiscent of Third Reich propaganda in Nazi Germany), which is now a collector’s item. Dismaland included grotesque art with much dark humour and irony regarding theme parks, which included a mock security entrance reminiscent of an international airport. Gags included the Grim Reaper dressed as a skeleton with black cape and hood, riding a dodgem car, typical of UK fairgrounds (Zebracki 2015). He was in a darkened room and dancing to the Bee Gees song Staying Alive from the disco-themed film Saturday Night Fever (Badham 1977). There was an interactive piece about the refugee crisis situated around a boating pond, with scaled-down models of navy patrol boats and other vessels crammed full of asylum seekers, including several figures scattered face down in the water and presumably dead. This coin-operated Dream Boat installation offered the audience a chance to steer a model boat using a stainless-steel wheel as though at the helm. Banksy satirized the global Disney corporation brand with a take-off of its logo (of a fairy princess in a mock castle) and a gruesome interior narrative. And there was a Pocket Money Loans kiosk where kids could borrow money at 5,000% APR. Dismaland was promoted through a spoof advert of a nuclear family going to the theme park for the day and a grotesque Punch and Judy show performance (Banksy 2015). I have discussed the notion of disneyfication in America and the ‘re-creation of reality into fantasy laden with Disney values and ideologies’ elsewhere (Clements 2013: 160– 85), and Dismaland was a grotesque satire on Disneyland as it targeted low-income families who frequent the tourist town. Therefore the irony was that it was aimed at

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the ‘99% who would rather not be at an art show’ (Pricco 2015). Such support for the ‘culturally excluded’ throws into sharp relief exactly who constitutes the audience for art, and, however successful Banksy has been within established art worlds, it is recognition that his work possibly reaches a wide-ranging selection of people due to his background as a street artist, which gives him credibility. Dismaland was an attack on such values and the inauthenticity associated with commodity capitalism and the American Dream, which obfuscates the harsh realities resulting from a system that traps workers in low-income, zero-hours labour. It conjures up and satirizes Walter Benjamin’s (2006) notion of phantasmagoria and daydreaming laden with consumerist ideologies, which distract people from the grim reality of their lives. People happily wallow in their alienation to avoid the present and imagine another life. Benjamin’s highly seductive dreamworld has been captured by Dreamland, the aptly named amusement park in Margate, UK, which reconstructed a traditional seaside funfair, presumably another heterotopia that Dismaland ridiculed. An alternative narrative is that Banksy and those involved in creating Dismaland are part of the educated and wealthy bourgeois elite (the 1% rather than the 99%) who recognize the potential of his name brand. So the humour, rather than playful satire, has a superior edge, targeting low-income families and tourists that engage with Disney; in which case this art theme park exposes much ambiguity. Not everyone viewed the park positively and one criticism was that it was over-staged and trite (Zebracki 2017). Pollock & Sharp (2012) have noted that cultural regeneration projects, which loosely describes this event, often primarily focus on economic objectives rather than community agendas and expectations. However much Dismaland was criticized, it was lauded for its entrepreneurial acumen and for adding £20 million to the local economy (Harvey 2015), which evokes the adage that any publicity is good publicity.

The Cemetery The cemetery possibly represents a heterotopian space that has ‘the sharpest … disruption of time’ (Johnson 2012: 10), which also is a place of taboo as it has associations with bad luck. These deathscapes may be highly emotional and traumatic for those grieving and remembering, or places to think, meditate and pray in contrast to everyday life. They are ideologically and discursively constructed, although these ordered spaces are disrupted by individual ‘creative and counterpublic expressions of alterity’ (Clements 2017b: 2), which include some dark humour. The cemetery is full of dead bodies, literally excluded from civil society, taken away and managed. Although it is permissible in the UK to bury a dead body in your garden (www.gardenlaw.co.uk/gardenburial.html) it is rare as cadavers are either burnt in crematoria or buried in official graveyards. The body cannot be kept in the attic or garden shed unburied or uncremated as it has to be lawfully declared and disposed of accordingly. An example of dark humour, expressed at the funeral of the disabled poet-songster Ian Dury at Golders Green Crematorium, London, was a large wreath spelling ‘Durex’ (Birch 2010: 345), which was a play on Dury’s name. Another relates to Eric Clapton, the notorious ‘god’ of guitar, who is renowned for his addictive, depressive and racist views. He suggested that, even at his lowest point, ‘the only reason I didn’t commit suicide is because I would be dead and couldn’t drink’ (Zanuk 2017).

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In the city, cemeteries are quiet rural spaces of respite and contemplation in contrast to the busy urban metropolis and super-fast postmodern world. Matthew Gandy, expanding on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, maintained that it is ‘a coterminous juxtaposition of incompatible elements’ (Gandy 2012: 733). He suggested that Abney Park Cemetery in London was a liminal place that forged a heterotopian alliance between very different interests, namely queer space and urban ecology. Cruising and other courting rituals exist alongside a space for nature lovers to enjoy, as well as the traditional contemplation of the deceased. It is a place in the urban metropolis for people to think and act differently, therefore express ‘other’ viewpoints. This I developed in terms of an alliance between marginal space for the performance of counterculture, public art aesthetics and celebrity in Highgate Cemetery, London, showing the elasticity of heterotopias and how they cater for conformity, diversity and dissent. They can imagine a utopian world of equality whilst expressing difference in status, through the distinct cultural and economic capital of those interred (Clements 2017b). There is a space surrounding the memorial to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery where the non-religious and religious dissenters were traditionally buried, which includes revolutionary epitaphs and a range of aesthetic gravestones. This heterotopia represents a variety of ideas, besides hegemonic religious and bourgeois narratives of spirituality and morality. It is a space of celebrity, creativity and counterculture, and for atheists, revolutionaries and artists to offer alternative, political, aesthetic and humorous epitaphs. These contrast with traditional religious texts that are situated around six themes of death as: a journey, sleep, a joyful life, a call from God, loss and the end (Crespo Fernández 2011). Professor Clifford, an atheist, encapsulated resistant irony with his pithy epitaph: I was not and was conceived, I loved and did a little work, I am not, and grieve not (cited in Mellor 1981: 158) The gravestone of Simon Paul Wolff (1957–1995) includes the epitaph ‘I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world’. This citation from Albert Einstein is darkly ironic as he created nuclear energy used in the first atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, massacring more than 100,000 Japanese directly and countless more from the effects of radiation. The citation is ambiguous at best and can be read as a direct criticism that God gambles with people’s lives, but also that life is fragile and far from certain, a sentiment that befits today’s postmodern ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) and a world of rampant materialism, narcissism and virtual reality. The artist Patrick Caulfield designed his own grave in Highgate Cemetery which displays more than a touch of irony (see Fig 7.2). He was a mainstream artist renowned for his use of colour and vibrancy who came into prominence in the 1960s. His humble, working-class roots in west London and early life of deprivation and impoverishment are in stark contrast to his sophisticated and colourful imagery, and, as Clarrie Wallis (2013: 12) surmised, he was ‘an outsider to the middle class milieu’. Maybe this grave is a stylistic reaction to his success and vivid use of colour, with the word ‘dead’ cut out of monotone stone, offering a grand monumental modernist gesture that would not be out of place in Szoborpark.

Figure 7.2 The gravestone of Patrick Caulfield, 2005, Highgate Cemetery, London. Photo by Paul Clements 2018.

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The most celebrated tomb in the cemetery is the monument to Marx, which is a gigantic sculpted head of the man perched on top of a box-shaped stone plinth that has now become part of the London tourist trail, and also offers much irony. The Christian cemetery has symbolically ‘reclaimed’ a freethinking and creative Jewish atheist and revolutionary communist, who had such a huge impact on the political economy of countries around the world in the 20th century, as a fallen soul in the Christian tradition. Moreover, visitors take ‘selfies’ with the memorial as they would with any celebrity or London landmark offering ever-more diversity of meaning (Clements 2017b: 12–13). Bob Moulder (2014) collected epitaphs from gravestones in Kensal Green Cemetery, London. These included a satirical epitaph about ‘quack’ medicine and Nathaniel Peach, who was buried in 1835: Here lies poor Nathaniel Peach, To whom the docs applied a leech: When they returned they found peach prone, The bloody leech had gained a stone! (Moulder 2014: 28). Diane Arbus photographed a headstone with the simple engraving ‘Killer’ (Headstone for ‘Killer’ at Bide A Wee Cemetery, Wantagh, NY (1960)), bringing out the quirkiness and darkness of funerary statuary. The irony surrounding Leonard Matlovich, a soldier who was decorated with a Purple Heart in the US, concerns his declaration of sexual orientation on his tombstone. He was the first gay member of the US military to publicly pronounce his sexuality and he died of AIDS in 1986. His epitaph in the Congressional Cemetery, Washington DC, reads: A GAY VIETNAM VETERAN. WHEN I WAS IN THE MILITARY THEY GAVE ME A MEDAL FOR KILLING TWO MEN AND A DISCHARGE FOR LOVING ONE. (www.mentalfloss.com/article/66298/29-unforgettable-epitaphs) Some other morsels of humour include an epitaph from an atheist in one of the cemeteries in Thurmont, Maryland. It reads, ‘HERE LIES AN ATHEIST ALL DRESSED UP AND NOWHERE TO GO’ (www.et.byu.edu/~tom/jokes/Funny_ Epitaphs.html), whilst another reads, ‘RIP PLEASE DEACTIVATE MY FACEBOOK’ (www.welikeviral.com/ 25-funniest-weirdest-unique-epitaphs-youll-ever-see.html). Humour may not be the first thought in people’s minds when visiting cemeteries, and it may not always be obvious or intended. In many ways these spaces are typical outsider heterotopias, taboo places of death that are awkward to reconcile in an excessively materialist society. They hold up a mirror to that society, where humour returns individuals to a collective humanity through an ability to laugh at themselves (Critchley 2002).

The Freak Show Another exclusionary construct is the freak show, side show or dime museum, which were very popular between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries in Europe and the US

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(Durbach 2010). These transitory heterotopian sites were carnivalesque spaces of ‘otherness’ where ‘enfreakment’ was the result of congenital disorders, those labelled ‘born freaks’ in contrast to ‘made freaks’ who aspire to freakery (Kérchy & Zittlau 2012). Born freaks include the notorious Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick), Hottentot Venus (Sara Baartman), General Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton), Bearded Lady (Annie Jones) and Singer’s Midgets, ‘dwarfs’ who became famous as the Munchkins in the film Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939). Made freaks, who have displaced the born freak, include tattooed ladies, sword swallowers and pain resisters; although the distinction between those born freaks and those who aspire towards freakery becomes blurred, as a sword swallower may be congenitally different in some manner. It is moot the extent to which watching ‘freaks’ perform is funny as they are looked upon with an ambivalent mixture of awe and disgust. The freak is ‘othered’ and an object of curiosity, ridicule and humour, more akin to ‘comic horror’ than incongruity. Michael Chemers (2008: 6–7) traced the word freak to its common usage in the 18th century, when freaks were exhibited in ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ from which appeared freak show performance genres. It is a pejorative term and the demise of the freak show in the latter half of the 20th century was due to greater respect for the disabled and political correctness, but it was appropriated by 1960s counterculture. The phrase ‘freak out’ (and lyrics that ‘le freak, c’est chic’) was employed as the title of the classic funk track Le Freak by Chic (Rogers & Edwards 1978), which imbued the term with positive vibrations. But also from the 1970s came the negative term ‘control freaks’, those who have a compulsion to manipulate everything around them, which may appear as a positive sign of individual freedom and ‘doing your own thing’ but which has dark connotations. Notwithstanding this, the freak show was resurrected on Coney Island in the late 1980s and populated in the main with made freaks (Stephens 2005). Elizabeth Stephens noted that this was due to the advances in medical technology and ‘almost total disappearance of congenitally different bodies’, as well as the emergence of the Disability Rights Movement, which attacked these shows as promoting discrimination towards the disabled. An example of how the born freak was marketed can be found in the rather patronizing and bizarre publicity material for the conjoined twins Millie-Christine (Millie and Christine McCoy) who were exhibited in London in 1893 (see Fig 7.3): Girls in the city are divided into two classes – single-headed girls and double headed … [who] appear to be the most attractive … There was one man who courted [a double-headed girl] successfully … but before popping the question he kissed one face first, and then could never get the consent of the other head. She is now waiting until a two-headed man comes along … though the assurance given that she eats with both heads may tell against her with parsimonious wooers, yet the fact that she buys dresses for one only must be an immense advantage (cited in Durbach 2010: 82). The twins were disabled outsiders from North Carolina, US, born into slavery then sold to the circus, where they performed song and dance routines. They attracted much curiosity from the medical and scientific world as they were co-joined at the base of the spine. Millie-Christine were known variously as the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ and ‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’.

Figure 7.3 Millie and Christine McCoy, 1867, photograph by Eisenmann. Wikimedia Commons/ Wellcome Trust.

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The freak show provides entertainment, fascination and titillation for paying audiences, which is steeped in superiority. The audience symbolizes and circumscribes the dividing line between ‘normality’ and ‘otherness’, highlighting geographical and temporal contextualities, socio-political concerns and communal anxieties (Kérchy & Zittlau 2012: 10). Nadja Durbach has suggested that, however cruel and unacceptable freak shows may have appeared before the First World War in the UK (especially regarding deformity for profit), these were sites that instigated debate about bodily difference and related meanings about identity: By exploring the imprint of class, gender, sex, race, and ethnic difference on the body, freak shows helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness – and this classified what it meant to be British – at the moment when Britain was constructing itself as a modern and imperial, and thus model, nation (Durbach 2010: 32). The British actor Mat Fraser created and starred in a one-man play entitled Sealboy Freak (Fraser 2002a), which included much self-analysis and referred to the character of Stanley Berent, who toured the American freak shows in the 1950s as the character ‘Sealo the Sealboy’. Fraser, like Berent, was born with phocomelia (very short arms) so identified with this character and his life struggle. Possibly more pertinent was Fraser’s television documentary Born Freak (Fraser 2002b), which covered the history of the Coney Island freak show. He argued that this offers a conundrum for disabled actors as these shows empower ‘freaks’ (and Berent earned a lot of money through star billing), whereas in mainstream theatre disabled actors tend to play minor roles. He challenged the audience whether they wanted to see an actor or a freak (cited in Clements 2006: 333). Fraser reimagined disability through freakery whilst at the same time he critiqued the freak show genre and its recuperation for the 21st century audience. Similarly, as Stephens (2005) has suggested, the freak show challenges well-meaning, politically correct sentimentality about freaks as it problematizes assumptions concerning the freak as victim of the unscrupulous capitalist proprietors of the shows. The 21st century freak show continues the public exhibition of unusual characters, but they are active agents in its recent transformation. For example, Circus Amok, Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, Tokyo Shock Boys, The Happy Side Show and the Kamikaze Freak Show have reinvented the traditional freak show of ‘born freak’ anatomical curiosities. The Kamikaze Freak Show showcases: creepy crawly munching, piercing, stapling, suspensions … glass walking, bed of nails, the human ashtray … a dwarf who hangs weights off his nether regions, a ringmaster freak extreme with a penchant for pain. (www.stillmisbehaving.com/pro_kf.html) It is gothic entertainment situated around carnivalesque circus and novelty acts. A more traditional example of modern freakery is the born freak contortionist Captain Frodo (formerly from the Kamikaze Freak Show and La Clique), who is also known as ‘The Incredible Rubberman’ as he was born with a rare genetic condition and is double-jointed. His act revolves around passing his body through tennis racquets of decreasing diameters by dislocating his joints, which he turns into a comedy act where his body is a grotesque site of transformation. This new wave of freakery, which also employs circus acts as well as painful and daring stunts, has been referred to as ‘grossed-out’ comedy (Hall 2008).

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Stephens (2005) offered a caveat that freak shows, whether they embody a medical or performative discourse, are exclusionary and essentialize cultural constructions of corporeal normality, which fixity re-embeds discrimination and exclusion.

Prison James Scott (1990) revealed through his anthropological research the methods employed in the art of resistance. Subordinate groups are neither compliant with hegemony nor defiant, but exist in a grey area in between. They are vulnerable and therefore do not directly confront, but undergo a surreptitious ‘ideological guerrilla war’ that uses disguises and linguistic tricks, which requires interpretation. This concurs with Michel de Certeau’s (1984) concept of the tactics that those without a voice who lack power employ to resist hegemony (see Clements 2017a: 177–80). Scott (1990: 139) gives an example from the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s text The Joke (Kundera 1983: 83–8) which is set in a penal colony for political prisoners. There is a race between the camp guards and the prisoners who acknowledge that they are expected to lose, so they spoil the competition by humorously exaggerating their compliance to the point of mocking the race and their opponents, gaining some small symbolic victory. This race shares similarities with Alan Sillitoe’s book The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (Sillitoe 1959). Smith, a working-class kid, is arrested for robbing a bakery and serves time at Ruxton Towers Borstal. He uses his time constructively by training as a long-distance runner and is the star performer in a race against the local fee-paying school. The denouement at the end of the race sees Smith, who is well ahead of the field, refuse to finish and forfeit the race to a privileged school runner, his small gesture of defiance. Prison is an extreme environment which encourages extreme gallows humour, an historical prison culture of those literally laughing at death prior to hanging. Today prison culture is still suffused with such humour (as well as superior bullying formats), which operates alongside the official culture. A real-life scenario that I witnessed in a prison library was a quick-witted retort by a prison officer to a prisoner. It is a good example of gallows humour: Prisoner: Is there a book on how to commit suicide? Prison Officer: I’m sure there is. Look in the ‘Self Help’ section or ask the librarian over there. First, there are no books on how to commit suicide in the library. Second, suicide is not encouraged in prison, so the prisoner is challenging the officer with his defiant request. Finally, the officer refuses to react to the provocation and asserts his authority and power through po-faced dark, ironic humour. Prison is an extreme environment and humour offers a range of possibilities. A case in point was F Wing in Brixton Prison, London, a heterotopia that combined prison with psychiatric hospital and where I worked for many years. There was a high incidence of suicide and the wing was completely inadequate for acute care, closing in 1992 due to pressure from prison organizations, health professionals, politicians, the public, ex-prisoners, prison officers and an enlightened governor. It was redesigned, redecorated and replumbed, then renamed G wing. Dinner Time on F Wing was created after the closure of the wing (see Fig 7.4). I studied art history at college but had very little practical art education and taught myself to draw, initially with wax crayons in my twenties, then moving on to acrylics and oils. The painting attempts,

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Figure 7.4 Dinner Time on F Wing, 1996, Paul Clements, oil on board, Museum of London.

possibly naively, to construct a humorous representation of this dark heterotopia with its gaudy olive and light blue colouration and strong but wonky black lines that express to some degree the ever-present tension. It is part realistic document, part caricature and part dystopia. The prisoners from all the four landings queued up to collect their dinner from the ground floor and returned to their cells to eat. The privileged ‘Red Band’ prisoners served up the food in white jackets and those prisoners queuing up to collect their food wore blue pin-striped shirts (not unlike city workers) and brown jeans to signify they were on remand (rather than blue jeans for convicted prisoners), overseen by the two officers on duty. As Erving Goffman (1959) suggested, these are props to support their new roles in prison. For the ‘Red Bands’, white jackets, spatulas and serving spoons signify the role of food server (amongst other duties), offering a higher status than an ordinary prisoner. But for all prisoners the dispossession of their former selves, personal artefacts and the disinvestment of these meanings undermine self-worth, part of the mortification process (Goffman 1991 [1961]). In this situation they lose agency to construct their identities, which strips away their former civilian and criminal lives. F Wing was a disciplinary space of exclusion and Christian names were replaced by surnames and numbers, a ‘total institution’ where the individual was defined by the institutional discourse. In the top right-hand section of the painting (as viewed) and behind the tea urn are the urinals, the recess area where prisoners ‘slopped out’ (emptied their buckets), a degrading and unsanitary practice. Each remand prisoner had a cell (and some shared cells) with a hatch through which medicine was passed, a bed, cupboard and bucket, and there was limited contact with other prisoners and even less with the rest of the world. The smell of shit, sweat and halitosis is an abiding memory.

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There are small, humorous details in the painting, including smoking by those serving out and collecting food. The central saucepan of marrowfat peas on the hot plate matches the gaudy décor, as do the plastic cups, bowls and plates. The prison warders carry distraught shell-shocked facial expressions, with the hair of one of the officers shaped by his peaked cap. The long, oblong hot plate divides them from the ‘Red Bands’ and the remand prisoners. The wing was a human zoo and nicknamed Fraggle Rock, after the children’s television programme about fantasy creatures, which employed Jim Henson’s Muppets. The non-linearity of the painting, with overpowering altered perspectives and wonky lines, was the reality for many prisoners who were medicated on what was known colloquially as the ‘liquid cosh’ (Largactil), which quelled psychotic prisoners, some of whom suffered side-effects of double-vision. It was an authoritarian and hierarchical space with obvious ranking amongst officers and prisoners. The ‘Red Bands’ worked on the wing for privileges which allowed them out of their cells for much of the day, unlike the other remand prisoners who were locked up for considerable parts of the day (often 23 hours). This heterotopia consisted of the misfits and ‘othered’ outsiders in society who resided in prison on remand due to the severity of crimes committed and their ‘abnormal’ mental states1. I worked with one particular remand prisoner in my tutor-librarian role who was awaiting trial for rape and murder and spent much of the day constructing daily menus and ruminating over them. The Lord Jesus had spoken to him about eating the correct food, which was his avenue for becoming a better person. He thought that his life was threatened on the wing because the prison regime was trying to poison him (presumably his paranoia, rather than evidence-led supposition). It was his delusions and schizophrenia that allegedly drove him to perpetrate heinous crimes, for which he eventually received a life sentence. Nonetheless, he was keen for me to receive the divine wisdom of his food cosmology and constructed his thesis in a letter outlining his philosophy, which is included with a sample menu dictated to me (see Fig 7.5). This was his form of creative expression, with his philosophy capitalized for emphasis. With regard to humour, this is challenging and evokes ‘unlaughter’. It feels awkwardly superior and politically incorrect laughing at the incongruity of the letter and menu as the prisoner was a rapist and killer with extreme mental illness and he intended these as serious statements. The prisoner never laughed as he had a solemn and sombre disposition, which only adds to the incongruity, and the written text does not fully portray the humour which was exacerbated by his awkward body language and deep, slow, laconic voice.

1

Nonetheless, some mentally ill prisoners were incarcerated for minor offences (for example, stealing clothes from a retail store) because they did not possess a home address, therefore were denied remand. This was exacerbated by the closing down of asylums in the 1980s and later Conservative government’s underfunded ‘care in the community’ policy set out in the ‘National Health Service and Community Care Act’ (1990).

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Tomorrow’s Menu: Breakfast – Porridge (without salt) Dinner – Toad-in-the-Hole (without salt), chips (without salt), vinegar, peas (without salt), jelly (green), tea (with sugar) Supper – Soup (without salt), bread roll (not wholemeal flour), Mr Kipling cakes (without wholemeal flour), no tea, cigarette

Figure 7.5 Diet for Health and Strength, 1988, name withheld. Personal letter and dictated menu. Private correspondence.

As Morreall suggested, incongruity is not always humorous: ‘coming home to find your family murdered is incongruous but not funny’ (Morreall 2009: 13). He also offered three functional benefits for humour in extreme environments: first, a critical function that recognizes the many problems encountered; second, cohesion, by creating solidarity amongst those laughing; and, third, as a coping mechanism and means by which people survive the environment. Laughing was my form of relief and way of coping, as it was for many others. The Koestler Trust and Southbank Centre Inside exhibition (Royal Festival Hall 2017), curated by artist Antony Gormley, was another annual showcase of work by those in the criminal justice system. It included the ironic piece 0132 The Secret Left-Handed Diary of a Right-Handed Lifer Aged 50 and 3/4s (2017), by Stephen (whose surname was withheld). It was a simple pencil drawing of his left hand with a tick alongside his right hand crossed out with some added text that stated, ‘This diary will contain the lefthanded truth the whole lefthanded truth and nothing but

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the lefthanded truth’. The picture also included an ‘appropriate’ dictionary definition of prison as ‘one kept in prison’ and ‘captive’, with some added reflection that ‘regardless of how persistent I know my righthand will be trying to influence the content …’. It is a humorous but sad piece from a prisoner serving a life sentence whose mind has been split, ‘influenced’ by institutional coercion and the righthanded ‘truth’. These different sides of his body and related cosmologies are in tension, symbolizing schizophrenia. Moreover, the notion of right-hand and lefthand having double meanings refers back to their linguistic derivation. Right (proper and correct) derives from ‘dexter’ in Latin and the notion of dexterity, whereas left has a derogatory meaning (‘gauche’ in French and ‘sinister’ in Latin). Stephen is criticizing this ‘regime of truth’, offering his left-handed version as an alternative to established thinking, which presumably reflects his excluded status as a lifer. Moreover, there is a political manifestation regarding left-wing and rightwing ideologies in the UK and elsewhere, and how the right appears hegemonic and dominates the left. The title is a pun on Sue Townsend’s book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (Townsend 1982) which humorously detailed an adolescent growing up and was the first in a series of books adapted for radio and television, stage and later musical. The ‘lefthanded truth and nothing but the lefthanded truth’ possibly refers to the prolific number of television and film narratives that revolve around American justice and the oath used in court – ‘do you solemnly swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth so help you God’ – to which those giving evidence have to affirm. The diary confirms Stephen’s mortification and de-individualization as the institutionalized lifer attempts to rearticulate his alternative left-handed identity and voice. The emplacement of exclusion (outsider heterotopia) and ‘outsider’ artistry in prison has many manifestations with much grotesque and dark humour, which throws up a range of ethical issues and moral objections. John Morreall (2009: 92) listed the traditional objections to humour as insincerity, idleness, irresponsibility, hedonism, diminishing self-control, hostility, fostering anarchy and foolishness. Irresponsibility refers to our disengagement from ‘reality’, the acceptance of everyday iniquities and injustices and a lack of moral fibre. Laughing at those less fortunate and vulnerable is distasteful as humour bullies and excoriates through ill-directed ridicule. Morreall responded by suggesting that this type of humour offers positivity as it focuses upon issues that should be corrected in society (as discussed regarding freak shows). This is the moral discourse underpinning satire, where jokes are not literal assertions but a play on words, ideas and narratives. As Terry Eagleton optimistically opined, humour offers ‘a momentary respite from the tyrannical legibility of the world, a realm of lost innocence which pre-dates our calamitous fall into meaning’ (Eagleton 2019: 27). It supports Mikhail Bakhtin’s recognition that humour, even at its darkest, is a distinctive form of knowledge, which like art allows us to see the world with new eyes and engage with communality. But dark humour brings an altogether different dimension into play, illuminating those often-hidden, taboo and awkward areas of life. When we laugh it is the pleasure that is foremost, although humour can challenge our reality, especially when it questions our compassion and morality or promotes prejudice; hence the need to debate political correctness and ethics.

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Transgression, Spectacle and Political Correctness

A varied theoretical framework situates humour in relation to superiority, transgression, spectacle and morality within a paradoxical late modernity. Humour challenges expectations and modernist binary thinking torn between fixed and relative conceptualizations of truth, work and leisure. There is critical evaluation of dialogism and people’s laughter (Bakhtin), effigy protests (Göttke) as expressed by Matthew Nightingale through his dark marginal art, which situates ‘unlaughter’ and how humour can contravene taste (Marsh). The abnormalization of leisure (Rojek) expresses transgression, which is evaluated in light of the historical recuperation of leisure through Puritan suppression of carnival activities and the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the public sphere (Stallybrass & White), the civilizing process (Elias) and continual redefinition of the centre that has offered an ambiguous diversity and identity politics (Jenks) contributing to political correctness. Radical notions of gendered exclusion are set out utilizing the political actions and creations of the Guerrilla Girls and ‘menstrual art’ of Liv Strömquist. Activist-artists are defined (Grindon), as is asymmetrical conflict (Zolberg) which is applied through a playful range of humorous situations and performances. Clowning employed by activistartists expresses resistance, social criticism and the articulation of identity, revisiting comic morality highlighted by the actions of The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and other clowning events, as well as the recent Extinction Rebellion protests. A critique of the society of spectacle (Debord), of media, celebrity and consumerism is expressed through the dark humour of rock idol Frank Zappa and his recuperation. Finally, political correctness is evaluated in relation to humour and offence (Gitlin and Collini), with regard to self-censorship and normalization (Foucault) and the creative critical role of humour in the articulation of diverse identities (Hall and Turkle).

Modernity, Humour, Transgression and its Recuperation Marshall Berman (2010 [1982]: 88–90) excavated Karl Marx’s notion that living modernity requires navigating modernism, whether regarding uncertainty or paradox, through the dictum ‘all that is solid melts into air’. An admixture of solidity and lack of solidity embraces the reality of (post)industrialization and socio-economic change alongside diverse spiritual and aesthetic imaginings that discombobulate the real conditions of existence and social relations. Consequently Chris Rojek (1995; 2000), in his research into leisure practices, theorized two opposing but interdependent faces of modernity: modernity 1, which concerns the construction of a rationally shaped society and its systems determined in part by bureaucracy, industrialization, science, capitalism and urbanization; whilst modernity 2 is the innovative and transgressive reaction to these alienating

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processes. We have become hardened to modernity 1 and cynical of its overbearing rationality and atomizing character, which requires art and humour to articulate modernity 2, as expressed through transgressive and ‘abnormal’ cultural practices that challenge norms and offer alternative experience. But any romantic conception of inclusion resulting from these reactions fails to recognize how humour can be employed to ridicule the marginal who take the brickbats in exchange for social acceptance, as explained earlier in relation to Jewish entertainers in Germany between the wars. Artists may remain socially excluded, however much they appear included culturally, embedded in legitimate cultural worlds but highlighted for their difference, as typified by freak shows and Outsider Art exhibitions. At this juncture it is apposite to return to the theoretical ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) in relation to people’s laughter and its ‘abnormal’ manifestations. His focus on counterculture, notions of polyphony (multiple voices) and dialogism (the interaction of different viewpoints that affect the interpretation of meaning) contrast with monological communication by a single dominant voice, which is unbalanced, empty and lifeless (Haynes 2013: 144). Unofficial folk (or popular) culture is a dialogical avenue for the expression of resistant and excluded voices, in contrast to official and hierarchical ‘highbrow’ culture that often excludes them. Arguably this binary distinction is far from clear, epitomized by social forums and blogs on the internet, which exclude as they are dominated by particular voices, however much pertaining to democratic and inclusive sociocultural processes. Bakhtin’s understanding accepts the notion that genuine encounters of individual consciousness grounded in collective ideas are expressed through dialogical social practices, where art articulates with life and is not merely for its own sake (Haynes 2013: 12). This offers a moral dimension to the arts beyond relativity and individual opinion, and the use of humour is part of this process. Gavin Grindon (2004) highlighted the continuities and differences between carnival as expressed by Bakhtin (1984) and the activist-art of the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem (1979). The notion of situationism suspends normal social relations and creates a temporary and revolutionary micro-society, which like carnival is a non-hierarchical and relatively equal imaginary, where laughter and desire have an important role in sustaining this reality, fusing art and everyday life. Grindon wryly commented that libertarian Situationist concerns for radical self-realization have a resemblance to the neoliberal ideology of individualism abhorred by the revolutionary Marxist philosophy underpinning it. Such is the complexity, absurdity and ambiguity of ideological positions, as culture mutates, continually reshaped through various hegemonic, discursive and resistant processes. Hana Owen (2011) revisited Bakhtin in relation to his hypothetical ability to overcome difference and articulate the polar extremes of universalism and total relativity. Modernism, which typically promotes binary thinking (good or bad, rich or poor, outsider or insider), is an ‘us and them’ philosophy that suits the mainstream, social elites and hierarchies, keeping the ‘other’ undeveloped and at bay; whilst postmodern processes of deconstruction fragment and relativize understanding, which destroys trust in meanings as they are so fragile and changeable. Truth is therefore an endless possibility and play on meanings that are never fixed but are readily appropriated by individual outlooks, which are isolated, lack objectivity and therefore cut off from the array of possibilities of social meaning. Terry Eagleton was more scathing in his assessment of meaning in this blended modernist and postmodernist scenario that comprises late modernity, as we ‘seem torn between an empty universalism and a blind particularism’ (Eagleton 2000: 44).

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Bakhtin (1981) pre-empted this impasse by suggesting that dialogism encourages different viewpoints and other voices, grounded in material existence, time and place, a notion he termed situatedness. His conceptualization requires a blend of flexibility and fixity to shape collective meaning that is grounded, playful and avoids absolute control. It concerns interaction, dialogue and the articulation of very different ideas, typically expressed through art and humour. Such conversations aid co-operation and understanding as dialogical culture offers ambiguity and various meanings, founded upon the creative interplay of ideas and imagination that has no limit. For humour these are the terms of freedom, although awareness has ethical implications reconfiguring morality, immorality and amorality. As Owen attested: Bakhtin’s ideas are able to resist absolute relativism because they are able to unify and recognize dialogical interplay whilst relativism tends to separate and hence isolate individuals and cultures … The avoidance of relativism is achieved through dissolving the exclusivity of binary opposition and their hierarchy and instead recognizing there is a little bit of this in that and vice versa so that all oppositions are dependent on each other … which in turn unifies them (Owen 2011: 145). These oppositions are everyday conversations between ethical and unethical positions, official and unofficial versions of life, possibly driven by satire and irony, where alterity and transgressive thinking express the range of diverse cultures and possibilities. Richard Sennett agreed that Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism encourages reflection, although it: does not resolve itself by finding common ground. Though no shared agreements may be reached, through the process of exchange people may become more aware of their own views and expand their understanding of one another (Sennett 2013: 19). To a large extent the social process of exchange, unofficial transgressive life and meanings refers to leisure time. The more hierarchical and official life defines and is defined by work cultures, although this is far from definitive as leisure cultures may be official, serious and formal rather than casual and resistant as each is imbricated in the other to some degree (Stebbins 2001)1. Besides infraction, leisure is synonymous with entertainment, enjoyment and play, as shown already by avant-garde art, carnival, caricature, graffiti, seaside promenade and beach heterotopias, Punch and Judy shows, Pierrot Clown troupes with commedia dell’arte associations, demonstrations, street art and theatre. Bakhtin (1984) recognized Renaissance culture and the medieval Catholic world as the historical apogee of ambivalence, as official court and church cultures converged but were at odds with unofficial popular folk culture; and humour was the currency that unified them, as suggested by Bruegel’s The Fight between Carnival and Lent (see Fig 5.3). For Bakhtin, the mockery of pious churchgoers in the painting is regenerative because carnivalesque humour does not destroy other meanings as it is not superior, nor intended to degrade and dismiss piety. The humour also is directed at the drunken butcher, all of which creates dialogue and involves everyone. People live carnival and: 1

The strict binary couplet of work and leisure is unrealistic. The networker is a good example of someone who utilizes leisure time for official business rather than for playfulness, however much this may be disguised through humour.

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Transgression and Political Correctness carnival ambivalent laughter is a laughter that recognises it is a part of that which it mocks through a dialogical interplay, [which] transforms it, allowing for rebirth and new conceptions (Owen 2011: 146–7).

So humour as a social practice enables us to laugh at ourselves and others so that we are unable to take a superior individual position, which is all very well in theory. Graham St John (2008) has referred to the modern day ‘protestival’ as a hybrid of playful protest and carnivalesque, which may concern local issues or global critiques of capitalism and militarism in an attempt to question power relations and reclaim the future. It relies upon people’s laughter and a transgressive admixture of incongruous ideas and ambivalences that refuse fixed signification but also any form of hierarchy or power to fix meanings. So carnival time is a period of equality, with free and familiar contact between all, unusual mésalliances of binary opposites (fat and thin or tall and short), eccentricity and profanation, which has a limited period (the duration of the carnival), after which normality returns (Bakhtin 1994: 251). Crucially, dialogical thinking offers inclusivity, tolerance and understanding where the narrative and humour is steeped in a collective matrix. Simon Critchley (2002: 83) questioned Bakhtin’s romantic representation of modern European history as a dour, Protestant taming of the transgressive comedy of the Catholic world. The transition from a medieval-Renaissance world-view to that of modernity … defined in terms of the gradual disappearance of the ludic, playful element in culture. He argued that humour is a modern conception of wit that corresponds to the rise of a democratic public sphere, although he shared Bakhtin’s conceptualization of humour as a collective social process ‘that exposes the limitations of the human condition’ (Critchley 2002: 16). But Bakhtin’s idealistic and romantic notion of humour ignores political realities, however much it lampoons hierarchy, privilege and gross inequality. Although humour is ambiguous and playful, it cannot escape recuperation for superior intent, nor can ‘carnival time’ operate counter-hegemonically for long periods as ‘normality’ is eventually reestablished. There is symmetry with the notion of the creative underground and avantgarde windows in the arts, which open when the socio-cultural and political conditions are right for radicality and close when these have passed (Clements 2017a: 76). For example, the anarchic character of Randle P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey 2002 [1962]) creates a carnivalesque atmosphere on the ward at Oregon State Mental Hospital, although institutional power eventually destroys him. But this is not to say that there will not be quirky carnival episodes challenging order and resisting power in the future. The hanging and burning of effigies is a typical resistant act of carnival, especially at the end of festivities associated with the mock decrowning of the carnival king or queen, which is the denouement of the event. For Bakhtin (1994: 252–4) this grotesque ritual representation of death and rebirth was an ‘all-annihilating and all renewing time’. Florian Göttke referred to the different interpretations manufactured by this well-worn form of political dissent, with ‘effigy protests’ performed in three ways (Göttke 2015: 132–6). First, through purification rituals that tend to be cyclical; for example, those traditionally performed at Crop Over carnival in Barbados from the late 18th century.

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This signified the end of the sugar cane harvest, which was a bitter-sweet time for plantation workers as the relief that it was the end of harvest also meant economic insecurity as most were seasonal workers now unemployed. Effigies of ‘Mr Harding’ were constructed out of cane trash to symbolize the plantation owners, but the ritual effigy hanging and then burning became illegal in the 1980s as it was perceived as detrimental to the tourist industry, which now holds its own recuperated carnival (www.thecaribbeancur rent.com/crop-over-a-sweet-summer-taste-of-barbados/). Second, through effigy protests that represent popular justice and incorporate ‘rough music’ (Thompson 1991), aimed at those in the community who have transgressed social norms as epitomized by the skimmington. The humiliation intended is a form of vigilantism and often includes noisy, unscripted mock trials, which are ambivalent as they are inspired by progressive thinking that relates to civil rights on the one hand and reactionary ideas reinforcing stereotype that may be disablist, racist or homophobic on the other. Third, by utilizing a formal procedure of effigy protest where an actual puppet is subject to a mock trial which has been scripted and then performed. A mixed media painting entitled Hangman’s Field (2018) was displayed at the I’m Still Here Koestler exhibition of art by ex-offenders, secure patients and detainees at London’s Royal Festival Hall (2018). The artist, Matthew, number 6107, created a very busy picture of intricate designs interspersed with profuse foliage and insects2. There are bees drawn at different angles and perspectives, as well as ladybirds, earwigs or beetles, snakelike and caterpillaresque creatures, flamingo heads and a parade of bees around the perimeter of the picture, all of which symbolize fruitfulness and a message of hope (see Fig 8.1). But towards the bottom of the picture, in contrast to the luscious colouration, is a black vignette of a human effigy on a green hill hanging from a scaffold as though spied through a circular keyhole (see Fig 8.2). The profuse garden full of life is in stark contrast to the only human sign in the picture, which is of death, a dark parody that appears to represent the ambiguity of life and issues of popular justice. As Göttke suggests, ‘questions remain as to who is laughing and whether these effigy hangings and burnings are reason for laughter’ (Göttke 2015: 142). This ‘unlaughter’ and the erection of socio-cultural boundaries related to issues of morality and ‘the refusal to laugh … emphasize[s] the seriousness of the transgression’ (Smith cited in Göttke 2015: 142). Moira Marsh (2014), in relation to practical jokes, concurred that humour appreciation includes censure and debate about whether the joke should have taken place and if it goes too far and transgresses taste. I asked the artist for his intention and understanding of the picture. I called the picture Hang Man’s Field because half way through it, one of my friends hanged himself. Then another friend did the same thing. In the same bloody field. Both of them I was drinking with the day before. And both of them were really happy. I keep thinking if you are happy why kill yourself. Anyway I went out one night and cut the tree down (private email correspondence with Nightingale, 2018)3. 2 3

The artist’s identity was not revealed in the exhibition but he communicated through personal emails that he was happy for me to use his full name, Matthew Nightingale. Nightingale told me he had served minor prison sentences for not paying fines and fighting with a man who stole his van, and that he supports his girlfriend who suffers with mental health issues. What was also revealing was that he was dismissive of art education in prison, which he refused to participate in because he thought it was infantilizing. He now has an agent to promote his art work. This is a good example of Welfare Art in the process of transforming into a sub-genre of Outsider Art.

Figure 8.1 Hangman’s Field, 2018, Matthew Nightingale, mixed media, 122 x 82cm. Koestler Trust/Matthew Nightingale.

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Figure 8.2 Hangman’s Field, detail of the scaffold.

Following on from carnival and effigy protests, Chris Rojek (2000) constructed a category of abnormal forms of leisure, predicated on Michel Foucault’s (1971) medicalization of life, Victor Turner’s (1982) notion of liminal leisure forms and Jack Katz’s (1988) moral transcendence in relation to criminality. This ‘abnormality’ has moved from the periphery and repositioned itself in mainstream culture; for example, the popularity of adrenalin sports – whether free climbing (mountaineering without ropes), skiing off-piste, parkour (navigating rooftops and obstacles encountered whilst running atop urban architecture), or the practice of creating graffiti and street art. Stephen Lyng (2004) developed the transgressive concept of edgework and taking risks in leisure practices, which is an apt description of people who need to live on the edge and are searching for new understandings, experiences and thrills. This freedom of action is in response to the constraints of modernity 1, anomie and alienation. Jeff Ferrell understood edgework as expressing the philosophy of anarchy as performed through direct action and do-it-yourself (DIY) resistance to established norms, which can be an aesthetic and socio-political response using humour. He recalled his years as a graffiti artist and the adrenalin rush that accompanied a night’s work, which he referred to as ‘experiential anarchy’ and ‘visceral revolt’ (Ferrell 2005: 84). These ‘illegal acts of daring’ express a counter-narrative to established thinking and social practices, although there are consequential issues regarding the extent to which the assimilation of the graffiti images (by the gallery system), the commodification of image and postmodern irony recuperate the action (Clements 2017a: 110–6).

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The expansion of leisure time has allowed people to engage with and reflect on culture, its limits and acceptable social practices that question normative values (Rojek 2000: 140)4. It has included a spectrum of different forms of leisure driven by greater individualism and personal taste (which concurs with cultural omnivorism). Rojek railed against the binary construction of serious ‘highbrow’ leisure as an enlightened and educated engagement with culture encouraging a sense of self-worth and purpose, and casual ‘lowbrow’ entertainment deemed opportunistic, unenlightened and about immediate gratification. It exposes a false dichotomy between elite esoteric concerns and ersatz popular culture, revisiting cultural prejudices and issues of authenticity. However much these distinctions feel forced, ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ formats refer to different types of humour that symbolize differing qualities of cultural capital, as previously iterated. For example, humour is employed by different classes and social groups to create symbolic boundaries, which reflects their values and tastes (Friedman 2014) and distinguishes those with an interest in sophisticated, self-reflexive and non-abusive humour from the rest. This reflective practice situated against a backdrop of individual and collective human rights has helped to define political correctness. It contrasts with working-class humour co-opted from carnivalesque folk culture and its association with earthy ‘lowbrow’ culture, whether stand-up routines in working-men’s clubs or jokes on the football terraces. The transgression connected with carnivalesque forms of humour challenges the maintenance of a centre of normativity (and the values of the establishment), which has to be maintained (Jenks 2003: 15). Political correctness is an ambiguous part of its ethical armoury, with unsophisticated and bawdy humour obvious targets for disassembly and removal. It is not always clear what constitutes ‘unlaughter’ in relation to political correctness, as humour is conditional within a changing cultural landscape. Therefore there is conflict as it supports diversity whilst at the same time criticizing different aspects of ‘lowbrow’ humour. The sophisticated cultural omnivore who consumes ‘highbrow’ culture may embrace certain aspects of ‘lowbrow’ humour that may challenge or mock political correctness and selfreflexive and educated wit. This may encourage the critical appraisal of social norms and regulations, even act as a transformative catalyst for social change (Rojek 2000: 19–20). An early example of political correctness and the ‘ping pong of recuperative cycles’ (Feather 2018: 122) that underlines this was detailed by Stallybrass & White (1986), who recognized how in the late 17th and 18th centuries the Puritan spirit of the English Revolution was again rechannelled into the theatre. King Charles II, who was restored to the throne in 1660 after the Roundhead Revolution, reintroduced transgressive Restoration comedies (written, for example, by John Dryden, George Etherege and William Wycherley), which risqué style of theatre had been banned by the Puritans, who constructed a new language of political correctness. Restoration comedies were raunchy and very suggestive, mocking bourgeois restraint and re-emphasizing monarchical authority. But critics in the Puritan tradition attempted to clean up and ‘civilize’ these heterotopian spaces in two ways: first, in terms of reconfiguring the content of lewd Restoration comedies, which concerned censoring sexual transgressions and imposing new etiquette; and second, more pointedly, in relation to ‘civilising’ the behaviour of the audience. So 4

There still appears to be more emphasis in the developed world on work culture than working towards a post-work society, possibly one consequence of the squeeze on state welfare and insecure wages, the corollary of the recessionary economics of austerity. This is aided and abetted by the metric of commodity capitalism, which stimulates the desire to spend.

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rehabilitation concerned recuperating the ‘aristocratic’ transgressions acted out in the play and the lewd working-class conduct of those viewing the spectacle. This ‘civilizing’ discourse concerned a focus on individual comportment and self-discipline, ‘separating out … individual faculties of evaluation from the visceral pleasures of crowd behaviour’ (Stallybrass & White 1986: 84). It reflected the aspirations of the burgeoning middle class and the liberal political discourse of self-regulating individuals, which corresponded ideologically to attempts to reconfigure the public sphere away from carnivalesque practices. The ‘middle’ way of the middle classes, however democratically intended, was (and still is) trapped between an autocratic aristocracy of individual entitlement and democracy related to collective popular culture. It championed the work ethic and the attainment and accrual of material wealth, then driven by a puritanical Christianity. Typically, humour is a site of identity and public display where bourgeois response may be calculated and measured rather than spontaneous and authentic. Norbert Elias, taking a macro-sociological and historical perspective of European societies, evaluated the psychological and socio-cultural changes resulting from the ‘civilizing process’. Historically there were demands placed on the individual, including restrained conduct, which self-regulation offered predictability and peace: The effort required to behave ‘correctly’ … becomes so great, that besides the individuals’ conscious self-control an automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control is firmly established. This seeks to prevent offences to socially acceptable behaviour by a wall of deep-rooted fears, but, just because it operates blindly and by habit, it frequently indirectly produces such collisions with social reality (Elias 1994: 446). The self-regulated individual articulated a budding liberal ideology in opposition to the absolutism of the aristocracy. In the UK from the late 17th century, notwithstanding Restoration comedy that was a riposte to puritanical censorship, this was played out in the new coffee-house culture which offered a novel public sphere of debate for mainly white bourgeois gentlemen, permitting free exchange of ideas rather than aristocratic deference. An altered topography and dynamic resulting from the rise of the bourgeoisie transformed norms of behaviour, which contrasted with sovereign power that had stymied debate. The coffee-house presented a heterotopian space for discussion and rational discourse, which sobriety best promoted the ideology of capitalism and a correspondingly disciplined work-force (Stallybrass & White 1986: 97), hence the bias towards the culture of coffee drinking, hard work and self-promotion rather than one of alcohol, fun and carnivalesque leisure practices emanating from court culture and the gin palace5. This emerging democratic public sphere was not an inclusive phenomenon as it required a new cultural manner (as did the theatre), which reflected self-restraint, objectification and etiquette alongside aspiration and competitiveness, an individualism that rejected the common culture and its protagonists emplaced in public house, marketplace and fair. The new puritanical discipline was employed ideologically in the 18th century to close down a number of heterotopian spaces, notably the large fairs that occurred in towns and cities across the UK. From the 17th to 20th century there were thousands of acts of legislation passed in Europe to suppress carnivalesque practices. By the 19th century the Paris 5

The term ‘gin palace’ itself creates an association between a working-class signifier (gin) and an aristocratic signifier (palace), with a similarity in attitude towards pleasure.

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carnival had transformed into a trade show, and in Germany after the Franco-Prussian war carnival festivities were militarized. In London, open spaces were built upon and the Fairs Act of 1871 abolished over 700 fairs. Stallybrass & White suggested that this was the result of bourgeois hysteria and disavowal of collective popular customs, which were ‘othered’ and replaced by an individualized framework offering a psychoanalytical discourse for understanding communal enjoyment (Stallybrass & White 1986: 176–8). Chris Jenks (2003) situated transgression and the desire to exceed the limits as key to our postmodern times beset with uncertainty and risk. Also, he alluded to the manner in which the focus on minority groups and identity politics had taken on a new role of defining the centre as the margins had now become the focus, thereby challenging the nature of normality and its relative contextual character. Furthermore: instability and uncertainty are expressed today in peculiarly privatised forms that rarely extend beyond ourselves or our immediate circle … we now appear to espouse a fear of collectivity; we have become wary of seeking commonality with others (Jenks 2003: 6). There is wariness of the collective today, with a focus on personal digital networks and individual engagement through social forums as well as self-definition regarding identity. Transgression continually redefines values and meanings, norms of behaviour and morality, reshaping the changing attitudes of primary definers (Hall et al. 1978). It alters the configuration of the ‘other’, those excluded individuals and groups who by default define normalcy. Jenks (2003: 2) listed typical binary constructions that situate exclusion and transgression (good and evil, sane and mad, centre and periphery, etc.), discursive constructs that ebb and flow. But, no matter the extent of change and mutual influence, this is rarely an inclusive process, as one pole of the binary remains ‘othered’ and deemed inferior therefore undeveloped and negatively constructed. Despite dialogism and acceptance of diversity there is always an excluded ‘other’ person or group created relative to context. Ultimately, exclusion is a position that helps to enforce conformity, whilst inclusion connotes entitlement and privilege. Correspondingly, established culture can cherry pick particular marginal artists and arts cultures assimilated through legitimate niche markets, which helps enable it to control the process of artist classification. There are degrees of inclusion, with certain creative individuals and groups more difficult to co-opt. However, greater tolerance and inclusion of particular marginal groups may be balanced by greater marginalization of others, as pointed out earlier, exposing the fallacy of an inclusive society. The extent of inclusion and exclusion vacillates, hence Foucault’s deliberations on madness (Foucault 1971) and criminality (Foucault 1977) have exposed the alteration in representations of marginality historically. There is a circularity of thinking that delimits and references acceptable behaviour and social practices to what we already know (and is deemed safe), where transgression is feared as it concerns desire of the unknown, which may create stagnation, stifle new ideas and freedom of expression. Majken Jul Sorensen (2008: 178) emphasized that humour surmounts these fears as it contributes to a mentality of collective resistance that overcomes apathy and isolation precisely because it encourages people to share their attitudes and ideas in order to transgress social norms. But transgression through humour can be dangerous, as highlighted in extremis by the targeting by Islamic terrorists of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. It received death threats from fundamentalists after

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publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 and was accused of blasphemy. The secular French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo suffered two violent terrorist attacks, in 2011 and 2015, in response to its spoof attacks on the Prophet Muhammad, which left several staff members dead and wounded. It published one issue entitled Charia Hebdo and another with a nude cartoon of the prophet. The search for ‘who I am’ (self-identity) can be transient and its expression requires some degree of edgework, recognition of the collective basis of culture and the role of the individual. Activist-artists involved in clowning and edgework have a strongly libertarian attitude, although in many cases this is tempered by a collective conscience (whether anticapitalist, environmental or promoting a common culture), which is in marked contrast to the excessive individualism and spectacle that drives the capitalist economy and neoliberal ideology.

Activist-Artists, Humour and Spectacle Activist-artist was a term coined by Berlin Dada to describe the producers of avant-garde art through direct forms of action (Grindon 2011: 92). Gavin Grindon distinguished between the different terms of activism, separating out ‘art-activists’, those who challenge pre-existing canons of art, from ‘activist-artists’, who use art as a direct form of political action in everyday life and are steeped in modern conceptualizations of the avant-garde. However, these terms are not always so easy to differentiate, as shown by the antics of the Guerrilla Girls. I have highlighted creative notions of transgression through everyday activist-art elsewhere (Clements 2017a: Chapter 8), whether through countercultural events or leisure activities, including those politically motivated demonstrations against G20, the Indignitas and Occupy movements. But here I want to triangulate this radical notion with issues of exclusion and humour. Michael Mulkay (1988) distinguished serious from humorous modes of thinking, and Sorensen (2008) reconfigured this in regard to innocence, whereby although oppression in particular should not be laughed at, the use of humour can reformulate naivety, however grave the intention, inverting the issue into an absurdity. This humour affects people in a manner that logical reasoning cannot and underpins non-violent resistance and the tactics employed to facilitate this, which crystallizes group solidarity during activist-art actions. Sorensen (2008: 186) suggested that different types of humour may more obviously facilitate different responses; for example, jokes for resistance, spectacular actions for oppression and self-irony regarding liberation, although a caveat is that these actions may backfire. Protestival practices owe a debt not just to carnival, clowning and street protest, but to agitprop, Dada, Boalian participatory theatre, street art and Ken Kesey’s pranksterism. Radical activist-art has been the staple of the Guerrilla Girls, the collective of militant feminists hiding their individual identities behind gorilla masks, who burst on to the American art scene in the 1980s. They have employed irony amongst other playful and incongruous forms of humour, typified by their 1991 street poster entitled Guerrilla Girls pitched in SoHo, New York. It stated that there are 13 ‘advantages of being a women artist’, including: Working without pressures of success … Knowing your career may pick up after eighty … Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.

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This dry humour appears innocent, however radical the political intention. Unfortunately, the Guerrilla Girls’ ‘public service message’ and ironic gender critiques have been recuperated by mainstream and commercial concerns (Hess 1996: 139). Even so, they have brought to the forefront political activist-art tactics, which have a long pedigree. A more strident and difficult place regarding gendered representation and dark humour is inhabited by the Swedish graphic artist Liv Strömquist, whose commission for Storstockholms Lokaltrafik (the Stockholm transport authority) was accepted very much to her surprise (Hunt 2018). The Night Garden (2017) series shown at Slussen Station is a satirical take on gender art in the public domain and this heterotopia has produced a storm. Her personalized feminist felt-pen sketches have been labelled ‘menstrual art’; for example, Strömquist’s image of an ice skater with a stain on her leotard has the caption ‘It’s alright (I’m only bleeding)’, which graphically portrays a taboo issue that in turn has angered many commuters and resulted in someone daubing the image with black paint. This graphic, earthy portrayal is to some extent reminiscent of the work of Egon Schiele, the late 19th and early 20th century Austrian artist whose figurative work has been considered by some as obscene, sexist and pornographic. Schiele in particular failed to display female nudes who correspond to ‘high’ art perfection, offering a realistic, albeit grotesque, representation of the human body. Strömquist revisits orifices beloved of carnivalesque but challenges the viewer to face this particular reality, emphasizing that transgression is serious rather than humorous. In contrast to this powerful and challenging imagery, activist-artist engagement with absurdist humour has underpinned periods of social change, including demonstrations in Poland prior to its liberation from Soviet hegemony. The Solidarity Movement, which in the 1980s fought for the democratic development of free trade unions and wider freedoms in society, employed a range of tactics to get its message across to the public and the autocratic communist regime. The government at local level ensured that controversial political slogans and graffiti decorating the streets was hidden by painting over the slogans. In response to this, demonstrators started to turn these white canvases of paint into krasnoludki, or red-hatted ‘dwarfs’, whilst at the same time protesters decked themselves out with red hats and relevant dwarf attire (Crawshaw 2017: 32–3). This incongruous humour developed further during the demonstrations as protesters chanted the absurdist phrase ‘there is no freedom without dwarfs’, which incongruity was a détournement of the usual chant ‘there is no freedom without solidarity’. Similarly, the Uprising of the Zombies in the winter of 2012/3 was a series of protests in Slovenia, which involved more than 100,000 people demonstrating against a corrupt political elite pushing through austerity measures (Milohnic´ 2015). Activist-artists coopted the vicious political sound bites of the regime, employing détournement and performative ideas. The demonstrators dressed as phantoms and zombies wearing ghoulish papier-mâché and homemade cardboard masks. Activist-artists employed street theatre antics in Belarus in 2011. This republic, deemed the last bastion of dictatorship in Europe, was and still is dominated by the ‘iron man’, President Alexander Lukashenko. Instead of demonstrating vociferously against the

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regime and lack of human rights, activist-artists employed irony through spontaneous applause rather than anger. This led to the banning of public applause, now deemed an act of terrorism. Such transgression challenged the hegemony of a system that had outlawed positive public expression, isolating it further from reality and humanity (Crawshaw 2017: 24–5). Steve Crawshaw imagined the outcome of this legislation and its operation during presidential addresses to the party faithful. This fear of clapping was in stark contrast to the usual exaggerated and overblown reception of Lukashenko’s speeches by party apparatchiks. Humour also has security consequences. Lauren Martin described the banning of bomb jokes in US airports and how the Transportation Security Administration surveillance apparatus has securitized subjects post 9/11: British citizen Samantha Marson was arrested in 2004 for quipping ‘Hey be careful, I have three bombs in here’ as she placed her bag on the scanner belt at Miami International Airport … Similar policies are in place outside the USA, and travellers continue to be arrested and detained for similar quips in the Philippines, Australia and elsewhere (Martin 2010: 18). Here ‘speech acts’ (Waever 1995) and those who express them are deemed to represent a security threat and performative language becomes a site of state intervention. Key to this is literality and the decoding of sarcasm and irony that creates ambiguity but depends upon a shared knowledge of cultural codes to reframe the power of language. Villy Tsakona and Diana Popa (2013) recognized the ambiguity of political humour, which both challenges and supports the status quo, by acknowledging three different types: those comical statements or texts that emanate from politicians, target politicians or are used in public debates. Political humour alters depending upon social and cultural context, with the internet in particular demonstrating the utility of humour in dialogue and for promoting politicians and ideologies as well as marketing the party brand. A group of clowns in the UK and Europe that trades on ambiguity, The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), has operated largely post-millennium employing activist-art as a vehicle to usurp authority. It has used direct non-violent action around issues of social justice (Ramsden 2015), whether against the military outside the Faslane submarine base, or anti-capitalism during the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles in Scotland (Routledge 2012). Members of this ‘army’ paint themselves up as clowns and wear brightly coloured clothing, including standard army camouflage, colanders for hats, clownish uniforms and other ridiculous paraphernalia. Hilary Ramsden (2015), who trained as a clown and co-founded CIRCA, recognized performative protests as a form of détournement that embodies stupidity and allowed participants to find their inner clown and evade the stereotypical role of protester. The transgression includes much mimicry, ridicule and self-parody, rather than anger towards authority, playful idiocy with an edge. Many CIRCA ‘clownbatants’ use whiteface clown makeup, although there is much individual leeway. Ramsden explained that the rebel clown was a hybrid of the traditional red-nosed clown and the cunning buffoon. The buffoon in medieval times was a marginal social outcast who resided in excluded colonies with a variety of ‘othered’ characters, including drunks, sexual deviants and the mentally and physically disabled, literally living on the periphery (of acceptability and town). These characters would be invited back to the town of their exclusion every year and they would lampoon the upstanding members and authorities who had excluded them using humour as a weapon. The buffoons explored the

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authoritarianism that had sealed their outsider fate through playful carnivalesque ridicule with the intention of making the townsfolk laugh so much that it would bring on a coronary or a fit of choking – death by laughter. This is the revenge of the banished. Paul Routledge referred to a process of sensuous solidarity whereby clowns ‘raise public awareness about issues, challenge popular assumptions and open up a dialogue’ (Routledge 2012: 429). They utilize a symbolic logic based on visual signs, actions and wordplay employing both individual spontaneity and learnt collective methods that resonate emotionally. CIRCA has employed these tactics to challenge authority, drawing police officers, army recruiters and security guards into their clowning antics. These have included playing children’s games of tag or Grandmother’s footsteps whilst continually impersonating the guards. This mimicry expresses Bakhtin’s notion that different voices interact through universal laughter where everyone laughs (and is laughed at), except in this case it is the guards who are excluded from this world and cannot join in with the humour6. The clowns push until they get a reaction, then they draw back, which is their tactical guerrilla action: It is this self-deprecating retraction, the apology after the taunt or transgression that marks a significant difference in tactics for activists previously accustomed to persevering with a more confrontational approach (Ramsden 2015: 147). The resulting ‘ethical spectacle’ (Duncombe 2007) and tension more often than not confronts the viewer as it mocks authority and disrupts normalcy, creating degrees of disruption. This kind of playful activism relies on tactics of surprise and gesture, which enables an inversion of mundane reality through the anarchic treatment of power relations (Clements 2017a: 191). An early action in 2004 concerned détourning a local army and navy recruiting office in Leeds; here rebel clowns created a parallel event by attempting to recruit into CIRCA using mimicry and absurdity, creating mayhem (Ramsden 2015). Vera Zolberg (2010) employed the military metaphor ‘asymmetrical conflict’ to highlight how the technological and material dominance of the powerful can be inverted and employed in some manner by the powerless through creativity and guile. She was referring to how marginal artists are able to attain prominence using similar techniques to established artists, just as CIRCA has employed mimicry to invert the actions of hierarchical security and law enforcement organizations and their staff. I witnessed a bizarre act of idiocy on a demonstration in London entitled The National Unity Demonstration Against Fascism and Racism (November 2018) organized by Stop the War Coalition. At one point on the demonstration several mounted police horses had stopped to surround a public house inside which several demonstrators wearing hoodies and scarves had decided to enter for refreshments rather than complete the march. There was a tense stand-off as a small crowd assembled to watch the police spectacle. Out of the blue an elderly woman wearing a bright pink, fluffy hat and pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair approached the L-shaped line of police horses. She engaged each police horse in turn, calmly talking to them and stroking their noses, which, far from dissipating the tension, had the opposite effect, creating expectations of a possible police (over)reaction. Like a CIRCA tactical guerrilla action she maintained this tension, although the police held their 6

Routledge (2012: 445) offers the story of clowns playing peek-a-boo at the G8 summit at Gleneagles, with police officer reinforcements gathered behind a wall giggling and smirking, trying not to get involved.

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nerve (and remained frozen), unwilling to reprimand two innocuous elderly members of the public. The situation was hilarious and fascinating as it was unclear what her intention was and whether she was a demonstrator or not, and if this ‘action’ was in support of the mounted police or critical of their presence outside the pub, which exacerbated the ambiguity. Routledge (2012) surmised that it is important not to overemphasize outcomes and the notion that clowning will deliver intentions and expectations. In contrast to this fleeting action, the Extinction Rebellion protestival lasted for several days over Easter 2019, creating a number of heterotopias and bringing parts of London to a halt. One group transformed Waterloo Bridge into a garden, a bizarre pop-up heterotopia that symbolized alterity and incongruity situated on a bridge more used to ferrying people soberly dressed for work (see Fig 8.3). Another site at the busy intersection of roads at Oxford Circus was centred around a pink boat named Bertha (reimagining the carnival ‘ship of fools’). These bold, absurd actions by those pleading for environmental sanity stopped the traffic and the consequential air pollution that affects all who live and work in the city. Extinction Rebellion protesters handed out leaflets asking for disruption to prevent global ecological disaster and requesting Londoners to ‘act now’ (www.rebellion.earth). These playful actions communicated very serious intent regarding the destruction of our planet, which has influenced public opinion and the political establishment7.

Figure 8.3 Extinction Rebellion Protestival, April 16, 2019, Waterloo Bridge, London. Photo by Paul Clements.

7

Extinction Rebellion is an interesting leaderless group which may appear bohemian but is possibly more puritanical at heart. The focus on a future for the planet and delayed gratification has radical and serious bourgeois intent, with much of the carnivalesque atmosphere pointedly educational regarding ecology and survival.

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The explosion of counterculture can operate for varying periods, with student-worker action during the 1968 period of civil unrest in France (supported by the Situationists) peaking in May and simmering for many days before and after. It was a temporary revolution, not unlike carnival (or CIRCA or Extinction Rebellion protestivals), which in medieval times lasted for as little as a few days or as long as three months. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1995) was a criticism of late modern capitalism for materializing cultural value, thereby undermining ethical and aesthetic concerns, critical thinking and playful fun. Spectacle, which is the consequence of modernity 1, highlights the effects of the media, capitalism and ‘rationality’, and is a pejorative term that is discursively constructed and dependent on appearances. It is ‘a visible negation of life – and as a negation of life … has invented a visual form for itself’ (Debord 1995 [1967]: 14). The idea that people are subjugated by meaningless visual culture resulting from the spectacle was an attempt by Debord to highlight the effects of government and industrial/corporate power on contemporary society, as was Ken Kesey’s (2002) notion of ‘the combine’, Banksy’s Dismaland and Extinction Rebellion’s protestival. Debord dismissed the duplicitous and superficial character of society as it appeared to offer acceptability on the one hand but ridicule on the other. Spectacular imagery was deemed to mediate social relationships through false consciousness, creating a zomboid non-life driven by technology. Raoul Vaneigem (1979) added that this imparted a tainted individualism as the individual is controlled by commodity and has become an estranged object. Here we are misled into thinking we are part of a wider group constructed through networks of togetherness, as conceptualized by Bakhtin’s carnival time and people’s laughter. Jeremy Gilbert (2008: 100–1) described the spectacle as a sensory overload that creates human alienation and defines advanced capitalist societies. It is an inauthentic false consciousness that contorts visual representation, a notion embedded in Marxist philosophy and Platonism, driven by narcissism and hyper-individualism. Like the Frankfurt School thinker Eric Fromm (1960 [1942]), the Situationists wedded revolutionary social change with creativity, playfulness and spontaneity, where art was an activist trigger. Vaneigem recognized spontaneity as: the mode of being of individual creativity, its original, immaculate form, neither polluted at the source nor threatened by co-optation. Whereas creativity is the most equitably distributed thing imaginable, spontaneity seems to be the privileged possession of those whom long resistance to power has endowed with a consciousness of their own value as individuals (Vaneigem 1979: 170). Therefore, spontaneous creativity and lived experience have an authenticity and trustworthiness as they are less easily manipulated by mainstream representation, assimilation and mediation processes, which correlates with the perception of marginal artforms. As Gilbert (2008) and others have suggested, the Situationist view implies the universality of art and that those who are not primarily creative are slaves to capitalism and its ideologies. Critically, it belies the reality of revolutionary change, which is built on complex and far from exciting social coalitions within society that go further than thought-provoking slogans and actions from activist-artists. He indicated that ‘believing in simplistic fairy-tales like the spectacle just leaves us spitting in the wind’ (2008: 102), however humorous these acts may appear. Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1979) maintained that the dehumanization, objectivization and materialization of value are the apogee of

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manipulation, disinformation and exploitation. We are deceived by cultural products, not just in terms of false needs but in relation to claims of originality that bestow on us a pseudo-individuality and delusion that the consumption of standard industrial product and kitsch has a creative and magical enlightened quality. This refers back to one of many highly robust myths of capitalism, that the consumption of expensive commodities benchmarks and expresses our individualism. Both the Situationists and Frankfurt School have provided potent critiques of spectacle, uniform lifestyles and brainwashed identities, which may appear far-fetched but are possibly more apposite today than when they were writing due to the influence of digital technology and spread of fake news. The optimistic scenario that humour rehumanizes everyday life and helps to dissipate this dehumanizing spectacle concurs with Bakhtin’s ideal that people’s laughter makes us whole as a community, although radical transgression and collective understandings are readily assimilated back into mainstream thinking. These cycles of recuperation can neuter humour, which may not reflect any obvious enlightened moral or political position. An example of recuperation is rock ‘legend’ Frank Zappa, who wrote critical countercultural songs. The grotesque I’m the Slime (1973), written for his band The Mothers, wonderfully describes Debord’s dystopian spectacle, Vaneigem’s estranged and tainted individualism and Adorno’s notion of standardization driven by commodity capitalism and pseudo-individuality. It was a polemical attack on US society that castigated television as a means of brainwashing its viewers; Zappa used a deep, echoing voice to portray the zomboid quality of control speak (presumably the god of consumer capitalism): I am gross and perverted. I’m obsessed ’n deranged. I have existed for years, but very little has changed. I’m the tool of the government and industry too for I am destined to rule and regulate you. I may be vile and pernicious, but you can’t look away. I make you think I’m delicious, with the stuff that I say. I’m the best you can get. Have you guessed me yet? I’m the slime oozing out from your TV set. Slime is dirty and subversive and he goes on to describe viewers as having to obey television as they lack creativity and autonomy or any ability to critically engage with culture. They are entranced and seduced by media speak (fake news) and therefore pawns of the system and a fashionable lifestyle that highlights pseudo-individualism. As Zappa suggested, people kowtow to this power ‘until the rights to you are sold’ and the individual becomes a chattel and slave. His music was banned in Czechoslovakia during the communist era due to its radical liberating potential as satire (and its promotion of individualized celebrity). But after the Velvet Revolution in 1990 under the new democratic regime of the Czech Republic and its President and playwright Vaclev Havel, Zappa was afforded the title ‘Special Ambassador to the West on Trade and Tourism’ and shared his entrepreneurial ideas to facilitate this (Maštalíř 2006). Historically affected by autocratic rule and influenced by Hitler and Stalin, Prague like other eastern European cities has become a spectacular commodified tourist centre of McDonald’s restaurants, Disney stores and mass consumerism. Many former dissidents have since taken up a right-wing nationalist ideology that has taken hold in Europe, presumably mesmerized by the media ‘slime’. Prague is a heterotopian spectacle and has become the European destination for cheap stag and hen parties and drunken weekends. The representation of Zappa

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before his untimely death in 1993 had altered. He was no longer the bad boy of rock but champion of neoliberal and entrepreneurial capitalism, which during the late 1980s and early 1990s after the break-up of the communist system was seeping into eastern Europe. So a once politically incorrect rebel poacher had been recuperated as business gamekeeper, which besmirched his former transgressive self. Christening his children Ahmet, Dweezil, Diva Muffin and Moon Unit does proffer incongruity or, alternatively, it reinforces the ideology of hyper-individualism and the contrived whims of a very powerful rock ‘god’.

Political Correctness and Identity Political correctness is an uncomfortable phrase that bristles with righteous indignity and moral superiority as well as bombast, behaviour that elicits anger and offence in those subjected to its gaze. Todd Gitlin (1995), in his research into political correctness in the developed world, acknowledged that, although it supported tolerance for minority groups, it encouraged other extreme separatist positions on the margins. Nonetheless, tolerance of minority rights has aided the inclusion and assimilation of many marginal individuals and groups, despite reaction to this today. Political correctness is a relative phenomenon, critiqued by Owen Jones (2015) as a novel form of mainstream ‘Establishment groupthink’, whereby individuals are coerced by extreme social pressures. No matter the extent to which we are bombarded by liberal ideology in relation to the creative individual and the right to acclaim our freedom of expression, politically correct rhetoric pressurizes us to conform. As Steven Poole (2017) surmised, this critique of political correctness as ‘groupthink’ is another attempt by a few at criticizing the many following the herd who conform to specific expressions that signify inclusion but are deemed unable to think for themselves. Also, it reveals much about the few and their need to stand out as distinct mavericks, which is in tension with conventional establishment tropes, secure boundaries of language and taste. Political correctness is a slippery concept, which like humour is prey to ambivalence and switching of positions, fashion, socio-cultural contexts and political currents. There are debates around political correctness within the contemporary art world; for example, in relation to the recuperation of ethnicity. Renata Dohmen (2016) explained that, despite the globality of contemporary art, ethnic arts remain on the fringes of mainstream institutional culture (galleries, museums and biennales). Plural art worlds and greater diversity were predicted and championed as the millennium loomed, but Euro-American hegemony has persevered and, despite the global spread of the visual arts, several art critics, including Thomas McEvilley and Claire Bishop, have argued that Eurocentrism has actually consolidated its position globally (cited in Dohmen 2016: 2). Those artists from outside Europe and the US continually gravitate towards Euro-American metropolises and cultural hubs. And their inclusion into global markets depends upon immersion into these hubs controlled by specific cultural gatekeepers and institutions and driven by the metric of global capitalism, which begs wider ethical questions. Offensive politically incorrect humour is often difficult and sometimes funny, depending on context, and it is not easy to disentangle the whacky and outrageous from the immoral. It is unclear, as previously stated, whether jokes endorse discriminatory attitudes, which itself is a convoluted contextual position that concerns the intention of the teller and sensitivity towards the minority group or the specific issues to which the joke alludes (Woodcock 2015). Scott Woodcock tentatively maintained that people in

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general are not malevolent or saintly, but still we employ our privileged positions to laugh at the excluded in a superior manner. Moreover, working-class humour has been castigated in the media for embodying politically incorrect themes; for example, older women’s ‘earthy sexual jokes’ (Affardo 2010) which are antagonistic to middle-class values and taste. Pierre Bourdieu, who maintained that taste distinguishes and marks out the ground for status acquisition and lifestyle, acknowledged how humour can aid and reinforce this process. Bourdieu (1984: 255–6) referred to the linguistic prowess of the educated bourgeoisie and their ability to go beyond strict grammatical and pragmatic rules. The freedom through which they perform their identity using humour offers strategies to take liberties, construct individualized scripts and even become a tastemaker employing new expressions and uses of language. Smooth, casual and confident communication is the ultimate aristocracy of distinction, which opposes stark, blunt, often graphic and grotesque working-class humour, although cultural omnivores may include elements of this to distinguish themselves from univore ‘highbrow’ taste. The utility of such ‘base’ humour for the educated includes superiority achieved by employing parochial accents to describe coarseness through mimicry8. Criticism, whether through platforms of parody, grotesque satire or irony, is likely to offend, although it may showcase social injustice and issues of free speech, however insensitive this may appear. Traditionally there has been a ‘conflict between power and freedom, or between conventional social attitudes and outspoken truth’ (Collini 2010: 5). Stefan Collini in his manifesto maintained that this has become a complex issue because people are more reflective and aware of the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. Some have taken up progressive attitudes towards disadvantage to neutralize the subtle way in which elitism and inequality are sustained, which was typified initially in the UK during the 1980s by politically correct humour. This is wishful thinking, however well intentioned, as it presupposes a degree of equality and the centrality of human rights. Whether criticism of someone else’s firmly held opinions is acceptable or not is a quandary. Collini took the ‘modernist’ position that we have the right to criticize, which use of dialectical argument and counter-argument contrasts with a specific postmodern and relativist understanding that individuals brandish the right to remain unchallenged, an understanding that lacks any objective referents and entrenches egocentricity. In this latter case, as in the myth of Narcissus, we can only see our own reflection and position (which we do not fully recognize), nothing more, and it is not our business to comment on other people’s self-definition, or them on us, denying dialogism. Collini advocated that all issues should be subject to rational scrutiny, including our own beliefs. Identity too readily becomes unhinged and singular, fixated upon one or two aspects of a person’s (self-)definition, a stereotype that unhinges and overwhelms other identity positions. For example, those who identify as overweight may lose sight of the range of identity positions that makes them up, whether regarding national or regional identity, class, gender, religion, sexuality, parental role, creativity or job. They may become 8

As well as nationalist and class associations, there are racial and homophobic overtones, as stereotypical mimicry of the language of another class, race or nationality, or particular ‘camp’ mannerism of speaking is purposely employed to show superiority in an obviously derogatory manner. Alternatively, such mimicry refers to desire for those ridiculed, who may offer authenticity.

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obsessed about this one embodied position which is regarded as more than fundamental to their identity, so they become hypersensitive about body image and resentful of any critical commentary about exercise, diet or lifestyle. This form of singularity limits autonomy and an ability to take a wider perspective, engagement in dialogue or the critique of related issues. It creates a binary us and them, delineating ‘others’ who are the ‘unfat’ critics manning the moral barricades of obesity, re-emphasising individualized ‘fattist’ perceptions of the world. This narrow-minded process shows how easy it is for individuals to ‘other’ people and collude in their own exclusion. But beliefs are far from rational and the two are odd bedfellows as we have visceral reactions to inequalities, as expressed by the great British satirical cartoonists of the 18th century who portrayed ‘outsideness’ by showing some empathy for the unfortunate and reacting adversely to historical privilege and unfairness. They had one foot in a networked world of art and privilege in order to make a living, and the other foot outside it in order to be able to lampoon the great and the good from a distance. This allowed them to judge and create imagery with a degree of objectivity and autonomy, built on ‘outsideness’ grounded in self-and-other relations which offers dialogue and collective value. Resentment lies at the heart of offence, which may override any rational argument about the issues involved and build up in a negative fashion. Those critics making judgements may be deemed to hold a condescending understanding and embody inauthenticity as they lack relevant experience of exclusion. Moreover, if they treat the resentful subject as too stupid or sensitive for criticism this compounds the issue, displaying the complex and contextual character of political (in)correctness. Mockery employs playful humour precisely to persuade the justice of the critical claim, where, as Collini explains, ‘laughing may be the right response to the emperor’s new clothes and horseplay can be a good way to identify horseshit’ (Collini 2010: 29). He goes as far as to insist that the most important mannerism we can recognize in ‘others’ is that as rational, intelligent and reflective human beings we treat them in the way we would like to be treated. This ‘Golden Rule’ of reciprocity has a long pedigree across the globe, from Indian Sanskrit literature (the Mahabharata), ancient Greek philosophers (Plato and Socrates) to the great Roman thinker Seneca. But this is idealistic rather than realistic. Besides reciprocity, self-regulation affects critical engagement and political correctness, which Michel Foucault (1982b) proposed was driven by technologies, mechanisms and techniques in society emanating from a range of social institutions, from government downwards. These apparatuses of control are either disciplinary or conform to liberal governance and operate on a number of levels that engineer strategies of normalization (Foucault 2000a [1978]). Liberal governmentality concerns the alteration of conduct and ingrained habits through a learnt ability to regulate ourselves and reflect on our behavioural mannerisms. Self-censorship and critical abstention are the result of pressure to manage ourselves in order to cohere with ‘others’ in a modern cosmopolitan society. Unfortunately, far-right political and fundamentalist religious groups have little interest in finding common ground, empathy or difference, let alone people’s laughter. Moreover, an attitude of self-censorship can exude moral superiority – for example, deferred gratification or religious purity through denial – which can stymie important communication and dialogue. As Collini assured, consideration for social justice and political correctness: has a particular bearing on the role of literature and the arts in general, especially since they have been fertile ground for controversy about offence and censorship in recent decades. One of the ways in which our experience of being human is both

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extended and defined is through those activities we may broadly classify as ‘play’ … we pretend, we allow the imagined to stand in for the actual, and in this way we can get some kind of perspective on the actual … ‘Art’ has some resemblance to ‘play’ in these respects: it’s a temporary roped-off space in which some imagined alternatives to, or modifications of, reality can be explored (Collini 2010: 42–3). It has been shown throughout this book how the arts and humour employ incongruity and operate playfully to ask questions about the status quo and mock the entitled. But the notion that it is politically incorrect to ridicule subjugated and under-privileged minority cultures, but acceptable to mock the privileged in order to fight injustice, offers an awkward asymmetrical understanding of humour. Collini regarded this as ultimately corrosive and counter-productive with regard to genuine respect for difference and equality, which concurs with Bakhtin’s universalist conceptualization of carnival laughter, where everyone is involved and subject to its logic. Nonetheless, there is a danger that this position supports hegemony and gives succour to superiority and a privileged viewpoint and identity, which reconfirms hierarchy and entitlement. There is a very fine dividing line and balance between these positions, with the caveat that humour in anarchic and playful mode cannot resist chipping away at these boundaries anyway. Identity politics and political correctness grew out of the human rights issues of the 1960s counterculture, which was originally a collective concern and a rainbow alliance between subjugated minority groups. Key to identity, as explained earlier, is the range of differing identities and how these articulate. Stuart Hall (1996) maintained that this fluid process referred to the linkages made between different identity positions within changing contexts and under diverse conditions. The individual is socially prescribed and selfdefines aspects of identity, which permutation of historic and novel characteristics changes according to the local situation, type of communication and relationships between people, influenced by the macro dynamics of discourse, ideology and representation. This offers variety, creativity and difference. Sherry Turkle (1995) encapsulated the diverse and fluid notion of identity through the term Multi User Dimensions (MUDs) which postmodern trope accounts for the complex, incongruous and even conflicting identity positions people adopt digitally. This concept attempts to accommodate the shift from a collective determination of identity to a more self-defined one. Humour and art are vital critical and creative tools that offer new perspectives and transform meanings, which include identification with the ‘other’. They both conform to and disrupt certainty over meanings and interactions, both scrutinizing and challenging identity positions offering a critical social role. Humour is mercurial as it shift-shapes and alters perspective, thereby capable of highlighting the dividing line between one identity position and something that appears its opposite, especially regarding conformity, exclusion or political correctness, which processes help to re-embed our humanity. Also, like art, it offers a range of meanings and interpretations, articulating various collective voices, experiences and ideas that question our presumptions and expose our prejudices. Together they challenge boundaries of taste, hence are necessarily supportive and at odds with politically correct ideas and practices, both supporting identity politics and critiquing it.

9

Afterthoughts

Humour can disrupt and distort and there is a lack of clarity regarding its effects. Positively, it offers succour to the powerless and a voice to ridicule the powerful and laugh at Hell. This optimism, as expressed through Bakhtin’s people’s laughter, advances progressive change, collective ties and renewal but unfortunately does not cover the gamut of social and cultural realities. Humour is employed to malign, ridicule and belittle the excluded in a superior fashion and there is some degree of determinism, with social inequalities reproduced through its use. My original intention of employing humour as a method to better understand representations of the outsider and exclusion through the visual arts in particular has reaffirmed the complexity of meaning. Four changeable variables that exacerbate this beyond individual and group tastes are: the unstable (self-) definition of outsider; the extent of alienation of marginal artists; the ramifications and unpredictability of humour styles; and cultural recuperation. Creative outsiders, however disenfranchised, construct their own narratives to express their ideas, values and experiences, where humour is a strategy of communication that humanizes them and actively challenges established practices and negative social norms. As John MacGregor warned in relation to the art of the insane: So long as a group of people is seen as less than human—an endeavor that seriously undermines our own humanity—we feel justified in ignoring their efforts to inform us about themselves and seek instead to understand them from outside (MacGregor 1989: 309). Whilst agreeing with this sentiment, the associated issue of comic morality is problematic. This position implodes the more it becomes bound up in its own moral inconsistencies and ambiguities, let alone the ironies exposed through the process of political correctness. The ‘highbrow/lowbrow’ division of culture has become blurred and rearticulated, which creates greater complexity and lack of clarity regarding the variability of belief, taste and need for authenticity. Positively, greater communication and understanding of the ‘other’ point of view acknowledges engagement with difference, where the collective expression of people’s laughter is vital for a shared humanity offering dialogue and new ways of looking at old issues and ideas. But humorous art which can reinforce the status quo and prejudice, as well as critique them, encourages other playful dimensions as it chips away at the rigidity of society by unsettling normalcy, thereby creating ambiguity, removing individual and collective sureties. It is dark humour in particular that unearths the hidden issues and presents a mirror to society that is unsettling but vitally important.

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The importance of chaos and the randomness of systems, social processes and practices cannot be underestimated. Creative expression through art and humour articulates non-linearity, which, without venturing into extra-sensory perception and occult weirdness, fractures and discombobulates those ‘rational’ systems and discourses imposed from above that entrap our minds and sensibilities (including language). The importance of incongruous humour is precisely because it offers a critique of repetitive habit, restricted thinking and a perfect digitally constructed world of algorithms and meanings. Politically, resistant art is vital; whether artivists demonstrating against corporate and state hegemony, grotesque realists graphically detailing bodily ‘imperfection’, caricaturists besmirching privilege and cosy establishment arrangements, satirists lampooning hubris through scatological comedy, or transgressive graffiti artists who détourne language. These are a crucial riposte to networked ‘insider’ art worlds and established hierarchies, however much these humorous, creative individual and collective voices from the periphery are subsequently recuperated through aesthetic laundering of the ‘dirty’ and authentic. In this era of ‘fake news’ and disinformation, truth is a casualty alongside objectivity, taste and critical engagement. Humour is an apt leveller and, like art, can rein back humbug, dubious sentiment and gross distortion. It is highly unlikely that humorous art will change the world and it is impossible to predict when it will realize the latent social and political impact it can have. There is no certainty of comic or aesthetic representation or effect, which is a relief but also refreshing and, dare I say, funny.

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Index

ableism 71 Abney Park Cemetery 152 Abramovich, Roman 9n4 acceptable behaviour contracts (ABC) 47 acceptable disrespect 34 activist-art/artivism 15, 36, 82, 109, 164, 173–180 activist-artist 8, 11, 86, 163, 173, 178 Adler, Jankel 88 Adorno, Theodor 38, 91–92, 139: and Horkheimer, Max 78 advertising 19, 40, 43 aesthetic 116, 163, 178 Affardo, Salvatore 181 African: American 144; Art 59 Age of Reason 57, 94 agency 29, 32, 55 agitprop 15, 82, 173 AIDS 154 alienation 10, 44, 56–57, 67, 69, 94, 133, 169, 178, 184 alternative: experience 163; lifestyles 6, 62 The Alternative Guide to the Universe (exhibition) 122 ambiguity 10, 62, 139: of moral and political position 170 American Dream 137, 151 American Visionary Art Museum 111 Ames, Kenneth 109, 115 Anderson, Stacey 14 Anglim, Philip 71 anomie 10, 44, 55–56, 169 Anthony Petullo Collection 111 anti-art 39–40, 112, 113, 115, 132 anti-essentialism 62, 67 anti-semitism 88–91, 96–97 anti-social banning orders (ASBO) 47 anti-structure 34 applause: staged 33 Arbus, Diane 61, 70: Backwards Man in his Hotel Room 70; Headstone for Killer at Bide A Wee Cemetery 154; The Human Pincushion Ronald C Harrison NYC 70; Untitled Project 70

architectural installations 147 architecture 53, 142, 144 aristocracy: and elitism 53–54; of distinction 181 Aristotle 30 Armstrong, Jimmy 70 art (visual) 8, 10, 24, 184–185: activist 173; for art’s sake 86; contemporary 9, 180; diversity 38; as exclusive 3, 27; and humour 1–2, 4–5, 10, 25–26, 35–43, 65, 72–74, 81, 86–90, 103–104, 105, 110, 123–132, 148–149, 153, 158–159, 165, 167–169, 173–178, 185; interpretation 19; joke 2–3, 16, 19, 36, 41; as kitsch 132; as life (life as art) 80, 110, 134, 139; and madness 94–95 184; manifesto 109; market 58, 66, 76 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 132, 145; and Nazism 88–90, 92–93; non-conformist 61, 75–76; performance 100; regime 17, 29, 117; stars 76; theme parks 11, 142, 148–151; therapeutic 94, 114, 115; universalism of 178; utility of 17, 81, 86–94; worlds 24, 27, 61, 64, 75–76, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 145, 151, 180 Art Brut (Raw Art) 57, 94, 112, 113–117, 178 Art Works in Mental Health (exhibition) 118 articulation 10, 61, 76–77, 163, 165, 183: theory 77 artist: autonomy 76; brand 151; craziness 66; as fetish 132; humiliation 81; and inmate 64–66; joke 10, 11, 13, 23, 24, 51, 109, 132; as marginal 6, 9, 66, 88, 111–120; naive 76, 113; as outsider 26–27, 38, 50–51, 67, 76, 109–141; psychotic 116; romantic 114; self-taught 110, 113, 117, 158 Arts Council of Great Britain 111 Asa Berger, Arthur 13, 18, 32 asinine masses 105 Asperger’s Syndrome 56, 110, 119 Astaire, Fred 92 asylum 64, 65: seekers 52 asymmetrical conflict 163, 176 Atkinson, Will 27 atomic bombs 152

202

Index

Attardo, Salvatore 21–22 attitude endorsement 97 Aubert, Maeva 40 Aunt Gemima 84 Auschwitz 38, 139 austerity 32, 51 authenticity 9–10, 27, 44, 54, 71, 78, 78, 93, 110–114, 117, 122, 170, 178: contrived 66, 77, 115–117, 171, 181n8, 184; pseudo- 122; -security 29n7, 109, 121, 123; trip 122; of the working class 23, 53–54, 93 autocratic societies 82 avant-garde 39, 58, 75–76, 89, 93, 109, 110, 132, 142, 145, 173: artists 38, 40, 100, 109, 110, 139; co-option 9; demise 76; modernism 100 AVO (Hungarian Secret Police) 148 Babcock, Barbara 81 Bahktin, Mikhail 5–6, 13, 18, 19, 22, 24, 33, 61, 68, 71, 72, 79–80, 81, 87, 102, 104, 144, 162, 163, 164–166, 176, 179, 184 Bandido 56 Banksy 10, 13, 25–26, 150, 151, 178: Basquiat Mural 25; Girl with a Balloon/Love in the Bin 132; Slave Labor (Bunting Boy) 132n12 Barbican Art Gallery 25 Barbusse, Henri 46 Baron Cohen, Sacha 85–86 Barron, Stephanie 74, 88–89 Barthes, Roland 86 Basquiat Boom for Real (exhibition) 25 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 10, 13, 25–27: Boone 19, 26; Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump 26; Obnoxious Liberals 27n5 Bataillee, Eugène: La Jaconde Fumant la Pipe (Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe) 19 Baucheron, E & Routex, D 74 Baudelaire, Charles 17, 82, 134, 139: The Little Old Woman 133; To The Reader 133 Bauhaus 88 Baumann, Zygmunt 44, 53, 54, 68 Baxter, Greg 109: The Mark of Death 140 Bearded Lady (Annie Jones) 155 beat 46, 139: writers 110, 133–139 Beck, Ulrich 152 Becker, Howard 44, 46, 61, 64, 75–76, 113: Outsiders, Study in the Sociology of Deviance 45 Beckman, Max 88, 97 bedlam 57 Bee Gees: Staying Alive 150 Béla Kun 148 Béla Kun Memorial 148–149 Belarus 174 belief 61 Bell, Steve 35, 54 Benjamin, Walter 133, 151

Bennett, Tony et al 27, 121 Benny, Jack 18 Benton, Gregor 13, 32, 33, 96 Berent, Stanley 157 Bergson, Henri 22 Berlin 96, 142 Berman, Marshall 133, 163 Bertha 177 Beyond Reason. Art and Psychosis. Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (exhibition) 122 Bhabha, Homi 81, 93 BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT (stencil graffiti) 1–2, 5 binary logic 44–45, 69, 113, 116, 164, 165, 170, 172, 182 Birch, Will 141, 151 Birth of a Nation 92 Birth of the Dragon 92 Bishop, Claire 180 black: identity 26; males 47; rights 84; underclass 67 Black Sabbath 14 blackface 81, 90–91, 93 Blake, Peter 38, 78 Bloc, Ernst 89 bloco 105 Bloom, Jim 11, 109, 127: Careful You Don’t Become That Sad Old Queen 127; Momma had a Baby and its Head Popped Off 127; Nancy’s Promise 127 Blunt, Anthony 78 Boal, Augusto 13, 15 Boalian drama 9, 173 body 63: art 56 Bogle, Dan 84, 84n1 Bohemia 53, 54, 120, 139 bohemian 6, 45, 133: heterotopia 49, 62n2; subculture 46 Bolsonaro, Jair 105n9 Booth, Charles: The Life and Labour of People in London 53 Borat 11, 81, 85–86 born freaks/made freaks 70, 116n7, 155, 157 Bosch, Hieronymus 131: The Gardens of Earthly Delight 54 Bosworth, Patricia 70 Bourdieu, Pierre 13, 22, 27–29, 44, 56, 59, 61, 76, 87, 120–121, 181 bourgeois (see middle class) Bowie, David 71 Bowness, Alan 64 Boyle, David 77 Boyle, Frankie 23 brand(ing) 66, 77, 112n3 Brecht, George 40 Bremser, Ray 133 Breton, André 58

Index Brigstocke, Julien 106, 139, 142, 145 Brill, Dorothée 4, 40 British Museum 68–69 British satirical cartoonists 19, 35, 54, 182 Brixton Prison 158–159 Brooks, Mel: The Producers 97n7; Young Frankenstein 71 Brown, Chubby 21 Brubaker, Rogers & Cooper, Frederick 62–63, 67 Bruegel, Peter: The Fight between Carnival and Lent 11, 81, 87, 103, 165 Bruhn, Matthias 102 Bruno, Frank 109: Work Hard and Save Your Money 131 Brus, Günter 100 Buck 84 Budapest 148 buffoon 175–176 Bukowski, Charles 11, 109, 133, 134–136: Nut Ward East of Hollywood 135–136; Post Office 134–135 Burlesque 15, 19 Burroughs, William 133 Busker (Santiago de Compostella) 90–91 Butchins, Richard 70 Butler, Judith 67 Butterfly Effect 100 Byrne, David 52, 58 Byrom, Michael 106 Cabaret 97 cabaret 106, 145 Callot, Jacques: Grotesque Dwarves 70 Cameron, David 47 Camus, Albert 46 capitalism 40, 48, 56, 69, 76, 94, 133, 142, 151, 170n4, 173, 178, 179: and exploitation 52; and myth 179; recuperative properties of 56, 150, 179–180 Capote, Truman: Breakfast at Tiffany’s 92 Captain Frodo (The Incredible Rubberman) 157 Cardboard City 132, 132n11 Cardinal, Roger 57, 93, 109, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119 caricaturist 8 carnival 15, 19, 102–106, 120, 164, 165, 173, 178: Brazilian 105; humour 33, 103–104; 108, 166, 183; inversions 84, 102, 137; king of 36, 166; recuperation of 105; sites 120; time 11, 81, 87, 104, 108, 166, 178; Venice 106; Verona 106 carnivalesque 11, 19, 22, 24, 31, 68, 82, 84, 120, 135, 138, 144, 145, 148, 155, 157, 165, 177n7: diaspora 120; freedoms 105; leisure 11, 170, 171 Carrol, Noel 13, 16, 17, 19, 31–32, 82, 83, 86, 92, 97

203

Cash, Jonny: Folsom Prison Blues 57 Cassady, Neal 133 catharsis 17 Catholic 31, 90, 105, 166 Caulfield, Patrick 152: Gravestone of Patrick Caulfield 152–153 celebrity 76, 152, 163, 179 cemetery 11, 52, 102, 142, 143, 151–154 Chagall, Marc 88 Chairman Mao 82 Chand, Ned: Sculpture Garden 110, 114, 147 Chaos 100–102, 104, 185 Chaos Theory 11, 81, 100, 102 Chaplin, Charlie: The Great Dictator 96 Chapman brothers 127 Charlie Hebdo 105, 173 Le Chat Noire 139 Cheval, Ferdinand 76 Chic: le Freak 155 Chicharro, Mario 114 children’s games 176 Cho, Margaret 79 Christ 30 Christiana 53 Christianity 2, 58, 114 circles of recognition 64 Circus Amok 157 civilizing process 163, 171 The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Army (CIRCA) 11–12, 163, 175–176, 178 Clapton, Eric 151 Class 13, 28, 120, 133, 136: and the body 54 classical body 68–69 Clements, Paul 15, 17, 19, 26, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 71, 76, 78, 96, 100, 104, 109, 113, 118, 119, 121, 133, 134, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 158, 166, 169, 173, 176: Charles Bukowski, Outsider Literature and the Beat Movement 110; The Creative Underground: Art Politics and Everyday Life 109–110; Diet for Health and Strength (personal letter & dictated menu) 161; Dinner Time F Wing 159; The Excluded Terms of Culture 110 Clifford, Professor 152 clown(ing) 13, 14, 101, 163, 173–177, 176n6 clownbatants 175 Cobain, Kurt 26 cochlear implants 75 Cockney slang 141 coffee house 102, 171 Cohen, Stanley 44, 46 Coldstream, William 78 Collection l’Art Brut 111, 112 collective value 103, 154, 182 Collini, Stephan 163, 181, 182–183 The Colony Room Club 64n2

204

Index

the combine, 138, 178 Comedia dell’arte 81, 106 comedy: double act 134; insult 23 comic: amoralism 31–32, 79; categories 13, 19; horror 155; immoralism 31–32, 97; morality 10, 11, 13, 21, 31–32, 35, 85, 97, 163, 165, 180, 184; skills 34; space 44 commodification 48, 49, 115, 133, 169, 179 common: culture 87; inheritance 67; people 6, 22 communist 148, 174; critique 148–149 Compagne de l’Art Brut (archive) 112 consumerism 60, 163, 179 control freak 155 controlled: interpretation 13, 24; nonsense 34 Cooke, Rachel 78 Cooks, Waiters and Bellboys (exhibition) 36 cool 59: entrepreneurial hipsterdom 76 Coon 84 Cooper, Bradley 71 Cork, Richard 66 Couette, Deborah 94 counter-hegemony 82, 83, 96, 99, 112 counter-spaces 143 counterculture 8, 11, 53, 59–60, 97, 115, 152, 164, 173–178, 183 Courbet, Gustave 88 court oath 162 Covent Garden 53, 106, 120 Crawshaw, Steve 174, 175 creative: anarchy 34, 101; genius 57, 75, 121; outsider culture 112–120; underground 109–110 Crespo Fernández, Eliecer 152 criminality 57, 58, 169, 172 Critchley, Simon 13, 34–35, 44, 55, 67, 82, 87, 121, 154, 166 Crop Over 166–167 crowd funding 77 Culbert, David 92 cultural: appropriation 27, 184; capital 10, 16, 23, 28, 44, 56, 75, 82, 121n9, 122, 170; classification 111–120; dialogue 75; homelessness 28, 29; imperialism 27; intermediary 75, 114–115; omnivore 27–28, 121, 170, 181; ordinary 110; policy 88; practice 96, 143; regeneration 129, 151; revolution 82, 84; turn 8 culture: as deviant 112; jamming 42; as meaningless 178; as other 87; popular 27, 164, 165, 171 curation 87–88 Currie, Ken: Krankenhaus 54 Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia 179 DIY resistance 169 d’Ancona, Matthew 86

da Vinci, Leonardo: Mona Lisa 17–18, 19, 26 Dada 4, 40, 42, 58, 173 Dadaist 38, 100, 110, 132 Daily Express 47 Daily Mirror 58 Dali, Salvador 82 Daltrey, Roger 7–8 Darger, Henry 93, 115–116 dark: humour 11, 13, 95, 98, 133, 135, 141, 142, 144, 150–151, 153–154, 162, 163, 184; matter 61, 76, 79, 117; web 79 Davidson, Bruce 61, 70: Clive Beatty Circus 70 Davidson, Jim 21 Davis, George 1 Dawson, Les 18 de Beauvoir, Simone 46 de Certeau, Michel 18, 61, 72, 81, 93, 101, 158 de Hempsey, Sydney 107 de Ribera, Jusepe 99 de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 139 de-individualization 162 deathscapes 151 Debord, Guy 49, 110, 163: The Society of Spectacle 178 Debussy, Claude 139 decrowning double 144 Dee, Jack 18 Deener, Andrew 145 deformity 69 dehumanization 56, 179 del Caso, Pere Borrell 13: Escaping Criticism 41, 42 DeWall, Nathan 55 Deleuze, Gilles 16 democratic: public sphere 171; societies 32 demonstrations 11, 142, 174 détournement 42, 174, 175 Deutscher Kunstbhericht (German Art Report) 88 deviancy 110: of youth 44 dialogical/dialogism 11, 163, 164, 165, 181 diasporic communities 67 Dickens, Charles: Little Dorritt 134n14; Oliver Twist 53 Dickie, Simon 69 Diet for Health and Strength 161 Dina Schama, Lidia 13, 16, 18, 33–34 dirt(y) 23, 53, 54, 68, 100, 102n8, 103, 110, 120, 133, 179 disability 33, 58, 71, 75, 83, 99–100, 110, 140–141, 144: and rejection 61, 69 Disability Rights Movement 155 disabled war veterans 11, 61 discourse 50, 109, 113, 117–118, 120, 158, 171, 185 Dismaland (Bemusement Park) 148, 150–151, 178 Disney, Walt: Snow White 70n5

Index disneyfication 150 Disneyland 150 Dispositional Theory 17, 19, 83 dissonance 10, 13, 29, 93, 103, 121 distinction 22, 24, 27, 59, 75, 87, 121, 181: as countercultural 44 distribution of the sensible 17 Dittmer, Lowell 82 diversity 6, 27, 31–32, 75, 86, 99: lack of 48, 59, 96, 108, 154, 163 divine spirit 94 Dix, Otto 54, 61, 71–74, 88, 97: To Beauty 72; Card Players 72–73, 74; The Ill-matched Couple 72; Portrait of Dr Fritz Glaser 74; Portrait of the Jeweller Karl Krall 74; War Cripples 72 docile body 50 Dodd, Ken 68 Dohmen, Renata 9, 180 Doisneau, Robert 112 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 46 double: entendre 33; meaning 162 Douglas, Kirk: Lust for Life 75; Spartacus 141 Douglas, Mary 68, 101, 110 Downs Syndrome 89 Dreamland 151 Dryden, John 170 Dubin, Steven 109, 116–117 Dubuffet, Jean 57, 93, 94, 109, 112, 125: L’Art Brut Préfère aux Arts Culturel 113 Duchamp, Marcel: L.H.O.O.Q 19 Duggan, Mark 47 Duncombe, Stephen 176 Durbach, Nadja 154–155, 157 Durkheim, Emile 44, 55 Dury, Ian 109, 151: Bus Driver’s Prayer 141; Spasticus Autisticus 140–141 dystopia(n) 5, 104, 159 Eagleton, Terry 13, 15, 17, 18, 22, 44, 52, 110, 139, 162, 164 Eco, Umberto 82 ecological disaster 177 economic: depression 74; disparity 44 ecosystem 147 ecstacy 45 edgework 169, 173 Edinburgh Fringe 28 Edwardes, Charlotte & Dex, Robert 42 Edwards, Richie 26 effigy protests 11, 163, 166–167 egalitarian society Einstein, Albert 152 Eisenmann: Millie and Christine McCoy 156 Eleőd, Ákos 148 The Elephant Man 57, 71 The Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick) 57, 155

205

Elfo 109, 129: Bonsai Liberation Front 129, 131 Elias, Norbert 163, 171 embourgeoisement 163 Emeryville mud flats 142, 146–147: El Salvador Death = $ 147; USS Misery; Resist the War in Central America 147 Emin, Tracy 66: Tracey Emin 66n3 enfreakment 155 Engel, Matthew 1 Engels, Friedrich: Conditions of the Working Class 53 English Revolution 170 English, Ron 132n12 enlightened eclecticism 29, 121 Enos, Joey 146 Entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art) 11, 18, 74, 81, 88, 89, 93, 100 Entartete Musik (Exhibition of Degenerate Music) 11, 18, 81, 89–90 entrepreneur 122 epitaph 144, 152, 154 essentialism 61, 62–63, 64, 83–84 establishment groupthink 180 The Eternal Jew 92 Etheridge, George 170 ethical: boundaries 117; spectacle 176 ethnic: art 27, 59, 180, 87–88; youth 47 Euro-American hegemony 180 European: policymakers 6; Tour 137 excluded 7, 83, 131: artists 65, 76, 109; body 61, 68–75; community 137; culturally 151; minds 10, 44; places/spaces 44, 52–53, 70, 105; as self-defined 61, 62, 132, 182; youth 47 exclusion (see social exclusion) exhibition politics 27 experiential anarchy 169 exploitation 115, 179 Expressionism 58, 92–93 Extinction Rebellion 177 Extinction Rebellion Protestival 163, 177, 177n7, 178 F Wing (Fraggle Rock) 158–160 Faggan, Robert 137, 137n15, 138 The Fairs Act (1871) 172 fake news 45, 47, 110, 179, 185 false consciousness 178 Fanon, Franz 61, 81, 93, 117: Black Skin White Masks 67 far-right 182 Faslane 175 feast of fools 14 Feather, Howard 150, 170 Feldman, Marty 71 Feminist 20–21, 84, 105–106: critique 139 Ferrell, Jeff 169 Fine, Gary 122–123

206

Index

finger/glove puppet shows 98–99 Finnegan, Ruth 67 Finster, Howard 114 flâneur 133 flash mobs 11, 120, 142, 146 Fluxamusement Centre 39 Fluxus 38–40 Folk Art 59, 114 folk 105: artists 76; culture 164; devils 46, 55 fool 14, 105: natural and artificial 14–15 forum 14: theatre 15 Foster, Hal 36 Foucault, Michel: 5, 44, 50, 66, 94, 113, 142, 143, 152, 163, 169, 172, 182 Fourth Plinth 70 frame analysis 61, 63 Franco, Francisco 91n5 Frankfurt School 178 Frankl, Victor 98 Fraser, Matt 157: Born Freak 157; Sealboy Freak 157 freak show 11, 57, 115, 142, 154–158, 164: recuperated 157 free climbing 169 freedom: of expression 34, 180; of speech 22 French: existentialists 110, 139; Humanist Photographers 112n2; pantomime 106, 139; Revolution 145 Freud, Lucian 54 Freud, Sigmund 13, 14 Friedman, Sam 13, 22, 28, 29, 121, 170 Fromm, Eric 178 Fumistes 145 The Fun Boy Three with Bananarama 28 fundamentalist 114, 182 Further 137 Fuseli, Henry: The Vision of Lazar House 57 Futurists 38, 110 G8/G20 demonstrations 173, 175, 176n6 Gablik, Suzie 5 Galdi, S et al 21 gallows humour 158 Gandy, Matthew 142, 147, 152 Garage Museum of Contemporary Art 9n4 Garnett, Robert 36 gatekeeper 47, 72, 75, 86, 111, 117, 179, 180 Gattrell, Vic 22, 106, 120 Gay Pride 145 gaze 50, 117, 149, 180 Geertz, Clifford 34 gender 20–21, 105–106, 120, 144: exclusion 83, 163, 174 General Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) 155 Genet, Jean 46, 109: Thief’s Journal 136–137 genius 44, 57–59, 75, 110, 121: as brand 66

George, Malcolm 105–106, 105n10 Gerbner, George 21, 105–106 German Expressionists 74 Gervais, Ricky 23 Ghost in the Shell 92 Gibson, Richard 70 Gilbert, Jeremy 178 Gill, Madge 78, 93, 110 Gillray, James 3, 54: Midas Transmuting all into Gold Paper 35 Gin Act (1763) 59 gin palace 171 Gitlin, Todd 163, 180 glass bedroom 78 global: art market 9, 180; capitalism 180; terrorism 47 globalization 47 Goebbels, Joseph 88: Ten Principles of German Music Creativity 89 Goffman, Erving 16, 24, 61, 63–66, 75, 77, 79, 81, 94–95, 97, 159 Goldberg, Vicki 70 Golden Rule (of reciprocity) 182 Golders Green Crematorium 151 Gordon, Colin 144 Göring, Herman 83 Gormley, Antony 161 Gorsen, Peter 124 Goth 139 Göttke, Florian 163, 166–167 governmental(ity) 67, 182 Goya, Francesco: The Madhouse 57 Graeae Theatre Company 141 graffiti 1, 64–65, 86, 143, 144, 169 Graham-Dixon, Andrew 89 Greaves, Richard 142: The Sugar House 147 Greenfield, Verni 125, 127 Grindon, Gavin 105, 163, 164, 173 Grosberg, Lawrence 77 grossed out comedy 157 Grosz, George 4, 54, 72, 88, 97 grotesque 22, 61, 120: body 54, 68–69, 71, 131, 174: gargoyles 39; humour 9,19, 39, 102, 120, 138, 141, 150–151, 162, 181; inversion 81, 102 Grutas Park (Stalin World) 148, 149 Guerrilla Girls 142, 163, 173: Guerrilla Girls. Is it even worse in Europe? 144, 173–174 gumpics 129–130 Gursky, Andreas: Toys ‘R’ Us 40 Hahl, Oliver et al 109, 121 Hall, Julian 157 Hall, Stuart 8, 44, 61–62, 63, 67, 76–77, 163, 183: et al 47 Hamilton, Peter 112n2 Hamilton, Richard 38 The Happy Side Show 157

Index hard-boiled 134 harlequinade 106 Harrison-Pepper, Sally 44, 49 Harvey, Dave 151 Harvey, David 142 Hauser, Johann 114 Hausmann, Raoul 88 Havel, Vaclev 179 Haynes, Deborah 79, 87, 164 Hayward Gallery 40 Heartfield, John 97 Heaton, Charlie 71 Hebborn, Eric 78 Hebdige, Dick 46 Hell’s Angels 56 Henderson, Gretchen 100 Hendrix, Jimi 26 Henry Boxer Gallery 111, 119, 122 Hepworth, Barbara 112 Herman, Edward & Chomsky, Noam 44, 55 hermetic drift 82 Hess, Elizabeth 174 Hesse, Herman 46 heterotopia 11, 52–53, 57, 91, 120, 137–139, 142–162, 174–178: pop up 108, 120, 142, 143, 145–146, 150–151 heterotopian: alliance 147, 152; space 5, 10, 44, 52, 142–162, 171; spectacle 173–179 Hetherington, Kevin 67, 142, 145 Higgie, Jennifer 13, 19, 24, 38, 96, 132 high status denigration 121 Highbrow: culture 9, 22, 24, 28, 29, 59, 66, 68, 83, 104, 108, 110, 112, 133, 164, 170, 184; taste 27, 109, 121, 123, 181 Highgate Cemetery 152 hippie counterculture 46, 137–139, 145 hipster 76, 122 Hislop, Ian & Hockenhull, Tom 68–69, 105 Hitler, Adolf 88, 96, 179 Hogarth, William: Beer Street 58; The Gates of Calais 59; Gin Lane 58; Hubridas Encounters the Skimmington 105; March of the Guards to Finchley 59; The Rake’s Progress (In Bedlam) 57 Hollins, Kathryn 75 Hollywood Hall of Fame 129 Holman Hunt, William 116n6 Holquist, Michael 79 homelessness 11, 81, 97–98 Hood, Charles 58 Hope, Bob 3n2 The Horniman Museum 36 Hottentot Venus (Sara Baartman ) 155 Houlbrook, Matt 78 Howard, Ryan 108 Howerd, Frankie 127 Howlett-Jones, Kate 129

207

Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame 99 human rights 181 humanity 184 humour 6, 7, 8, 13–43, 61, 68, 81, 109, 161, 170, 173, 184–185: absurdist 40, 81, 173, 174–176; and agency 42, 95; and ambiguity 10,13, 28, 29–30, 63, 68, 92, 100, 139, 175, 177; and anarchy 29–30, 81, 83, 102, 103–104, 137–139; asymmetrical 183; in autocratic societies 3, 10, 13, 32–33, 96; background 13–16; and bourgeois values 21–22, 134–135, 139; bullies 162; camp 127–128; and class 22; coach 85–86; complexity of 13, 81, 97; as critical reflection 33, 105, 148, 162, 163; cruel 104–105; and distinction 22, 87, 170; functional 8, 10, 11, 19–20, 22–3, 24, 32–35, 67, 81, 86–94, 161; historical-comparative approach to 24; for humour’s sake 8, 32, 86; as ideas 13, 14; and individualism 24; as inequality 22; legitimacy of 13; and literature 133–141, 166; and lost innocence 162; as madness 11; as methodology 15; and moral enlightenment 15; as multiplicity of meaning 13, 18, 97; and normality 50, 172; objections to 162; as offence 163; popular 22, 28; and power 17, 55, 61, 87, 98, 100, 102, 144, 181; as reactionary 13, 82; lack of scholarly attention to 13, 96; and security 175; self-deprecating 69, 82, 96, 98, 154; self-directed 35, 82–83, 86, 96, 175; self-reflexive 121; sentimental 97; slapstick 19, 84, 107; as social practice 24, 34, 35, 136, 158; as solidarity 161; spontaneous 16; styles 19, 24, 184; as subversive 8, 24, 28, 33, 34, 132; as symbolic interaction/ism 13, 24, 87; taboo 79; theories 7, 10, 11, 13, 16–23, 81; and ugliness 82, 99, 106–107; underdog 98, 136–139; as unethical 15, 83, 86; utility of 17; and worldy engagement 99 humourless 114 Hunchback of Notre-Dame 57 Hungarian Soviet Republic 148 Hunt, Elle 174 Hurt, John 71 Hutcheon, Linda 35 hybrid(ity) 23, 121–122: art 114; humour 81–86, 90 Hydropaths 145 hygiene 102, 102n8 Hyman, Timothy 106 identity 11, 12, 61–68, 76–79, 95, 116, 163, 172, 181–183: ambiguous 44; art 87, 122; ascribed and inherited 67; claim 61–63; deaf 97; diverse 12; fluid and liquid 68, 77; lefthanded 162; through humour 8, 64, 81, 87,

208

Index

96, 97–98; performance 95; personal 66, 67, 87; politics 6, 163, 183; as postmodern 11, 172, 183; social 66–67, 87 ideological guerrilla war 158 I’m Still Here (exhibition) 118, 167 In Another World: Outsider Art from Europe and America (exhibition) 122 inclusion 3, 55, 60, 62, 96, 172, 180; of addicts 49n2, 61 Incoherents 145 incongruity (incongruous humour) 4, 7, 17, 18, 19, 31, 71, 95, 100, 110, 139 ; and superiority 17, 82–86 Indignitas movement 173 individual(ized) 10, 55–56, 58–9, 77, 93, 114, 119, 143, 172, 172, 178, 180: identity 8, 55, 118; psychological framework 120 individual(ism) 26, 44, 62, 71, 75, 93, 99, 133, 169, 173: hyper- 11, 78, 178, 179; Protestant 52, 58; pseudo- 179 industrial revolution 145 infotainment 48, 148 Inner Worlds Outside (exhibition) 93, 122 Inside (exhibition) 118, 161 insider 67, 116: art 185 institutionalization 61, 64, 137–139 instrumental rationales 83 integrated professionals 75 interactive dialogue 61 Internet technology 47–8 iron cage 139 irony 13, 14, 17, 31, 33, 35, 36, 40, 78, 85–86, 104, 106, 123, 142, 144, 148, 150–151, 152, 158, 165, 175: postmodern 41–42, 169 Januszczak, Waldemar 66, 70–71 jazz 89, 90–91: dance musicians 45 Jefferies, Jim 79 Jelavich, Peter 96 Jenks, Chris 163, 170, 172 jester 14 Jew Süss 92 Jewish: comics/entertainers 3, 96–97, 164; representation 81, 96 Jewkes, Yvonne 139 Jiagoo, Wally 109: Glass Windows and Glass Ceilings 139–140 Jim Rose Circus Sideshow 157 Johansson, Scarlet 92 Johns, Jasper 38 Johnson, Peter 142, 143, 151 joke 96: American 85; as confusion 101; gendered 20–21, 83; as inequality 22; insider 79; as resistance 173; sexual 21, 181 joker 13, 15 Jones, Brian 26 Jones, Jonathan 132

Jones, Owen 180 Joplin, Janice 26 jouissance 86 Joyce, James 3 junk sculpture 142, 146–147 Jyllands-Postern 172–173 Kamikaze Freak Show 157 Kandinsky, Vasily 88 Karl Hammer Gallery 111 Katz, Jack 169 Kazakh government 85 Kensal Green Cemetery 154 Kérchy, Anna & Zittlau Andrea 155, 157 Kerouac, Jack 109: The Vanishing American Hobo 136 Kesey, Ken 11, 109, 137–138, 173, 178: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 137–139, 166 Kessel, Martina 96 King Charles II 170 King Lear 14 Kinley, Monika 111 Kirchner, Ernst 88 kitsch memorabilia 148 Klee, Paul 58, 88, 93 Kleebatt, Norman & Silver, Kenneth 38 Klein, Naomi: Disaster capitalism 40 Klein, Sheri 16, 18, 35, 40–41 The Koestler Trust 118, 161 Kokoshka, Oskar 58 Kort, Pamela 123, 125 krasnoludki (red-hatted dwarfs) 174 Krenek, Ernst: Jonny speilt auf (Jonny strikes up) 89–90 Kuipers, Giselinde 13, 16, 19, 24 Kundera, Milan: The Joke 158 Kuppers, Petra 69 Kurtovic, Larisa 98 labelling 10, 44–48, 110, 116: of deviant 45 Lachman, Renate et al 104–105 Ladame, Charles 58 Lahire, Bernard 13, 29, 109, 121 Laing, Olivia 26 Lang, R. D 137 language of security 44 Lapper, Alison: My Life in My Hands 71 laugh tracks 19 laughter (see humour) 3, 13, 30: death by 176; official 13, 33; social function of 18–20, 28, 86, 105; universal 183 Laurel, Stan & Hardy, Oliver 19 Le Frenais, Ian & Clement, Dick: Porridge 57 Lee, Bruce 92 Lefebvre, Henri 142 legitimate: art worlds 75, 76; culture/system 29, 61, 76; taste 27, 29

Index leisure 163, 165, 169–170: abnormalization of 163, 169; recuperation of 163, 169 Lenin, Vladimir 148 LGBTQ 144 Levine, Judy 109, 118 Levinson, Jerrold 17, 41 Levitas, Ruth 44, 51, 52 Li, Dabo 91n5 Liberace 127 Liberal(ism) 3, 10, 50, 86, 171: governance 44, 182; ideology 171, 173 Lichenstein, Roy 38 Lidchi, Henrietta 27, 87–88 The Life of an Agent 148 lifestyle 27–29, 61, 68, 74, 77, 121, 181 liminal: leisure 169; space 11, 49n2, 102, 120, 152 liquid: cosh 160; identity 68; modernity 44, 54–55 Lizardo, Omar & Skiles, Sara 28, 121 Lombardi, Sarah & Rousseau, Valérie 147 Lombroso, Cesare 58 London 1938: Defending Degenerate ‘German’ Art (exhibition) 92–93 London Paralympic Games 70 Longrigg, Clare 66 Lorenz, Edward 100 losers 48, 52 Louden, Albert 93, 110–111, 116, 123 lowbrow: culture 9, 22, 28, 29, 104, 121, 133, 170, 184; humour 23, 121 Lukashenko, Alexander 174 Lund, Roger 61, 69 Luxmoore, Matthew 150 Lyng, Stephen 169 McCrum, Robert 83 McEvilley, Thomas 87, 180 McGovern, Bronwyn 97–98 MacGregor, John 58, 184 McGuigan, Jim 88 Maciunas, George 10, 13, 39–40: Flux-Smile-Machine 39 Maclagan, David 57, 117, 123, 125 McRobbie, Angela & Thornton, Sarah 47–48 mad, sad or bad 50, 66, 98 madness 10, 11, 44, 50, 57–58, 81, 94–95: creative 10, 44, 115, 172 Magnussen, Billy 92 Magritte, René 5, 82: Golconda 4–5, 142; The Treachery of Images 5 Mahabharata 182 Mahler, Gustave 89 Maire, Auguste 58 Maizels, John 109, 113, 117 Malinauskas, Viliumas 150 Mammy 84: Two Shoes 84 Manco, Tristan 131

209

Manet, Éduard 88 manic depressive 57 Manning, Bernard 21 mansplaining 21 Manufacturing consent 44, 55 Manzoni, Piero: Merde d’Artista 110 Marcuse, Herbert 56 Mardi Gras 103 Margate 151 Marginal Art 10, 29n7, 93, 109, 110–123, 158–161: and humour 11, 123–132 marginal(ity) 6, 8, 44, 52, 58, 59, 67, 76, 95, 104, 111, 113, 117, 120, 132, 133, 172, 180: artist 75, 109–132, 145, 146–147, 161, 167–169, 172, 184 marijuana users 45 market dynamics 102, 132 Marsh, Moira 97, 163, 167 Martin, Lauren 175 Martin, Steve 84 Marx, Karl 44, 56, 133, 148, 163: memorial/ monument 152, 154 Marxist 111, 164, 178 Masonic Lodge 145 Masson, André 93 Massys, Quentin: Ugly Duchess 99 Maštalíř, Linda 179 Masters, Tim 106 materialization 56 Matlovich, Leonard 154 maverick 11, 75–76, 78, 113 May, Theresa 32 media 163, 179: effects 21; labelling 44; manufacturing consent 44; panic 10; spectacle 45 mediatization theory 48 medicalization of life 94–95, 169 Meisel, Martin 35, 100, 101, 102 Meldrum, Andrew 59 menstrual art 163, 174 mental: health networks 117–118; illness 64, 70, 89, 93, 129 Merry Pranksters 137 Mésalliances 33 Metcalf, Eugene 54, 67, 79 Mézáros, Istávan 133 Michelangelo: David 68 middle class 10, 28, 59, 181: ambiguity 44; and capitalism 54; and Christian identity/values 28, 81, 104, 171, 181; control 120; cultural imaginary 53–54, 102, 103; and dirt 54; elite 151; gentleman 171; hysteria 120, 172; identity trapped 53–54, 102, 171; as middle way 171; restraint 170; work ethic 54 Militant League for German Culture 92 Millennium Bridge 129 Millie-Christine (Millie & Christine McCoy) 155–156

210

Index

Milohnić, Aldo 36, 174 Milosovic, Slobodan 33 mimicry 81, 93, 110, 113, 176, 181: and desire 61, 181n8 minority: cultures 8, 172, 183; digital spaces 48; humour 31, 81, 96–99; rights 180 Miró, Juan 93 Mr Punch 106–107 mixophobia 53 mock trial 167 mockery 71, 170, 182; of under-privileged 183 Modern Art 93 modern(modernist/ity) 100, 106, 145, 163: 1&2 163–164, 169, 178, 181 Modigliani, Amedeo 88, 89 Mods 54: and Rockers 45, 46 Molnár, Virág 145 Montmartre 139, 142, 145 Montreal 145 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 30–31 moral: discourse 15, 61, 78, 162, 163; entrepreneurs 45, 46, 47, 55; panic 44, 46–47, 78, 95; superiority 180; transcendence 169 Morgenthaler, Walter 58, 112 Morreall, John 7, 13, 16, 17, 20, 81, 86, 161, 162 Morrison, Jim 26 mortification of the self 63, 65, 81, 95, 159, 162 Mosley, Oswald 83 The Mothers 179 Moulder, Bob 154 Moulin de la Galette 139 Muehl, Otto 100 Mulatto 84 Mulkay, Michael 13, 21, 22, 34, 87, 173 Multi User Dimensions (MUDs) 183 multiculturalism 8, 75 multiple voices 48 Munch, Edvard 116n6 Munder, Heike 28, 38 Murdock, Graham 48 Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro 59 Museum of American Folk Art 111 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 26 Musgrave, Victor 111 mutual influence 75 Narcissus 181 Nash, Paul 78 National Health Service Trusts 118 The National Unity Demonstration Against Fascism and Racism 176 nationalism 22–3, 72, 83 Natterer, August 114 naturalized: bourgeois identity 54; social inequalities 44, 50, 84

Nazi 117, 150: canivalesque 89; memorabilia 83; regime 74, 95, 97 neo-dada 38, 110 neoliberalism 33, 46n1, 51, 52, 164: co-option by 149, 179 New: Existentialism 46, 110; Objectivity 72 Newton, Richard: Treason! 68 Nicholson, Ben 112 Nightingale, Matthew 163: Hangman’s Field 167–169 1918 flu epidemic 74 Nitsch, Herman 100 Nolde, Emile 88, 93 nomad 61, 72, 74 non-linear 81, 100 normality 50, 58, 66, 184 normalization 12, 64, 163, 182 not joke 85–86, 101 O’Keefe, Georgia 116n6 objectification of women 21 Occupy movement 173 Ono, Yoko: Wrapping Piece 40 omnivore/omnivorous 27, 29, 59, 109, 121 ontological reality 80 Optor movement 33 oral graffiti 49 Orbán, Victor 149 Oregon State Mental Hospital 137 Orientalism 81, 93 Orton, Joe: Entertaining Mr Sloane 127 Osbourne, Ozzy 14 other(othered/ing) 7, 10, 11, 27, 44, 52–55, 57–9, 61, 63, 69, 70, 80, 83, 87, 93–94, 95, 100, 116, 120, 123, 142, 152, 155, 160, 164, 172, 175, 182, 182, 184 otherness 66, 94, 145, 155 outer value 80 Outlaws 56 outsideness 5, 11, 61, 79, 80, 87, 182 Outsider Art (exhibition) 111, 122 Outsider Art 10, 11, 44, 57, 93, 109, 110–111, 111–117, 122–123, 132, 164, 167n3, 178: too commercial 111; criticisms 115–117; mythology 111; status 132 outsider 6, 10, 11, 44–49, 55, 58, 61, 67, 72, 74, 79, 119, 122, 131, 135–141, 152, 184: actor 157; Bohemian 49; creative 184; groups 45; heterotopia 44, 79, 142; hip 11, 26, 44, 59, 61, 78, 121, 162; humour 11, 109, 123–141; individualism 26, 78, 93; liminoid 49; literature 11, 109, 132–141; model 93; musician 140–141; porn 123; recuperated 93, 116, 184; representations 44, 78; as romantic 61; self-defined 61, 62, 132, 182; space 11, 142–162; writer 132–140, 160–161

Index outsider-insider 38, 116 outsiderdom 9, 49, 50, 78: and exclusion 44, 60; as fixed category 45; as mannerism 60, 78; as spiritual awakening 46 Owen, Hana 164, 166 Oxford Circus 177 Paik, Nam June 40 Pallant House Gallery 122 Palmer, Jerry 3n2, 8, 13, 14, 30 Panto Dame 78 pantomime 106, 107, 139 Paolozzi, Eduardo 38 paradox 13, 15, 34, 41, 52 Paralympics 141 Paris: Carnival 171–172; Commune 53, 142; Salon 88; May ’68 53, 178 parkour 169 parody 13, 17, 19, 35, 36, 40, 144: of art/artists 35, 113; of work culture 98 Pascal, Blaise 18 pastiche 38 patrimony 148–150 Pavice, Patrice 61, 75 Peach, Nathaniel (epitaph) 154 Peaky Blinder gangs 45 Pearson, Adam 71 Pearson, Erika 78 Peiry, Lucienne 112, 117 people’s laughter 13, 22, 33, 71, 72, 87, 102, 163, 164, 166, 178, 179, 182, 184 Pepys, Samuel 106 performance 11, 61, 63–64: of humour 28, 28n6, 98 performativity 61, 66, 75 Perry, Grayson (Claire) 13, 41–42, 77–78 persons of restricted growth (dwarfs) 11, 61, 69, 70, 70n5 Peters, Olaf 72, 74, 88 Peterson, Richard & Kern, Roger 13, 27, 58 Pfizer Ltd 118 phantasmagoria 102, 151 phocomelia 157 Picabia, Francis 93 Picasso, Pablo 3, 59 Pickerill, H. R 99–100 Pierrot clown 106, 139 Piketty, Thomas 8 ping-pong of recuperative cycles 150, 170 Pissaro, Camille 88, 139 Plastic Paddy 50 Plato/nism 178, 182 play(ful) (humour) 7, 17, 34, 77, 82, 86, 103–104, 109, 127, 139, 141, 147, 163, 166, 173, 176, 178, 182, 183: disruption 13, 84, 103, 138, 176, 184; ideas 87, 177; superiority 90, 166; teasing 34

211

pleasure principle 13 poblaciones callampas 131 poesis 101 poetic melancholia 94 poetry 133 Poland 150, 174 political: action 173; ambiguities 13; art 36, 185; (in)correctness 3, 11–12, 18, 20, 23, 29, 35, 86, 97, 163, 170, 180–183, 184; economy 48; humour 32–33, 82, 219, 131–132, 175; satire 40 Pollock, Venda & Sharp, Joanne 151 Poole, Steven 180 Pop, Andrei & Widrich, Mechtild 99 Pope 34: Pius XII 91n5 Pornographic Potter 42 Porter, Roy 94 post truth 47 post-communist 148 post-industrialization 163 post-work society 110, 170n4 postcode gangs 45 postmodern(ism) 27, 164, 181: representation 61, 77 poverty 44, 52, 134, 136–137: maps 53; porn 59 power 181: of humour 8; inversion of 81, 84; and knowledge 50; microphysics of 143–144; relations 93, 116; sovereign 171 practical joke 16 Prague 96, 179 pranksterism 173 primary definers 47, 55 Primitive Art 27, 113 Pring, L et al 109, 119–120 Prinz, Jesse 109, 115–116 Prinzhorn, Hans 58, 89, 112: Image-making by (Artistry of) the Mentally Ill 117 Prisbrey, Grandma 11, 76, 109, 127: Bottle Village 114, 125, 127, 147; Shrine with Headlamps 125–127 prison 11, 54, 57, 98, 99, 120, 136–137, 138, 142, 144, 158–162 Private Eye 18, 22, 105 Privilege 31, 44, 105, 182 Prophet Muhammad 97, 172: cartoons 34 props 63, 65, 68, 95 prostitute 98 Protestant: morality 52; taming of Catholicism 166 protestival 166, 177 psychiatric hospital (mental asylum) 54, 117, 124, 133, 137–138 psychoanalysis 120 psychotic 116 public: applause 175; art 36, 144, 152; identities 79; opinion 177; and private (privatization) 147, 150; sphere 11, 48, 121, 148, 163, 171 Pueblo clown 14 Pulcinella 106

212

Index

Pulver, Andrew 92 pun 5, 13, 33, 35–36, 40 Punch and Judy Show 11, 81, 106–108, 150 punk 26 Puritan 170: suppression 163 Quebec 147 Quinn, Marc 61: Alison Lapper Pregnant 70–71 racial/racist 74, 83, 92, 93, 97: joke 22–3, 33: other 67; stereotype 84–94 Racial and Religious Hatred Act 20 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 24, 34 Radio Erevan 32 Ramírez, Martin 93 Ramsden, Hilary 175–176 Ranciere, Jacques 13, 17, 29, 87 Raphael: The Madonna of the Pinks 68 rational systems 185 rationalization 94, 102, 163 Rauschenberg, Claus 38 Raw Vision 114, 117, 122 realist literature 110 rebellious release 81 Rebold Benton, J 39 Recuperation 38, 65, 149, 150, 157, 179: of culture 9, 60, 88, 93, 174, 185 Red: Band 159; Guards 82 Réga, Marcel 112 regimes 66: of identity 87; of truth 45, 113 Reichskammer Museum 88 Reinhardt, Django: Hot Club of France 92n6 relativist/relativity 164, 165 relief (humour) 7, 17, 105, 161 Rembrandt van Rijn, 99 renaissance perfection 61, 68 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 139 representation 7–8, 9, 10, 61–62, 71, 96, 184, 185 resistant 11, 102, 121: practices 8, 62, 72, 96, 97, 101, 113, 139 Restoration comedies 170 Réthly, Ákos 148, 150 Reynaud, Raymond 114 Rhodes, Colin 111, 117 Rictus (exhibition) 54 ridicule 104, 105, 149, 155, 163, 178 Riley, Terry 3 Ringgold, Faith: Who’s Afraid of Aunt Gemima 84; Two Jemimas Quilt 84 risk society 152 the roast 23 Robinson, Bill Bojangles 92 Rodia, Simon 76: Watts Towers 114, 147 Rojek, Chris 67, 163–164, 169, 170 Roman Saturnalia 19, 102 Room, Graham 6–7

Rooney, Mickey 92 Rosenberg, Alfred 92 Roualt, Georges: Le Clown Blessé 106 rough music 106, 167 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Émile 112n3 Rousseau, Valérie 147 Routledge, Paul 45, 175, 176, 176n6, 177 Rowlandson, Thomas 3, 35, 54 Rowson, Martin 35, 54 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 42 Ruxton Towers Borstal 158 Ryan, Frances 71 Sacks, Oliver 109, 119 Sadowitz, Jerry 23 safety valve 105 Said, Edward 81, 93 St Ives School 112 St John, Graham 166 Salon de Refusés (exhibition) 88, 112 San Fransisco (Haight-Ashbury) 53 Sanders, Teela 98 Sanskrit literature 182 Santiago de Compostella 90 Sapper, Craig 39–40 Sarajevo 98 Sartre, Jean-Paul 46 satire 8, 13, 17, 18, 20, 33, 69, 71–73, 81, 97, 104, 110, 140, 142, 144, 148, 162, 165, 179 Saturday Night Fever 150 Saunders, Dave 19 Saunders, John 145 Savant Art 11, 109, 110, 118–119 Saville, Jenny 54 Scarfe, Gerald 54: Donald Trump - Obscene 35 Schiele, Egon 54, 93, 174 Schira, Ron 127–129 schizophrenia/schizophrenic 57, 113, 124, 125 Schlichter, Rudolf 72 Schmidt, Samuel 19, 21 Schmidt-Rotluff, Karl 88, 89 Schneegans, G 13, 19 Schoenberg, Arnold 89 Schrimpf, Georg 72 Schröder-Sonnenstein, Friedrich 11, 93, 109, 114, 124–125: Mr Razewitz 123–124 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul: Kunst and Rasse (Art and Race) 89 Schwarzkogler, Rudolff 100 Scott, James 158 Scott, Judith 116 scriptural economy 101 Scruton, Fred 131 Scruton, Roger 66 Scuttler gangs 45 Second Law of Thermodynamics 101 Second Life 78

Index securitization 10, 48 self-censorship 12, 163, 182 self-definition 44, 50, 77, 77n8, 122, 172, 181, 183 self-esteem 63 self-identification 45, 62, 77 self-irony 173 self-regulation 171 selfies 154 Sellen, Betty-Carol 115n5, 122 Seneca 182 Sennett, Richard 165 Sewell, Brian: The Complete Outsider Almost Always: Never Quite 78 sexism 20–21 sexual abuse 79 sexuality 83, 127–128 Sham 69: George Davis is Innocent 1 Shandausstellungen (Exhibitions of Shame) 74 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 57, 99 ship of fools 147, 177 shock of the new 132 Sholette, Gregory 76, 79, 117 Shrovetide 102, 103 Sickert, Walter 78 silent revolution 148 Sillitoe, Alan: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner 158 Simmel, Georg 56, 61, 72 Singer’s Midgets 155 Situationist 40, 42, 64, 132, 164, 178, 179 skiing off piste 169 skimmington 11, 81, 105–106, 167 Skradol, Natalia 13, 33 Slawson, Nicola 26 Slinkachu 109: Scavengers129; They’re Not Pets Susan 129 Slovenia 174 Smith, Arthur 16n1 Smith, Leonard 100, 101 snobbery 28 social: cachet 28; fragmentation 51; inclusion 51, 71; service art 118 social exclusion 6–7, 9, 10, 25, 27, 33, 49–55, 60, 75, 83, 95, 116, 158: as cachet 50, 58, 121; critiqued 52; discourse of 44, 97; through humour 15, 34–35, 44, 87; through media panic 47; multi-dimensional 51; naturalizing inequalities 51, 158; as outcast 62; structural 50, 116; as underclass 51 Socrates 182 Soja, Edward 142 Solidarity Movement 174 Solomon, Carl 133 Sommer, Bob 146 Sontag, Susan 13, 16, 19, 24 Sooty and Sweep 98

213

Sorensen, Majken Jul 33, 172, 173 Soutine, Chaïm 10, 13, 36–38: Head Waiter 36; The Little Pastry Cook 36–38; Page Boy at Maxim’s 37; The Return from School 127 Soviet: System 149; Union 3, 32–33, 96 space: alternative 143, 147; forbidden 143; as heterochronic/time 142; othered 53, 152; production of 142; public 142, 143; regulated 143; third 143 Spanish Inquisition 30–31 Spanke, D 72, 74 spectacle 11, 49, 59, 150, 163, 173, 176–179 spectacular action 173 speech acts 48, 175 Speight, Ed 141 Sperling, Franziska & Sperling, Johannes 23 Spode, Roderick 83 spontaneity 178 Springtime for Hitler 97n7 Stalin, Joseph 3, 33, 104, 148, 179 Stalinism 104 Stalinist purges 6 Stallybrass, Peter 59; and White, Allon 23, 44, 53–54, 61, 69, 81, 102–103, 104, 105, 117, 120, 163, 170–172 standardization 179 Stebbins, Robert 165 Steely Dan 59 Stephen (prison inmate): The Secret Left-Handed Diary of a Right-Handed Lifer Aged 50 and 3/4s 161 Stephens, Elizabeth 70, 155, 157, 158 Stereotypes 28, 96 Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde 99 Stigma 11, 81, 95, 98 Stoker, Bram: Dracula 57, 99 STOP MAKING STUPID Artists Famous (stencil graffiti) 65 Stop the War Coalition 176 strangers 72, 74 streams of consciousness 58 street: art 11, 13, 86, 96, 143, 144, 169; protest 173; theatre 19, 49 Strömquist, Liv 163: The Night Garden 174 stupidology 39, 64 subculture 45, 46 subvertising 42 superclass 52 superiority (superior humour) 3, 7, 16–19, 35, 44, 55, 69, 79, 81–86, 96, 97, 123, 157, 158, 162, 181, 182, 183: male 21: through self-deprecation 82–83 surrealist/surrealism 5, 38, 82, 83, 100, 110 Swing Time 92 Sylvester, David 66

214

Index

symbolic: boundaries 28; exchange 18; interactionism 24; inversion 81, 84, 101–103; logic 176; marking 61; masks 81; meanings 142 symmetry Szoborpark (Statue Park) 148–149, 152

unlaughter 18n2, 61, 74, 87, 99, 127, 160, 163, 167 Uprising of the Zombies 174 urban: outsider 72; pranksterism 145; stranger 61 utopia(n) 5, 8, 104, 142, 152

tactical guerrilla action 176 taste 10, 13, 23–24, 27, 60, 63, 78, 100, 120, 121–122, 170, 180, 181: boundaries 183; contravening 163; guardians of 86; hierarchies 29; individual 27–28, 87, 121; omnivorous 13, 28–29, 29n7 tastemaker 181 Tate Modern 129 terata 58 Terry, Charles 98, 99 Theatre for the Forgotten 118 theme park 144 Thompson, E. P 106, 167 Thurmont (cemetery epitaphs) 154 Tokyo Shock Boys, 157 Tom 84 Tom and Jerry 81, 84, 102 total institution 63, 65–66, 94–95 Townsend, Sue: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 162 trans-rational 3 transgender 78 transgression 11, 25, 49, 61, 68, 87, 145, 162, 163, 172, 174, 175: as humorous 86, 105, 167, 170 Transportation Security Administration 175 transvestite 101 trickster 101 Trompe L’oeil 13, 41 Trump, Donald 45, 48, 144, 146 truth 163, 164 Tsakona, Villy & Popa, Diana 175 Tuchman, Maurice 38 Turkle, Sherry 163, 183 Turner, Victor 34, 49, 102, 169 The Turner Prize 66 27 club 26 Tzara, Tristan 4

Valdés, Luis 109: Economy of Resources 131–132 Van Gogh, Vincent 58, 75, 116n6 Van Son, Brendan 105 Vaneigem, Raoul 164, 178, 179 Varga, Imre: Béla Kun Memorial 148–149 Veblen, Thorsten 16 Vegetarian 62 Velasquez, Diego: Las Meninas 70 Velvet Revolution 148, 179 Venice Beach 145 Verist 72, 74 Verlaine, Paul 139 Vichon, Jean 112 Viennese Actionists 100 Vietnam war 46 Vilnius 148 virtual 102: identity 78; public space 78, 79 visceral revolt 169 visionary 113 visual humour 1–2, 4–6, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 30–31, 24, 25–26, 34, 35–43, 54, 57, 58, 64–65; 70–74; 84–86, 88–92; 103–108, 110, 123–132, 152–154, 157, 158–160 Von Kaulbach, Wilhelm: Das Narrenhaus 57 Von Lüttichau, M 89

ugliness 81, 99–100 Ugly Clubs 99 Ultras (fans) 51n3 un-German: art 74, 88–89; music 89 Uncle Tom 50 underclass theories 47 Üngör, Uĝur 98, 99 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 141n16 universalism/universalist 164, 178, 183 univore/univorous 28, 29, 121

Waever, Ole 44, 48, 175 Wallis, Alfred 112 Wallis, Claire 152 war zones 11, 81, 98 Warlock, Peter 78 WARS ’R US (mural) 40, 42 Waterloo Bridge 177 Watson, Cate 13, 15–16, 96 Watts, Robert 40 We Are All Humans (exhibition) 118 wealth inequality 8 Weaver, Simon 55 Weber, Max 139 Wedd, Kit et al: Creative Quarters 120 Weimar Republic 72 Welfare Art 11, 27, 109, 110, 117–118, 167n3 Weston-super-mare 148, 150–151 Westworld 79 white masks 67 The Who: Behind Blue Eyes 7–8 Widener, George: Megalopolis 119 Widrich, Mechtild 100 Wilder, Gene 71

Index Willets, Paul 62n2 Williams, Barry 79 Williams, Kenneth 127 Williams, Kipper 42 Williams, Paul 148, 149, 150 Williams, Raymond 59, 67 Williams, Sheldon 125 Wilson, Ben (chewing gum man) 11, 109, 129: Millennium Bridge Greeting 130 Wilson, Colin 44, 45–46, 72–74, 110 Wilson, Scottie 93, 116 Wiltshire, Stephen 118–119 Windsor, John 110–111, 123 Winehouse, Amy 26 Winlow, Simon & Hall, Steve 51 wit 13, 26, 40–41 Wizard of Oz 155 Wodehouse, P. G 83 Wojcik, Daniel 109, 114, 125 Wolf, Simon (epitaph) 152 Wölfli, Adolf 93, 114, 116 Women’s March on London 145 Wonder, Stevie 97

215

Wood, Christopher 112 Woodcock, Scott 32, 180–181 Woodward, Kathy 62 work 162; ethic 54, 171 working class 117: conduct 170; humour 21–22, 23, 181 Wycherley, William 170: The Country Wife 34 xenophobia 54, 88 Year of the Disabled 141 yellowface 92 Yoshimoto, Midori 40 Young British Artists 64n2 youth-as-trouble/youth-as-fun 46 Zanuk, Lili Fini 151 Zappa, Frank 163, 179–180: I’m the Slime 179 Zebracki, Martin 150 Zhukova, Dasha 9n4 Ziegler, Adolf 88–89 Zola, Émile 139 Zolberg, Vera 61, 66, 76, 113, 163, 176