Jumping for joy ... Lepus Animatus by Hyungkoo Lee. Photograph: © Hyungkoo Lee
Wandering through the national pavilions recently at the Venice Biennale, I along with many others was given pause by the South Korean entry: an installation by 38-year-old Seoul artist Hyungkoo Lee.
The main room was dark. On a long central plinth - like a catwalk, and just as brightly spot-lit - were two skeletons, arranged so that the smaller appeared to be running from another, much larger, which looked about to pounce. This narrative, together with the relative sizes of the creatures, reminded the viewer less of untrammeled Darwinism, than of old-fashioned cel animation. Tom and Jerry, to be precise.
And then, looking closer, one discovered that in fact, it was. To be specific: resin approximations of the bones of MGM's best loved double-act, complete with the implication that they had been actual, living creatures. And for the cartoon fan, it got worse: in the next room, laid out as if after an autopsy, was what looked suspiciously like the skull of Goofy.
It's not so far removed, either in terms of style or subject, from the work of Maurizio Cattelan, whose cat skeleton is currently on display at the Baltic. And, as with that artist, Lee's aim is not to provoke the typical feelings of disquiet or confusion in the viewer, but to amuse. To entertain.
In an accompanying text, he spoke wryly of his feelings of inferiority, growing up "puny" and Asian among his beer-chugging classmates in the US. (He took a Master's degree at Yale.) To overcome this, he said, he began thinking more explicitly in terms of body-image and physicality: this series, titled Animatus, was the result.
This rationale was fine - yet the crowd (and the three rooms were packed) simply didn't care. Where other pavilions were shrouded in solemn quiet, this one had a constant undercurrent of soft laughter, whispered conversations. People emerged, grinning, into the afternoon sunshine.
As such, it bought up a somewhat thorny question: is there a place for humour in art? South Korea's was one of the most conspicuously well-attended pavilions at the Giardini. But did that count, alongside the provocations of the neighbouring Arsenale, where a number of internationally-renowned artists (Jenny Holzer, Léon Ferrari) responded to the current State of Things - in particular, the war in Iraq - with anger, dismay and a fierce, startling eloquence? Is it even morally justifiable, in the current climate, to be anything less than furious?
We are trained, both as viewers and as consumers, to accept only the grave and magisterial as great. And while Romantic sturm und drang has fallen from favour - to be replaced, in our estimation, by something far less showy: the numbed impassivity that encapsulates and signifies modern life - the respect accorded the playful, the determinedly slight, has dropped even further.
If a work is light in tone - if it evokes, not reverent appreciation, but a fit of the giggles - then it is deemed frivolous, ephemeral, and unworthy of sustained analysis. In other words, Not art.
Graeme Thomson's music blog seemed to suggest that most agree there's room for humour in rock. However, while literary critics might accord Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse and even, more grudgingly, Hilaire Belloc the status of Great Men, but most humorists are dismissed as hacks, pandering shamelessly to the great unwashed. (Who, it is assumed, wouldn't know their Wodehouse from a woodlouse.)
Art critics, meanwhile, might praise Lee's pop-cultural savvy, or his "subversive" Eastern appropriation of Western iconography, and the attendant notions of cultural colonialism and/or globalisation. But maybe it's simpler than that. Perhaps he just found them funny.
