The Strategies of Humor and Australian Art Post 1970 Essay

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The role of humor concerning needs and emotions illustrates a society as a powerful teacher in the construction of the social self-reinforcing of which emotions are acceptable. Humor refers to the art of emotional maturation which entails the process of developing awareness of needs that require communication with other individuals and contact with society. When painted, sculptured, or installed, humor gives credit to the artist to experience the wit and discover various dimensions of eternal pleasure within the process of self-learning.

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Art has given the privilege of humor to observe the situation and include it in creative works (Freshwater & Robertson 2002, p. 67). However, humor has also been a subject of neglect for centuries, this is the reason why we don’t see many artists who have portrayed humor in their artwork. This paper would be an analysis to what extent contemporary artists like Gordon Hookey, Fiona Foley, and Martin Sharp have been successful in embedding humor into their magnum opus.

The reason for admitting these drawings into the category of humor art lies simply enough in their sensuous quality. As the humor strategies turn these pages the viewer found his delight in the paintings expressed in wondering evocations of the names of modern artists. The viewer finds an element of spaciousness in such comparisons that these artists have been influenced by various types of primitive art and it is, therefore, no wonder that we find echoes of such eclecticism in these newly discovered prototypes.

But the artistic application in this statement underlines that the Australian drawings have something in common with already known types of primitive art. Therefore, it is to such similarities and possible dissimilarities among the art that they deploy to explore Australian Aboriginal realities to direct the viewer’s attention. In the end, we analyze the area of their strengths in comparison with each other and determine how much they have remained capable to achieve their success?

Gordon Hookey

Native Australian artist Gordon Hookey’s colorful paintings are a representation of Australian feminism and cultural issues that focus on contemporary working-class humor. Dedicated to the content of Aboriginal natives, though Hookey has worked not much on Aboriginals still he presents a detonation of raw emotion and frustration that was influenced by the Pop Art movement. Hookey’s paintings when put in exhibitions illustrate a flair for the bright colored canvases and demonstrate the relationship between Australia and other Western Countries. Of course, the paintings depict more the contemporary stereotyping and cultural settings and lesser the post art but the way he mentions the subject on canvas is remarkable.

Since gender and nation have been a critical issue within Australia, Hookey has tried to portray the significance of masculinity while drawing on masculine experiences. The paintings depict a sense of humor in the form of bright-colored cartoons how Australian culture has remained prevalent throughout the centuries. Hookey’s initial art proposals for what might constitute feminist art concentrated in terms of funky colors which on personal experiences reexamined in consciousness-raising sessions. It seems he embeds every story in a stroke and shares the untold Australian stories of marginality and repression while reworking into statements of rebellion and affirmation.

The paintings depict a bold yet awakening of body awareness, pride, and anger. Sarcastic readings of female images are drawn in form of solid strokes in popular culture which are attempted to formally central-core imagery and layering and proposed as metaphors of female sexuality (Schor 1997, p. 51). These proposals which Hookey has based on his conventions are the empirical observations of thematic and formal recurrences in Aboriginal art by women. His strokes form innocence and idealistic persona of women who are also in opposition to male representations and sought artists to create representations of female sexuality. In this case, he forms femaleness and femininity in high art and provides evident and implicit representation in oil colors.

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‘A painting for the underdawg 2005’ is an illustration of Hookey’s work on oil painting depicting cultural humor (Underdawg, 2005). Oil painting on canvas depicts how Hookey is attached to his individual passion of bringing humor and interest in his artistic contemporary hobbies. On one hand, it presents how vehicles have added primitive luxuries in our lives, while on the other hand it suggests being stereotyped while following the mass culture is becoming requisite.

This was one of the lines of evidence how Hookey used to construct humor in the form of arrogance for Australian Aboriginal art. Arrogance in his artistic passion refers to the comments he often writes side by side along with his paintings on canvas. Though Hookey is good at making systematic use of differential kaleidoscope weathering in his cartoonist style of depicting humor. But the way he analyses underlying culture the sense of consumerism and materialism is unique. It is unique because he deploys creativity in most of his oil paintings which when compared with other post artists reveals humor to the extent where the audience is impressed by his excellence on subjects like feminism, mass culture, stereotyping and cultural identity.

Hookey considers consumerism in his paintings as a symbol of modernism which has become a powerful and evocative symbol of contemporary capitalism and the modern Western world. Indeed, in many of his paintings, viewers feel canvases are faced by the crisis of the environment and present the radical transformations in Eastern Europe. Hookey’s paintings are highly visible in colors and metaphors and it seems that humor is just an added advantage to them.

The imagery not allows the viewer to laugh but to think about the solid imagery that permeates the physical and cultural territories it occupies. Hookey embeds modern identities and imaginations in his artwork where the viewer feels as if these features are knotted inextricably to it. As long as the paintings portray modernism it is clear but to the viewer the aspect of humor is critical. However, intellectually and morally it has not been easy to make sense of such sky-high humor that Hookey wants the audience to understand.

Therefore, troubling questions have been raised within the social circles of other artists and it seems as if the social sciences and cultural arena have perceived such humor as critics been a recurring concern because of the consolidation of the consumer society. It will not come as a surprise to hear that these critics do not bother Hookey to offer consistent explanations or responses. Some artists have condemned Hookey’s consumerism whereas others have welcomed it. Hookey’s opponents or conservative critics have expressed their condemnation of pictorial mass consumption in similarly elitist terms in the way Hookey has demonstrated in ‘Underdawg’.

Fiona Foley

A recognized artist and activist, Fiona Foley when attempts to stand at the front end of cultural-political discourse in Australia she witnesses a history of trauma through her sculptural installations and photographs (Gallery, 2009). It seems to the viewer as if has entered an outrageous but humorous art room where every icon represents political extravaganza. Her artwork reveals the descendant tale of the Badtjala people who were forcibly removed from the island of Thoorgine at the turn of the twentieth century.

Fiona Foley makes good use of humor to explore the tensions between body and sex as a major issue found in regional Queensland. She is a well-known artist and is aware of the fact that the practice of art is not always seen differently by indigenous art-makers as compared to their contemporary artist counterparts (Foley, 2009). Though her works are often subjected to critics for having many commonalities with other artists and in actual it is true that Foley has a lot in common with much contemporary artwork. But the way she expresses humor creates a barrier within the viewer while making him helpless to cope with contemporary social issues and dilemmas.

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Foley utilizes her sense of humor gratitude in conceptual, installation, and issues-based paintings, sculptures, indoor and outdoor art installations. She believes in the notion that in this modern era though it is impossible to bring ancient times morals, there is room to recall past notions of self-expression in the form of contemporary demonstration of decoration of humor. Humour according to Foley when embeds in her artwork bring spiritual and survival purposes in mind to which a viewer feels helpless to change the society. She values traditional art forms and demonstrates through her artistic objects that traditional art can be perceived in this epoch as an object of criticizing contemporary trends.

Foley’s humor is in using a wide range of mediums and materials in a way that gives the impression to the viewer as if he lives in an unjust society. Like many contemporary artists, Foley makes good use of contemporary art while lesser participating in traditional categories of art like painting and sculpture. Her work mostly consists of two-dimensional paintings, photographs, and collages at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery. While contributing to indoor and outdoor installations she is also good at creative work of three-dimensional elements. She gives attributes to visual communication when conducted face to face with the viewers.

This helps her determining their way of perceiving things needed not to be hidden from view. She explores techniques and perceives herself to be in the learning process and seeks means to express appearance and color to impact the success of the final design.

Foley points out through his humor the market and cultural division of labor in this era has dissolved traditional boundaries of the state and sovereignty through deregulation and transnational capital flows. She points out that diaspora displacements and minority or hybrid identities such as those of the Australian Aboriginal peoples have been invasively generated and now remain to haunt modernity (Joseph & Fink 1999, p. 15).

For these communities, the coerced hybridities of place and language have returned as demand for cultural sovereignty, despite the large infusion of globalization. Foley portrays the struggle and her paintings depict her pain for Badtjala Aboriginals whose land rights in the historical context of imperial internationalism diminished along with the contemporary international trend of the symposium (ibid).

Foley in context with the feminist perspective paints the people of the disappeared colonial archive where she visually inscribes the repressed history of indigenous women into the Australian national imaginary. While reconstituting the heroic indigenous woman as a forgotten myth she merges personal and public memory in her paintings and locates the history of the Badtjala people within an international arena of the struggles for sovereignty and rights of Australian indigenous peoples. Foley’s artwork possesses the capability to draw out the tensions between international forces, native rights, and the violence that led to the hybridizing of specific local economies. It seems to the viewer that violent hybridization has taken the form of the lost concerns of Aboriginal peoples, specifically women.

Foley’s magnum opus surrounds the human body to keep it memorable among one of the significant export industries in the Australian colonies and her portraits recognize the epoch when it was shipped for exporting Aboriginal skulls.

Her paintings represent a feminist perspective of gender which reveals sex-hungry males and their lust for Aboriginal women. For this reason, her paintings are a true picture stating that Aboriginal women were usually objects of desire, and often it is seen in her galleries the portraits of Anglo-Australian males forcibly unleashing their brutal lust and sire illegitimate offspring. The dilemma is that the unspoken taboo of sexual relations with Aboriginal women was never elevated to the status of marriage. This complex categorization reveals how the black woman was placed on the lowest economic round of the ladder.

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Martin Sharp

Among one the well-known pop artists, Sharp contributed towards Australian culture while sharing it with many nations as an urgent need to think about the sources of belonging. He created a need filled with humor which kept on transforming and strongly fueled the obsession with identity (Sharp, 2009). Since the 1960s Sharp is serving Australian culture with the best of his humor art and has played an especially important part in constructing citizenship and national identity in developing humor.

In this Sharp has focused on the legitimacy and efficiency of community life and his paintings depict that if emerging Australia is to enjoy long-term viability, citizenship and national identity must do more than bestow formal legitimacy and promote adequate efficiency. Sharp through established sources has learned through his experience that emotional support evolves and takes firm shape. Since Sharp acknowledges the fact that any viable alternative politics lies with progress towards civic nationalism, Australians must be secure in each component i.e., the national and the civic which is evident from Sharp’s life as he is not a solo artist but an artist capable to produce many forms of art.

For this and for long-term cohesion, over a transitional time of consolidation Sharp’s view of culture is that a changing Australia must affirm the core culture with its complex ethnic dynamic. The plain fact is that he believes that everywhere the nation’s legitimation and its efficiency are under siege whether it be bureaucratic systems struggling with legitimation or welfare structures encounter formidable problems. The transforming art that Sharp has adopted suggests that any kind of state-defined citizenship now confronts some degree of crisis.

Sexuality is a major feature of Sharp’s work and if not the major, element of his personal life. This is evident from one of the paintings that Sharp did with the cooperation of Tim Lewis named Still life: Marilyn 1973 (Andy and Oz, 2007). It was the work that portrayed the celebrity psyche while paying tribute to both Warhol and Marilyn Monroe (Andy and Oz, 2007). Sharp, one can claim is an opportunist in seeking art moments because later in the months that followed Monroe’s death when Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings combining two of his consistent preoccupations named death and the cult of celebrity Sharp initiated a collage of Monroe from a poster that later was printed (ibid).

In this context, we can say that the commodity of indigenous sexuality is seen clearly in Sharp’s portraits where art is an extension of the patriarchy. Although in some of his paintings, both indigenous and the women are the object of the white male subject the patriarchal assumptions of imperialist violence and imperialist views of indigenous violence places the male indigenousness in a slightly different perspective.

This distinguishes from the traditional deified female figure identified by so many feminist critics that Sharp’s artistic work has become humorous in many aspects. He has transformed female gratitude in the form of ‘refemalation’ in so many contexts that the representation of even the celebrities in humorist form attracts many viewers. Sharp has defined the image of the female as a receiver of the male power that provides an explicit opportunity for the white patriarchy to enter the land. If as in the majority of the early works and many of the later the sexual relationship feels in repressed or denied form, Sharp presents femininity in a more complex and explicit object as the domination is not through sexual interaction but through the spectator’s perspective.

As far as mass culture is concerned, Sharp himself adopts the commercial character of culture and was aware of the fact that it causes the difference between culture and practical life to disappear. Sharp himself was an example where color unless added with the gloss remains unidentified which commercial advertising lends to the commodities which absorb it in turn. But Sharp’s paintings pointed out this dilemma that they possess every color and moment of recognition but lacked independence which specifically addresses the idea of color lost in the process.

Sharp comments on mass culture and consumerism and reckons established products’ significance in becoming more similar in technology and functionality to an extent where companies have turned to design to differentiate their offerings through human-centered innovation and to create stronger emotional connections with their customers. This scenario is also applicable in the artwork where the design influenced the expansion of opportunity for another design is due partly to advances in technology which Sharp suggests is due to maturing confidence in the human-centered design profession.

This profession like an artist challenges the wisdom of focusing on the individual artifacts themselves when people’s interactions can be better supported by thinking about design opportunities more holistically. Consumerism is also partly a result of new business strategies in which companies seek competitive advantage through more integrated offerings with differentiation through all points of customer contact that express their brand. In art culture as depicted by Sharp design is asked to influence not just the look and feel of individual things but the quality of experience that people have as they live their lives through time and space encountering the designed world.

Sharp’s paintings are firstly designed with what people want to experience in this era. That means it fulfills the modern era of consumerism which we need to understand more about what matters to the people who will buy and use the things we design.

This according to the commercial portraits Sharp excels in demands some knowledge of their activities and their thoughts and feelings about these including related goals and social and cultural contextual meanings attached to different features and objects (Mcdonagh, et al. 2004, p. 14). Secondly, Sharp’s paintings and artwork are constructed according to people’s experiences of art that incur within a physical and socio-cultural context and through time. Sharp designs all contextual and spatial and temporal dimensions and sketch the limits of traditional modeling tools to explore and communicate what it will be like to interact with the things he designs.

Comparison between the three artists

Hookey’s paintings reveal a solid artistic sense which is not present in the works of the other two artists. However, Hookey’s work reflects more critical aspects as compared to Sharp’s work and is not perceived that much commercial in nature as the significance of consumerism we see in Sharp’s cultivation. Similarly, Foley has not been able to embed humor into her magnum opus the way other artists have done. One can say about Sharp’s art that it analyses a sense of dynamic communication artifact that when interacts with a socially intelligent robot being designed for mass consumption warrants a participatory design process.

This process serves as a methodological infrastructure that has the potential to engage mass audiences and even those who possess the taste from conception to production and distribution. Such consumer response is not witnessed in Hookey’s artwork in which we elicit and measure consumer response as an appropriate indicator of the mass audience’s positive emotions towards a mass-produced communication artifact. This means among the three only Sharp has been able to retain himself as a consumer servant producing commodity of their taste and style.

In a traditional context, we see that Foley has been successful in advertising herself with the use of not only her unique artwork but also through the art of pen that has led the advertising campaigns limited to market and have been able to sell her Aboriginal art products to a mass audience. She has created a niche in indigenous Australian cultural heritage culture and people particularly those who prefer unique rock paintings and carvings and have also escorted them towards the subject of cultural tourism (Mulvaney & Jones, 2002). This way she has carved her personal identity.

Hookey is more towards pointing a stereotyped mass audience in his artwork which is more design process-oriented from conception to production may be done through the application of simple but bold aesthetics. Hookey is more personal towards criticizing contemporary culture and believes that the aesthetics to use must be designed to communicate artifacts. This is so because acquiring the audience’s response while input and participation are essential in making an artifact more socially conceived and designed if interactive aesthetics are applied throughout the creation of the artwork.

References

Andy and Oz, 2007. National Gallery of Australia. Web.

Freshwater & Robertson, 2002. Emotions and Needs: Open University Press: Philadelphia.

Foley, 2009. Web.

Gallery, 2009. Web.

Joseph May & Fink Natalya Jennifer, 1999. Performing Hybridity: University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Mcdonagh Deana, Hekkert Paul, Erp Van Jereon & Gyi Diane, 2004. Design and Emotion: The Experience of Everyday Things: Taylor & Francis: New York.

Mulvaney Ken & Jones Jerry, 2002. Lightning Strikes Twice: Conflicts in Perception of Painted Images. Australian Aboriginal Studies, Vol 2, p 27.

Schor Mira, 1997. Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture: Duke University Press: Durham, NC.

Sharp, 2009. Web.

Underdawg, 2005. Web.

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