Are you having a laugh?

5 April 2012

EXHIBITIONS OF THE WEEK

Laughing in a Foreign Language
Hayward Gallery
*****

Juan Muñoz: A Retrospective
Tate Modern
****

There's a clever trick concealed in the title of the Hayward Gallery's Laughing in a Foreign Language, which presents humorous work by international contemporary artists. If you don't laugh at the artists' jokes, it implies, it's because you don't share their culture. The problem, however, is that in the age of The Simpsons, which broadcasts to more than 200 countries, and Monty Python, a British brand which is almost as familiar as the Beatles, no one is going to buy the idea that it's a good joke but they don't get it because they come from another country. They're more likely to think: "That's not funny."

So how funny, really, is this show? Well, that depends if the following work of art would make you laugh: just as you leave this exhibition you glance at a duffed-up cardboard box leaning against a wall. You think to yourself: "Oh, the packers have forgotten to tidy up after the installation." A split second later you hear a plaintive voice, speaking English with a thick Japanese accent, saying: "Hello ... hello. I am a cardboard box. I like being a cardboard box because I get to travel all over the world."

Well, I thought that was hilarious - but I love stupid jokes, and this exhibition is full of them. The New York video artist Candice Breitz has got some of her friends to enact a Japanese TV drama but using only internationally known Japanese words - "Kimono Udon Honda Kamikaze," one of them says, talking gibberish but in the hurt tone of an offended parent. Another Japanese artist has created a comfortable padded stool in the very realistic form of a crouching man. As you sit on it, you can hear it reciting the names of Tube stops on the Central line. If only Ikea were selling this one.

A pair of Danish artists have taken one old man's stamp collection and piled every stamp very neatly on top of each other, to build a 10-centimetre tower in the shape of a monument. The (male) Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, a previous Turner Prize nominee, puts on a glittering bikini and dances a surprisingly elaborate and sustained bellydancer routine.

Meanwhile, the black American artist Kalup Linzy has made side-splitting videos in which he parodies the plots of the worst black American soap operas but transforms them into rude storylines about gay love.

If your sense of humour is broad enough, then you will find this exhibition is like an art gallery version of The Fast Show.

There are, though, some real turkeys here, too. This exhibition does a nauseating line in politically correct jokes about cultural difference. These, the inverse of racist jokes, are rather unfortunately clustered around the first rooms and may put off many visitors. Thus Chinese artist Jun Yang has produced a set of street signs with pictograms which "illustrate appropriate codes of Western behaviour for foreigners" such as "Get a Formal Haircut", or "Don't Wear a Headscarf". The normally rather good Swiss artist Olaf Breuning must have been having a bad day when he shot his appallingly self-indulgent video Home 2 (2007) in which, in one scene in an African rubbish dump, he provokes a scrum among the child workers by giving away a wedge of $10 bills. That's really not funny, Olaf.

Still, alongside the bad jokes, there are some complicated and original ones, which, like all the best jokes, challenge authority or cross the line of the politically correct. Doug Fishbone has reversioned a child's electronic toy which tells a joke every time a button is pressed so that it recites a litany of politically incorrect and offensive quips. The Cameroonian Barthelemy Toguo plays a series of pranks on the immigration officials at airports. He was so fed up about having his luggage searched every time he went through customs that he made himself a set of suitcases out of solid wood, which, of course, could not be opened.

Unfortunately, being funny is only half the challenge the curators of this exhibition have given themselves. People who find the art funny are likely to be concerned about the reverse problem - is the humour art? Too often the answer here is: yes, but of limited quality. There have been a large number of very important works of art produced in the past 20 years which use humour, such as Jeff Koons's porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson, Maurizio Cattelan's waxwork of the Pope struck down by a meteorite, and, inadvertently, the entire oeuvre of Damien Hirst, but none of this stuff is in the exhibition.

There is one masterpiece here, yet it does not provoke laughter. The Chapmans have done their Goya trick to Hogarth's series of engravings, The Rake's Progress - yet they have altered them with such skill, imagination and brilliance as to make their defacements of the Spanish artist's prints look like an early rehearsal.

Here they add monstrous, Max Ernst inspired bird-faces to some characters, while turning others into fishy Cyclops. Narrative details are changed - instead of money changing hands between two rogues, it tumbles out of one of their character's elephantine nose. And there are clever art in-jokes - one doggy face is borrowed from the obscure American painter George Condo, with whom they have previously collaborated. The whole effect is to transform Hogarth's work from a prurient 18th-century moral tract into an orgiastic celebration of vice. This work - and this work alone - makes this exhibition a must-see.

Going round any exhibition with its succession of rooms full of strange sights and objects is an experience that relates rather closely to dreaming - but Tate Modern's Juan Muñoz exhibition is the most dreamlike show I have ever seen. One moment you are looking up at iron balconies floating in the air, the next walking across a long floor, with infinitely repeating geometric patterns, towards a small child on a bench.

Then you are surrounded by scores of Oriental men, who are laughing with each other but you can't hear what they are saying and they don't notice you. You pass through a corridor of bathroom cabinets, in which, amid translucent tubes of creams and crystal dentures, tiny men and women admire themselves in mirrors.

As the show draws to a close, wonder gives way to fear, as in many dreams. Just before the exit, a silhouette of a man lit from the back as though by headlights from a vehicle he hasn't seen throws a dark shadow on the wall. Next to him is an upturned crashed car. You peer inside and see the doors and stairways of a large house. Then you wake up.

Muñoz is one of those late 20th-century artists whose work seemed, until recently, impossibly difficult to place. The Spanish artist started late, making his first works in his thirties, and died young in 2001 at the age of 48. He was a sculptor, installation artist, utterly brilliant draughtsman and not averse to using the odd found object, yet he left a body of shamefully old-fashioned work.

Like the subject of Tate Modern's previous European retrospective, Louise Bourgeois, he was a late 20th-century surrealist, but, thanks to the strong narratives of the scenarios he created in his installations, his work seemed to have more to do with the theatre of Robert Wilson, the Spanish-language literature of magical realism, the animations of the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer and even late 19th-century symbolist painters than with the development of contemporary art.

Now, amid the revival of figurative painting, and thanks to this peerlessly curated exhibition, we can see what Muñoz really stood for. At a time when only the bravest of artists dared to tell stories, and sculpture was defined as the creation of single objects, Muñoz reimagined it as a three-dimensional painting. Not that he turned his back on the minimalist language of his peers: in wall-mounted sculptures of smoothly polished banisters, or drawings of facial features on crumpled brown paper, he introduced the aesthetic of everyday textures and materials, and the austere brown, black and white palette of artists like Robert Morris into the imaginative world of surrealism. Muñoz was Joseph Beuys on mushrooms and Paul Delvaux as an installation artist. But, above all, Muñoz brought the motifs of the cinema of suspense into surrealist sculpture and painting. His use of transitional domestic spaces (all those staircases that go nowhere), the drawings of empty interiors (full of armchairs and sofas with light emanating from behind half-closed doors), not to mention his predilection for men dressed in raincoats reek of Hitchcock and film noir.

Not that Muñoz was a particularly good artist. Muñoz's contribution to surrealism is entertaining rather than revolutionary. The curator, to put it kindly, plays to the strengths of an artist, who was also repetitive, very uneven, and whose work usually teeters on the edge of toothless sentimentality and gift-shop kitsch.

You won't find in Muñoz the unnerving violence and sexual trangressions of other Eighties and Nineties surrealists like the Chapmans, Paul McCarthy or Robert Gober. Much of his vocabulary is familiar, rather than surprising - the spiral staircases, the silent drums, dwarves and mirrors lack the originality of Dalí's floppy clocks, Bourgeois's rolls of knitting thread and Max Ernst's birds. But herein resides his skill - he plucked his own small vocabulary of richly associative forms from art history, psychoanalysis and contemporary culture and built a world of his own.

Like any decent dream, it's frustratingly difficult to work out what Muñoz's art means. But if you listen carefully to an audio track of a conversation that accompanies a small maquette of two seated figures, you can find the answer. "What did you say?" asks one man. "I didn't say anything," says the other. "You never say anything, but you keep coming back to it," replies the first. It's an exchange that could be straight out of Pinter or Beckett and it's a clue to the riddle. Muñoz's work is about the sense of meaning existing, without being able to know what it is.

And so he slots into the post-war movement in which surrealism segued seamlessly into existentialism. The best-known exponents were the greats Giacometti and Bacon, and yet there is something Muñoz's art lacks that the work of those other artists and playwrights possesses.

In this exhibition there isn't a lot of suffering, just an occasional moment - like the piece in which two raincoated men hang from the ceiling, apparently by their tongues, like torture victims. Otherwise Muñoz's work is just a little too warm-hearted, funny ha ha rather than funny strange. That makes him "in there" - but not quite "up there".

Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, until 13 April, £9 (0871 663 2501, haywardgallery.org.uk).

Juan Muñoz: A Retrospective, Tate Modern, until 27 April, £8 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk/modern).

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