Concrete comedy: a primer.

Maurizio Cattelan's 3-D cartooning is, every time out. Piero Manzoni's cans of "artist's shit" are, while his white Achromes are the furthest thing from it. Warhol's Brillo Boxes are examples, but his paintings aren't. Painting almost never is, in fact, although Kippenberger's always is. Jack Benny did it remarkably, but only once; ditto the Ramones. Another rock band, the Replacements, embodied it their entire career. Ernie Kovacs brought it to TV, and for some twenty years David Letterman has remained a gleeful practitioner. Jeffrey Vallance consistently pulls off an anthropological version of it. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is a walk-in version. John and Yoko were the first to take it global, and Andy Kaufman smuggled it into stand-up. To date, many more men than women have done it, but that imbalance has faded in recent decades. Thirty years ago Eleanor Antin contributed one of its landmarks, and Vivienne Westwood has been no slouch at it either. Fame has nothing to do with its effectiveness; there've been countless anonymous examples. Lots of people have done it a few times; few people do it for long.

**********

WHAT IS IT? It's concrete comedy. Since emerging in the Western industrialized nations in the early decades of the twentieth century, concrete comedy has yielded a wide array of conceptual objects and existential gestures. Like its more conventional cousin, concrete comedy has accepted the imprint of many different sensibilities: smart and dumb, vulgar and refined, nasty and sweet, blunt and baroque. Estimable examples have come from figures associated with art or show business, from amateurs unconcerned with amusing any audience other than their friends, and from corporations whose comic output was committee generated and approved. Concrete comedy makes room for all--object makers, comedians, actors, rock musicians. MIT students, and traveling salesmen--and accords all equal weight as instances of an embodied comedy of theatrical gesture and artifact.

Radical as such leveling may seem, it's really only comedy's time-tested egalitarianism, implemented; funny is funny. Concrete comedy proposes that what had previously appeared to be two traditions, one called "art," the other "entertainment," is actually a single impulse--comedy--tailored to the conditions of two specific worldly contexts. Works in this tradition share a unified, consistent structural life, constituting a single history that offers at once an alternative to conventional comedic practice and an alternative reading of recurrent visual-art strategies.

The Mainstream

In comedy, the mainstream is determined not by subject matter or tone but by conventions of presentation. Mainstream comedy is emphatically verbal (it's the funny line, the funny thing said), narrative (a story or plot organizes the proceedings), and illusionistic (there's a strong element of make-believe). Traditional histories of comedy are confined to this triumvirate and so reinforce a restricted vision of what comedy is and might be.

The best of mainstream comedy is, of course, wonderful, funny, life-enhancing stuff. Yet nothing about the distribution systems that deliver the incessant flow of movie and TV comedy is integral to the quality or effectiveness of the comedy in a particular film or television show. (If just two people had seen Annie Hall, the comedy in that movie would still have been marvelous.) But the distribution systems in question have been so successful, and, as a result, the sort of comedy designed to be distributed by them is now so pervasive that it's difficult for audiences to imagine any kind of comedy other than that appearing "on NBC! on Thursday nights! at eight o'clock, seven o'clock Central!" or "opening soon at a theater near you." Comedy--our flexible strategy for scraping from our lives the thin film of shit produced by human society so as to restore the animal joy of breathing in and out--is simply too important an imaginative response to life for our vision of it to be fitted with blinders ordained by mere commerce.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Five Things Every Parent Should Know

Identifying the assumptions that underwrite conventional histories will illuminate concrete comedy's distinctiveness. I'm aware of five essential differences.

SAYING VERSUS DOING. Neither speech nor even sound is necessary to communicate comic sensibility. Comedy can be articulated entirely through physical action. Silent movies are an obvious example from mainstream comedy. Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and their peers (concrete comedians, Film Division) turned out reel after reel of ingenious, brave, astonishing physical comedy. Concrete comedy also turns the sound off, directing our attention to action, to gesture, to physicality. In fact, silencing speech and displacing articulation onto action is essential to concrete comedy. Its impact derives from the difference between saying and doing.

Speech, whether man's or dolphin's depends on the refinement of an extremely narrow band of evolved behavior. A rung lower on the evolutionary ladder, "doing" is the story of the body negotiating the physical world and so gives expression to deeper, more animal urges, engaging the invention of behavior itself. By emphasizing doing rather than saying, concrete comedy taps our physical relation to existence and as such, our whole selves--brain and body both. In spoken comedy, the body is given little to do other than to fall down in some amusing way; in the comedy of doing, the body builds a world.

Foregrounding comedy's behavioral essence in this manner is appropriate. The "medium" for comedy isn't paint or film or music or writing; the medium is us--what we do, and the way we do it. Comedy is a behavioral enterprise that freely trespasses contextual borders while remaining utterly consistent with itself.

EXTENDING THE SHORT SYNAPSE. A second supposition perpetuated by traditional histories of comedy concerns the time framework for "performance." According to these histories, performing involves a certain directness, a one-to-one correspondence between an impulse and its manifestation before a live audience or recording device. In fact, comic performance doesn't require such immediacy; the synapse between the comic impulse and its manifestation before an audience can be lengthier. A comic gesture can be slowed down, stretched out--over hours, over days, months, years, even a lifetime--and never sacrifice an iota of comic intent.

Duchamp's comedy unfolded over the course of his adult life. So did Kippenberger's: A single work by Kippenberger is often half-baked; you need all the others--you need the Kippenberger story--to ascertain the coordinates of his comedy and apprehend the scale of his achievement. The effectiveness of the Museum of Jurassic Technology's comedy is directly pegged to institutional duration; a single exhibition does not an institution make.

THE ABSENCE OF AN AUDIENCE, OR I'LL CALL YOU WHEN I NEED YOU. Like instantaneity and immediacy, the presence of an audience is not an essential factor in defining the temporal parameters of a comic performance. The comic no longer needs an audience to watch the entire duration of a performance but, instead, to watch at the right moments--those moments that clearly communicate comic intent. When Jeffrey Vallance meets with the King of Tonga to present him with giant swim fins, he doesn't need our presence to make this moment of theater a rich comedy. We know of it only from the texts and objects that followed. And the texts and objects are indivisible from the comedy.

Since the means by which comic intent gets communicated can take on an infinite variety of forms, the whole concept of comic performance is radically redefined. The communication of comic intent need not be limited to live performance. Indeed, the communication of comic intent need not even be, in form, animate at all. Ed Ruscha photographs every building on the Sunset Strip, but the only record of his deadpan comic action is a book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966--and the book is all that's needed to get the comedy across.

THEATER. PRESERVED. A fourth factor distinguishing concrete comedy from conventional comedy involves the question of permanence. A funny line heard for the fifth time ceases to be funny. With the element of surprise removed, the line dies, after which, if it's lucky, it passes into the Beyond: philosophy. That's the happiest fate of a funny line, and it's a rare occurrence.

A funny thing done, however, stays funny, because the structure of behavior itself was somehow engaged. The funny thing done bypasses language, constituting a gesture that is not reducible to words. Because it is gestural, it's closer to the mystery of our animal selves. We can never quite get to the bottom of the funny thing done, and for this reason it rewards repeated viewing.

ILLUSIONISM. Conventional comedy assumes that performance requires some kind of staging device, a proscenium arch--whether theatrical, filmic, or electronic--that provides a window through which we may observe a recognizable picture of life. The traditional idea of comedy is thus illusionistic. Comic performers in movies, TV, radio, or onstage pretend that whatever situation they're in is like life, and they pretend to be like people. Stand-up comedy, too, is illusionistic: Through talk, a window onto life is established. (Jerry Seinfeld asks, "What is it about lemon fresheners?" confident that his audience will visualize lemon fresheners.)

It's here that we arrive at the crucial distinction between concrete comedy and conventional comedy. Conventional comedy relaxes the tension of human and material relations by letting us all hold hands and escape into illusionism, while concrete comedy remains tethered to the actual and develops the tension. Concrete comedy is nonfiction comedy, the comedy of things done for real, of things really done. Expanded to its logical limit, this nonfiction comedy becomes a comic life. Think of Kippenberger. Think of Duchamp. Think of Andy Kaufman.

The Beginnings of Concrete Comedy: Karl Valentin

Karl Valentin, the most popular comedian working in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, recorded dozens of 78s, starred in nearly forty films, and trod the boards in literally hundreds of stage works (his own original sketches and comedies are said to number over four hundred).

Valentin also created objects and installations. Exhibit A: "Cold Steam of an Express-Train Locomotive"--a clear glass flask, half-filled with plain water. Like Valentin's other objects, "Cold Steam" is carefully presented but not especially aesthetic. It doesn't luxuriate in its materiality. We are not invited to lose ourselves in interpretation. To the contrary, a specific interpretation is provided by the title, which is written on a little card placed before the object. "Cold Steam" represents the typical Valentinian transaction: We have the real thing, slightly altered (if at all)--here, some water in a flask--and we have Valentin's disposition toward, i.e., the framing of, the thing, expressed, in this instance, via words on a card. (For comedy, that's enough. Comedy is, when all is said and done--and whether it is said or done--nothing but attitude, really. Comedy is the little card placed before, and directing our perception of, the actual.)

Valentin's Panoptikum

Valentin understood that consigning the comic object to the venues usual to the display of self-conscious imaginative objects--the art gallery, the art museum--would cause them to be interpreted as art. For their distinctive hum to be audible, his objects required another context. He undertook to establish that context in the early 1930s, adapting an exhibition model common throughout Europe during the nineteenth century--the Panoptikum, a mix of science fair, history lesson, and Mondo Cane wonderment (during the same century, P.T. Barnum's American Museum offered New Yorkers an especially mind-boggling variant of this idea).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Housed in the cellar of the Hotel Wagner in Munich, Valentin's Panoptikum played games with traditional categories--science, re-creations of historical scenes, aberrations of nature, sundry wonders trivial or grand. His proplike objects and evolving installations offered audiences sly comedies, sophisticated comedies, vulgar comedies, dumb comedies. There was "The Apple, From Which Adam Took the Bite" and, not far away, "The Jacket That Janitor Josef Maria Meier Was Wearing When He Met His Wife." A portrait of a child was titled "Portrait of an Eighty-Year-Old Geezer at One Year Old." Preserved drops of "Bureaucrat Sweat" were on view, and an "Old Box That Once Was Young." Standing about were anonymous wax figures purported to represent little-known inventors, including "Mr. Empfenzeder, the Inventor of the Sponge Bath" and "Mr. Rembremberdeng, the Inventor of Barley Soup." Living creatures, animal and botanical, were interspersed among the waxen and the stuffed likenesses; figures assumed to be still would suddenly move. The cinema room gave the opposite effect, as paying customers found themselves seated next to life-size dummies.

With his Panoptikum, Valentin invented a new context for comedy. He signed his own name to it, yet the real value of his invention lies in its impersonality. The context invented by Valentin isn't restricted to the objects he personally created for it. Rather, it expands to include like-intentioned objects made by other comic imaginations.

A Few Things The Know About the Contic Object

Karl Valentin's proplike creations represent the earliest link between comic performance and the production of objects with conceptual aspirations. His are not art objects but "something else." They introduce another category: the comic object. (Valentin didn't term his creations "comic objects." I did.)

The comic object is a common physical product of concrete comedy. Certain of its qualities can be identified.

The comic object is not a joke on art. The clever visual artist who is "tweaking" art history isn't creating a comic object. The comic object is a response to life. It is not a way of adjusting the specialized language of art to one's own advantage.

A comic object is performative. It indicates or instantiates a theater in real space and real time. Uncontained by any illusionistic frame, this theater expands outward toward an absolute congruence with the Real. Moreover, this theater enjoys an ascendant emotional arc. The theater of the comic object communicates a position, and the position is that, when all is said and done, existence is a desirable condition.

The comic object is not a prop but proplike. A prop hasn't any ambitions of its own; it lives to serve a story, it doesn't create a story. By way of contrast, "Cold Steam of an Express-Train Locomotive" has no story other than the one it supplies. The object is the play. Valentin has consciously disconnected his objects from the magic force field of proscenium-arch illusionism. A concrete, theatricalizing object that is introduced into the actuality of life is not a true theater prop but a life prop--a far more complex notion. Unlike art objects, comic objects do not attempt to absorb, compress, or distill reality. Instead, comic objects displace reality. However subtly, they have a more aggressive, belligerent relation to reality--comedy, after all, makes fun of "things as they are."

Rather than concentrate focus toward an iconic payoff a la art, the object in concrete comedy disperses focus onto qualities other than the visual or physical, namely, the literary, the theatrical, the attitudinal. As distinct from the art object, the comic object is not separable from the theatricalized moment that produced it, and which it necessarily reflects. In the sense that the comic object exists to designate the particular coordinates of the comedy, it is a kind of sign.

In order to ensure that sign's legibility, aestheticization must be restrained. The comic object cannot sustain too much of it. Take a work of mine, The Off-Target, from '94. Once the comic event has been communicated, any additions are superfluous. While a direct correspondence between action and sign may be in the tradition of Conceptual art, The Off-Target isn't concerned with art matters or treatments. It's about comedy, and as such must meet other, independent criteria. It's for this reason that the comic object cannot sustain too much aestheticization. Too much "art," too much aesthetic inventiveness, obscures the comedy. Materially, everything the comedy requires is present; adding anything else smudges the joke.

When great technical effort or material invention is engaged in order to create a comic object, it is done so out of necessity, in order to establish the finished product's relationship to its origin in the real. The real is a necessary presence in the comic object, as it is in all comedy; remove reality, and comedy has nothing to make fun of.

Begginnings II

To create his David, Michelangelo chipped and smoothed actual marble over a period of actual months. He wasn't an actor playing Michelangelo in a film about Michelangelo's life but the real deal, from start to finish. While movies and TV enjoy the advantages of mechanical distribution (open a movie in 1,500 theaters and regardless of its quality that movie will have an impact), greater existential weight attaches to the real than to make-believe. The art context serves as the Official Context of the Actual, the site designated by human beings for self-conscious meditation upon their experience of the actual--real space, real time, real materials, the life lived for real through them. Even when it's an illusionistic painting of a scene, the power of visual art is and always has been the power of real actions inscribed, for their own sake, in the real, and it is this power which the art context values, celebrates, reinforces, and protects.

In the modern era, the art context's purchase on the actual became a focal point. And no one exploited the power of the actual in a more straightforward, unadulterated, unadorned manner than Marcel Duchamp. Deploying the neat, simple, ruthless jujitsu of his most extreme innovation--the readymade--Duchamp dislodged the actual by unmooring our perception of it.

The first readymade--Bottle Dryer, a galvanized iron rack for drying wine bottles--was purchased in 1914 by Duchamp at Bazar de l'Hotel de Ville, a Paris department store, and then it was signed by him. This inaugurated a series of readymades--premanufactured objects to which nothing is done, save for the addition of a signature or a title to lend "verbal color." (In 1915, Duchamp elevates a snow shovel to readymade status with the title In Advance of the Broken Arm, and considers designating as a readymade the Woolworth Building in Manhattan.) By doing "nothing" to them, Duchamp exploited without mercy the stubborn grip on reality that they already enjoyed. He identified the objects' essential integrity, their hold on the actual, and also identified himself with that integrity as closely as it was possible to do. There is no conversion of matter, here, only a conversion of energy.

The readymade stripped all stylistic decoration from the twin poles of the comedic proposition--The Thing and What Is Said About the Thing--and then thrust the two forward into the merciless condition of the heightened, magnified, amplified Actual that defined the art context. There was the bottle rack, and there was Duchamp's activation of an attitude toward it--actuality and perception, goaded into a stare-down. It was the latter that blinked, of course, because only the latter can blink. The object's hold on reality didn't budge. It wouldn't, it couldn't, it was too proudly, stubbornly, pathetically real, so our perception of it shifted instead. The readymade was thus essentially performative, a prop on which perceptual change turned. Duchamp's was a theatricalizing gesture enacted with a playful attitude, a rendering of both the context of life and the context of art as constructs. Like his contemporary Valentin, Duchamp was essentially of the theater.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Duchamp's second major contribution to the history of comedy can't be described by a single, isolated gesture. It was carried out, instead, over the trajectory of his career. Plainly stated, Marcel Duchamp was the first to thematize the question of the artist's sincerity. He consistently cast doubt on whether or not he was to be taken seriously. (Imagine the strength of character!) In this he was truly a groundbreaking comedian.

By 1920 or so, then, the two foundations of concrete comedy have been established. From the comedian Karl Valentin we get the idea of an invented, theatricalized context. Objects and gestures of the Valentinian persuasion stand on their own merits as comedy and infer their own comedic context. Artifacts created and gestures enacted by figures such as Jack Benny, Robert Benchley, the Ramones, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, David Letterman and Jeffrey Vallance are appropriately placed in this category.

Of equal weight, import, and value are comic actions that explicitly recognize, engage, or activate context, including the art context. Use of context as a material is a possibility derived from the example of Marcel Duchamp. The comedic output of Marcel Broodthaers, Andy Kaufman, Maurizio Cattelan, and others fall into this category.

Throughout the history of concrete comedy, one or another of these integers, the Valentinian or the Duchampian, will figure. Space does not permit examination of each fascinating wrinkle in every example of concretist comedy.

Software

Plenty of comedy, of course, doesn't result in any sort of physical object at all. When concretist instinct isn't communicated in a proplike, theatricalizing object, how is it manifested?

For an answer, hold the constancy of the concrete against the changing character of the backdrop. The concrete resists the illusionistic, by definition, but the intensity of that resistance varies in direct proportion to the pressure applied by the forces of illusionism. When concrete comedic instincts are manifested within, for instance, the art context (a context established specifically in order to celebrate distillations of the real), they enjoy a sympathetic presentational syntax, and consequently need merely a firm, resolute non-illusionism to succeed. By contrast, concrete comedians in the performing arts--a context defined by proscenium-arch, "window" media such as stage, screen, and television--face far greater pressure to bend a knee to the reign of illusion. Thus the concrete comedian is pressured into a more aggressive stance and, instead of settling for non-illusionistic status, turns to anti-illusionistic measures. By means explicit or subtle, via material strategies or conceptual, the concretist jams a stick in the gears of narrative, pricks the dream-state of make-believe. The concretist works against deep illusionism, draws it into the shallows; there, it flops about on the surface--and consequently, the surface becomes activated. Stretched tight between illusionistic and anti-illusionistic forces, the surface goes taut and springy with tension. Ironically, the surface acquires substantiveness, meaning--"depth."

To operate within this surface tension demands a particular conception of comic persona. Again, aestheticization is restrained. Promoted instead: approaches to performing which carry a conceptual dimension that enables the performer to remain essentially, consistently himself or herself--i.e., to remain real. In his 1979 film Real Life, director Albert Brooks plays Albert Brooks, a director making a documentary about an average American family. In place of an illusionistic "doubling" of identity, concrete comedy sets forth persona as identity multiplied, say, one and a half times. This fractional multiplication causes the audience to wonder at and about the true personality of the performer--about what is and isn't performance, about the "I" that exists in quotes.

Instead of grounding their comedy entirely in craft and character and the transparent melding of these in illusionistic, narrative-driven media, performers like Andy Kaufman, Albert Brooks (in the earlier stages of his career), Alex Bag, Tom Green, and the rock band the Frogs mobilize selected facets of identity, organize them into a facade, and extend them, via concept, into an imaginative space rich with the tension between the actual and the pretend, between sincerity and insincerity. A skillful manipulation of comic persona can result in a behavioral model at once identified with that personality and separable from it as concept. When watching Andy Kaufman we don't only enjoy Kaufman the performer--his timing, voice, posture, and presence--but the idea about comic behavior that he's exploring. Kaufman's audience has the privilege of returning again and again to the behavioral model he brilliantly embodies, in order to scrutinize its contour and structure, much as they would a physical object.

Big Finish

That comedy might be spoken about in this way; that some of us should prefer not to dilute comedy's more radical promise with illusionism; that some among us should pursue, by the purest possible means, the challenge to reality that is implicit in comedy--this is a modern phenomenon. It is the sensibility of our time. While glimmers of it did appear in the nineteenth century--Oscar Wilde's famous plays and stories about appearances, vibrating with surface tension and resisting any deep illusionism; the obscure series of unmodulated, monochromatic lithographs published in 1897 by Alphonse Allais with titles like Round of Drunks in the Fog (beige) or Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night (black)--the genume article doesn't surface until the century of Valentin, Duchamp, and their comic progeny.

Why that timing? What social developments might have catalyzed this kind of massive change? Given that comedy is a big, fundamental response to existence, we can expect that the reason for the transformation of our comic imagination to an increasingly concrete manifestation of wit will be sizeable, seismic--cataclysmic, even.

We'll never know the cause for certain. But a strong candidate is the Industrial Revolution, stages one and two; we are, after all, talking about an attitude toward objects, here. The steam and grease and iron revolution that begins late in the eighteenth century in England reorients the lives of everyone it touches--and in the next century it's touching more and more lives. With newfangled mechanical devices disrupting people's sense of a contiguous relation between an action and its impact on their environment, certainties traditionally derived from hands-on experience grow blurrier and the average person's knowledge of how the world works becomes abstracted from them. The materiality of daily life takes on the condition of mystery. Meanwhile, in order to absorb the machines production once self-reliant producers must now be converted into consumers. An unceasing flow of finished goods forces consumers to evolve. Attitudes toward the qualities of the manimate grow ever more baroque. The Industrial Revolution has introduced the inanimate into a web of abstraction, from which it can never again be considered apart. From here on out, there is the thing, and there is what we say--to ourselves, to others--about the thing. The modern advertising industry is born, and the modern fashion industry, and the art market: culture, emergent as industry. Life after the Industrial Revolution is an increasingly synthetic affair.

The psychological change that will yield the attitudes of concrete comedy doesn't show up in the first generation to have abstraction brutally forced, by machine, between hand and production. No, for that generation the change is trauma. Nothing but trauma. A way of life, gone! Years must pass for the psychic wounds to heal sufficiently that another generation might have a little sport with the abstraction. Sure enough, two generations later (the children of the traumatized generation are transitional; they've had to deal with injured parents), a fresh kind of mind does appear, one with a different, more relaxed, natural, and even disrespectful relationship to the abstraction that courses through the entire manmade environment. For these fresh minds, alert to the realities of the early twentieth century, the disconnect between hand and product no longer induces the trauma their parents and grandparents knew but is instead a done deal. To the new kids, the abstraction introduced by the machine has acquired the neutrality of a fact. They can be philosophical about it. They are free to amuse themselves. They are free to take the disconnect and warm it up.

Not every kid, mind you. Particular kids. The kind of kids who, in any generation, are inclined to detect and/or contemplate and/or marry action to such invisible matters as these. Every generation turns up a few. (Valentin was one of them, Duchamp another.) A few is usually all it takes, if they're the right few and the cards fall for them.

Since concrete comedy started showing up almost a hundred years ago it has become a permanent part of the cultural landscape. Decade by decade the number of practitioners has increased. But its history hasn't been written yet. And it's needed, in my view, because making sophisticated comedy for real is the instinct of more and more young people. As did their forebears, many of them insist on introducing their stuff into the art context (there are few other places for it to go), where, too frequently, it is dismissed (not incorrectly) as inferior art when it might be celebrated instead as superior comedy. Valentin was right to pursue the invention of another context.

Asked to provide a portrait of the French gallerist Iris Clert for a 1962 group show, Robert Rauschenberg sent a cable which read, "THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO." Exploring that strategic assertion--"this is art because I, the artist, say it is"--was the work of modernism. Beginning with Duchamp and his readymades, it was employed by countless artists countless times in order to "introduce X into the art context" or to "designate Y as art."

Today, some of us work with a different attitude. We accept that art is a context but we also understand that it's only a context. We have respect for competing forms of communication, and for the contexts in which these forms are situated--movies, TV, radio, and so on. As a result, we're less comfortable with privileging art as the absolute terminus point of the human imagination. It's not to the benefit of every idea to insist that it aspire to the condition of art; certain ideas are diminished rather than enhanced by their introduction into that context. Comedy, to take one example of an endeavor as sturdy and essential to the human experience as the creation of refined pictures and objects, addresses another part of our nervous system, another aspect of our response to life, than does art. Monty Python and Mark Rothko were up to different things.

I aim to use the designatory power enjoyed by the modernist artist to establish and set apart for consideration the history of an activity that is not art, to insist on the separateness of that activity, and to make visible that activity's structural life and goals. The modernist artist's prerogative can be inverted. Concrete comedy is comedy, not art.

David Robbins is an artist and writer currently living in Milwaukee. A retrospective of his decade-long, "Ice Cream Social" project [see page 202] opened last month at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Parts.