Thursday 4-2-09

Dark humor

"People of humor are always in some degree people of genius."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) British poet, critic, and philosopher.

"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering--and it's all over much too soon."
- Woody Allen

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
-Terry Pratchett, novelist

(I couldn't stop at just one, I love it too much)


Weisenburger, Stephen. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

"Black Humor has therefore remained an enigmatically vague concept in American literary studies, when it might well have been understood as a central development of postmodernism in this country."

This book was a little over my head with its literary terminology and referencing periods of literature that I know nothing about, if I even knew they existed at all. But I'm sure of one thing - postmodernism in literature relates to postmodernism in photography. In order to be more confident in this claim I had to do a little research into what postmodernism in literature is. Just like in photography, it's a hard term to pin down, with its incredible wide range of manifestations and our generational proximity to it. In Wikipedia, that wonderful quick-research source, I found this: "For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author's "univocal" control (the control of only one voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature." This can so easily be applied to postmodernism in photography, which often relies on chance (such as the degredation of an image being scanned and rescanned, or photographed and rephotographed) rather than craft (not to say that the photographers or authors are throwing things together willy-nilly with no skill involved, but a lack of emphasis on a refined piece and more on the process). Postmodernism in photography also often deals with high and low culture, smashing them together and putting them in the blender until everything is one big pile of mush (not to say postmodern photography is mush, but you get where I'm going). In addition, postmodern photography often began to feature subjects not before deemed fit for fine art photography (the snapshot aesthetic in general). Either way - I digress. The topic is black humor. Before I read this I never thought of black humor as a significant "movement" or even a movement at all. I wasn't giving it fair thought however. It's use can be powerful in creating change, cathartic, and/or insightful. I'm not sure my work reaches anything so profound (not to say my work isn't good enough to be profound...that's just not where I'm going with it). However, black humor has played an important role in my life, it has helped me through some of the worst times, and thus it is often evident in my work. This work I think is the strongest manifestation of black humor in my work. I think it deals with more than just the playful danger on the surface of the image, but speaks to the terrible danger I have experienced in life and am still not ever comfortable speaking about without several drinks in me.


This was literally the first image that came up in my google image search of black humor art. So poignant.