Foam Rainbow: where humour, disgust and failure mingle in contemporary art

Abstract

This thesis explores the potent interconnections of humour, disgust and failure to understand their function in contemporary creative practices. Operating in shifty and nebulous terrains, the three experiences are under-researched, and rarely considered in combination. Fused together in certain creative practices, they operate on the threshold of pleasure, revulsion and fiasco. Such an intersection has the potential to produce surprisingly profound aesthetic experiences that fuse cognitive and emotional responses, momentarily disrupting the artifice in art and representation. Humour, disgust and failure are corporeally grounded experiences. Focusing on representational, embodied creative practices, the thesis relies on feminist and aesthetic critiques of representation and gendered subjectivities to position disgust and humour as critical mechanisms. The risks of failure are rethought as disruptive modes through which meaning is created and disturbed to generate new ways of thinking and making. Using my studio-based practice and key works by artists, comedians and filmmakers as examples where all three intersect, the thesis illuminates the peculiarities of gender in the formation of humour, disgust and failure in creative practices. With myself as image source I explore vulgarity, revulsion and representation within an ethical framework that places embodied subjectivity as vital for critiquing and messing-up gendered representation. Combining video projections with sculpture, installation, images and odour, the studio research invites the viewer to experience the work through multiple orifices. This thesis demonstrates the intertwined affectivity of humour, disgust and failure in creative works, how the power of revulsion to arrest merges with the rush to laugh in thresholds of experience that can at any moment collapse, wobble or explode. The interactions of humour, disgust and failure generate complex insights and potent affects which momentarily allow us to “enjoy” a sense of dissolution, to acknowledge our corporeality and aesthetic senses as unified and yet overflowing and intermingled with the world. When this occurs, the ridiculousness of gender, representation, fashion, codes of behaviour and the corporeal nature of ourselves can be revealed.