In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the Presidency of Donald Trump, humour has been regarded as serious, incendiary, and potentially fatal, business. A curious phenomenon has simultaneously occurred in contemporary art, as artists located around the world have turned to humorous aesthetic strategies in order to document and re-assess global politics, experiences of crisis and collective trauma. In spite of this turn, and although the politics of humour has attracted recent attention, leading scholars across the social sciences and humanities continually lament the lack of scholarly analysis on the subject.
The LIAE project directly addressed this considerable gap in visual culture studies to provide a new framework for understanding the role of humour in contemporary art practice, and its capacity to contribute to cultural resilience for communities facing ongoing crisis.
LIAE was informed by a comparative study of 3 key case studies each legislatively recognized as sites of crisis and each emblematic of particular forms of contemporary ‘emergency’: economic/refugee crisis (Greece), indigenous sovereignty/endemic disadvantage (Australia) and military conflict/occupation (Palestine). Employing an adaptive form of visual culture research (discourse analysis, fieldwork, in-situ visual analysis, interviews, archival and primary research) refined through a training program and expert supervision at the University of Manchester, LIAE produced innovative interdisciplinary research on the social function of humour, unpacking the capacity for art to act as tool of cultural resilience for disadvantaged, marginalised and vulnerable groups.
The overarching aim of the LIAE project was to advance the field of visual culture by creating the first comprehensive framework for humour in contemporary art, revealing the crucial role of humour as a tool of cultural resilience capable of responding to diverse contemporary ‘emergencies’.
In order to achieve this aim, the project was informed by three key research objectives:
a) to develop a conceptual framework and gather empirical information to account for the impetus behind the emergence of humour in art from contemporary sites of ‘crisis’
b) to develop a novel framework of how humour advances the social function of art by operating as a vital agent of cultural resilience in three keys ways: re-enforcing connection to place, coalescing collective identity, and by subverting oppressive authority structures
c) to develop a conceptual framework that accounts for how ‘high art’ settings radically differs to that of ‘viral’ or ‘demotic’ forms (cartoons, memes and street art).
The research and novel interdisciplinary framework developed by LIAE took on new significance in 2020. This is because the pronounced global uncertainty ushered in by the COVID19 pandemic produced renewed interest in the role of humour as political and social tool in the face of emergency. The research data, publications, and outreach activity produced by LIAE contribute to this growing interdisciplinary research field and it thus anticipated that they will provide valuable resources for future research.
