David Dawson
Dark Humour
Dark humour is a type of comedy in which serious or taboo subjects are treated with levity or wit.
The idea of dark humour was one of the central concepts of Surrealism. André Breton, the Surrealist leader who published his own Anthology of Black Humour, referred to his form of gallows humour as ‘the moral enemy of sentimentality’. The four artists in this display use a similar approach to illuminate and offset traumatic or grotesque subject matter.
In 1925 a group of Surrealist including Breton developed the game of cadavre exquis, a version of Consequences in which players take turns to draw part of a body onto a piece of paper which has been folded to hide what the other players have drawn. Adapting this technique, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s series of Exquisite Corpse etchings feature their characteristic comic-horror imagery.
Marcel Dzama’s drawings often present fictional species - anthropomorphised and hybridised animals and plants - interacting with humans. Influenced by the comics that he read voraciously as a child, his figures and scenarios are highly stylised, containing the minimum of detail necessary to convey character and a fragment of narrative.
David Shrigley’s texts and drawings are similarly pared down, while communicating frequently complex layers of humour. Their simple format and naive observations recall the world of children. His work often conveys vulnerability or the suffering of cruelty inflicted by an outside figure.
Louise Bourgeois’s Autbiographical Series portray the events and fantasies of the artist’s childhood and adolescence, again using a child-like style. Bourgeois’s lightness of touch undercuts her traumatic subject matter: family dramas including the ordeal of birth, the pubescent discovery of the body and the often fraught dynamics of familial relationships.
Field Day
The zoo has just bought
a giant bird of prey
We go to see it
We stare up at it
like children
We are cold in its shadow
In the gift shop
We buy albatross bones
They are hollow
Inside them there are
sweets, beads, tiny statues
You have to break the bones
to find them
You have to crack them open
—Tess Carroll
