Beyond Laughter: ‘Funny as in funny peculiar not funny haha’ at breakroom - ArtThrob (2024)

A review by Ellen Augustyn on the 5th of June 2024. This should take you 5 minutes to read.

breakroom
19.05 - 14.06.2024

Within the hustle and bustle of Woodstock sits breakroom – a new project space managed by Igshaan Adams Studios (IA Studios). It is a creative space that offers a platform for artists as they navigate their journey of discovery and cultivate a degree of expertise in their craft. The second exhibition held in the space, Funny as in funny peculiar not funny haha, features the works of artists; Boytchie, Lebogang Mogul Mabusela, Karen Elkington and Mitchell Gilbert Messina.

As you walk into the space, the work is not immediately visible, it is concealed, perhaps reflecting the same sense of concealment captured in the exhibition title — where more serious themes of hustle culture, capitalism, consumerism, and the emerging world of artificial intelligence are hidden by humour through subversion. Each work uses a specific symbol or object to bring these issues to light – a gun, a car, a couch, a computer…objects of obsession.

In Mabusela’s work, Hello Muhle and Ngeke ngik Chonche I and II, the viewer is confronted with bold shades of pinks and purples. The work drips with satire and irony as these colours, commonly associated with femininity, are used to depict men adorned with chains and BMW cars. Mabusela portrays scenes of hypermasculinity and rape culture, particularly through catcalling. She clearly pokes fun at these men with their loud and ridiculous attempts to assert their masculinity. The fantasy quickly turns menacing when you turn a corner and are met eye-to-eye with one of Boytchie’s slightly larger-than-life Boogeyman wooden sculptures. Its eyes are hollow, and it is watching you, holding a gun. I make a connection between the two works; it seems Boytchie’s work exposes the grim reality of violence present in Mabusela’s work. Humour quickly fades, revealing a dangerous potential. Boytchie’s wooden sculptures are a stark contrast to Mabusela’s colourful monotypes. They loom over you. Perhaps their mechanical and large-scale appearance is a manifestation of the power dynamics and imbalances in society that we also see in Mabusela’s work.

Once I had recovered from the jump scare that hit me by turning the corner, I noticed that three Boogeyman figures were situated in a way that suggested they were playing a game. Perhaps cops and robbers, as all three are holding guns. For me, the work emphasises the dystopian nature of our society where violence operates on many different levels. The object that forces one to pay attention here is the gun. These sculptures build upon Boytchie’s previous body of work, Kash Out — a series of paintings characterized by distorted bodies, mangled faces, claw-like fingers, and exposed ribs, that evoke a sense of hunger through an insatiable desire and a relentless pursuit of material gain. The artist reflects on this insatiability, “When I think of capitalism, I think of a gun pointed at your face,” he states. His sculptures not only display physical violence as an issue in society but also demonstrate the more insidious violence of a capitalist system. This theme of capitalism is carried perfectly in the next work I approach.

Inspired by an ad for a couch in a magazine, Karen Elkington’s The Four Couches of the Apocalypse is a quadriptych. Each painting contains a couch, only each one is rendered in a different colour — yellow, blue, red and purple. It is a clever reference to the Christian belief of the four horses that will signify the end of the world. Only the end of the world won’t be signified by horses but by the effects of consumerism. Elkington’s work offers a critique of the mass production that takes place as a result of overconsumption. In an interview, founder of breakroom Igshaan Adams comments on this work, stating; “so many people are quick to call out the injustices of the world but in private they will refuse to sacrifice the comfort of the couch for the greater good.” It highlights the hypocrisy of performative activism, where a magazine promotes eco-friendly values to attract activists but then immediately pushes consumerism with a colourful couch ad. Consumer culture has convinced us that obtaining the newest and trendiest material objects will lead us to happiness and fulfilment.

Messina’s work is an audio-visual installation titled This Is The Story. The work consists of a black rectangular screen set against the wall, featuring a single-channel video. His work takes up a tiny corner of the space yet demands attention throughout the whole exhibition as the audio loops over and over, just loud enough to pique your curiosity as it is the only auditory feature within the exhibition. With a duration of 1 minute and 45 seconds, the speaker plays a series of songs that make up the story through the perspective of a computer that is programmed to flag copyright infringements using Artificial Intelligence. The computer gains consciousness and proceeds to tell its story of self-realization by using songs from Bob Marley, Billy Joel, and Johnny Cash, among others, that it discovered during its search for copyright violations. Self-referential in nature, this is an incredibly creative piece that seems relevant today when Artificial Intelligence is quickly evolving. I can’t help but think of Harlan Ellison’s iconic 1967 story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which tells the tale of AI programmed to hate humankind, functioning as a weapon for war. In Ellison’s story, the computer exterminates humanity except for five individuals it tortures out of hatred. In Messina’s version, the conscious computer is trapped in a loop, narrating its story through music due to its programming limits.

Funny as in funny peculiar not funny haha is a thought-provoking reflection on contemporary society. From the searing critique of hypermasculinity and consumer culture to the exploration of AI, consciousness and the dystopian consequences of unchecked capitalism, each work serves as a poignant commentary on the human condition, prompting viewers to reconsider their perceptions of the world through humour.