Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
The question posed by the title of the American Visionary Art Museum’s current exhibit What Makes Us Smile? is easily answered by the looks on the faces of patrons roaming the winding halls of the main exhibit floor. The works are organized into rooms by theme, ranging from potty humor to sex to political satire. It is a maze of creative cultivation in the form of mixed media whirligigs, bedazzled sculptures, and other more traditional cartoons and paintings. Walls scream in fire hydrant reds. A bear taxidermied in sequins and plastic pinwheels houses a DVD player that loops stand up comedy and offers a hand holding a crystal ball wrapped in Mardi Gras beads. It feels like a circus at times, but unlike one that has been orchestrated before. This sure isn’t Barnum and Bailey’s doing.
Curating art with a topic as broad as “joy” could have come at the expense of the exhibit’s cohesion. This, however, was not the case. Though each piece may not relate directly to one another, the combined emotional effect of each ties each viewing room together. Such an achievement could only be made by the collaborative triumvirate of talent that curated the show: Matt Groening, Gary Panter and Rebecca Hoffberger. Groening, creator of The Simpsons, mark is all over the show. Some of the more risqué yet playful pieces in the collection clearly fall in line with the famous cartoon’s shtick. Renowned graphic designer and Pee Wee’s Playhouse set designer Gary Panter adds a welcome bizarre and whimsical vibe of the exhibit. The outstanding amount of creative energy generated by these two is honed, organized, and compounded by the efforts of AVAM founder and director Rebecca Hoffberger, who coordinated the successful partnership. The contributions of the trio harmonize seamlessly, hitting on both the concrete neurological explanations behind smiling and laughter, and those births of creativity that by and large just make you smile (who doesn’t love a wall covered in hanging sock monkeys?)
Somewhere past the whoopee cushion-upholstered bench and through the furry hallway walls, you’ll find Gloria Garrett’s works that live up to her very punny title “makeup artist” (her pictures are created using makeup instead of conventional artistic mediums). Across the hall is Patrick-Earl Barnes’s squeal-inducing grid of miniature shirt and tie combos, made from real fabrics (which on an unrelated note reminded me of workworkworkworkwork from Charles LeDray, a recent addition to my personal list of favorite artists–his work will undoubtedly leave you amused and amazed at its precision!) An interactive “tickle machine” allows you to crank a gear that brushes a feather back and forth, much to the dismay of a tortured wooden figurine. In John Callahan’s The American Government a cartooned, frumpy grammar school teacher informs kids, “The American Government Has 3 Branches: ABC, CBS, and NBC.” Every step of the way, the pieces in the exhibit are diverse, often bizarre, and undoubtedly entertaining.
What the show makes evident is that smiling, laughter, and humor is inherently human and universal —there’s plenty of literature on display to support this notion. The viewer is informed that babies born blind will have trouble learning basic motor skills like walking, but retain the ability to smile naturally. Stroke patients who suffer from partial face paralysis sometimes have the ability to smile symmetrically, when the grin is involuntary or subconscious, that is–not on command. These notions form the crux of the exhibit–our favored and most natural moments of joviality go beyond conscious thought, into some strange realm of mental processes that we can’t necessarily control or understand. Humor grounds us and puts us on the same playing field. It is only those pesky little obstacles like time and space that separate us, preventing an Ancient Greek playwright, a 14th century Buddhist Monk and Pauly Shore from laughing over potty humor together. Comedy and the practice of all things facetious and buoyant in nature have the ability to appeal to those natural facets of the universal human experience. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Laughter is contagious”, but the same applies to nature of the smile itself. Strangers subconsciously spread their smiles to one another when they hold the door, make that awkward eye-contact while crossing the street, or wash their hands next to each other in a public bathroom. We display our teeth in a grin, big or small, as a peace offering, breaking the ice and showing that we are relatable to one another as people, and not just cogs in the big machine.
These thoughts and ideas appear on the wall in text — a trademark feature of all AVAM exhibitions that enhance the museum experience. However, the theories of the ubiquitous nature of smiling were evident and in practice just by being at the exhibit. All of us “ooh”-ing, “ah”-ing and “oh COOL!”-ing alongside each other were participating in the shared experience of art, involuntary lab rats of the experiment aimed to answer the question, What Makes Us Smile?
If you visit the AVAM, make sure to leave some time at the end for the whimsical and eccentric giftshop, SideShow! Guaranteed to make you smile, no matter what exhibit is on the main floor.
What Makes Us Smile?
The American Visionary Art Museum
800 Key Highway
Baltimore, MD
Runs through September 4, 2011
Tags: american visionary art museum, American Visionary Museum, art
Filed Under: Community Feature Sights
Great post! I’d like to visit AVAM again this summer
April 5, 2011 2:26 pm