Do we laugh? Perhaps we should laugh a little more It consists simply of a swelling D-shape (her face), and perched on its crest there's an elegantly twisted blob of hair, like a cartoon cloud. There's a marvellous head of the American culture-vulture, Nancy Cunard (also called Sophisticated Young Lady). There's a likeness, but it's the likeness of an extreme caricature.Just so: and some of Brancusi's work is overtly caricatural. When he makes a portrait-sculpture, he uses the caricaturist's formulae and economies. Go from a fish to Brancusi's Fish, a featureless teardrop sliver of highly reflective bronze. Go from a bird to Brancusi's Yellow Bird, a standing elongated bottle of yellow marble, precariously balanced on a tiny base, its top becoming an upward gaping mouth, opened in song or hunger. These are brilliant simplifications, but what's delightful about them is that they are oversimplifications. Their reductions go just too far in turning the living body into a dumb thing. Do we laugh? Perhaps we should laugh a little more.Brancusi's people and animals often give the impression of being things, and the effect - the abrupt compacting of creature into thing - is often funny. And this is the very essence of comedy - at least according to one big theory of the time.In 1900, the Parisian philosopher Henri Bergson wrote an essay on laughter.
What was the fundamental element in the laughable? For example: what was so funny about a person falling over in the road? Bergson closed in on his central principle. We laugh when a living body is subject to rigidity, inelasticity, at "something mechanical encrusted on to the living" The comic arises out of a struggle between soul and matter. The soul is infinitely supple, subject to no law of gravitation Matter, however, is obstinate, and resists. "When matter succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements, and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves - at the expense of the body - an effect which is comic."This idea has its limitations. (It doesn't see that the excessively soulful bodies of Rodin could be laughable too.) But as an account of a leading tendency in 20th-century art, it is prophetic. Bergson says: "We laugh every time a person gives the impression of being a thing." How true that is of Picasso's great inanimate lumps of girls, of the metallic, cylinder-limbed figures of L?r, of Duchamp's sex-machine * * imagery of organisms encrusted with gadgetry. His figures involve a sense of distance, a jump, a jolt, between the animate organic subject, human or animal, and the inanimate geometric or mechanical entity to which it is reduced. |
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