O amargo humor da arte contemporanea

Abstract

The research on humor in contemporary art led me to divide the artists selected a for this study in three groups, according to the theme of their work: those who present the subject of excrement, recurrent since Piero Manzoni and which can be found in the works of Paul McCarthy, Win Delvoye, Andres Serrano, Paulo Nazareth, etc.; artists who identify themselves with the feminist cause, such as Judy Chicago, the Guerrillas Girls, Melanie Bonajo, etc.; and the Latin Americans who are concerned with political and power issues, such as Nadín Ospina, Luis Camnitzer, Héctor Zamora, Javier Téllez, among others. This work also presents the history of Elinor, a cloth doll who, in November 2016, lived for a few days together with high-school students that occupied their schools in protest against the changes in education imposed by the government of Michel Temer, the new president of Brazil after the coup that removed former president Dilma Rousseff. The bitter humor of contemporary art does not try to define the types of humor, but to observe the contradictions that shape them, trying to understand art and our time.