Humour in contemporary art. Defaced/refaced statue.
Classical statue, marker pen. June 2015.
A humorous work consisting of a headless classical statue with a cartoon-like face drawn onto the oval form of the neck.
Part of the humor of this piece is the juxtaposition of opposites – the elegant and timeless form of the classical statue in contrast to the crudeness and immediacy of the contemporary cartoon head.
The piece also contains dark humour and an unsettling quality due to the fact that the drawn two-dimensional head is occupying the surface created by the decapitation of the statue’s three-dimensional head.
The drawn-on face also has the appearance of graffiti, so it could be said that the act of giving the statue a face is in fact defacing the statue. The word deface literally means to remove the face (as occurred with iconoclasm and the vandalisation of statues in the past), so the fact that the act of adding a face to a statue can be interpreted as defacing the statue is ironic.
Humour is an important element in a lot of my contemporary art work. As well as being an artist I’m also a cartoonist, with my cartoons having been publishered widely in publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Irish Sunday Independent newspapers, and magazines such as Private Eye, the Spectator, Prospect, the Critic and more.