In this recording, Jennifer Higgie (Editor, Frieze) is heard in conversation with Dr. Chantal Faust (Royal College of Art) and artists Hardeep Pandhal and Bedwyr Williams.

Responding to Rottenberg’s exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, and a display of poet and songwriter Ivor Cutler’s archive, the discussion explores the nature of humour and absurdity in contemporary art through academic research and artistic practice. The discussion explores how, and if, absurdity can be claimed as a mode of critique, reflecting on the ripeness of its aesthetic at a time in which politics seems ever more irrational, and labour and production increasingly abstracted.

Absurdism, as discussed by writers such as Albert Camus and Henri Bergson, recognised the repetitions of daily life under industrialism as comic. Through recognising them as such, one could resist and fight them. As industrialisation has given way to accelerated and globalised forms of production and consumption the category of the absurd seems apt, but how has it transformed for this specific moment in time?

Read Less...