back


Does Humor Have Balls or What Are the Bad Girls up to in the Red Library?
Zuzana Stefkova


- Darling, do you always have to answer with a question?
- Do I really do that?


When Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova presented their project called The Red Library (2005) at the Jeleni Gallery (Center of Contemporary Art, Prague), the audience divided into a few, excited groups. That would be nothing special - the amount and intensity of excited commentaries, however, by far exceeded the Czech average. What was interesting, though, is that one of the important determining factors of the division was gender (as well as the actual sexual orientation) of the viewers. What was The Red Library about, then?

The artists wrote and presented - using large-priny format - an erotic short story, whose characters were artists and critics working on the Czech art scene. The story is about the pursuit of "the woman in red" - a kind of symbol of the collective desire of all male protagonists, whose identity and names come and go in a kaleidoscope-like manner; we witness their idle pursuits, as well as the final erotic scene: there is a different man starring in almost every sentence. Part of the project is a list of artists, critics, and gallery owners all lined up according to the level of their sex-appeal, the various lists which titles such as "Secret Love Objects (Men Who I Find Difficult to Resist)" or "Men Who Turn Me On by Their Very Look."

The exhibition draws on a similar Dialectics of Subjection #1 video (2005) with Chisa and Tkacova comparing and evaluating Slovak artists and historians, and the following Dialectics of Subjection #2 (2005), created especially for Prague Biennale 2, where the artists chat about the qualities of Milan Knizak and Giancarlo Politi, the two general curators of the two competing biennale exhibits. In their private conversation they talk about both the influence and professional potential of the two men, as well as their sex appeal, and finally discuss the extent of their sexual services, and the kind of artistic support they would ask for in exchange.

There is one more important aspect, however, which differentiates these videos from the "lists" shown at Jeleni Gallery. The former were always comparing two men, possibly competing in professional life. Losing here was just losing to a rival in a duel - in Jeleni, however, men might have contrasted their position with their more/less successful colleagues in various lists, featuring various categories.

But let's come back to the atmosphere at the opening: women having a great time and men either biting their nails in frustration, or bathing in success - it was not that easy. The female audience, however, had a specific response: in a joyful curiosity they awaited the men's reaction. While men were being evaluated and lined-up, thus artificially put into a position of mutual comparison, women (at least those who didn't stake a claim for the evaluated men) could enjoy a feeling of superiority, for once.

In his essay Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud interprets the comical as a result of releasing repressed energy leading to the gain of pleasure. In Freud's view, the female audience's amusement would come from comparing all the energy and effort to gain the subject of their desire, and the lightness with which they are evaluated. Or, from the imbalance of the value the male attaches to coitus and the degradation of this on the "repulsive" list, cf. "Biological Must - Sexual Intercourse Only if the Human Species Is in Danger of Extinction" or frivolous carelessness cf "Common Decency Sex - Males whose Courtship I Give In To, by Mistake". Even a male can be poking fun at other plodding men: if his energies devoted to the pursuit of "the woman in red" are minimal, and he still achieves his goal. There is, nevertheless, the chimera of gender solidarity looming over him as well, the idea of sharing the failure. Yet not even the artists' position is fee from (self) irony - considering their taking on the role of the vain (cf. "Making Virtue of Necessity - Men I Sleep with When I Need to Inflate My Ego" and loose, cf "Momentary Infatuation - Men who Get me after 6 Mojitos". The amusement of both the artists and the rest of the female audience is guaranteed if the men on the list (at least some) are really after them. At the same time, they could easily become targets of their own joke, if the energy invested in their narcissistic scheme had proven to be too high and disproportional, considering the possible universal lack of interest from the men's perspective. Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova have made a bet on their physical attraction, and they won judging from responses of some men, quite at a loss by their impudence. It's not only impudence that counts, however. Works of both artists tend to provoke an exchange of - often very animated - views, as well as an incomplete determination to say what we are not supposed to day. It's the political correctness that Anetta and Lucia can't stand. "They are aggressive; they aren't waiting for someone to approach them. Moreover, they don't let you finish your sentence. Moreover - they love speaking with their mouths full," described Marcia Tucker, American art historian and curator, the phenomenon of the so-called Bad Girls at the homonymous New York exhibition in 1994, and with a slight exaggeration her words fit our Slovak&Romanian duet as well. Bad girls, among other things, enjoy making "private things public," which according to Tucker, "is one of the humorist's greatest skills." It's not, however, prying into other people's private lives, but rather chatting about and exposing their own erotic preferences usually followed by bursts of laughter, both in videos and reality. The whole project then could be regarded either as the artists playing a cruel and adolescent game, an uncompromising reply to the macho talk judging women by their looks, or finally, as a complex system of seduction, revealing a surprising aspect of female humor.

I am now coming back to the initial quote of this text: a question answered by a question. Although the grammar of the joke does not clearly state who asks and who answers, the common expectation identifies the inquirer as a man, and the one who responds as a woman. A typical woman (let alone a blonde) in jocular culture is often presented as an irrational being, affirming by her very behavior her childishness and stupidity. I have not borrowed this joke to prove its collective authors guilty of a masculine-chauvinist conspiracy, but rather to illustrate the connection between humor and our gender experience. The same is true about the works of Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova. Their humor exploits - as well as ironizes - traditional feminine roles, be it the stereotype of a flirting seducer (cf The Red Library), porn-star (cf Porn Video depicts fully dressed artists performing classic porn movements), wedding-hungry suckers (cf the video Capital, where they have their fortune told from Marx's magnum opus), or overgrown dolls (cf in their early video Les Amies Lucia Tkacova performs with a life-size Barbie doll).

(...) Stereotypes and their contexts are, of course, tainted by the viewer's gender identity. Let's look at a pair of jokes, both starting from classic gender stereotypes. - What's a brain-eater doing in a woman's head? - Dying of hunger. - What's a four-letter fatal disease for men? - COLD. These jokes are perceived differently in mixed and strictly male/female audiences. According to Freud, jokes are "the most social of all mental activities, aiming to gain pleasure," functioning thus in real or fictional dialog, and together with "a different mental process which it had fueled". Gender "jokes work differently in situations when a member of the ridiculed sex is present, and when not. Laughing at the third party, the target of the joke, leads to a pleasure gain magnified by the mutual understanding of the teller and the listener, poking fun at the other sex. On the other hand, however, the very fact of being able to laugh at the exaggerated gender characteristics of one's own sex, could have a mutually liberating value, for example, in situation where I as a woman tell a joke making fun of female stupidity to a male listener, and laugh at myself. The very ability of self-ironic distance I regard as a very important feature of the discussed works. In some of the projects of Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia TkáĊová, this goes hand in hand with authentic existential motivation. Fortune telling from Marx could be interpreted as a joke, or a political comment aimed at coffeehouse socialists, but don't, after all, most women long for some kind of happiness rooted in the family? In The Red Library the artists were making fun of men, but at the same time, they exposed a need of admiration from their male colleagues. And here I shall return - for the last time - to Freud. Jokes, just like dreams, are tied to the subconscious and take advantage of "dream work". In consequence, the, jokes have just like dreams both manifest and latent meanings. And this reading brings us to an interesting gender paradox, which is being hinted at by the discussed works. (...) The Red Library portrays two imaginary "Alpha Females", whose humor is highly sophisticated in the "feminine" way, but nonetheless has "balls".


back