There is a shot of Elvis Presley at the start of this show where the King is no longer in his prime. Bloated and flushed, he smiles woozily down at some unseen audience. Above his head runs a German phrase, like a song title, which roughly translates as “Don’t Ever Say He Was Fat”. And that’s the end of that.
Astrid Klein’s montage was made in the 70s – the peak era for conceptual photography. It is exactly as limited as it sounds. Which is quite a problem for a show that sets forth more than a hundred conceptual photographs to persuade us that this was an art of unexpected wit as well as intellectual rigour. Klein’s work has no trace of either.
Seriously, at Sprüth Magers, has to be the most counterintuitive art show in years. Its claim is that conceptual photography, so often regarded as “self-serious and academic”, employs humour “to meaningfully engage the viewer as well as challenge visual norms”. All those years of radical politics and philosophy, so often played out in images of excruciating dullness, are about to be redeemed. There will be laughs and perhaps even slapstick.
Caveat emptor. There were none. And why should there be? It is frankly bewildering that some of these artists are included at all. Was it for this that Bernd and Hilla Becher took their austere typological images of water towers, blast furnaces and German factories, noticing the abstract shapes and the lonely structures? Would Helen Chadwick have been happy to appear as light entertainment, got up as a washing machine in a wearable sculpture in 1977, only her head projecting above the churning drudgery? An idea, not incidentally, brought down by the presage of Birgit Jürgenssen’s self-portrait, in which she wears an apron that doubles as a 3D oven, hanging right next to it on the wall, from two years earlier. The arrangement of Seriously is frequently crass.
Land art has never appeared remotely funny, yet here’s a whole lot of glum monochrome photographs of rocks, hills and grass, with or without words or solemn interventions. Trespassing, ecological disaster, industrialisation: the concerns are rarely uplifting. Although there is, here, what amounts to a droll sequence by Keith Arnatt. The artist disappears, feet first, into the ground in a purported act of self-burial – that’s the title – but the effect is of the artist being sucked into a large hole in cartoon frames. You can almost hear the Looney Tunes sound effects.
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I took along a friend with a famously ready laugh. She was amazed by the lack of wit. The Benny Hill innuendo of women gorging on bananas, the supposed pun of dogs being made to watch bestial porn, the artists deliberately driving over a carton of milk in pseudo-grimy long shots.
Surely the man with the peg on his nose would be more sharply titled Deceit than Regret? And why does anyone need to see incessant shots of Star Wars figurines? The show is riddled with such questions.
It is not obvious, for instance, why William Wegman’s callow two-shot experiment – standing on his head in the first, the world viewed upside down in the second – has been chosen over the lyrical conceptualism of his canine capers. And surely Bruce Nauman forcing his lips into squishy shapes is nowhere near as striking as an early self-portrait such as Fountain. But go down that road and in no time the entire selection starts to feel second-rate.
John Waters’s Art Market Research (2006) is a series of questionnaires supposedly filled in by parody focus groups commenting on contemporary art stars. Andreas Gursky’s conceptual photographs are “too big; won’t fit over my sofa”. Thomas Demand’s photography shows scenes “where something bad happened from the news”, but where the heck’s the explanation? Gursky and Demand are both in this show; it’s good to see artists send each other up.
Any detailed description of humour can be intolerable. So the marvellous sight gags of American conceptualist Douglas Huebler should not be diminished this way. Suffice it to say that his Oxford Street photographs, taken in 1974, finding direct analogies between silly shop-window mannequins and equally silly living people are the wittiest images anywhere in this show.
The ratio of hits to misses is shockingly bad. This feels like curating by computer: a theory backed up by jpegs without any thought to the experience of the visitor looking at full-size photographs in an actual gallery. My, how we did not laugh.
Seriously is at Sprüth Magers, London, until 31 January