It’s not clear what Renegade Humor, now through July 8, 2012, at the San Jose Museum of Art, really wants to be. At times the exhibition seems designed to highlight pieces in the museum’s collection by Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Bruce Nauman, Richard Shaw, Peter VandenBerge and William T. Wiley, all graduates or instructors at the University of California, Davis. In other moments, the show aspires to be a somewhat academic exploration of how unconventional approaches to humor have been used in art. Renegade Humor is a great title for an exhibition; would that it had been more unconventional itself, as well as more sharply focused.
A couple of galleries crammed with art that pokes fun at politicians and the powerful, occasionally sticking a middle finger in the eyes of its subjects, would have been timely. In fairness, when the show was being organized, no one could have predicted that the source of much of the work in the exhibition, U.C. Davis, would generate international headlines and spawn an Internet meme when a campus cop pepper-sprayed students peacefully assembled for an Occupy protest last November. But a reference to the incident is given a prominent place on the museum’s wall, and surely someone must have realized that 2012 is an election year. The renegade nature of Occupy, and even the renegade style of some of the remaining candidates in the Republican primary, is the likely context for the word “renegade” for most viewers, which makes the fine pieces on view by artists like Shaw, Gilhooly, De Forest and others feel decorative and even a bit frivolous.
Melt, Walter Robinson, 2008.
Obligingly, Renegade Humor offers plenty of examples of its self-inflicted missed opportunity. It begins promisingly enough, with a cheerfully dark Walter Robinson sculpture of three glistening, melting sugar-frosted animal cookies standing pensively (if oversize depictions of cookies can be called pensive) around a puddle of blue. Melting glaciers and polar bears come immediately to mind, and we admire Robinson for his ability to pivot so deftly from kitsch to global warming.
Fire Suit, Viola Frey, 1983.