Mulfinger focused primarily on the more political, twisted humor, cataloging artists such as Paul McCarthy and Kara Walker. Both artists revel in both base materialism and evoke laughter through the sheer nervousness of their audience. While I would admittedly prefer to never see anything by McCarthy again, I did enjoy Mulfinger's own work titled “Regrets Project”. Participants of the project walked in city streets with computers on their backs and had strangers submit some of their worst regrets in life. The regrets were then projected onto buildings and screens for others to relate and empathize with. I thought this was a neat way to get at personal struggles and the universality of human nature via anonymity.
Washburn presented pieces like William Wegman's “Milk” and her own “Television Drawings” series, in which she covers her TV with household materials like butter, potatoes, and other extraneous items to create an abstract collage over the projected shows. She emphasized the material interconnectedness of humanity, and how there is humor in the fact that we are all mortal and simply trying to cope with such a heavy detail of our limited existence. One of her quotes, “humor lives and dies with individuals,” struck out to me and reiterated the reality that all senses of humor are different, and that context is crucially important to understanding what allows us share in laughter.
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