Make it Funny: Jeffu Warmouth and Ellen Wetmore

Last week I gave a talk to some art history students to close out the show I had up at UMass Lowell’s University Gallery. Like the other students I had met there, they were bright and engaged and mostly not asleep. They seemed excited (or at least not unbearably bored) to look at work that didn’t take itself so seriously. In fact, while I was trolling for questions, having run out of things to say to a group of art history students (“How ’bout that Degas guy, huh?”), somebody commented on the fact that they liked the humor in my work. Although this was not a question, I used it as an excuse to talk about how I hate what the art world considers “funny.” I’ve given this spiel before, but in the rare times when you go to a museum or a gallery and they have a show based on humor, it will invariably be strange, weird, upsetting, and not funny at all. Too often in the art world, “funny” actually means “fucking weird.” Like, 12 foot tall mannequins with long flowing vagina hair or plastic deer with human heads. That’s not funny. That’s strange. And while I’ve certainly made my share of strange paintings, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that, I’ve also made work with the expectation that somebody might actually laugh out loud while looking at it. That’s what comedy is, art world.

Halfway through my rant about how boringly serious most of the art world is, I glanced over to my left and saw Ellen Wetmore sitting there and paused for a moment. Ellen teaches at UMass Lowell and happens to do sculpture, video, and installation work that, while sometimes as strange and jarring as anything I mentioned above, is also genuinely funny. Her husband, Jeffu Warmouth, also makes sculpture, video, and installation work, that is also weird, interesting, and decidedly actually funny. In fact, their work might actually make you laugh. I certainly do when I look at it.

The natural inclination when referring to husband and wife artists is to call them a “duo” or “team.” But Jeffu Warmouth and Ellen Wetmore actually do very distinct work, even while sharing similar tastes in media, and occasionally collaborating on each other’s projects. I’ve known Jeffu (and his work) since we showed together at James Hull’s Gallery at Green Street (a gallery which was, quite literally, in a subway station) way back in 2006. I was immediately drawn to characteristics in his work you almost never see in the art world: an almost Mel Brooks-like sense of humor in some of his video pieces, where inanimate objects and food products reenact various mainstream movie tropes (the monster movie, the science fiction adventure, the kung fu movie). And an honest to goodness sense for slapstick.

Of course, I also really like Jeffu‘s work for reasons that are less rare in the art world: his hilarious but generally good natured skewering of American food culture. His series of Jeffu branded canned food items are like Andy Warhol, only if he were decidedly less blase and spent more time watching Blazing Saddles. His more recent projects, involving video sculpture and installation, perfectly recreate a fast food drive through experience, only if everything made absolutely no sense. Which of course is how I already feel about fast food culture: it makes no sense. These works have a dash of Ron English to them, but are less acerbic and are genuinely funny to watch and enjoyable to play with. I guarantee if you see one in person, you’ll want to order everything off the menu at JeffuBurger, Il Jeffuria Pizza, or JFC.

Like Jeffu, Ellen Wetmore often casts herself as the central character in her works. I don’t know the history of her art as well as I do her husband, but while it appears she has long had surrealistic tendencies in her sculpture and video work, she has more recently turned to a subject that I can only presume is the pinnacle of human physical strangeness: pregnancy. While I am perhaps the least qualified person in the entire universe to say anything whatsoever on the topic of having babies, I think I can safely say that Ellen takes what is most frequently a maudlin and sentimental subject (judging by ads I see for the Lifetime and TLC networks) and skewers it straight through its distended abdomen.

Pregnancy and child rearin’ are not topics you would think lend themselves to humor – at least not in the art world. But I grew up with Bill Cosby and Roseanne and countless other comedians who have been mining their children for comedy gold for years. I’m making assumptions here, since I have clearly never been a pregnant woman, but I’m going to guess that Ellen looked at herself going through pregnancy and, instead of saying “what a miraculous event this is,” probably uttered something more like “What the fuck is happening to my body?” At least that’s what I get from her work. She’s made a number of self portrait sculptures with her stomach missing, or sliced open, or melting into a puddle. It’s probably the least sentimental portrayal of pregnancy I’ve seen since high school biology. In one of my favorite of her video pieces, she solves that tricky problem of getting rid of excess baby weight by simply green screening it away (or, in this case, black screening). Much in the way that Jeffuburger is a light hearted finger flip to fast food restaurants, this feels like a similar gesture directed at the countless hordes of magazines lining the supermarket checkout exhorting you to Lose That Baby Weight!

 

A couple years ago I had the pleasure of attending “Nourishment” at the Art Institute of Boston, a combined show of Jeffu Warmouth and Ellen Wetmore‘s work. While I probably had the most fun playing with the interactive JeffuBurger station, one of my favorite pieces in the show was Ellen’s Falling Baby Neon Sign. First of all it was hilarious. It was such a delightfully candid and funny take on the fears you have when you first have a child. I mean, I’ve held a few kids in my time, and that’s about it as far as my parenting skills go. But all that was running through my head the entire time was “Don’t drop the baby. Don’t drop the baby. Don’t drop the fucking baby.” Seeing this sign was like having someone erect a giant billboard of your semi-irrational thoughts, in blinking lights, for the entire city to see.

Seeing as I don’t have kids, I generally feel like it’s not my place to crack wise about parenthood, and the sometimes ridiculous things you go through on your way to having (and raising) a child. And it isn’t my place. At all. But Ellen Wetmore‘s work makes me feel glad that there is somebody out there qualified to talk on the subject, with a cutting sense of humor, poking holes in the things we might take for granted. And I’m also glad that Jeffu Warmouth is out there poking similarly large and funny holes in the consumer culture that surrounds us and that we all also mostly ignore. Funny isn’t something we should shy away from in art. People are complex, and making heavy handed, overly dramatic political statements (Hunger Is BAD!) doesn’t do us any justice. Our lives are serious and sad, but they’re also funny, and ridiculous. I don’t see why our art can’t be as well.

If you act quick, you can catch the last day or two of Ellen Wetmore‘s solo show, Seven in Bed, at the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Jeffu Warmouth just wrapped up SuperJeffuBurgerMarket at SHOW in New York City. Check out more of their work below, or click on their names in this post to check out their websites.