"Drape Wave" at The Ski Club is a collaboration between artists Jordan Tate and Rick Silva.
The current exhibition at the The Ski Club, “Drape Wave,” a collaboration between artists Jordan Tate and Rick Silva, turns out to be many things, but the first thing it is is hilarious. Not funny strange or funny ha-ha; it’s the rare art exhibition where belly laughter is a possibility.
A gallery-sized version of one of those inflatable anthropomorphic tubes—the kind seen flapping wildly in front of low-rent mattress stores and auto dealerships—undulates with incessant and unavoidable insistence. Try to find an alternative entry point into the exhibition, and this writhing figure will intercept you, grab you by the ear and drag you towards it. This in itself isn’t particularly funny, it might even be irritating, but what is funny is watching the pathetic organism spastically beat its face at random intervals against a reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Fog.
Wanderer is in a select group of painted images that has nearly calcified into pure historical meaning. It is Romanticism, like Childe Harold wandering the mountains or Wordsworth above Tintern Abbey, dwarfed by nature’s vastness, but also a symbol of willful individuality. And to see those sublime circumstances battered by the head of an absurd, writhing dildo of a thing is preposterous.
The work is more than simply funny, though; it’s about funniness. It’s about the pathos and ironic distance that makes funny possible. For example, a surfboard resting on the gallery floor with a flat-screen TV skewedly resting on top of it appears inert at first. But with one corner of its screen hooked like a foot under a securing bungee cord while looping a Fischli and Weiss chain-reaction sequence, the stupid subject becomes an animated surfer. It takes on life and point-of-view; a consciousness that’s part Aristotle and part Laird Hamilton. But alas, the TV lies prostrate and motionless in an art gallery without a rhyme or a reason, on top of what is arguably one of the most iconic symbols of mobility and freedom outside of a Romantic painting.
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The show’s title piece, Drape Wave, features an image of an individual lying in a hammock in a Corona beer commercial-type paradise, printed on sheer fabric and draped on the wall. The work sags in the middle, obscuring the supine, leisurely figure, and reinforces the cumulative, tragi-comedic themes of paralyzed motion and frustrated free will. Like the case of the surfboard-riding TV 10 feet away, irony emerges from the gap between subjects who might feel liberated and in control but are, in fact, prisoners of language, history, convention and physics itself.
Silva and Tate are appropriationists, not comedians. Those roles ply similar territory, though, which is the reason Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are often as funny as they are conceptually provocative. A grid of depersonalized electric chairs isn’t really that different than the comedian Steven Wright uttering, “I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.” Both thrive on the unexpected pairings of incongruous ideas.
It’s difficult to know in the end why we laugh one moment and gasp or cry the next. This, too, might be related to context; maybe we’re simply more prone to laugh at something if it’s performed between a microphone and a brick wall and to contemplate it if it’s displayed in a white cube. Either way, the art is in the dismantling and repositioning of relationships, not in the number of laughs belted, tears shed or collisions of an inflatable figure against a digital reproduction of the Swiss Alps.
