Group exhibition explores slapstick's serious side through Buster Keaton and contemporary art

A group exhibition examines the less humorous aspects of slapstick comedy, using silent film star Buster Keaton as a reference point. Featuring 25 artists working from the late 1960s to the present, the show includes film, sculpture, installation, and performance. Works focus on themes of heroic failure, domestic drudgery, and the absurd through physical danger and endurance. Ben Woodeson presents a large glass pane installation titled Fuck You You Fucking Fuck from 2012. Hayley Newman's Domestique (2010–13) features dishcloths embroidered with miserable faces. Miranda Pennell's 2003 film Fisticuffs transposes a Western saloon fight to a working men's club with knitting elderly women. Emma Hart's film Lost (2009–11) projects in a narrow corridor with the artist's excitable commentary. Three Buster Keaton films are included: One Week (1920), The Boat (1921), and a scene from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) referenced in Steve McQueen's Deadpan (1997). Gordon Matta-Clark's seminal film Splitting (1974) shows a bisected house. Fischli and Weiss's 1987 short Der Lauf der Dinge provides sound accompaniment to nearby silent films. The exhibition concludes with Bas Jan Ader's 1971 performance Broken Fall (Organic), Amsterdamse Bos, Holland, where the artist falls from a tree into a river. The show runs concurrently with Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg's Slapstick! exhibition in Germany. The article originally appeared in the December 2013 issue of ArtReview.