[singlepic id=12 w=320 h=240 float=left]Curators, critics and gallerists salivate over any bad-boy German artist—best not to ask what that herd instinct is about—and increasingly that role is filled by the Swiss as well. Maybe minaret aversion isn’t the only flaw in this supposedly perfectly socialized country.  John Oliver’s recent hilarious cracking of the hard imperturbable nut of the Swiss ambassador to the UN on the Daly Show seemed to answer a pressing desire for comeuppance on the part of the general public.  One of the funniest riffs presently making the rounds of the artworld, best declaimed in drunken unison is :  “If we were German they would name us;  if we were Swiss we’d be famous.  Prost!”

And yet . . .and yet. . . .the latest Olaf Breuning exhibition is really good.  In the past this artist’s “acting out” videos were only another wearingly familiar example of the “adolescent” genre, predictable nose-thumbing, confusing the chaotic with the transgressive. But while still irreverent this new output is truly funny and visually expert.

Economy is the watchword here, as though Breuning had tailored this installation specifically to the current recession.  The materials are notably inexpensive—wood and black paint.  The parts are affixed with hot glue, code for quick and ephemeral. There is economy of means.  Line is the shortest distance between conceptual points.  Breuning offers, literally, stick figures, drawn and built.  One pair even emphasizes, ever so lightly, the ill effects of starvation.  “No Food, No Brain” features hunger’s before and after.  Pre-prandial, enormous letters across the solar plexis spell out “stomach,” overriding and dominating the smaller typeface of “brain” up above.  Post-prandial, the relative sizes are reversed.  All is happily parsimonious:  word moonlights as image—in “Life is a Rollercoaster” the word “life” really is the car nearing the pre-plunge peak.  Letters do double duty as lines.  Subject matter is pared to a series of binary oppositions– “yes”/”no,” “stomach”/”brain,” “question”/”answer,” up/down, black/white—as if there were no time for niceties.  Perhaps not emergency but urgency is in the air.  Formally, we are down to the bone here.  No gesture is wasted.  A few black boards across the top of a doorway call up every extant cartoon strip evocation of shack aesthetic and like an eminently practical reversible garment, these “lines” turn drawing into sculpture while at the same time, oddly enough in one of the few pieces without language, turn Li’l Abner into an imagist poet.

Jokes, of course, are famously economical; as Freud pointed out they share the condensing mechanism of dreams.  And everything rides on a single line, the punch line.  No doubt the tired objection to “one-liners” will be hauled out for this display, but that too seems appropriate.  Among the things that we can no longer afford to waste is time.  These pieces are materially, intellectually, and emotionally so cheap we can afford to throw them away.  That, ironically, makes them extremely affecting—robbing concepts like “life” and “death” of their melodramatic cost. And at a time when many artists are refusing to honor commercial exhibition commitments because of the collapsed market, that is the point of these pert, impertinent, saucy, jaunty, lively, sprightly, piffling trifles.  When you ain’t got a barrel of money you can still have a barrel of laughs.

Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011

Olaf Breuning
Small Brain Big Stomach  29 October – 5 December, 2009