To subscribe to Afterall journal, starting with this issue, please click here.
Alternatively, if you wish to purchase this article individually, you may do so via JSTOR. Please follow the instructions on this page.A good joke about art is indistinguishable from a good work of art. Analytical or artistic ideas and humour have moments of complete identity. This is most clearly visible when it becomes impossible to make a joke about a good work of art because it already is - apart from its many serious facets - a joke about itself. A good joke about art does not simply belittle its victims, or maybe better said its targets, but rather it works alongside them with a sense of playful intelligence and concurrent sympathy. The complex levels of representation of an artwork merge with the ambiguity of the joke at this moment and become one.
Seen in this light, it is not contradictory to stand in front of one of Mary Heilmann's paintings and simultaneously sense a certain cheekiness, an intelligent comment and a painterly, often almost nostalgic, history. The paintings can never be reduced to a straightforward concept or a programmatic solution, nor does the artist seem concerned with isolated works that 'stand for themselves' in the monumental sense of abstract modernism. When she gave a lecture on her work at an art school in Vienna a few years ago, the whole presentation turned into a kind of performance. Her slide show mixed up her artistic ideas and biographical musings in the same way a swirling DJ might mix a set, interweaving different levels and references. It seems clear that the idea of crossover is crucial to her approach, not only in connection to her painting.
On first glance, however, Heilmann's paintings seem to point in a completely different direction. They appear to move within the tradition of
