GAG
Lucas Blalock (b. 1978), Film-Object (Mouth), 2025 (detail), from Tête-à-tête-à-tête-à-tête-à-tête. UV-cured inkjet prints on Dibond, motorized turntable display. Courtesy of the artist.
Torbjørn Rødland (b. 1970), Mid Iron, 2021. Chromogenic print. © Torbjørn Rødland, Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York.
Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989), Hit Movie Poster, 2022. Chromogenic print. © Martine Gutierrez. Courtesy of the artist; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966), Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (07), 2002–24. Chromogenic development print. © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Unidentified maker, Man posed on the corner of a rooftop with an arc of eleven suited men balanced on his shoulders, ca. 1930. Gelatin silver print. George Eastman Museum, gift of the 3M Foundation, ex-collection Louis Walton Sipley. Public domain.
Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968), Funny House (Speech Acts), 2019. Inkjet print. © Arnold J. Kemp. Courtesy of the artist.
What is "gag"? Gag moves. Gag is visceral. Gag catches in the throat. A laugh. A retch. A joke. A bind. Pleasure and pain. Both noun and verb, gag provokes strong feelings. And, in the hands of artists, it offers a means of grappling with contemporary experience in a tragicomic mode.
GAG proposes a bold new framework for understanding twenty-first-century photography and video. Beginning with the cinematic sight gag and its long history of comic interruption, the project expands to put in play uses of the terms associated with queer ballroom vernacular, judicial gag orders, BDSM and kink, choking and retching, and the dark feedback loops of social media and meme culture. What emerges is a rich conceptual language for work that refuses easy categorization: violent and slapstick, icky and sublime, funny and anxious, all at once.
The exhibition features the work of contemporary artists, including Peggy Ahwesh, Lucas Blalock, Patty Chang, Talia Chetrit, Buck Ellison, Martine Gutierrez, Whitney Hubbs, Steffani Jemison, Arnold J. Kemp, Tommy Kha, Tala Madani, Paul Pfeiffer, Pope.L, Josephine Pryde, Torbjørn Rødland, and Erin Calla Watson. Their works are complemented by a selection of historical photographs from the George Eastman Museum collection that propose a lineage of gag(s) evident in sources ranging from vernacular photographs to significant works associated with the Bauhaus, Surrealism, and conceptual art.
Curated by Phil Taylor, Department of Photography.