Ambach & Rice: dining with dictators

Like parade floats, mass murderers loom large but lack physical weight. Because their deeds remove them from the stream of daily life, they become unimaginable as flesh and blood. Eric Yahnker pops that bubble. His popping tools are found objects, real books whose titles were probably intended as jaunty but land with a thud in the bizarre. What’s shocking is the reminder that the ghouls in the titles sat down for breakfast, lunch and dinner, making witty repartee.

Yahnker A Full Plate, 2010. Found Books & Shelf

Yahnker is one of five artists in Playboys & Killjoys at Ambach & Rice. Its title derives from Harry Levin‘s idea that comedians can be divided into those categories. Playboys we laugh with, killjoys we laugh at.

I’m not sure either applies. Art rarely provides hilarity. The jokes it features are more of a nudge, a knock or a confoundment. They revel in displacement, undermine the expected and charm us with deliberately false cheer. It’s possible to appreciate them without cracking a smile, let alone laughing.

William Sloane Coffin once observed that the Bible is like a mirror. “If an ass peers in, we can’t expect a prophet to peer back at him.” Yahnker whited-out everything in his Bible but letters that sequentially spell out “Beegees.” It’s the first time I looked in a Bible and thought of Saturday Night Fever.

Jokes repeated lose their humor. The crack and curdle, become red in the face, fall flat, get no respect. Depending on the teller, however, the stale can rise again, acquiring a faint patina of horror.

Sara Greenberger Raffery Rodney, 2009 C-print.

Remember those boys in seventh grade who inked battles in their notebooks? One of them grew up to be Raymond Pettibon. The arrested development of his content glows inside the fluid grace of his delivery.

Air guitar, kitchen version: Greenberger Rafferty, Testing 1-V, 2009 (Microphone stand and baster, whisk, slotted spoon and ice-cream scoop.) Detail