'Age of Trash Triumphant', a Group Show at Kimberly Klark, New York

In what Lauren Berlant calls humorless comedy, we laugh at unwitting subjects whose attempts to ‘game the system’ fail in ways that are upsetting: think of the aspiring business mogul whose half-baked plots end up flaccid, or the poorly aging man wearing his hair in a sad comb-over. Emerging from a feeling that can be aqueous and indeterminate, laughter signals a slight revolt of the surface of social life. It is sweetest when laughter surfaces at the margins, at unexpected moments when the ice breaks and we find ways of relating to each other, sometimes across great temporal and geographic distances. This moment of relation has a utopian shimmer, and while the works included in this show are not concerned with offering a vision of a sci-fi future, they do give us a chance to laugh at ourselves, and at our own visions of the past.