Nick Lutsko I got into meteorology and atmospheric science because I’m interested in climate change. People often think about climate change in terms of increases in mean climates, but most of the damage is done by extreme events. These events tend to be rare and often unique, so they can be tricky to understand. Lately, I’ve been studying weather on exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. The awesome James Webb telescope that was launched in 2021 is going to give us completely new insights into exoplanets, where people are searching for evidence of life in other solar systems. For me, it’s also a new opportunity to study weather under weird conditions. I’ve been looking at tidal-locked planets, which are planets that always show the same face to their host star. These planets always have one warm side and one cold side, the same way the moon has a dark side.

Aki Sasamoto I started working with the weather a few years ago, when I made a series of kinetic sculptures powered by the wind. I’m primarily a performance artist, but at the time, I was pregnant, and I couldn’t perform. So I wanted to make objects that perform. I used phase transition [the process of changing from one physical state to another] to get objects to perform for me. Kinetic sculptures are often something that you just plug in, but I wanted to harness the environment rather than use a motor. That’s when I started to get interested in weather patterns, because as you circulate air or heat, the patterns can be unpredictable, yet are still the product of a system. My background is in structured improv, and I thought, weather patterns are basically structured improv, since it is difficult to predict the near future even with a certain understanding of patterns.

Lutsko Weather is all about this combination of chaos and predictability. You can count on it being warmer during the day than at night; or warmer in summer than it is in winter. And yet, there are often unexpected events. I wonder how you think about balancing structure against disorder.

Sasamoto I’ve always been interested in that dichotomy of chaos and control. It’s a big part of choreography: when you choreograph, you have to understand the macro view, or the structure of the piece, as well as the performers’ bodily experiences. It’s impossible to perfectly regulate even the best dancers: your body can be different depending on the day. The weather is like that too.

Lutsko When you perform, does it feel chaotic for you? Or are you trying to create chaos for the audience?

Sasamoto I’m not trying to create chaos, but I do like to perform the same piece in iterations. If two weeks pass between performances, my body might change—as a woman, my body can feel very different depending on where the moon is. I don’t write down my concepts and I don’t have scripts, but I do repeat performances. It’s like the difference between storytelling and story writing: in the storytelling, things change, although the story is the same. If I perform the same piece when I’m 20, and then 30, and then 40, it should be different each time, like when you read a book again 10 years later, and different things stand out to you. That’s what fascinates me about repetition.

Lutsko I’m the complete opposite. I’m often looking for patterns, so when things are changing a lot, it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes, I’m worried it means I don’t understand very well whatever system I’m studying.

Sasamoto Weather predictions are based on understandings of the past data, but that data is always growing, right?

Lutsko Totally. But if I’m trying to understand a weather event and I don’t have many previous examples, then I get worried. This happens often with extreme events, and these are what do the most damage. If I have, say, 20 events, and they’re all a little different, but they also have a lot of similarities, then I might have enough data to feel comfortable making predictions or saying something general about these types of events. If I study some extreme event and I only have one example, then I may very well predict the next one incorrectly. Here in California, we just had a huge bomb cyclone and an atmospheric river. There’s a lot of work to do to understand the system and to make better predictions next time.

Sasamoto A lot of commentary around these extreme events seems to center on how human activity creates the conditions for these kinds of disastrous weather, that maybe if we had remained nomadic and didn’t rely on electricity or something like that, the weather would be less disastrous.

Lutsko There’s a lot of interest these days in what we call attribution. Some people want to say that human activities made the storm, say, 15 percent worse. But I always feel nervous about those claims. People often do this with hurricanes, but we have only a few strong hurricanes each year, so I feel worried we don’t have enough data.

Sasamoto Japan has had earthquakes and typhoons for a long time. Making my piece Weather Bar [2021], I got really interested in the wind and how finicky it can be. I wanted to make a whiskey glass spin forever on a table, but it was difficult to create the tornado: I contained it in a vessel that had to be a certain shape, and then pumped in wind, which had to be very precise. I experimented a lot with making various weather phenomena in my studio. I tried making a cloud in a jar by changing the internal pressure.

I was pregnant at the time, and so was dealing with climate change in my body: I was changing in shape, in feel, in temperature. Everything was fluctuating and unpredictable. Having kids and becoming middle-aged was a big new chapter in my life, so it dawned on me to make a piece about phase transition, which both clouds and wind undergo.

At the time, I couldn’t drink, even before I became pregnant, because of my kidneys. And I loved drinking, so I was longing for a bar. Sometimes, I’d go to happy hour at a sports bar and watch the big screens. I thought I’d sum up these ideas in a weather forecast video that also talked about aging, and screen it at the bar I re-created for the installation, where a whiskey glass spins and spins.

Lutsko I was recently reading about the history of weather, and found out that in the 1600s, people were doing experiments with things like glass bowls: they’d heat up the air inside, then measure pressure, which is how they established there was some kind of relationship between temperature and pressure. They thought, maybe that’s what’s going on in our atmosphere. Or they’d add water, then change the temperature and watch as it condensed; then they thought, maybe that’s what clouds are. I wonder if you’ve read about that, because your experiments seem so similar to theirs.

Sasamoto No, I haven’t read about that! But I was watching public lectures with various scientists, and I was fascinated by their laboratories. When I saw some of the devices they use to visualize weather patterns, I got inspired, because they can be so sculptural.

I used to hang out at Yale’s School of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, and there, I became interested in how scientists create conditions for their experiments, especially in engineering.

Lutsko That’s like what Bruno Latour wrote about: that the instruments we use to conduct experiments are also participants. When modeling weather, one of the biggest uncertainties is phase transitions and clouds. So there’s a kind of give-and-take between picking answers that make realistic-looking models and simulations, and giving the system the freedom to evolve on its own and give interesting answers.

Sasamoto I was thinking about the laboratory, and also wind, with Sink or Float [2022], which I showed at the most recent Venice Biennale. I made an airflow table that enabled things to move in a chaotic manner that depended on the geometry of the object: I would float snail shells, which have clockwise spirals, and they’d always spin counterclockwise. Then I put a feather in, and it would spin the opposite way. Each object performed the same wind differently.

Lutsko That piece makes me think of dust, which, if you zoom out far enough, gives a kind of materiality to airflows. There are these incredible satellite photos taken off the coast of West Africa, where you see the dust flying off the Sahara. You can use that to track the air masses. Similarly, your piece allows us to see the airflow as we watch how these objects are being carried by it.

Sasamoto I wonder about your relationship to metaphor. In literature or film or art, weather events are often associated with particular emotions.

Lutsko I think of what I do as a set of boxes nested within each other, because the climate system and the atmosphere are so complicated that we can’t study them in totality. We can’t examine every molecule in the atmosphere, so we have to simplifythings to get to the essence of the phenomena that we’re interested in. Distilling these complex systems into a few simple principles or a couple equations is so fun. Then, once you feel like you understand something through the most basic metaphor, or at the simplest level, from there, you can start to work back up to other levels of complexity. And you try to see if what you thought you understood about the system still works.

Sasamoto And do you have emotions you associate with particular weather phenomena?

Lutsko I guess I would say the strongest emotional connection I have comes from finding that feeling of elegance when, say, you have this elaborate set of boxes, and you manage to figure out the physics in a way that works really well. It’s so satisfying.

Sasamoto I think I’ve met your kind before, in the laboratory…

Lutsko I’d like to ask about the title Phase Transition. I wonder what connection you make between phase transition and weather: do you think about passing weather and daily life, like how it can be stormy one day, and calm the next?

Sasamoto I’m more focused on age: teenage versus middle age versus old age. It’s amazing how the same bodily material can behave so differently. As my body changes, I feel like I’ve started to really understand scientific ideas that I only knew in theory before, since they are actually happening to me.

I’ve also become really interested in supercritical fluids, which can be liquid and gas at the same time. I wonder, what does that feel like? My work is often about thresholds, not dichotomies. So I wanted to create an environment based around that critical point. Entering middle age was really confusing: when I moved to the United States, I was gay, but then later in life, I found myself with a straight dude, having a kid. I came out of the closet as a teenager, and then I found myself going back in, and
I didn’t understand. It felt like a phase transition for real.  

—Moderated by Emily Watlington

ART HAS ALWAYS had a sense of humor. Scenes from Greek theatrical comedies are immortalized on classical vases. Bawdy sexual jokes are common in the art of the Dutch Golden Age. And many of the paintings favored by 18th-century French aristocrats were inspired by commedia dell’arte pageantry. The history of art can be a lens through which to examine the ever-evolving cultural forms, dramatic genres and literary conventions that fall under the heading of comedy. Whether reveling in the pleasures of everyday life or skewering the cultivated manners of the elite, art with a comedic sensibility can reflect the values of a dominant class, challenge ruling ideologies—or sometimes appear to accomplish both at the same time. Erupting from perceived incongruities in otherwise conventional situations, comedy can effect a “victorious tilting of uncontrol against control,” as anthropologist Mary Douglas has observed.  Laughter, however, can also accompany a feeling of self-satisfaction—what Hobbes called “sudden glory”—that comes from witty assertions of superiority.

The essays that follow explore some intersections of contemporary art and comedy while reflecting each contributor’s singular sense of humor. The comedic forms they consume, spanning from experimental improv to late-night talk shows, are as diverse as the work they produce. Comedian Kate Berlant performs at both galleries and comedy clubs, manipulating the expectations embedded within different venue types. Self-described conceptual entrepreneur Martine Syms identifies kernels of truth within the sometimes pallid fare offered by television sitcoms and romantic comedies, even as she is drawn to the memes shared within online subcultures. While new media defines new contexts for humor, a remarkable reliance on physical comedy and the immediacy of performance remains, whether through the spontaneity and responsiveness of the improv techniques that Amy Sillman applies to her abstract paintings or the dynamics of slapstick that animate Aki Sasamoto’s performances.

—Eds. 

AKI SASAMOTO

A SOMBER ETHICS CLASS on a sticky hot Tokyo summer day. A pencil rolled off a dozing student’s desk, and my friend and I both saw it fall. We were sitting on opposite sides of the classroom, but we sliced the boring air with laser-speed eye contact. We gave each other a nod to acknowledge our shared witness, and we giggled.

As we developed chuckles in reaction to synchronized agreements, we also discovered laughable moments around missed connections wherever we were. Every time I caught something odd and turned to her only to find that she missed it, I would hit her hard on the head, forehead, shoulder or leg. The slap was another form of acknowledgement, marking a glitch in our synchronicity. There were rules to the game: as my hand rose to smack her, she had to defend herself by taking a funny position or quickly commenting on the missed moment. If she succeeded, I wouldn’t hit her. It was an exercise of reflex.

Slapstick was a popular form of comedy in Japan in the ’90s. That must have nurtured our combative nature. We’d laugh whether a slap hit or missed, and we’d spend school days fishing for a pencil-falling moment, just to see if it would lead to a nod or a slap. We each got better at anticipating what the other saw before the world happened.

A GLOOMY DORMITORY common room on a misty Welsh evening. The students returned drenched, because nobody in the country seemed to use umbrellas. It struck me as funny. I wanted to share my observation with somebody, anybody, by nodding or slapping. But I couldn’t.

At 16, I’d left my home for an international boarding school in the U.K. with two English sentences under my belt: “My name is Aki” and “This is a pen.” They didn’t take me far—even when I’d pull a pen from my back pocket as an aid—because I couldn’t comprehend the replies. So I ran off after greeting people with my pen before they opened their mouths.

Desperate to make a friend, I would randomly smack people, and follow up with forced laughter. I thought this would clone my friend from home. I worried about skipping the nodding ceremonies, even though my intent was to express affection. But my language of slaps was inappropriate where hugging and kissing were the norm. So I learned. Humor develops over time. What has not already been experienced together is hard to share.

In that year of miscommunication, I made only one friend: a “Little Aki” who lived inside me, who had grown there over the history of my life. She always agreed to laugh with me whenever I seized a notable moment. I internalized my observations of weird British behavior in order to perform my slapstick act with Little Aki. I no longer needed to hit other people. They didn’t want me to, and their reflexes weren’t good enough anyway.

AN EXPERIMENTAL SHOW at Long Island City’s Chocolate Factory Theater. It was 2009, and I was performing Secrets of My Mother’s Child, which included a monologue about crying in the airport bathroom after seeing my mother to the gate for her flight. I was standing on a wooden table, stepping on grapefruits with a pair of knife-shoes—a wearable sculpture I’d made. As grapefruit juice dripped through holes in the tabletop and splashed loudly in cups on the floor, I spoke of my tears and a woman having diarrhea in the next stall. And that was when I heard an audience laugh at my work for the first time.

I’d been making performances since learning about dance and Conceptual art at college in New England, and they were serious—I had no need for laughter because I was satisfied with my inner giggles. Secrets of My Mother’s Child came from sadness, and as I stood on the table I was preoccupied with the seriousness of my performance. Executing the scene even had a therapeutic effect on me.

So it was a complete surprise for me when the audience started laughing hysterically. In retrospect, their response was predictable, because my performance was visually odd and full of toilet talk. I didn’t intend to make people laugh with my “serious” art, so I was puzzled. Now I knew how my European schoolmates felt when I hit them and laughed in their faces.[pq]I didn’t intend to make people laugh with my “serious” art, so I was puzzled. Now I knew how my European schoolmates felt when I hit them and laughed in their faces.[/pq]

AN OVERCROWDED ART STUDIO in an East Village basement. Miriam Katz, a curator who loves comedy and brings stand-up acts to museums, is visiting. I told her about how I received unexpected laughter at the Chocolate Factory, and my observations that some audiences respond to foreignness, seriousness, or the juxtaposition of them as humorous. Miriam told me about open mic nights, where comedy clubs allow anyone who signs up to try out a routine.

I teach in an MFA program, and I’ve experimented by assigning my students to do a stand-up act at an open mic night. I think of it as a lab to find out what parallels artists can draw between the world of comedy and the world of art, and the blind spots of art we can identify as a result. Sometimes when artists are overly concerned with expressing a particular intent, it helps to try out a completely different form. By taking another perspective and measuring their tendencies against a new set of criteria, the essence of their work can suddenly emerge.

I took on the challenge myself along with my students. My first stand-up routine was a miserable failure. Waking up the next morning with all the should-haves and could-haves was something I had never experienced with my “serious” work. As if I fell off a horse and needed to get back on to erase the trauma, I’ve gone back to open mics on my own, to test some of the episodes that I include in my performance work. But the rules of stand-up are different. There’s no sculpture for visual juxtapositions. There’s none of the seriousness that comes with performance art venues. Laughter is not my ultimate goal in art, but the open mic is the ideal place for me to pare my mixed-medium ideas down to plain speech, and hone an effective delivery.

A RUNDOWN APARTMENT complex on a blooming Kyoto street. As part of my contribution for “Parasophia,” the Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture, I made a diptych performance piece titled The Last Call, Wrong Happy Hour (2015). The work was site-specific; I fit myself in a storage unit buried in the ground, and streamed a talk on stand-up comedy to viewers outside. Then I moved on to Wrong Happy Hour, an installation where I offered the audience beer and casually preached about romance, aided by sculptural gags. At the end of my performance, I went behind a wall that was mobile and pushed it to evacuate the audience to the street.

The shrinking bar provoked much laughter when it premiered at JTT Gallery in New York. Here in my home country, no one laughed. It surprised me at first, but then I remembered my private giggling with my teenage friend, and my silent laughter with Little Aki. Shortly after the Kyoto debut, an audience member wrote me a letter with a long description of how funny she found the piece. She and others in the audience may not have laughed out loud, but they nevertheless described the piece as omoshiroi, which means interesting or funny. As it turned out, the audience’s perception of the humor was as deadpan as my delivery.

It was yet another moment of lost and gained friends. Comedy as a form of communication changes its rules with the landscape and the weather. I cannot expect the same reaction from a Japanese audience as I do from a New York one. And yet it came close. Like a cheap key ring whose ends won’t meet, I’d come back around, but I’d lost the key to that girlhood friend I once shared laughter with.

Nobody travels between different places and mediums with me. I laugh even louder inside, with a deadpan serious face outside.