(“Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center)
Animation and Cartooning's comedy was premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children. Irrupting cartoons (or rotating ASCII) into the real - the real that we daily refer to as dissolving, mocked as “meatspace”- feels apt, funny, impish pranks of mischievous adolescent arts. What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves.
See too: Danny McDonald at House of Gaga , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Nicholas Buffon at Freddy , Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick