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Chagal for Dubuffet fans, smiling manically. History is filled with men behaving stupidly, the ape-theater praised interminably for it, the assumption that painters, no matter how hamfisted, are only acting stupidly, acting ostensibly different than being. Amy Sherlock in Freize relates Gronemeyer's anecdote, learning ballet: "She didn’t know the steps, but something stuck with her: the teacher telling the dancers to ‘grin as stupidly as possible’, to imagine they were totally idiotic. To be relieved of the tell-tale responsibility of her own expressions, to abdicate the need for the correspondence between outer appearance and psychological reality, was, Gronemeyer found, totally liberating." The mania of today, of history so laughable we may, Toufic relates, die from it; the modern paradox of whether to laugh or cry related well by Lloyd Wise in Artforum, the question, "Is that a grin or a rictus?"
See too: Judith Hopf at Museion, Rob Pruitt at MOCAD