- Venue
- The Coningsby Gallery
- Location
- United Kingdom
Most of the people I chatted to at the private view for this exhibition claimed not to have seen or know of Harry Hill’s TV Burp, despite it having been a primetime Saturday night ITV staple for the past ten years. Perhaps they just don’t have children, but if you also have never seen it, all you really need to know is that it’s like a children’s show for grown-ups, and the humour is based on sheer good-hearted silliness. It regularly features sausages just because they are inherently funny and a little bit crude without getting all Freudian about it.
The surprise of the exhibition is that the artist has treated TV Burp, and all its regular characters, recurring props and themes, as the continuation of a cultural phenomenon manifested throughout history as Carnival, and artified it all in the same traditional ways. It would be easier to see this if her subject was more ancient, and so it comes as a realisation that Carnival, the celebration of slapstick, folk artefacts and poking fun has simply found a new way to exist in culture as it always does.
This is one instance where the sheer volume and quantity of work convinces just as much as the content. It’s been a worthy obsession by the artist to sketch the characters and farcical situations showing the archetypes that have emerged in our society since medieval times. These are not new forms of art, but deliberately older forms – sketches and watercolours, knitted characters, papier mache figures and painted thimbles.
Odd in a good way. You may like art, and you may like TV, but which is best? There’s only one way to find out.
