| Abstrakt: |
Many of American artist Grant Wood's best known paintings are humorous, even irreverent. Honed in theater, interior decoration, and commercial art, Wood's camp sensibility of artifice, exaggeration, and comic subversion intentionally disturbed normative assumptions about taste, value, nature, and, in particular, gender and sexuality--what Moe Meyer called "queer parody." Wood's humor-inflected paintings aimed at enlightening viewers about the fundamentally invented terms of American character and history. Contrary to his Regionalist reputation, Wood's humor segued with that of New York Dada and with the theoretical insights on humor and American culture offered by Constance Rourke, Gertrude Stein, and John Dewey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
