The Nervous Laugh of the Comedian or One Date, 91 Years Apart
What do bananas say when they answer the phone? Yellow. Where do bananas buy their clothes? The Banana Republic. Why are bananas funny? Just ask the Comedian.
by Annie Mendoza and Tashima Thomas
On December 6, 2019, the art world, as well as those who don’t care too much about art, were connected via news sources as well as social media to talk about a banana for sale. This discussion did not take place at the local grocer or bodega. And this banana for sale, was not just another finger from any old bunch. This banana went viral. This banana was a piece of fruit with a price tag of $120,000. This banana was duck taped to the wall of a Miami art gallery and was fittingly titled “Comedian.” The fruit was the brainchild of artist and provocateur Maurizio Catellan and was being sold at the 2019 Art Basel Miami, which, in the past few years has become the stomping ground of the who’s who of the art world. It is fair to say that no other work of art in the 17-year history of Art Basel Miami has ever garnered such attention.
Cattelan’s Comedian is clearly adopting the legacy of comedy attached to bananas since the late 19th and early 20th century when banana peels were the signature pratfall of comedy legend Charlie Chaplin and other Vaudevillian performers and comedians capitalizing on the slippery skin and phallic nature of the yellow fruit in their acts. Cattelan’s gallery owner, Emmanuel Perrotin, told CNN that bananas are "a symbol of global trade, a double entendre, as well as a classic device for humor," adding that the artist turns mundane objects into "vehicles of both delight and critique."
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/art-basel-miami-maurizio-cattelan-banana-scli-intl/index.html
Perrotin could be advocating for Cattelan’s Comedian as conceptual art which stems from a very robust history of the readymade or mundane object presented as art in order to provoke, interrogate artistic and cultural systems, and challenge perspectives about the art object. Perhaps one of the most famous examples is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, (1917), which was a urinal signed “R. Mutt” and submitted for inclusion to an exhibition hosted by the Society of Independent Artists. The marvelous scandal that ensued was similar to the sensational fervor visited upon Cattelan’s Comedian. Duchamp figures prominently in any discussion of conceptual, modern art, especially Dada, an avant-garde art and literary movement that emerged around WWI in an effort to critique artistic and cultural norms. Duchamp’s work is dynamically positioned for discussing a plurality of themes and representations including: the mechanical mind, modernity, masculinity, the destabilization and complexities of identity, artist collectives, transatlantic production, and the readymade object, such as a banana.
Michael R. Taylor begins his chapter, “New York,” from Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, NY, Paris with a discussion of Duchamp’s Fountain and describes it as provocative gesture, a premeditated joke, and as a subsequent refusal and thus a rallying point for New York Dada’s creative freedom and its opposition to wartime propaganda and peacetime consumerism. However, the Comedian’s premeditated joke seems to be lost in translation having abandoned its Dadaist forebears and forsaking connecting creative freedom with opposition to the Banana Republic, peacetime consumerism, and obscene levels of income inequality.
In Equivocal Masculinity: New York Dada in the Context of WWI, Amelia Jones states that WWI was a crucial context within which one may understand New York Dada. Jones states that the popularity of anarchism in the WWI period among artists, writers, and political activists, “testifies to a broad-based politicization that was in many cases (including for a short while, that of artist Man Ray)…made quite explicitly.” Jones identifies anarchism as a disruptive strategy. Likewise, Cattelan’s Comedian became the most disruptional installation at Art Basel drawing thousands of onlookers to the point of posing a safety risk that mediated security measures by the gallery and Miami Beach police. The Banana Republic, income equality disparities, and agricultural labor abuses could have been the crucial context wherein one might understand ‘Miami Dada.’ But, the Comedian has strayed from its anarchist origins and instead went from Dada to Nada, becoming a flaccid readymade, a symbolic gesture of the ridiculousness of the art fair economy and its skyrocketing prices promoted by the popularity of the Instagrammable moment.
One juxtaposed parallel was completely ignored by the art world, the Instagrammers, as well as scholars, and that is that the date of December 6 already had a very important anniversary in connection to bananas. On December 6, 1928, ninety-one years before the $120k banana was being exhibited and up-for-sale in the Miami design district, an unknown number of Caribbean workers lost their lives in the midst of protesting against the unfair labor practices of the international mega fruit-corporation, the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita Brands International. This event took place in Ciénaga, Colombia, in Colombia’s banana plantation region of Santa Marta, part of the nation’s Caribbean. Known as the masacre bananera in Spanish, or the banana massacre in English, the tragic events of December 6, 1928 only garnered attention outside of Colombia upon the international success of Gabriel García Márquez novela maestra, One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1968, forty years after the tragic events. Recently, we re-visited García Márquez’s work in connection with other Colombian artists and writers who have used the legacy of the banana massacre and the culture of labor plantation for racialized bodies as a point of discussion in their own work: “Literary and Visual Rememory at the 90th Anniversary of the Banana Massacre in Colombia” by Annie Mendoza and Tashima Thomas. Many scholars have also analyzed these connections over the past few decades, and in particular since García Márquez’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, a testament to the impact of his magnum opus. As scholars, we decided to reconsider many of these themes because 2018 marked the 90th anniversary of the tragedy. The economic and political realities of post-colonial Latin America which made tragedies such at the 1928 banana massacre in Colombia or the 1954 coup d’état against democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (also discussed in our article) not only conceivable, but “the law of the land” in the imperialist reality of newer nations, crushed under the tentacles of greedy trans-national economies, and ushered in the era of the “banana republic.”
The exact 91 years of separation between the two “December 6” banana-related dates and what it means for labored bodies—in terms of the extremities of income inequality, exploitation, and the invisibility of labor—is hauntingly telling of our desire as a society to ignore tragedies on one extreme, and celebrate excess on the other. Whether Cattelan was aware of the December 6, 1928 connection is unknown, but what is clear is that the exploitation of labored bodies continues fully into today. It is a poignant correlation and juxtaposition with the $120k banana that a custodial industry demonstration took place on the streets of Miami within days of the debut of the Comedian at Art Basel and was aptly called the “Platanito Protest.” At the “Platanito Protest” (or “Little Banana Protest”), janitorial workers, with bananas duck taped to their shirts, flooded the streets of Miami to draw attention to their income, way below the living wage, as well as their sub-standard working conditions. Interestingly, when we speak of the original concept of the “banana republic,” we can no longer discuss this as a US form of business in other lands. In his 2016 book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe, presidential nominee Bernie Sanders says that the concept of the banana republic is now very much part of the reality of US inequality as well:
When we were kids, we read about “Banana Republics” in Latin America and other oligarchic societies that existed in countries around the world where a handful of families held almost all of the wealth and power. Fellow Americans, take a look around you. See what’s going on in our country today. This obscene level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable. This type of rigged and unfair economy is not what America is supposed to be about. And it’s not what America used to be (208).
This connection of the political climate as embedded in economic inequalities in the United States, and the specific example of how it is playing out in and around Miami—arguably the economic capital of Latin America—has many levels. The connection to the Platanito Protest and the 1928 banana massacre in Colombia are many, and grounded in the poor living and labor conditions for those whose work is silenced, invisibilized and ignored. Yes, we can and should laugh at the ridiculousness of the Comedian, however, we should never laugh in the face of the labored hand who chopped that banana from a bunch, on a plantation… where? Somewhere in Central America? South America? The Caribbean? Cattelan did not disclose other details from his purchasing of the banana (was it Chiquita? Dole? Del Monte?). All we know is that this banana (since eaten by New York artist David Datuna) drew global attention to the market price of consumer items from fruit to artistic fodder and thus re-emphasized the laughability of the situation. However, who the real target of this satire is, remains the constant question. Why didn’t Art Basel catch the joke of Cattelan’s banana? Because it split. Not just devoured by Datuna, but completely detached from an economic, historical, and cultural context that could have made the Comedian a lot more appealing.
