I’m Dying Up Here

In Charles Baudelaire’s 1855 essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” the poet and art critic considers, among other provocative ideas, that laughter in adults is fundamentally demonic. He cites a conventional instance familiar to all of us—the reception of someone who slips and falls. Why would we laugh at this, if humanity weren’t essentially Satanic? Laughter is the expression of our inherent tendency towards superiority, force, domination, and cruelty.

Tammy Rae Carland’s series of five color photographs, each entitled I’m Dying Up Here with a parenthetical subtitle, depict the bizarre scene of stand-up comedy, that is, a space in which a crowd of people gathers and one person stands up front and tries to make them laugh. In Carland’s work, something has gone terribly awry in each of these scenes; such displacements suggest that the spectacular, institutionalized patriarchy is always already awry, and the rarified stage of stand-up is only one of its scenes.

Four of the five photographs depict the performing body as female bodies engaged in a struggle. In Mop Face (2011), for instance, the comic leans precariously forward, enveloping her own head into the head of a mop. In Upside Down (2010), the effort to maintain the awkward pose is clear. The appurtenances of the stage of stand-up are emphasized as stable icons against the precariousness of the figures, each of which is about to “flop.” The accoutrements in these images—a water bottle, a microphone and stand, a stool—are often explicitly phallic, robust vertical lines against the elegant horizontal stage set and the clumsiness of the body in the lights. The triumph of the setting reaches its zenith in Glitter Drapes (2011), a scene in which everything is prepared for the comic, and only she is absent.

Tammy Rae Carland. I'm Dying Up Here (Upside Down), 2010; color photograph; 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

I’m Dying Up Here stages what’s at stake in the relation between a crowd and the figure at whom they gaze. These photographs insist on the violence of that relation even as they approach their subjects with tenderness and sympathy. This is also to say that I’m Dying Up Here is an extremely finessed presentation of this spectacle. Yet, as part of a discourse that explicitly resists the optic debasement inherent to the sex-gender system, Carland’s photographs are also, among other things, funny. Even “funny ha-ha.”

Tammy Rae Carland's photographic series I’m Dying Up Here is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, as part of Bay Area Now 6 through October 22, 2011.