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| The Laughing Umbrella |
| Saturday, 10 April 2004 |
The Laughing Umbrella is a surreal, brightly coloured device. It creates a space where anyone can laugh, providing a safe, private, childlike place for people to lose self-consciousness. The Umbrella is part of Nicola Green's Laughing Project
Artist Nicola Green created this unique, portable environment so that she could record the unselfconcious laughter of people in any location. Nicola's tactics when recording laughter: she invites people to come under her umbrella, and asks them to laugh. People are surprisingly ready to laugh if you present them with a Laughing Umbrella.
"Laughter always has a rather difficult place in art. If something is funny, it is usually deemed silly, irrelevant or, at best, low art. Usually the only way someone working in fields associated with laughter can be taken seriously is to die by their own hand or to be French. In "The Name of the Rose", Umberto Eco explores this prejudice. The plot turns on an imaginary lost tome by Aristotle in praise of comedy. So irate does the existence of this treatise make the 14th-century Catholic church — which believes that all the works of God are perfect and to laugh at them is to consort with the devil — that a monk takes steps to ensure all who encounter the book die horribly. But if laughter is opening a wound, does it not deserve the attention that heartbreak receives from today’s tortured troubadours?" Steven Armstrong, Sunday Times
Copyright © 2003 Nicola Green
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