Quintilianus, in his habitual elegance, put together a simple formula for the concept of irony: one must understand the opposite of what is said. This exquisite proposal looks for opposites in what is similar, complicating the simple – and yet it ends up providing an implicit clarity, because it exposes the absurdity hidden in conventions. Satire, a social adjustment exercise, destroys in order to build. And because its disguised essence lies not in the words, but in the situations in which they are spoken, understanding them requires that the ironist and the spectator are in agreement about the nature of reality. After the stunt, there will be a silent bond between them that expands the meaning of the message because it is intuitively assimilated, beyond the limits of language.

Nevertheless, in its inconceivable destruction of traditional values, the modern spirit has stripped the individual of everything that structured them in a common experience. With the grand truths that gave existence its meaning destroyed, irony too was reluctant to rectify a fractured reality, moving away from concreteness: interested but indifferent, the ironist is unaware of the true meaning of what they are saying. They prefer distraction to clarity – they swap concepts not to be understood, but just to escape any kind of limitation: their cynical ambiguity conceals them in an eternal non-positioning. Its value comes from the failure to understand the message, because it mainly intends to nurture its own autonomy, it puts everything except itself into perspective. ‘All that is genuine and self-contained becomes only spectacle’, writes Hegel: ‘mere appearances under the power and infatuation of the ego’.^[1] The mystic also has a laugh because they perceive the absurd core of life, but their humour propels them towards the sacred. The ironist, when ascending, meets nothing except the vain pedestal that separates them from everything. In this way, they achieve the opposite of classic irony: they reinforce the state of affairs by concealing its dynamics.

Such a defeatist approach sees them swing between self-deprecation and self-exaltation, because deep down they know they are only clever enough to realise their own futility. Ultimately, they realise how vain they are – their contact with the world has not developed the candour necessary for true self-analysis. Secretly, they want to return to the concreteness of life, but fear giving up their illusory sovereignty. ‘Sometimes you are a god, sometimes a grain of sand,’ Kierkegaard writes. In between these fluctuations, something remains: boredom.^[2] Far from everything, we now find ourselves in this paradoxical state of motionless mobility, self-imposed powerlessness that feigns movement to comfort itself in inertia. Irony is an attitude cynical enough to hide in plain sight, allowing us to joke without acting – walking in irony is the most effective way of staying still. There is nothing left with a purpose capable of sparking hope for the future: we are out of history.

However, for Hegel, the very nature of reality is ironic, because it is contrary to itself: everything is also its inverse. The intellect that analyses the world through the rationale of non-contradiction only reduces existence to the meagre coherence of its mental forms. On the other hand, irony contemplates the contradictions of existence without trying to settle them, because it is content in its insurmountable richness. Could it transform itself into a more open approach to the strange core of life, overcoming both the naivety of yesteryear and the present-day scepticism? Using its mischievous wit to deliver the sweetest riddles, the ironic temper would fill reality with an excess of meaning. With only uncertainty as its conviction, its wisdom would frustrate the utilitarian stance.

Written and curated by Alexander Burenkov for Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, the exhibition Don’t Take It Too Seriously endeavours to understand how art not only explores the ironic temperament, but above all finds existential alternatives within irony. Despite their different backgrounds and temperaments, the six artists featured here have the same interest in the implicit and paradoxical through the lens of contemporary culture.

Robertas Narkus’s Board Room series brings together banal objects and various items of debris on chairs. His Babel-like clusters of promiscuous apathy, or balanced collapse, balance chaos and order to question the current state of our civilisation. By using industrial waste to occupy the chair, an element of rest and a symbol of our overcoming of natural dynamics, Robertas subverts it into an expression of material waste and productive exhaustion – it is now the excessive waste of the structure that has been created just to guarantee our well-being, in an ironic inversion between ends and means. The tension between the zeal he puts into the arrangements and the disarray of their overall appearance is a comment on both the frailty inherent in our plans and the longing to return to the comforts of yesteryear. Not surprisingly, his compositions almost form human silhouettes.

Anna Solal also gathers the residues of a society stifled in its own productivity, articulating them in images whose irony is aimed at criticising current topics: broken mobile phones are surveillance satellites camouflaged by the innocent silhouette of children’s kites. Here, fragmentary rubbish is disciplined into flawless silhouettes and almost classical arrangements, revealing the logical harmony between part and whole – possibly due to the confidence in being able to recover the clarity of forms, transforming chaos into redemption: with Forest Bird, she uses shoe soles in flying mechanisms of evocative transcendence.

Our uncanny proximity to technology also appeals to Johanna Ulfsak, who captures a natural landscape remodelled by virtual intelligence by weaving. The metallic and bucolic Lorem Ipsum is unsettling because it is both sweet and distant, like a synthetic reflection of something that was once so very central to our imagination. Could craftwork bring back the original luminosity of our collective dreams? However, the weavers’ practice, with their mechanical dexterity, precision and patience, resembles digital humour. Underneath these ambiguities, the work can be understood both as the swansong of a humanity striving to regain the mirage of what we once were and as the acceptance of change which, however, is above all an updated version of old practices. These are all lost battles – the subtle turbulence of the image points to the imperfection of our actions, or the collapse of fantasies delicate enough not to support their own exposure.

Agnes Scherer’s Bonbonnière contains symbols of fertility that point to the exuberance of a wealth to come. The egg-shaped form of her womb suggests that it holds all the future, and yet, when we look through her pelvic mask, we see nothing but emptiness. We are disappointed by the irony of her dress, which trivially swells in the wind. Even in her painting Small Psychostasis, the cosmic poise is preserved by the lightness of ignorance – the opening to the intimate is harboured behind her back. Powerless to know themselves or others, because they are trapped in the precision of the scales, they suffer what we see as a benefit: to contemplate the life womb is also to empty it, maybe not because of its inherent pointlessness, but because of our inability to understand, weighing down the innocence of hidden things and preventing the soul from transcending.

Philipp Timischl, in Far From Intellectual, ironically analyses the convergence of two stances that are misunderstood in modern culture as opposites: the cult of the body and intellectual commitment. He ridicules the Hellenic ideal in a visual irreverence that finds its humour in the overlapping of disparate signs – could the lapel of the book, lined up with the open pelvis, be an erect phallus that stands in idolatry to transcendence? This eschatological fusion of libido and intellect is also expressed in the formal aspects of the work: the physical ecstasy of its expressive gestures coexists with a screen that reshapes the figure through the pure intellect of artificial intelligence, tensing styles to both relativise and reinforce the originality of the painted image.

For Kierkegaard, if irony is just existence contradicting essence, Joshua Citarella in e-deologies challenges the influence of the nationalist ideal in a context of social instability and throwaway identities. The range of his flags both reflects the current extolling of small differences and questions the solidity of such elusive dynamics – the only constant for the individual who yearns to know themselves through collective belonging is a performative fluidity of ironic flavour, which transitions so much between categories that it ends up jumbling them together. The artist allows himself to exchange identity marks from different groups, perhaps exploring how the absence of rigour in the composition of certain collectives implicitly reinforces their latent similarities.

The works’ ironic tone presents us with the latest panorama of our zealous caution, or hopeful disillusionment. There is no question that their breadth of concepts and plasticity contributes to the variety of a reality that seems to want to break apart and then perhaps become synthesised into new configurations. Is it enough to expound on our temperamental repertoire, criticise power structures, bemoan our sentimental narrowness or admit to political apathy? In imperceptible movements, every moment a new world is recast from the cosmic husk of the old, allowing us to rethink the attributes of each thing. The start of every thought is the sacred shrine of all subversion – there the ironic kneels to envision other futures. Aristotle believed that the world moves for love of the divine. Only the most impossible desires can overcome inertia. Could love be at the heart of healthy irony? The insolence of the ironic Falstaff, as William Hazlitt writes, is ‘an overflowing of his love of laughter, and fellowship; a vent to his heart and overjoy with himself and others’. ^[3] The lover is just the person who allows the beloved, a transforming presence, to occupy their innermost being. The ironic person, filled with the world and a lover of existence, would be like the actor who enjoys losing themselves in the role to empathise with foreign perspectives, in a humbleness tinged with desire that casts them outside of themselves. Fitzgerald writes that, after all, withholding judgement is a form of infinite hope. Irony, then, is perhaps the most optimistic model: its playful energy can expand beyond today’s cynicism, pushing us out of this interstice where everything seems to be working to uphold passivity.

Don’t Take It Too Seriously is at Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, in Tallinn, until May 5.

^[1] Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction, (iii) Irony. Available in: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/

^[2] Kierkegaard, Soren. (1992). On the Concept of Irony. Princeton University Press, segment XIII 356.

^[3] Hazlitt, William. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, Henry IV. Available in Project Gutenberg.