Isabelle Graw: Keynote Lecture at Avery Singer WORDS ON PICTURES – PUN AND PUNISHMENT Symposium

“A joke is never fair to its subject. It bears it no niceties, it punishes it!” says Avery Singer, responding to the use of humor in her paintings. Hence, the symposium, developed together with the artist, invites a group of critics and fellow artists that share Singer’s interest in self-reflexive painting and its irritations: paintings that may excite the viewer precisely because their production process is not veiled by conceptual statements, but instead by the introduction of new techniques and image-production mechanisms unfamiliar to the practice of painting. Departing from such questions of medium specificity, contributors will elaborate on several “attitudes” of painting as a multi-layered practice of (self-)punishment by way of the pun.