Just Like Egypt: Ed Haddaway and Ed Larson are funny, but fortunately, they are not hilarious.

BY DENNIS JARRET

 SANTA FE REPORTER

            Paintings and sculptures aren’t funny. They are not supposed to be. It’s ok if writing is funny (‘Whom are you, he said, for he had been to night school”) and humor is acceptable in serious modern dance. We allow music to be briefly funny, usually because of surprises. Drawings? Fine. If they are called cartoons. But not paintings and sculptures. We’re supposed to regard them and go “Hmmmm.”

            Two blue men wearing dunce caps, their arms swinging, walk towards each other. Between them is a thing -- it might be a little coffee table with a red coyote mounted on it. Since the men are clowns they are looking at us, not at each other so they are about to crash. Near them is a spotted creature with humps, the head of a dinosaur and the legs of a bird. It looks like a child’s drawing of a camel. Only it’s made of painted steel, like the clowns. It stands inside a hemisphere festooned with seven Spirals. Ed Haddaway, the artist calls it Grandma Egypt Tale.

            Art is about being happy said Haddaway. “Its one of the few things that makes me happy. Why be miserable making art? Be miserable doing something else. Don’t get me wrong I’m plenty miserable while I’m doing the work.”

            His tall standing piece in the window is called Queen of Egypt She Said. “It’s a palm tree with a spiral and a pair of dull brown shields.  If you had to pick the funniest country, would it be Egypt?  “I had a really wild aunt,” said Haddaway, “She was dozing in the car as we drove through Arkansas and she woke up and said “this looks just like Egypt”. This made my father furious for some reason, and he pretty well shouted, “It looks nothing like Egypt …it looks like Arkansas.” It became a family story, and for years my aunt would occasionally say, “You know it really did look like Egypt…”

    The funniness in Haddaway’s work is not the kind where there is a punch line and you laugh and then (as people love to say) you get on with your life and you begin the grieving process. “I like the ‘W’ word…. What is it….?” said Haddaway striding around the gallery as his pieces took their places on the wall, “Oh Yeah… It’s whimsical.”

 ….

            The exhibition is billed as “Humor Will Have a Hey-Day” which is hardly the case, but who would want it to be? If you leave LewAllen Gallery convulsed with laughter it will be because of something your tax accountant said earlier that day, not because of what you have seen. Still, it’s properly amusing.

            Haddaway pointed out that Duchamp’s work was intended to be funny but it entered art history as if drawn there by horses in a funeral cortege. It became serious. You can now look at it and go “hmmmm.”

January 13-19, 1999