Soldered brass, iron, 20 x 15 x 10, 2018.
Created in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland.
The title joins two senses of a word. Gallows humour is the joke made in the face of death. Humorism is the Greek medical doctrine that health is a balance of four bodily fluids, with temperament set by whichever fluid predominates. The sculpture is built as a balance, and a gallows stands on one side of it.
Two scrolled arms spread from a central column and meet at a block at its head, so the whole reads as a beam on a fulcrum. On one arm rises the gallows: a post, a projecting arm braced by a diagonal strut, and a ring hanging from the end where the noose would go. On the other arm the form unwinds into a coil, an open loop and one long sinuous line that runs out and ends in a second ring beside the base. Rigid right angles stand against a curve that moves freely. In humoral terms, melancholy, the black-bile temperament held responsible for despair, is weighed against the sanguine temperament of blood, which laughs. The sculpture sets the two against each other and holds them level.
The joke is in the dressing. The post is jointed like a cane, flares at its top like the mouth of a horn, and carries a scalloped plate along its length like a flag. Flag and horn make the execution a public occasion with its own fanfare. The gallows stands on a scrolled bracket of the kind made to hold a candle, so the instrument of the sentence is presented as a piece of domestic furniture. The ring that would take the noose has a toothed leaf hanging from it, and the end of the opposite scroll carries a second leaf. What hangs here is foliage. The sentence is carried out on a plant, which is both the sculpture’s cruelest joke and its mercy.
A pendant on a ring also hangs plumb, and a plumb line is the instrument for testing whether a thing stands true. The hanged leaf therefore doubles as a measure of the balance it hangs from, so the gallows checks the equilibrium of the very structure that carries it.
Gallows humour has a long Irish lineage in the wake and in the ballad of the condemned man who jokes on the scaffold. Beckett’s two tramps beside their tree work out which of them the bough will bear and which will break it. They treat suicide as a problem of counterweights and do the arithmetic calmly, and the humour comes from the calm. Gallows Humorism does the same sum in brass.
