Among my less-than-glowing observations of this month’s Art Crawl, few have lingered in my mind the last few days save for a comment left on the post by a fellow art crawler who took issue with Laura Paolini’s exhibition Hello, Schrodinger? at Hamilton Artists Inc. My preoccupation is certainly not with his negative impression of the show in contradiction of my own positive opinion - on the contrary, I’m glad he took the time to reason his opposing viewpoint, and delighted for the excuse to ramble here now - but rather with the commentator’s assertion that “Suicide is not a joke.”

While valid as an authentic viewer response to the work, there’s something in the finality of the statement that demands some critical unpacking. And I think that something extends beyond the simple counter-argument that contemporary art has a a tendency, if not an outright responsibility, to expose and question such barriers to expression as this.

But first, some backtracking may be necessary. The video in question, Untitled from December 2009, presents a subtitled dialogue between two robotic toy cats confined to a domestic setting in which one decries its wish to end its life to the impatient and unimpressed other. On those terms alone, Paolini is playing an absurdist hand that undermines the seriousness of the subject. The cats themselves are laughable automatons, and the irreverent dialogue defies sympathy, especially when the suicidal cat is given to spells of hysterical excess.

So there’s little doubt that the video makes light of suicidal themes - that’s granted. But I think there are serious gains in Paolini’s strategy that redeem the joke at the expense of suicide in general.

The most basic and personal being that this video made me laugh. On a completely uncritical level, I cracked up at the stupid suicidal cat. And surely if “Suicide is not a joke” is a valid response, so too is its opposite, if “Suicide=funny” was an honest reaction on my part?

In trying to think of other instances where suicide is widely acknowledged as a source of humour, I found I didn’t have to reach exceedingly far for examples - our culture is littered in gallows humour, perhaps most tellingly so in the 1971 classic Harold and Maude.

Even in the trailer alone, Harold enacts a ridiculous number of ersatz-suicides, yet this film’s message is irrefutably positive and life-affirming. And these two conditions of suicide and life do not contradict each other, but rather are deeply interrelated. Harold and Maude seek life on their own terms - vibrantly, controversially so - and enact suicide as a rejection of banality, of death-in-life masquerading as the authentic lives the characters desire.

I would argue that something similar is at work in Paolini’s cats. Most fundamentally, they are not real and they know it. In her related Crocodile Tears (Crying Cat), the robotic toy weeps to see a living cat frolicking outside on television, fully aware that its artificial existence indoors is the antithesis of the life enjoyed by the happily playing cat. The cats in Untitled demonstrate the same awareness, and in this context the suicidal cat is a melodramatic Harold who seeks control over his own fate as a housebound pet. This grim message both underlines the serious intent in the artist’s work - she is not entirely a comedian - while affirming the value of life through one of the most emotive means possible, through laughter.

Hello, Schrodinger? continues at Hamilton Artists Inc. until February 26.

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