“What’s The Funniest Joke In The World?”

a text Shimmer wrote with Laurenz in Vienna

over the duration of our exhibition Mike Kelley and Marlie Mul in the summer of 2025.

Here is a short excerpt:

[...] What connects Unnamed Charms and The Banana Man is the intensity of labour—the detail, the patience, the persistence. Both are collective. Mul’s works may appear as individuals, unnamed rather than untitled, but they always arrive together, echoing her wider practice of curating and hosting. Kelley’s film is equally collective, made with his students, held by their chorus. Both remind us that art is never solitary.

And so we return to the pond in the film—stagnant on the surface, yet alive with duckweed, lilies, snails, frogs, and toads. Life held in stillness.

This is the terrain we share. Four individuals forming two collectives, tending to what grows in our ponds and stables. Like The Banana Man, we stay—funny and sad, wise and stubborn—but always moving when others move with us. He startles us into recognition, into laughter, into scribbling notes to self.

And yet, the work is also this: Hinterhauses to fly-over zones, the periphery, or perhaps the very deep, deep spaces we prefer not to discuss—the places where the shit happens, where it bubbles up in the suburbs, where a clean horse leaves the stables for the Master to ride without ever seeing the labour. The fucker on our shoulders, the steaming pile scraped away, the unseen work of what “magically appears.” Someone once told me: you better love what you’re doing if you’re painting walls at 3 a.m. That is the stable of our industry.

In Kelley’s persistence, in Mul’s laser focus, and in our own endless tending, there is not just endurance but the possibility of growth. In these gestures of precision, and in the unseen labour that underpins them, the future takes root. —-

Thanks to Verschiedene Bilderor giving our text — a beautiful visual appearance.