Free Glee!?!:- Joy @ the Wellcome Collection.

"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked" - On Joy and Sorrow, Kahlil Gilbran

The first sunny day of the year, the face of a small child opening a present, walks with friends, a pint or two in the pub with good company, the voice of Al Green, the guitar sounds of Orchestra Baobab, a Marina Hyde column, seeing Stewart Lee perform live, an ice cream in the park, a poppadpom dipped in mango chutney, going down the water slide at Plas Madoc Leisure Centre with my god-daughter, a Scrabble night with friends, a pub quiz, Skeptics events, a long train ride, someone smiling, a hug, heading out to a festival.

All of those things bring me joy and much of it. But the trouble with joy is that not everyone gets joy from the same things. Someone may find joy in a quiet night in with a book. Someone else may find it at a packed nightclub. I feel I am fortunate in that, at times, both of those things have brought me joy. But the definition of joy is different for different people and therefore putting a show together about that feeling, one of joy, is a lot trickier than it sounds.

Barry Lewis - Butlin's Holiday Camp in Skegness (1982/2021)

Though there were things in the show that undoubtedly brought me joy I have to say my main joy  of the day was seeing an old friend, Darren, going for a pint with him and having a nice veggie meal afterwards. The levels of joy the exhibition brought me were much lower than that and certainly not as high as the experiences I've outlined in my opening paragraph.

In fact the main joy of the show was using it, and specifically David Shrigley's contribution, to cajole Darren into coming up to London and spending the afternoon in my company. Having said that, the image of Butlin's Skegness, above, definitely brought me joy. Or at least elicited joyful memories of youthful holidays in the Butlin's of Minehead, Clacton, and, yes, Skegness.

Skegness was the best one because all my cousins came too. The Butlin's slogan, OUR TRUE INTENT IS ALL FOR YOUR DELIGHT, comes from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream which would have been lost on me as a child but Butlin's was THE place. Monorails, outdoor swimming pools, adults getting drunk, kids eating sweets and skidding on the wooden dancefloors, and free fair rides all day long.

Free things can, of course, always aid joy and, fortunately, this exhibition (and the Wellcome Collection on the whole) is free to enter. Dancing too is free but dancing is something that, for me, is more fun to do than it is to watch. That's one of the reasons I don't watch 'Strictly'. That and the fact I live on my own and it seems a weird thing to watch on your own. Like baking shows and the like, the joy you get from these programmes is chatting with your family and friends as you watch them. Gogglebox haven't been knocking my door.

Harold Offeh - Joy In Our Tears (2020-1)

The people dancing in Harold Offeh's Joy In Our Tears, Offeh is one of four artists who have made specially commissioned pieces for this show, look like they're having fun but the video was THIRTY-TWO minutes long. Both me and Darren agreed that there were more joyful things we could spend half an hour doing; That was time lost in the pub we'd not get back.

Luckily, nothing else in Joy made such demands of our precious time. There was a fair bit of historical stuff of people doing joyful things in the olden days. Timothy Bobbin seems to be suggesting that joy can be found both in the pub (which I'd agree with) and in the schadenfreude of seeing someone else in pain (which I don't).

Timothy Bobbin - Weeping & Joy, in The Passions, Humorously, Delineated (1773)

For me, it's quite the opposite. I can find joy alone but a joy shared is not a joy halved but a joy enhanced. I love it when friends, old and new, join my walks. I love it when friends call for a chat. I love meeting up with friends for chips and drinks. I love it when my friends create and I love it when we get together to create.

That hardly makes me exceptional. Most people do find joy in others and joy in sharing. A question in this exhibition made me think about smiling. "Do we smile because we're happy ourselves or do we perform a smile to make others feel better?". Think about it. How much better do you feel if someone smiles at you. Think of a child turning round to pull faces at you on a bus and the happiness they get if you gurn back at them.

Smiles from strangers increase our wellbeing but, even more importantly, friendships underpin much of our emotional life. I feel hurt if a friend lets me down, badmouths me, or lies about me. Luckily, most of my friends are genuinely lovely and supportive people so that doesn't happen so often. One important thing to share with your friends is your hobbies, your interests, and your passions.

Darren and I like much of the same music, we both like going to the pub, we like very similar comedy, and we both like David Shrigley. I'd been worried there'd be a minimal contribution from him in this show and Darren would feel I'd dragged him away from his family under false pretenses. While Shrigley's contribution, in turns of hours put in to creating his work, always looks fairly minimal there were plenty here and some, if not all, of them were very good.

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

If you like Shrigley that is. Darren's wife Cheryl was very clear that she didn't and decided to give the day out a miss. You don't really need to explain Shrigley. It's all there as soon as you look at it but his wry observations on life can be amusing, they can be somewhat droll, and, when he really hits the spot, they can give you a new perspective.

Not just on joy but on life itself. Some of the other contributions to the show are a bit odd. An image of a young lady, in the mid nineteenth century, dancing a tarantella anyone? The tarantella is an Italian folk dance that women would do in an attempt to ward off fatigue and sickness after being bitten by a spider. The idea being that super quick, frenzied, dancing would dispel the venom from the body. The dancing, and the release of the venom, would surely be happy but being bitten by a poisonous spider would not bring me much joy.

Unknown maker - A young woman dancing the tarantella (c.1850)

Unknown maker - A Mevlevi, or whirling dervish, performing a ritual mystic dance (c.1850)

Dancing does seem to go with joy though. Feelings of release, of disinhibition, and, just maybe, a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. Gig goers dance, ravers dance, football fans dance, people have first dances at weddings. Other than Italian ladies who have been bitten by spiders, the people who take dancing most seriously appear to whirling dervishes. Or Mevlevis.

So of course there's one here. The idea is that by spinning round faster and faster, the dervish reaches such an ecstatic state that they feel at one with their God. It's not too different to dropping an E down the Ministry of Sound and it certainly sounds like a better way of having fun and experiencing joy than putting on a mask and sacrificing a goat to Bacchus.

P Lombard, after F Cleyn - Athenians wearing masks celebrate the vintage by dancing around a statue of Bacchus and sacrificing a goat to him (1654)

Though as this lot were Athenians, strictly speaking they should be using his Greek name. Dionysus. Which reminds us that another short cut to joy, at least temporary joy, comes via the bottle.

That's not something the Joy exhibition dwelt on but I have done quite a lot of personal research on the subject and no doubt will again. It's an ongoing project but my findings, so far, are that consumption of alcohol can indeed lead to happiness. Though it can also lead to ill health, problems with relationships, and depression.

Charles Darwin - The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

On balance then, hardly the purest form of joy. At the Wellcome Collection they're more focused on how our brain perceives joy and there are sections devoted to wanting, liking, and satisfaction as well as an 1872 book by Charles Darwin in which he considered how humans expressed emotions facially. There's another, this time much shorter though not any more interesting, video by Harold Offeh of a man smiling while listening to Nat King Cole sing Charlie Chaplin's Smile, and there are a few more Shrigleys to bring a smile to your face.

Harold Offeh - Smile (2001)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

Joy Labinjo - Family Portrait (2019)

There's a Joy Labinjo painting of a reasonably happy looking Nigerian family (to be honest, I think Joy made the cut in this exhibition simply because of her name), there's a great image of the Stockport Spider-Man who entertained children of that town during lockdown in spring 2020 - look at those kids at the window having their day brightened up by both the spectacle of it all and the sheer silliness, and there's a periodic table of emotions which looks good but which I had minor gripes with.

Phil Nobel - Stockport Spider-Man (2020)

Aidan Moseby - Sagacity:The Periodic Table of Emotions (2015/2021)

Aidan Moseby - Sagacity:The Periodic Table of Emotions (2015/2021)

Aidan Moseby's Sagacity:The Periodic Table of Emotions was compiled by looking at Twitter tweets that contained words describing emotions and then he made it into, yes, a periodic table. The colours are lovely and it's a great idea but there seem to be positive emotions on each flank and I think it'd have worked better if the 'journey' took us from happy to sad.

The next batch of Shrigleys were probably my favourite in the show. Why the snakes are in a good mood or life is like a bowl of noodles is never explained and nor do they need to be. It's food for thought, it's daft, and it doesn't detain you for very long.

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

It was like a palate cleanser before the driest section of the show. There's a drawing of a viscera in an Islamic encyclopaedia from 1632 (something to do with the link between intestinal and mental health), there's a frontispiece to a Christian tome from a couple of decades later in which love is held in check by reason and the passions are used correctly (boring), there's an old Chinese illustration of the heart - the ruler of all organs, and there's another small drawing intended to illustrate Aristotle's belief that senses are gateways of perception

They're all small and under perspex screens so they're hard to enjoy, hard to study, and hard to photograph. Then we're back with the last Shrigley selection and one that Darren found unimpressive. I wouldn't want them on my wall but I liked them. Who hasn't thought that 'just one kiss' might make their 'horrible' life better? Who hasn't been asked if they're having fun and not really been able to answer truthfully?

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

David Shrigley - Untitled (2020)

Admittedly, probably not when flying in a formation of fighter planes. There's just time for some designer cookbook adorned with rather basic, or in one case fairly nonsensical, slogans, an image of an Indian festival that celebrates the arrival of spring (always a joy - especially after a British winter), a peculiar Sam Jevon drawing where the dogs are bigger than owners in his 'Crazy Community' - one which I tried to resist describing as Lowry on acid (anything 'on acid' is such a cliche), and, best of all, some students making a smiley face to protest against the Vietnam war in Maryland in 1971.

Sister Corita Kent - International Dining with Spice Islands Cookbook (1963)

Sister Corita Kent - International Dining with Spice Islands Cookbook (1963)

Unknown Lucknow painter - Holi festival (19th century)

Sam Jevon - Crazy Community (2016)

Steve Budman - Smiley Face Protest, University of Maryland (1971)

It all looks very Wicker Man, very folk horror. Amalia Pica's commissioned Procession for eighteen is a riff on the placards we carry when we go on protests but instead of slogans or crude images of Donald Trump naked or David Cameron fucking a pig or something there are just abstract triangles of pure colour.

Then just as you leave the exhibition proper there is one last, surprise, installation. Stefanie Posavec's Updating Happiness makes use of all that data we so willingly provide to social media but this time puts it to good rather than nefarious use. There's some very complicated system she's used to colour and lay them all out but at heart it is, in very much the same way as I began this consideration, a list of things that bring people joy.

Funk music, chocolate biscuits, marmalade on toast, dipping chips in milkshakes, ravens (really? Imagine how excied they'd be if the saw a heron! Or a toucan! A flamingo! A peacock!), and farting under the duvet. Although that only truly brings joy if you're sharing a bed with someone and able to subject them to the ol' Dutch oven.

Strangely enough, this little list of joyful things was one of the most joyful things in the whole show. I liked the show even if it was a bit disjointed and sometimes felt a bit rambling and cobbled together. I can't say it brought me any more joy than many other exhibitions but exhibitions, alongside gigs, festivals, walks, and parties bring us together and being with friends, to me, is still the greatest joy of all.

Amalia Pica - Procession for eighteen (2020-21)

Stefanie Posavec - Updating Happiness (2021)

Stefanie Posavec - Updating Happiness (2021)

Stefanie Posavec - Updating Happiness (2021)

Stefanie Posavec - Updating Happiness (2021)

Stefanie Posavec - Updating Happiness (2021)

Stefanie Posavec - Updating Happiness (2021)

Thanks to Darren for joining me for this exhibition and even more so for his company both at the show and in the pubs of Kings Cross and at the delightful Mildred's vegetarian restaurant afterwards.