Toby Kamps

John Wood & Paul Harrison: Answers to Questions Toby Kamps

John Wood (born 1969) and Paul Harrison (born 1966) fuse their aesthetic research with existential slapstick comedy. Working together since 1993, the British duo use a wide variety of props, including furniture, household utensils and their own bodies, setting up comical interactions with objects that they record in austere video works. Describing themselves as performance artists and sculptors whose audience is the video camera, Wood and Harrison are heirs to silent film comics Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and to uniquely British comedy troupes like Monty Python. Through their efforts, no matter how absurd, Sisyphean or masochistic, Wood and Harrison reveal the potential for inventive play in all scenarios. Grounded in the joys and pratfalls of the everyday, Wood and Harrison's blend of high and low, philosophical and funny, captures both a sense of wonder and the thrill of genuine experimentation.