.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The clown is a leitmotif in Ugo Rondinone's extraordinarily diverse oeuvre. Since 1992, this circus mainstay has regularly made its appearance in his performances, video recordings, installations, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. In each case, the clown can be seen as existential effigies of the artist as public entertainer and, like Pierrot, Rondinone uses their role as both an antidote and a platform for melancholy. The tragicomic nature of these figures is most poignantly and disturbingly rendered in his life-sized sculptures of sleeping clowns, who have abandoned their buffoonery to become unexpectedly prone beings that are no longer able to serve our need for distraction. Although Rondinone has performed as a clown himself, most of his work relies on actors and models to create exaggerated expressions of the artist/fool. If there were anywhere but desert. Thursday is an uncannily realistic fibreglass cast clown painted and clothed by the Swiss artist. Executed in 2001, this Buddha-bellied prankster is part of a series where a unique sleeping clown was created for every day of the week. In this work, Rondinone seems to have revived his earlier gender-bending photo-pieces by dressing the corpulent figure in mid-riff baring spandex and a body-con skirt. The permanent, exaggerated expression painted on his face is a mask of hysterical happiness, while there is an inescapable hint of depression underlying this disguise. The disturbing quality of the traditional clown's makeup is widely acknowledged. That you could be painted to look like you're happy and still look like you're sad underneath underlines the dichotomy of the clowns' persona, where any sense of the interior, or real self is concealed. The ridiculous costume, makeup and form of this figure makes If there were anywhere but desert. Thursday teeter on the edge of pure farce, but Rondinone reclaims the sculpture to the world of beauty with its poetic title. His work frequently refers to of literary antecedents and this title refers to a book of poems by Edmond Jabs, an influential French/Egyptian/Jewish writer known for his meditations on anxiety and longing.
Life-like yet artificial, this figure provides a conduit for the shifts between states that Rondinone nimbly manipulates--between active and passive, male and female, interior and exterior, happiness and sadness. Ever adept at switching roles, the clown seems uniquely qualified to represent the complex identities we negotiate today. He is a character rooted in many of the most fundamental, elemental aspects of culture and mythology. Carl Jung identified the clown, fool or trickster as an archetype who performs his diversionary antics for our benefit, often being cruel, or suffering cruelty, on our behalf. The clown is synonymous with self-deprecation and absurdity; and yet once, as court jesters of old, they alone were able to speak the truth, without fear of punishment. They are free in a way that most humans will never be, to laugh and to cry, to succeed and to fail before large audiences. It is easy to see why there is such a well-established legacy of artists adopting the clown as a potent allegory for their own condition. Yet Rondinone's clown is unusual its utter passivity. He does not perform, make jest, or even gesture, but lies at our feet, completely vulnerable and shut off from his audience. His creepy realism puts the viewer in a state of unanswered expectation for entertainment, but as a disengaged figure of contemplation he only offers isolation and disenchantment. 'The clown is an invention of high nobility to push away boredom and melancholy out of the court,' Rondinone explains. 'At the same time it functions as a substitute: it has a freedom of speech his masters don't have. On the other hand my clowns do not move. They only sit or lie down, do not laugh, do not say either good day or good night. By its absence of demonstration and its disinterest in the outside world, the character of the clown is possibly a self-portrait. He leads to a melancholy empty of meaning, which perpetuates itself in the vacuity of a world without irony' (The artist quoted in C. Ross, The aesthetics of disengagement: contemporary art and depression, Minneapolis, 2006, p. 45)
Six years before the If there were anywhere but desert series, Rondinone aligned his clowns with a state of ennui in a performance piece at Zurich's Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, where he created an installation that brought together live actors, sound, painting, and video. At the show's opening, several mute, paunchy, middle-aged clowns lounged lazily on the floor of one of the galleries, moving only to change position or to yawn. Recorded fits of hysterical laughter were triggered activated by sensors whenever a visitor entered--thereby aiming the laughter at the spectator, not the clown. On the walls behind the clowns, huge spray painted "targets" referenced the giddy colours used in the clown's costumes and makeup. Installation work ultimately provides Rondinone with the opportunity to reconcile his multiple interests but self-contained sculptures like If there were anywhere but desert. Thursday are equally effective on their own. This overweight, down-and-out and out-of-it clown is a mocking revelation of the true nature of art and the artist. In a subtle and ambiguous way, this sculpture plays with the clich of the clown as a middleman who allows man to laugh at himself, and the artist's responsibility to create situations for us to reflect on life. But this clown is represented as a tragic everyman trapped within the banality of his own life and his job of making us forget the banality of ours; a role, one senses, that Rondinone strongly identifies with.
Life-like yet artificial, this figure provides a conduit for the shifts between states that Rondinone nimbly manipulates--between active and passive, male and female, interior and exterior, happiness and sadness. Ever adept at switching roles, the clown seems uniquely qualified to represent the complex identities we negotiate today. He is a character rooted in many of the most fundamental, elemental aspects of culture and mythology. Carl Jung identified the clown, fool or trickster as an archetype who performs his diversionary antics for our benefit, often being cruel, or suffering cruelty, on our behalf. The clown is synonymous with self-deprecation and absurdity; and yet once, as court jesters of old, they alone were able to speak the truth, without fear of punishment. They are free in a way that most humans will never be, to laugh and to cry, to succeed and to fail before large audiences. It is easy to see why there is such a well-established legacy of artists adopting the clown as a potent allegory for their own condition. Yet Rondinone's clown is unusual its utter passivity. He does not perform, make jest, or even gesture, but lies at our feet, completely vulnerable and shut off from his audience. His creepy realism puts the viewer in a state of unanswered expectation for entertainment, but as a disengaged figure of contemplation he only offers isolation and disenchantment. 'The clown is an invention of high nobility to push away boredom and melancholy out of the court,' Rondinone explains. 'At the same time it functions as a substitute: it has a freedom of speech his masters don't have. On the other hand my clowns do not move. They only sit or lie down, do not laugh, do not say either good day or good night. By its absence of demonstration and its disinterest in the outside world, the character of the clown is possibly a self-portrait. He leads to a melancholy empty of meaning, which perpetuates itself in the vacuity of a world without irony' (The artist quoted in C. Ross, The aesthetics of disengagement: contemporary art and depression, Minneapolis, 2006, p. 45)
Six years before the If there were anywhere but desert series, Rondinone aligned his clowns with a state of ennui in a performance piece at Zurich's Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, where he created an installation that brought together live actors, sound, painting, and video. At the show's opening, several mute, paunchy, middle-aged clowns lounged lazily on the floor of one of the galleries, moving only to change position or to yawn. Recorded fits of hysterical laughter were triggered activated by sensors whenever a visitor entered--thereby aiming the laughter at the spectator, not the clown. On the walls behind the clowns, huge spray painted "targets" referenced the giddy colours used in the clown's costumes and makeup. Installation work ultimately provides Rondinone with the opportunity to reconcile his multiple interests but self-contained sculptures like If there were anywhere but desert. Thursday are equally effective on their own. This overweight, down-and-out and out-of-it clown is a mocking revelation of the true nature of art and the artist. In a subtle and ambiguous way, this sculpture plays with the clich of the clown as a middleman who allows man to laugh at himself, and the artist's responsibility to create situations for us to reflect on life. But this clown is represented as a tragic everyman trapped within the banality of his own life and his job of making us forget the banality of ours; a role, one senses, that Rondinone strongly identifies with.