If a Clown Falls Down in a Forest, and There's No One There to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?
On the role of the Artist
A clown tree in the forest, by et.
Hello dearest subscribers! Remember me? I’m alive, I’ve simply been lying fallow. And as any farmer will tell you, this is a necessary, even natural occurrence. The land, much like the artist’s psyche, must rest in order to regenerate its bounty (if you’re reading the tea leaves here, of course you can expect a great harvest of newsletters to come). During my fallow period, I’ve not only taken a break from writing, but dare I admit, from clowning as well. I haven’t taken a break however from posing the question to myself, “Am I a clown if I am not clowning?”
Perhaps you have asked yourself this question. Ok maybe you’re not a clown, but you are a painter, or an embroiderer, or a sheep shearer. And although you may be the doer of said activity, perhaps you’re no longer taking razor to ewe, brush to canvas or needle to fabric, and you are therefore wrestling with the very notion of your identity. Adding fuel to this existential fire is the fact that an artist has to make things in order to survive (in this economy!?). As a clown, ideally you’re making stuff that moves an audience - that makes them laugh and weep and squeal. Making stuff is of course a form of production. A clown has an idea, puts on their little red nose and makes a show. They perform. They do. And so they exist.
This gets to the very nature of art and capitalism. *Sigh* a tale as old as time. In Marxist terms, capitalism is a system built on the means of production. I produce therefore I am. We produce to justify our very existence. So who are we when we are lying fallow? According to capitalist philosophy, we simply cease to exist in the market economy.
But rest assured, the human heart doesn’t beat on capitalism alone. I have recently quit my job and I am still alive and kicking baby. The connection between art and means of production is of course a fallacy. We are indoctrinated into this belief system because we grew up playing the board game monopoly and we live in a state of consumption where we need money for basic survival, and so month after month we are forced to orient our artistic work towards production in order to survive. But the real soul of art has nothing to do with production. Because art, unlike capitalism, is not a system of control and domination. It’s a philosophy of freedom. It’s a state of being, a state of being human. Perhaps the more pertinent question to be asking is not “Am I an artist if I’m not producing art,” but rather “What makes an artist?”
Good news is lots of smarty pants who are unequivocally artists have already tackled this question so you don’t have to rely on me pontificating. Baldwin in his 1962 essay, “Creative Process” sets the artist apart by defining them in relation to solitude;
“Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone….Most of us are not compelled to linger with the knowledge of our aloneness, for it is a knowledge that can paralyze all action in this world…...[An artist is] also enjoined to conquer the great wilderness of himself.”
Clown is an art form well versed in the aloneness Baldwin suggests. We frequently call this vulnerability in clown circles, but I maintain that it’s more specific than that. It’s a particular humility that comes with having to find a way to help, and uplift yourself in those inevitable moments of pain in front of an audience. If that hasn’t been my last year + on this earth, please exorcize this alien living inside my flesh suit and bring me home!
Even in ensemble work, when there are multiple performers at once, clowns are mostly in a state of solitude on stage - in their play, their stupidity and their humanity. I’m thinking back to a performance I saw of FLWLS, a group of very near and dear clowns, at a show at the Yard hosted by Caroline Cummings. The group is live directed and conceived of by Chad Damiani (that night by Deidre Lee), and like most clown, is nearly all improvised. The performers were given the prompt by an audience member, “Dead Uncle Locked in a Freezer,” and proceeded to create a group piece. Even within the collective organism that formed, and the tableau they compiled at the end, there were distinctions - an aside by Reshma Meister declaring the sadness of the piece, a cheeky comment by Emily Maverick about how sexy the show was, a tone def rap by Ava Lalezarzadeh who kept coming back to the first laugh she got on stage despite the sad funereal rite taking place. Each was alone up there, taking risks, differentiating themselves, despite being together.
There’s also the very exposing work that takes place in most clown workshops, which usually consists of an empty stage, and a clown without any props or costumes, making an unrehearsed entrance and improvising something. My experience over the past couple months of doing this type of work has essentially been me, center stage, feeling exposed and empty, failing at finding anything and feeling the paralysis Baldwin describes.
You may recall from my last newsletter my description of this paralysis. There is nothing more solitary than standing in a room full of people and losing that room. Two weeks ago in Idiot class, a workshop led that day by Amritah Dhawliwal and Kevin Krieger, I found myself in such a moment. I was working very hard to find something, anything, that the audience would connect with, bowling myself over with laughter at something quite stupid, only to look up and realize no one was laughing. I was alone in the great “wilderness,” disconnected from the audience and very alone. I conquered nothing, I simply burst into tears in front of the whole theater. Baldwin doesn’t suggest an artist should simply sit in this dark lonely wooded expanse, rather he suggests it’s their job to overcome it. In that same essay he continues,
“The precise role of the Artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
Since I’m unemployed and a highly sensitive person, I have of course been reading a ton of poetry. Poets are very in touch with the wilderness of the human experience. Billy Collins, a former poet Laureate of the US, describes the necessity of being in this state. In a short profile in the New Yorker he says, ‘...If you can’t be lost and alone, how can you find inspiration?’ As many of my reader friends know, I have been so lost and alone for so long, which makes the pain of this current unproductive, clown wilderness particularly salient. It’s been nearly a year since the person I thought was the love of my life left me with no warning and no explanation that I’ve been able to make sense of. I’d recently moved to LA, and had, it turned out no close friendships to call on, no car to drive, and a whole truckload of fresh trauma to process. Since then I have moved, quit my job, got a honda fit and continued to search. Since I’m apt to believe people like poets, who mine the deep well of their feelings for a living, I am hopeful my inspiration streak is around the corner.
Ada Limón, the current poet laureate of the US, is another writer who speaks on the subject of the artist. Her most recent book the Hurting Kind, who is very in touch with the suffering of human experience, as it was written in the pandemic. In an interview she describes her art making in relation to interconnectedness and humanity;
“...So often as an artist, we think our job is to look, but I think as a human what we also need is to be not just seen, but to be beheld. And I think that when that happens…it is this kind of connection, an interconnection and also that sense of working against aloneness.”
Ain’t that curious? The very thing shining the mirror up to my aloneness is the thing capable of liberating me from it…I’ll keep you posted as the journey continues. It’s helpful to have a possible explanation to why I keep showing up to do this work when it’s been feeling so bad. Limón gives me some resolve in understanding this - it’s the simple human need to be beheld and the commitment to showing up until I am.
Jane Hirshfield, another accomplished poet, whose entire CV would take up the rest of this newsletter, similarly describes the role of the artist writer, in relation to the overall human experience; “You can’t just be a writer. You have to be a person,” Speaking of herself she continues,
“I knew that I would never be much of a writer at all if I did not know much more about how to be a human being.”
Which brings me to why my break from clown - I guess I’m figuring out how to be a human again off the stage - reading and writing poems every morning, making an excessive amount of GF baked goods, opening my heart up to be broken again, and painting my apartment shades of pink and purple. Clown work, art making, creative practice, it isn’t always fun. It’s not all sunshine lollipops and rainbows, to quote the song my mom recently threw down to during a trip to Palm Springs. Artistic work requires us to reveal our inner world, to make friends with it and share it. And when our inner worlds are dusted and hurting and crying for love, exposing them to the general public can be very ouch indeed. Since this issue of ICN wouldn’t be complete without some wise words from our gal Julia Cameron, the creativity guru, I’ll leave you with her definition of creativity, the salve for the aching artists heart. In The Artist’s Way, Cameron says, “in a sense creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is in fact of your physical body and nothing invented, creativity is in fact of your spiritual body and nothing you must invent.” There’s one thing off my plate. I’m off to live as a human, as this atmospheric river continues to pound. And I’ll be performing tonight, baring all of my wild wild wilderness.
That’s it for this week’s issue. I’ll be back in two weeks. Stay stupid!
Feel free to drop a comment on your favorite book about artistic praxis and art making.
ICN is written by me Isabella Kulkarni, with illustrations by et.