Clods, Compost and the Buoyancy of Clowns

Abstract

Of all performers, clowns might be the most mundane, in that their work – attending the etymological roots of the mundane – firmly and fixedly is of the world. Earthy, coarse and material, rebounding from whatever slip, trip, stumble or fall, their ascents only ever return them to the surface, back to the world. But of what is that buoyancy made? How does a clown get back up? To account for that force, this paper follows what Shoshana Felman finds, via J. L. Austin, as 'triviality as a philosophy – as a method'. When Austin writes: 'To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges,' it is Austin's humour, Felman shows, keeping him afloat. Buoyancy, then, could be understood as a species of performative force. Given how Felman's reading has shaped performance theory, this paper pushes her term triviality into the mundane by citing the context of performance and taking a performer whose ostensible field is humour. This paper, then, considers a clown, Alex Tatarsky, and a series of workshop performances given in an autumn 2021 residency at The Kitchen in New York, which turned, specifically, around the performance of etymology and an ecological commitment to compost. Celebrating how organic matter breaks into dirt gives Tatarsky a vehicle to break the linguistic-symbolic itself into roots. Revelling in the visceral force of language's materiality – as sound, history and the means by which we meet and misunderstand one another – Tatarsky pulses through states of disintegration both individual and collective. In the performance of etymology, they offer the common derivation of clown as clod, as in dirt – what makes the ground. Fixing that signature, Tatarsky breaks down themselves, and in that, rebounds to show something of how the world holds together, and what can happen when it doesn't.

Notes

1 The specific clowns Brecht references elsewhere as most influential were Karl Valentin and Lies! Karlstadt, performing in the cabarets and beer halls ofMunich.SeeD onald McManaus, No Kidding!: Clown as protagonist in twentieth-century theatre for a fu Her reading of clowns throughout modernist theatre in Brecht and beyond.

2 Tatarsky uses they/them pronouns. This helps stall another methodological question of what pronoun to give clowns, considered as distinct from the performer. Different from the way an actor may have a different gender from the role they play, it is not clear how clowns carry or embody gender. Still, as much as they are seen as silent, clowns are generally seen as male. The relationship of gender to performativity is alive in this question; it could even be a through-line. For now, I’ll just mention it is an abiding concern. Beyond historical play with drag, and despite their often being female clowns and fools (who are as most often referred to as the ‘first’ or ‘only’ as Adams and Keene have noted (2012)), perhaps the strangest contemporary case comes from Stephen King’s It. The title of the book, in fact, is the gender pronoun for the novel’s scary clown. While the clown, named Pennywise, appears male, in the book the terrorized children decide between themselves to refer to it as it rather than he. The spectres of gender and sexuality the clown thereby summons seem part of their terror.

3 This was a running joke on Baskets, the FX Show starring Zach Galifianakis, who attends a school in France for clowns. (The joke, too, especially on US Americans, is that going to school for a thing does not make one something either.) Coming back to the United States with a French woman using him for residency, she says to him, ‘You look like a cloon, but you are not a cloon.’ For a clown, actually, heeding the interpellation seems to go something like: I identify with this whole from which I am excluded, and because of that I can exist, for a time, in its gaps. I am somehow at the centre of where I do not belong.

4 Artists included Basie Allen, Cassandra Mayela, Rolando Politi, Kenya (Robinson), Sparrow, William Padilla-Brown, manuel arturo abreu, Cecilia Vicuña, Candace Thompson, Precious Okoyomon, Narendra Haynes and Poncili Creación with Juan Del Hierro.

5 There is of course much more: a tutu; a black bowler hat; white felt gloves with the nails painted red; a tie with black and white zig zags down the front; a purple onion bag from a nearby Indian restaurant; red onions from that bag; a bowled clear plastic face covering evidently part of a missing helmet; a lantern case (with no lantern inside); a rubber chicken, of course; and on and on, and if that was not enough, Tatarsky sent around a bucket during the show to collect more, so much tangible pieces of feedback.

6 The laughter here is more like the vertiginous laughter Charles Baudelaire describes in ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ from 1855, where one cannot tell if it comes from inside or outside the body: ‘As soon as the vertigo has entered it circulates through the air; one breathes it and vertigo fills the lungs and flows through the blood … What is this vertigo? It is the absolute comic. It has taken hold of every being’ (2021: 540). (Translation mine, aided by that given in Kevin Newmark’s ‘Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter’, which translates vertige as vertigo (1991). Other common English translations use ‘intoxication’ instead. ‘Vertigo’ accurately connects to the sense of the Fall that Baudelaire also discusses at length.)

7 Freud, actually, performs this same slip in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, making this not just the prototype of a slip of the tongue, but a literal Freudian slip. As James Strachey’s translator’s note explains, a joke about the Roman jurist Labeo, whose name is mistaken for labeor, Latin for ‘I fail’, plays on the German word fallen, which means both to fall and to fail an examination (1989: 36).

8 I harp on this point because clowns, and those writing on clowns, seem especially susceptible to such reversals. In the issue of Performance Research called On Failure (17.1), in fact, Eric Weitz wrote an article titled, simply, ‘Failure as Success: Clowns and laughing bodies’. I have no beef with the article, and it wonderfully describes laughter similar to how Felman calls it ‘a sort of explosion of the speaking body’ (2003: 87). And as Barbara Johnson’s article ‘Nothing fails like success’ shows – observing how, ‘As soon as any radically innovative thought becomes an ism, its radically groundbreaking force diminishes’ (2020: 327), which fully tarries with Carriger’s special issue on performativity – such reversals are common. What strikes me in Weitz’s title is that, unlike Johnson’s, or other puns and plays on the concepts, it is unadorned: the reversal is stated simply as a tautology. Such naked identification of opposites seems like it would refute even a deconstruction. That, as Weitz attests, too, is something of what clowns do.

9 As Tatarsky and Ming Lin say in their ongoing collaboration Shanzhai Lyric, ‘The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies.’ Hence, they play deeply with what is real, copied and counterfeit and the material histories of those markets.