Rules of clowning

 

1. The body tells the story.
2. Be interested, not interesting.
3. The work happens on stage. The effect happens in the minds and bodies of the audience. 
4. We paint a picture in the minds of the audience using their paint and their canvas; we are the brush.
5. The most basic technique of the clown is to create and maintain rapport.
6. Everything can be seen as a problem to be solved, a knot to be unravelled.
7. Everyone needs to breathe all the time, even when on stage. The audience unconsciously breathes with you. 
8. Don’t tell or show the audience or your partners what to think, do, or feel.
9. Have an emotional reaction and invite the audience to join in your experience.
10. Tension without release undermines your performance.
11. The clown enters the stage to accomplish a task, not to get laughs. If there are laughs it is an interruption.
12. Find simple ways to accomplish complicated tasks, and complicated ways to accomplish simple tasks.
13. Don't leave your comfort zone. Make your comfort zone bigger.
14. A clown is costume and makeup. Clowning is a verb.

Self-love and self-harm

 "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."

I heard this quote while running and listening to a James Hollis audiobook this morning. I can''t remember who the author was who was being quoted, but it made me laugh, and it made me think that what I want is to present an image of a tragic figure that we can laugh at. I thought of Samuel Beckett, Charlie Chaplin, Commedia Dell Arte, I also thought of the Man of Sorrows. And Tony Hancock.

Some of them fitted the bill, some didn't.

I'm aware that I want to laugh at myself. What's happening here is confusing. I feel that I'm loving myself, or being tender toward myself. Do you remember when you saw yourself crying in the mirror? How you looked like a clown? I also feel there's a kind of self-harming. I feel stupid and weak when I'm sad. Or perhaps it's just a way to acknowledge sadness with an English reticence and embarrassment of high emotion? An old man rending his hair and beating his chest is funny, isn't he? At least partly-funny? 

Anyway, the image of the tragi-comic figure holds a power for me at the moment.

...it says by being, not by saying.

The best work neither shows nor tells: it says by being, not by saying.

M John Harrison

Reasons to be cheerful

Productive anonymity—the ability to experiment without much at stake except your own process of discovery.
 

Privacy—particularly, the ability to experience artworks in a relatively private environment, even if in public spaces. 

 

Time—to think and to not think; to look at art; to waste on dead-end art projects that no one will ever see again and that your best friends may remember better than you will, because to them it was an event but to you it was just a step along a long road. 

Liberation from art that is front-loaded with conscious intentionality. 


Benign neglect—the ability to do things with just enough attention to make you feel like you are part of a world and can go forward, but not so much that your gesture becomes a trademark and a creative prison.

Mira Schor

Gradual development and constant revision

But Adler’s statement suggests that creativity is some kind of specialty like piano tuning or knee surgery, or that it is something one picks up in art school. But I doubt if having an art degree or even a successful career in the art world is any guarantee of spontaneous "creativity" or the ability to impart it. Moreover, psychological studies of creativity have shown that the popular picture of the artist constantly making "creative leaps" does not match the actual procedures of most professional artists, including some famous names such as Alexander Calder or Picasso. Gradual development and constant revision are more likely than occasional moments of sudden inspiration.[29] In fact, as Philip Alperson has remarked, there is a "vast spectrum of ways in which artists work," a spectrum, I would add, that largely overlaps the approaches of makers and discoverers in many other fields.[30]

Larry Shiner

How do you exercise judgement in a discipline that has no rules?

How do you exercise judgement in a discipline that has no rules?
Or, how do you play a game without rules?
Or, how do you play a game in which the rules are constantly changing?
The unstable nature of the rules becomes the game.
The rules require adaptability and flexibility in a changing environment.
Think of fashion, or the stock market. or evolution.
Are there other areas?

Value is of no value

Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world… You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO…

Try to do some BAD work—the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell—you are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT.

Sol Lewitt in letter to Eva Hesse

This has been said many times in different ways, but it's not the call to make bad art that's interesting, it's the fact that the need to make good art is problematic. The concept of value is the opposite of creativity.

Why should that be?

How does it relate to education of art?

How can you have a sense of progress if the concept of good/bad is not just irrelevant, but an impediment?

Or, perhaps it's just that questions of value (good-and-bad, etc), come after the making. This is part of the process of appreciation.... 

I think not. I have a hunch that the process of assessment is another activity entirely unrelated to making. The so-called critical faculty is not just unhelpful, but unconnected to the making-process