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

willing to be very slow

 "I try to work one sentence at a time and be willing to wait a long time until the next sentence comes. I'm just willing to be very slow, and let the back of the mind come forward."

Lynda Barry

poetry is of many sorts and is all around us

"I think the first aim of someone teaching poetry in a high school should be to continuously demonstrate that poetry is of many sorts and is all around us; that a rhymed political slogan is poetry of a kind, for example, and the lyrics of a song by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan may be poetry of a very high order; that inevitably most people have commerce with poetry in some part of their lives"

Thom Gunn

Sketch for Feral Child picture

Theatre vs cinema

"In my opinion, manga is very cinematic and three-dimensional. When people compose panels, it’s like they’re aware of where the cameras are positioned, whereas illustration in the west is more like a play, with fewer close-ups and the camera at eye level."


Fumio Obata 

This was interesting. It got me thinking about how much cinema has actually influenced the visual arts. I just take it for granted that the influence of cinema is everywhere, has saturated every art form,  but Obata is implying that western visual culture is more static and traditional. More like theatre than cinema? I read this and then looked up at my painting on the wall and, yes, it is at eye-level (strangely, I spend a lot of time taking perspective out as far as possible; eye-level all the way up and down, is how I think about it). And, yes, although I'm primarily influenced by film stills and old paintings, I can see what he's saying about the staticness, at least in my images.
I suppose, I'm thinking; Why don't I want to use the moving camera? The dramatic, expressionistic looking-up or looking-down viewpoints. I don't, do I? The film stills that appeal to me are, as Obata said, at eye-level and not super-close-up.
I have been thinking recently about the quality of film stills as opposed to other forms of photograhy and other images. Why are they so interesting?

I was a middle-aged werewolf

Other title; Werewolf Dad

self portrait as a werewolf - in progress

All the problems of creativity are problems of living

"Essentially, I think all the problems of writing are problems of living. And all the problems of creativity are problems of living. They are all problems which we all share. I had been brought by my particular path to an experience of certain structures breaking down that I realized were old. For example, today I drove over the Brooklyn Bridge and remembered all the things I’d read about the infrastructure of American roads and bridges being in bad repair. I thought, “Am I entirely safe here?” It’s been here a long time, but it doesn’t mean it always will be. It’s that feeling of realizing that your consciousness, what appears to be your individuality, is actually resting on old, possibly decrepit structures."

Rachel Cusk

Creativity as another war enterprise.

"If war contributes to the construction of society, then those who instead of wanting war are engaged in aesthetical enterprises will infact be using more than others their prohibited violence in other war enterprises.

Destructiveness and violence are absolutely crucial for seriously good creativity.

Matisse for instance talked of his work in terms of rape."

Juliet Mitchell

I have a game

"I have a game in which I put a small pebble on a sloping board, then roll a pencil towards it – each roll of the pencil, always from the same position, pushes the pebble further. I make a series of marks where the pebble stops. I’ve chosen the gradient, the pebble and the pencil, but the randomness throws up surprises which intuition, or measurement, never can. Is this nonsense?"

Harrison Birtwistle

Not being able to do it.

"Not being able to do it is part of being able to do it."

Leon kossof

The thing you fear the most, and his wife. Ideas

Taliesin ideas

Orpheus reversed ideas