DEAD-WHITE CLOWN recapitulates the earliest Halloween costume I can remember having. When I was three years old I wore a clown costume that my mother had made. It consisted of a blue smock with orange pompom buttons and some kind of big ruffled or pleated collar. I probably had a classic pointed hat, maybe also with pompoms, but I don't recall it.
The clown costume expressed my career ambition at the time. I admit this with some chagrin now, because within a few years of the Halloween costume I came to hate clowns, and I still basically do. Broad physical humor tends to embarrass me, and sentimental or sad clowns -- pretty Pierettes shedding appliquéd crystal tears on trashy T-shirts -- well, ugh.
On the other hand, I am drawn to the imagery of commedia dell'arte, an Italian clowning tradition that extends back at least to the renaissance and embodies a whole set of characters and conventions, some widely influential in the development of modern theater and opera. That interest is perhaps one thing that drew me to create this guise. But really I conceived Dead-White Clown out of an intense and mysterious desire to be bald, naked, painted flat white and wearing nothing but a huge collar and a black mustache.
I made the collar out of -- you guessed it --filmy drapes from a thrift shop. Maybe it was a memory of the collar on that early Halloween costume that influenced me to make it a key feature of this guise.
I did this character at the end of the series when I didn't have much time left, so I didn't cover my entire body in white and thus didn't shoot any full-length pictures as I usually do. For that reason, this is one guise that I'd like to return to someday in order to complete the imaging. I picture him in some kind of pouffed skirt held up by black suspenders.
I think the images that resulted from this last shoot in series one have a rather ghostly or skeletal quality, which is why I chose dead-white as opposed to chalk-white or flat-white to describe him.
Images created on: August 29, 1997
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