Clown is on the outside of all systems looking in. He is obsessed with art, his own. The space where his labour and life unfolds is precisely the place of leisure for others, they do for fun what he can only ever do, thus, he only relates other humans inside a microscopic sliver of shared social space. He dies on a beach, laying next to people rubbing bronzer into their legs, doing nothing. For him, every-thing seems to be lost in translation, he is floating above or below, but never among. So he carries on working, there is nothing else, practicing, inventing, expanding, loosening and sharpening; end-less production, yet, he is perhaps ultimately his only audience. Art is his only place. His only gear. He doesn’t need Catholicism or Protestantism, Art is God, too.
In twenty-something years he plans on ending up in a canal under a bridge. He is slowly self-destructing. I’m curious about this. Would this happen if his world existed inside the normal structure of everyone else's system? Is it some form of weathering that happens from opposing the forces and direction of the world?
Sure, it's an acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of everything. Time and gravity are total buzz-kills. I don’t see him to be an optimist, but its hard to think that anyone obsessed with art could be anything else, despite the cliché. Self improvement is a basal pillar of optimism and there cannot be art without challenges bested and self improved.
I have been producing non-stop for years and years and years and years. My landlord accused me of being a junky and staged an intervention. I very rarely do drugs. It was highly offensive. Their logic was "how can you be so poor if you’re such a good artist?"
Clown says that good artists get paid badly and bad artists get paid well. I think this is just the universe's sense of humour. His work is an endless rehearsal for a piece of theatre or performance that potentially will never happen. The end result as some kind of a pretext for the process of being.
I live in a five hundred person town in the countryside in Spain and I can't drive. I spend all day, every day making watercolours now. These days I only leave my house to find new fragments to use. Im "going to buy bread", but really I’m hunting for shapes, colours, solutions, some stupid any-thing to juxtapose against something else, on top, under. I look for the perfect twisted old olive tree whose form converts into the abstract shape that will solve a painting. The SpongeBob Square pants mesh baby visor suction cupped to the inside of a minivan window. I had an orgasm the other day and precisely at that moment an image of a fluffy sheep exploded into my head and I ran to paint the sheep, solving a problem.
My girlfriend and I just bought a house in tiny village of 58 people. I’m waiting for the deal to go through. Everything is in flux. My studio is the dining room table. The wind is blowing. Everything is always in flux.
Clown says God rested on Sunday. Clown says that children don’t rest, and neither does he, full-time, they and he are always stimulated, open. This seems unbearable to him. Would he rather be a normal person? Too bad. He is a child. A man-baby.
Clown spends time observing gestures in the world and copying them, as would a child, or a complex bird, thus constructing particular moves or notes in his choreography, which are longer constructions of many moves and styles, copied, practiced, and perfected.
Clown protects his values at all costs, to the chagrin of even himself.
I very much relate to him. Well, less in his words than in his actions. His intentions. His values. I am obsessed with the pleasure of existing inside a channel of a pure non-stop working. I cannot believe how infinitely lucky I am to be an artist. I cant tell if he is pleased about this or not. Maybe hes folding under the chaos.
Either way, he and I and even you are stuck here, as this. Some people enjoy spending their lives on an island, others do not.
— Andrew Birk
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