The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to the gallery walk scheduled for June 2-3, 2023 in the Charlottenburg neighborhood in Berlin, Germany.
Known as the “Charlotten Walk,” the two days will see more than 40 galleries – from the established to the up-and-coming – open their doors to all. Hours for Friday, June 2, are 6pm to 9pm, and on Saturday, June 3, from 12 noon to 6pm.
|The Charlottenburg neighborhood in Berlin is home to one of the most active and fastest-growing gallery scenes in Germany, making for an exciting locale for contemporary art. Participating galleries include Kornfeld Galerie, Studio 4 Berlin, Galerie Michael Haas, Galerie Akonzept, TVD Art, Mommsen 35, and Zilberman.
In the last few years, an ever increasing number of galleries have moved to the neighborhood from other parts of the city, such as from the Potsdamer Strasse, and from other cities such as Hamburg and Köln.
The Charlotten Walk gallery tour was created in 2018 by Artbutler. Sussanne Burmehl took the helm in 2022.
While the Carl Kruse Arts Blog does not have a specific tour planned for the Charlotten Walk it encourages all to explore on their own the exciting offerings in contemporary art open to the public and free of charge.
A unique phenomenon emerged in the heart of Berlin in the nineteenth century: a creative center for fashion and ready-made clothing. Hundreds of garment companies were established, which manufactured modern wear and developed new designs that were sold throughout Germany, and the world. The industry reached the height of its success in the 1920s. Freed from corsets, sophisticated women of the time dressed in the popular “Berlin Chic” sold by Valentin Manheimer, Herrmann Gerson, and the Wertheim department stores. Berlin’s fashion industry became a global, highly desired brand. Fashion and the vibrant art scene in Berlin stimulated creativity. Bauhaus architects influenced the making of simple and effective fashion designs, and composers, actors and directors of popular musicals and films turned fashionable themes into everyday cultural items. Berlin’s fashion industry was as popular and lucrative as Paris Couture, and Jewish fashion designers were regarded as trendsetters for new styles in Europe.
However, after 1933, most Jewish clothing industrialists, shop owners, and fashion designers were confronted with the hatred and violence of Hitler’s Third Reich. In 1836, Hausvogteiplatz in the center of Berlin, had become the established center of the German fashion industry. Now it was targeted by the Nazis. Many Jewish companies were “Aryanized” while their owners were robbed, displaced, and murdered. Under new Aryan management, these newly created firms produced conservative clothing that represented an entirely different image of women. In November 1939, Nazi stormtroopers raided hundreds of Jewish companies and shops all over Germany, particularly in Berlin. That was the end of more than 100 years of creative fashion and Jewish design in the city. Of the more than 2800 Berlin fashion companies in 1930, none was left in 1939. Until today, there is still no official recognition by the German fashion industry of their active part in the confiscation of Jewish companies starting in 1933. Some Jewish fashion designers, originally from Berlin who managed to escape, launched successful careers in the USA.
Join us on May 10, 2023 at 6:30pm at the Inizio restaurant, Fasanenstr. 77 in Berlin as Uwe discusses his book. There will be a brief presentation, followed by a Q &A session and then complimentary wine, soft drinks and appetizers for all. There will be a cash bar and full restaurant menu as well.
Uweis an author and journalist residing in Berlin and London. He has worked for the international PEN association of writers, and as a journalist and producer for PBS and CBS in New York. He is the author of four history books about the Third Reich, numerous essays, and articles in the United Kingdom and Germany. His work has also appeared on Radio 4 and BBC. Recent lectures at Berkeley, Yad Vashem-Jerusalem, Florida JCC, Milwaukee, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington and at the FIT New York.
Uwe Westphal
I personally look forwarding to welcoming all followers of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog at Inizio at what will be a special evening.
===================
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepaege. Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com The blog’s last article was on Outsider Art. Another Carl Kruse Blog is at this link.
Sometime in the 1940s, the artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term “Art Brut” which roughly translates as “Raw art”; un-cooked and close to the initial mood of creation; or, the closest representation of the individual’s creative urge before the influence of learning. Much of Modernist art had been playing with this theme and had been courageously trying to get over the hump of earlier academic training, or taking steps to create a new one. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, questions of style and representation were caught between all those -isms that populate that fertile period. Picasso speaks about how he learned to see like a child; ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, in their only publication, showed an enthusiasm for “naïve” forms of folk art; Dadaism made its point of no-point while Surrealism automatism was nearing the surface.
The nineteenth-century academic artistic standards that had provoked rebellions lived on through those initial rebellions. Authority presumes opposition, and it is because of its relative stability that it provides an energetic ground for creation. The nineteenth-century judges of “fit aesthetics” provided a proven ground of what later artists could rebuff, and gave them an idea of what subject and style would not only shock public taste, but were still rude, still waiting to be expressed – so, in a sense, they lived on through opposition. When Picasso reviewed his plan for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, he decided to nullify any sense of perspective and model the faces on African masks, giving the audience those sharp, cutting glares of an art form that had found the traditional Western forms of representation wanting; perception had been altered from the previous century, so they say, but in that painting, what was also being expressed? Rebellion, alteration, vigor of the artist, an intellectual/cultural conversation about expression? A want of recognition?
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
The keyword for the purpose of this essay is “found”. Most Modernist artists and the -isms all knew the traditional forms and were searching far afield to find new expressions. What these breaks and rebellions symbolize is a complex of ideas about aesthetics within a tradition. Modernism was working on two fronts in order to change perception, one through freeing the visible expression and the other through forcing reflection in how we perceive – and they knew what the critic, the art enthusiast, already knew or expected. Mainstream modernism was a cultural duel, and Art historians are quite confident in their abilities to see the rise and fall.
“Art Brut”, or what has been called “Outsider Art”, was (still is?), an art form that has not “found” anything in any artistic canon wanting because it has not supposedly been influenced by culture. Dubuffet was particularly interested in a psychiatric study by Hanz Prinzhorn: Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). In the study, Prinzhorn studied ten, of what he called, “schizophrenic Masters”. Most of the subjects displayed a spontaneous irruption of artistic delight and seemed to present an image of “raw” feeling in the treatment of their craft. Many of the Masters had led usual working lives before being hospitalized for the sudden onset of schizophrenic tendencies – this study of Prinzhorn was also the birth of “psychiatric art”, which would later result in Art therapy.
It was not only the art that came out of the psychiatric ward that interested Dubuffet. He also took an interest in the drawings of children, and of spiritualists and hermits. What binds these artists in Dubuffet’s eyes is their unassuming desire to create, their lack of concern for reward or appreciation, and their supposed lack of cultural knowledge and artistic tradition – this last reason is harder to qualify. All these variables cause hesitation, planning, and a degree of self-consciousness that inhibits the initial impulse and follow-through – two things that, by the 1940s, Dubuffet desired more than carrying on the Modernist experiments.
Paris-Montparnasse, Jean Dubuffet, 1961
These “works from solitude” were for Dubuffet an analgesic. To stand a piece of “Art Brut” beside any work of “cultural” art was to see the paling of society; the intuitive power and unabashed presence of Art Brut next to a cultural composition shallowly vying for our attention. Excited and enthused by his discoveries, an art form that had not been swallowed by culture and thus choking off its genuine expression, Dubuffet set up the ‘Compagnie de l’Art Brut’ with leading Surrealist André Breton. The aim was to exhibit, discover, and document, the plains of outsider art. The movement lasted three years before being turned into a more commercially viable ‘Collection de l’Art Brut’.
Dubuffet himself, as you would expect, turned to a style of painting that was more simplistic, supposedly less concerned with intellectual matters, though how he spoke about his art remained intellectually refined. Did Dubuffet kill the authenticity he felt was in Art Brut by championing it, studying it, and trying to embody it? Is the one-sidedness of his argument convincing: culture, academic artistic culture (even with Modernist influence) = stifling, pretentious vs. art created outside these boundaries, at the expense of experience, in the case of the child, or at the expense of sanity = authentic. The authentic would never appear so without its other half.
Art Brut leaves the question of authenticity unanswered, and it is fine that it does: antipathies and sympathies drive the artist along. When the question of authenticity arises, the artist often will go “out of the common way” to bring something new into a culture. How does it sit when it is established? Must authenticity mercilessly create and destroy itself to be renewed? It’s true, the Art Brut of August Netter, or Adolf Wölfli, is fascinating and brilliant, and perhaps there is something to be gleaned: the abandonment of pretension, the utter giving up of one’s body to expression, the delight of play. What Dubuffet found so vital in Art Brut was the spirit and the necessity of art, something akin to what we feel finding in our heritage the caves of Altamira and Lascaux.
========== The Carl Ktuse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com The blog’s last post was on Comic Kids. Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include Thoughts on Science Fiction, the Street Art of Insane 51, and the Art of Atari. A Carl Kruse Blog on technology and internet culture is here.
It was back in 2018 that Reed and Kat Horth had an idea born from their desire to give back to kids in Miami’s under-served communities in the best way they knew how…with art. They started teaching a weekly comic and cartoon illustration class for children at Big Brothers Big Sisters Miami. Soon, they affectionately began referring to the kids as our “babies.” Teaching them on Thursdays quickly became their favorite day of the week. They chose comic illustration because Reed had fallen in love with art and reading as a child through Marvel and DC Comics. Powerful messages of “misfits” overcoming odds helped him through his parents’ divorce and led him ultimately to a career in art. If he could do it, he thought, so could other kids in similar circumstances.
The impact and messaging from the class made Reed and Kat realize that teaching kids to draw comics and cartoons resonated with them. This needed to be bigger they thought. And from there, Comic Kids was born.
Comic Kids became a formal non-profit just before the Miami schools went online in March of 2020. Quickly, the pandemic showed that the best way to reach vulnerable communities was through virtual learning. Since then, Comic Kids has taught thousands of children how to draw over 250 different comic and cartoon characters, interweaving books and graphic novels into their classes.
In the fall of 2022, Comic Kids was contacted by NBC’s Kelly Clarkson Show regarding a segment they produce called “Rad Humans.” This production features “Mom and Pops” who are weaving goodness into their communities. Comic Kids resonated with them.
On January 30th 2023, Comic Kids appeared on the show, which can be viewed here.
Kat and Reed – Rad Humans.
We have previously written about Comic Kids and Reed and Kat’s beautiful work and are happy to see their wonderful efforts honored by a major media outlet.
The mist has lifted, and life is back. It is an abyss, a swamp of unknowing and learning how to live without the glistening sheen of adrenaline that glosses over your eyes for the weeks and days preceding and encompassing a show. You lie flat, and all appears flat. Everything reminds you of it, and you are reminded of the loss of it. Life is back, and it is clear as day.
My company and I were reminded on the last day of the show that theatre is ‘live’, and that that is both the beauty and the curse of it. Its liveness is what can make it so much greater than any other acting form, and yet it is also its downfall – while simultaneously, if it is indeed great, it will be remembered, it must yet always live within the mind of its beholder, never to be looked upon again, and so its greatness dies a death after the final bow.
The stage is effortlessly alive. It is a space to breathe and swim in, and its heart is palpable, touchable, unlike the screen. I love film, and television, but theatre is a beast apart from these things. How wonderful to be able to reach out and brush the leg of the actor as they scurry in the round, to smell their skin and feel their breath on you as they pant and sweat and scream and whisper. How is it than an art so old can be breathed into and brought back to light out of the fetid dust it has oftentimes become. Theatre is a difficult place, a breeding ground for ham and cringe and fault. It demands much, and, if committed to, its reward is jubilance and a drug-like high. Laziness is all too obvious, all too noticeable on a stage. One cannot hide, one cannot be tired, one cannot be human, when one acts in the theatre. A missed beat hangs like a rotting beam of wood. A forgotten prop is befitted with mime, and it breaks the mind of the observer in half, letting reality seep through like worms pushing through a rain-covered mud. A bored actor stood in the corner of a stage stands out like a pustule, bringing all eyes to their ugly treason. There is no room for mediocrity in theatre, and yet mediocre theatre is made, making the art harder and harder to work within. One bad song can be skipped. But a bad play repulses like a disease. An hour trudges by as boots through a waterlogged field. An uncomfortable chair takes the attention’s precedence over the action afore the onlooker. This is why the inevitable end of the run of an astonishing play is so very sad. It is a tragedy that the world must keep turning, and that we can dwell but for a second on a moment so great.
I don’t know what to do with myself. My whole body has come crashing down. My bones feel heavy, and I can barely lift myself. The wild rush of the show run has left me crumpled while, at the time, it made me feel as though I could go on and on and on without stopping. Veins of fire turned ash, now. Still. What a dream it was. You know, I still pinch myself thinking on it. Me? Here? Doing this? I could but wish for others to feel what I have felt during this past week. My mind strays back to the day I was accepted, and then further on to the first night I spent in my home in London, then to the first day of the course, when I walked home teary-eyed. Many a moon that was ago. Today I skip and leap even with my fragile temperament. I am low, but am ready to be lifted high again. How endless the process of a show is. How panicked one becomes when one really realises the show is come upon them after weeks of tough drudgery through lines of text not altogether imaginable until they’re spat on stage. How suddenly it all ends.
Mother Courage and Her Children is an important play. An integral play. It speaks to an audience in a way quite unlike the war films and history books do. Though the adaptation we performed was set in 2080, it harkens to our lives today, to the wars that prevail around and through us, and to the depravity and beauty of our sorry world. My character, Kattrin, was at once the beacon of hope and compassion at the centre of the play, and yet ended the play as the very horror at the root of it, Mother Courage herself. We have all of these things within us. The kindness and softness of a child, and the brutality and violence of a mother who has lived through trauma so profound she knows not what else to be other than tough and sharp and cold. I will be forever thankful to have lived through Brecht’s world, and to have revealed it to others.
I could continue at lengths about theatre and the stage and Brecht’s play itself, but perhaps I should end this piece by speaking on something else. For those who don’t know the dressing room, and for whom its name speaks of secrets and celebrity and mystery, I shall tell you of it now. It is a warm place, filled with the oddity of bodies fueled by nervousness and tiredness and excitability. Bodies naked and clothed, passing around sticks of charcoal to dirty the edges of their faces, bodies coated in thick layers of sweat and grime and cloth. Bodies dancing to music off of a small black speaker, laughing together, hugging, weeping together. Women howling and singing and stretching before they go into the wings around the stage. Women cheering one another, eating together, sharing thoughts and jokes and love and pain. The dressing room is the place in which it all begins. A stage manager comes in and calls the ‘half’. The squirming commences, the jumping about, the endless anxious toilet visits, the swigs of tepid water from old plastic bottles, the hand squeezes, the giggling. A stage manager comes in and calls ‘beginners’. The performers become cool, collected, zoned in. They breathe as one. I leave them, and wish them well. One clasps me by the head and says to me: ‘You are the heartbeat’. I go down, alone, and enter the stage. The audience have not yet arrived. I sit inside the metal frames of the ice cream van in the centre of the room, and become her. The audience file in. Blackness. Silence. The play begins.
Science fiction has striven off its striking position in the world of letters. In the past century, it has evolved tremendously, unexpectedly, and not without its controversies. This transformative potential of SF signals something of its quality; this fiction of the speculative in which speculation can become troubled; a method of projection where the project can become equivocal. After the phases of SF seen in the last century, it has become increasingly difficult to define. There was a time when Heinlein could state: ‘a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might be read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method’. A prosaic line that many SF writers after Heinlein disagreed with, and taking Heinlein’s definition in mind, the points of contention, of diversion, are already there: ‘realistic’, ‘adequate knowledge’, ‘real world’, ‘past and present’, are all terms that SF writers interrogate in significantly perceptive ways. SF is, and continues to be, an open form with a remarkable receptivity for the limits of thought.
SF has been able to divide itself into sub-genres with relative ease, and the cause and impetus behind definition seems no more than a method for categorization, a method of hemming, outlining the richness of its themes, all radiating from the central SF point: Steampunk, Biopunk, Post-apocalyptic, Dying Earth, Space Opera etc. There have been significant and obvious transitions in the last century alone: Pulp SF to the Golden Age, from there to New Wave. With the inventive foundations of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, ‘scientification’ in a narrativized romance could be more than just entertainment. The composition of artistic vision and scientific fact was felt to be, in the words of Hugo Gernsback, publisher of the first US SF magazine, “instructive […] They supple knowledge…in a very palatable form…New adventures pictured for us in the science fiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow”. And, possibly not what Gernsback had in mind, a story by J.G. Ballard still has this message, even if the story’s outcome is a damning one.
It is the SF form, then, that supplies this distinct experience: an instructive sense of wonder. It is remarkable that it should so considering the essential mechanism of alienation which SF often employs. A SF novel can confirm a reality far distant from our own, but still display the essential experience of humanity – if it didn’t, if some mirror did not reflect our self, our society, our grasp of knowledge, then it would make for trying reading. It may be, arguably, able to reach a sense of clarity on being so far removed from daily experience. As with all literature, it has that unique quality of depicting, simulating, ideas, only SF has the extended metaphor of scientific speculation as an aid. For example, looking at the heads of the ‘Golden Age’, Heinlein, Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, there are particular themes that emerge from each: Libertarianism, the wonder of science, and a return of spiritualism which had been neglected during the Gernsback years. SF proved equal to take the burden of these ideas comfortably.
The question emerges: why write in the SF form if you are interested, for example, as Heinlein was, in libertarianism? Of course, Heinlein was free to choose, and being a scientist himself, it makes sense, but not focusing on Heinlein explicitly makes it an ambiguous question to answer. Literary fiction, from the early twentieth century, and still into the period in which Heinlein began writing, had been under the tension of Modernism, and the form of the novel had been shown to be amenable to experimentation. We can think of Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The Modernist fascination with the experience of Being, and the ambiguity of life, is, in some ways diametrically opposite to the sharp-cut mission of science. It is precisely because form and content could be fashioned with clarity, and with something analogous to the ‘scientific method’ that one would pen a SF novel. SF, at least during the Golden Age, could distill ideas into a manageable form, could extrapolate principles from what they knew then, and use the novel as an informed exploration. It was operating on a larger scale than the minute subtleties sought by other fictions.
It is not only this clarity of style and content that the earlier SF writers employed; they were also alerting readers to another facet of experience: our relationship with technology. Much of SF points to the fact that, not only is our relationship to experience mediated by technology, but a large part of how we gain access, understanding, and control of ourselves and our environment, is through technology. It is the stuff that coheres our societies, and enables our scientific ambitions to understand the universe. The SF interest in an object, a ‘gizmo’, especially during the Golden Age and before, can be measured by its utility for humanity, and by this the reader can infer a certain outlook on how the world is perceived, felt to function. The New Wave transition in SF, around the 60s, found that there was another facet to explore in our relationship to technology, one not so optimistic.
New Wave Writers were looking back on the Modernist tradition and wondering how to bring experimentation into the form and content of SF. It was felt as a less gripping, more pretentious, age of SF, but it did give space for a certain sensitivity to break through into the SF channel; themes and explorations awaking to a more anxious note would be found in a writer like Philip K. Dick; the subtle complexities of social classes were explored in writers like Samuel Delaney and Ursula Le Guin; each, in their turn, awake to the fundamental ambiguity of humanity’s position in the universe. After the dust of experimentation settled, even a Golden Age writer like Isaac Asimov made use of this shift in sensitivity, finding space to write about a menage-a-trois and homo-eroticism where before sexuality featured little in his novels. There is no doubt that New Wave help introduce what used to be called the ‘soft sciences’ into SF: psychology, sociology, political science and history. It is not that the foundations of SF were forgotten, but that they were complicated; no longer did the scientific method seem useful. Understanding that technology is an extension of human consciousness, and that the schools of psychology and sociology had expanded rigorously, rendered new cause to engage with this relationship between the self and technology.
Where this technology came from, how it was and could be used, became of interest. The fuel of the 60’s ‘consciousness expanding’ culture definitely played a part in SF’s response to its legacy. It gave them the critical ability to look back and re-work older themes, contemplate with the time past how SF could be a pertinent form of writing for the world that had seen a man on the moon, and was growing increasingly bureaucratic and technologically driven. By pushing the boundaries of what could be considered SF in a similar way that Modernism pushed the boundaries of what could be considered literary fiction, New Wave also opened a space for concern; concerns about human delusions, stupidity, and the myth of human superiority. This pessimism was a first step into a more rounded SF, once the furore of New Wave died down.
But much more was happening here, and looking closely, the significant shift, or tension, of New Wave appears to be only a way-station on the journey of speculation, of sense-making, and the sense of wonder over the latter. What part of SF one prefers shouldn’t cloud the judgment on its movement – whether how much something ‘progresses’, or merely changes, means it has evolved for the better is difficult to discern; any controversy is only highlighting the tension in the shift. SF was, and continues to be, an open endeavour of thought. What can be discerned in SF, especially in the SF of the last century, is a stable form of conception that has some baring, some pertinence, to our cultural milieu. It is tempting to read its pattern throughout the last century as a kind of undercurrent to history – one that is aware of the subtle shifts in consciousness, shifts in attitudes towards human limitations. The sense of wonder that lingers throughout, perhaps dipping now and then, but remaining a stalwart agent of its prose, is more than wonder for wonder’s sake – a strange wonder that can be both exciting and terrifying, ambiguous and painfully clear; a multi-form conduit for the myriad conceptions SF attempts to reveal.
==================
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage. Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other articles by Fraser Hibbitt include the Art of Insane51, Vangelis, and the Art of Atari| An author beloved by the blog, who also ventured into the fantastical, was Borges.
The fundamental reality of creation is solitude. This is what Lecoq tells us, and, when I turned around and faced the audience, clothed with my red nose for the first time, I did indeed feel very alone.
We had started doing clown the week before, but we only have one session a week with our Lecoq tutor, Ally Cologna, who had trained with Lecoq before his death in 1999. Clowning, as interpreted by French theater practitioner Jacques Lecoq, involves the smallest mask available to the actor: the little red nose, and normally comes last in a series of other more obscuring masks, including larval and expressive masks. Due to its smallness and thus its tendency to expose the actor beneath it, the red nose is often seen as the most challenging mask of all.
Jacques Lecoq
The week prior to my own attempt at clown, Ally had told us that we were to go up one at a time and complete a few basic tasks. The first was to walk around the space, without the red nose on, during which time a member of the audience would come up to the space and mimic our walk as best they could. Once a rhythm had been negotiated between actor and mimicker, the actor would turn round and watch their comrade’s impression of the walk. Then, when the time was right, the actor would go behind the mimicker and mimic their impression of their own walk. After this, the mimicker would leave the space and the actor was to continue walking in the particular fashion that had been observed by the mimicker in order to receive and experience the sensation of interpreting another’s perspective of their personal movement patterns.
Eventually, the actor would be instructed by Ally to walk as ‘themselves’ once more. For the actor in the space, discovering the unexpected picture which had been painted of them by the mimicker was often a cause for hilarity and a great method to release tension; for myself, the mere presence of a fellow actor in the space prior to entering into this new phase of our acting journey – clown – reassured me quite. Lecoq calls this practice ‘ways of walking’ and states that it can help the student to find their own characteristic walk which is a natural development from their own personal way of walking, not a forced comic walk which is artificially built from nothing. Lecoq also works with ‘forbidden gestures’, those which are not normally permitted for adults and which we quell and crush deep within our childhood so as to be more societally respected and, perhaps, ‘normal’, if there were such a thing. Lecoq suggests that the psychologically freeing nature of this work, whereby the actor will hopefully find himself much more open, less defensive, and more receptive, will allow the actor to find his ‘primary clown’, which, as Nathalie Ellis-Einhorn describes it, might be an access to ‘childish joy, curiosity and vulnerability to the world, [with the knowledge that] children are also spiteful’ (from her thesis: I.M. L.O.S.T! a show about clowns). The clown might be innocent and unguarded in his presence, but this does not mean that he is always kind or sympathetic to both his Monsieur Loyal or the other clowns which might join him in the space. This statement should not be interpreted insidiously, as, according to Lecoq, ‘the clown needs no conflict because he is in a permanent state of conflict, notably with himself’. Rather than making the clown inauthentically selfish or impudent, this inner conflict results from a desperate need for attention and love which might materialize in the clown blaming others for his ‘flops’ in order to gain praise for his own behavior, but this is not inherently egocentric or insolent conduct that comes from a protective societal mask.
After the walking exercise, Ally would instruct the actor in the space to turn around and put their red nose on. Ally was clear that neither the red nose nor the act of clowning must be referred to in the duration of the actor’s clowning practice, or else the illusion of the clown be broken. I suppose this makes sense; we do not usually refer to the characters we embody on stage, lest the Fourth Wall be irreparably shattered. It might make even MORE sense with a clown; as a clown is itself ‘the person underneath, stripped bare for us all to see’ (Lecoq, The Moving Body, p. 143), it makes sense that the person should not refer to their clown in case they become even insensitive to this vulnerable, exposed part of themselves, which might have been previously unseen by their colleagues. I don’t know. I’m merely hypothesizing.
My colleagues and I saw a few different clowns on the first day of our clown training. It is wonderful to watch someone grapple with the candidness and the verity that the red nose offers them, but this is a task that is sometimes too much for the actor to handle, at least on the first try. In fact, rather a large proportion of those first clowns ‘telephoned’, either a little or, God forbid, a hell of a lot. ‘Telephoning’ in clown occurs when the clown deliberately leads himself down a path of reactions and actions rather than being ‘entirely without defense…[and] always [] in a state of reaction and surprise’ as Lecoq encourages. If the clowns begins preceding his own intentions, one might say that the actor clowning had begun to play a role, or put on a coat, as opposed to being innocent and open to the possibilities of the moment. I ‘telephoned’ a few times during my own turn at clown, I think. But I’ll get on to that.
Students at the L’ecole Internationale de Theatre de Jacque Lecoq find their clown.
I want to comment for a moment on the character that our teacher Ally evolved into when she was provoking our clowns. She called it ‘Madame Provocateur’ after ‘Monsieur Loyal’ of circus and clowning tradition, otherwise known as the ringmaster or ringleader. During many difficult moments for my colleagues’ first clownings, ‘Madame Provocateur’ was capable of eliciting brilliantly authentic and, often, hilarious responses and actions out of the unseasoned young clowns before her. She was oftentimes brash, offensive, and extreme in her berating of the clowns, but one never felt unsafe or at all nervous in her presence due to the fact that Ally herself was unable to keep a completely straight face as she scolded the pitiful clowns on stage. Ally is a phenomenal teacher, and I shall surely miss her when the time comes for me to finish my training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
I went up to clown during our second lesson of clowning with Ally. My walk, as displayed lovingly by my colleague, was rather more ‘sexy’ than I had previously believed. I was rather sure that I had more of a swagger, but I took on the exaggerated version of my walk produced by my colleague and strolled around with it for a while before shaking it off and going to put on my nose. I had thought fleetingly about what my clown might be and had concluded that it was likely going to be quite a grotesque or obnoxious clown, perhaps speaking back to Madame Provocateur or being generally unpleasant and profane (from a most unguarded state, of course). But what I discovered that day was sadness, and loneliness, and an inability to understand why my audience was laughing at me. I say this not to overemphasise the freedom that I found in my clown, for my clown was not entirely candid; as I said, I’m certain that I did ‘telephone’ a few times, for it is oddly difficult not to react defensively to some of the comments thrown towards one by Madame Provocateur. However, the sympathy with which my clown was received by the audience made me feel so very safe, safe enough that I was not afraid to feel sad and misunderstood and equally unafraid to display my desperation to be loved. How much I wanted to be loved and seen by my colleagues. How I wanted them to watch me and smile with me and love me. I suppose this clown is much like some personas which I indulge in in my personal life. My twin sister and I still continue the role-playing which we started when we were much younger, which involves myself as the younger, dumber, and more endearing character and my sister as the character of authority and tyranny. All the bravado and crudeness of my habitual social mask were stripped away by my clown, and all that was left was a timid, pitiful little clown who thought little of themselves. I wonder how I did not see this coming. My colleagues commented that they had not expected such a clown from me either and that they believed that they had now seen a side of me which they had only spotted in glimpses prior to then.
I am excited to see where I can go with my clown, but I sometimes fear that I will begin to orchestrate my clown’s reactions and tendencies should I get too comfortable with how my first clown was received by my audience. The novelty of my first clown lent itself well to honesty and openness, but even in my second attempt at clowning I found myself ‘telephoning’ a little more than I had the first time. In my third attempt, I found it difficult to put words into my clown’s feelings, and ended up being rather too silent and ‘meek’ compared to the other clowns, who readily answered Madame Provocateur’s provocations.
Despite my uncertainty about how this side of myself came to be that which lent itself to my clown, I believe that I know this ‘clown’ very well. It is that part of my being which believes that I am quite useless, however hard I try, and it indeed does try hard! Perhaps clowning is the safest place wherein I can explore this darkness and melancholy, for the clown mask enables one to experience a conflict of self in a way that does not linger on into the rest of one’s day, or week, or month. Lecoq speaks of the difficulty that might arise when exploring these intimate depths of emotion:
‘The student must be prevented from becoming too caught up in playing their clown, since it is the dramatic territory which brings them into closest contact with their own selves.’
And, importantly, that:
‘[T]he clown should never be hurtful for the actor.’
I wish that I could comfort my clown and tell it that it is worthy of the love it desires so intensely from its audience. But equally, I wish to exploit and indulge in the emotions that the clown allows me to experience while eliciting laughter and pitiful sighs and groans from the audience, because these small indications of validation might help me to understand that I, and this particular aspect of my being, are fundamentally ridiculous, and that this part of me is merely an essential part of what it is to be human.
(All quotations described as coming from Jacques Lecoq are from the book ‘The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre’, trans. David Bradby, Methuen, 2000, of which the original text, ‘Le Corps Poétique’, was published in 1997 by Actes Sud-Papiers.)
Ahoy art friends, especially those in South Florida. A college friend has loaned 16 ancient artifacts from his private collection to pair with 16 works of modern artists in an exhibit called “Justified + Ancient.” In this exhibit, contemporary artists display their work side by side with ancient pieces, dating from 3000 B.C.E to the 19th century, in an exploration of what might make art timeless. The exhibit runs from November 1-17, 2022 at the Mara Art Studio and Gallery, 421 Fifth Street, Suite A, in Sarasota, Florida.
My friend is interested in continuing the exhibit to other galleries, museums or art fairs and I would be super grateful for any contacts or suggestions that could help him continue the exhibit. Reach out at carl AT carlkruse DOT com.
Yours in art, Carl Kruse =================== The Carl Kruse Arts Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.net Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com The blog’s last post was Zeus in Olympia. Other exhibits covered by the blog include those of Yury Kharchenko and Adele Schwab.
In the northwest of the Peloponnese there is a small village of about 150 inhabitants called Elis, which retains vestiges (even in its modern buildings) of its ancient significance.
The city was once the most important in the region, controlling Olympia, where the Olympic Games were held every four years, in honor of Zeus. The games were organized by Elis, which led to prestige and wealth, despite being more distant than another important city, Pisa, which tried, from time to time, to take over the management of the games, succeeding for short periods.
The city that controlled Olympia, with the attached sacred places, managed the flow of travelers and pilgrims who came on the occasion of the games or to visit the great temple dedicated to Zeus, with its gigantic statue, the work of the great Athenian sculptor/architect Phidias. The statue of Zeus in Olympia, which took about three years of work to complete, probably between 436 and 433 BC, was included in the ranking of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Artist rendition of the statue of Zeus in a 16th century print
It was reportedly made of gold and ivory (chryselephantine), a terrific representation of Zeus, to which pilgrims came from all over the Mediterranean to pay homage, and then imitated in subsequent representations of the god both in Greek and Roman art, even reproduced on coins and pottery. For about eight hundred years the magnificent statue amazed those who came to Olympia for reasons of worship or to watch the games.
When Phidias was called to Olympia to make the largest statue in honor of a god, he was already well-known for having supervised the construction of the Parthenon in Athens and for the creation the gigantic statue of the patron goddess of the city, Athena.
In Olympia the temple dedicated to Zeus soon became the best-known place of worship in the ancient world. Imposing in its dimensions (64.2 x24.6 meters x 20 high), the sanctuary is rich in sculptural decorations, in pediments and metopes, which perhaps are the work of a single artist, whose name has not been passed down. The scenes are inspired by various myths: the twelve labors of Hercules, the race with the chariots of Pelops and Oinomaos, a battle between centaurs, and include a majestic statue of Apollo.
After the inauguration of the statue of Athena Parthènos, Phidias was the artist chosen to create the work that would surpass any other of its kind in grandeur. The sculptor moved to Olympia, where a laboratory was made available to him, of which archaeological evidence remains, even a cup (or perhaps a wine jug) with the inscription “I belong to Phidias”. In the laboratory were found some ivory tools, awls, hammers, and lead sheets, as well as the terracotta matrices used to model the gold sheets of which the robe was made, adorned with drawings of lilies in glass paste and stones.
Phidias’ laboratory in Olympia
The statue of the divinity, kept in the cell, represented for the Greeks the heart of the sanctuary. When the doors of the temple were opened, the god (or goddess) appears to the faithful . From this central position, it can attend the ceremonies in its honor and appreciate the offerings of the faithful.
It is difficult to imagine the effect that the large statue of Zeus, 12 meters high, with the god seated on a majestic throne would have: the warm white of ivory and the sparkle of gold probably left the faithful speechless, who certainly could not help feel the power of the divine representation.
Phidias creates a chryselephantine statue: ivory, used for the body and face of Zeus, and hammered gold foils for the robe, scepter and parts of the Nike (victory), straight from the right hand of the god. Other materials, such as silver, copper, glass paste, ebony are used for the decorative details and also for the precious throne, adorned with relief figures from mythology (Achilles, the Amazons, Theseus) and history (the battle of Salamis).
Reconstruction of the statue’s arrangement in the temple
The whole composition — Zeus, the throne and the footstool — rests on a black marble base, decorated with scenes from the birth of Aphrodite, which bears the artist’s signature: “Phidias, son of Charmis, an Athenian, He made me”.
Of that wonderful work, known throughout the ancient world, only the literary descriptions remain, such as that of the Greek geographer Pausanias:
“The god, made of gold and ivory, is seated on the throne. On his head is a crown worked in the shape of olive branches. In his right hand he holds a Nike, also a chryselephantine, with a bandage and, on his head, a crown. In the left hand of the god is a scepter adorned with all kinds of metal, and the bird that rests on the scepter is the eagle. The shoes of the god are also golden and so is the mantle. Figurines of animals and lily flowers are embroidered on the mantle. ”
The statue of Zeus in an illustration by Quatremère de Quincy
The statue remained in its place for about eight hundred years, even if the Roman emperor Caligula, at the beginning of the first century AD, did everything to bring it to Rome, without success. According to Suetonius, a thunderous laugh froze the workers who were tasked with removing the statue, who then fell from the scaffolding around the statue and gave up the undertaking. Over the centuries, individuals and city-states offered their gifts to Zeus, which made Olympia rich, not only in economic terms, but also in art and culture.
All this ends with the Roman emperor Theodosius I (347-395 CE), who banned pagan worship practices, including the Olympics. In 393 CE, the last Panhellenic games are played, after about a millennium of tradition, for a total of 293 competitions.
The sanctuary fell into disrepair and was then set on fire, by order of Theodosius II, who in 435 AD ordered the destruction of all pagan temples still standing.
The statue of Zeus follows a different fate, although not certain: perhaps it is brought to Constantinople by a high Byzantine official, Lauso, who keeps it in his palace along with many other pagan works of art. In 475 a fire devoured that building along with the entire collection.
Other sources speak of an earthquake or tsunami that destroyed the place where the statue was kept, perhaps in the fifth or sixth century AD.
It is worthwhile, as a closing note, to tell what happened to the great Phidias.
The sculptor was the greatest exponent of classical Greek art, the one that best expressed the cultural and aesthetic ideal of the age of Pericles. Although his works are known mostly through copies or literary descriptions, no one has ever doubted the fundamental importance of Phidias in the history of Greek art.
Alas, while alive he was subjected to personal attacks, intended to discredit Pericles. Some say that Phidias stole part of the gold destined for the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthènos, but the accusation is unfounded: the sculptor himself had the gold sheets disassembled and weighed, which corresponded to the exact quantity received. Since he was not a thief, another accusation must be found: impiety. How did the sculptor dare to portray himself and his friend Pericles on the shield of the goddess Athena?
He ends up in prison in Athens, where he dies after about a year, perhaps of illness or perhaps poisoned. According to other sources, he escaped, or was exiled, to Olympia, where he died. However, his fame and his name live on. Perhaps he too would be amazed to know that, 2,500 years later, we still talk about his greatness.
They are curled and strewn and spread and sprawled, as though they were dead.
But they are not.
Some breathe shallowly, quickly, as if their hearts fluttered about like moths.
Some breathe deeply, forcing air bull-like through their noses.
Others are almost inaudible, but, if you look closely, you will see their bodies heaving up and down, up and down, up and down.
These are the bodies of actors, and they are about to become animals.
A woman, sitting in the corner of the room with a notepad, begins counting down from ten. The actors start shuffling about in their sleep, yawning, groaning, growling, stretching. The woman calls out:
“One.”
The bodies spring up, and they begin to move. Each is a different animal, going about in the space unbeknownst to one another, acting as if isolated in their separate habitats. A body hangs from the ballet bar, chewing slowly: she is a sloth. Another rests on its back, fondling a ball on its chest and squeaking at intervals: he is an otter. Another prowls about, his shoulders rising above his head, his paws padding heavily, yet gracefully, into the sprung grey floor: he is a puma.
I am a gorilla. A silverback eastern mountain gorilla, one of the two subspecies of mountain gorilla known to exist. I grunt softly, and belch. I crawl around quadrupedally, resting my weight on my fists and keeping my lower body close to the ground so as to maintain the arch in my back. My buttocks are stuck out, and I collapse into them when I find a feeding place. My eyes do not dart, for I am considered, and controlled in my primate-hood. I need not rush, for I hold my place in the group without effort, without arrogance. I am a leader without raising a fist.
Save when I am threatened.
The woman plays a track on her phone. Sirens begin resounding around the four walls. The animals in the room begin to panic, except for those too slow to do so (I speak of the sloth and the slow loris). Big cats ready themselves to pounce; a giraffe and an orynx start to prance about in terror on their dainty hooves; a meerkat scurries away back to her burrow; two penguins begin honking and waving their beaks around in distress; the slow loris raises her arms above her head, for she has poisonous glands in her armpits.
Channeling Your Inner Animal
I begin my ritualized charge; hastening hooting, symbolic feeding, getting up on my hind legs and lurching forwards bipedally, throwing plants, beating my chest, doing one-legged kicks, running quadrupedally (but sideways), slapping and thrashing vegetation, and whacking the ground with my palms. My hooting turns into screeching and roaring, and I throw myself around the space, expanding my chest and attempting to intimidate whatever was causing the ruckus.
The woman turns the sound off and replaces it with the sounds of birds singing and rustling leaves, perhaps those of a rainforest. I do not think. I see leaves, leaves which I know will taste good, and I eat them. I sit unselfconsciously, my belly protruding and my legs open, revealing myself. I do not think; instinct rules me.
The woman speaks: she tells us to return to our nests and settle ourselves into slumber. We do. She counts down from ten;
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
And only humans remain.
I have been studying the silverback mountain gorilla for a few weeks now. When I eat my dinner alone in my apartment, I watch endless documentaries about these great apes. When researching in order to embody an animal, one has to pay close attention to specific movements and characteristics which the animal exerts without effort; it is no use attempting to caricature the animal. We might find a slow loris or a sloth cute, but this is not their intention, and thus should not be our own. A gorilla does not come to standing, albeit quadrupedally not bipedally, in the same way a human does; they roll on their voluptuous buttocks onto their fists and come up this way, whereas we might throw ourselves forwards and push onto the palms of our hands to stand. A gorilla does not take care not to salivate nor to keep their mouths shut as they chew on the stringy stems of bamboo and the pithy interior of the banana tree, so I cannot if I am to truly embody the gorilla in all its intricacies.
There is something remarkably freeing about relenting the militant control that we force upon our bodies in order to be acceptable within human society. This may be obvious, but to be an animal is to be unselfconscious, or at least not self-judging in the way a human is as a result of exterior influences. To be an animal is to feel no guilt for resting, to have no cause for arbitrary stress over the need to work and exert oneself, to have no worry other than in the presence of a predator or if in fear of one’s young’s life. To be an animal and then to emerge from it is to realize the ridiculousness of the human, and yet also to admire it for its odd insecurities and nonsensical ways of being.
Most documentaries I have seen about various primate populations have emphasized their tenderness and their so-called ‘humanistic’ tendencies, and this seemed odd to me; it was as though we would only be able to find empathy and compassion for a being if we could find points of comparison between ourselves and it. I suppose this is normal, though. We are intellectual beings after all. These documentaries did bear some interesting revelations on how life could be, or could have been, had humanity’s aim been geared towards the joy of the many as opposed to the plenty of the few; the black-crested macaque, which lives on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, lives almost entirely without conflict – due to the abundance of food generated by the island’s hot climate and copious monsoon rains, the macaques rarely fight, and almost all disagreements are resolved by kisses and hugs. These primates cuddle each other constantly, and also seem to smile regularly (at least according to our human conception of a ‘smile’).
Animal Studies, as a practice, was created by Lee Strasberg during the twentieth century, with the aim of eventually distilling the ‘pure’ animal practice into something more human, and, ultimately, a character, such as Marlon Brando’s Stanley of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which was famously based on the study of apes. The strength in this practice lies in the precision of the initial practice; by being so accurate and detailed in one’s observation and imitation of an animal, including its thoughts and habitual patterns of life, one might be able to find a similar dedication in the realization of a character and in doing so create a more rounded and human portrayal of said character as opposed to them being simply an extension of oneself.
To end, I would like to suggest that perhaps, in finding the simple joy and beauty of exploring our natural world in such a visceral way, we might also learn to have more compassion for this fragile planet we call our own.
============ The Carl Kruse Arts Blog Homepage. Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com Other articles by Hazel include – Six Viewpoints, Metropolis, and the World of Wearable Art. The SEO folks insist on putting this Carl Kruse link here though this is not a site I am associated with.
