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Clown

Life Itself | Clown | Steps of the Way| Bath | Emmit House

Look closely at the faces of clowns, take the time to ponder their colorful and unconventional physiognomy and you will recognize that every clown possesses his own peculiar personality. Gordon Shepard has long been enamored with clowns and their eccentric abilities to entertain and to occupy the center stage. It will be clear to any viewer of Clown that Gordon's story is not one of grand adventure played out under the big top, but rather one revealed in those smaller events that incrementally tell the tale of a life. Along with performing as a clown in small circuses and other venues since 1969, the septuagenarian artist alsocreates drawings, personalized popsicle-stick boxes, and models of sideshows in his apartment and at an art center for adults with developmental disabilities in San Francisco. After ten years in a mental hospital (a place he denounces as a "concentration camp"), Gordon decided that becoming a clown might ward off the sadness of his many years spent there. To understand Gordy the Clown as an alter-ego of Gordon Shepard would be to misread his performances and his person; his clown persona isnot simply a character but a fundamental part of Gordon's story. Clowns, like jesters and monsters, fools and freaks, embody the notion of the outsider in a socially acceptable role, the entertainer. In one short film shown within Clown, Gordon portrays a mad scientist who seeks to transform a woman in order to give her the face of a monster. Here, Gordon puts a different face on his own sense of difference from those around him. "When the heroes go off the stage," writes the poet Heinrich Heine, "the clowns come on." Clown never views the story of Gordon's life as any sort of heroic struggle but offers a stark and decidedly unsentimentalized portrait of a man who takes to the stage according to his own dictates. "The world's kind of like a circus," Gordon says, as newspaper headlines and television broadcasts, images of parades of protest and parades of tanks make small invasions in the film to remind us of the presence of the more political circuses that surround us. Near the close of the film, Gordon wanders through his own sideshow world and reflects on the central predicament of its denizens. "If I were told I had to be put on display as a freak just because I was a little different, I don't think that would make me too happy." The final image of Gordon in the film shows him in his full clown makeup, wearing a face we now recognize is not so very different from the man beneath it. Anthony Miller Anthony Miller is a writer and critic. He has written for NewCity, Bookforum, Black Clock, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles CityBeat, and other publications.

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