{"id":6028,"date":"2023-04-21T20:17:35","date_gmt":"2023-04-22T00:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=6028"},"modified":"2023-05-03T14:58:31","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T18:58:31","slug":"the-clown-at-midnight-coulrophobia-counterculture-and-the-decadent-pierrot-mask-9-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2023\/04\/21\/the-clown-at-midnight-coulrophobia-counterculture-and-the-decadent-pierrot-mask-9-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Clown at Midnight: Coulrophobia, Counterculture, and the Decadent Pierrot Mask"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Samuel Love<\/span><\/h4>\n

Writing Pyrotechnic Insanitarium <\/em>(1999), <\/em>an apocalyptic account of twentieth-century Western culture, Mark Dery was sure of one thing: \u201call the world hates a clown.\u201d1<\/sup>\u00a0In Dery\u2019s eyes, the clown persistently haunted the waning century, resulting in the appearance of the term \u201ccoulrophobia\u201d\u2014an uncontrollable fear of clowns in popular discourse. The association between clowns and fear was so strong that Robert Bloch, author of 1959 cult classic Psycho<\/em>, stated \u201cthe essence of true horror\u201d was reified in \u201cthe clown, at midnight.\u201d2<\/sup> This fear, Dery argued, resulted from \u201cthe duplicity implied by the frozen grins and false gaiety of clowns\u2026[Their] transparent artificiality constantly directs our attention to what\u2019s behind the mask.\u201d3<\/sup>\u00a0In other words, what provoked this visceral reaction was an uncanny failure of authenticity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dery could have observed the same phenomenon a century earlier. Beginning in the 1880s, the figure of Pierrot, the white-faced clown of the commedia dell\u2019 arte<\/em>, proliferated in the cultural imaginary of European modernism. This renewed interest paralleled the emergence of what would now be considered early coulrophobic reactions.4<\/sup>\u00a0Pierrot became a totem for the artists and writers who were, often self-consciously, considered to be \u201cDecadents\u201d\u2014representatives of a French (or more generally, Western European) artistic movement characterized by its hedonism, pessimism, and provocative defiance of social and moral convention\u2014precisely because of the destabilizing force of the clown\u2019s artifice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 1. Jean-Antoine Watteau. Pierrot<\/em> (Gilles) (1718\u20131719). Oil on canvas. 72.6 x 58.9 in. (184.4 x 149.6 cm). Louvre, Paris. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This allegiance between artist and clown has typically been viewed with suspicion in modernist scholarship. Benjamin Buchloh\u2019s seminal 1981 polemic \u201cFigures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression\u201d evinced a form of conceptual coulrophobia in attacking specifically the utilization of commedia <\/em>imagery as \u201cenforced regression\u2026the clown functions as a social archetype of the artist as an essentially powerless, docile, entertaining figure.\u201d5<\/sup>\u00a0But in Decadent circles and those they influenced, Pierrot recurs for the opposite reasons. For example, the French graphic artist Jules Ch\u00e9ret (1836\u20131932) spoke for his generation in valorizing the Pierrot costume\u2019s \u201cmysteriousness\u2026which disquiets the spectator with [its] expressionless white face\u2026.the hermetic curtain behind which one will try to see the man.\u201d6<\/sup>\u00a0This essay explores how the uncanny inauthenticity of the Pierrot mask has been harnessed from nineteenth-century Decadents to their progenies in the \u201cpyrotechnic insanitarium\u201d of the twentieth, the aesthetes of glam rock who Dery acknowledged as the rightful heirs to Decadent art, to articulate a radical disidentification with contemporary social and moral conventions.7<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The history of the Decadent Pierrot has been extensively elucidated in extant scholarship.8<\/sup>\u00a0Nascent in touring Italian pantomimes of the sixteenth century, the figure of a na\u00efve Pierrot typically falls in love with the wholesome Columbine, who rejects him for the rougher, bolder Harlequin. Resultantly, Pierrot came to stand for a generalized sense of marginalization in Romantic circles in the nineteenth century. Pierrot emerged in the performances of Joseph Grimaldi (1778\u20131837) in London and Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796\u20131846) in Paris, two actors whose tragic personal lives were popularly thought to underpin their interpretations of the suffering clown.9<\/sup>\u00a0The same circles appreciated the work of the French Rococo master Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684\u20131721), whose isolated, mysterious Pierrot in Gilles<\/em> dovetailed with their theatrical tastes (fig. 1). Although art historian Judy Sund has disproven that Watteau\u2019s Pierrots were melancholy ciphers for the artist\u2019s outsider status, this Romantic fiction perhaps took deep root because of pervasive associations between clowns and outsiders.10<\/sup>\u00a0Dery traces the origins of clowns to the disabled, impoverished, or otherwise non-normative performers of antiquity, establishing what he terms the \u201cclown\/freak connection\u201d and the concretization of the clown as \u201cabnormal or nonhuman Other.\u201d11<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The model of the clown inherited by late nineteenth-century Decadents was steeped in the language of suffering, rejection, and abnegation. It is precisely in this milieu that Pierrot\u2019s alienation, rather than divested of meaning through repetition, as Buchloh suggests, was reinvigorated by the extent to which these attributes were embraced to \u00e9pater la bourgeoisie<\/em>. The association between the clown and marginal, transgressive identities inevitably led to the assumption that what was uncannily concealed by the inscrutable mask was a source of danger; as evidenced in Ch\u00e9ret\u2019s enthusiasm for Pierrot, this was duly exploited by Decadent artists.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 2. Jules Ch\u00e9ret. Frontispiece for Pierrot Sceptique<\/em> (1881). Lithograph. In L\u00e9on Hennique and J-.K. Huysmans, Pierrot Sceptique<\/em> (E Rouyvere: Paris, 1881). Courtesy of Internet Archive. Digitizing sponsor University of Toronto.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was Ch\u00e9ret who provided illustrations for Pierrot Sceptique<\/em>, a \u201cpantomime\u201d co-authored by the arch-Decadent J. K. Huysmans, in which Pierrot\u2019s white blouse is symbolically replaced by black evening dress. Huysman\u2019s Pierrot, no longer merely a sufferer, is a murderer and an arsonist in his own right.12<\/sup>\u00a0Ch\u00e9ret\u2019s illustrations belie the interest in coulrophobia that Pierrot\u2019s painted face could trigger. The discrepancy between the clown\u2019s sadism and his fixed, atavistic, curiously apelike grin engenders this reaction (fig. 2). In canvases which have since largely disappeared into private collections, Ch\u00e9ret frequently depicted Pierrot as an airborne wraith menacingly toying with the chorus girls of the newly founded playhouse Moulin Rouge, its windmill a symbol of both the glamor and danger of fin-de-siecle <\/em>Montmartre.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 3. Adolphe Willette. Parce Domine<\/em> (1884). Oil on canvas. Mus\u00e9e de Montmartre, Paris. 78.3 x 153.5 in. (198.9 x 389.9 cm). Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Figure 4. Adolphe Willette. Pierrot Meutrier<\/em> (Pierrot the Murderer)<\/em> (1885\u20131895). Lithograph. 10.9 x 7.4 in. (27.7 x 18.8 cm). National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Creative Commons. Courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, the Moulin Rouge was itself designed by Adolphe Willette, who was known to sign his works as \u201cPierrot.\u201d Willette also painted a mural for the nearby nightclub La Chat Noir that anticipates Mark Dery\u2019s \u201cpyrotechnic insanitarium\u201d in its apocalyptic vision. Titled Parce Domine <\/em>(fig. 3), a Pierrot attired in the same fashion as Ch\u00e9ret\u2019s leads a bacchic procession of naked women, wolves, wraiths, and clowns down from the windmills of Montmartre and into a rapidly disintegrating landscape; the head of Willette\u2019s procession brandishes a smoking pistol before him. Such atavistically violent Pierrots also permeate Willette\u2019s minor works, evinced in drawings such as the brutish Pierrot the Murderer <\/em>(fig. 4).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 5. Gustav-Adolf Mossa. Pierrot of the Minute<\/em> (1906). Oil on canvas. 31.5 x 25.6 in. (80 x 65 cm). Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts Jules Ch\u00e9ret, Nice. Fair use. Courtesy of WikiArt.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The theme of Pierrot as a threatening, violent force was reprised in the twentieth century by the likes of Gustav-Adolf Mossa and Leo Rauth. Mossa\u2019s Pierrot of the Minute <\/em>(fig. 5) (1908), indicating the influence of Huysmans and Ch\u00e9ret, features Pierrot brandishing a bloodied knife while clad in the immaculate garb of an eighteenth-century nobleman. Rauth\u2019s subject of the monstrous and ironically named A Welcome Guest <\/em>(1912), armed only with a bouquet of roses and a twisted grimace, seems to stream with blood from the illusionistic tumult of red ribbon clutched at his throat (fig. 6). Such creatures belong to the ranks of what journalist Benjamin Radford terms \u201cbad clowns\u2026 vigilante antiheroes of the id\u201d: inscrutable, inhuman beings whose painted faces at once conceal and suggest a sadistic moral void beneath.13<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Figure 6. Leo Rauth. Ein gern gesehener Gast (The Welcome Guest)<\/em> (1912). Lithograph. University of Illinois, Illinois. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yet, not all Pierrots became monsters; some simply embraced the artificiality of their pose, constituting the clown\u2019s conceptual affront to authenticity as opposed to the visceral affront provided by his uncanny appearance. The decadent poet Arthur Symons understood Pierrot as \u201ccondemned to be always in public\u2026.he must remember to be fantastic if he would not be merely ridiculous\u2026.And so he becomes exquisitely false.\u201d14<\/sup>\u00a0This is precisely the inauthenticity that enraged Buchloh in clownish iconographies, translated into psychological terms by Martin Green and John Swan who argue that \u201cto feel oneself to be a commedia<\/em> character gives one a sense of self that is hard to combine with\u2026marriage and parenthood.\u201d15<\/sup>\u00a0<\/sup>It is perhaps fitting that Arthur Symons was writing of his friend Aubrey Beardsley, who \u201cwas\u2026this Pierrot\u201d in Symons\u2019s eyes, and whose tuberculosis meant that he would not live past twenty-five.16<\/sup>\u00a0Renowned for his exuberant dandyism, Beardsley was known to have quipped that \u201ceven my lungs are affected\u201d in reference to his fatal ailment.17<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

It was, however, arguably not until the years immediately preceding the publication of Buchloh\u2019s \u201cFigures of Authority\u201d that the pose practiced by Aubrey Beardsley was transformed into a method of transcending the boundaries of conventionality by Decadence\u2019s most flamboyant progeny: glam rock. David Bowie, glam\u2019s most intellectual acolyte, established a manifesto of sorts in stating that music should be \u201ca parody of itself\u2026[it should be] the clown, the Pierrot medium.\u201d18<\/sup>\u00a0And in its theatrical inauthenticity it was, although its appropriation of Pierrot asked the opposite question to that of its Decadent forebears. If the likes of Willette associated Pierrot with criminality to attain distance from bourgeois conventionality, glam\u2019s luminaries began from a position of near-criminality and found in the inauthenticity of the mask a provocative rebuke to encroaching bourgeois conventionality.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Mark Fisher observed, glam \u201chas a special affinity with the English suburbs,\u201d where its luminaries grew up: \u201cits ostentatious anti-conventionality was negatively inspired by [the suburbs\u2019] eccentric conformism.\u201d19<\/sup>\u00a0Critiquing its gender politics, Fisher also notes that glam was predominantly the \u201cpreserve of male desire,\u201d which unwittingly elucidated the arena of glam\u2019s \u201costentatious anti-conventionality\u201d: male sexuality, with homosexuality only decriminalized four years before glam\u2019s explosion in 1971, and glam\u2019s aesthetics embracing a provocative effeminacy and androgyny which flirted with a disruptive queerness.20<\/sup>\u00a0<\/sup>It was, again, Bowie who made this clear. Bowie had performed as Pierrot under the tutelage of the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, with whom he had a sexual relationship. Kemp had also promoted the work of Decadent writers to him, making the Pierrot character the first Bowie assumed before raiding the dressing-up box for others throughout the 1970s.21<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

When this journey of experimentation ended in 1980, it was Bowie in the spectacularly bejeweled Pierrot costume, captured by photographer Brian Duffy in the music video for Ashes to Ashes<\/em>, who announced the effacing of the singer\u2019s first publicly recognizable character from Space Oddity<\/em>\u2014\u201cWe know Major Tom\u2019s a junky.\u201d Yet, under the mask of Major Tom lay the mask of Pierrot: Bowie\u2019s putting away of childish things did not result in the throwing on of bourgeois normativity. Instead, he remained the outsider incompatible with the values of heteronormative adulthood. Significantly, pop star Steve Strange, who appeared in the Ashes to Ashes <\/em>video, reprised the role of Pierrot in the early 1980s, as did Klaus Nomi, a backing singer in a televised performance of Bowie\u2019s The Man Who Sold the World<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Journalist Simon Reynolds records that glam \u201cdrew attention to itself as a fake\u201d in its quest to \u201cescape from reality into a never-ending fantasy of fame and freakitude.\u201d22<\/sup>\u00a0In this, Bowie\u2019s identification of the movement with commedia <\/em>is obvious. The cultural logic of commedia <\/em>that Green and Swan observe is echoed by glam\u2019s demand to reject quotidian reality to preserve its dreamworld. Reynolds, however, does not entertain the possibility that many of those who sought this dreamworld had been forbidden entry to its alternative: the suburban world of their childhoods. Evinced in the sexual politics of glam is a rerun of Pierrot\u2019s Decadent identification with the freak. Thus, the failure of authenticity that triggered nineteenth-century coulrophobic reactions to the white visage of Pierrot during the fin-de-siecle<\/em> was translated into a twentieth-century conceptual failure of authenticity under glam: what unites the two artistic circles is how this failure was reconceptualized as a critical, countercultural strength.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/p>\n

Samuel Love<\/strong> is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of York. His thesis explores the carnivalesque visual culture of interwar British High Society, tracing how its engagements with baroque and Dionysian iconographies constituted a transgressive rejection of sociopolitical norms.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________<\/span><\/p>\n

Footnotes<\/span><\/h4>\n

1.\u00a0Mark Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink<\/em> (New York: Grove, 2000), 65.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. See Benjamin Radford, Bad Clowns<\/em> (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 21\u201322, for this quotation from Robert Bloch.<\/span><\/p>\n

3.\u00a0Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium<\/em>, 74.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. This thesis is most comprehensively explored in: Martin Green and John Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia Dell’arte and the Modern Imagination<\/em> (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Andrew McConnell Stott, \u201cClowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Dickens, Coulrophobia, and the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi,\u201d Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies<\/em> 12, no. 4 (2012): 4.<\/span><\/p>\n

5.\u00a0Benjamin Buchloh, \u201cFigures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,\u201d October<\/em> 16 (1981): 53.<\/span><\/p>\n

6. See Robert Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask<\/em> (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) 121, for this quotation by Jules Ch\u00e9ret.<\/span><\/p>\n

7. For an extended exploration of the evolution of glam, see Mark Dery, All The Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters<\/em>, Boing Boing, 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n

8.\u00a0The authoritative study remains: Storey, Pierrot,<\/em> 3\u201393.<\/span><\/p>\n

9.\u00a0Stott, \u201cClowns on the Verge,\u201d 9\u201311.<\/span><\/p>\n

10.\u00a0Judy Sund, \u201cWhy so Sad? Watteau’s Pierrots,\u201d The Art Bulletin<\/em> 98, no. 3 (2016): 321\u2013323.<\/span><\/p>\n

11.\u00a0Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium<\/em>, 77, 79.<\/span><\/p>\n

12. Dery, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium<\/em>, 119.<\/span><\/p>\n

13.\u00a0Radford, Bad Clowns<\/em>, 4.<\/span><\/p>\n

14.\u00a0Arthur Symons, The Art of Aubrey Beardsley<\/em> (New York: The Modern Library, 1925), 28.<\/span><\/p>\n

15.\u00a0Green and Swan, Triumph of Pierrot<\/em>, xvii.<\/span><\/p>\n

16.\u00a0<\/sup>Symons, Aubrey Beardsley<\/em>, 28.<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

17.\u00a0David Colvin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Slave to Beauty <\/em>(New York: Welcome Rain, 1998), 53.<\/span><\/p>\n

18.\u00a0Quoted in Alexander Carpenter, \u201c\u2018Give a Man a Mask and He\u2019ll Tell the Truth\u2019: Arnold Schoenberg, David Bowie, and the Mask of Pierrot,\u201d Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music<\/em> 30, no. 2 (2011): 7.<\/span><\/p>\n

19.\u00a0<\/sup>Mark Fisher, \u201cFor Your Unpleasure,\u201d in Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night<\/em> (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017), 178.<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

20.\u00a0<\/sup>Fisher, \u201cFor Your Unpleasure,\u201d 178.<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

21.\u00a0<\/sup>Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy: From the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century<\/em> (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), 88.<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

22.\u00a0<\/sup>Reynolds, Shock and Awe<\/em>, 3\u20135.<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Samuel Love Writing Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (1999), an apocalyptic account of twentieth-century Western culture, Mark Dery was sure of one thing: \u201call the world hates a clown.\u201d1\u00a0In Dery\u2019s eyes, the clown persistently haunted the waning century, resulting in the appearance of the term \u201ccoulrophobia\u201d\u2014an uncontrollable fear of clowns in popular discourse. The association between clowns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6028"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6123,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6028\/revisions\/6123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}