Description

unpaginated, circa 76 pages including 36 colour plates (printed with blank verso). “The modalities of appearance mark Roni Horn’s series of 36 head shots of a clown. Originally seen in her Clowd and Cloun installation, a series of alternating images on the two motifs of the cloud and the clown, Horn’s stunning photographs of the inevitable clown (he always looks the same) disintegrate the very consistency that makes a clown recognizable as a clown. The clown is a constant, a symbolic form whose identity is rooted in a conventionally defined appearance (red bulbous nose, a shock of bright frizzy hair, white pancake skin, an ear-to-ear grin), one that occludes the specifics of the persona–the player–who temporarily assumes that guise. Cabinet of repeats 36 times the dissolution of the clown’s appearance and thus, perhaps, the defining features of the clown itself.”  //  “This work is about the phenomena of appearance and disappearance. The book shows 36 head-shots of a clown. If mutability of appearance is integral to the phenomenon of the cloud – since dissolution or erasure is inevitable – the converse is proposed for the clown.”