Oh, Clown! You Give Me Hope!
“Sharing,” a sculpture by Bruno Lucchesi, Sarasota, Florida, USA. Visited on December, 26 2021.
If not for the clown, I would call this propaganda. I would call it blatant ideology shaped by a homogenous community’s idea of family. The commissioners of this piece had in mind an ideal.
How else to explain the exaggerated happiness of this matronly mother, the uncomplicated confidence of this fit and perfectly coiffed father? I see their wide smiles, their zero percent body fat, the casual affluence of their attire, and my first impression is disgust.
The son is delirious. Look at his face. He wants to be there, and he doesn’t want to be there. Like every child, he relies on his parents for love, support, and protection, but he already feels it comes at a price. The conditions on which his survival depends are thrust upon him. He has no choice! Look at his face!
I find this whole idealized form of family repulsive, unimaginative. “No shade on Lucchesi,” I say, as T and I prepare to walk. I too have patrons, which means sometimes I make the art I want. And sometimes I make it for money.
Before we go, I take a photo. That’s when I notice the boy holding a doll, a clown whose countenance makes the boy’s ludicrous grin seem angelic by comparison.
Oh, clown! You salvage the sculpture. You give me hope. Like the cat in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, you are much more than a peculiar detail whose significance is lost on the many. You are a divine irritant.
This is how revelation comes, by the way. As fireworks, no. As a detail missed by the unreceptive, yes. Upon first look, the administrators of the town nodded their heads, pleased with the work. After all, this is Sarasota, Florida, home to the Ringling Brothers. The clown is a nice touch, they’d say, oblivious to its subversive purpose.
But the child should be holding a teddy bear or a blanket. Those objects would allow the ideological motives of the town to be fully realized. Only here could Lucchesi substitute the “acceptable” object with a volatile variable and have it praised as a nice touch.
With cunning, he turned puffery into art. More to the point, he got away with it! So clever, how he accomplished the deception!
Because it is impossible to incorporate the clown into the apparent message of this sculpture, the sculpture is hideously perfect, infuriatingly luminous.
Located behind the Sarasota library, “Sharing,” promotes literacy and education. The parents hold the open book and read to their son. But a wide-ranging education, an unfettered literacy, and any serious engagement with history, would endanger this family. So, the clown is an aberration. It is out of sync with the tone of the sculpture.
The clown is to the family as the raven is to Poe’s narrator—innocuous at first, then irritating. Then, insistent in a way that becomes irrepressible.
It unexpectedly consumes your thoughts. It distracts. But it does not change. It stays the same, no matter how long you look at it. It does not change, but it changes you.
It insists you reevaluate your assumptions. It insists you reconsider its “meaning” and “interpretation.” Even then, it refuses your firm conclusions.
The sculptor casts figures. The sculpture casts doubt.