Daniel Burley – Untitled (clown shaped speaker)
The work Untitled (clown shaped speaker) is conceptualised and originally displayed by the artist Daniel Burley, as a speaker, playing Cook In The Slaughterhouse; an audiobook written and recorded by the artist. It is part of Shoreditch Arts Club’s most recent rotation of artworks, situated above the large projection wall when entering the club, its presence looming overhead…
Cook In The Slaughterhouse is about a necrophiliac serial killer who is being hunted by detectives, whilst also secretly being a member of the police, trying to keep his unlawful activities hidden. It is largely written from the perspective of the killer, with winding musings and peppered with absurd detours.
The audiobook is used as a motif to explore ideas of abjection, horror, psychotic states, various existential and ontological dilemmas, clowning, casuistry, mysticism, animism, theology of death, the archetype of the trickster, the psychology of the subconscious, semiotics, the evolution of technology, etc.
Untitled (clown shaped speaker) was originally shown in Quench Gallery in a solo show by Burley. The clown shaped speaker operates as an ode to the archetype of the trickster. Whilst the ideology of clowning is, in essence, trying to exaggerate and amplify emotions of the individual performing as a clown in order to generate a catharsis and/or humour for themselves and their audience, there is a mischievousness built into clowning which connects to the philosophical disposition of the trickster. The archetype of the trickster is as a disruptor; breaking the rules by placing objects or events where they should not be, with the inadvertent consequence of generating something unexpected and new. Clowns similarly, through mischief, disrupt situations and generate havoc. They provoke engagement with their audience, ignoring normal social etiquette and boundaries, and in doing so generate different responses to clowns in different people: some people love clowns whilst many people hate and fear them.
Likewise tricksters are hated by some and loved by others. Tricksters in mythology are considered the springs from which culture erupts. Mythologically and Folklorically in many cultures they are deemed societally crucial to regeneration, because without their disruption there can only be a continuation, which inevitably leads to stagnation.
Untitled (clown shaped speaker) is therefore, in a sense, a beacon of chaos. The eyes look outward, one eye with a dark slit in the light which is emanating from it, and the other open with no slit disrupting the flow of light. On its forehead is a large silver tennis ball - formally echoing the spheres which depict the clown's cheeks and nose. The spheres appear like balls that you would play catch with or play games with or find in a ball pit - operating as symbols of play. Tennis balls, more specifically, are used to hit back and forth above a net, just as ideas are hit back and forth in the dialectical; paradigms of thought responding in opposition to one another, like a tennis ball being hit back and forth in an infinite game - a symbol of competition and duality. This silver tennis ball is embedded at the center of the clown's forehead - implying a proximity to the mind and the spirit. It harkens to the central role that the trickster plays in the Socratelean tradition of the dialectical, which is perhaps the most significant bedrock from which Western thought has emerged.
Untitled (clown shaped speaker) is therefore intended as representational of the horror and expansiveness of the Western tradition and emphatic of the role that tricksters and chaos inherently plays within it.
Click here to listen to audiobook Cook In The Slaughterhouse
