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.