'The clown is an invention of high nobility to push away boredom and melancholy out of the court.' Ugo Rondinone

'I’m drawn to the German Romantics. The German Romantic movement was the first to blur the line between reality and illusion. In this sense I’m very attached to the idea of art and art making as an environment that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to a linear logic. In general I like art that is capable of organizing a space of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time and language and image in an immobile place. There is no true identity, history, or meaning, but only that which I construct for myself.' Ugo Rondinone

If There were Anywhere but Desert. Friday by Ugo Rondinone best exemplifies the artist’s attempt to allude to themes of isolation and disenchantment, whilst simultaneously marking his continuing distinction in the international art scene. As with his earlier works, noted for their diversity of forms, Rondinone’s representation of clowns unites a consistent ambiguity with intense psychology, which at once unsettles and intrigues the viewer. The present lot, executed by Rondinone in 2002, is an extract from the larger, seven-part series by the Swiss-born artist in which he represents the days of the week with unique, motionless figures. It epitomises Rondinone’s fervent desire to translate, through vibrant and bold imagery – in the form of a clown - conflicted psychological states into environments that provoke corresponding moods in the viewer. The clown has here been divested of its power as an entertainer, and is instead confined to lie on the floor as a flabby, mute and quasi-static figure. Wholly passive, he is presented as perpetually cut loose from the laughter he was once able to provoke, and has thus been denied his virtuosity in reaching the viewer through jest. This act of reducing the clown to a seemingly lifeless state enables Rondinone to emphasise the clown’s seclusion, rejection, and persisting passivity: characteristics which, in imparting an overwhelming sense of alienation to the viewer, leave us feeling disconnected from our usual terms of reference – our usual selves.

An arguable effigy of the artist as a public entertainer, the clown figure is further used by Rondinone as a way to articulate a melancholy sense of loss. Portrayed as lethargic and worn-out, the clown is rendered in such a way as to suggest that he is altogether stripped of the freedom and ability to fulfill his role of the trickster or fool – an archetype identified by psychiatrist Carl Jung, whose sole function is to serve the audience’s need for distraction. This immobilisation of the clown creature, and disclosure as a figure in a state of near-inertia, is significant in communicating a loss of creative melancholia, for as Rondinone himself explains: 'The clown is an invention of high nobility to push away boredom and melancholy out of the court. At the same time it functions as a substitute: it has freedom of speech his masters don’t have.on the other hand my clowns do not move. They only sit or lie down, do not laugh, do not say either good day or good night. By its absence of demonstration and its disinterest in the outside world, the character of the clown is possibly a self-portrait. He leads to a melancholy empty of meaning, which perpetuates itself in the vacuity of a world with out irony' (The artist quoted in C. Ross, The aesthetics of disengagement:contemporary art and depression, Minneapolis, 2006, p.45). Indeed, the melancholic clown, as the modern alter ego of the artist, takes its tragic fate from the very fact of not being seen.

The clown is a recurrent figure in Rondinone’s oeuvre and has, since 1992, made ceaseless appearances in his performances, installations, video-tapes, Polaroid photographs, and sculptures. Certainly, Rondinone can be placed amongst other twentieth-century artists such as Mauricio Cattelan, Roni Horn and Cindy Sherman, whose works of art similarly demonstrate an interest in the figure of the clown, and its metaphorical potential regarding representation and self-representation. In particular, Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture of 1987, a work which Rondinone quoted in his previous installation Where do we go from here?, also refers to a communicational break between clown and viewer. Nauman’s clowns, however, are animated, and presented as still possessing their role of an entertainer whose main function is to make its audience laugh – an aspect which is in stark contrast to those by Rondinone, who in having lost all facility to amuse, render the viewer’s presence as somewhat obsolete and unnecessary.