When we look for the word “slapstick” on search engines, we find the following clarification: that it refers to the knockabout farces of American cinema, in which the actors behave foolishly and blunder all the time. Yet there is an element lacking in this general definition, an element that determines the way in which I conceive the presence of slapstick in my own work. The description based on the theatrical tradition of clowns and mummers may seem satisfactory, but gags, false steps and falls are produced by an unexpected “meeting” with objects. My sculptures explore the comic and awkward condition of the object as projection of an anthropocentric narrative with allegories of everydayness and mythological narratives; therefore, it is quite understandable why I find so moving the American burlesque and all its laughter-producing intersections with dominant objects.
“Slapstick” corresponds literally to this test, since it is a device composed of two thin wooden boards that produce the sound of “slap”. Slapstick as an object is used in Commedia dell’arte, when one comedian slaps the other. Here, we cling to the beneficial role of slapstick, a.k.a. batacchio in its original Italian version, in producing with very little force a powerful noise, just like the forceful blow a comic actor would receive without feeling pain. A slapstick gesture-as-narrative might include the notion of a clumsy log, a material that resists and reacts against any attempt at manipulating it, and remains pure in its primitiveness, as in the story of Pinocchio.
In that sense, in the terms of a gag gesture, the awkward relation of action-reaction shared by the clumsy log and the rigid wood with the spectator is completed by Barnet Newman’s seemingly dismissive statement, that “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting”. Through this enlarged unity of “Slapstick Acts”, I mean a bare and restless form which participates in the comic plot of the object and into which it is always possible to bump. In this way, bumping becomes the occasion to wonder about the nature of sculpture as an obstacle, as part of an ontology that permits the subject to think. For all that, it would not be impossible to infuse to sculpture the charge of the ephemerous and of momentary pleasure. I notice a constant need for reflectiveness, and at the same time I make a point of annulling it. In the same way, the dominant narrative that preoccupies me is the gap produced by daydreaming and its frustration by reality.
My sculptures also fuel a series of paintings in which there is an evident gestural dimension that starts with the erection of the line and moves downward, displaying the instability and the fragility of writing. In my three-dimensional constructions too, there is a fragile balance with the sense of an imminent breakdown of the materials.
Quite often I notice the transcription of the process of an incomplete identity, of a clumsy construction, and in any case whatever perfection there is tends to be combined with an underlined incongruent point in the whole synthesis. It may be an irregular shape, a bump, symbolically equivalent to the idea of an incomplete sphere, as suggested by the etymology of “Clown”, clot + clod. I conceive Slapstick as a study on the moral consequences of error and clumsiness, a study that incorporates a tradition of non-conventional spirituality with the natural, material, and physical breakdown of the religious subject. This condition may justify why slapstick is laid bare and does not disguise itself.
Kostis Velonis
