The Eccentrics

<p>Everything changes with the circus. It makes the unbelievable real and the familiar unfamiliar. Formalized during the Victorian era, the institution emerged and evolved through industrialization, drawing on elements of ancient roman rituals, street performances, and esoteric knowledge. Testing the limits of the physical, the circus requires enormous expertise, artistry, endurance, and courage. extraordinarily, it makes danger into entertainment, wild animals into performers, gravity into an illusion. though the rituals and acts of this spectacle have transfixed audiences for centuries, in recent years it has begun to lose its urgency, no longer holding the same sway over audiences. As Federico Fellini asks in his 1970 documentary The Clowns, which features the last legends of the European circus:</p> <p><em>Where are the clowns of my childhood? Where are they today; that terrifying comic violence, that noisy exhilaration? Can the circus entertain? the world which it belonged to no longer exists. theatres transformed into runways. glowing ingenious sets, the childish naiveté of the public; they no longer exist. What remains of the old circuses? Subtle, wasted traces.</em></p> <p>Though the circus has been supplanted by other modes of entertainment, this unique form of recreation has continued to nourish the popular imagination into the modern period. If its box-office reality has changed, its meta- phorical presence endures. given its persistence, one can argue that the circus functions as an axis, bridging ancient spectacle and modern creativity; most notably and instrumentally inspiring film, new media technologies, and art.</p> <p>The exhibition <em>The Eccentrics</em> has less to do with the circus itself than with the reinvigoration of its “subtle, wasted traces” in contemporary artworks. the exhibition considers strategies for communicating a comi-tragic sensibility and for calling on a viewer’s willingness to react with laughter as well as feelings of apprehension or astonishment. As the famous French clown and director Pierre Étaix says in Fellini’s film: “Clowns haven’t disappeared. People don’t know how to laugh anymore. the whole world needs to laugh again with clowns.”</p>