Ugo Rondinone's Vocabulary of Solitude - Saige Kennedy

 

Solitude is a strange feeling. For many people it can feel like a mix of sadness, frustration, and numbness, but it can’t be so easily pinned down. Loneliness is a complex emotion with a lot of ways that it can manifest. In art, depicting loneliness isn’t an uncommon occurrence, but there can be challenges in trying to visually display something that everyone has felt, but no one can fully describe. There are many ways artists throughout history have displayed solitude, from wide shots in cinema, to desaturated blue tones in painting. The swiss artist Ugo Rondione however, chose an uncommon way of tackling loneliness in his public installation “Vocabulary of Solitude”.

Ugo Rondinone, despite being born in Switzerland, is based out of New York City, but has found international success. Most well known for his colorful piece of land art “Seven Magic Mountains”, Rondinone has made a name for his bold use of color and contrast. His website is separated into two sections, “NIGHT” and “DAY”. On the “NIGHT” section, you can find all sorts of stark, serious pieces, almost all in some shade of grey, from earthwork and sculptures made out of stone and bronze, to his black and white landscape paintings. On the “DAY” side however, you’ll see an explosion of neon color, from painted earthwork — such as “Seven Magic Mountains” — to rainbow colored signage, and colorful ‘target’ designs. From this it’s clear that Rondinone loves to explore different media, and also that he loves to play with contrast. The “NIGHT” and “DAY” sides of his website almost look like the portfolios of two different artists, one of the only few connecting threads between them being his use of earthwork art. One piece however, demonstrates his love of contrast quite well, potentially better than any other of his huge catalog. On the “DAY” side of his website you’ll see “Vocabulary of Solitude”.

Vocabulary of Solitude is a multimedia public art installation that first appeared at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 2016, before travelling to eight other locations all across the globe including Tokyo, Berklee California, Rome, and most recently in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki from December 2021 to February 2022 and Mexico city later in 2022. For such an unconventional public art piece covering solitude, a topic that's been done in every single medium imaginable, how did it manage to endure this long, flying across the entire globe from The Netherlands to places including New Zealand and Mexico, being shown in almost ten different museums and even surviving a pandemic?

Clowns. So many clowns. Forty-Five statues of clowns to be exact.

According to MOMA curator Laura Hoptman, “Rondinone is best known for his multimedia installations”. Rondinone has worked in paint, sculpture, and even land art. And Vocabulary of Solitude is no exception to Rondinone’s creative use of medium. Each of the forty five clown statues were created out of foam, epoxy and cloth. The installation also made use of colored photo film. In his new york studio, Rondinone milled the foam that would later become the clowns’ bodies using lathes and other machinery. Once the individual foam pieces were sculpted, Rondinone then glued them together using epoxy resin. And finally, once the clowns all had bodies, he dressed with appropriately comical and colorful clothing. These clown statues were created in specific poses, all of them portraying a feeling of melancholy through not only their pose, but also their expressions, quite appropriate for an installation with ‘Solitude’ in its title. The statues were placed, and arranged throughout a large, blank, white, empty room — or in its most recent showing, the north atrium of Auckland Art Gallery — for visitors to wander through. The last piece of the installation is a rainbow film that is applied to a window in the room where it’s being shown, bathing the clowns in a vibrant colorful glow on a sunny day. 

Rondinone himself stated that the 45 clowns collectively “represent one person in solitary activity within an enclosed space.” 2 Each clown is supposed to represent an action being taken by this solitary person, and is named with the word of said action. Some of the clowns’ names include “breathe”, “shower”, “cry”, and “remember”. Rondinone has the clowns perform all types of these actions, with some being mundane, some having a negative or positive connotation, and some even being comical. He likely did this to reduce the emotional impact of all of the actions, to show how really living in solitude would actually reduce the emotional impact of doing these tasks. By displaying actions with wildly different implied emotions all in the same way, Rondinone brings them all to the same neutral emotional level. Normally this would be a bad thing for a piece of art, especially a piece of public art. But in this case Rondinone does this on purpose to show how when alone, showering, eating, and even feeling can all feel devoid of meaning, devoid of life, someone struggling though loneliness can begin to feel helpless, like a jester performing for an empty audience. Rondinone also comments that the use of clowns is meant to evoke societal outcasts, potentially drawing attention to the fact that many of these outsiders are forced to take on solitary lives of their own. Clowns are a divisive figure, many find them weird or creepy. Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns is incredibly common, and so using the image of a clown to represent someone who has been socially outcast simply for being different makes a lot of sense. Clowns are also a common theme in subculture fashion; many alternative groups, who frequently consist of the marginalized and socially outcast, are inspired by clown and circus imagery and use clown-like makeup and fashion as a statement of their identity. Rondinone's use of the clown to represent someone who feels ignored by society is incredibly effective through both history of clown symbolism as well as the juxtaposition of emotional shorthand.

Vocabulary of Solitude creates a juxtaposition between the (mostly) cheerful connotation of  clowns and a bright, chromatic, rainbow of colors, with the dour, depressive poses of the clown statues, and the space between each clown. The large gaps create that sense of solitude that the entire piece is centered around. This along with the manner of fact way that Rondinone named each clown, opting for single words in the present tense, creates a dry emotionless response to each name. Even a word that normally has a positive connotation such as “dream” takes on a lifeless emotional impact when left on its own among a sea of other similarly lifeless words. This juxtaposition creates a theme in the exhibition of lost meaning. These actions that the person of solitude is acting out is simply that, an act. The activities have lost all meaning and life now that the actor is alone. This mirrors the real life effect of leisure activities becoming statistically less enjoyable for those with depression. This symptom is known as anhedonia, and is present throughout Vocabulary of Solitude. This feeling of lost humanity, that all the life has been sucked out of your actions is something that’s reflected in the statues themselves. Rondinone chose to leave the statues unpainted, leaving the skin of the clowns to be white, lifeless and manikin-like, along with the representation of anhedonia, this stark white also further contrasts with the colorful clown clothing the statues are wearing. The fact that these clowns are supposed to represent different snapshots in one person's day further emphasizes the exhaustion felt by this ‘main character’. As a visitor walks through the exhibit, they would experience this character's life through their own emotional lens, a social outcast, or ‘clown’ trying to find meaning in their solitary life and not being able to find any. 

Everything discussed so far largely hasn’t touched on the importance of one big thing: Vocabulary of Solitude is a public art installation, and wouldn’t be nearly as effective if it wasn’t. The version of this installation that was shown in Auckland, New Zealand is particularly interesting as public art, as it arrived on the tail end of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This put Rondinone’s piece in a unique place to speak and connect to the public. After struggling through lockdowns for over a year, countless people experienced a type of solitude that they had never felt before. Unable to leave their houses for work, school, or anything that wasn’t a strict necessity. 2020-2022 and even some lockdowns that lasted into 2023 left wide reaching emotional traumas that we’re now only just discovering the depth of. Because of this, Rondinone’s installation at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki was a prime opportunity to connect to a public that had just recently experienced the type of loneliness that Vocabulary of Solitude touches on. Having art that speaks to a traumatic experience can help people heal and bring people together. Rondinone had the perfect opportunity to let his art uplift a community and he went for it.

The metaphor of the clown imagery representing social outcasts is reinforced through its function as a piece of public art. The juxtaposition between the clowns and the poses they're in,  as well as the strangeness and absurdity of the piece can both hook a potential viewer, and draw them in. The broadness of the piece and the exaggerated emotions then allow viewers to relate to the clowns, and begin to think more deeply about what the art means. Then once the viewer is paying attention, and thinking about what the piece means, the clown takes on a new meaning. As a character to relate for a viewer to empathize with, to then direct the viewers empathy to the broader societal issue of inclusion. Rondinone brings a viewer in, then directs their thought to think deeply about including those who society rejects through subtlety and empathy. By showing viewers the emotion of the piece then revealing the meaning, Rondinone creates emotional investment in an issue that the public might not have cared about before. Vocabulary of Solitude acts as a way of showing the broader public the plight of the socially shunned. Showing the effects of being outcast in a light-hearted enough way as to not scare viewers off, yet effective enough to deliver the importance and seriousness of the message. 

Vocabulary of solitude is a masterclass in effective public art, as it offers different narratives depending on how deeply a viewer interacts with the piece. Someone who, for example, doesn’t have a lot of time to examine Vocabulary of Solitude doesn't have to. The piece is simple enough on first inspection that a viewer in a hurry can grasp the overall meaning of it very quickly. From just the name “Vocabulary of Solitude” you know what the piece is talking about, and by simply looking at the poses of the clowns, you can understand that Rondinone is trying to express the feeling of loneliness through juxtaposition, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, so viewers who don’t want to engage with bigger topics don’t have to. But for those who do want to think more deeply about the piece, these viewers can dive into the meaning behind the clown imagery and how the clowns represent the socially shunned, the significance behind showing the piece so recently after a pandemic, and the metaphor of each clown being a different action taken by the same person. Rondinone shows mastery over not only his craft, but his understanding of the public and getting them to relate, his ability to tell a multilayered narrative, and his skill at delivering a fun and lighthearted piece at first glance, that has a real and meaningful societal message behind it.