But Levant was a gargoyle, to be treasured as the ugliest runt ever to grace a movie screen, and if you inspect the contacts of that session, reproduced in Avedon's book "Evidence" (1994), you will discover Levant grinding his way through every known rictus of despair until Avedon finally traps him in the most clownlike, the most collapsed, and, by a long stretch, the most mortal.
"The show is challenging some social ideas and traditions, and that's why it may get so much attention," said Waleed Monem, a host whose clownlike grin and energy serve as the program's center of gravity.
Actors' faces are coated with white paint and etched with exaggerated, clownlike expressions, and the characters mug and play to the audience while speaking in the third person.
Clown faces or clownlike presences are discernible in Hal Saulson's built-up painted wood relief; Ellen Gronemeyer's small dark canvas, "Twin Peaks"; Heike Kati Barath's abject rendition of a demonic rabbit; Norbert Prangenberg's clay "Kopf (Head)"; and even Miriam Cahn's relatively sober rendering of a mother and child who could be in whiteface.
He also said, "The character development that I bring to the part is almost expunged by this clownlike makeup".
On Dec. 8, the opening day of the festival, the installation "Urban Flipper" turned the facade of an old theater that once played host to Sarah Bernhardt into the world's largest interactive pinball machine, adorned with clownlike touches that resembled a large white mustache and six orange eyebrows.
Environmentalists see a clownlike face as a potent symbol in the fight to preserve endangered species.
The expressive imagery of the Pilobolus acrobatic poetry — by turns biological, clownlike and Edenic — made it a new genre.
One time I couldn't help but laugh at my clownlike rosy cheeks.
That again, to me, feels very much from the South Africa of our youth, where white people would mock black people, or would simply not take you seriously, but would see something clownlike or apelike in that behaviour.
Only someone who was in Sarajevo at that time would understand their macabre banter (Sarajevans were famous in the former Yugoslavia for their clownlike humour).
