ABSTRACT
The joker appears to be a privileged person who can say certain things in a certain way which confers immunity. Characterisations of contemporary artists as jokers, clowns, tricksters or shamans are still fairly ubiquitous, but far from perceiving this as a slight, many artists actively cultivate and maintain these forms of identification. Paul McCarthy and John Bock have appropriated clownishness and buffoonery, Joseph Beuys, Marcus Coates and James Luna play at being a shaman, Richard Prince and Jens Haaning tell jokes and Donelle Woolford and The Atlas Group and Michael Blum try to trick us. Tricksters, as Lewis Hyde confirms, like to hang out in doorways. Trickster's motivations are more sophisticated and their methodologies less easy to comprehend. The modern intellectual is embraced by Bourdieu's transgressive personage of trickster and fool. Post-simulacral, parafictional strategies are oriented less toward the disappearance of the real than toward the pragmatics of trust.
