You may not see Brian Whiteley at first, as he lurks in a Chicago graveyard on a brilliant, spotless day. It takes you a few moments to spot him as he passes from gravestone to gravestone. The sun is bright, and at first he’s just a coloured speck, distinguishable by his trio of balloons and oversized clown costume. 

Our brains work by identifying what is familiar. When something is unexpected – like a clown in a graveyard – things take a little longer, like the slight delay you get sometimes when watching live TV. Your brain takes more time to receive the image, flip it the right way around and process what it’s seeing. Why is that freaky clown lurking in a graveyard in the middle of the day? And, more importantly, has he seen me?

Freaky and sinister clowns are deeply rooted in our collective history. From YouTube prank videos that you sincerely wish will never happen to you, to the genre-defining evil clown of It, the idea that clowns are in some way to be feared is embedded in our cultural DNA.

Performance artist Brian Whiteley dresses up as the clown of your worst nightmares in order to explore ideas of fear and phobia. His work makes deep reference to the ways in which the media distorts and manipulates truth to communicate a sense of fear to its audience – because, as we all know, fear is easy to understand, and fear sells.

Whiteley is a former clown himself (he attended clown school at the age of 12), but his earlier performance work centred on the idea of the Bigfoot myth. After years spent skulking in woods and interviewing fake Bigfoot ‘experts’ to explore the complicated world of the Bigfoot hoaxers, Whiteley decided it was time to create a new myth. Dressing as a clown and putting on unscheduled appearances in graveyards across the USA, Whiteley’s work explores the ways in which our fears of the collective unknown are distorted by the 24-hour news cycle and social media. Dazed caught up with Whiteley to find out why there’s so much more to his art than merely trying to scare you shitless.

Hi Brian, thanks for talking to us. Can you explain why you decided to start dressing up as a clown?

Brian Whiteley: I used to perform as Big Foot a lot. I’d film myself wandering around the woods in upstate New York and would send the videos to Big Foot experts and crypto-zoologists and all these mystery websites you could email. People started giving me feedback on my performance, but no one knew who I was. I created my craft around these performances, then I did my initial clown piece in a Brooklyn cemetery and I wanted to see what the feedback would be like to something like that. So I sent a video of my performance into a local newspaper, saying “hey I caught this bizarre clown in a cemetery on camera” and it kind of blew up from there. The news went all over the world – there were news crews out there taping it, it was being reported in the UK on the Daily Mail and across America. That’s when I realised that the press was fascinated by this kind of stuff. It’s kind of funny though, because all these news outlets are covering a performance art piece without even knowing it.

What is it about clowns specifically that makes them so interesting to you?

Brian Whiteley: Everyone has this connection to clowns, whether it’s fear of creepy clowns or a more positive association. They’re a universal trigger, like Big Foot or the Yeti or Sasquatch. So when you use those triggers in weird or unique ways, it captures people’s attention. I love using these universal identifiers as a means of provoking people into questioning their everyday surroundings in a way.

It’s quite surreal, seeing a clown in a graveyard. Is that what you were aiming for?

Brian Whiteley: It’s all about getting these characters and placing them into strange situations and documenting them. The little twist of placing a clown in a cemetery, that’s what it’s about. I felt with the performance in Prospect Park cemetery that it was really well placed to go viral. But more generally I was reading about belief systems recently and a vast majority of people in the USA believe in ghosts and other-worldly beings, so there’s a whole load of people who are extremely fascinated by this stuff. That’s what I really want to tap into. 

How important is it that your work goes viral? Do you feel like art doesn’t have meaning unless it’s widely shared? 

Brian Whiteley: It’s not necessarily that important, but I like the realisation moment when people stumble across my work and they didn’t realise it was a performance art piece.

Your pieces are often set up in a really elaborate way to involve the media – whether or not they’re knowing collaborators. Why is this important to you?

Brian Whiteley: Yeah, so for the Chicago piece my best friend from middle school is the girl being interviewed in the CBS news report. I had fake emails created, fake Facebook accounts, and then I got her to go in and do the interview. I thought she’d get busted, but she was fantastic. Part of my work is about the mystery, but it’s also about ways of manipulating the media. I want people to question their surroundings but also to question what content is being delivered by what sources.

What about your own phobias? What are you scared of? 

Brian Whiteley: Probably the impending doom of my own mortality. That’s the fear that’s always chasing me around. But by working in cemeteries, I find myself kind of confronting those fears. It’s cathartic to me, in a way, familiarising myself with death.

Why do you think people are so fascinated by what you do?

Brian Whiteley: People have this inherent thirst to solve mysteries. I spoke with Rick Dyer, who’s one of the most famous Big Foot hoaxers, and he used to make $20,000 at a state fair with all the people queuing up to see these creature. I remember asking him why he was doing these things, and he said that it was a symbiotic thing. People are dying to see something different, to find proof of paranormal beings and he’s just providing that for them. Even if the exhibit is clearly fake, at least the people got to see something. They got to fulfill that need. The public – they’re as much at part of the process for me as a performance artist as anything else.

What are your future plans? 

Brian Whiteley: The performances are going to get more elaborate, but I can’t give any more detail because I want to keep the element of surprise. I’m also running a solo show in Miami right now, with a lot of the ‘clown suits’ I use in performances. I’m planning on expanding overseas soon too – so there might be a clown coming to a cemetery near you.