You might remember that last year brought us joy in the form of captivating Brooklyn-based mysteries. They made us ask questions related to the security of our landmarks and whether living in a building with a garbage chute was really worth the convenience after all. A couple of them even made us consider the paranormal, if it weren’t so obvious that all of them were some lousy art thing. There were the white flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Prospect Park Brooklyn Nets skeleton and, of course, the clown just hanging out in Green-Wood Cemetery last summer.
Sometimes mysteries remain unsolved, eventually becoming local lore and capturing the imaginations of generations to come. But sometimes, you just have to consider Occam’s Razor. No, it wasn’t the incorporeal spirit of a dead clown haunting the grounds he would no longer ever get to leave, because come on. It was some jerk who was performing a piece of what he really wants us to call “art.”
This guy, who wanted to “do something that combines people on a universal level,” as he told the Brooklyn Paper with a straight face and everything, goes by the name of Brian Whiteley, who filmed and starred in videos depicting him as a lackluster performance artist dressed as a clown in Green-Wood Cemetery and as Bigfoot roaming Prospect Park during that snow storm earlier this year. The paper caught Whiteley, who won’t confirm it was him, when they noticed his website had listed “Green-Wood Clown” as one of his performances, before he took the information off the site. The artist, whose other credits include filming himself in blackface and starring in a video wherein he slaps himself for not nearly enough time, swears that he “wasn’t trying to gain notoriety for a prank,” which is great, because we already forgot his name. Was it Bradley?
Anyway, maybe he stopped stalking our public green spaces because he decided he was done with this lousy art thing, or maybe it’s just because it’s really goddamn cold out. Either way, we’re just glad it’s over. If the mystery of the cemetery clown was keeping you up late at night, fret no longer. Consider this one solved in the lamest way possible.