Clown Exposure: ‘What Is the Question?’

Congratulations to Slipknot percussionist M. Shawn Crahan, who celebrated his birthday last week with a gallery show of his photos and paintings at the Kirkwood Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa. While the joint was adorned with lots of his finest works, one photo missing from the wall is this week's Clown Exposure submission, 'What Is the Question?'

The photo depicts a naked wooden doll on its knees, with its arms in a shrugging position. The background is a wash of blue and white, giving the picture an almost spiritual Buddhist mood. Then you look at the right side of the shot -- and whether Crahan intended it or not (in all likelihood, he probably did) -- you can see the edge of a curtain or canvas frame, and you realize the spirituality of the image is an illusion, and that what you see is really what you get -- a wooden doll positioned in front of a bluish-white background.

Just as interesting as the photo itself, is the story behind it. The day he found the model for the picture, Crahan was wandering through the streets of El Paso, Texas. "It was real close to Juarez, Mexico, which is all our craziness right now," he tells Noisecreep. "El Paso is the final wild wild West city. And I was in this pawnshop that was filled with shrunken heads from El Salvador and these crazy rain forests in South America. And they had human bones, and they had Pancho Villa's trigger finger in the window for $9,500. And they had a vampire heart with two nails through it for $7,500."

Crahan was so intrigued by the place that he kept going back in search of further enlightenment. "I went in there four times, and I bought this prosthetic arm that was built in the '30s or something. And it's just wrong. It's got chrome and the fingers are all rotted off. There are spiral, metal pieces for the fingers and there's a string to make the hand open and close. And then I came across this doll, and it just spoke to me."

The doll in question is the wooden figure in 'What Is the Question?' At the time, the question being asked wasn't "What is the meaning of life?" it was "What can you do for me?"

"The thing was more or less crying, 'Help, get me out of here. I've been in here too long,'" Crahan says. " I tried to buy it once, and no one knew how much it was. And the guy who did wasn't going to be back for three hours. I sat in the band bus and went, "Man, there's this baby down there that I gotta go save.' And everyone's like, 'Whatever.'"

After some time passed, someone in the bus asked Crahan if he was gonna go get the doll. "I was like, 'Man, I just forgot about it, and you brought it back up. That's that thing talking to me,'" he says. "So I went down there again and the guy who was selling it showed up mysteriously. I asked him how much it was and he said $30. I was like, 'Whatever.' So I paid $30 to save this thing's life. And I don't know if it's a boy or a girl. It's just a little doll, and I took it back and put it up in the top of my bunk."

While Crahan clearly overpaid for the trinket, the doll compensated him in conversation value almost immediately. "People would come in and they were like, 'Whoah, what's up with this thing?" Crahan says. "I ended up putting it up in the bus window in this pose, and it's almost like the concept is even though I felt I saved it, it's almost like it's this things birth right to say, 'Well, do you think your special for saving me?' That's how heavy this thing was to me."

For Crahan, the position of the doll in the photograph and the sky-like background sums up the energy of the afternoon. "It was really just a matter of setting it up and creating a picture of how I felt for the whole day," Crahan says. "The thing is, I put it in the window and didn't even allow it to look you in the eye for the truth. And that's the ultimate question. What is the question? Everybody wants answers, but I don't think there are any."