DAVID BROOKS
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. The only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, The Aldrich has engaged its community with thought-provoking exhibitions and education programs throughout its fifty-two year history. Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/Secretary; Diana Bowes; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Michael Joo; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine
David Brooks: Continuous Service Altered Daily Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 2016 Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart May 1, 2016, to February 5, 2017 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
David Brooks: Continuous Service Altered Daily is generously supported by Brad and Sunny Goldberg, and is part of Site Lines: Four Solo Exhibitions Engaging Place, which has received major funding from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation. Additional support is provided by Danbury Audi and DEDON, and CTC&G (Connecticut Cottages & Gardens) is the official media partner.
Alyson Baker, Executive Director Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder © 2016 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Amy Smith-Stewart Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877, USA 203.438.4519 aldrichart.org ISBN: 978-0-9976615-3-8 Design: Gretchen Kraus Copy Editor: Jane Calverley Photography Support: Chris Manning Printer: Quad/Graphics, Inc. Photos by Tom Powel Imaging unless otherwise noted Cover David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Decomposition zone (installation view detail) Courtesy of the artist Back cover David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Habitat Formation zone (installation view detail of gold-powder coated components), 2016 Courtesy of the artist Opposite David Brooks, disassembly of combine in progress for Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Courtesy of the artist
The artist and the Museum would like to thank the Gelfman family, and especially David Gelfman. Without his technical skill, resource problem solving, and singular diligence, this project would not have been possible. The artist would like to thank Ana Miron, who helped guide this project.
David Brooks: Continuous Service Altered Daily
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
David Brooks, disassembly of combine in progress for Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Courtesy of the artist Photos: David Gelfman 4
Return to the Moon1 by Amy Smith-Stewart All great monuments celebrate the leading faith of the age—or, in retrospect, the prevailing idiocy. – Robert Morris2 On every right side mirror of every American car is engraved an ontological slogan that is highly appropriate for our time: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. – Timothy Morton3 The tools of technology become a part of the Earth’s geology as they sink back into their original state. Machines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust. – Robert Smithson4
Continuous Service Altered Daily is a sprawling, site-engaged sculptural array, or, as David Brooks refers to it, an “asteroid field without a distinctive beginning or end.”5 Brooks has disemboweled a beacon of agricultural technology, a 1976 John Deere6 3300 series combine harvester (weighing 8,543 pounds),7 into hundreds of individual components, ranging from the iconic and specific (corn head, augers, tractor tires, cab) to the common and standard (nuts, bolts, gears, cables). He has deftly arranged every part, with not a single piece excluded, in a ceremonious line, an ambling procession that begins in the Museum’s front plaza, winds through the Leir Atrium and front first-floor galleries, pierces the inner courtyard, and dead ends in the rear Sculpture Garden. The project is understood as one continuous action that is expressed in a myriad of sculptural moments. The title points to the installation’s art historical roots, referring back to a work and a body of writing, Continuous Project Altered Daily, by the influential artist and thinker Robert Morris. Morris’s room-sized sculpture was on view at the Leo Castelli Warehouse on 108th Street in New York from March 1 to 22, 1969. Inspired by experimental theatre and dance, and the chance operations of John Cage,
it was a work that Richard Kalina described in Art in America as “workman-like activity at the point of inception and installation ... [that] took precedence over final form.”8 Brooks’s replacement of “project” with “service” underscores the use value of this machine (as harvester and labor saver) and its connection back to the land. Here, the machine has been resited from a rural farming town near Troy, Ohio (the machine was purchased from an equipment dealer in upstate New York), to the colonial suburban town of Ridgefield, Connecticut. Its components are separate, yet composed as a spatiotemporal experience with sightlines that boomerang within the Museum and out onto the surrounding landscape, memorialized as high art. Brooks’s word choice seems apropos, as Morris surmises: “Site specific works can hardly be described as commodity production items. They seem to assume the role of a service function rather than that of object production.”9 Brooks uses a harvesting machine “inextricably linked” to the earth as material, as the Earthwork artists before him used a specific landscape and its natural features (earth, rocks, gravel, water) as material. Here, Brooks is investigating “what makes the materials and the built environment possible, at what cost, and what lies outside of that myopic perception.”10 Brooks’s installation stages an analogy: a combine harvester provides a quantifiable service. It reaps crops like grain and corn. It supplies a product through the elaborate mechanization of moving parts, all happening simultaneously, thereby making their individual elements impossible to perceive underneath its heavy, bulky, extraterrestrial metal shell. Likewise an ecosystem, which represents “the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit,”11 serves a life-sustaining purpose, and can be mistakenly likened to a mechanized instrument. It, too, offers commodities like filtered water, clean air, food, and energy, but its interconnection to its natural environs and the greater planet is not only invisible, but promulgates
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a mistaken perception that these functions can be reduced to mere services and that these “services” will be available in perpetuity. Brooks makes a compelling visual correspondence here. He has chosen to group the machine parts into nine zones that represent nine ecosystem services that occur continuously in our biosphere and upon which we rely daily: water purification, pollination, disease regulation, decomposition, air purification, habitat formation, primary production, ornamental resources, and erosion and flood control. In doing so, he gives these services a perceptible materiality as “the action of disassembly is a procession with us, as opposed to for us.”12 The act of disassembly can then be seen as a pictorial metaphor, or elaborately staged projection, for us to ponder the significance of the components and the wall labels side-by-side, so “context can also be read as a service.”13 Within the Museum, each zone is represented by an engraved metal placard describing the designated ecosystem service, and every object (or group of objects) on display has been given an interpretive individual label that supports this correlation. For instance, a label in the primary production zone refers to the operator’s seat in the combine as an “Apex Predator (Primary Production), 2016.” Thus, Brooks subverts the traditional role of didactics by presenting the viewer with an interpretative conundrum that supports his machination.
Brooks grew up in the corn belt of the MidWestern corridor of the United States, in the outskirts of a small town called Brazil, Indiana (on his mother’s side, the family were farmers, and on his father’s side most of the men worked in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, “known for its large steel industry and as the birthplace of the Jackson 5”14). He spent his formative years skateboarding, an imaginative and physical activity that shaped his perception of urban space. It’s not much of a stretch to see why Brooks’s sculptural practice is often riddled with an incisive exploration of the tenuous relationship between our ecological life and technological industry. Besides being a full-time artist and professor, Brooks spends long stretches of time on volunteer research expeditions in the Florida Everglades, the Amazon rainforest, Guyana rainforest, Cuba, and elsewhere as a field team member working alongside conservation biologists, discovering unknown fish and bird species and exploring areas with vast and rich ecosystems that are constantly under human threat. His experience working with these scientists for over a decade has conditioned him to “look at things in deep time scenarios.”15 Working within “real-scale dimension”16 is something of a trope for Brooks, evident here and in other monumental commissions, such as Desert Rooftops (2011–12), for Art Production Fund (a 5,000-square-foot urban earthwork in Times Square); Preserved Forest (2010–11), at MoMA PS1 (comprised of twenty tons of concrete and thirty-foot-tall trees of Amazonian origin); and A Proverbial Machine in the Garden (2013), at Storm King (a vintage tractor entombed in concrete compartments within a manmade hill). As Brooks explains, the work has “to be realized in real, not ‘representational,’ scale. It qualifies its existence by maintaining its true scale ... it displays its materiality as both form and concept.”17 Moreover, it is inextricably linked to its “site” (and the myriad ways of defining what “site” is). Brooks’s work pulls from particularities of Land art, Duchamp’s readymades, Minimalism, and the current ecological crisis. He indicates that his work is comprised of actions, not simply objects,
David Brooks, detail showing original wear and tear on the surface, next to sandblasted surface treatment, next to brass-plated surface treatment 6
as they employ the “conventionally made.”18 In other words, the manmade (machines, asphaltshingled rooftops, greenhouse-grown trees) is used to conceive an “unconventional composition”19 (a burial, a dunescape, a petrified forest, a procession) particular to its setting. To consider “the natural world vs. the built environment,”20 one must work from within an evolving or evolutionary vernacular. A vintage tractor is returned to dirt. Storm King, once farmland, is today a pastoral sculpture park (A Proverbial Machine in the Garden). A displaced forest is desiccated in concrete. The Amazon rainforest, the most biodiverse place on the planet, is shrinking as a result of predatory developers, and at risk of becoming a desert (Preserved Forest). A combine harvester is eviscerated; an ecosystem is reduced to a life-supporting machine (Continuous Service Altered Daily). Brooks’s installations function as allegories, reminding us that while an artwork can be “a document of present conditions, it is also a response to its failings, but it is also an experiential moment that can potentially incite a sense of agency in its audience—since it is they who shape a future.”21
on gallery walls, where they appear as artifacts, specimens, fossils or rarefied polished objects, “an expression of life lived (or indexical traces of life and life lived).” 22 As Brooks said in a recent interview, “I choose certain materials because of the very fact that they have a baggage to them, because the energy it took to utilize that resource is materially self-evident and tells part of the story.” 23 In doing so, Brooks is also demystifying the agency bound within methods of museum display, from the traditional trappings of highbrow art objects or precious natural history presentations. As the visitor moves through this arrangement of dismantled parts, grouped according to the ecosystem service they connote, it is impossible to conceptualize the combine harvester in its entirety, or to ascertain the complete machine’s functions. Similarly, an ecosystem integrates innumerable constituents and processes, most of them too vast, intangible or imperceptible to comprehend, into an imagined whole; thus, we are unable to continuously perceive our daily lives unfolding as part of something unquantifiable.
Brooks’s method of presentation offers this weird and wonderful machine’s shell and innards in varying degrees of material transformation: a) in its weathered condition, indexing its forty years of deterioration, but with its trademark John Deere green still visible, b) sandblasted to remove all evidence of wear and tear so as to return the object back to its material origin, c) and d) brass plated and powder coated, elevating the individualized status of the pieces to that of precious objects. Signature mammoth features, like the operator’s cab and corn head, are situated at the front of the Museum in their native green, while the smaller, more jewel-like and Modernist object-like pieces— blades, pipes, and fittings—are brass plated and encased in vitrines. The larger elements, like the hopper, hood components, and elevator chutes are powder coated and situated outdoors in the Sculpture Garden at the rear of the Museum, where they resemble public artworks. The machine is stripped of its functionality, its components displayed within vitrines, atop pedestals, or hung
David Brooks, sorting disassembled combine components for Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016
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We can experience Brooks’s installation both up close and at a distance, as it reverberates near and far-off lines of sight, granting multiple opportunities for “views” and encounters. Spectators can respond to it at different vantage points as they move around the galleries and grounds. A combine is something we are used to seeing from afar, out in a field in the countryside. It appears on the horizon like a creature from outer space, an awkward antique of the future. Despite its camouflaged color, it appears strange. Here, in the Museum, its more identifiable elements seem uncanny. The separation, selection, organization, and hierarchical partitioning rarifies these individualized components, making them wholly unique; the machine-object is anthropomorphized, like a dissected creature. We are confronted with the mouth (corn head), skin (hood), heart (engine), intestines (cables), arms and legs (axles), hands and feet (tires). Despite the dispersal of parts, its monumental scale is not diminished. It is impossible to recognize its entire functionality when in working order, and it is inconceivable to see this procession all at once—despite sight lines visible through the Museum glass, only some of the elements are directly relatable at any one time. Continuous Service Altered Daily is a single gesture comprised of singular actions represented in nine “zones,” each composed of individual works. Thereby, the project moves concurrently from the macro to micro, zooming in and zooming out, “an enactment of the collective and the individual concomitantly.”24
Twenty-first-century speed is hyperkinetic. Technological progress today is impossible to perceive in the present tense. Urban and suburban sprawl happen so fast that it is infeasible to ascertain their impact on existing infrastructure that has been with us for millions of years. Continuous Service Altered Daily ultimately attempts to channel evolutionary time. A 1976 combine is a symbol of nineteenth-century innovation updated in a twentieth-century model. Brooks captures this progression through three stages of presentation, and thus likens it to the processes of interconnected life forms themselves. The wear and tear over its forty-year existence is self-evident in a rusty green corn head (past). The machine is then stripped of its lived history as its age is sandblasted away (present). Shiny objects with a fetish finish are re-presented as ornaments or modernist tabletop sculptures (future). But it is a temporal arrangement, one that marks time and space by compressing it within a schematic system that is itself impermanent. As the installation extends beyond the windows and walls of The Aldrich, we are wedged inside the far off and the close up. We are Jonah trapped inside the whale’s belly, drifting among the graspable and the unfathomable. David Brooks was born in 1975 in Brazil, Indiana; he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Water Purification zone (installation view detail) Courtesy of the artist 8
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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
The title of this essay is borrowed from the title track of EL VY’s debut album, Return to the Moon (4AD, October 2015). Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation (The MIT Press, 1993), p. 229. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (The University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 27. Nancy Holt, ed., Robert Smithson’s Collected Writings: Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects (New York University Press, 1968), p. 85. Phone conversation with the artist, February 2016. Now nearly 175 years old, John Deere was founded in 1837 by the eponymous inventor and blacksmith from Illinois. Hiram Moore invented the combine in 1834. Richard Kalina, Art In America, artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/robert-morris/ In this durational event, over a three-week period Morris daily arranged and rearranged organic materials such as soil, grease, clay, and felt, and construction materials such as shovels, wood, barrels, and plastic. Records of his labor-like activities were documented in a series of black and white photos he took at the end of each day, as well as tape recordings that captured his movements aurally. Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 224. Email from the artist, February 25, 2016. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ecosystem Email from the artist March 18, 2016. Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 225. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary,_Indiana David Brooks in His Element, video documentary, produced by art 21 and released on March 1, 2013: art21.org/newyorkcloseup/ films/david-brooks-is-in-his-element/ David Brooks Tears the Roof Off, video documentary produced by art21 and released on July 13, 2012: art21.org/newyorkcloseup/ films/david-brooks-tears-the-roof-off/ David Brooks in Bomb magazine: bombmagazine.org/article/1000088/david-brooks David Brooks Tears the Roof Off. Ibid. Brooks’s familiar expression about his practice, stated in dozens of instances over the years. Brooks in Bomb. Ibid. Ibid. Email from the artist, March 18, 2016.
David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Ornamental Resources zone, (installation view detail) Courtesy of the artist 9
Color schematic diagram of the Nine Ecosystem Zones for installation arrangement
Front Courtyard
Sculpture Garden
DISEASE REGULATION PRIMARY PRODUCTION
↓
↓
↑
↑
HABITAT FORMATION
DECOMPOSITION
↑
WATER PURIFICATION
↑
EROSION AND FLOOD CONTROL
↑
AIR PURIFICATION
POLLINATION
ORNAMENTAL RESOURCES
CAB
Tall double e frame postts
CORNHEAD
Rotary fan Exhaust
Hazard sig gn
Thick wall shelf misc. pieces that can stand up
SEAT
STEERING COLUMN
Grill &?
?
?
?
Sheet metal layers
Augurs Back hood
?????
???
Spindle thing
?
Weathered John Deere Green
metal hydraulic tubes
Sandblasted
Brass plated
Powder coated
wall compositions (w/wall pedestals?)
Large g Axle A-frame & misc.
?
tall single Brancusi
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TEETH TROUGH
HYDRAULIC
AXLE AXLE
CORNHEAD
Grill w/ blades
LADDERS ENGINE
Four states of material transformation
vitrine with sandblasted
wall composition behind (w/wall pedestals?)
round things & fan blade
David Brooks has grouped the combine harvester parts into nine zones that represent nine ecosystem services that occur continuously in our biosphere and upon which we rely daily: water purification, pollination, disease regulation, decomposition, air purification, habitat formation, primary production, ornamental resources, and erosion and flood control. Every object (or group of objects) on display in the exhibition has been given an individual interpretive label that supports this correlation.
Air Purification Forest systems renew our air supply by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Trees clean our atmosphere by intercepting airborne particles—anthropogenic pollutants that can induce asthma or other respiratory problems—and by absorbing ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and other greenhouse gases. Trees absorb carbon dioxide during the process of photosynthesis, thus becoming major repositories of carbon.
Nine Ecosystem Zones
Habitat Formation Many organisms are “ecosystem engineers”—organisms whose presence or activity alters their physical surroundings or changes resource flow, thereby modifying or creating habitats and influencing associated species. These habitat changes range from local to biogeographic-scale modifications, and help to maintain the viability of gene pools, nutrient and biogeochemical cycles, and physical environments for migratory species.
Water Purification Water purification occurs when pollutants are removed from the water. Forests, woodlands, wetlands, and natural grasslands act as sponges to slow the movement of rainwater from where it falls to where it enters streams, lakes, and estuaries. Bacteria and fungi break down chemical contaminants in the water. Pollutants such as metals and radioactive elements are absorbed by silt particles, which settle to the bottom or are filtered out. Pollination Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the male parts of a flower to the female parts of a flower of the same species, which results in the fertilization of plant ovaries and the production of seeds. It is an essential service that depends to a large extent on the coevolution and symbiosis between species, the pollinated and the pollinator. Disease Regulation Pests and diseases are regulated in ecosystems through the actions of predators and parasites as well as by the defense mechanisms of their prey. Natural control of plant pests is provided by generalist and specialist predators and parasitoids, including birds, bats, frogs, spiders, beetles, mantises, flies, and wasps, as well as entomopathogenic fungi. Detoxification and Decomposition of Wastes Decomposition is a critical service that removes wastes, recycles nutrients, and renews soil fertility and carbon sequestration. During the process of decomposition, dead organic matters convert into smaller and simpler compounds. The products of complete decomposition are carbon dioxide, water, and inorganic ions. Detritivores help to turn animal wastes and animal carcasses into organic material that can be reused by primary producers. Remineralization is the complete breakdown of an organic chemical, such as may occur by microbial digestion, and destroys toxicity inherent in waste.
Primary Production Primary production is the production of organic matter through processes such as photosynthesis and chemosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process by which autotrophic organisms use light energy to make sugar and oxygen from carbon dioxide and water. Through photosynthesis, plants harvest the energy of the sun, providing both food and habitat for other organisms. Ornamental Resources People obtain non-material benefits from ecosystems, such as aesthetic values, intellectual development, spiritual enrichment, and recreation. Landscapes with significant natural elements like plants, water, and rocks provide psychological relief in addition to their aesthetic values. The psychological benefits gained in natural settings increase with biodiversity. Iconic species and landscapes provide an easily accessible means of entering into a relationship with a particular place, and often capture the imagination of the public through their charisma, beauty, or recognizability. Erosion and Flood Control Porous wetlands and forest floors act as sponges to quickly absorb and control floodwaters and reduce flow velocity through friction. As floodwaters move into riparian flood plains, vegetation slows the water’s movement, reducing its erosive potential and permitting runoff to seep into groundwater aquifers. Standing vegetation and forest buffers stabilize soils, especially along stream banks, on steep slopes, and where soils are highly erodible. Vegetal cover also intercepts driving rain and slows the flow of water over the ground, thereby reducing scouring and soil erosion.
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(opposite and above) David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily 2016 Primary Production zone and Detoxification and Decomposition zone (installation views) Courtesy of the artist 13
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(opposite) David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily (installation views), 2016 (top) Left side of room: Erosion and Flood zone, with sandblasted surface treatment Right side of room: Water Purification zone, in its original wear and tear condition (bottom) Pollination zone, with all fuel and hydraulic fluid lines, all electrical wiring, and all remaining hardware
(top) David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Erosion and Flood Control zone (installation view detail, with sandblasted surface treatment on bottom, and original wear and tear condition on top) Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist 15
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(opposite) David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily (installation views), 2016 (top) Sponges (Air Purification zone) (sandblasted drive chains) (bottom) Decaying Leaves (Air Purification zone) (sandblasted sampling of every type of fastener)
(top) David Brooks, Iconic Species (Ornamental Resources zone), 2016 (brass-plated auger bearing) Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist 17
(top) David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Ornamental Resources zone (installation view detail, with all components brass plated), 2016 Courtesy of the artist
(opposite) David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 (top) Disease Regulation zone (installation view detail) (bottom) Habitat Formation zone (installation view detail of gold powder-coated components), 2016 Courtesy of the artist
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