Marshall Brown: SBMA - by renée reizman

BY RENÉE REIZMAN

RE-IMAGINING AN IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE Marshall Brown Finds Beauty in Dystopia

Above: Pantheon, 2020. Collage on archival paper. SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the General Art Acquisition Fund. © 2022, Marshall Brown Projects.

Opposite page: The Round Tower, 2021. Collage on archival paper. Courtesy Marshall Brown Projects and Western Exhibitions, Chicago. © 2022, Marshall Brown Projects.

One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through an open pit, illuminating a subterranean realm. There are thin, precise incisions along the collage, which are then mended with irregular strips of blue painter’s tape. The Round Tower (2021) is one of Marshall Brown’s many paper monsters in his solo exhibition “Marshall Brown: The Architecture of Collage” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Collage is inherently about creating unexpected amalgamations, and Brown uses the medium to build grotesque labyrinthine architectures and opaque, impassable cities. A licensed architect, urbanist and professor at Princeton University, Brown taps into his deep knowledge of architectural history. Primarily working with reference materials like old trade journals, magazine back issues and historical maps, Brown is an analog world builder crafting the future from jewels of the past.

The Round Tower references another work of the same name, created by Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi for his series “Carceri d’invenzione” (Imaginary Prisons) circa 1749–50. In Piranesi’s etching, staircases loop around a panoptic stone building, which Brown echoes in his own collage with Marina City. Piranesi combined archways, staircases, windows and cantilevers from his real-life surroundings to create these winding environments. Brown—long fascinated with Piranesi’s method of building the impossible with existing architecture—uses this work as a launching point for his own series, “Prisons of Invention.” Many of these works are included in this exhibition.

Brown mounts his free-form collages on large, blank archival paper, often embossed in the corner with his architecture license, and suspends their edges in a void. In Pantheon (2020), the curved walkway of the Guggenheim blends into many improbable routes. One ramp takes you to a mid-century modern stone facade, another extends downwards into an arrow that points into emptiness . Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful museum becomes a fortress with no clear exits. There are suggestions of blue skies, clouds and trees, but these features are turned on their axis and made inaccessible to its wanderers. Other collages in this series prominently show concrete in repetitious forms that are strongly associated with both Brutalism and Futurism. Two figures occupy opposite ends of the composition in Prisoners on a Projecting Platform (2021), framed in circular, concrete apertures. They are separated by a mundane office building’s window facade, but in this context it mimics a jail cell’s barred doors. In Brown’s re-imaginings of prisons, aesthetics have been improved, but people are still caged. This theme—that ideologies from the past will continue to be embedded into the future— runs through Brown’s exhibition. His “Chimera” series incorporates recognizable fragments of Le Corbusier, a Nazi sympathizer. Another, 14-03-10 (2010), samples Zaha Hadid, who was criticized for using forced labor (although the art center featured in this particular collage is not part of that controversy). Preserving these architects’ signature styles, even in fantastical configurations, means that the darker parts of their legacies will linger, but the people inhabiting Brown’s collages don’t seem troubled by these histories. A woman straight out of the 1960s lounges on a red sofa in A Choice to Do Both (2019). She gazes into the blank part of the canvas, oblivious to the architecture surrounding her.

It’s rare to see human figures doing anything but idling in Brown’s collages. They’re captured standing around at art museums, waiting at airports and gazing from balconies. It’s due to the nature of Brown’s source material; glossy celebrations of architectural achievements in which people simply marvel at their surroundings. People don’t seem to work or struggle, other than the three construction workers in 13-12-31 (2013) who are surrounded by cranes and steel. The laborers are outnumbered by the ruling class, living in the margins, visible only when they’re building Brown’s modular structures.

As much as Brown’s exhibition evokes the past, one can envision a speculative future that emerges from the historical imagery. A newer body of work, Brown’s Piranesian Map of Berlin (2022), inspired by Piranesi’s map of the Campus Martius (1762), repackages Berlin as a sprawling super-city in which the population has exploded and new development has kept pace.

Brown built this map with different types of urban diagrams that the German government produced before the reunification of East and West Berlin. The colorful zoning charts, street plans and topographic drawing fuse contradictory geographies, creating a Kafkaesque infrastructural failure. Navigating this speculative Berlin recalls Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle, K., who cannot access the titular castle and instead ambles through the surrounding village, bouncing from one dead end to the next.

While “The Architecture of Collage” has a shining surface, a closer read of the work reveals that the future of urbanism might be more dystopic than utopian. But we can still grab on to the beautiful imagery in Brown’s new worlds. We are already in an era of modular design, where homeowners are converting container ships into resorts and cheap, prefabricated cubes can be stacked into Accessory Dwelling Units. Brown shows that design can instead be more freestyle and organic. We could maintain the craftsmanship that created so many architectural icons, like Marina City, but we must also be careful not to transform them into prisons of invention.

BY LAUREN GUILFORD

PODCAST

Ana Mendieta’s work is as much about life as it is about death. Attuned to the sacred bond between bodies and land, Mendieta regarded nature as a sensitive and emotive force entangled in culture and politics—a messy assemblage of energies and ideologies embedded in life and soil, crossing borders and spanning timelines. These forces can be traced in earth’s geological terrain and detected in its simultaneous containment of the past, present, and future—a landscape where death and life continually bloom and wither like an accordion tune. “My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid,” Mendieta explains. “Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.” These words describe a worldview that is vibrational and sensitive to the energies of life’s currents, and yet, Mendieta’s legacy is largely defined by her death and the decades of protest that have followed. The artist Jose Muñoz asks, “what is attempted when one looks for Ana Mendieta? What does her loss signify in the here and now?” Muñoz’ questions were present in my mind when I heard curator and art historian Helen Molesworth was the host of “Death of an Artist,” a new podcast about Mendieta. The art world rarely appears in mainstream media, but when it does, it almost always comes with a sensationalized headline. It seemed fishy when I saw the thumbnail graphic for the podcast, which features an image of Mendieta’s young smiling face beaming with ambition, with the cryptic title overlaid before her and the whole image adorned with thick Tarantino-red brushstrokes. All of this gave me pause and discomfort, especially in the absence of her name and the looming presence of the word Death. I’m generally uneasy with the growing genre of the “true crime” podcast, suspicious of the agendas that intend to capitalize on the sensationalized, sexualized, and dramatized stories of violence inflicted on women (especially women of color). Molesworth (an undoubtedly excellent storyteller) begins by stating her intentions to tell Mendieta’s whole story “all the way to its shocking and troubling end… a story the art world would prefer I didn’t tell” (spoken in a tone that feels perfectly at home with the “true crime” zeitgeist).

Molesworth appropriately asks the exhausted question: can and should we separate the artist’s life from the art? How critics and curators frame Mendieta’s oeuvre is especially important, considering most of the work we see today was never actually exhibited during her lifetime—she didn’t have a chance to frame these critical conversations that shape her legacy. How can we acknowledge the injustice of her death while also creating space for expansive and nuanced discourse? I don’t claim to have the answer, and I’m left with the persistent conundrum surrounding the canonization of her work, which artist Coco Fusco says, “has nothing to do with how she lived,” arguing that ”in an art world willing to congratulate itself for championing overlooked and maligned women, we must also acknowledge—as curators, viewers, writers, collectors, dealers and protesters—the possibility that we may be complicit in a collective type of abuse...How do we remember Mendieta without viewing her practice solely through the lens of her death?” Fusco’s words resonate with the uneasy feeling that sat in the pit of my stomach throughout the podcast. The art world remains fixated on the horror of her death—telling her heartbreaking story time and time again, creating a mythological version of Mendieta, petrified by the violence carried out against her.

It’s hard to ignore the circumstances I suddenly found myself in mid-way through this critical response—as I finish this draft, I’m writing from the hospital waiting room where a lifelong friend sits beside me in pain from the abuse inflicted by her boyfriend. I am filled with sadness and rage as we wait for the nurse to examine and document my friend’s wounds. This experience brought the tragic reality to the surface: Mendieta’s death is no “mystery,” but an all too familiar story of violence that ends in the worst possible manner. While Molesworth’s podcast raises awareness of this injustice, at what cost does it do so? Mendieta’s art and life are mentioned, but they feel like lengthy footnotes, marginalia to the bigger death story. I want to put forth another kind of call to justice: Considering Ana Mendieta as an artist and a person that, like all of us, is multifaceted, particular, and mercurial; one who made work about death, as well as about life and rebirth.

Helen Molesworth True-Crimeifies Ana Mendieta

LA CONVENTION CENTER | WEST HALL