BRAD
BROVVN
GETTING USED TO USING OCTOBER JUNDT
ART MUSEUM
20 - DECEMBER
• GONZAGA
UNIVERSITY
EACH OTHER 13, 2006 • SPOKANE,
WASHINGTON
BRAD
BROVVN
For artists of a certain self-reflexive order, the relationship of process and image is deeply rooted, complex, and indelible. Aside from any other significance it may possess,their work depicts the procedures that form it; pictorial time is astelling as pictorial space. It is well known, for example, that the British painter Howard Hodgkin often works sporadically on paintings, even small ones, for a period of years; thus each embodies a prolonged meditation on the suitability of its own pictorial means. In his War Drawings, Brooklyn-based Kim Jones enacts, with pencil and eraser, epic battles between armies of xs and os, embedding the shifting tides of conflict in the act of drawing. Californian Bruce Connor's elaborate, obsessive ink-blot drawings, in which innumerable, symmetrical hieroglyphics straddle one of the several folds in the paper by which they were clearly created, wear on their sleeve the painstaking means of their making. Though a generation younger than these artists, Brad Brown takes a concern with process to even greater lengths, examining the idea of ever really completing anything. Born in North Carolina in 1964, he lived for a time in San Francisco and relocated to Brooklyn in 2002. He says he is "a real Romantic," though this outlook is distinctly mediated. Brown is utterly confident in the validity of his idiosyncratic pictorial impulses and intuitions, even to the point of wanting to complicate those impulsesthrough the addition of chance events, and of time. His project has become the invention of structures within which minor acts of improvisation find their significance, like cogs in a vibrant visual machine. Brown achieved wide recognition in 1994 with his solo debut at San Francisco's Southern Exposure gallery. The Look Stains (Fragments and Notations) introduced the public to Brown's apparently effortless graphic virtuosity, and his strategy of recombining many dozens of smallish drawings in large-scale installations. These "pages,"
initiated in 1987, are limited in palette, keyed to the achromatic, earthy tones of charcoal, ink, oil, and masking tape, but bear a dazzling variety of approach. Seemingly haphazard drips and smears are teamed with exquisite autographic markmaking, establishing a dialogue between the accidental and the willed in which neither gains the upper hand. Each page has been revisited over the course of several years. (Every time he adds to one, Brown notes the date in pencil on the back.) Though they frequently appear to be wholly abstract, Brown says his approach to drawing does not tap into the subconscious, as in the "automatic" drawing favored by the Surrealists and expanded upon by some Abstract Expressonist painters. Rather, it is "notational," proceeding from his response to the visual stimuli of the world around him. The artist explains the title of the project in terms of the psychic stresses the component pages have undergone during their material development and exhibition history. For over a decade, Brown rented rather than sold the works to collectors, as a precaution against losing any page, however peripheral, that he might want to add to, or use in a later reconfiguration. During the term of their lease, in Brown's view, the caretaker/ collector stained the pageswith their looking, gradually altering the images with their repeated gaze. They may be depleted, or reinforced, throughout this period of "looking as marking," but always the pagesare somehow fundamentally transformed. In the fall of 200 I, Brown decided that the several thousand battered and bruised, multiply-beheld sheets of The Look Stains had accrued to the point where it made sense to finalize their - . recombination. It then became a "closed system," allowing no new additions; Brown works only with the existing inventory of components, and will continue until the pagesare used up. Having torn many of the sheets to a size that fits easily in the palm of his hand, Brown now floats one above the other, attaching other bits to these pairs, and to the wall, with small nails. His choice of hardware is typically off-hand, but ideal for this functon, as the slim, silvery nails retreat visually even while providing the perfect narrative conceit for his allusive, elusive fragments: Brown has finally nailed them down." In Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett uses and reuses snippets of language, shards of sound, in a series of ninety-six deadpan paragraphs, each of which uses many of the same words yet builds, ironically, to a different expression of stasis. At one point, the text comments on its own arbitrariness: '~ny other would do as ill. Almost any. Almost as ill." A complex architecture of sound and sense arises from a crabbed yet concrete syntax. Deeply impressed by this work, one of Beckett's three late novellas known as the "closed space" stories, Brown transcribes the text of one of these paragraphs on each of the small diagrams that maps out a finished piece from The Look Stains. This feels utterly appropriate, for Brown saysthat his visual sources don't matter in themselves-or, that they only matter when they become too evident, and wrongly focus the viewer's attention. This is in keeping with Beckett's aversion to imagery in Worstward Ho, or even to an intelligible declarative sentence, as if such recognizable linguistic conventions ould upset the novel's tough, tenuous balance. For a 1999 print project at Crown Point Press, Brown made a series of thirty unique intaglio prints, variants in which eight discreet panels use many of the same
plates in different combinations and orientations. The closely related Textbook Comic Devices and Tender Jokes followed in 200 I; Brown has continued his printmaking activities in recent years at Shark's Ink, in Colorado, and Hui Press in Maui. These projects are fascinating in that they obviate the insistent physicality central to The Look Stains in favor of its underlying graphical concerns; their spatial situations are disembodied, but the layering (for which printmaking is procedurally suited) remains. Brown focuses the valence of structure and improvisation even more sharply in a new series of multi-paged wall works called one sixteenth for every quarter and eighth, begun in 2005 and unveiled at Larissa Goldston Gallery in New York City in the fall of that year. For these commanding, ninety by one hundred and twenty-inch pieces, Brown works from an inventory of brushy drawings done on stout, twenty-two by thirty-inch Arches watercolor paper and precisely torn down to quarters, eighths, and sixteenths of the sheet. Among his many sources for these drawings, Brown is fond of the anonymous, somewhat generic yet precise illustrations on old matchbook covers, advertising graphics, and instructional illustration, and especially comics from the 1920s and 30s. Louis Glackens, the younger brother of the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, drew ad art for novelty companies marketing dribble glassesand whoopie cushions; these vernacular drawings are among Brown's favorites. Brown assembles these pieces by working from the randomly stacked torn-down sheets. Each row consists of four sets of one quarter-sheet and two eighth-sheets, variously aligned; one sixteenth-
s eet is then hung so as to eclipse a portion of each of the larger sheets. The scope of Brown's ecision-making is limited to what intrigues him "locally," that is, among the limited elements he is eaJingwith at the moment. He relinquishes control over the whole. Thus, though the generative parameters are preordained, the specifics are left open to the spirit of play in the installation process. e result is a mesmerizing field of truncated gestures, an optical flickering, punctuated by irregular yet . p torn edges that reiterate the template of the grid. Brown likens the structure to a net, and indeed snares some of the graphically most interesting bits to emanate from his work table. It also suggestsa game board, and, like chess, poker and baseball, the project flirts with mathematical quantification. As ree of every eight locations are obscured by one "sixteenth," some twenty-seven percent of the work ot visible. The number of possible permutations of the piece could be calculated, just as there is a . e if ungraspably enormous number of games of chess that can be played. Certainly, their complexity irtually ensures that these pieces can never be installed the same way twice. Echoing Beckett, Brown adds that a given installation can be "never any better or any worse" than another, since the process y which they are generated possessesa self-justifying internal logic. Revealing both consummate faith i his method as well as blissful resignation to the power of chance, Brown describes the project as nfinished and unfinishable," but seems undaunted by this prospect. In fact, it goads him to further action.
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Among Brown's other literary sources are The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, first published in 1964. Piece is a recent foray into painting, exhibited here for the first time, It is inspired by Berrigan's modular approach, which recycles and recombines many individual lines throughout the book's eighty-eight poems. Brown works with standardized, interchangeable elements: plywood panels, twelve inches square, mounted on deep cradles. His palette is familiarly muted, his facture more tactile than ever. He marks up large sheets of luon, then cuts them up with a jig saw into evocative, often biomorphic fragments. These are cobbled together with the plywood panels in scrappy low relief; the panels can be coupled up, or hung in a horizontal sequence, or in a grid. Like the lines in Berrigan's sonnets, each panel has its own integrity while deriving part of its meaning from the panels to which it is contiguous. Getting Used to Using Each Other goes one line, and in this turn of phrase, with its promise of unfolding but rejuvenating effort-of eventual fruition-Brown locates the attitude behind this new body of work. -Stephen Maine
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IMAGES
Cover: The Look Stains (3437-3441),
2006.
Oil, etching, tape, glasine, paper, wire brads, II" x 7 1/2"
Left panel: (top to bottom) Piece 3 (detail), 2006. Oil, masonite, plywood,
luon, screws, wire brads, stir stick, 12" x 24"
Piece 2 (detail), 2006. Oil, masonite, plywood, luon, screws, wire brads, 12" x 12" Piece I (detail), 2006. Oil, acrylic, masonite, plywood, luon, mdf board, screws, double point tacks, wire brads, 12" x 24"
Center and Right Panel: one sixteenth for every quarter and eighth #3, 2006 Oil on paper with double point tacks, 90" x 120"
Right fold: By and By # 15, 2006 Color mono print collage, IT' x 29"
Back panel: The Look Stains (32/6-3306),
2006.
Oil, charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor,
Photo Haines Alfonso Shark's Daphne
tape, etching, lithography, paper, wire brads, 36 1/2" x 52 3/4"
credits: Gal/ery Paredes Ink Zepos
This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign, 2005©Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258-00 I
2006.