BRAD BROVVN

GETTING USED TO USING EACH OTHER

OCTOBER 20 - DECEMBER 13, 2006

JUNDT ART MUSEUM • GONZAGA UNIVERSITY • SPOKANE, WASHINGTON

BRAD BROVVN

For artists of a certain self-reflexive order, therelationship of process and image is deeply rooted,complex, and indelible. Aside from any othersignificance it may possess,their work depicts theprocedures that form it; pictorial time isastelling aspictorial space. It is well known, for example, thatthe British painter Howard Hodgkin often workssporadically on paintings, even small ones, for aperiod of years; thus each embodies a prolongedmeditation on the suitability of its own pictorialmeans. In his War Drawings, Brooklyn-based KimJones enacts, with pencil and eraser, epic battlesbetween armies of xs andos, embedding the shiftingtides of conflict in the act of drawing. CalifornianBruce Connor's elaborate, obsessive ink-blotdrawings, in which innumerable, symmetricalhieroglyphics straddle one of the several folds inthe paper by which they were clearly created,wear on their sleevethe painstaking meansof theirmaking.

Though a generation younger than these artists,Brad Brown takes a concern with process toeven greater lengths, examining the idea of everreally completing anything. Born in North Carolinain 1964, he lived for a time in San Francisco andrelocated to Brooklyn in 2002. He says he is "areal Romantic," though this outlook is distinctlymediated. Brown is utterly confident in the validityof his idiosyncratic pictorial impulsesand intuitions,even to the point of wanting to complicate thoseimpulsesthrough the addition of chanceevents, andof time. His project has become the invention ofstructures within which minor actsof improvisationfind their significance, like cogs in a vibrant visualmachine.

Brown achieved wide recognition in 1994with hissolo debut at San Francisco's Southern Exposuregallery. The Look Stains (Fragments and Notations)introduced the public to Brown's apparentlyeffortless graphic virtuosity, and his strategy ofrecombining many dozens of smallish drawingsin 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 beara dazzling variety of approach. Seemingly haphazard dripsand smears are teamed with exquisite autographic mark-making, establishing a dialogue between the accidental andthe willed in which neither gains the upper hand. Each pagehas been revisited over the course of several years. (Everytime he adds to one, Brown notes the date in pencil on theback.) Though they frequently appear to be wholly abstract,Brown says his approach to drawing does not tap intothe subconscious, as in the "automatic" drawing favoredby the Surrealists and expanded upon by some AbstractExpressonist painters. Rather, it is "notational," proceedingfrom his response to the visual stimuli of the world around him.

The artist explains the title of the project in terms of thepsychic stresses the component pages have undergone duringtheir material development and exhibition history. For over adecade, 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 alteringthe 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 thousandbattered and bruised, multiply-beheld sheets of The Look Stainshad accrued to the point where it made sense to finalize their - .recombination. It then became a "closed system," allowing nonew additions; Brown works only with the existing inventory of components, and will continue until thepagesare used up. Having torn many of the sheets to a size that fits easily in the palm of his hand, Brownnow floats one above the other, attaching other bits to these pairs, and to the wall, with small nails. Hischoice of hardware is typically off-hand, but ideal for this functon, as the slim, silvery nails retreat visuallyeven while providing the perfect narrative conceit for his allusive, elusive fragments: Brown has finallynailed them down."

In Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett uses and reuses snippets of language,shards of sound, in a series ofninety-six deadpan paragraphs, each of which uses many of the same words yet builds, ironically, to adifferent expression of stasis. At one point, the text comments on its own arbitrariness: '~ny otherwould do as ill. Almost any. Almost as ill." A complex architecture of sound and sense arises from acrabbed yet concrete syntax. Deeply impressed by this work, one of Beckett's three late novellas knownasthe "closed space" stories, Brown transcribes the text of one of these paragraphs on each of the smalldiagrams that maps out a finished piece from The Look Stains. This feels utterly appropriate, for Brownsaysthat his visual sources don't matter in themselves-or, that they only matter when they become tooevident, and wrongly focus the viewer's attention. This is in keeping with Beckett's aversion to imagery inWorstward 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, Brownmade a series of thirty unique intaglio prints, variants in which eight discreet panels use many of the same

Brown assembles these pieces by working from the randomly stacked torn-down sheets. Each rowconsists of four sets of one quarter-sheet and two eighth-sheets, variously aligned; one sixteenth-

plates in different combinations and orientations. The closely related Textbook Comic Devices and TenderJokes 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 insistentphysicality central to The Look Stains in favor of its underlying graphical concerns; their spatialsituations 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 ofmulti-paged wall works called one sixteenth for every quarter and eighth, begun in 2005 and unveiledat Larissa Goldston Gallery in New York City in the fall of that year. For these commanding, ninetyby one hundred and twenty-inch pieces, Brown works from an inventory of brushy drawings doneon 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 ofthe anonymous, somewhat generic yet precise illustrations on old matchbook covers, advertisinggraphics, 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 companiesmarketing dribble glassesand whoopie cushions; these vernacular drawings are among Brown's favorites.

s eet is then hung so as to eclipse a portion of each of the larger sheets. The scope of Brown'secision-making is limited to what intrigues him "locally," that is, among the limited elements he iseaJingwith 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 indeedsnares 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. Asree 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 ungraspablyenormous number of games of chessthat can be played. Certainly, their complexity

irtually ensures that these pieces can never be installed the same way twice. Echoing Beckett, Brownadds that a given installation can be "never any better or any worse" than another, since the processy which they are generated possessesa self-justifying internal logic. Revealingboth consummate faithi his method as well as blissful resignation to the power of chance, Brown describes the project as

nfinished and unfinishable," but seemsundaunted by this prospect. In fact, it goads him to further action.

IP

Among Brown's other literary sources are The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, first published in 1964. Piece is arecent 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. Brownworks with standardized, interchangeable elements: plywood panels, twelve inches square, mountedon deep cradles. His palette is familiarly muted, his facture more tactile than ever. He marks up largesheets of luon, then cuts them up with a jig saw into evocative, often biomorphic fragments. These arecobbled together with the plywood panels in scrappy low relief; the panels can be coupled up, or hungin a horizontal sequence, or in a grid. Like the lines in Berrigan's sonnets, each panel has its own integritywhile deriving part of its meaning from the panels to which it is contiguous. Getting Used toUsing Each Other goes one line, and in this turn of phrase, with its promise of unfolding butrejuvenating effort-of eventual fruition-Brown locates the attitude behind this new body of work.

-Stephen Maine

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IMAGESCover:The Look Stains (3437-3441), 2006.Oil, etching, tape, glasine, paper, wire brads, II" x 7 1/2"

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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, 2006Oil on paper with double point tacks, 90" x 120"

Right fold:By and By # 15, 2006Color mono print collage, IT' x 29"

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Back panel:The Look Stains (32/6-3306), 2006.Oil, charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor, tape, etching, lithography, paper, wire brads, 36 1/2" x 52 3/4"

Photo credits:Haines Gal/eryAlfonso ParedesShark's InkDaphne Zepos

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This publication was funded by the Jundt Art Museum's Annual Campaign, 2005- 2006.©Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA 99258-00 I