STANDARD BEARER

THIS PAST SPRING, the Art Institute of Chicago held the first ever comprehensive solo exhibition of stanley brouwn’s work in the United States. Expertly curated by Ann Goldstein and Jordan Carter, the show included more than fifty works made between 1960 and 2006 and was accompanied, at Dia Beacon, New York, by a presentation of two additional room-size installations organized by Carter. The Beacon exhibition will remain on long-term view, and the Chicago show will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2024. Aside from these basic facts, the hosting museums provide little to no public information about these shows, their decision to do so in keeping with the late artist’s exacting and deliberately minimal approach to promotional and representational conventions. 

This debut may seem belated for someone whose work was at the forefront of artistic production and discourse in the decades following World War II. But brouwn is known for being enigmatic. A key figure in Fluxus, the Zero Group, and Conceptual art, he showed in major exhibitions throughout the 1960s and ’70s and was represented by leading European galleries of that era such as Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf and Art & Project in Amsterdam, the city where brouwn was based for most of his career. Yet he chose an elliptical path through the mechanics of the whole thing. Beginning in the early ’70s, brouwn (who spelled his first and last names in lowercase) stopped allowing photographs of himself or his works to be printed, refrained from giving interviews or showing up to his own openings, and prohibited the publication of biographical or bibliographical information in connection to his art. This meant that his sculptures, text pieces, drawings, artist’s books, films, and videos were to function without a “before” (absent an author figureor an identifiable origin story) or an easily captured “after” (in the form of photographic reproductions or a CV line in the back of a book). 

brouwn’s decisions were meaningful amid the growing contemporary art market of the ’60s, wherein the international circulation of artworks in reproduction (via magazines and catalogues) and of artists themselves (via plane tickets and live talks and interviews) were key tools for validation. Minimalist art, though designed to stamp out from the final product any traces of the author’s subjective decision-making, nonetheless tended to be buttressedby the figure of a vocal artist holding court. Conceptual art, which took the form of relatively dematerialized textual and ideational propositions, occupied new avenues of publicity that merged the life of artwith the business of advertising.¹brouwn took up many of the aesthetic, compositional, and conceptual strategies that were in vogue in the ’60s, but he did so without any such forms of auxiliary representation, thus doubling back on those movements’ gestures of negation. 

The result is a powerfully open and generative body of artworks—so long as you can manage to see them. In Europe, his pieces are still frequently on view in museum collections and the occasional gallery show. But they are otherwise hard to come by. Significant scholarship on his work does exist, one classic example being Anne Rorimer’s New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality, which includes a section on brouwn, but no monograph has been attempted. Since his death in 2017, brouwn’s studio archive has remained closed to researchers. For these reasons and more, this current exhibition is a major event, made possible by Goldstein’s longtime support of the work and brouwn’s having agreed, prior to his death in May 2017, that the curator could organize a show of this scale. 

It wasn’t that brouwn was against circulation per se. And he wasn’t, like some other artists at the time, concerned with irretractable site specificity, nor did he vanish off the grid. On the contrary, many of his works evoke international mobility and networked connections, both interpersonal and mediatic. In the ’60s and ’70s, he used telecommunications and various means of transportation as conveyances for his work. One filmhe purportedly shot on a train ride into eastern Turkey in 1970 and then screened on the backside of a van driving through the streets of Amsterdam. For three televised pieces from 1970 and 1971, he broadcast footage of urban pedestrian crosswalk traffic on national channels in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands; brouwn was behind the camera, unseen but either walking steadily at a brisk pace or standing still and taking one deliberate step while unnamedbusinessmen, young mods, elders, pigeons, bicyclists, cars, and trams crisscrossed one another’s paths around him.² In exhibitions of that same period, he would use closed-circuit TVs to beam live views of the sidewalk outside the gallery or museum to a monitor displayed in the interior. These works conjure an anonymous, simultaneous collective of individuals on the move, a kind of supranational “imagined community” rendered conceivable by that era’s satellite-transmission and emergent information technologies.³ 

At Dia, one of the rooms devoted to brouwn is empty aside from a small wall label, which tells viewers they are walking through cosmic rays (particles that enter our atmosphere from outside the solar system):

^{. . . in this space, just as in every building on earth, it is also a case of “raining cosmic rays.”    
walking consciously through the invisible cosmic rays in this space confirms, intensifies the presence of this space.} 

The original installation of this piece, at the Städtisches Museum Mönchenglad­bach, Germany, in 1970, featured one of brouwn’s closed-circuit-TV works, the pedestrians outside the museum ostensibly also bathed in cosmic rays. Though we don’t have that at Dia, a work in the next room summons the outside world in a different way. Several small paths outlined in white strips vectorize the floor, telling visitors to “walk 5m in the direction of belém,” “walk 5m in the direction of calcutta,” or “walk 3m in the direction of marrakech,” all pointing toward those cities. The initial version of this piece was realized in 1970 at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, the Netherlands. Together, these rooms endow the ground on which one stands with an expanded sense of space, suffusing a single point with planetary connectedness. We are reminded that one always stands in relation to an elsewhere. If in their initial context these works would have touched on psychedelic- and moon-landing-era visions of micro and macro scalability, as well as on the postcolonial waves of migration and interchange then unfolding in Europe, today they resonate with an ever more prevailing virtuality and the time-space compressions produced by global capitalism.

EVEN AS BROUWN ABSENTED the artist figure in a conventional sense, he inhabited his works with details pertaining to his location, both actual and imaginary. For the “Information” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970, his sole contribution was a page in the show’s catalogue listing his home address and telephone number. In other pieces from 1970 sent by mail and as messages in bottles tossed out to sea, he asked recipients to “send me a map of the place where you are living” or “send me a poste-restante letter / send the letter to a city of your choice . . . ” and provided his address. Works from the last decades of his life, two of which are on view in Chicago, inform the viewer that “at this moment the distance between stanley brouwn and yourself is x feet.”⁴ Appearing frequently in the third person, “brouwn” comes across as a protagonist we are trailing in a book, a kind of everyman. Counts of brouwn’s footsteps in various cities and countries populate his oeuvre, as in a 1971 bulletin that Art & Project mailed out for his solo exhibition that year, consisting of lines referring to the artist’s hypothetical travel in the future:

_{the total number of my steps in 1971 in oslo 
the total number of my steps in 1972 in addis ababa 
the total number of my steps in 1973 in tokyo 
the total number of my steps in 1974 in dublin 
the total number of my steps in 1975 in montevideo 
the total number of my steps in 1976 in rome 
the total number of my steps in 1977 in reykjavik 
the total number of my steps in 1978 in beirut 
the total number of my steps in 1979 in port au prince 
the total number of my steps in 1980 in mexico city}⁵ 

brouwn’s art parodies the spirit of modern technocracy. It plays on a classic dialectic, that of systems of rationalization and all that escapes them. From the early ’70s onward, his works articulated such dynamics using the metalanguage of standardized measurement. At the Art Institute, the curators’ selection beautifully showed the great breadth brouwn found by using this as an artistic material for nearly five decades. In the ’60s, Minimalist and Conceptual art had been looking to numerical measurements as supposedly neutral means of composition and a factual expression of real, not illusory, depth. (Take Donald Judd’s mathematically sequenced wall progressions, begun in 1964, or Mel Bochner’s “MeasurementWorks” of 1968–71.) brouwn’s works summon that objectivity, but they also delve into systems of measurement as so many dialects of a broader language of space, which can disclose philosophical observations and material histories. Archaic systems are brought alongside those currently in use, reminding us that such “standards” have been imposed historically by empire and by laws of exchange as they calibrate and rewrite the world. brouwn primarily made use of single units of length, which can accrue to an extended plane (when grouped as orthogonal pairs) or to a volume (when arranged in three dimensions). One meter, one foot, one eighteenth-century Dutch ell, one ancient cubit: He often represented these with thin lines drawn side by side on a sheet of paper or with flat strips of metal laid on custom-made tables painted a quiet blue-gray. When they are aligned and juxtaposed, their difference and alikeness are plain. One unit is shorter or longer than the next, but we can see that they are like different words for the same thing. The systems they come from all measure length, just by means of a different baseline. Each unit can be rephrased as a ratio of another. Every distance can be written in feet. 

Into this matrix, brouwn introduces his unit of the step. “One brouwn step” is equal to the length of a stride by brouwn. It is an embodied, personal unit of measurement, variable between roughly 840 and 890 mm depending on the iteration. Integrating “one step” thickens the joke on codification and bestows on one person’s gait the glimmer of a universal convention (a kind of anti-“foot” of the British imperial system, which is a concretized generalization of the length of a man’s foot). Charts, clockings-in, and tallies of brouwn’s steps record the paces he takes through life with rigorously empty exactitude, as in a Borgesian short story. The Chicago show included several of brouwn’s card-file sculptures, in which uniform stacks of cataloguing drawers contain dozens of index cards, each representing an individual step or other length, each drawer standing for a single walk or some other distance. These submit brouwn’s individual strides to the law of equivalence proposed by the card file, raising the specter of population control, of the inscription of human bodies into coded and gridded systems of power.⁶ Taylorization, or the processing of workers’ limbs and movements within a standardized regimen of labor, looms here too. But brouwn submitted these files in lieu  of providing actual biographical content. His card files and step counts lean more toward the straight-faced humor of Fluxus events, in which artists carried out nonsensical, funny actions with officious, bureaucratic airs. 

FOR HIS BEST-KNOWN SERIES, begun in the early ’60s, brouwn stopped passersby on the street, asked them for directions from their present location to elsewhere in the city, and took whatever they’d written on his notepad as a readymade drawing, stamping it with the series’ title, THIS WAY BROUWN. The “This Way Brouwn”drawings, of which hundreds were made (six were on view in Chicago), externalize individuals’ subjective conceptions of space and their paths through it. Hovering on an otherwise empty page, they evoke walking in the city as a phenomenological intuition more than the set Euclidean navigation of one’s surroundings. Eric C. H. de Bruyn has written that the topological diagrams of “This Way Brouwn”are symptomatic of the disorientation effected by postmodernity, demonstrations of the Jamesonian theory that the mid- and late-twentieth-century city dweller’s increasing inability to decipher a cognitive map of the place in which they lived emblematized the “bewildering new world space” of late capitalism, under which we lack all critical distance.⁷ De Bruyn sees the drawings as fragmented cognitive maps; they exemplify people’s lack of a vantage point from which they might picture the whole in which they are embedded. This is one narrative that brouwn’s work, and the legacy of global Conceptualism more broadly, has to contend with today.⁸ Conceptualism’s developments along international communication lines, its shifting of artistic materials toward data sets, systems, and text-based operations, lie in perilous proximity to what de Bruyn calls the “informational networks of power” that have in the course of the twentieth century transformed multinational capitalism into something beyond cognitive reach or, for that matter, democratic control. Born of a moment of optimism regarding the potentials of electronic media and forged in the context of a multipolar world, Conceptualist projects such as brouwn’s have tended to be judged, from a post-’89 point of view, as naive passengers or complicit actors in the creative destruction wrought by neoliberalism and the triumph of capitalism on a global scale. 

One could even read brouwn’s artistic vocabulary of intersystem translations as a corollary to the internet itself, which at its start was essentially a protocol enabling different computational codes to speak with one another, thereby lacing together disparate places, people, and networks. And his step counts and comparative coordinates may read today as a proto-Fitbit, analog geo-tracking, or a vision of the world become one big treadmill. Though brouwn’s cosmic depictions of space exhibit qualities of what the scholar Zöe Sutherland has identified as a vacuous “abstract globality” found in much Conceptual art, his work also puts imaginaries of universality in tension with the particular or the individual.⁹ To relegate the complex irreducibility of brouwn’s project to a mere symptom of quantification and data-fication of every aspect of life would be to miss the art of it. And how would one square such a claim with the artist’s own prohibition against reducing his life to a market-ready CV? 

Another prominent way in which brouwn’s work has been discussed in recent years brings the artist’s identity into the picture. Present-day theoretical frameworks, which emphasize embodied, experiential knowledge as artworks’ chief source of meaning, see brouwn’s work through his personal background—brouwn was of Afro-Surinamese descent and emigrated from the continental Caribbean Dutch colony of Suriname to the Netherlands in 1957. New interpretations of his work have considered the ways in which his cross-border steps and relational distances register experiences of migrancy and displacement. In this light, brouwn’s oeuvre begins to figure its own theory of identity. As Adrienne Edwards writes, “brouwn’s conceptualization of the artwork circumvents an authorial position for a relationality”; this enacts a philosophy not dissimilar to Édouard Glissant’s vision of “entanglement,” a societal condition epitomized by the Caribbean context but applicable to cultures and identity formations worldwide.¹⁰ brouwn’s translation of himself into so many steps or routes, in place of a rooted persona grounded in the past, echoes the anti-essentialist kinetics of African and Caribbean diaspora studies, disciplines that have rethought the concept of cultural identity outside of national borders or fixed origins.¹¹ Recent coverage of his work attributes to brouwn’s early-career elisions a politics of refusal by a Black artist within a then-white art-world context, or within the colonial metropole. Some have attested to the fact that his work mobilizes conceptions of space traceable to Afro-Surinamese spiritual perspectives.¹² In other words, under the lenses of diaspora, Black radical study, and decolonial histories, the abstractions of brouwn’s work take on political significance, but at the expense of breaking the artist’s rule of keeping his biography separate.

The curators of the current survey exhibition chose not to go this way. Taking a what-would-stanley-brouwn–do approach, they provided in Chicago a small introductory text that was adapted from brouwn’s 2005 retrospective at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, giving only spare contextual information with which to approach the show. No events, no educational programming, no catalogue, no fanfare, no photos, no biographical background were in sight. This allowed the works to stand by themselves in stark relief, articulating by their own powers the distinct poetics of his work. However, on the day that I visited, at least, the show was nearly empty, even while the rest of the museum was packed. The few people who entered the exhibition in most cases either voiced a lack of connection or breezed through its rooms too quickly to glean anything from what was on view, leaving a palpable feeling of vacancy in the air. On the one hand, this atmosphere of lack was appropriate to works that traffic deliberately in absence and emptiness. But it also felt like a missed opportunity for greater engagement. Maybe the disconnect speaks to the near impossibility, in our entrepreneurial and image-heavy present, of doing as brouwn did—participating in a broader discourse while sidestepping its requirements for visuality. In any case, a quandary lingered: Respecting the artist’s boundaries also risks an unintended elitism, or the hushed stagnation that a cultlike following can bring. And wouldn’t that also be a form of fetishizing the artist’s biography? 

To write on this work is, admittedly, a rather self-defeating task, which some even argue should be forgone entirely, in accordance with the artist’s wishes and given the crass commercialism of the arena in which such texts participate. But the self-irony built into brouwn’s systems seems not so much to wish to punish us for trying to write about the questions his art raises. Rather, the work taunts and puzzles our desires to do so, watching as we overlay analyses onto it like so many systems of measure.

NOTES

1. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

2. At the Art Institute of Chicago, one room in the permanent-collection galleries included a similar, later video work by brouwn from the Van Abbemuseum collection: steps, 1989. 

3. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh characterizes brouwn’s “artistic structures” as “collective, anonymous, and participatory.” In his estimation, the seriality in brouwn’s work is like that of Daniel Buren and Dan Graham in that it “led away from the collectible (and collected) found objects [of other art deploying seriality in the 1960s] . . . into a public architectural space of simultaneous collective experience.” My reference here links such qualities with Benedict Anderson’s idea of the modern nation-state as an “imagined community” brought to consciousness by a new perception of simultaneity and the consolidation of regional dialects enabled by print capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 32. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). 

4. This serves as a caption below a thin strip of aluminum seemingly one foot long for one 1996 work included in the Art Institute of Chicago’s show. A 2014 piece also in the Chicago show consisted of a small box containing a text that reads, “at this moment the distance between stanley brouwn and yourself is x feet, x feet is the length of the sides of an imaginary square 1 brouwnfoot = 26 cm.”

5. brouwn’s list continues up to the year 1985. A version written on index cards, the total number of my steps in . . . ,1972, was on view in Chicago.

6. Allan Sekula discusses photography’s nineteenth-century entry into the filing cabinet in these terms. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.

7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 6. Eric C. H. de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room, no. 25 (Fall 2006): 32–63.

8. The term global conceptualism was coined by the exhibition of that name curated by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss in 1999. The show countered a predominantly white, Western, male canon of Conceptual art from the 1960s with a decentered history of Conceptualist strategies emerging between the ’50s and the ’80s, many of which were politically motivated. Claude Gintz’s essay in the catalogue analyzes brouwn’s work in the context of Situationism.Claude Gintz, “European Conceptualism in Every Situation,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss (New York: Queens Museum, 1999). 

9. Zöe Sutherland, “The World as Gallery: Conceptualism and Global Neo-Avant-Garde,” New Left Review, no. 98 (March/April 2016): 81–111.

10. Edwards discusses brouwn’s use of errantry, relation, and opacity in light of Glissant’s writings. She provides historical context regarding the Dutch colonial project, legacies of enslavement and marronage in Suriname, and prejudice faced by Surinamese immigrants in the Netherlands in brouwn’s generation. Adrienne Edwards, “At the Threshold of Withholding: Stanley Brouwn’s Modernist Repetitions,” in Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World, ed. Huey Copeland and Steven Nelson, Seminar Papers 4 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2023), 181. On brouwn and Glissant, see also Allison K. Young, “Remy Jungerman: ‘To Say Without Saying’: Abstraction and the Black Atlantic,” in The Measurement of Presence: Body, Spirit, History. Dutch Pavilion Venice Biennial 2019, ed. Benno Tempel (Lichtervelde, Belgium: Kannibaal bvba/Hannibal, 2019).

11. Stuart Hall’s writings on cultural identity post-Windrush and our changing relationship to place under globalization, as well as his thinking about the Creole character of Caribbean cultures as “translated societies,” in continual transformation and hybridization, find echoes in brouwn’s project. brouwn offers perpetual movements in place of fixed identity (“steps” in place of biography) and presents distance or length as inherently relational. Stuart Hall, “Créolité and the Process of Creolization,” in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, ed. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate. Migration and Identities (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall et al.  (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

12. See writings by Charl Landvreugd and debates surrounding the Dutch pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale in Tempel, ed., The Measurement of Presence. On discussions of race and brouwn’s cultural identity in the Dutch context, see also Sven Lütticken, “The Distance Between Stanley Brouwn and Yourself,” Texte zur Kunst 28, no. 109 (2018): 186.