REVIEW: stanley brouwn at the Art Institute of Chicago

Cover image: entrance to the stanley brouwne exhibit at the Art Institute’s Modern wing. Image courtesy Michael Workman.

REVIEW
stanley brouwn
The Art Institute of Chicago
3252 W North Ave
Chicago, Il 60647
April 8 - July 31, 2023

By Michael Workman

In 2017, I wrote a review for Rain Taxi about Tell Them I Say No. The book tasked itself with a survey distinguishing where contemporary artists draw the line between "the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world." In it, among a number of artists that include Cady Noland, Agnes Martin, Laurie Parson, and Trisha Donnelly, they also included a chapter on the work of stanley brouwn (always lowercase). On some level, that book is an example of artists who have carved out their own pathway to preserving their voice in an art industry that doesn’t care if they’re drowned out or not, a kind of guide to preserving one’s artistic integrity and surviving the current ongoing neoliberalization of art. It’s useful in many a sense: artists require autonomy, the ability to make mistakes, work in a state of sustained indeterminacy, and maintain control over the narrative and contexts in which their work is presented, and etc.

By contrast, what is meant by the “needs of the art world,” of course, are the too-often standard operating procedures of the commercial or institutional (broadly speaking) bureaucracy of the creative industries, whose interests may, and often do, come to compete with that of the artistic. One has only to ponder the enigma of a Hans Haacke hanging in an art fair trade show booth to realize that the institutional critique implicit to his artistic project has gotten meaningfully compromised somewhere along the way. Thing is, where one might hope to find a consequential rejection of the less-than-caretaking aspects of the creative industries, a radical, progressive pushback of some kind, what this often amounts to is too often simply an attempt to preserve some degree of autonomy and decision-making by artists over how their work is presented, while still working well within those industries.

So, brouwn’s rules of engagement elicit a larger problem that I’d like to briefly discuss. Context, if you will. I’ve got a friend who once said, get together with a group of comics artists, and everyone wants to talk about drawing: line, technique, their own particular preference of styles. But get together with a group of contemporary artists and everyone wants to talk about artistic strategy. Messaging, how to climb the scholarship / market support / exhibitions ladder to that oh so important art stardom that can guarantee you those lucrative grants, awards and recognitions, tenure, collectors, inclusion in biennials, all the checkboxes of “high art” success. It’s low-hanging fruit for funders to offer, who would conceivably complain? But this of course has led to the generalized understanding that artists in particular should never, ever bite the hand that feeds them, and despite claims of prioritizing justice and equanimity, will go ahead and accept that grant award funded by Monsanto, or sail right on ahead into mounting that show with a museum actively employing Kafala caste slavery to build their Middle-Eastern franchises (there's actually a bunch of them) with seemingly zero qualms.

This strategic approach is of course critical to the maintenance of oppressive and exclusive social hierarchies in the art world (not to mention violent, anti-Democratic regimes’ claims to art-cultural relevance) and also why, despite a contemporary art world jam-packed with claims to class consciousness and sensitivity to racial advancement, there curiously never emerged an Occupy movement in the art world, leaving the prestige of auction houses, galleries and art fairs and the at-times dreadful “private museums” to operate undisturbed despite unfriendly public rules or skirting serious concerns as to provenance of works in their collections that traditional museums by contrast should recognize an ethical obligation to answer for out of respect for the public(s) they are maintained to serve.

A TV screen on a small pedestal outside the main area of the brouwn exhibit.

It’s also at the heart of why, by way of comparison, classical ballet continues to dominate the dance world, with its hard schisms against any mixing with performance art or conceptual dance, or why the commercial form of the novel continues to dominate publication of literary fiction and, well, everybody already knows the similar complaints about the movie and music industries. It’s also a historical dividing line fascistic regimes like to evoke when seeking to distinguish “Classical art” from its more obscene “degenerate” Modern forms, a tension going all the way back to roots in the (still incomplete) French and American revolutions.

So it is that for contemporary artists who employ these strategies, the mediation is often designed as a somewhat cynical ploy for navigating their own path to stardom, at times employing hollow claims of real-world activism, for example. It really can accurately be described as just posing, ultimately. But despite this fact, it can also be a generally effective strategy. Much like academia appointing faculty or provisioning curriculum and more or less considering the problem of societal structural racism solved, the art world likes to anoint a select few to hold up as proof they’ve advanced society and participated in providing solutions to the larger problems of historic inequity and inequality. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, in any individual domain, and the uber-insular (often arch conservative-populated) art world upper tiers usually lag many decades behind real-world social progress.

All of this is to distinguish notions of “artistic strategy” in this sense, to some degree, from the intentionality behind brouwn’s work — and brouwn’s “rules of engagement” for how museums, galleries and other exhibitors should set up the public to have an encounter with his work, are indeed an artistic strategy. But he exists in this vast complex as a knowing interlocutor, and where many lesser-informed artists might employ a more cynical strategy, here brouwn (as the wall text states) has specifically opted to prohibit “biography, bibliography, interpretation or photography,” to eliminate the curator, or any individual really, from interpolating his work in a way that could spoil the immediate experience he wishes us to have of it. Fair enough. And I think for brouwn, this was an earnest desire: he wants viewers to have an authentic, personal experience of his work without pre-digestion.

So, the work itself I leave to the viewers. Without diving into any specifics of the exhibit, it’s well known description of brouwn’s work that it involves a self-referential human experiential scale, the 1 at one side of a 1:1 encounter with the viewer, if you will, often through the metric of walking distances, and the records that may be created from such activity. In this sense, brouwn joins a number of contemporaries who have employed the strategy of the flâneur and the flâneuse to fertile conceptualist gains, which Chicago critic and art historian Lori Waxman traces in her Keep Walking Intently: The Ambulatory Art of the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus to the April 1921 performance in Paris’s 5th arrondissement of “André Breton and the Littérature group under the auspices of Grand Saison Dada'' to counter growing audience boredom with Dada performance. Innumerable subsequent variants include examples such as Vito Acconci’s “Following Piece,” wherein he followed a random stranger every day or, to name a few further examples of many, Todd Shalom’s “Elastic City'' and its “experiential walking tours given by commissioned artists,” the development of psychogeography more broadly, or the work of interdisciplinary dance artist Yvonne Rainer, in dialogue with whole cityscapes.

What’s different from all these, however, is the mindful, austere singularity it asks us to reserve for what lies inside the exhibition, the unique sense of wonder it does in fact reward viewers with, or at least those who earnestly seek out that authentic experience of brouwn’s work. Emerging out of European conceptualism of the 1960’s, as the wall text states, this exhibit marks the “first monographic presentation” of brouwn’s work “to be organized by a museum in the united states.” That this is the case itself points to a widespread aversion to difficult-because-“unclassifiable” work such as brouwn’s or, for example, the work of choreographer Tino Sehgal, whose “constructed situation” Kiss was only acquired by the MCA as a gift by exchange with a patron supporter in 2007. In defying category, these artistic approaches have also eluded the attention of art patrons, art spaces and museums more broadly, leaving these underrepresented art forms and rigorous entire art histories to continue to struggle to find support elsewhere. Still, it’s worth hoping that this trendline of care and concern for less recognizable approaches mark the first dim spark of hope for more thoughtful, inclusive approaches in the future. 

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