David Henry Brown Jr at Daniel Silverstein Gallery for Zingmagazine #17

The idea of celebrity is completely fused with our perspective of everyday reality. Celebrity is a component of fame, a more momentary and satisfying instance in which the illumination of flash bulbs, the “royal treatment” of celebrity peers, and the adoration of unnamed masses all act to separate us from those from whom we bear away a large part of our common nature. As a subject for art, celebrity presents a slippery slope full of hidden agendas, mixed messages, and a breadth of cultural context which is rarely plumbed, for fear it may reveal the collusion between greatness and its opposite. Yet one artist today has made celebrity his main focus. David Henry Brown Jr, over the last few years, has developed an expansive body of work which explores these ideas.

The first part of this exploration took the form of a series of actions, subtly interwoven into the social fabric of given public events. Brown invented a company in ‘98 called Carpet Rollers, which for $99 offered to roll out a red carpet for private parties. “We were able to get into private people’s affairs,” says Brown. “The kind of people that liked to enjoy life. We’d come up to a party with our red carpet and people would gather around us. Hundreds of people would come and watch and we would say that we didn’t know who was coming. The red carpet was a symbol. It created a discussion and people would say stuff about who they thought was coming. It was like “Waiting for Godot.” They were all waiting for this grand thing to happen that never happened, and the real thing was the waiting.” (1)

This experiment revealed a basic truth about the nature of fame: it requires an event. The event is rarely pure happenstance, though it can be intentionally caused by a celebrity-wannabe. For instance there is the story about how Jean-Claude Van Damme met a Hollywood producer and said words to the effect that if he could kick above the man’s head, would he put him in a movie? He did, of course, and that was the beginning of his story. Fame may be elusive but celebrity endures for as long as there are people who wish it to endure. There are also the casualties of celebrity, such as Princess Diana. Then there are people who became known for an act of cruelty, like OJ Simpson, or for self abuse, like Robert Downey Jr. We need only to say their names for everyone to know who they are, without any reference to the careers which made them stars—perhaps even heroes—in the eyes of many Americans, and around the world. Success is a form of heroism in a culture where there is a such a vast divide between the rich and the poor, between the ones who merely get by, and those who thrive within their own milieu.

Brown’s next project, “Alex”, was more closely related to the sense of social recognition which creates the phenomenon of celebrity. He masqueraded as a celebrity, but not any particular celebrity, someone with actual accomplishments, but a person whose fame rested specifically upon his family name: Von Furstenberg. Brown cultivated the casual earnestness and lack of pretense which qualifies those who are born to positions of social celebrity. In effect, just by becoming Alex Von Furstenberg, he carried the event of fame around with him, even if, in his ostensible realness as Alex, he were to meet someone who was fooled into believing that he was who he said he was. The images which resulted have him shaking hands or standing shoulder to shoulder with the well to do, the curvaceous, the politically aspiring, and the culturally revered.

In “Host,” Brown explores the cult of the pose. For this project, Brown masqueraded as a guide at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. Brown attended visitors as they toured the museum, providing historical narration on figures as diverse as Mayor Giuliani, the actors Nicholas Cage and Whoopi Goldberg, and political entities Fidel Castro and Jesse Jackson. The images which resulted from these encounters (expertly captured by Susanna Wimmer), reveal an interesting dynamic in which Brown, once critiquing the notion of celebrity by having his picture taken with known celebrities under the social agenda of masquerading as a socialite, now poses with wax figures of known famous entities. Yet the presence of these tourists, who may visit the museum to pose also enlivens the intentional quality of this work. With whom is Brown posing? Brown’s photographs may include an image of him, but are rarely about him, but about the context he creates. Brown’s images taken of celebrities and the images taken of tourists with wax models which, in collusion include him, are all images.

Our association with a given wax model such as Pope Jean Paul II, Morgan Freeman, or Woody Allen, is proof of how we relate to the world, who our heroes are, and the images in “Host” are really of the tourists, who represent the most chaotic and unpredictable aspects of social interaction inspired by this situation. Brown operates as a cipher, directing our attention to the expressions of those around him, and paying homage to the figures themselves, as if they were really people like Woody Allen or Barbara Streisand, and not just charismatic replicas. The figures with whom people posed said a lot about what they thought was important. morgan pictures the actor Morgan Freeman dressed as the chauffeur in “Driving Miss Daisy”, his eyes looking off into the distance in a pose reminiscent of George Washington crossing the Delaware was visited by two African American women, a mother and daughter pair, who are framed by Brown in a warm embrace, one woman beside him, the other holding Freeman’s chest as if he were her sweetheart. In chris, Brown joins a father and his paraplegic son with the wheelchair bound image of Christopher Reeve; the boy wears a T-shirt with the classic logo of Superman on it. The actor’s identity post-accident emboldens him as a figure of extraordinary dimension whose desire to surpass his limitations as a cripple have surpassed his identity as a portrayer of the comic book hero, Superman. For fidel Brown joins a Cuban family in a group salute at the statue of Fidel Castro, vogues out with elle, sits in impassioned introspection with woody, beams with glee alongside elton, is cool or tough with lenny or nick.

A few other elements rounded out the exhibition. The first was a series of photographs in which Brown posed in a frozen state and then unfroze to scare various groups of tourists, who were always shocked when he did so. I’m sure that he was quite interested in what it was like to be one of the statues; after all, they are the objects of appreciation, the source for the degree of social intervention that occurs ad nauseum at Madame Tussaud’s, a type of interaction which is rarely if never viewed in art museums, or any formal museum environment, for that matter. The second were the artifacts of his experience, a letter stating the position of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in regard to Brown’s artful interloping, and a video Brown had made in which he is filmed in his role as guide, mocking out as a frozen statue, and interviewing one particular wax museum habitué who candidly states his preference for a world in which everyone was made into a wax replica, as it would simplify the necessary amount of social exchange and dissolve the expectations of proprietary interest. If we could all have a date with Elle McPherson, what would be the use of envy or insecurity?

The final image of the videotape shows Brown frozen in a relatively isolated corner of the museum, with the noise of the crowd and the lights aimed at known celebrities felt from far off. This image reveals the degree of fragility inherent in the need to pose, to take on a timelessness which separates us from others. The desire for celebrity leads us into labyrinths of self-reflection. The images which Brown’s reflection presents will pursue us into the future.

Notes: (1) Berlind, Robert. “David Brown Isn't Von Furstenberg, But He Loves to Pretend He Is!,” The New York Observer, 1999

Nancy Spero / Look Back in Gender

RECENT EXHIBITIONS 1996

Sheela Na Gig at Home, Jack Tilton Gallery / Black and The Red III, PPOW / A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II, NY Kunsthalle

Sheela Na Gig at Home, Courtesy Tilton Gallery.

Nancy Spero is an artist in whom I’ve had a strong interest of late. Her work is full of drama, poignancy, bitterness, and triumph. Many emotions and politics compete for the viewer’s attention, as do the image she employs in various designs and juxtapositions. It is difficult to face up to the accomplishments of her oeuvre as a whole—it is both comprehensive and indifferent to viewers; it does not cohere as does the work of Jasper Johns or Ellsworth Kelly, or even Louise Bourgeois. This incoherence, though partly intentional, is the primary obstacle to its comprehension. In the main, Spero’s intentions have been nothing if not grandiose: the formulation of a dramatic system pf female representation for the past (women wronged, scorned, justified, and emancipated). Hers is a work of the mind and the heart as much as it is of a particular aesthetic system. She has developed her visual vocabulary into a unique idiom, the purpose of which is to replace historical stereotypes of women as silenced, bound, and separated from the vitality and action of life.

Her most recent series are concerned with matters of domesticity and the taboo against libidinous pleasure. This was most evident in her installation at Jack Tilton titled “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home” in which ropes were strung across the gallery, clotheslines holding night gowns, stockings, and underwear. These shared the space of the clothesline with large white on black and grey cutouts of the “Sheela”—the image of a woman squatting with her legs spread and her hands spreading open her pudendum to reveal a dark pit of mystery and excitement. Her eyes possess a pleased but distant look to them, as if she had glimpsed a pleasure to come, either one she awaited to fill her, or one which did not need to be filled except by her own attitude. There is an element of playfulness in the usage of this figure, and a subtle manner of exhibitionism both in Sheela’s pose and Nancy’s clothes. However, their playfulness soon seems to resemble a dogmatic indifference to anything but the Sheela’s pleasure, and littered amongst her clothing, it helps to orchestrate a commentary upon what a woman does—a woman relegated to roles of domestic slavery and social separation due to these assigned tasks—the cleaning of the home, caring for children, and making herself beautiful and acceptable not only for her husband but in advance of the censure of the greater patriarchal society.

In Jo Anna Isaak’s book Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (1996), she illustrates this position through Freud’s idea of Primary Narcissism, which is achieved through humor. “Humor,” Freud says,“has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation in it… The grandeur in it clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than the occasions for it to gain pleasure.” Spero’s work exists in the space between primary narcissism, and the other, lesser, female expressiveness, called hysteria; that the importance of laughter—or even the most subtle hint of female pleasure—as an act of signification raises. It could easily be confused with its opposite. But this is the space in which Spero chooses to work. Hers is neither is Kristevian ‘text’ not a Freudian ‘primary narcissism’ but an intertextual passage between the two (and beyond them) within the position created by their occlusion.

Black and the Red, Courtesy PPOW Gallery

Spero’s exhibition at PPOW this season was the third installment in a series titled “Black and The Red,” a panoramic scroll-style exhibition which measures some couple hundred yards long by one or two feet high. In these, various of her female symbols are juxtaposed against brightly colored backgrounds in checkered or vertically striped areas in vibrant primary colors as well as black and white. The sequence of images, when spread along one continuous horizontal area, resembles the effects by mixture and constancy of montage in film, and this particular manner of depiction proves equal parts delight and exasperation. For as the colors and interaction of forms engage the viewer, it is still difficult to keep in order the pattern of their occurrence, and one has to repeatedly retrace one’s steps. This is an activity which further complicates matters because each break in the narrative of perception disintegrates an understanding of the progress of the scroll altogether, causing a break in sensuous enjoyment instantaneous with a recontextualization as images blur into and against one another. Of the sensuous enjoyment I have carried away from the work I can say little, though a part of me refuses to deny it was there. I find myself most affected by the relationship of the specific symbols (Nefertiti; the Dildo Dancer; the leaping nude among others) with the dramatic interplay of their respective backgrounds in each section of the scroll. I was unable to evade the hypnotic effect that even a gradual viewing of the series had upon me. Consequent printings of the same image upon varied backgrounds caused me to react in a merely sensory manner, one which did indeed achieve a negation of the context of a given individual figure, and my emotional reactions were guided by the aggression and variety of different color/space/figuration juxtapositions. Jon Bird, author of a recent monograph on Spero, offers some explanationof this phenomenon.

“A heraldic term, mise en abyme, used in literary studies to mean signs that are simultaneously details and signifiers of the work as a whole, appropriately describes the structure of “Black and the Red III.” In any section we perceive both detail and totality, not as an example of an additive logic—the sum of parts—but, rather, as an episodic bricolage of meaning and reference. The directional impulse of the viewer is confounded at various stages by a counter-movement within the scroll and the invitation to retrace our steps, to move up close, to study a detail, or to retreat to consider figure/ground or color/field relationships as a whole.”

A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II., Courtesy New York Kunsthalle

The third exhibition of Spero’s this season was organized at the New York Kunsthalle and titled “A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II.” It was comprised of four areas in a building’s interior: the entrance vestibule; two large rooms; and a side room where a projection was running of two projects of Spero’s in recent years. The Two large room held banners made of silk and satin, with her selfsame female figures dancing, flipping, fighting, crying, or running upon a playing field. The banners fluttered in a draft and shone so brightly in house lights as to obscure any direct image upon their surface. I found them grandiose and ostentatious, undeserving of the subtlety that can be the strongest aspect of Spero’s work. However, I do see why she attempted to utilize the banners—it was another step away from the conventions of traditional work: away from the flat, white surface and the stationary vantage point, things she sees as concepts invented and maintained by men. However, my favorite part of this exhibition was less affected and more immediately intimate: her wall drawings in the vestibule of the building. The room itself is large with tall white walls which were perfect for her purpose. There is a little of a framing device in these pictures, and the dynamic and theatrical qualities which they possess in relation to each other; and as significations of a boundless and expressive feminine psyche, are best shown in her menagerie of mythical and literary (sometimes imaginary) figures which include the following scenes: two images of women, standing with shoulders arched and hands thrown up, either in praise or in evocation of a monster’s haunted pace, stand across from one another facing the viewer. One is painted yellow, and the other blue. They seem to have jumped out of the shadows, sch is the vibrance of their pose and their brightly colored bodies, which are lit from within by the vivid colors which enhance their willingness to either shock or entertain. Because of the absence of a referent for their action, it becomes obvious that they do it only for narcissistic pleasure. Another scene shows a woman hunched over in agony, her hand to her mouth, and her eyes ablaze in fear and regret as she peers in the direction of a huge and impassive soldier in the garb of a Roman Centurion. His figure is raised and his visage clouded. Hers is extreme and her body lowered so that it is obscured by where the wall and floor meet. She has sunk as low as he has risen, and we leave this scene feeling nothing but pity for her. Other figures are more ambiguous, showing only a single figure, such as a warrior astride a falcon, looking away from the viewer into the void of distance created by the vastness of the wide wall before us. There is also a long orange serpent with human heads at every point along its body, each with a long red pointed tongue splitting forth from toothy jaws.

Spero continually deals with hidden aspects of the female psyche, with the demons and angels, warriors and victims, mourners and celebrators pf an interior life. The individual images are striking enough, but when combined with either an overly colorful and abstract background, or one of pure white, like fresh snow or the void of a cloudy day, they become either active or acted upon as kinetic and lithe or dense and turgid. In all circumstances, however, these actions and reactions are seen as following the hand of the artist, herself a woman, and not that of a masculine adversary.

Throughout her career as an artist, Nancy Spero has succeeded where other important women artists have not—in the recognition of women’s issues. Her exhibitions this season show her prodigious abilities for conception and creation in a manner which has relentlessly maintained its basis in gender and the connection of gender to inspiration. The work is these shows has perhaps been her most successful, for its reveals a clear shift away from her work in the 1970’s. The emphasis is on strength and vitality, on a sort of hedonism that can only be enjoyed without reference to an opposite, an Other. It seems that Spero has finally come into her own. With this change it may lose the subversive function it possesses; it may move into the strange realm of obscurity related to the most important and recognized of artists, that of austerity. So that the questions that are always asked of an artist can be asked again.

NY SoHo Arts Magazine, January 1997