art reviews

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Herb Brown: Painting & Video Works from the 1960s

BLT Gallery, New York

By Megan Marie Garwood

Herb Brown’s work from the sixties offers an artist’s view of a decade shrouded in the penumbra of social dichotomies: peace and war, sexuality and prudence, individual and caste, counter-culture and consumption. His paintings are comprised of ripped pieces of paper from advertisements or subway posters adhered to stretched canvas that are then painted over with thick wide brushstrokes of rich dark hues. The subject matter revolves around warriors, nudes and cultural icons. His video installations utilize an oil painting juxtaposed against a television, which eerily coalesce his art with recorded television images from the sixties. Brown’s works reflect on three major motifs scrutinized in the sixties: commodification, the Vietnam war and experimentation in sexuality. His subversive strokes, alluding to sixties’s graffiti style, manipulate pervasive imagery, resulting in multiple layers of abstract figuration, sexually charged subject matter, and social commentary applicable to social awareness in 2010.

The sixties was a decade of change for the whole nation, marked by great national progress but limited individual accomplishment. Equality and post-war economic achievement led to an emphasis on commodity goods and conformity. Technological advancement furthered America’s new reliance on commodity goods and its mass-produced iconography constructed through wide-spread advertisement media. 

The relative spread of wealth beginning in the 1950s made it possible for a new market of goods to develop in the 1960s, which consisted of wants and not just needs. Further advancements in mass-produced printed advertisement and posters encouraged shared information between suburbia and the city while also pushing the same ideas into all public viewing spaces. Advertisement and printed material played with the individual family’s values rewarding being up to date to show status and superiority in the newly-constructed suburban communities. In the early-sixties, families used extra money to replace old products with new technologically-advanced gadgets that were updated as soon as they had been purchased. So much importance was fixed to commodity goods that high fashioned goods became prevalent. Conforming to a new set of social standards, many people had categorized themselves into“living products,” such as the “Modern Woman” who took care of the family by day and hosted dinner parties by night.

These paintings appropriate ubiquitous images from advertisement and media by the adherence of actual posters and printed images to canvas and their overworking with oil paintto produce a finished work that not only assess the original images but also manipulates them with Brown’s subversive painting methods and subject matter.

His 1966 large piece entitled Party confronts the viewer’s distinction between “commercial” art and “high” art by amalgamating visible and recognizable images and text from advertisements painted over with bold Expressionistic strokes rendering blatant explicit imagery. Numerous layers of paper and paint meld to form flatten pictorial space, mimicking the “flatness” of advertisement at the time. Party depicts one woman in the center overtly staring at the viewer over the top rim of her sun glasses as she pouts her lips. She wears patterned hat and long sleeve shirt while she easily balances a tray piled with deserts. Just below her tray, she is caught with no paints; Brown has painted over the original advertisement. To her right the party continues without anyone else noticing that he or she has no paints. Through the most-heavily painted parts of the composition, such as the legs, the advertisement still transcends through the paint, leaving men and women with bottles as thighs. The top right corner reads, “Add the right bright touch to your party.” As Brown plays with advertisement and paint, he creates a space where commercial art and studio art are contained together entrusting the viewer with contorted subjects to figure out. In the sixties such nudity would never be placed where advertisement would be; it would be seen only at a museum. Moreover, the combination of pervasive images colored over would most likely be seen in the subway after an act of “vandalism.” Brown exhibits what one might imagine when viewing advertisements; the beautiful crowd sells the product, not the product itself. 

Two video installations of cryptic oil-painted images painted onto the television screen then framed continue Brown’s exploration of consumerism. Television commercials illuminate haunting depictions of abstracted human faces and form. The addition of sound to this cacophony twists the boundaries of medium and confuses the meaning. The viewer’s eye chases the screen wondering what is concealed while it is left with pieces of brushstroke, film and voice overs. 

In the sixties, another huge influence on American culture was certainly the Vietnam war. Never actually declared an official war, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was the only document that explained the reason that American troops were sent to fight in the Vietnam “conflict”.  In it The Resolution seemed intended to scare people into believing that there was a reason to send troops to Vietnam. As the fighting continued throughout the decade, Americans became unsure of the real reason to be there. In a 1963 NBC interview with President John F. Kennedy, the young president alluded to a terrifying “Domino Theory,” that would manifest if Vietname fell, the scourge of communism would spread across Asia and then throughout the world. 

Yet as more young people lost their lives to no apparent purpose, Americans questioned their government’s credibility, perhaps for the first time. The soldiers became a kind of commodity goods packaged and sent across the ocean to fight in a war they did not unerstand. The more lives that were lose, the more soldiers were sent to battle with no respect for their present or future accomplishments. 

A smaller painting Warrior echoes the eerie numbness spread across America by the constant sight of violence in the media brought home by the Vietnam war. The warrior in the work is consumed by a thick application of black oil paint. His face dicernable only due to an elliptical smudge of flesh colored paint and allusions to eyes and mouth. Exposing no advertisement or poster, Warrior separates the viewer from comfortable iconography and leaves the us to decipher the meaning of Brown’s paint on canvas. The separation and void of commercial design found in the other works upsets Brown’s pattern. The painting is distant from the viewer, just as the violence of the Vietnam war was distant from the Americans watching it through the television. In this regard, the canvas becomes like the medium of television and print that numbed Americans to the violence in Vietnam.  

During the Vietnam war, more confusion was created by the dispelling of America’s home-spun Camelot fantasy world. President John F. Kennedy had added a youthful air to the United States when he was first elected as president. His beautiful wife, his personal charisma and his adoring  children were considered American royalty. In 1963, the Camelot dream was shattered when JFK was assonated. Americans had to find a new icon to express emotions and ideas. People began to utilize sexuality as an outlet and a revolt against constructed social norms that had seemed to fail after the national tragedy. 

The 1965 series Fucking is comprised of five large paintings (four on view) of various sexual positions framed in the same dark oil paint that mainly composes Warrior. In Fucking, the figures, nearly all rendered by uncovered advertisement, both jump from the background, due to vibrant hues, as well as mesh into one figure due to bodies created by similar material. Brown’s harsh human contours, pure hues, and abstraction recalls Fauvism’s later leap into sexuality and the nude. Look closer, the paintings in the series are composed of allusions, alluding to human forms with stylized features. Brown’s crass depiction of sexual acts formed by combining commercial art and text makes the images “dirty.” As if Brown were placing a sales sticker on the act of Fucking. Still tainted by commodification, Fucking de-idealizes sex applying the same worth to it as the papers and posters that form it.

The choice to again exhibit these 1960 works in 2010 asks the viewer to examine why they have importance in our decade. As inclusions in a retrospective, these works are important because Brown found it nearly impossible to show them in commercial galleries during the sixties. Moreover, Brown lost much of these works in a studio fire in 1966. Yet, why are they relevant in 2010? His works display a sense of rebellion that New York street artist still push for. The works’ motifs parallel contemporary American debate: consumerism, war in Iraq (and seemingly everywhere), and sexuality in a post-AIDS world in which sex and death had become a brand unto itself. 

Herb Brown’s works question the incongruity manifested in the sixties (commodity, capricious war, exploration) by using subversive painting techniques to manipulate overwhelming images of “normalcy” depicted in the media. Formally, Brown’s paintings evoke dichotomies. Seemingly erratic collages, this painting series carefully pieces together a time in American history in which social reform brougyt  both wider freedom and greater isolation to Americans. By reworking images that document the state of affairs in the sixties, Brown’s art can be read as a silent critique of the changes that came about in one seismic decade.  M

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Sara Klar, Noah Landfield:
Abstract Works 

Sideshow Gallery, New York

By Mary Hrbacek

Abstract painting, in all of its kaleidoscopic guises, continues to proliferate as artists mine past genres while they forge new directions with or without the added complexities that machine mediation offers. In this two person show, Sara Klar and Noah Landfield work in abstract painting to realize  personal visions with contrasting strategies.

Sara Klar’s powerful haptic paintings create impact through heavy textural relief supplied by cracks, fissures, torn peeling paper, and built-up matter embedded in the painted surfaces. She seems to see her art in metaphoric terms; each piece is painted, resolved and reworked repeatedly, to create a sense of events unfolding in time as they unfold in the life of an individual. She also references her paintings to trees that contain rings of material that signify each stage of their growth.  

In some works, the random relief on the paint surface makes recognizable figural elements, such as teeth, lips, legs and feet, that emerge unintentionally, producing a break in the forceful interplay among red, purple, black and green hues. Her vernacular is both abstract and expressive; she eschews illusionistic space in favor of the sculptural relief that lends a real space to her art. This draws the viewer in for a look at an undefined topography of dripping, mingled expanses eliciting the appearance of candle wax melting in folds that droop at the bottom of the canvas. There is a sense of torment and Herculean struggle here that mirrors life’s wrenching dramas, played out in the artist’s efforts to contend with challenges in her own life. Klar’s intuitive painting process is completely open-ended. Freedom from expectation, the element of surprise, and lack of preconceived structure make this work experimental and improvisational. The cool halogen light she paints by informs her art with an unconscious industrial subtext.   

Issues of personal identity arise from Klar’s recurrent use of peeling, torn paper. This scraping and tearing gives rise to musings on the question many  struggle with, namely, “Who am I?” Her paintings are personal and metaphysical expressions of her attempt to find the answer. Life moves on, as do we as individuals, so it is impossible to ultimately fix that personal definition of “Who I am.” This work offers a hint of the sense of suffering and also the optimism that the artist experiences through physical labor and its attendant emotional catharsis. 

Noah Landfield’s compositions are defined by the tension that arises between colorful, discreet shapes, and the abbreviated marks and notations culled from digital photography that create the aerial views of Japanese cities glimpsed obscurely through abstracted clouds. These landscape-inspired works are not fully abstract; they encourage a representational interpretation of the narrative that plays out between the shapes, the colors, and the notational marks employed by the artist. The artist’s intention to base the themes in his compositions on the universal forces of creation, and destruction, is communicated obliquely by the discreet abstract shapes that define the surfaces of the paintings via their warm and cool hues. These forms make for the prevailing impact of the works while the notations play a subordinate role in the format.

Landfield skirts the territory between representation and abstraction in ambitious large-scale formats.  He has an intuitive talent for depicting light and air through the use of pure color. This enables the viewer to imagine that the orange forms show the heat that rises when lava spews forth from volcanoes located near Japanese cities and towns. The pale yellow shapes are visual clues to hopes for possible recovery from the damage. In these attractive, environmental themed artworks, the paint is applied thinly, as Landfield expresses the interaction of the warm and cool colored forms in quasi-illusionistic topology.  M

Ed. Note: 
Sideshow Gallery is located at 319 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, (Williamsburg) NY 11211  Tel: 718.486.8180

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Eye Of The Mind:
Contemporary Photography
by Emerging and Established Artists  

Fountain Gallery 

By M. Brendon Macinnis

Juxtaposing the works of such towering figures in art history as Hans Bellmer, Lee Friedlander, Morton Bartlett, Richard Shaver, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Weegee with emerging artists, this group show dubbed Eye of the Mind, serves several worthwhile purposes. On the one hand, it gives young, gifted artists a rare chance to see how their work holds up next to the great artists of past generations in a gallery setting, and it gives the viewer a unique opportunity to see rarities first-hand and perhaps in the process discover new artists of tomorrow.

Curated by Sue Stoffel, an art historian and museum specialist, the show is in keeping with the not-for-profit Fountain Gallery mission to change common misconceptions about people living with persistent mental illness by presenting works by gifted artists living with mental illness. 

Some of those emerging artists do indeed more than hold their own. Standouts include Bradford Stringfield, whose digital photograph, Female Figure on Wall (2009), resonates with Bellmer’s La Poupée  (1936). There is in both works the notion of the found object, however posed, whereby uncomfortable subject matter is sexualized and imbued with an undercurrent of implied violence and aesthetic decay. Tony Cece’s  Marble  Torso (2008), a digital photograph of a classical nude sculpture, can also be read as a Bellmer reference, albeit with a different emphasis. This work is also disturbing, but in a much more subtle sense. The beauty of the form hides the bondage theme in plain site, as it is only after looking back again do the wrist restraints become apparent. 

Athough the professed aim of the show’s curator to “ask the audience to re-examine the creative process and mental illness” is a bit of a stretch here, it is enough to say that the work of these artists stands up well next to some of the most creative artists of the past century.  ­­M