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Archive for May, 2007
I’m slightly drunk at Denise’s party. I am sitting on her couch with Jeff Musical and Nicole, properly enjoying myself. Over and out.
“The fluid technology of paint is the most accurate and detailed way of describing the creative process as a slow flux.”
–Glenn Brown
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Glenn Brown.
In Brown’s work, images come and go without ever becoming completely fixed. Although borrowing images is endemic to everything he does, it is but a first step. Brown then subjects these borrowings to a slow and intuitive process over many months, by which the subject and medium of each painting slowly morph (via re-sizing, manipulating, reversing, cropping, stretching, and distorting) and accumulate into replicant versions of their former selves. Interestingly, he describes the end of this process as “ceasing” rather than “finishing” as if to suggest that the image, like life, might remain in perpetual flux. His deft scrambling and conflating of subject and genre combined with the astonishing bravura of his brushwork continues to provide challenging comment on the condition and reach of painting at a time where human experience has become largely vicarious.
Brown’s mannerist inventiveness derives not so much from a compulsion to break new ground as from a desire to examine and pervert the existing thicknesses of history, to recollect an open-ended mesh of references to painting and cultural history, past and present. In doing so, he creates a carnivalesque world where the rational and the irrational, the abstract and the visceral, the beautiful and the grotesque, the empty and the full are brought together in a vigorous state of play. Nothing in Brown’s paintings is as it initially appears to be. His evocation of memorable images from Rococo to Mannerist, Expressionist, Surrealist, and sci-fi masterpiecesâ€â€disturbs because his sophisticated distortions prevent the sources from ever being truly fixed and identified. His heterogeneous titles – Senile Youth, Polichinelle, Deep Throat, The Alabama Song and so on–echo from popular culture, past and present, adding an element of free association to his perverse and slippery formula.
Beneath the sheer, flat surfaces of Brown’s paintings lurk roiling depths and textures, intricately described yet deprived of mass. In his lurid subjects, history swirls against vapors or in the silent vacuum of outer space. His courtly women and bloated, ectoplasmic figures float and melt in the process of efflorescent growth or decay – morbid reflections on the grand visions and gestures of image-making, the tenuous structures of life, death, myth and cliché, and the textures of the physical world that support them. In Brown’s occasional sculptures – a “still life” comprising a small table encrusted like a well-used palette, the other a “portrait” comprised entirely of thick strokes of paint–his fascination with the physical properties of his chosen medium is given ultimate expression as
both the subject and object of the work.
Glenn Brown was born in Northumberland, England in 1966. He studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education, then Goldsmith’s College, London. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Serpentine Gallery, London (2004), Ecstasy: In & About Altered States, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles (2005), Delays and Revolutions, Biennale di Venezia (2003), and Domaine de Kerguehennec Centre d’art contemporain, France (2000).
Here is a wonderfully crafted excerpt from Roger Zelazny’s The Changing Land. He shows us an interesting and very well described concept of the workings of a spell.
Holrun had hung the mirror upon a section of bare wall between a desk and the hearth, covering over threescore and eight interesting runes and symbols. Now he reclined himself upon a heap of cushions before it, drawing upon his water pipe as he considered the approach, slowing his heartbeat, tensing and relaxing groups of muscles. After a time, he set the mouthpiece aside, still thinking of the thing he had learned at the Council meeting, where they had hovered disembodied abouve the Kannais, considering the Castle Timeless. Jelerak employed a system of mirrors to transport himself between his strongholds. It would require access to one of the mirrors and a full knowledge of the governing spell to utilize the system as he did. The castle itself was surrounded by a hard, dark aura which completely shielded it against psychic penetration. It was too far away for immediate physical access, and the land about it might begin its mad dance again at any time, anyway. Holrun had committed the appearance and the feeling of the place to memory. Upon returning to his body and his quarters, he had checked in his voluminous library for any reference he could thinkn of which might bear upon the subject of the mirrors.
Now he released his spirit once more, to return to that place. Soon the Castle Timeless winked below him, immense and sinister. Its psychic shield still held, but there were places beyond places – planes where reality was reduced to a simple vision…
He shifted to that of pure energy and found his way barred there, too. Then an archetypal place of pure forms, where he was also excluded. With considerably more effort than he had thus far employed, he moved to the plane of essences.
Ah…
The entire pattern of the castle was bizarre, one of the strangest things he had ever beheld. But he wasted no time cataloging wonders. Having already set his will upon locating the mirror, it stood out quite clearly for his inspection in what, in the mundane world, would be the north tower.
He approached it cautiously, searching out unusual essences in its vicinity.
There was a single man present, and from this plane the essence of an extra hand was visible. So that was Baran. Well, well…
He saw the spell and shifted to the plane of structures, where he felt more comfortable. It became a series of interconnected lines of various colors, all of the pulsing, beads of energy passing in seeming-random fashion from junction to junction.
Interesting. Something else was studying it also, from close up, over on the energy plane.
He withdrew somewhat and watched the watcher. If it could locate the starting point for him, a lot of time and energy – not to mention risk – might be saved. He did not like that fuzzy blue coiled thing in one small corner. Upon careful inspection, it seemed to be touching yet unattached…
His fellow student of the spell, upon closer inspection, appeared to be one of those vague, cislunar elementals normally of amorphous, fiery aspect when drawn to his own plane. Here it was an inquiring hook, pulsing redly. It traced tthe periphery of the spell several times, rapidly, without coming into contact with that cage of lines. It did seem to slow it’s passage at one sharp corner each time that it went by, however.
Each line that he beheld represented a single unit of the spell, spoken or gestured. That power which filled it was, of course, entered by Jelerak himself in accompaniment to the ritual, drawn either from his own being or from a sacrificial source. The problem for Holrun was to determine the sequence in which the structure had been created back on his own plane – a difficult task, for the beginning was not readily visible, as it would be in the work of a neophyte or even that of a journeyman with no great passion for secrecy. It was an exceedingly intricate piece of work, and Holrun felt an unwilling admiration for the man’s technical proficiency.
The hook slowed at another place – a lower angle, as if suddenly attracted to something there – then passed on and paused again at the sharp corner. Holrun maintained his passive screen
Today marks the beginning of our repository, and the first step towards a long future of information sharing and correspondence. Let us be care-free as to how we use this tool. I care little to regulate the type of content we post here, rather I would prefer an uninhibited freedom to use this space in whatever way we’d like. Links, photos, artwork, music, commentary, discussions, meaningless dribble… All things holding value in our eyes will have a home here. In short, any and all things that pique our interest will be archived, so that these bits may live long beyond the darkening of the sun.
