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| Jenny Brown, Learning the Ropes, 2007 |
Forms of Responsibility - Recent Projects by Jenny Brown
by Gary Sangster
In early 2005, an elegant gesture of product repatriation was conceived
and produced by Jenny Brown as a way of both describing certain elements
of a working global economy and tracing the efficiency of a path of
distribution. It was a modest act of economic anthropology that engaged
research, performance, and documentation, as well as articulating an
imagined or real cultural narrative of a concept of homeland and the
actual journey of anonymous artifacts to their site of origin. The
somewhat poignant, yet deeply ironic, pursuit of a homecoming, for near
valueless materials or objects, small stones, garden decor-purchased
inexpensively from a down-market, transnational department store in
Sydney-heightens the sense of disconnection and inauthenticity produced
through a global economic marketplace. The project, Placing stones as they are found,
suggests a sense of loss, or alienation, as objects of value, objects
of use, objects of function, and objects of desire, large or small,
voluble or mute, are interminably transferable, anonymously
interchangeable, dislocated and redefined throughout the trade routes of
mass-market capital. The work is an action of little consequence, a
specific kind of elusive gesture of futility towards irreversible
systems and processes, which makes sense only as a poetic or aesthetic
form of art.
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| Placing stones as they are found, 2005 |
For some time now, contemporary art, always somewhat elusive and
mobile, has been avidly ‘shape-shifting’ in sometimes subtle,
sophisticated ways, and sometimes in obvious, awkward ways, either of
which can make us uncomfortable through their misidentified or
unrecognizable guise. Presenting us with new and unfamiliar forms,
materials, and ideas, as well as undercutting our convenient systems of
display and distribution, contemporary art has infiltrated a wide range
of physical, cultural, and intellectual spaces with surprisingly mixed
results. For some, art should be comforting and accessible, for others,
art should be challenging or confronting. For some it should be easy,
or it may be expected to be demanding. But perceiving art to be either
simple or complex, lucid or dense, are not the kinds of even-handed
dualities that make sense in the light of the variety of new art. From
the immensely tangled diversity of forms, strategies, and systems now
embedded in contemporary art it is possible to produce seemingly
unending discourse and to pose questions or pursue inquiries that may
not have clear-cut and well-defined solutions. While this inevitably
makes the taxonomy of art more expansive, it also brings it into ever
more reflexive and dynamic relationship with real life and lived
experience. Contemporary art is becoming more connected to every life,
more relevant to lived experience, both depending on and producing
experiences and artifacts that entangle the aesthetic and the practical
nature of experience in a way that can go far beyond the observational
didactics of the museum or the exhibition-driven art world. Contemporary
art is not something apart, a reflection of the world, it is embedded
within the world of lived experience, and operates in the same way that
life, and the real world, is fragmented, discordant, or dissonant.
Aesthetic constructs, art theories, or holistic notions of seamlessness
that may posit harmony or unity in art works are limited modes of
understanding new art or of determining what constitutes successful art.
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| Tied, 2006 |
Scanning the range and mode of work produced by Jenny Brown during
the past decade, it is not difficult to see how her work inhabits one of
the rapidly expanding zones of art known as social sculpture. It is a
field that eschews formal models of daily studio production, as well as
traditional gallery modes of presentation, in favor of more research,
production, and engagement that takes place within existing frameworks
of culture and society. In other words the art is drawn from, is
produced within, and takes place in the real world, rather than within
the world of art and its institutions. Like many committed to this
social field of practice, Brown’s work responds to Joseph Beuys’ famous
call to artists “to participate in transforming and reshaping the
conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives.” In
some cases the responsibility inherent in this invocation can be
accomplished by observing, witnessing, and documenting the conditions of
the real world. This signifying process can provide an extended
critical language that will engage both power and knowledge. For others,
including Jenny Brown’s practice, this has meant a more concrete way of
activating art within the contours of formal systems and institutions
in the world. It means engaging with protocols, regulations, and
bureaucracies in ways that both incorporate yet extend beyond
signification in generating meaning and value. In this form, the locus
of meaning and value that is generated through art lies primarily with
the audience rather than the artwork. What is evident in this mode of
art practice, pursued rigorously in Brown’s extensive range of work, is
the sense in which both human values and conscience lead beyond the
contemplative and subjective, and enter the realm of action/reaction,
where engagement-social, political, emotional, psychological- is not
tacit or optional, but obvious and necessary.
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| Tied, 2006 |
In 2006, Brown created a work titled, Tied,
which was a complex multi-layered project that involved an
Indigenous-owned fishing vessel, the Tribal Warrior, and an event on
Sydney Harbour that culminated with a funerary performance, in which ice
sculptures of sea creatures were melted into the ocean. The work
engaged a specific range of communities to reflect on the effects of
global warming and rising oceans on low lying Pacific Islands,
archipelagos and tufts of rock, coral and land, which will be amongst
the first submerged should the seas rise, yet have contributed nothing
to the rapid increase in global warming. The intricacies of Tied,
in which mourning, loss, and displacement are critical references,
spoke not only to the probable geophysical erasure of environment and
property, or at least their drowning, but also to the disappearance of
unique communities, cultures and languages. Brown’s review of the
anthropological research revealed that the Pacific Islands contain a
disproportionate section of the world’s cultural and linguistic
diversity in which more than one third of the world’s languages are
spoken in four countries in Melanesia, Papua New Guinea, The Solomons,
Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and each island group is home to distinctive
human cultures, having extant social and cultural mores, dance, dress,
traditional knowledge and technologies. An impending migration to a
larger, more developed, and more culturally uniform society, would
inevitably eviscerate or even collapse the rich depth of cultural
knowledge, tradition, and language contained in southern Oceania.
Through a variety of different cultural references and registers,
elements designed to evoke and imply or imagine, rather than describe
unequivocally, Tied
presented a means to enact a pre-memorial and to grieve in the face of
an impending, near inevitable, environmental transformation and cultural
decimation.
The artifacts that constitute this style of art practice-the
gestures, the strategies, the arrangements, the interactions-are
shifting fields of experience rather than specific objects, documents,
or images. Staking territory quite tangential to the iconoclastic
programs of the art market and the museum archive, positing different
modes of production, and envisioning quite a different end-user or
functions of her aesthetic product, Brown participates in or leads the
production of nodal points of communication. Like many political
activists her work is concerned with mediation, with aligning distinct
positions and trajectories of self-interest in order to pose a solution,
rather than provide the solution. To provide means, as an aesthetic
gesture, rather than present an end, as an aesthetic artifact or artwork
may be described. Her work prompts or prods audiences to interact with
the pragmatic world of political or social action through aesthetic
programs that may in fact have some tangible outcomes. It is not so much
an active resistance to the ubiquity of the increasingly lavish
international art world, but a circumvention of its authority to account
for or even restrain all fields of art.
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| Blue Mountain Woodworking Collective, ongoing. |
Brown’s style of work hones in on the elements of modernism that
correlate with utopian idealism, collective cultural vision, and
spiritual insight. But it is not uncritically separatist or indignant in
approach. It is work that is tempered by exposure and sensitivity to
the exploitative trajectories of the politics of colonialism,
capitalism, globalism, or media monopolies. The work embodies a critique
and resistance to the harmful tendencies of the world’s leading systems
of social organization, and so is designed to support individuals,
communities, and classes who may be beset from systematic institutional
and functional pragmatism.
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| Temporary Refuge I, 2006 |
In an ongoing project, initiated in 2006, Temporary Refuge,
Jenny Brown begins to examine shelter. Brown was initially inspired by
the idea that women make the majority of houses in the world, and after
time spent in China, Brown relates the work to the Sixth Patriarch Hui
Neng’s teaching that, “the body is an inn.” Her perspectives are
typically complex including the economics of modern housing, the
sustainability of contemporary dwellings, the rituals of regulations
surrounding individual rights and the commons, and critically, the
spiritual and psychological dimension of personal space. While home is
generally thought to be a permanent site of safe haven, Brown suggests
it is provisional, shifting, and insecure, but no less a place of
transient respite from the risks inherent in our self-conscious
vulnerability. Brown’s project is to construct a dwelling using an
‘additive’ gleaner sculptural approach, arriving at a livable house of
reduced scale using many recycled materials. The work can be readily
conflated with the commodifiable sustainability goals of
neo-environmentalism, but is perhaps more in tune with an earlier
counterculture approach to generating forms of alternative or vernacular
architecture, that are pragmatically site-specific and persistently
irreplicable.
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| Temporary Shelter II, 2009- |
From the outset, Jenny Brown’s work is a process of self-conscious
responsibility, addressing community concerns, environmental threats,
social issues, and political institutions. In many cases she also
expands her frames of reference more generally to address power and
authority or justice and equity. Some of the topics her work has engaged
are a hot list of political issues that traverse a wide range from the
personal to the political, including diversity, equity, capitalism,
disability, therapy, global warming. So on first encounter with her
work, form appears a secondary concern to content. But in this context
the works of social sculpture mimic the strategies of conceptual art,
focusing on ideas, processes, and effective or practical outcomes,
rather than prioritizing a sensuous visuality. Brown plays in the realm
of policy, and rigorously resists the lure of visual expression in favor
of pragmatic accommodation and accomplishment. But just as the somewhat
arid readings of early conceptual art gave way to an awareness and
enthusiastic acceptance of the structure of the aesthetics of
conceptualism, form can never be a secondary consideration. The
manifestation of the work is form ‘be it virtual, ephemeral, tangible,
or permanent’ and form is what constitutes its existence. Even
invisibility is a kind form, just as process, system, or protocol will
also constitute a manifestation of form in conceptual art, as well as in
social sculpture.
Brown’s work stakes out claims for both functional ends and aesthetic
forms. Sometimes melding the two trajectories tightly, sometimes
privileging one of the goals over the other. In her multi-phased
project, Beyond Rapa Nui,
developed in collaboration with Gavin Ramsay from the University of
Western Sydney working with 13 local government councils, the Australia
Council for the Arts, and over 20 other organisations including the
Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, the work builds on a regional
permaculture public art program involving 11 local government councils
devised in 2008, to analyze and develop food production capacity and
local supply mechanisms. The project addressed the deficiencies in both
agribusiness and retail food distribution to consider ways to enhance
local communities capacity to meet health and nutrition needs. Beyond Rapa Nui
is a project conceived to investigate and leverage critical
opportunities in the science of local and indigenous agriculture, the
economies of food, the process of community engagement, and programs of
health and self-awareness. Brown’s primary role is in the
conceptualization, outlining, and negotiation of collaborative
processes, actions that mediate the development of a coherent system.
Brown is not attempting to shape the project towards a given aesthetic
form or a specific criteria of art practice, rather she is forming
connections and alliances within a research and policy program designed
for enhancing public utility and awareness around food production and
nutritional resources.
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| Temporary Shelter I, 2006 |
While this kind of project in the main resembles
the functional aesthetics of design or urban development, what shifts
this work incrementally from an instrumental aesthetic reading, are the
imperatives of community education, enhanced self-awareness, and the
ecological moral dimension of sustainability. It is the ‘connective
aesthetics’ that is endemic to social sculpture. Brown’s mediating role
as an artist in driving the scheme of Beyond Rapa Nui
is to ensure that the project matches the personal and psychological
developments of those involved, with the civic, scientific, and economic
elements of the project.
The work accomplished through projects such as Tied or Beyond Rapa Nui,
is both functional and discursive, drawing on an integrated sense of
moral reflection, while being animated through complex political
situations. These projects affirm that culture is a mutable, often
fluctuating or pulsating set of competing forms of knowledge, covering a
broad spectrum of experience from the personal, perceptual, and
subjective, to the social, conceptual, and communal knowledge that can
be psychological or visceral, semiotic or sensual, or a bundled network
of these systems of understanding and experience.
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| Temporary Shelter II, 2009- |
Interleaving a coherent sense of the values of social awareness, a
commitment to engagement with the political field of everyday
experience, and the role of signifying practice within the aesthetic
realm of art as a creative practice, one that entails a degree of
open-endedness, a degree of unknown, unpredictable outcomes within the
formalities of political accountability, is a remarkably daring project.
It is a challenge for artists to function effectively within the
strictures of a social, public, and institutional framework and retain
the right to experiment and reinvent forms of knowledge. Gallery and
museum art is already coded with that privilege intact.
Social sculpture entails an entirely different kind of responsibility
than the subjectivity of creative expression characterized by the
majority of studio practices which are aligned with an individual vision
of a single artist’s voice. Jenny Brown’s work, melding the demands of
an integrated social structure, in concert with specific community
interests, knowledge, history, and memory, into a pragmatic aesthetic
discourse requires remarkable integrity. It requires the construction
and maintenance of processes that possess a dynamic self-regulation,
while avoiding a trajectory of inevitability that is constrained by the
conditioning of an anticipated outcome or the moralism of a didactic
conclusion. Artists who absorb these challenges and respond to
collective situations and political contexts are creating new forms of
expression, and expressing new forms of responsibility through art
practices that are in an ongoing process of being regeneratively
articulated and codified.
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| Blue Mountain Woodworking Collective, ongoing |
Many thanks to Gary Sangster and Jenny Brown for this. GR
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