Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
stanley brouwn
Dutch, Surinamese; 20th-century, 21st-century
Beacon, NY: Dia Beacon
84%
walking through cosmic rays. 1970/2009. cosmic radiation in a certain space, indicated by a text
The artwork is an empty room with a wall label that puts you in mind of the cosmic rays that are passing through the room, or rather, the artwork is those cosmic rays themselves. I had a profound experience when I came across the piece at Dia. Thinking about the cosmic rays in the space there with me made me hyper-conscious of the space itself and my shifting position within it, which of course is classic minimalism. But the fact that what was doing the work of articulating the environment wasn't a physical object but, instead, a conceptual notion gave the piece a leg up on minimalism's shallow aesthetics. The fact, too, that that conceptual notion (invisible cosmic rays) was also arguably a physical object gave the piece a leg up on conceptualism. If the (legitimate) argument against 60s art is that it cheats — it short circuits experience so as not to have to work towards experience through art's history — walking through cosmic rays manages something aesthetically significant by cheating on the way it's cheating: the ambiguous materiality/immateriality, reality/unreality, of the piece's titular rays is a literary flourish at the core of the artwork. Our experience of the work is an experience of this ambiguity, but one which we displace onto the fanciful idea that sunbeams are shooting through us. If the limitations of so thin an artistic approach are significant, this piece mostly overcomes them. (TFS, 2025)
Utrecht, The Netherlands: Madridstraat 1
74%
Het Gebouw. 2005 (with Bertus Mulder)
brouwn, a conceptualist, designed the building and Mulder, an architect, executed the design. The gridded repetitiveness of the structure is belied by the fact that its dimensions are in "sb-feet," the bespoke unit of measurement brouwn devised based on the length of his own foot. This disparity between the artwork's austere presentation and the flighty imprecision of its conceptual underpinnings is characteristic of brouwn's practice. What's essential about the piece, and also what aesthetically damns it, is that the ethereal presence of brouwn's measurement system removes one's experience of the building from the history of architecture and places it into the history of ideas. As a work of International Style-pastiche it's competent and playful but unremarkable; as an instantiation of one man's private reflections on his own body, sanctioned by several decades of artistic experimentation, it's insane. But as a building, which it inevitably is, it can't step outside of the shadow of Mies and Meier and Johnson et. al., no matter how hard its conceptual elements work to skirt their influence. And so brouwn's gesture of romantic self-indulgence — impersonally personal in a way that almost aches — is stymied by histories of form which it shouldn't have had to deal with. Whence modern art's necessity of formal novelty. (TFS, 2026)
Otterlo, The Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum
72%
The artwork is ten little plaques that mark the starting point of ten short walks taken by brouwn in 1984. The plaques list the date of the walks and the number of steps taken for each, but not any other pertinent details like his direction or speed of travel, the length of his strides, or even whether he walked in a straight line. The disconnect between the sterile, scientistic delivery of information and the willingness of the work to invite speculation, even fabulation, is a big part of its poetry. Thinking at all about the actions it indicates comes to feel like a transgression of the artwork’s austere presentation, given how much wiggle-room it provides for the imagination: the work demands that you reject its principles of indexical clarity if you want to experience it at all. Like much conceptualism, however, Starting Points suffers for admitting too much contingency into its form. While the basic operation I just described is aesthetically productive, its limitlessness becomes a limitation. You’re not disinvited, of course, from thinking anything at all about the actions indicated by the plaques; you could picture brouwn doing naked somersaults, getting up, and taking a step after each one, and you’d still be within the borders of the artwork. But the more and more wildly you ponder the piece, the more you realize that pondering in general provides greater, freer pleasures than any pondering that’s yoked to a walk some guy took 40 years ago. This is the problem with turning thought itself into the formal crux of an artwork. (TFS, 2026)