Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
stanley brouwn
Dutch, Surinamese; 20th-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)