NWAA Presents: Brookes Britcher and Amanda Kamen
In his 1970 exhibition, Information, at the Museum of Modern Art, artist Joseph Kosuth proposed a new way to experience a work of art—by reading it. Kosuth and other artists aligned with conceptual or Story Art in the mid-1970s were using text as a narrative tool within their works. Brookes Britcher and Amanda Kamen find similar ways to include the nostalgic through the combination of text and image, recalling past emotional states or personal memories.
Britcher is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates pieces that investigate process, relationships, and emotional states. He describes his sculptures as “diaristic,” recording his responses to past events or feelings.1 Prior to his current body of work Brookes concentrated on photography, capturing images of discarded things. As his process and interest shifted into making, he retained that focus on found materials, and has accumulated objects for his pieces. That process of collecting is integral to his practice and Brookes likens the refiguring of the objects into his sculptures as therapeutic.2 Equally important is titling, and it is here that Brookes conveys those “archives of moments” that each work captures.3 This second layer of meaning provides a direction for the viewer but, as with Giving names to countertops (2008), the narrative if often cryptic and deeply personal, as if the viewer is allowed a brief glimpse into the artist’s thoughts. By exploring the past as source material for his work, Britcher documents that process of constructing memory.
Amanda Kamen’s journalistic drawings explore her personal experiences. She is a collector of sorts—accumulating old lists, journals, found words, images from clippings, past conversations, and remembered situations. These are the fodder for her work and she notes that her work “encourages a desire for understanding the human condition and the natural world.”4 Her process begins with this collecting and mark making, and progresses to small studies with the possibility of reaching a final, larger drawing. Kamen also has a love for animals and includes them with humorous quotes or imperatives, as in psst (moose) (2009). Like other figures in her drawings, the animals become peculiar characters, intent on eliciting a response from the viewer. These often quirky text and image combinations are a lighter approach to the conundrum of human existence.
Both Britcher and Kamen expose the personal through their work, as recordings of events past or those yet or never to come. Critics noted a sense of introspection as representative of the 1970s and one could argue that this mood is again present in Britcher’s and Kamen’s work. Like artists from the now almost invisible Story Art group in the mid-1970s, Britcher and Kamen focus on the direct sense of the personal—“the artist, his life, his thinking process, his sensations, desires and visions that are seen by the viewer.”5
—Margaret Winslow, Curator
February 2009
1Brookes Britcher, Conversation with artist, March 26, 2009.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Amanda Kamen, Artist Statement, 2009.
5Paul Schimmel, ed., American Narrative/Story Art: 1967-1977 (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1977): 4.
BROOKES BRITCHER
by Katrina Kuntz
The telephone game is more than child’s play and simple misunderstandings. It is about the physical dimension of communication: the pounding pulse of anticipation and knotted stomach of apprehension as the message approaches, the intense, contagious excitement as bodies draw near and heads incline, the hot breath of a whisper on the ear. The concentration, the hesitation. Recollection. Transmission. The absence of sound takes on a positive role in these moments and can be valued, as Philadelphia-based artist Brookes Britcher signals in his installations, for its creative potential. In What a Wedding Day It Was Last Night, plastic cups suspended from the ceiling with yarn and straws spill across the floor, terminating in a pile of red twist ties. A makeshift tin can telephone at rest, the work demands its connecting line to be drawn taut in communication. The red, symbolically charged, pile of fasteners underscores the physicality of silent language in the piece while the free-standing light bulb.
Silence is also given definite presence in Giving Names to Countertops, an installation of a found touch-tone phone, its spiral cord vertically stretched to its limits to interact with a large light fixture and the wall. As the fixture hums and pulsates with light, the handset dangles limply in pregnant silence. Works like Giving Names to Countertops call to mind Walter Benjamin’s admission that the telephone was his twin brother. Benjamin suggests through this unusual twinning a shared special connection to the telephone. For better or for worse, they are forever linked; one and the same.
There is a deeply personal, even romantic, undercurrent to Britcher’s work that speaks to the ramifications of miscommunication (the reason adults do not play the telephone game) as well as the immediacy and intensity requested by some messages. This is most apparent in Kindred, a collection of disparate ephemeral materials, including cardboard panels assembled as a blank screen and paper towel rolls painted to resemble sticks of dynamite. The accompanying gibberish audio was compiled from found audio diaries and re-recorded by the artist. The result is a dissonant piece that attests to the difficulty in conveying accumulated personal musings. The title, Kindred, is misleading but the message underlying blank screen and dynamite is not; this is a complex work as much about intimate relationships as it is about larger missed connections, the inability to exchange information or the loss of information. Britcher’s creativity is a fine balance between detachment and immersion. Much of his work, particularly New (again #1), is indebted to Duchamp, not only in the use of found objects but also in the investigation of the boundaries between art, science, and life. The patched up fissures of New (again #1) are reminiscent of the fragility of the non-referential surface of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a work the Dada master referred to as “a wedding of mental and visual.” Both Duchamp and Britcher utilize a similar language of analogies drawn from physics, mathematics, and engineering to structure and diagram otherwise spontaneous and tangential relationships between men and women.
A found string drawing on a sidewalk or photographs of areas cordoned off with caution tape which flutters in the breeze are cunningly simple but poignantly beautiful when read as documents on the small failures inherent in the very operations of attempting to show personal experience. This Minimalist aesthetic pervades much of Britcher’s work. He is capable of making a viewer aware of her own perceptive capabilities, of forcing her into the work. His is a process-based language of art-making which produces work that is both sculpture and installation. There is an obvious awareness of space as a fundamental component of his object-making as well as an identification of and relation to the objects—electrical cords, light bulbs, wire, audio-visual components—on a material level. The time-based nature of many of the installations speaks of certain physical properties of material and matter in general, specifically entropy. This idea that all matter which is part of a repeating system will eventually break down is essential to the enjoyment of telephone game. But, entropy also correlates to the understanding of communication in general as fragile gatherings of meaning that become reconfigured through their juxtaposition.
Katrina Kuntz is an independent curator and critic based out of NYC, NY.
In addition to her active contributions to the New York City art dialogue, she holds an MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, she is completing her PhD in Art History and Criticism at SUNY – Stony Brook in New York.
