brookes britcher /// artist

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.