Robert Delford Brown: A Retrospective

Robert Delford Brown: A Retrospective

Curated by Mark Bloch

Text by Robert C. Morgan, A.D. Coleman, Robert Delford Brown, Rhett Delford Brown, and V. Vale

Update: FEBRUARY 9, 2002
Subject: CREATION SPIRITUALITY

Portrait of the Artist/Religious Leader as a Young Man

In 1960 I could have said that I knew a great deal about art. By 1970 I could only have said that I knew a very little bit about art. A sheet of lined notebook paper had become a serial composition. Marcel Duchamp's prophecy had come to pass. Life had become art. Every one had become an artist. Modernism had sputtered out in a profusion of styles that had been adumbrated earlier in the 20th century. Everything was now seen as an event, as a relationship, as a process. DILEMMA! If you really wanted to be a real artist, (A REAL MODERN ARTIST), where was there to go? You had to find a limb to crawl out on! All the formal innovations for the communication of contemporary events had been completed. In addition, the role of the lone experimenter had come to an end. The only frontier open to innovation was in the area of content in a social context.
The most challenging project I could imagine was to choose as my medium the creation of a religion. For the previous 20 years I had yearned for a religion which could give me some comfort and direction, a raucous, exuberant religion that explained the hectic discord and frenzied changes I saw taking place all around me. The one defining characteristic of the 20th century has been total confusion, but in my opinion, the yiddish word fablonjet gives a much more substantial feel to this disordered state. I have chosen to anglicize the term, "Pharblongence", and use it as the central concept in the teachings of the church.
I felt that there was a real need to reexamine, renovate, and therefore revitalize religion. When the major religions of the world were created nothing was known of the earth as a planet possessing an extraordinary range of climates and inhabited by an astonishing variety of people.
” Brown studied at Long Beach College and UCLA from 1948-1952. In 1952 he received his B.A. from UCLA and in 1956 he received his M.A. from there. “I lived in a little ten foot square apartment which was above the merry go round on the Santa Monica pier. I absorbed a lot of the carny atmosphere and devil-may-care eccentricity of that place.” From 1955 to 58 he studied drawing with Howard Warshaw (1920-1977). “When I came out of school in 1950, the art world I was preparing for was gone.” In 1959 Brown moved to Manhattan. “If you aspired toward becoming an artist you had to go to New York.”

Art critic Robert C. Morgan said, “ The New York art world was a fast-moving situation, very much in contrast to the somewhat sluggish Los Angeles scene. The climate of the late 1950s pulsated with new ideas. The galleries on Madison Avenue and Tenth Street were the favorite haunts of the young Brown. “Through my twenties I lived in extreme poverty. I spent more money on art supplies than I did on my rent. ”

Brown’s art career as a first rate iconoclast started shortly thereafter. “In 1963 I met Rhett and life got better.” His wife and art-partner for the next thirty years, Harriet (Rhett) Elsa Gurney once said, “When I met Bob he was 29 and working as a dishwasher. A lot of his work comes out of that experience.”

In 1992, Allan Kaprow, credited with originating the Happening movement that followed Abstract Expressionism in the early 60’s said of Robert Delford Brown “Consider his early raw meat environment in a commercial refrigerator, his S & M garishly-colored photo blowups, his "mad artist" role in Stockhausen's Originale, his performances in motels all across the American continent, and most of all, his inauguration of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic… The ecstatic power that has marked his art since the 60's… Brown's work….threw a monkey wrench into the avant garde in those days. He was hard to explain, hard to categorize. He was (and is) a visionary you couldn't ignore or forget… Brown's work is important … He touches a nerve at the core of the social codes that organize not only our behavior but also the limits of our art… Robert Delford Brown's transcendent vision takes on a great significance.”

Some Observations by R.D. Brown

"In retrospect, Cubism was Pop Art. The entire history of modern art was Pop Art.... l knew that things were not going in the direction I wanted them to go. I didn't dedicate my life to becoming a Pop artist. "

“ When I was thirty-five and I had all that success with the ‘Meat Show,’ it seemed like a god damned bore to spend the rest of my life maintaining success. This is not what being an artist is all about--maintaining success, maintaining the status quo, treading water, just keeping things the same.”

“After doing my meat show I got a fair amount of publicity and everyone assumed I should do one meat show after another—become a meat artist. I wasn’t interested.”

“Art, to me, is discovery. And this is what people more and more have to learn--that continual discovery is the only way to live."

Bob and Rhett: The First Artist Couple

Robert Delford-Brown in 1990: “The most serendipitous event in my life was my meeting with Rhett Cone. She had founded the Cricket Theater on Second Ave. and Tenth St. where she showcased new material, presented Blanche Marvin's "Merry Mimes" children's theater, and produced and directed plays by such writers as Edward Albee, and Samuel Becket. For the past 27 years Rhett has been my most fervent admirer. For the past 25 years she has been my wife and enthusiastic collaborator, as well as co-conspirator.”

Robert C. Morgan: “In 1963, Robert Delford Brown met Harriett (Rhett) Gurney, a theater director for Off-Broadway Plays…It was through this warm and supportive relationship with Rhett that Brown became interested in performance (and) the impact of the "Theater of the Absurd"-playwrights such as lonesco, Albee, Beckett, Pinter and Arrabal. Their plays were being performed on Off-Broadway stages in the Greenwich Village area. Rhett Brown was instrumental in getting many of these productions on the bill. The plays of Samuel Beckett-Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, and Krapp's Last Tape-were significant catalysts that helped to direct attention to the aura of a new existentialist art. This existentialist interest in "the absurd" was also bringing a European tradition into view…”

“Initially, the idea of performance was ancillary to Brown's painting. Even though Brown had always had a propensity for performance, he had never considered it in relation to his art. Through Rhett's involvement with the theater world …Brown became fascinated by the possibility of entering into an interdisciplinary situation in which multimedia events might replace the practices of the solitary artist who worked outside of the public realm and only in the solitude of his studio.”

“By 1963, Brown was ready to open up his discourse and to liberate all of the force of his creative drive. Robert and Rhett were to marry in 1963.”

Quote from Bob

“We were the first artist team… Kienholz, Christo etc.” quote from my videotape of Bob.

Rhett has said, “Before out first event we really didn’t know how to do happenings or performances but from my theatre background I was the one who hired a press agent. We got the meat show a lot of publicity.”

The Meat Show: A Major Art Work of the 20th Century

Brown had wanted to get into performance as early as 1961 when he had first conceived of his famous "Meat Show." … But this piece was not to be realized until 1964.

I was born in 1930. When I came out of school in 1950, the art world I was preparing for was gone… my 1964 Meat Show said, “It’s really all really really over with.”

The "Meat Show" was staged in 1964 in a 14 feet wide and 90 feet long refrigerator unit at the Washington Meat Market….Brown, the first artist to stage a meat performance, rented “tons of meat and gallons of blood” and a refrigerated locker for a blood-spattered happening. “Hermann Nitsch read about it in a German art magazine Das Kunstwerk and expanded this idea into a career.” Said V. Vale in his Pranks book. Nitsch and Gunter Brus paid homage to Brown on their first visit to the US. “Joseph Beuys corresponded with us,” said Rhett. “He did his ‘Fat Show’ two years after.”

Rhett continued, “ We went and rented a meat locker, telling the owner that we were making a movie and needed a set. The trucks arrived bringing all this steaming hot meat. We hung it everywhere on hooks. Then we got thousands of yards of lingerie-like sheer fabric and created rooms as in a brothel. It actually looked very erotic. The cops came in to inspect and said we had to have some red lights in the back which made it even more erotic.

“Bob used blood as a painting medium on the fabric. There was blood dripping everywhere. You had to push through about eighty perfumed curtains to tour the entire environment. We had doused the place with literally a gallon of ‘Strange Moods’ perfume. Underneath lurked the insistent odor of butchered flesh.”

“In the center of the ceiling we installed a mirror ball which threw revolving light everywhere. The place looked like a mutated discotheque.”

“We had white coats for people to put on when they walked through, and when they emerged we served them sausage.”

“The event lasted for three nights,” Rhett continued, “The Daily News society column chatted it up so lots of curious people in limousines made their appearance.”

Robert Delford Brown: “ I decided to write an inflammatory statement of the kind that had served the dadaists so well… The response from the media and city officials astounded me… I proclaimed that… ‘It is my belief that even the most totally bereft wretch will be jolted into some kind of consciousness when confronted by the fearsomely beautiful sight of tons of meat, gallons of blood, hundreds of yard of lingerie fabric and other sights as yet undisclosed, which will be organized into a harmonious and inspirational work of art.’”

Robert Morgan: “This was an important statement for the times-one that caught the imagination of the press, and one than left an indelible mark on the audience, as a ritual.”

Originale: Stockhausen, Kaprow, Brown

Robert C. Morgan: “Another significant event for Brown was his participation in the musical play entitled Originale by the German avantgarde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.”

Rosalee Goldberg, in her book Performance Art, 1979, recalled that the piece caused a “schism between locals and foreigners…” “At the Carnegie Recital Hall... in August 1963… a reconstruction of Stockhausen’s Originale orchestrated by Kaprow, and including Nam June Paik, Robert Delford Brown, Lette Eisenhauer among others… various dissidents-- Henry Flynt, George Maciunas, Ay-O, Tony Conrad---picketed this performance regarding the foreign import as ‘cultural imperialism.’”

Morgan: “This event was held at Judson Hall in New York City as part of the Second Annual Avant Garde Festival in 1964. Brown created the part of "the mad painter" for Originale. The presentation of the play took the form of a Happening and Allan Kaprow was the director. …Brown's contribution was outrageous and provocative. He donned a fireman's uniform and wore an enormous phallus, achieving the hybrid appearance of a devilish inseminator…. He began by dumping raw eggs on stage from a high ladder. ”

Robert Delford Brown: “I wanted to do something visually interesting. Jackson Pollock had thrown paint, Georges Mathieu had dressed funny and squirted paint from tubes, and Yves Klein had dragged naked women covered with paint across canvases, and had used a flame thrower to paint with fire. I decided that I would wear a firefighter's suit and drop eggs and red powder from a ladder. I suddenly realized that I was coming up with a creation myth that had similarly occurred to people for millions of years.”

Sex and murder

AD Coleman: His series of tinted photographs involve the reworking of found pornographic, scatological and forensic photographic imagery… Brown’s works are lessons expositing the politics of politeness,… the fascism of good taste.”

Rhett Brown: “We imported this four volume set of books from Germany with the aid of my psychiatrist. Laymen couldn’t import these at the time., At the same time we mail-ordered photos from the little ads in the backs of magazines (e.g. Seven oriental Poses) and went to little shops around 42nd Street and bought sex books and magazines. Then Bob selected the photos he wanted to work on. We went to Modern Age to have the photos blown up to life size but they wouldn’t touch ‘em. So we had to produce a letter written by Lawrence Alloway of the Guggenheim that this was serious work after which they agreed. The negatives were kept in their vault and were enlarged on Sunday when no women were working. Then Bob carefully hand colored them.”

Coleman: “Recurrent in his work is the theme of taboo.”

R.D. Brown: “I did a little prank on Andy Warhol. He had said in an interview that he was going to be the Walt Disney of Porn. He had just started Interview magazine and through this person who worked there, we managed to get this ad we did on the back page without Andy knowing. A hand colored photograph of a woman in bondage, lactating. After that appeared he couldn’t be the first.” “(the) huge tinted blow ups of sex-crime victims and perversions outdid Andy Warhol’s silkscreens in intensity,” said AD Coleman.

Ideal Self Portrait 1965

Robert Morgan: “In an early photographic piece from 1965, Brown took an old passport image of himself, crumpled it up and creased it, and then asked Rhett to take it to a commercial developer and have it rephotographed and touched up. He asked Rhett to tell the developer that this was the only picture she had of a deceased relative and that she wanted to have it framed and to hang it over the mantelpiece. When Brown received the blown-up and retouched black and white photograph of his portrait back from the developer, his appearance had utterly changed--it had been transmuted into an ideal non-living portrait.”

Orgasm Event

Rhett Brown: “In 1966 we visited France where Bob did the orgasm event... In Nice we rented the bridal suite of a hotel and sent out cocktail invitations. In one room we served cocktails and in the other room Bob hard set up a kind of homage to the Statue of Liberty--naked but covered with red plastic, holding sparklers which lit up everything.

In the bathroom we staged a lust-murder scene featuring a woman clad in black lace lying in the bathtub, her legs sticking up and lit by highway flares. On the bed nearby were two people who looked like they were fucking.”

“It was a four minute event, “ said Bob, “it lasted as long as the flares lasted. Everythin g was red so it couldn’t be photographed.”

Rhett: “After that we took our church to London for “Free Striptease with Drum and Bugle Corps Accompaniment.” For two weeks we were stopping traffic because Bob had stripped his hair white and then dyed it shocking day-glo pink and his clothes were covered with buttons that read “I am a Young Jazz Immortal…When he still had hot pink hair he had a girl sit on his head and titled the piece ‘giving head’.”

Free Striptease and Bugle Corps Accompaniment

Hanging

AD Coleman explains, “His Hanging Pamplet (1967) is an excerpted reprint from a medical text which was the first manifestation of another leitmotif in his oeurve: plagiarism.

Bob says, “Most of what people term “original” is plagiaristic so why not call it what it is?”

Robert Morgan: “Robert Delford Brown has been an appropriator of images from other sources for a considerable length of time. In the early 1960s he was appropriating old photographs of Victoriana, old pornographic shots, revived from old albums, old trunks in storage in decrepit attics.

…Even his Maps to Nirvana were essentially appropriations---nude photographs, soft porno, black and white images, mixed with color skeins and fragments, collaged together, a kind of ecstatic bricolage, a fleeing of time caught in orgiastic recourse-recourse instead of discourse…Robert Delford Brown's name should be added to this historical tendency as an early appropriator who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.”

Vulva prints

More to Come

The Great Building Crack-Up: An Architectural Improvisation

Doodling with bricks

1969 to 1996

251 W 13^th Street NY NY 10011

Robert Morgan: “By 1967, Rhett and Robert Brown were thinking in terms of real estate in New York City and they had the good fortune to discover a branch library building that was up for sale in the West Village. They immediately seized the opportunity and bought it for very little. This was a perfect place for the headquarters of a work begun in 1964: The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. The building itself would be referred to as The Great Building Crack-Up.”

“…Brown called his religion at the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. "orthodox paganism." …His desire was for the Great Building Crack-Up to house a Church that need not be taken too seriously; … "It is a parody of the past, a burlesque of the present, and a travesty of the future! It has but one prohibition. DO NOT EAT CARS!"

Robert Delford Brown: “ It was the "SUPREME DADAIST GESTURE". I decided that by colliding a 19th century building with a 20th century building something might happen that would be akin to colliding sub-atomic particles in a cyclotron… The method which I chose to accomplish this feat was to introduce a live architect, Paul Rudolph, to a dead architect, Richard Morris Hunt. I knew the bricks would fly…This renovation was one of the first attempts at contemporizing an old building in New York City. It has consequently been very influential, but I was looking for something more.”

put in quotes from the times

Mr Jesus Christ Contest

March 30, 1972

Garrick Theatre New York NY

Robert Delford Brown: “This happening was the 12th grand opening service for the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. and the first formal announcement of the church’s religion, Orthodox Pagaanism. The contest was open to all, women welcome!—and contestants were judged on the basis of originality, spirituality, beauty, sincerity, and tastefulness. The judges panel included a Christian clergyman, a journalist and an art critic. The purpose was to aid man’s search for new pillars of faith, ew fountains of wisdom and hopefully to shock us into a spiritual revelation.”

First-Class Portraits

Robert C. Morgan: “Another aspect of Robert Delford Brown's work is his use of the camera. In 1973 he did a book of portraits entitled First-Class Portraits, accompanied by an essay by the esteemed photography critic, A. D. Coleman. One of the concerns of this book of photographs is the issue of an exact definition of portraiture….Brown deliberately and subversively manipulated his Polaroid shots of people by smudging emulsions, taking the picture out of focus, or by creating situations of bad or irregular lighting. Yet Brown captures something of the moment; the shutter snaps shut on an unrarified moment.”

V. Vale in the book Pranks: “Brown was the first artist to publish a book of “bad photos” which were out of focus, influencing photographers like Joel-Peter Witkin who immediately recognized that he had opened up a whole new area of freedom in photography outside the realm of academic standards of perfection.”

A.D. Coleman called Brown’s work “a restless individual intelligence engaged in a running creative battle with the structures of its native culture.”

Update: FEBRUARY 9, 2002 Subject: CREATION SPIRITUALITY

Update: FEBRUARY 9, 2002
Subject: CREATION SPIRITUALITY