Thanks for sending me the piece on Robert Delford Brown by Robert C. Morgan. It's one of the first serious accounts of Brown's work in a long time. It gets at the heart of the ecstatic power that has marked his art since the 60's. Just 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 of which the one true god is Who? Knows!....

Each of Brown's works threw a monkey wrench into the avantgarde in those days. He was one artist who upset most of us! He was hard to explain, hard to categorize. He was (and is) eccentric, irreverent, scatological, probably possessed, sort of "out of control" (even for us), and yet a visionary you couldn't ignore or forget. Next to Bob's epiphanic hysterias, I felt like a tame house cat. -

But as Morgan points out, Brown's work is important for us just because he is unsettling. He touches a nerve at the core of the social codes that organize not only our behavior but also the limits of our art. Now that the art market is once again proving to be a fickle illusion, Robert Delford Brown's transcendent vision takes on a great significance.

Best regards,

Allan

Encinitas, March 23, 1992

THE STRANGE CASE OF ROBERT DELFORD BROWN, ICONOCLAST

By

ROBERT C. MORGAN

"I must understand in order
that I may believe.
By doubting we come to
questioning, and by
questioning we perceive
the truth."

- PeterAbelard 1122A.D.

The intellectual inspection is the function of the head and therefore whatever understanding we may have of nature from this source is an abstraction or a representation of nature and not nature itself. Nature does not reveal itself as it is to the intellect ---that is, to the head. It is the abdominal parts that feel nature and understand it in its richness.

---- D.T. Suzuki

Many religions teach you how to get to Nirvana. They all give very complicated directions. The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. tells you how to get to NEVADA. It sounds close and it's simple. YOU TAKE A BUS!

---- Robert Delford Brown



When I first thought about writing an essay on the American artist Robert Delford Brown, I immediately reflected on a comment recently made over a Sushi dinner in New York's Greenwich Village. As we sat with our chopsticks, gobbling rice, and raw fish, Brown looked up at me and exclaimed: "You know, we've got to figure this out all together. As a civilization we've only been around for 10,000 years. We're just climbing out of the slime" He gave on of his typical raucous laughs and then proceeded to dive back into the Sushi.

On hearing this comment, I was struck by the phrase "out of the slime" ----- how accurate it was! We have only been out of the slime for a short period of time, relatively speaking. To think in terms of the larger context --- the context of time itself --- in which our histories are imbedded struck me as quite profound. Brown was voicing the singular notion that our history is completely relative, that there are various ways in which we can choose to read it. Our lineages, our traces, as a history and as a culture.---whatever the history or culture maybe --- somehow begin to dwindle in the face of a larger vision of time. This larger vision begins to give us another perspective, what one might possibly refer to as a spiritual sense of personal Being. Yet Brown, if I understand him correctly, is unconcerned with the isolated or the alienated Self; his concern, rather, is with our global sense of ourselves, with our communal Self. He is interested in the ways in which human beings now stand at the brink of discovering one another --- in the ways in which we are beginning to see that there is no further need for isolation and alienation, and that the identity now lies in something more than a single Self.

Robert Delford Brown is neither a new nor trendy artist. He appeared on the scene in New York City at the end of the 1950's. The second generation of Abstract Expressionists was on the move, struggling to refine the lessons of Pollack, De Kooning, Motherwell and Kline. Artists were dealing with concepts of gestural abstraction and giving them an urban grit (Leslie, Goldberg) or a natural delicasy (Guston, Tworkov, Mitchell), and the sensibilities of other artists were beginning a gradual shift from the inner directed angst of the immediately post-World War11 generation to and outward directed concern with with popular signs. Neo-Dada was in the air: Rauschenberg's combines, John's targets, Oldenberg's Store, Kaprow's Happenings, and the event art of the Fluxus group. All of these developments can be thought of as manifestations of an emerging sensibility, or, in fact, of a new and different language of Self. They marked a shift away from the trepid interiority of existentialism, and they moved in the direction of a more highly semiotic playfulness. The happenings of Kaprow and Oldenburg caught the eye and the heart of Robert Delford Brown in the early 1960's. Brown and his wife Rhett discovered them in Paris. Kaprow had mounted his infamous "Bon Marche" in the Bon Marche Department Store ---- and the Browns were suddenly converted to a way of thinking to which they had never before been exposed. This was in 1963, and the Browns were on their honeymoon.

"Bon Marche" revealed a possible route of exit from the condition of Bohemian isolation that Brown had known for most of his artistic career. For the artist to activate an art event was a different proposition from working in isolation in one's own studio. Brown had known such isolation for many years. Before coming to New York in the late 1950's, he had worked in a small beach front studio in Santa Monica, California. It was about the size of a large closet, and Brown had suspended wooden dowels from the ceiling in order to have a place in which to store his paintings.

There has always been a definite expressionist nuance in Brown's work -- the the early paintings to the events of the 1960's, and including the "Maps to Nevada" of more recent years. This expressionist yearning embodies a certain romantic fascination with life, and it stems from an attitude that is not at all cynical or trendy. If anything, Brown is prone to go too far in the opposite direction. The libidinal energy of these early paintings is unmistakable. Often there are traces of representation --- of figures, still-life, or landscape --and the scale of many of the canvases is quite diminutive; but still they are filled, for the most part, with the kind of abstract longing that was typical of the American (and European) bohemian art of the 1950's. This, after all, was the beatnik era, --- the period of reacting to the great repression that followed some twenty years after the Great Depression. Brown was not oblivious to this repression. He knew the uptightness of the American 1950's as well as anyone else. Sex was a bad word --- never to be mentioned. It was hardly considered a natural desire. Living well according to the "American way of life" was the determined absolute for most folks in the Post-World War 11 America. And what was the American way of life? For Brown, it was something deplorable, frozen in time. It was a style of life that had neither energy of substance. It was a style of conformism in which people were railroaded into categories and disciplines. It was a clean cut way of life without a trace of filth. It was the glorification of anal retentiveness. It was the neat little housewife greeting her husband who was dressed in his grey flannel suit. It was the neat little house in suburbia. In short, the American way of life in the 1950's was a form of social terrorism. It was a way of avoiding life.

Brown was looking elsewhere. He wanted an opportunity to express his "otherness" --- his angst and inner being. He was interested in the Dionysian as opposed to the Apollonian way of living. He was looking for a way to get out of a rut, to bypass absurdities and social conondrums. He was in search of himself as an artist in the American 1950's

Brown's decision to come to New York in 1959 derived from deeply-seated needs. The limited offerings of the Los Angeles art scene had left him with a feeling of frustration. He needed a more cultured atmosphere --- not simply a mass-cultured situation such as Los Angeles provided, but a situation in which he could spend hours looking at the great masters in museums. Brown remembers his earlier years in New York as a time when he was often to find himself alone with the guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No one else was around. He went from gallery to gallery. When he finished a day at the Met, he would go to the galleries on Madison Avenue, and then on to 57th Street. That was his daily routine. He never felt that he has seen enough art in a day. Going to museums and galleries was a way of life. He would go back home to his small studio and paint at night, basking in the feeling of living in a real cosmopolitan center. This is what he had felt he needed. New York was where he could be himself. Always attracted to the notion of noncomformity, as a means of eluding the pressures of the outside world, Brown could fully explore his own life-style in the city. It became his city --- New York! He went where he wanted to go and people did not give a damn. It was a true bohemian paradise, a sanctuary from the rest of America. It was a place with a pulse -- jazz, Abstract Expressionism, wild poetry, all night parties in the Village. Brown was at last in a comfortable environment.

Modernism was in its latter stages by the time Brown began his practice. He was surrounded by a second generation expressionis discourse that was gradually drifting into formalism. It was just about time to topple the seriousness of the New York art world. The severe inwardness the characterized the art world of the 1950's was on the wane, and newer sensibilities were turning greater interest towards outward signs. Nostalgia for the Ecole de Paris was beginning to vanish. In fact, it already had vanished.

Emerging onto the scene from Southern California, Robert Delford Brown began to see that the intimate expressionist angst that had so motivated his paintings in Santa Monica was imbued with a definite sense of romantic intrigue. But the forms of romantic intrigued to be experienced in New York had a for tougher quality. There was room to grow, to evolve, to develop and aesthetic that was conscious of urban grit and the revolt of the senses. What Brown wanted to achieve was some new form of aesthetic hybrid, some aspect of insouciance through which art might break the formalist chains that had come to fetter the scene by the late 1950's. The influence and the continuing impact of Action Painting had cast a new international light on the thinking and tradition of the American avantgarde.

Everywhere artists were seeking new aesthetic devices, hoping either to find their way to the heart of the scene or to discover some further breakthrough that would open up new possibilities.

One of the people in California who had most influenced Robert Delford Brown was the synchromist painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright, whose work was based on the amplification of the presence of color in relation to form. MacDonald-Wright was interested in opening up the structure of the painted surface to a sequence of primary-based color relationshipa, and then in moving into the spectrum in a way that would get beyond the idea of representation. Abstract painting needed some level of reference. For Brown, who was involved in an academic art school situation---first at Long Beach City College , and then later at the University of California at Los Angeles, from which received a Master's degree in 1958 --- the quest for structure in painting eventually grew tedious. He came to believe that art was getting too bogged-down in trivialities and endless formalist theories, and that what it needed was a way of entirely releasing itself from the burden of academic thinking.

For an artist like Brown, who held an essentially polemical view of art, even in his early art school days, it was an arduous task to sit through studio lessons taught by professors who were driven by little, if any, sense of outrage. Los Angeles in the early 1950s was far more provincial that it is today, and MacDonald-Wright's theories were predominant in the southern California art world. It was difficult if not nearly impossible to escape this formalist attitude in the academy. This situation wasn't to begin to change until close to the end of the 1950's when the Ferus Gallery opened in Los Angeles, and started to exhibit the artists of the beatnik generation, including Wallace Berman and George Hermes. But before Brown really had a chance to become a part of this new, if limited, counter-formalist movement on the L. A. scene, he decided to pack his bags and to move to New York. But even after coming to the East Coast, he continued to remain in the sway of certain West-Coast influences, including those of his former teacher, Howard Warshaw, who would eventually become associated with the new humanism in painting, largely inspired by the Mexican painter Rico LeBrun.

This humanist impulse in art cannot be overlooked in the early career of Robert Delford Brown. One might think of the humanist/expressionist gesture as the necessary dialectical response to the work of the formalists. What Brown wanted from his art training was a method of creative release, the acquisition of an extended set of sturdy and sustaining attributes that would allow him a certain rebelliousness. Given the somewhat limited and provincial situation in Los Angeles, it was difficult for the Colorado born artist to find a connection to any form of significant rebellion. Brown needed a context that would allow him to step outside of the cultural boundaries of the southern California art world. He needed a more open and challenging context, one in which he could develop a point of view that was independent of the academy and that emanated only from his own needs and his own vision as an artist. Brown had always been an independent person, and being an artist was, for him, a portable sign of independence.

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. Soon he found himself overwhelmed by the overwhelmed by the number of exhibitions, the number of artists, and the cultural extravaganza of the City itself. It was a lonely life for the first two years, but eventually things started to take shape. He met Harriett (Rhett) Gurney, a theater director for Off-Broadway plays, including the work of Albee, and Beckett. Robert and Rhett were to marry in 1963. It was through this warm and supportive relationship with Rhett that Brown became interested in performance. 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 and with artists who had a performance orientation in their work-people such as the Happening artists, the Fluxus artists, and then later Carolee Schneemann---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.

The period between 1959 and 1963 can be characterized as a time in which the inward-directed sensibility of Abstract Expressionism was evolving towards a more outward-directed concern with social signs. The Happenings of Kaprow, Oldenburg, Dine and Wolf Vostell were interesting and dynamic statements that pulled away from post-World War II inwardness and that found their orientation in a more free-for-all exuberance, a more desperate sensuality, and a more purposeful impulse of destructiveness. These Happenings were crucial to the shift in sensibility that at the time was underway. Brown considered Kaprow's "Bon Marche"-staged in the famous Parisian department store-to be a quintessential statement that could couple his impulse to paint to the sociological necessity of performance. Brown might have been attracted to Kaprow as a mentor at the time. Kaprow was a figure who was forging a new direction in art in the early 1960's, releasing it from the confines of a condition as a static object and endowing it with decisively kinetic and ambulatory functions. Without the theoretical mind of Kaprow, such maneuvers might have been difficult to justify. There was, of course, the history of performance in early forms of Modernism ranging from the Futurist's sintesi to the Dada events at the Cabaret Voltaire. What Kaprow did was to construe the art performance into a form of spectacle that related both to expressionism and to the popular culture of America. The establishing of a link between inward gesture and the outward display of public signs was typical of several manifestations both in Europe and the United States. Rauschenberg can be cited as a major figure. The Nouveaux Realistes in France were also significant in this regard. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Jean Tinguely, Martial Raysse and Arman. Fluxus artists were another manifestation-Dick Higgins, Yayoi Kusama, Alison Knowles, Ay-O, George Maciunas and others. But it was Allan Kaprow-somewhat though not entirely influenced by the composr John Cage-who emerged as the principal leader, theoretician and spokesperson of this tendency.

One should also take account of 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 affention to the aura of a new existentialist art. This existentialist interest in "the absurd" was also bringing a European tradition into view-a tradition of history and philosophy, the social sciences and literature. There was a general feeling of excitement and discovery. Paperback books on existentialist thought were being sold in Village bookstores. The new poets of the "Beat generation" were giving readings of their work in Village cafes. The concept of a performable art was omnipresent. The notion of art as something static was being momentarily displaced-or at least replaced-by another point of view: namely, that art could achieve a different stature through performance, a more relaxed atmosphere of intellectual reception. This was important for the Americans.

"Neo-Dada" was the critical buzz-word in 1960. A non-categorical approach to art was in vogue, and this underground spirit pervaded all of the arts, from painting, to sculpture, literature, theater, photography, music and dance. There were hybrids and cross-overs in all directions. Collaborations between poets and painters (O'Hara and Rivers), between composers and choreographers (Cage and Cunningham), between sculpture and theater (Tinguely and Rauschenberg) were more expected than unlikely. The atmosphere was open to all new ideas, to all possibilities of creative endeavor. A burst of intense and energetic life was coming into art. Art was no longer an academic affair, though clearly an intellectual one. New ideas traversed these hybridizations like strands of gold. The separation of the artist from the viewer was no longer expected or assumed. Efforts, instead, were directed to the mutual inclusion of artist and participant, or, better, as in the Happenings, to the transformation of the viewer into participant. In other words, the participant was entering into the art activity and thereby transforming life into art!

By 1963, when Robert Delford Brown met Kaprow in Paris, the raw energy of participation was beginning to institutionalize itself within the American avantgarde. Brown had wanted to get into performance in as early as 1961 when he had first conceived of his famous "Meat Show." Historically and culturally, this was a significant concept, a synthesis of Abstract Expressionism and the Theater of the Absurd. But this piece was not to be realized until 1964. In the meantime, there was an interval of confusion and disappointment in which Brown was witnessing the gradual dissipation of the Happening as an art form. This factor of dissipation had much to do with the forms of institutionalization that the media automatically bring about. Brown saw the glory as well as the destructiveness of the media. At any rate, the new trend by 1963 was the Pop Art movement: Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Jim Dine were coming into view. Brown has discussed this moment in American art in a recent interview with Francesco Conz:

"I didn't dedicate my life to becoming a Pop artist. 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."

When Brown remarks that things were not going in the right direction, his complaint is less personal than social and historical. Brown never felt comfortable with the pseudo-aura that Pop Art brought into the art world. There was a loss of intellectual play, a decrease not only in the importance of the art, but also in the quality of the receivership, the audience that presumably was responding to the art. It was not the audience of the Happenings. It was a more cynical and detached audience. It was a rich audience looking for kicks. There was a certain lack of desperation, a lack of existential confrontation, and-most of all-a lack of focus on the absurd.

The difference between the gritty sense of essence communicated by the Happenings as opposed to the more refined and manufactured look of Pop Art was noted by Lucy Lippard in her 1966 book on Pop Art, where she draws a distinction between "clean" and "dirty" art. "Dirty" art would be the "Neo-Dada" approach-the Happenings, the Fluxus events, the detritus of machines as in the work of Tinguely, the machinations of Wolf Vostell, Piero Manzoni's cans of shit. Pop Art was much more elegant-an art of the superficial, the label, a reflection of social fact, but voicing no demand for personal intervention. It was precisely for such reasons that the critic Max Kozloff rejected the premises of Pop Art at its inception in 1963, referring to its practitioners as "the new vulgarians." The slickness of Pop Art existed in opposition to the detritus of the Happenings. It was the latter issue that interested Brown, the transmutation of the slick into something that was unslick, or into something that was explicitly fake. For example, 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. In many ways this gesture by Brown, by way of the medium of photography in its most commercial (and sentimental) guise, i-s one of the most profound anti-Pop Art gestures of the decade. The intellectual subversion of the portrait image was, in many ways, a deconstruction of the Warhol grid-silk-screen paintings of such notables as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Edith Scull. Warhol may have deployed the kindof cynical detachment that was necessary to make the "portrait" function as a commercial image in the art world, largely by way of transposing advertising techniques into the realm of portraiture, but Brown's detachment was even more cynical in relation to an image of himself. By pushing the cynical into the realm of the absurd, Brown was able to capture the irony of Pop Art as serious art. Brown was concerned with using detritus, or the trash of the world, or a scatological principle as a process through which an image must be read. It was a statement about not ignoring the entropic nature of culture, or even of the historification of the Self. This photographic gesture by Brown is a kind of scatological/eschatological commentary. Through the immanent we perceive the transcendent. It is a phenomenology of the Self, using the detached role of the artist as the necessary fulcrum. Brown has further explained:

"This is what upset me in the '60s. When I was thirty-five and I had all that success with the "Meat Show," it seemed like a goddam 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. 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."

The "Meat Show" was staged in 1964 in a large refrigerator unit at the Washington Meat Market. 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. It was not easy to find a new medium that could shock the public after all the Happenings and art events-including those of the Fluxus group. Yet Brown's show was so sensually ludicrous, on one level, and so aesthetically profound, on another, that it would have been difficult to ignore. The link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art is often spoken of in relation to Rauschenberg and Johns, but one might also consider the argument that the most truly outrageous event that fell into the gap between "art and life" was this event. People wore heavy coats and entered an enormous storage locker where they were surrounded by huge chucks of beef. It was a scene right out of Soutine or Rembrandt, a scene more reminiscent of the former Les Halles in Paris than of anything concerned with New York. The absurd frenzy of the evening can be attributed to the fact that people were asked to make a contextual transposition from the art gallery to a meat locker, and thus to effect a shift in sensibility. Was the meat art? Or did the context make it so?

Another significant event for Brown was his participation in the musical play entitled Originale by the German avantgarde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. 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. The event was protested by some of the Fluxus artists, including Henry Flynt, who did not believe that Originale represented the true aspirations of the avantgarde. It is difficult to discern exactly what the Fluxus complaint was about; but there seems to have been a clearly adversarial relationship between the Happening aesthetic and that of other artists, largely for internal political reasons. At any rate, 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. The Dionysian aspect of Brown's performance was explicit and overt. He began by dumping raw eggs on stage from a high ladder, then howling and ululating at various intervals. In retrospect, Brown understood his role in Stockhausen's musical play as a kind of archetypal deity- a mythological presence that suggested the inception of life and the fertility of the creative moment. It was an outward display of conflictual, interior angst combined with bohemian joie de vivre. For Brown it was an important statement as to what the nature of the avantgarde should have been at that particular moment in its American cultural evolution. The Dionysian temperament needed to be unleashed after its suffocation during the previous decade of American life.

Brown's performance in Originale hinged on the Nietzschean distinction between the Apollonian man and the Dionysian man. There is an ecstatic element in Stockhausen's music, a meditative quality that is also charged with an iconoclastic sensibility. The Apollonian, of course, is the more subdued individual, the more stoic, the more contemplative, whereas the Dionysian is possessed by exuberant language and strident evocations, in addition to being given to blatantly amoralistic tendencies. This conflict of temperament, with the contemplative on the one hand and the raucous on the other, is precisely what Brown's mythological persona was meant to enact. Brown presented himself as the itinerant faun on the threshold of coitus; he embodied the interval of existential awareness, the hedonistic enunciation of the Self in confrontation with its dissemblance; he personified the disappearance of the Ego and the banishment of the banalities of secular strife and all

Brown's performance in Originale hinged on the Nietzschean distinction between the Apollonian man and the Dionysian man. There is an ecstatic element in Stockhausen's music, a meditative quality that is also charged with an iconoclastic sensibility. The Apollonian, of course, is the more subdued individual, the more stoic, the more contemplative, whereas the Dionysian is possessed by exuberant language and strident evocations, in addition to being given to blatantly amoralistic tendencies. This conflict of temperament, with the contemplative on the one hand and the raucous on the other, is precisely what Brown's mythological persona was meant to enact. Brown presented himself as the itinerant faun on the threshold of coitus; he embodied the interval of existential awareness, the hedonistic enunciation of the Self in confrontation with its dissemblance; he personified the disappearance of the Ego and the banishment of the banalities of secular strife and all of its mindless categories of exclusion. He asserted himself as a manifestation of the alert sensibility in a counterpoised situation of the Self. This abundance of mythological meanings emanated directly from the conflict embedded and deeply hidden within the Nietzschean paradigm of the Modern man. With all the aggressive blindness and desire, with all the consequence of humor and tragedy, with all the striking-out against repression in the form of a social nemesis, Robert Delford Brown carries the burden of his phallus into the world, the world where reveries and realities collide, the world where Being and Non-Being merge into a continuous process of becoming. The direction of Brown's performance in Originale was the direction of his art, a strange case indeed. For Brown, the iconoclastic artist, the reparation of life could only occur through the revival of myth, the rejuvenation of the libido in full accord with the magic of the interval, the interstice where the Apollonian and the Dionysian are no longer separate, where the Ego and the Id come together, where the unconscious and the conscious find a space-time continuum, a state of effervescence and untidy ebullience in the tide-waters of consciousness. Through myth, we discover a sense of wholeness. Brown took the role of the shaman, the playful gadfly, the humbugged clown, feeling and groping his way through the darkness, through the cesspools of the deep, the dark side of memory, the incurable traces of human needs. The need to find joy, to feel joy, in this strange, amoral world, became the directive, the limpid causality, for his art. Why-otherwise-become an artist? The question no longer had to be an obsession for Brown, a festering dilemma, an unacknowledged predicament scorned by the academics. The question, after 1964, would simply become "Who? Knows!"

The question was a good one. 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. Robert Delford Brown, naturally enough, was the founding director, instigator, and head of the Church. What was this Church? And why create a religion? What was Brown trying to prove? In fact he was trying to prove nothing. Nothing, in the sense that the world was already too full of things. Why not nothing? This all seems rather close to Americanized Zen. The riddle of the koan, a teaching device employed by Zen masters, has a certain implicit hold on Brown. His manifesto, for instance, might read as a kind of extended koan. It is full of serious absurdities and contradictions. As the Zen philosopher Alan Watts once proclaimed, in Zen you have to work to play; this is to say that it's no simple matter of just waiting for the arrival of nirvana or for instant enlightenment to strike you. It is a far more complicated affair. To be in tune with oneself, in the Zen sense, means that one has to empty the vessel, so to speak. Since the world fills one's consciousness with extraneous and superfluous thoughts, it is necessary to empty them out through meditation, by way of koans, by way of the use of conflicting and paradoxical epigrams, little anecdotes of which the meaning is obscured by paradox and self-contradiction. Brown called his religion at the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. "orthodox paganism." What he wanted to accomplish was to destroy the notion of all institutionalized ways of doing things; he wanted to go against the tide of conformism that was so endemic to American life. Brown was looking for a religious attitude that would go beyond the confines and limitations of institutionalized religion. His desire was for the Great Building Crack-Up to house a Church that need not be taken too seriously; and this is to say that he founded a religion that's based on the method of a lack of method, a system without a system. As he states in his manifesto of "orthodox paganism," the only commandment is to LIVE! He goes on to announce: "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!"

The question was a good one. 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. Robert Delford Brown, naturally enough, was the founding director, instigator, and head of the Church. What was this Church? And why create a religion? What was Brown trying to prove? In fact he was trying to prove nothing. Nothing, in the sense that the world was already too full of things. Why not nothing? This all seems rather close to Americanized Zen. The riddle of the koan, a teaching device employed by Zen masters, has a certain implicit hold on Brown. His manifesto, for instance, might read as a kind of extended koan. It is full of serious absurdities and contradictions. As the Zen philosopher Alan Watts once proclaimed, in Zen you have to work to play; this is to say that it's no simple matter of just waiting for the arrival of nirvana or for instant enlightenment to strike you. It is a far more complicated affair. To be in tune with oneself, in the Zen sense, means that one has to empty the vessel, so to speak. Since the world fills one's consciousness with extraneous and superfluous thoughts, it is necessary to empty them out through meditation, by way of koans, by way of the use of conflicting and paradoxical epigrams, little anecdotes of which the meaning is obscured by paradox and self-contradiction. Brown called his religion at the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. "orthodox paganism." What he wanted to accomplish was to destroy the notion of all institutionalized ways of doing things; he wanted to go against the tide of conformism that was so endemic to American life. Brown was looking for a religious attitude that would go beyond the confines and limitations of institutionalized religion. His desire was for the Great Building Crack-Up to house a Church that need not be taken too seriously; and this is to say that he founded a religion that's based on the method of a lack of method, a system without a system. As he states in his manifesto of "orthodox paganism," the only commandment is to LIVE! He goes on to announce: "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!"

Compared to other religious manifestos, this is of course absurd; and this is precisely what Brown wants his credo to be. The appeal to the absurd is a necessary element of shaking the foundations of institutionalized religions, those credos that take themselves too seriously. Brown is not attempting to denigrate any other religious faith; he is merely trying to elevate the importance of life in relation to whatever one chooses to believe. Unless life is understood in both spiritual and material ways, we are in trouble, according to Brown. This is reason for which he has so often quoted the writings of the architect-ecologist R. Buckminster Fuller. The spiritual and material worlds have to be in tune with one another. For example, in his little book of The Teachings of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. he quotes from Fuller's Critical Faith, published in 1981:

"Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to 'make it' economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution."

This might seem like an odd assertion from a credo based on the absurd, but there is a curious pragmatic strain that runs through Brown's work, a utopian way of thinking that is fully conscious of the human condition and of life on the planet.

Theology comes to mean something more than the study of God, just as aesthetics comes to be more than the science of beauty. In claiming a Church for himself, Brown took the liberty of espousing a point of view that was neither nostalgic nor trendy in terms of seeking out a consensus of approval. Brown has never been interested in conforming to anyone else's standards or in making amends simply to get along. He sees theology in terms that are confrontational-a composite of Zen and Dada-but always in a playful, good-natured way. The basic concept of performance is essential to his theology. Communication is also essential, but just as the Zen master will not rely on a rational means of communication to his constituency, neither does Brown. He is more concerned with the dispensation of vital energies and with how those energies manifest themselves in the secular world. There is little doubt that Brown functions within the secular world, the world of everyday affairs, on a pragmatic level; but then so does the Zen Buddhist. The Zen practitioner is by no means removed from the practical exigencies of the banal; indeed, he places himself at the heart of it, at the eye of the hurricane, where he may then enact his relationship to the world with a proper dispensation of energetic repose. Brown has received a considerable degree of spiritual and material guidance from Buckminster Fuller. In another of Fuller's books, No More Secondhand God, Brown discovered the close relationship between pure scientific thinking and the spiritual state of things. There is one poetically inspired passage that reads as follows:

and man is yet but fractionally informed regarding those complexities, and the fractional information is furnished only by those wave frequencies which are directly apprehendable exclusively within man's very limited sensorial spectrum frequency bands- tactile, olfactoral, aural and optical-

A statement such as this makes an appeal to the senses, an appeal that asks us to begin thinking more directly in terms of human needs; yet it also asks us to regard our human connection with other matter and events that exist outside of the limited realm of sense. Part of the ethical mandate of our time, according to Fuller, is to understand that the sphere of the invisible has powers and effects that are potentially greater than those of the visible world. Fuller believes that we have to begin to think in terms of the invisible without sacrificing what we know through the realm of the senses. It is a double-edged sword. Brown's interpretation of Fuller is essential to the theology of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. It is important to remember that the absurd does not necessarily imply a cul-de-sac for pragmatic concerns and that the realm of material, everyday circumstances is in fact contingent to a very large degree upon a reconciliation with the absurd. In order to make clear decisions about life, one must know how to cut through the language of confusion and to get to the essence of our problems: in other words, to catch a glimpse of the larger picture.

It is the larger picture that can give us a more accurate account of the vital energies that we in fact possess. Brown is interested in tapping into those energies, in figuring out what makes us tick as a social body. He is convinced of the importance of social concerns, but not in terms of trendiness or fashion. Rather he is convinced that it is necessary that we start listening to one another, that we communicate simultaneously on many levels, that we make use of our full range of faculties, our senses and our minds, in order to make the world work for us. What has happened, according to Brown, is that the world is standing still in terms of real progress because there is a crisis of energy... and he is surely not talking about an oil crisis. He is talking about the crisis of communication between human beings-about the ways in which we fail to understand one another, refusing to lend attention to one another's needs. Consequently, the economic systems of our new global environment are out of sync with one another. Profits are still based on manipulations that seem to imagine that human needs somehow run counter to the needs of business; hence, there is unnecessary conflict in the world. There is conflict between what our human needs really are and how business currently chooses to deal with itself. In other words, people have their concerns and business has its concerns, but the two sets of concerns are not in sync. Therefore, human beings live less than fully vital lifestyles and are fraught with depleted potentialities; and business is suffering the consequences, largely because business-referring to corporate post-industry-refuses to assume responsibility for what it is doing to the planet.

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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. Is it that the subject of a portrait is translated into the object of another subject's gaze, the photographer's eye? In perusing this wire-bound collection of images, one is immediately struck by the fact that they are nearly indistinguishable from one other. The portraits cannot be read in any traditional way This leads to another question: is Brown's work more about the camera than about the printed photograph? But this sounds too academic for Brown. Maybe the question could be located in a different way: is the subject-meaning the person holding the camera-more significant in the reading of these portraits than how the images translate as portraits? Is First-C/ass Portraits really about Brown himself? Here again I cannot resist a comparison with Warhol's portraits, especially Warhol's Portraits of the 70s, a show mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. With Warhol, the high-contrast images seem more important than the fact that they are supposed to be portraits representing specific individuals, such as Halston, Henry Geldzahler, Golda Meir, Dennis Hopper, and so forth. Given such a variety of individuals, it is curious that Warhol could fit them all into the same format, the double-image portrait. But are they really portraits? It would appear that portraits are not just visual representations of faces. There is another ingredient. In the case of Warhol, a missing ingredient. Warhol is using the language of advertising, the anonymous image, the image that summons up notions of spectacle and that finally becomes itself a spectacle to the eye of the beholder. The neutralized look of Warhol's silk-screened faces is not at all what we encounter in Brown's First-Class Portraits. Brown delibrately 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. The lens picks up an impression of light, a dull thud of resemblance. Something takes place between the subject (Brown) who presses the shutter and the subject who is being portrayed. There is a kind of conjugation, an extended optical link, as it were, between the gaze and the recipient of the gaze, between the perceiver and the perceived. It resembles an improvisation, something that is not completely controlled or even within the realm of control. Brown's use of the Polaroid camera is remarkably direct and without elaboration. The subjects who face one another are involved in a twofold fact of optical reciprocation. The person being photographed, ironically "first-class," is also compromised by the desires of the photographer; the smudging and scumbling of the surface imprint are a way of giving the membrane between perceiver and perceived the significance of a trace, a lingering whisper of an event, a fragile signifier of a moment in which a spark of reconciliation was achieved and then allowed partially to vanish.

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For that matter, 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. Some of these images reveal the horrors of twisted erotica; others are a pleasurable delight. Brown seems to have taken an amoral stance in relation to these images by not placing judgments on whether or not they ought to be exhibited. It was a matter of lifting the veil from repression, of revealing what there was to reveal about the human condition. He was trying to show images that did not lie, or to make images that deliberately lied in order to show the truth of how mendacity is the very first rule of the medium of photography. In the early 1960s, Brown felt the spirit of the times-the feeling that "anything goes"-therefore, why not reveal what had been concealed? Why not open the back door, and allow the darker side of consciousness into light?

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. There was Hannah Hoch, of course, in Berlin. There were Heartfield and Grosz. There was Max Ernst. 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. Nirvana was his visual orgy. The visual orgy was about a sensualist overload, an indiscreet layering of images without any predisposition to formality. Brown was (and still is) an ecstatic scavenger of images. He loves bright "electronic" colors and wacky child-like typography. He prints off the raster, direct from the computer. He is an artist in control of his technical means; therefore, he avoids the trap of falling into technique. He knows the difference. Art and craft are two distinct entities. Yet many of his recent Maps to Nevada have a child-like, craft-like look. He collaborates with friends and neighbors who come to the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. to work on group collages, ensembles of ecstatic juxtapositions, each person testing his or her visual intellect in relation to a fragmented whole. Now in his sixties, Brown takes care of himself: he gets plenty of sleep, eats right, and doesn't drink. He never touches tobacco. He wears trifocals and looks like a long-distance runner. White-haired and bearded (at this writing) Robert Delford Brown has proven to be a strange case. And what is the case?

In his "Teachings" he declares: "We are serious about being funny and funny about being serious." When Brown makes such a statement he is referring to the way in which we live, the way we act, and the way we communicate. This sounds as though it were all opposed to the elitist positions of Postmodernism; but actually it is not. It is elitist at another level-at the level of the democratic nonideal, or at the level of the ways in which people really live and act and talk. In the 1960's, Brown had a couple of moments of tremendous media hype. His parties, offered by himself and his wife Rhett, were ecstatic assemblies of people from all walks of life, artists and non-art people alike. But by the middle of the 1 970s, it seemed as though Brown had disappeared from the popular scene. His art had moved towards other concerns-far from the trends of the decade: Postminimalism, Postconceptualism, and other pluralistic forms of formalist painting and sculpture. Brown shifted his interest from "Maps to Nirvana" to "Maps to Nevada." He was no longer thinking in terms or trends or media attention. His art became more private, more inner-directed.

Relinquishing the past can itself be a work of art-and an entirely commendable work of art in an age of obsessions, narcissism, and fetishism. Robert Delford Brown learned how to ease the burden of loss and the burden of conscience by founding and exploring a new language. Giving birth to a new language-acquiring a new language-presupposes the attainment of another level of consciousness. It is about being awake. To maintain a state of wakefulness in this era of television apathy and mesmeric indulgences is a remarkable feat, a feat that Brown has been seriously engaged in for many years. His art is more about the child-like (in contrast to the childish) way of seeing. It is a way of opening the mind so as extend the parameters of seeing and believing to realms that lie beyond the ordinary while still remaining squarely within the project of everyday living. Brown's art has proven indeed to be a strange case, but precisely this strangeness has saved him from the alienation of fashion.

New York City, March 1992

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