How to measure eternity: The Inoperative Operations of stanley brouwn
The first rule of stanley brouwn is don’t talk about stanley brouwn. Few images exist of the artist or his work, and cursory searches under his name yield more information about what is unavailable. Unsurprisingly, his few contributions to catalogs typically consist of his name and a blank page.
So what do we talk about when we don’t talk about stanley brouwn? As it so happens, we talk about stanley brouwn, when we don't talk about stanley brouwn, and vice versa. This gentle paradox makes it seem at times as if there were two of them. The first is the "factual" or legal brouwn. He was born in 1935 in Dutch Suriname and immigrated to the Netherlands in 1957. Shortly after, he joined Nul, the Dutch wing of the anti-authorship Zero movement. In 1972, Brouwn began to prohibit any and all depiction or discussion of his work and personal biography. He taught at a university and died in 2017. stanley brouwn number two is the practitioner of peripatetic dandyism. He bridges the space between art and life so transparently that he often ends up mistaken for the gap itself.
This schism is not reducible to simplistic identitarian dualism. Neither brouwn is its other's opposite nor its negation. Rather, each brouwn is a self-differing hole that reciprocally causes and fills its counterpart.
brouwn's recalcitrance towards discursive or pictorial representation of his work precedes him. Accordingly, stanley brouwn, the artist's first stateside retrospective, lacks didactics with the exception of those denoting the title, year, and credit lines for each work. On a purely visual level, much of Brouwn's work is unassuming to the point where any signage indicating a prohibition on photography feels rather moot. Some stupid people might bristle at what is sure to be called elitist or “inaccessible,” but brouwn’s work is the last thing that necessitates mediation.
Above the door to Plato’s academy was an inscription, ἀγεωμέτρητος μὴ εἰσίτω, which translates roughly to “Let none but geometers enter here.” Other anecdotes go so far as to describe the dismissal of prospective students for not knowing what he called “handholds of philosophy.” For Plato, geometry was the basis of all thought, in part because it seemed the most direct path to fashioning sensible experience into abstract concepts.
Measure and geometry are not inherently analogous; stanley brouwn makes that much clear. Instead, measurement is a tool that regulates systems of equivalencies and exchange, whereas geometry culminates in the abstract expression of material occurrences. Measure can be an abstracting valuative system, or, as brouwn poetically suggests, measure, in service to a geometer, can be used to express the irreducibly material ways bodies experience the world-at-large. It would therefore be a mistake to characterize his work as being singularly concerned with measurement instead of recognizing it as but one structural grammar among many in his toolbox.
Take, for instance, the Dutch el (or ell), one of the many antiquarian dimensions that persistently recur in his work. The ell was not a universally standardized dimension; it was determined by measuring the distance from the inside of the armpit to the tip of a finger. As such, its exact size was dependent on where one was and whom one was with. Deploying outdated measurements alongside more contemporaneous ones, brouwn argues for a primary experience of space in hopes of supplanting a standardized way of living. Without any explanation on hand to justify it, brouwn leaves it to the viewer to recalibrate their faculties for geometric experience.
Although plumbing biographical details for context betrays both Brouwn’s wishes and my better judgments, it would be remiss to leave the artist's experience of having grown up in a territory under colonization unconsidered. For a colonial enterprise to function, measure is integral; it functions as a tool that efficiently converts life into an object ripe for capital exchange. An imperial power requires the tools of measurement to gauge distances for military campaigns, build the requisite infrastructure for resource extraction, and even conduct the physiological measurements that can form and distinguish racial typologies.
While I fear that one day brouwn could easily be flattened by less than serious biographical discourse, I also see the wall of silence around his practice tends to obscure him as just some guy who said “no.” By viewing both aspects of brouwn—the citizen and the artist—together, we may recover a better sense of how each informed the other. Likewise, it becomes easier to understand Brouwn's obstinance as a defensive tactic where silence protects against being adopted by a reactive identitarian camp just as much as an apolitically formalist one.
In 1973, Ursula K. Le Guin published The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Her short story succinctly describes a city that is by all accounts perfect until it is revealed that its idyll is made possible only by sentencing a child to a lifetime of inchoate misery. At a certain age, each citizen is informed of this fact, and while everyone is uniformly appalled by the truth, few choose to walk out on their way of life. Le Guin ends her story remarking that no one knows where people who leave Omelas go, but that it must be to some place “even more unimaginable.” By the time Le Guin published her story, stanley brouwn had been walking into thin air for a year.
Segments of brouwn’s most well-known project, this way brouwn, make that much clear. The pieces selected by curators Ann Goldstein and Jordan Carter show brouwn marching in a directionless direction. He marches towards nowhere—towards utopia. To complete each iteration, Brouwn would approach a passerby and ask for directions to a random point in the city from where he currently stood. Upon receiving his instructions, Brouwn would express the directions as a line without any other embellishments to mark buildings, streets, or wayfinders and promptly stamp the paper with an imperative: THIS WAY BROUWN
The maps, pedometry, and collection of footprints all assembled for stanley brouwn don’t so much reorient urban space—or more vulgarly, as many critics have said, “make participants aware of their space." Instead, they abolish it in favor of a contingent way of living made possible only through mutual cohabitation with others who are also, always equally, in passing. In his refusal to yield to the pressures of quantification, qualification, or even place, the defamiliarized objectivity that colors this way brouwn reveals an artist whose commitment to absence was preempted by an ephemeral, ethical disposition. Brouwn’s productive capacity stems from the ways they make inoperative those apparatuses of accumulation whose value pumps fresh air into both the colonial metropole and cultural sphere that justifies it.
Rather than rehabilitate a place’s topology, brouwn unseats the jurisdiction of spatial administration with blank pieces of paper, IBM computers, and the emptiness of an impromptu structure. He endeavors to create an atopic anywhere, for any time. He even proposed an “impossible” work whereby a hole would be bored all the way to the opposite end of the earth so two telescopic lenses could be retrofitted on each side. Whoever was on the other end of the hole could, at certain times, see the bottoms of brouwn’s shoes if he stood on the glass.
There is a playful dimension to brouwn's otherwise steely silence. His work cajoles the institution into a screwball game of cat and mouse. The museum plays the bumbling Lestradian detective, and brouwn deliciously performs his role as its devastatingly clever opponent. Consequently, a problem is raised: Is any of this (still) art?
Were there any semblance of an answer, it would be found on the paper nearest the exit; at this moment the distance between stanley brouwn and yourself is x foot. Whereas everything else feels like the calcification of chemical reactions that were at one point art, this statement is something that cannot be stopped, negated, or neutralized, even after Brouwn’s death. Were all else on view, clues left behind in the process of a crime called art, this declaration remains in action, caught redhanded in perpetuity.
This is the real fun of stanley brouwn, and also ends up being its tragic catch-22. By inhabiting the institution, his work renders the museum’s vital functions mostly inoperable. But, in the same breath, it must behave like a spy that will dutifully crack the cyanide capsule hidden in its mouth to avoid snitching. But in a perverse way, the fact that most of the “art” is flagrantly dead or dormant makes it easier to resuscitate or put what was previously unthought into practice today.
Despite Brouwn’s passing eight years ago, I was left with the unshakable sensation that he remains at large and on the move. On the way out I stumbled upon a small tag reading “C. Moore was right MF here June 14, 2023, @ 8:32 PM.” In that moment, the distance between Brouwn and myself felt infinitesimal.
