Ben Davis Aug 10, 2023
“What I’m Looking at” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth consuming, and other tidbits. Below, thoughts from the first weeks of July 2023. Artnet.
Unplaceable Goodness
This one-gallery White Columns survey of the recent output of the well-regarded Brooklyn-based sculptor Carol Bruns (b. 1943) makes me think of ghosts. Not just because these sculptures are mainly all in ghostly white, but because ghosts are border characters, between alive and dead. And I take the attempt to achieve a kind of eerie, resonant in-between-ness to be where Bruns’s head is at.
Bruns’s sculptures are in-between in at least three ways. First, in that they are made with found materials, and both show it and don’t show it—you can sense the underlying forms of Styrofoam pieces or pipes found on the street, but Bruns has semi-finished them in white plaster and paint so that they hold together into one, gawky form. Second, they are in-between in that they conjure faces and figures, but always in a not-quite-there way, the final form being half-creaturely, half-object-like. And, finally and most subtly, they are in-between in emotional tone: Are these mask-like reliefs and sculptures spooky or lovable? They exist just at the point where you have to project into them, and they shift states if you stay with them.
There’s a lot of control in holding all these levels of irresolution together at once in an artwork. And if you let yourself steep in Bruns’s show, it’s mind-expanding. (On view through August 26.)
Solo Shows
Carol Bruns’s aesthetic moralism, Two Coats of Paint
August 4, 2023 10:38 am
Contributed by Gwenaël Kerlidou / Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, is one of the first fictionalized accounts of the ravages of European colonialism in Africa. Marlow, the narrator, while surveying the grounds of an ivory collecting station on the Congo River, catches sight of a row of shriveled heads mounted on stakes. The episode segues to a deeper exploration of the psyche of Kurtz, a terminally ill but very successful ivory harvester working for the king of Belgium. His cryptic last words – “the horror, the horror” – sum up the situation. The title and content of Conrad’s novella reverberates through Carol Bruns’s current exhibition at White Columns of mostly monochromatic frontal sculptures, in which the human figure is omnipresent, either as hieratic totems or as ritual masks. Scattered in the gallery space, an unruly mob of chimeras and other nightmarish characters seems to be stoically harboring the scars, wrinkles, creases, and other traces of immemorable sufferings. Carol Bruns, Meltdown, 2022, cardboard, Styrofoam, paper, plaster, 21 x 16 x 9 inches
Conrad’s tale exposed the dark side of nineteenth-century Western exoticism that would eventually encourage the Fauvists’ and Cubists’ to repurpose African art. In the early twentieth century, Western cultures came to value “primitive” art for qualities taken out of context, ultimately reinforcing a formalist reading of Modern Art that culminated in the United States with Clement Greenberg’s theory of formalist reduction, under which the West systematically edited out what did not fit its historical model. Bruns will have none of this.
With a combination of paper, plaster, and other found materials, Bruns shifts the act of sculpting the figure from clay modeling to paper crumpling and assemblage. Her idiosyncratic paper lamination technique often integrates fragments of Styrofoam consumer packaging, melding an archaic organism with a post-industrial one. As a result, the show is rich in dichotomies, hybridizations, ambiguities, and coexisting opposites. Traditional indigenous ritual masks and totems are usually unconcerned with individual expression. But in works like Meltdown and Guardian, Bruns draws the viewer into her figures’ psyches, as if they were characters on a stage. With their petrified hysterical rictuses, they might have been extracted from the archeological site of a sudden ancient catastrophe. Less frightening than puzzled, their expressions hint at a prehistoric time when terror, awe, pathos, and tragicomedy were not yet distinct, and people were seized by forces far beyond their understanding.
As most of these characters seem to be male, Bruns may consider them archetypal Adams cast out of the Garden of Eden, haunted by their loss of innocence on behalf of humankind as a whole. Fringe Elements, a group of twelve masks mounted on sticks, is arguably the part of the exhibition most evocative of Marlow’s vision. The original idea came from an antique mask of Dionysus mounted on a stick, but the resulting Greek choir offers a much grimmer view of the endgame than his promise of pleasure. At the same time, Don’t Shoot, made in response to recent instances of excessive use of force by the police, engage the viewer on a more current basis.
The sculptures are rife with folds, creases and bumps, all signs of inner conflicts and tensions. Bruns takes the viewer on a safari from civilization’s primal fears to individuals’ existential terror. But despite the expressive formal distortions and the clear influences of psychology and symbolism, Bruns does not fully commit to existentialism, expressionism, or “the informal” – intellectual or aesthetic movements that might intuitively be associated with her work. Perhaps she is better identified as a kind of moralist, more concerned with the value system underpinning aesthetic choices than with their formal iterations.
Some of Bruns’s masks recall Jean Dubuffet’s papier-mâché heads from around 1959–60. Dubuffet’s fascination with Gaston Chaissac’s work is an interesting example of the relationship of mainstream to outsider artists, and resonates with Bruns’s sensibility and location in the art world. When Dubuffet was starting to explore the new realm that he would later call Art Brut, he encountered Chaissac, a shoemaker from a small village in Vendée, who struck him as a genuine outsider artist. Chaissac was quite aware of the art world but stayed away from it. For Dubuffet, Chaissac’s indifference to what he saw as “superficial” modernity proved irresistible. Although Bruns is not an outsider artist, she is aware of the contemporary art world and uninterested in participating in its game of history-making. As Dubuffet rejected the humanistic tradition of post-Second World War Cubism, Bruns today rejects the seductions of pop culture, formalist utopias, and post-Duchampian conceptualism. She is equally unenchanted by contemporary art discourse on social identity. From this perspective, her work is an act of political resistance to the cultural narratives and material accumulations of late capitalism.
The artist casts her figures as monsters, scapegoats, spirits, and demons, and one may wonder what kind of untold deeds these characters may have committed. In The Scapegoat, expanding on Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, René Girard posits that the social bond is cemented by the mechanism of the ritual sacrifice of a designated victim (the primal father for Freud), which constitutes the basis of all human culture. Bruns’s work returns to that foundational moment with a twist: her hybrid monsters look like both victims and perpetrators, vulnerable as well as threatening scared and scary.
Her reluctance to subscribe to the modernist presumption of civilizational progress indicates fundamental doubt about the direction the world is taking. In its preoccupation with the archaic, her work deliberately ignores historical and formal modernist references. She seems to take the well-known Latin proverb “homo homini lupus” – man is wolf to man – and the barbarity of so-called civilization as a central premise, as if the human race were permanently on the brink of regressing to its basic animal instincts. Among strict contemporaries, Bruns enters the conversation somewhere between Franz West and Huma Bhabha. But her sculptures extend a long tradition of monster representation, from the medieval gargoyles and Hieronymus Bosch to Francisco Goya, George Grosz, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Fautrier, Willem de Kooning, and Louise Bourgeois. Her meditation echoes Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the famous aquatint from Los Capriccios, his 1799 album of prints. In this moment of global climate crisis, major war, and political retrogression, she urgently suggests that homo sapiens start thinking like a tribe about its own survival.
“Carol Bruns: Sculptures,” White Columns, East Gallery, 91 Horatio Street, New York, NY. Through August 26, 2023.
About the author: Gwenaël Kerlidou is a French abstract painter living and working in Brooklyn who writes occasionally on exhibitions in the US and Europe.
Posted on August 7, 2023 by Steve Rockwell, Tussle Magazine
Carol Bruns at White Columns
by Robert Egert
Carol Bruns’s work first caught my attention in 2018 at SRO gallery in Crown Heights. Her exhibition showcased a mix of sculpture and works on paper. Her figurative sculptures conveyed the presence of human bodies in space, twisting, straining to emerge from their own materiality. Despite the rough construction and exaggerated physicality of those figures, one could still discern vestiges of humanist dynamics or perhaps a loose tether to drawing or sculpting directly from a nude model.
In her new, expansive show at White Columns, Bruns has departed entirely from the figurative tradition and embraced a kind of archaic, mythic approach. The gallery is filled with oversized masks, slender stacked totems, and distorted effigies. While these figures and heads still seem to struggle to emerge from the process of their making, once emerged they say less about the figure and more about the psyche.
As is true for many sculptors, materiality and process cannot be taken for granted, and Bruns has developed a unique process over several years. Her approach produces a papier mâché-like material that is thinner, lighter, and more malleable. It’s flexible enough for her to incorporate other materials such as hair, fibers, plant matter, and Styrofoam. The pieces are predominately painted in monochrome black or white, adding to their stark, confrontational presence while unifying the disparate elements. The final effect is disarmingly fresh, unpretentious, and incredibly present.
A cursory viewing evokes the art of West Africa, Polynesia and other pre-industrial cultures, including archaic Greece. While those connections to the art of past are clear, these pieces go beyond homage or derivation, for the clear influence of psychology and contemporary ideas about the self that are immanent in the work. Bruns cites early twentieth century modernists as an inspiration, in addition to the original, unnamed artists that inspired them, but her work is firmly rooted in the twenty-first century.
Every artist begins with intentions, and for Bruns I suspect the intention is to evoke mythos, to mine the archetypal psyche, to connect with the root forces and human experience that unites us simultaneously to pre-industrial, tribal artists as well as the early twentieth century modernists who referenced them. But, despite all intentions, none of us can help but be mediums for the zeitgeist, and the same is true for Bruns, whose work channels our contemporary state of being, clinging to individuality, polluted by industrialization, and disenfranchised by the post-industrial economy.
by Robert Egert
Carol Bruns’s work first caught my attention in 2018 at SRO gallery in Crown Heights. Her exhibition showcased a mix of sculpture and works on paper. Her figurative sculptures conveyed the presence of human bodies in space, twisting, straining to emerge from their own materiality. Despite the rough construction and exaggerated physicality of those figures, one could still discern vestiges of humanist dynamics or perhaps a loose tether to drawing or sculpting directly from a nude model.
In her new, expansive show at White Columns, Bruns has departed entirely from the figurative tradition and embraced a kind of archaic, mythic approach. The gallery is filled with oversized masks, slender stacked totems, and distorted effigies. While these figures and heads still seem to struggle to emerge from the process of their making, once emerged they say less about the figure and more about the psyche.
As is true for many sculptors, materiality and process cannot be taken for granted, and Bruns has developed a unique process over several years. Her approach produces a papier mâché-like material that is thinner, lighter, and more malleable. It’s flexible enough for her to incorporate other materials such as hair, fibers, plant matter, and Styrofoam. The pieces are predominately painted in monochrome black or white, adding to their stark, confrontational presence while unifying the disparate elements. The final effect is disarmingly fresh, unpretentious, and incredibly present.
A cursory viewing evokes the art of West Africa, Polynesia and other pre-industrial cultures, including archaic Greece. While those connections to the art of past are clear, these pieces go beyond homage or derivation, for the clear influence of psychology and contemporary ideas about the self that are immanent in the work. Bruns cites early twentieth century modernists as an inspiration, in addition to the original, unnamed artists that inspired them, but her work is firmly rooted in the twenty-first century.
Every artist begins with intentions, and for Bruns I suspect the intention is to evoke mythos, to mine the archetypal psyche, to connect with the root forces and human experience that unites us simultaneously to pre-industrial, tribal artists as well as the early twentieth century modernists who referenced them. But, despite all intentions, none of us can help but be mediums for the zeitgeist, and the same is true for Bruns, whose work channels our contemporary state of being, clinging to individuality, polluted by industrialization, and disenfranchised by the post-industrial economy.
Carol Bruns by John Mendelsohn. Tussle Magazine.
at White Columns, 91 Horatio St., New York, NY, July 13-August 26, 2023
At White Columns, there is a rogue’s gallery of monsters, avatars, fiends, sad sacks, and ghosts. Carol Bruns’s sculptures haunt the space like incarnations of psychological states: terror, abjection, withdrawal, self-awareness, and more. Constructed from paper, plaster, Styrofoam, and other found materials, these wall relief and free-standing works have a raw, material directness, giving us the feeling that there was an urgent need for them to be made. Through the physical processes of building, layering, and manipulating there is the sense of an inner life made manifest.
With this work, we feel in touch with something primal, a realm of the psyche that in turn is a portal to the mythic. The sculptures suggest a continuity between contemporary, expressive art and the artifacts of traditional cultures, in which masks, costumes, and sculpted objects connect the everyday with the world of the spirit.
There is a kind of wildness at work here, conjuring up the human form and face in extremis, and as well a sense of transgressive freedom, as we intuit the artist discovering the power of revealing a collapsing visage, a grimacing mouth, a morphing skull. Distortion and anomaly become the norm, with a fervid energy animating these personages that twist, bulge, and hollow themselves out. Often the surfaces are creased and rough, as if a strong wind had blown across sagging skin.
At the same time there is a kind of impacted, restrained quality in the limited palette of white, gray, and black, and in the way that the turmoil beneath the surface is contained within a sculptural form. This is especially notable in the totemic figures, whose movement is constrained by their column-like verticality.
There are a number of outstanding pieces that represent major directions in Bruns’s work. “Meltdown” is a wall relief head, with brick-shaped projections beneath the plaster skin that make the face into an emblem of freaking out, emphasized by the hollow depths of the mouth and eye sockets. Similarly, in “Oppressed”, a head under emotional pressure becomes a nearly abstract form, identifiable by its misplaced, empty eyes.At White Columns, there is a rogue’s gallery of monsters, avatars, fiends, sad sacks, and ghosts. Carol Bruns’s sculptures haunt the space like incarnations of psychological states: terror, abjection, withdrawal, self-awareness, and more. Constructed from paper, plaster, Styrofoam, and other found materials, these wall relief and free-standing works have a raw, material directness, giving us the feeling that there was an urgent need for them to be made. Through the physical processes of building, layering, and manipulating there is the sense of an inner life made manifest.
With this work, we feel in touch with something primal, a realm of the psyche that in turn is a portal to the mythic. The sculptures suggest a continuity between contemporary, expressive art and the artifacts of traditional cultures, in which masks, costumes, and sculpted objects connect the everyday with the world of the spirit.
There is a kind of wildness at work here, conjuring up the human form and face in extremis, and as well a sense of transgressive freedom, as we intuit the artist discovering the power of revealing a collapsing visage, a grimacing mouth, a morphing skull. Distortion and anomaly become the norm, with a fervid energy animating these personages that twist, bulge, and hollow themselves out. Often the surfaces are creased and rough, as if a strong wind had blown across sagging skin.
At the same time there is a kind of impacted, restrained quality in the limited palette of white, gray, and black, and in the way that the turmoil beneath the surface is contained within a sculptural form. This is especially notable in the totemic figures, whose movement is constrained by their column-like verticality.
“Afflicted Man”, is a life-sized standing figure, armless with atrophied legs, small torso, and a head that is nearly equal to the rest of his body. The features are cut into the white surface, yielding a shattered expression. Fox Totem is a standing form of stacked boxes emerging from a plaster-filled bucket topped with an abstract fox head, a reminder that in all this work the human and the animal can be seen as one.
“Prisoner”, an abstraction of bondage, is made of plaster-stiffened paper, forming an angular ring of limbs bound by hemp. “Forest Spirit” is a spherical head, dark and intense, with a bitumen surface covered with dry pine needles, out of which emerge peering eyes. In “Fringe Elements”, Bruns has gathered twelve of her heads mounted on posts, each with a plaster base. This grove of disembodied faces forms a kind of community, detached yet floating together.
Along with the feeling that we have entered a zone of the archaic and the primordial in this work, we see evidence of the current material and technological era in the form of found materials used for packing and shipping. There is a kind of homemade arte povera quality here, finding what is available and using it in often undisguised form. This connects her work to the spirit of outsider art, in its improvised, heart-felt openness. Her sculpture relates to modern and contemporary artists who embraced a similarly acute emotional vulnerability – Giacometti, Dubuffet, Bacon, and Bourgeois.
Carol Bruns’s work constitutes a challenge to the viewer to come face-to face with disturbing states of feeling in three-dimensional form. Throughout is an evocation of angst and suffering, but also the courage to create a visual witness to private and collective existential realities.