"Tony Brown"
Forum International, Belgique, mai/août 1993
Tony Brown
"Tony Brown"
Forum International, Belgique, mai/août 1993
This was the first sizable one-man show of Tony Brown's work in a French establishment.
Not before time, it gave us a chance to gauge the stature of this artist, who
is one of the leading figures in the new Canadian art scene. Le Magasin assembled
an outstanding quartet of works, including Wind Machine which was recently
shown at the Kassel Documenta, and a piece produced specifically for this Grenoble
show. It was also the first opportunity to see so many works by this artist
gathered together under one roof. Tony Brown's output is restricted, a result,
to be sure, of the extremely complex technical nature of the production of
his works, but primarily because Tony Brown belongs to that nowadays decidedly
overly rare breed of artists which produces little, and is informed by a desire
to measure everything and live the (ad)venture of the work. The work is seen
as an extreme experience. At Le Magasin, furthermore, the artist plunged us
into an intriguing and disquieting universe, a ballet, a show of machines turning
in the semi-darkness, sending on to the walls their shadows or projected images,
blowers. For Tony Brown constructs spectacular, moving machines. In this micro
age, when tools and machines are becoming miniaturized across the board, in
obedience not only to technological progress but also to a scaling-down of
living areas, Tony Brown constructs physically monumental machines. Machine-monuments.
Far from being an apology for the universe of robotization into which the contemporary
world has now ventured. Tony Brown's installations point a finger at the triumph
of the machine which dominates man's destiny "for better or for worse",
as Pierre Francastel emphatically observes. They also denounce an increasingly
robotized universe where man's own hand is becoming an abstract concept of
the past. Tony Brown's works illustrate the transformation that these machines
have worked in relation to our grasp of reality. They are "Vision Machines",
no less, to borrow Paul Virilio's formulation, and, inter alia, they show this
state of blindness into which post-modern society has progressively settled.
Tony Brown's machines produce images-images which dovetail, one into the next,
and involve us in a hypnotic movement created by their continual flow. These
images are overlaid one upon the other to construct an image block in which
the eye can never really hold still on just one image, because it is always
attracted by another. The age of distraction. Tony Brown's machines confirm
that we are in this permanent state of wandering, a state which pulls us toward
the periphery of these machines, to reinterpret their environment.
There are machines which have greatly increased our means of communication.
Modern man, in his office, can now communicate with the whole wide world, without
budging. Communications are becoming faster and faster. The post-modern world
has developed this impression of communicating, with no physical contact any
more. Above all, it has developed this impression of living in so many bubbles.
There is an image, here, of the invasion of message systems and services, of
this neo-tribal need to recreate communications networks.
Tony Brown's works might well be titled "machines for living in",
to use Le Corbusier's expression, and all the more so because they often introduce
the habitat-household architecture. As machines which produce nothing other
than their own, almost absurd, show. Tony Brown's perfectly made machines invariably
preserve traces of man-the person who sired them. In an age of high-performance
technology, the artist stresses the deliberately knocked-together aspect of
these machines. As if their own essence had to be mentioned-any group of material
parts manufactured by man, interconnected, forced into a movement, and capable
of transmitting and/or transforming energy. As objects alternately arousing
admiration and fright, and as images of the complex machinery of the modern
age, Tony Brown's works blatantly develop the association of anthropomorphism
projected on to robots or on to all machines from the onset of modernity (One
plus One). In toying with man's fondness for lending his own image to everything
he makes, in an age of remote-tactility, when it is possible to touch at a
distance, Tony Brown refers the body to distance, and to its image.
Jérôme Sans
(Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance)