Brooklyn Fire Proof News
ARTLIES: Mai Braun: "More Object" (review)
posted April 01, 2006
Artlies, Issue #50, Spring 2006
Mai Braun: “More Object”
by John Ewing
More Object…the title sounds like an artist’s “note-to-self” or one-half of a critic’s exhortation: “more object, less concept!” Indeed, Mai Braun’s assortment of work is a binary push/pull between rudimentary object-making, on the one hand, and high concept on the other. Braun, a Berlin-born artist and former Glassell Core Program fellow now based in Brooklyn, is rather nimble at this game—she understands that art that over-references art history can poison itself in the wink of an ironic eye. She sidesteps this toxic waste by making her delectable objects and academic ideas match in a kind of seesaw balance, which energizes the whole of the show.
Cardboard Structure (Silver), the exhibition’s grand centerpiece, is a large installation of silver-painted cardboard boxes—these have been broken down, attached flap to flap and stapled to a gallery wall, floor to ceiling. The result is a vaguely architectural, wonderfully tactile agglomeration of geometric planes and angles that climbs one end of the exhibition space. Gallery lights on silver paint create flashy surfaces and deep shadows, accentuating the variations in this free-form terrain.
It would be easy to claim that Braun, also a recent Chinati Foundation artist-in-residence, is merely referencing Donald Judd with her deconstructed, metallike “boxes.” Instead, the rather obvious connection is sublimated by channeling Judd’s interest in pure form and predilection for polished, milled aluminum into a new configuration of economical means. In Braun’s hands, the senior artist’s legacy becomes something generative rather than an echo of finished ideas.
This conceptual playfulness continues nearby in Crystalized Column, a floor-to-ceiling stack of cardboard boxes that have also been “refined” by Braun. Ordinary at first glance, the boxes under closer inspection reveal gemlike facets cut and pasted into the edges and corners. These complicate the geometry of the entire stack and create a more interesting, upward progression through the boxy forms. This crafty treatment challenges the viewer not to dismiss the boxes for what they at first appear to be, which in a sly, roundabout way is another reference to Judd and Minimalism in general.
Braun’s focus on construction—of objects and formal themes—is countered elsewhere with photographic images of breakdown, “deconstruction” in extremis. In an adjoining room, Corner Piece—a black and white image of an immense plume of black smoke—is installed in a corner to parallel the silver box installation in the first room. The image appears to be of an oil tanker on fire—a blackly humorous rejoinder to the silver-box construction.
Likewise, the stacked-box piece is paired with a photographic “counter work” entitled Immobile Object. In this image a damaged, abandoned tanker truck sits in the middle of a village square, encircled by buildings with signs in Arabic and teeming with male passersby. Combined with the boxes, one wonders if this is a critique of American imperialism, global economics or just a visual echo of the columnar form. Clearly, Braun enjoys the variety of possible resonances.
Braun’s cheekiest pairings are also the most unsettling—a testament to the artist’s range. Your Emotions Make You A Monster is a seriously creepy work that derives its power from an archaic source. Fashioned out of papier-mâché, this shaggy crouched form, which resembles a human in the most fetishistically simple ways—i.e., rounded haunches, jutting shoulders, headlike lump—is hunched over the edge of a sheet of reflective Mylar. The form is “gazing” at its own reflection…and at us as we gaze at it gazing at itself. The effect draws a little gasp as one recognizes in oneself inherent narcissism: the piece enacts a cathartic psychological experience of the self that is too rare, in art or otherwise.
Of course, the “monster” in question is also artistic hubris, which became tiresomely codified in postmodern notions of self-referentiality. This self-consciousness—both coolly formal and baldly human—is toyed with in the adjacent room, where Subject plays with the same elements in a more conscious manner, psychoanalytically speaking.
Frankly, Subject is not much of a subject—a pale-green, bloblike little sculpture that resembles a Venus of Willendorf under many layers of painted papier-mâché—but I feel certain that is entirely the point. Placed atop a white pedestal on a square of reflective Mylar, the little form sits on a reflection of itself. Though the physical object is one thing—materially speaking—the actual work of art exists in the object’s relationship to its own image and antecedents. Braun’s work succeeds compellingly by creating this conceptual dimension around its material parts.