Roland Brener: The Eternal Footman
The South Africa-born, Victoria-based sculptor has made a career end-running ruin
Footman, not in the sense of usefulness in service, but as in someone who opens doors, who transforms, who possesses a certain knowledge from the other side of living. Footman as in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which Prufrock, a trembling, abject Everyman if ever there were one, confides to the reader that he has "seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker."
Roland Brener, who was born in South Africa in 1942 and who studied at St. Martin's School of Art in London—Anthony Caro was his teacher and the sculptor Bill Woodrow a fellow student—has lived and worked in Victoria, B.C., for the past 32 years. He has an enviable reputation as one of this country's most deeply original and innovative artists (he represented Canada, together with the Quebec sculptor Michel Goulet, at the Venice Biennale in 1988), a reputation that continues to burgeon and scintillate with his accelerating generation of increasingly complex, demonically enigmatic objects and installations.
I call Brener the eternal footman because he lives on the nourishing outskirts of death. By which I mean that he can claim, with wit, vigour and a sense of rueful playfulness, to have been there and back. That which does not kill us, Nietzsche assured us, makes us stronger, and Brener's life has been tinctured with difficulties and illnesses (and is thus imbued with a creative resilience and elasticity) ranging from early misdiagnosed states of perceptual handicap to family death by automobile accident to, eventually, a sojourn in what was unquestionably terminal brain cancer, but which, in the end, merely visited upon him subsequent brief seizures and minor memory erasures. His Hello Mister Roland (1999), an upright wooden cabinet with a deep, unknowable void inside, searchingly but fruitlessly illuminated by hospital-like floodlights and quickened by a lugubrious, solicitous, How-are-we-feeling-today? kind of post-op soundtrack, is his memorial to the cataclysmic illness that was supposed to have killed him but which itself died inside him instead, a process the artist seems to have found merely "very interesting."
The fact that, for Brener, art end-runs confrontations with ruin lends his procedures, and the work that results from them, a certain madcap—yet troubling—élan. Brener, like Hamlet's Polonius, delights in the way it is possible, through applied indirection, to "find directions out." Though he has travelled much, both in the real world—often sailing out on the ocean in his 50-foot mahogany yacht, Reality—and in the vaster realms of discovery locked within, he has proclaimed, in an autobiographical essay called "Homing Devices," that "I have not been a good traveller. The places and moments of significance have been avoided. But sometimes, making art, I find instances and patterns others have missed. Uncalled for phantoms appear."
And Brener's best work is cunningly phantasmagoric, an unsettling mix of wry humour and darkness. His sculpture Ghost of Weeper (1997), for example, is emblematic in this regard: the work is a free-standing mahogany hoop perched atop a vertical support, with big staring mahogany eyes suspended within it that really weep, the day's tear-fall collected in receptacles and poured back into the sculpture again the next day, recharging it. The same year as Ghost of Weeper, Brener cut the ribbon on Endsville. This project sprang from an earlier work, owned by the National Gallery of Canada, called Capital Z, a sprawling model city of generic, Monopoly-style houses "complete with its own slum of cardboard shacks on the outskirts of town," as Brener describes it. Endsville is also, perhaps, a featherweight extrapolation from his Mini Monster House Variations (also from 1997), a four-part, computer-distorted series of heavy, wall-mounted, cement-and-steel houses derived from a single computer-generated design.
Sequentially mounted in Portland, Toronto (at Olga Korper Gallery) and Tokyo, Endsville presented the viewer with a complete, teeming, film noir-ish town consisting of 45 computer-designed, vaguely modernist miniature houses, made, like the slums of the uncomputerized Capital Z, of corrugated cardboard. Because each house was separately illuminated by a single interior light bulb that lit up its windows from inside (as if everybody were watching TV), Endsville always existed in a sort of perpetual twilight, an ongoing incandescent evening made eerily human by the town's soundscape, a community crackle and cacophony picked up from a voice-activated microphone suspended from the ceiling (both amplifying and distorting the sounds falling upon Endsville, and also affecting the behaviour of the light in the buildings). Endsville is a mighty responsive town.
For Brener, much of the pleasure afforded by Endsville was derived from the fact that, during the project's week of "nightly work parties" for a slew of volunteer cardboard-contractors, he was able to use the computer on-site, as it were, to design each of the houses just before it was to be fabricated. There was never much of a gap, therefore, between the idea and its realization.
Whatever gap there was would proceed to narrow as the computer steadily became the artist's favourite tool over the next few years, and digitalization his favourite recourse. His work Three Houses of Digital (1997), for example, is the result of a kind of obstreperous computer glee: I was drawing an interior view of my house on the computer. I applied distortion filter Bloat to my drawing and the house blew out from the centre as if built on the surface of a bubble. I then applied a Pinch distortion filter to the original. The house sucked in towards the centre. I applied the Pinch filter to the bloated house, expecting this would result in a house identical to the original. Instead the new house was distorted in many unpredictable directions—it was bloated in some places and pinched in others. Of course anybody can fool around with a Pinch/Bloat program. The brilliance of Three Houses of Digital lay in Brener's decision to commission his friend, the expert Victoria boat-builder Bent Jespersen, who had built Reality, to make constructions of the three computer drawings in mahogany and maple so they could be hung on gallery walls.
And if houses could be pinched and bloated, why not people—who essentially do this kind of thing to themselves anyhow? Brener discovered that by pinching and bloating the image of a highly conventionalized, suit-and-tie Everyman-businessman, he could produce weirdly unconventional, grotesquely distorted figures, monsters of bodily exaggeration that lay way beyond caricature, on the far side of satire.
His Swinger (1999), hand-built in laminated plywood from a 3-D computer model, is so distorted laterally he looks as if each of the slices of wood in the moulded stack of which he is composed has been pulled sideways to the imagistic breaking point. The horrid flattened face, the sloping, moronic forehead, the atrophied flipper-like arms, the dangling, dwindling legs, the revolting swell of belly, an impossible girth (suit jacket wrapped tight like a sausage casing) devolving into a ghastly, insectlike shell form at the back, Kafka's story Metamorphosis made palpable—all this speaks to an easeful savagery of conception born from the unsettling melding of classic boat-building procedures and a runaway hybridization worthy of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Why is the Swinger seated on a swing? Well, of course, distortion like this cannot support itself. But more than that, the figure is radically infantilized, a big dreadful baby in grown-up clothes. We could humanize Brener's unrepentant wickedness a little here by suggesting that the Swingers sit on swings like children in parks or, more accurately, like those awkward adults who try to leave their adult bulk behind (like a caterpillar shedding its skin) and attain whatever buoyancy lies locked and releasable in the act of clambering onto a kid's swing and making it go. But that rather overdeterminedly presses the work for some ameliorative reading. It's probably best to let such grotesquerie be. As Philip Monk so cannily points out, Swinger rather resembles "the perversely caricatured self-portrait busts by the Viennese neoclassical sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt." The shock of the monster, in contrast to which normality can be gratefully re-embraced as a newly cherished ideal.
The prototype Swinger then multiplied into several Swingers (2000). Three new Swingers in tinted polyester resin (cold blue, grey, brick red) were shown at Deitch Projects in New York and at Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto. Hard and slightly translucent (that is, not fully opaque), these jaunty new Swingers, clearly born from a mould rather than worked from wood, seemed, though no less grotesque, rather toylike—the very commodification of bodily distortion: bloat and pinch in the marketplace.
The Genies that followed (in 2004) were a magical, pixilated attenuation of Swinger technology. These light, buoyant, mercurial figures, made of polyester resin plus a dash of fibreglass (in Kool-Aid colours like grape purple, mustard yellow, scarlet, algae green), poured into a rubber (and therefore reusable) mould made from a plaster prototype, come wafting up out of their wish-fulfillment bottles, which provide the only base these airy, ascensional figures appear to have (genies, after all, are supposed to come billowing from their once-stoppered bottles after you've rubbed the bottles' flanks). Brener made a total of six Genies, three male and three female—you can tell the females because they possess, among other delicate attributes, high heels—and they are faerie imps. Arranged in a group, they formed a powerful magic circle, not easy or comfortable to step inside of.
With the Genies, the heavy grotesquerie of the Swingers was now delicately refined so that the faces of the genies—both baby-like and sort of simian—seemed satisfyingly otherworldly. They seemed almost queasily watchable—indeed you found yourself not just gazing at them, but staring, as if you were waiting for the blink of a genie eye, or for the wave of a tiny genie hand.
And then the figures stopped. Suddenly, Brener circled back to Endsville. In 2002, he won a Percent for Public Art competition commissioned by the Toronto-based Context Development Incorporated. Brener's proposal was to construct a small city to be installed within the greater city, specifically at the Radio City complex, a condominium development built on the site of the old CBC radio-antenna tower between Jarvis and Mutual streets in downtown Toronto.
The model city, called Radioville—first exhibited at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria earlier this spring—consists of 34 scaled-down, brushed stainless-steel houses (24, 36 and 42 inches high), each illuminated, as the Endsville houses were, but this time steadily and with the wiring underground, rather than lowered from above. Each house floats on a half-inch reveal of light, so that it appears to hover on radiance alone.
Like the Endsville houses, the steel Radioville structures are computer-designed, but with an important procedural difference: "as a refinement from the making of Endsville," Brener tells me on the phone from his home in Victoria, "I found I could now employ fewer designs for the houses than before. It's more elegant. In fact, I used only six designs for Radioville, but achieved the variation I needed simply by turning the houses in different directions, orienting and relating them differently to one another."
There is much that is radio-like about the houses, in addition to their location. Their soft glow takes viewers of a certain generation—like me—back to the days of listening to forbidden radio programs like Inner Sanctum and The Shadow at night, under the covers, by the soft, candle-like glow of the tube-powered radio dial. "And of course the softly rounded edges of the steel make the structures look a bit like radios from the 1940s and 50s," Brener adds. Radioville is designed both to be looked down upon from above (a city within a city) and to be used by passersby—a sort of modernist piazza and playground. Children can play on the houses, adults can use them as tables when they have lunch. The largest units are chest-height, so you can belly up to them as if you were at a bar, and shoot the breeze with fellow Radiovillers. But like everything Brener makes, Radioville has its dark and troubling aspects. Who is supposed to be living in these slick steel houses? Why is their town a kind of colony, a viral implant in the greater metropolitan mind? Radioville makes everyone feel huge. "It's like being a giant in a miniature city," says Brener. Which is not an easy thing to be.
Summer 2005
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