Appropriation, disruption and fun: stumbling across the Brown Collection.

Having finished at the Wallace Collection[i] and not yet tired of art, I used Google Maps to see where the next nearest art gallery was. ‘There’s one three minutes away,’ I say to my husband. ‘The Brown Collection.’[ii] Online, there were a couple of pictures which didn’t show much and seven reviews I didn’t bother reading. On a weekend away from house and family, we didn’t really care what we saw. We wanted to pretend we were free, young again, diving into the next adventure. A few steps against the crowds, a left turn, and we were in a quiet street facing an Edwardian warehouse.

            The lights were on, but the door was locked. There was a bell but in the reflection of the window I saw myself dressed in a charity shop woolly hat and a threadbare coat. Underneath was my stepdaughter’s cast-off jumper. Could we ring the bell, pretend we were the type of people who had money to spend on art? For surely, this was that type of place. About to turn, a young woman opened the door, ‘Come in.’ I pushed back my shoulders, took on the persona of a woman with money who also favoured rummage sales, and stepped in.

In fact, I needn’t have worried about money or snooty staff, the young woman was welcoming and informative and nothing seemed to be for sale. Standing in front of a painting of a swirling blue oil painting, the young woman told us how this was the showcase gallery for the work of Glenn Brown (b1966) who describes himself as an ‘appropriation artist’. He studies other artists’ work – from old masters to contemporary peers – and mines them for techniques and form. He transforms their art through use of colour, embellishments, distortion, and sizing.  The original picture is never quite lost though: the ghost of what was is always present in this new strange world.  Looking at the brochure later, I found this:

To the largest extent, what I paint is paint. I am painting other artists’ paint. And the brushstrokes are the real subject. So if I paint the picture of a man, what I am actually painting is lots of brushstrokes that come together to form something that looks like a man. In all of my work, really the subject is the paint.

 Glenn Brown in conversation with Reinhard Spieler, Hanover, 2023.

The young woman showed us Drawing 1 (2020) in which a drawing by Boucher had been mined for form and line. Brown had recreated it using india ink, coloured pencil, and acrylic on drafting film over cardboard. The frame had been chosen to mimic the swirls and was, according the brochure, a ‘Bolognese, 17th century carved wooden frame with open acanthus leaves, gilded with pure gold.’

Drawing 1 (2020) An example of a Boucher drawing

The young woman encouraged us to peer at it with a magnifying glass. We did so, dutifully.

            ‘Take a look around,’ said the young woman, ‘there are four floors.’

            We started where we were, pointing out a picture we’d seen only fifteen minutes ago at the Wallace Collection but now hanging upside down.

The end of the 20th Century (1996) -- Glenn Brown A Boy as Pierrot (1785) by Jean-Honore Fragonard

‘He looks a bit peaky,’ said my husband, pointing to They Slipped the Surly Bonds of Earth and Touched the Face of God, 2017

It wasn’t as though we weren’t enjoying ourselves, we were – after all, this was the kind of spontaneous thing that fitted neatly into our idea of a free weekend – but, speaking for myself, I was only mildly interested. How could playing with form in such a way tell me anything about my world? I wasn’t an artist; the original pictures weren’t ones I’d take more than a passing glance in at a gallery. I thought the painting were fun but I wasn’t sure, if I’d had the money and space, I’d want one on my walls.

            About to wander around the rest of the gallery (not wanting to seem rude), I spotted a title card which hadn’t been placed directly under the portrait – The Suicide of Guy Debord (2001). ‘Which one is that?’ I asked the young women.

            She pointed to the picture she had stood by when we first came in.

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘That’s so witty.’

With Guy Debord in the picture (literally and figurately), I found my key to Brown’s work. My portal.

Guy Debord was a French Philosopher whose work I had recently studied as part of my PhD. His philosophy, set out in The Society of the Spectacle,[iii] takes the form of two hundred and twenty-one short theses structured like aphorisms. These elucidate what he believes ‘the spectacle’ to be. In thesis six, Debord writes,

The spectacle, understood in its totality, is simultaneously the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, its added decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society.[iv] 

In short, the ‘spectacle’ is the capitalist system in which appearances and images dominate, overshadowing authentic experiences and meaningful interactions. To wake the viewer from a capitalistic ‘sleep’[v] induced by omniscient capitalist images and produce, Debord recommended certain ‘artistic’ interventions. One of these is ‘psychogeography’, the other is ‘detournement’. The literal translation from French for detournement is ‘rerouting’ or ‘hijacking’. According to leading branding expert, Professor Douglas Holt, detournement is when an artist or group of artists turns, ‘expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself.’[vi] 

            This is not to say that I thought Brown was turning against capitalism through his images. Quite clearly a lot of his work is a homage to the artists he loves that have found success with ‘the society of the spectacle’. But, in referencing Debord, Brown is surely acknowledging his deliberate intervention in how we view the world. In recreating art, he makes us look at both his work and the work he has drawn inspiration from in new and different ways, disrupting our stolid acceptance and forcing a recognition of form and technique. For example, in simply turning a little boy upside down, I was forced to remember the original painting in the Wallace Gallery whilst looking at Brown’s work. Both exist concurrently in the imagination and we are forced to look again.

            Although Debord is famous for being strict, quarrelsome, and often unhappy (his friends dubbed him Debord the Bore)[vii] what I have taken from his techniques to disrupt ‘the society of the spectacle -- ‘detournement’ and ‘psychogeography’ – is a sense of play. In psychogeography, one can create maps, get lost, find abandoned buildings, walk (like Iain Sinclair)[viii] around the M25; through ‘detournement’ one can paint murals or invent theme parks (like Banksy)[ix] or re-enact a miner’s strike[x] or set up an acid house rave using brass bands like Jeremy Deller. Yes, these have strong political points, but they also embody and sense of play, a sense of freedom.

            It was this idea I took with me around the next three floors of The Brown Collection. I saw in his overlaying of paint onto brass sculptures, a sense of play and fun: a disruption of art, an enquiry into what we think is beautiful, and a sense of past and present living in one moment (what Walter Benjamin might call a ‘dialectical image’).[xi] Like the work of the author W.G. Sebald, for example, who borrows so prodigiously it is hard to find words that are purely his own,[xii] Brown’s work is a conversation through the ages. And it was fun.

            ‘Do you think I could do this?’ asked my husband, pointing to Bikini (2022).

Perhaps he could, given time, he is a very good painter, but that wasn’t the point of what he was asking. He meant ‘do I have permission?’ – ‘Could I take a work of art and change it?’

The answer is yes, of course, yes. By borrowing, stealing, and distorting, we can find new ways of seeing, new ways to play.

The Brown Collection

1 Bentinck Mews, Marylebone

London W1U 2AF

Wednesday to Saturday, 10.30 am–6 pm.

Free admission.

Nearest Underground stations:

Bond Street, Oxford Circus, and Baker Street.

 REFERENCES

[i] ‘Exhibitions, Concerts, Talks, Tours and Workshops at the Wallace Collection’, accessed 27 March 2024, https://www.wallacecollection.org/whats-on/events/.

[ii] ‘The Brown Collection | Glenn Brown’, accessed 27 March 2024, https://glenn-brown.co.uk/the-brown-collection/.

[iii] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Berkeley: Bereau of Public Secrets, 1994).

[iv] Debord. 6.

[v] Thesis 21 states, ‘As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.’ Debord.

[vi] Douglas Holt, Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, First edition (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[vii] Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).

[viii] Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Penguin, 2003).

[ix] ‘The Segregation Wall, Palestine, 2005’, Banksy Explained (blog), 5 May 2021, https://banksyexplained.com/the-segregation-wall-palestine-2005/.

[x] ‘Jeremy Deller - The Battle Of Orgreave’, accessed 26 October 2023, https://www.jeremydeller.org/TheBattleOfOrgreave/TheBattleOfOrgreave_Video.php.

[xi] Alastair Bonnett, ‘The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography’, Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 1 (1 January 2009): 45–70.

[xii] Dwight Garner, ‘A Biography of W.G. Sebald, Who Transformed His Borrowings Into Lasting Art’, The New York Times, 12 October 2021, sec. Books, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/books/review-speak-silence-w-g-sebald-biography-carole-angier.html.