The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) exhibition, The Architecture of Collage: Marshall Brown, will be on view Oct. 2-Jan. 7. The presentation features 25 artworks, including six recent acquisitions by SBMA, loans from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and a private collector.
An original etching by the Enlightenment-era architect and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) from the museum’s collection will be included in the exhibition to illustrate the importance of Le Carceri d’Invenzione [Imaginary Prisons] as a prompt for Brown’s most recent collages.
Brown teaches architecture at Princeton University, and over the past decade has built up a body of work that challenges preconceived ideas about the creative process and what counts as originality. The most complete display of this body of work to date, the SBMA exhibition features examples from all four of Brown’s collage series.
The Prisons of Invention and Maps of Berlin make their premiere at SBMA, alongside previously-exhibited Chimera and Je est un autre [sic], a phrase taken from French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Working from architectural periodicals, books and photocopies, Brown cuts out photographs of buildings and reassembles them into levitating structures that hover between reality and fiction. James Glisson, SBMA curator of Contemporary Art and exhibition curator, explains their curious power:
“These artworks start a journey towards a destination unknown. They float in a state of suspension where possibilities can be weighed against each other without concern for practicalities or the outcome of a finished building.”
Are these collages sketches? Could these gravity-defying structures exist? These inevitable questions miss the point. The collages are exercises in imaginative freedom and achieve what contemporary art often does so well: they suggest that the world could be different than what it is without specifying what that might concretely be.
The collages also are physical proof that originality can be a selective borrowing and recombination from the history of art and architecture. Brown has written about his collages as a form of “creative miscegenation,” and he considers collage a medium well suited to unseating the pretensions around originality and authorship because as he says, “collage can break aesthetic boundaries, expose false dichotomies, and challenge intellectual bigotries.”
Although architectural design has gone digital, Brown insists on paper, glue, scissors, and X-Acto knives. The cuts and the joints matter because they are visible manifestations of his technique.
“The seams created between two pieces of paper in a collage are not lines but gaps,” he said. “If one magnifies a collage, the seams become fissures. Seams create conceptual connections by holding entirely unrelated things ever so slightly apart.”
A substantial multi-author catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition by SBMA and Park Books of Zurich, Switzerland, with distribution by University of Chicago Press. It explores the artist’s collage practice to date. The full-color publication includes some 60 illustrations.
The catalogue has been supported by Susan D. Bowey; Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications; Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; SBMA’s The Museum Contemporaries; and SBMA Museum Collectors’ Council.
Related event:
Parallel Stories – A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation with Marshall Brown and Jonathan Lethem, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 2 at SBMA’s Mary Craig Auditorium.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Admission is free 5-8 p.m. Thursdays.