on the elusiveness of being

artistic production, as the name already entails, has long been viewed as a merely additive, arduous process. michelangelo’s david remains the benchmark for artistic accomplishment — the idea that intense labor must produce something undeniably great, however relative “greatness” may be. yet, the art world operates on a quiet contradiction: it claims to embrace everything while leaving almost no room for true nothingness.

in an almost cartesian fashion, “cogito ergo sum” transmogrifies into “pingo ergo sum”, i paint therefore i am, and that which i am is, necessarily, always something. meaning that the consequent artistic production will also inevitably need to be codified as such. by default, such a methodology eliminates the possibility of a negative-ontology of the human; an ontology in which the over-reliance on the metaphysics of being is subverted by an active refusal to be seduced by them, to indulge in the “personality cult”, the fetishization of the artist as a means to no particular end other than narcissistic anthropocentricism. if, then, michelangelo and others materialized the human figure out of marble, situating the human even in insentient matter, there surely also needs to be a counterpart for artists behaving like mad gods, centering the human even in the immaterial as the only viable prerogative: the anthropomorph.

an example: conceptual artist stanley brouwn, who, in his practice, seemed to always be concerned not with the impression the human makes on his surroundings. instead he engaged with the lengths humankind is willing to go to experience the former, eluding anthropocentric arrogance in favor of an almost untouchable conceptual rigor. in attuning visitors to the unseen, the beyond-perception, brouwn is, paradoxically, able to probe a strange kind of inversion of the sufficient-reason parable: if everything that exists has a reason for existing, it is necessarily also true that everything that is negated has a reason to be negated. brouwn pushes this thesis into overdrive. the result: catalogues for group exhibitions where the artist’s contribution is but a blank page, no headshot, not even a single documentation of any work presented (although often, the actual book itself, for brouwn, becomes the work) – a negative ontogenesis demarked by a decidedly present unhuman absence. but brouwn ventures into another direction: for a 1970 exhibition at städtisches museum abteiberg in mönchengladbach, the artist refrained from showing any “artistic” object at all, insisting he would do so in order for the visitors to be able to experience the cosmic rays in the building. as martin herbert points out in his book “tell them i said no”, cosmic rays are actually imperceptible to the human eye and are supposed to only exist in the earth’s upper atmosphere.^[2] a further wall text began with the following sentence: “how empty is this space?”.

brouwn’s most renowned work remains this ways brouwn, a series of performative interventions he pursued, sporadically, from 1960 to about 1970. brouwn would ask passing pedestrians in amsterdam to draw a map to a specific point, from memory, on a white sheet of paper, which he would then stamp with the eponymous title of the work. here, the mere act of travel, even if entirely conjectural, becomes a signifier for presence, for a kind of “hypothetical portrait” that is never concerned with specificity and only ever with mere living, breathing, being in the world. yet, for someone as evasive as brouwn was, it is interesting to note that many of his works feature his own name, in the third person, almost as if to make it into some kind of brand; the name transcends the actual person. in fact, what ends up happening is a kind of negative ontology, much like the one found in many contemporary fashion brands that would keep the founder name and yet have entirely eclipsed the literal personification. here what the audience is left with is merely a computational reminder of a speculative “proof of existence” they are enticed to believe in. the works by the artist that feature his own name are, among others, the following: this way brouwn (1960–1970), brouwnhairs (1964), brouwntoys 4000 ad (circa 1964), this-way-brouwnproblems for a computer i.b.m 360 mode 95 (1970) or the self-referential the total number of my steps (1972).^[3] the titles of these works alone suggest that behind the elusiveness was an artist deeply preoccupied with his own space, geographically, in the world and the seemingly banal actions that fill a life. in an age of mass media and the fetishization of the personality cult sped into overdrive by social media’s insipid consumer capitalism, brouwn’s traces – often in the form of highly personalized ideas of measurement, organic matter (like the artist’s own hair) or his negative presence in exhibition catalogues – made the audience know him through his work, and not, as it so often is, know his work through who he was. effectively, he might’ve just been the lucky observer of, as he puts it in regard to this way brouwn, “people discovering the streets they use every day …”.^[4]