Not Jean Brown: Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, etc.
Premiere of a video by The Gerlovins and Mark Bloch, 16 min
with sound track by John Cage
and works by
George Maciunas, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, André Masson, Joe Jones, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Filliou, Geoff Hendricks, Nam June Paik, Christo, John Lennon, George Brecht, Ay-O, John Furnival, Dieter Roth, and others.
Preceded by videos:
The Concepts, The Gerlovins, 16 min, 2012
and
A visit with Collage Artist John Evans and the Avenue B School of Art, Mark Bloch, 28 min, 2004
FRIDAY, February 22nd, 2019 – 7PM
The Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway #2
New York, NY 10012
Admission is free
From left to right: Rimma Gerlovina, Jean Brown, and Valeriy Gerlovin at Brown's house, 1980. Photo: The Gerlovins.
The Emily Harvey Foundation is pleased to present the world premiere of NOT JEAN BROWN, a 16-minute portrait of the Massachusetts art collector, Jean Brown (1916-1994), some 35 years after it was originally begun in 1985. Though a finished copy exists in Brown's vast archives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the project has never been screened for a New York audience or any audience, really, despite it being a pet project of the eccentric art lover who was excited to document her collection. The subtitle of the film is "Surrealism, Dada, Fluxus, etc."
The original footage for NOT JEAN BROWN was shot by Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin on ½" video at Brown's home in a former Shaker Seed House in Tyringham, a small town in the Berkshire Mountains near Lee, Massachusetts. Brown enthusiastically encouraged the Russian couple to collaborate with artist, musician and video editor Mark Bloch, a friend of both Jean Brown and the Gerlovins, to formally bring the project to fruition, prior to Brown shipping her entire beloved collection to Southern California following her arrangements for placing it with The Getty Research Institute. At Brown's request, Bloch then contacted John Cage to help create a soundtrack for the work.
The result is NOT JEAN BROWN, a quick, personal portrait of the art collector, a group effort cobbled together by a few of her friends. The Gerlovins tested out their new home video equipment to shoot Ms. Brown and a tiny portion of her extensive holdings during one visit. Fluxus founder George Maciunas, who moved nearby a few years before his death in 1978, had custom built Brown a beautiful room to display her unique works. Though she kept everything from collages by Max Ernst and other art superstars to tiny oblique works sent by unknown practitioners of the mail art network in the dozens of wooden drawers that Maciunas built for her, this film mostly features the work of Fluxus artists. A fully documented video accounting of the work she amassed would have taken years to create professionally. So instead what we see is something that reflects the quirky, friendly personality of the owner: a somewhat roughly cut together collection of sometimes fuzzy clips shot on consumer equipment with a spontaneous voiceover by Brown. The soundtrack "Sink Sound (for Jean Brown)" is a "music of contingency" that Bloch recorded at Cage's loft on 6thAvenue in Manhattan one afternoon when Cage's plumbing was acting up. Cage asked Bloch to come right over so that the sounds could be used for the Jean Brown project.
Like a great many other artists, both Bloch and the Gerlovins have written and made art about their friend Jean, a gracious hostess and generous supporter of avant garde artists. The Gerlovins said about her: "Jean Brown's treasures were collected with an exclusive aesthetic intelligence, and it seems to us, certain ethical perception. Every time we visited her, we found something new in her multitude of drawers and boxes full of unpredicted conceptual curiosities. As soon as she sensed that her effort to share her vision was sincerely appreciated she was very happy because she found the meaning of her life in this sharing. Trusting intuition pure and simple, Jean discovered the meaning of this 'artless art,' then deepened it for herself and made it clear and meaningful for others. … Indeed, Jean's self-expression was clothed in language adapted to the ordinary understanding, at the same time her collection was the most extraordinary in terms of taste, erudition and eccentricity. Her holdings were processed by her life and finally reabsorbed through the eyes of other people."
Roberta Smith wrote in her obit about Brown May 4, 1994:
Jean Brown, a collector of Dada, Surrealism and Fluxus, died on Sunday at the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Mass. She was 82 and lived in Tyringham, Mass….Sometimes called the den mother of Fluxus, Mrs. Brown possessed a natural openness to new art and counted among her friends such avant-gardists as Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and George Maciunas, the leader of the Fluxus movement.
Mrs. Brown, whose maiden name was Levy, was born in 1911 in Brooklyn. Her father was a rare-book dealer who enjoyed taking his daughter to museums. She briefly attended Columbia University. In 1936, she married Leonard Brown, an insurance agent. They settled in Springfield, Mass., where Mrs. Brown worked as a librarian.
In the late 1950's, after collecting Abstract Expressionist paintings, the Browns began to acquire Dadaist and Surrealist art, manifestoes and periodicals. They soon moved on to Fluxus, a new, irreverent art movement that stressed multiples, printed ephemera, posters, newspapers and mail art.
After Mr. Brown's death in 1971, Mrs. Brown moved to Tyringham, and expanded into areas adjacent to Fluxus, including artists' books, concrete poetry, happenings and performance art. Her home, originally a Shaker seed house, became an important center for both Fluxus artists and scholars, with Mrs. Brown alternately cooking meals and showing her guests her collection. Activities centered on a large attic archive built by Mr. Maciunas."
In 1985, as the Jean Brown Archive approached 6,000 items, it was bought by the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, Calif. This was among the first collections of 20th-century material acquired by the center.
(from NY Times, "Jean Brown, 82, Avid Collector Of Dada, Surrealism and Fluxus" By ROBERTA SMITH, MAY 4, 1994).
The Concepts, The Gerlovins, 16 min, 2012
Coinciding with their book Concepts published in Russia in 2012, their art is grounded in playing with paradoxes and is rich in metaphor, language and symbolism. They frequently use their bodies as a surface for psychological experience. Male / female features are part of their metaphorical games toward a theatre of consciousness. Their philosophical and mythological implications are also reflected in their theoretical work and writings.
A visit with Collage Artist John Evans and the Avenue B School of Art, Mark Bloch, 28 min, 2004
Mark Bloch presses the late collage maestro John Evans for details of his various techniques regarding his decades of work with daily collage/diary works.
Rimma Gerlovina (American, b. Russia 1951) and Valeriy Gerlovin (American, b. Russia 1945) were founding members of the underground conceptual movement in Soviet Russia, described in their book Russian Samizdat Art. Since coming in America in 1980, they had many personal exhibitions in galleries and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago. The New Orleans Museum of Art launched a retrospective of their photography (Photoglyphs), which traveled to venues in fifteen cities. Group exhibitions include: The Venice Biennial; Photography of Inventionin Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; 100 Years of Avant-Garde in Central and Eastern Europein Bonn Kunsthalle, Germany; The Polaroid Collection in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Russia!in the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao, and others. Books featuring their works: Art on the Edge and Overby L.Weintraub,Reflections in a Glass Eye(ICP and Bulfinch Press); also art history college books such as Understanding Art by Lois Fichner-Rathus (Harcourt College Publ.), Making Art, and Criticizing Photographsboth by Terry Barrett (McGraw-Hill), or Art Since 1940by J. Fineberg (Prentice Hall). Their works have appeared on the covers ofThe New York Times Magazine; Zoom; The Sciences; The Buddhist Review Tricycle. In the Millennium Issue on art, The New York Times Magazinegave them a spread. Important Museum collections include: The Center Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Tate Gallery, London; The Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Cincinnati Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, NC; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria, and others.
Mark Bloch (b. 1956) is a writer, curator, historian, videographer, public speaker and pan-media artist living in Manhattan whose work uses visuals and text to explore ideas around long distance communication. Since 1977 Bloch has done performance art in the USA and internationally. An archive of many of Bloch's papers including a vast collection of Mail/ Networking/ Communication Art ephemera is part of the Downtown Collection at the Fales Library of New York University, which will present an exhibition of his work in April 2020. Bloch is the author of Robert Delford Brown: Meat, Maps, and Militant Metaphysics, published by Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, N.C. (2008). His writings on art have been published by the Brooklyn Rail, Whitehotmagazine.com, ABCNews and others. He was a contributor to Conversing with Cage (Richard Kostalenetz, editor, 1988) and Most Art Sucks (Walter Robinson, Editor 1998). Bloch organized and curated the Cavellini Festival in November 2014 at the Museum of Modern Art, Lynch Tham Gallery, White Box Art Center and Richard L. Feigen and Co. His lecture, "Jungflux Finger Storàge Box for Ay-O" was performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2011. In addition to his work as a writer and fine artist, he has also worked as a graphic designer for ABCNews.com, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and elsewhere. Bloch has degrees from Kent State University and Baruch College, City University of New York in Broadcasting (1978) and Digital Marketing (2013), respectively. A solo exhibition of objects, paintings, collages and assemblages "Secrets of the Ancient 20th Century Gamers" was presented by the Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, March 18-April 2, 2010.
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