ROGER BROWN
When pop first surfaced, art-world denizens–including many of the great abstract expressionist painters–thought both its subject matter and style abominations. Three decades later, many still deny that Warhol was a serious artist. Argued with any subtlety, the case against “low” art is usually that subjects or forms taken from popular culture lack the complexity and resonance of true works of art, from van Eyck to Vermeer to Cezanne. “Low” art is said to give the viewer the same limited and debased experience as mass-culture objects. Its defenders typically try to show that the artist has transformed mass-culture sources into something else.
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In a 1976 interview, Brown positioned himself at the far “low” end of the spectrum; whereas the pop artists were trying to make their low subjects into high art, in Chicago “one sees those images as art in themselves, not as something to be blown up to make art, but as something to parallel in your own work. Those things are already art: so if you can make art as good, you’re really lucky.”
The foreboding in Rosa Californica comes not from its subject, a large rosebush, but from the way it’s depicted. With four large branches growing from a near-barren strip of ground, the bush is almost black, filling the vertical frame. The roses and the glowing circles of green around them provide the only light, shining as if illuminated from within. One might see this pattern of flowers as decorative, but the looming hulk of the bush, dwarfing the boys who stand at either side in the background, is oddly aggressive.
Brown acknowledges a wide range of influences in addition to naive and folk art: Chinese art, Japanese prints, comics, advertising, medieval art, Indian and Persian miniatures, roadside architecture, the writings of architect Robert Venturi, the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, and farmland seen from the air. The non-Renaissance perspectives of his pictures–sometimes collapsing into flatness, sometimes almost awkward in their presentation of depth–seem to confirm these influences. The one kind of art Brown almost never mentions positively is mainstream Western high art, from the Renaissance masters to abstract expressionists.
Once again Brown envisions development turning the world into a decorative, patterned, artificial landscape–it’s hard to imagine walking from one ridge to the next in this place. It’s a vision true to every subdivision that tries to establish a picture-postcard world divorced from the land. The lone figures or couples become, as in Brown’s other pictures, emotional focal points. Though they inhabit the scene, their emotions are hidden from the viewer, and so he imputes to them his own responses, imagining them by turn comfortable in their predictable, well-ordered setting; isolated from others and from any sense of natural landscape; and afraid, perched on the edge of an unstable world, waiting for the inevitable end.
