Review of Marshall Brown's Chimera at Western Editions Summer 2016
Chicago summer finds architect Marshall Brown showing a series of architectural collages on paper at Western Exhibitions and an architectural garden folly at the Arts Club of Chicago. The collage works on view at Western Exhibitions follow many of the same principles of the garden folly across town. Both the sculpture and the collages playfully propose architectural forms that the artist does not propose with any seriousness. However, the embossed stamp of the architect on the two dimensional works act as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that these are proposals. They are not truly propositions, they are formal play.
Brown’s constructs the collages in a straightforward fashion, finding two architectural images that speak to each other formally, cutting along their existing lines, and combining them to create a singular imagined structure (or Chimera, as the show’s name suggests), a single fused mass floating neatly at the center of the page. The images remain in the realm of architecture, as Brown retains enough visual logic to create the appearance of functional structures, but quickly reveal their (disunity? What’s the word to use here?) by confounding the elements of that logic that briefly appeared. The effect is that the collages ask to be navigated with an imagined body in the same way that the folly does. One imagines walking through the spaces as a means of viewing the speculative spaces. Often, a steep perspective or serpentine pathway leads the body in, and just as quickly bounces it off the surface and back to the white of the page.
These floating aggregations of architecture are collected for their tight formal interplay with one another, and great detail and attention is payed to the formal logic of each isolated composition. The work functions like a solar system of unconnected architecural planets orbiting around the viewer. There are moments where connection between “planets” look possible, but ultimately the viewer must concede that connecting the works is our own desire and is not in the work. There are, however, vista points in many of the “chimera” structures from which to gaze into the yet unmade world of creme paper. Since the world is in fact extant, working within the limitations of collage is a natural choice for an architect working within the limitations of the existing built environment. (Maybe an example of one of his projects here?) One is left to wonder, however, about the architect’s attitude toward the vernacular aesthetic of collaged surfaces that happen naturally over time. My own 150-year-old brick home has been partially resurfaced in stone on the outside and countless kinds of laminate on the interior, chopped into four apartments and may very well be gutted in the future by some plucky young family with sleek glass and aluminum. Is it also this kind of Chimera that the artist points to? The show’s namesake, after all, is not just a creature composed of different parts, but a monster. The Chimera was a bad omen, a predictor of storms, shipwrecks, and volcanoes. If Brown’s collages are to function in this way, their message is still unclear. Any future disaster they portend (and the artist’s understanding of his role in it) remains contained and hidden beneath the surface.
Marshall Brown is a licensed and practicing architect, and as such has truly made new spatial configurations. These works feel like playful side projects in which the viewer is hard-pressed to identify and feel the stakes of these reconfigurations. The collages collapse disparate times and landscapes, but the sources of the images are not diverse or recognizable enough to provoke the encounter of two or more alien realities, in the way the Max Ernst asked of the collage medium. Architectural intervention does not happen in a vacuum, the way this work suggests. This speculative architecture does not point anywhere but to an “elsewhere” comprised of parts of contemporary and modern architecture.The “planets” are made from cutouts from glossy pages of architectural journals as opposed to newspapers or history books or tourist photos. This specificity of source keeps the conversation about the discipline of architecture. The speculative forms dislodge the conventions of design, but limit the scope of the impact of these speculative spaces to designers and architects. This is a conversation within the discipline, holding the discipline accountable, moving the discipline forward. It is also disconcerting to see a speculative landscape constituted by architecture which points to wealthy patronage. In this way, these collages have abnegated their responsibility to create a possibility of difference and instead reproduce a reality of the same (Expand here on what same is?). The logic of the recomposition, which could be a moment for criticality, remains strictly formal. It is disappointing to see the result of Brown’s imaginative exercise because, as he reminds the viewer with the embossed license on every collage, he can make real spatial change in the world. If this is an insight into his critical reimagining of possibility, it is lacking criticality.
Brown’s constructs the collages in a straightforward fashion, finding two architectural images that speak to each other formally, cutting along their existing lines, and combining them to create a singular imagined structure (or Chimera, as the show’s name suggests), a single fused mass floating neatly at the center of the page. The images remain in the realm of architecture, as Brown retains enough visual logic to create the appearance of functional structures, but quickly reveal their (disunity? What’s the word to use here?) by confounding the elements of that logic that briefly appeared. The effect is that the collages ask to be navigated with an imagined body in the same way that the folly does. One imagines walking through the spaces as a means of viewing the speculative spaces. Often, a steep perspective or serpentine pathway leads the body in, and just as quickly bounces it off the surface and back to the white of the page.
These floating aggregations of architecture are collected for their tight formal interplay with one another, and great detail and attention is payed to the formal logic of each isolated composition. The work functions like a solar system of unconnected architecural planets orbiting around the viewer. There are moments where connection between “planets” look possible, but ultimately the viewer must concede that connecting the works is our own desire and is not in the work. There are, however, vista points in many of the “chimera” structures from which to gaze into the yet unmade world of creme paper. Since the world is in fact extant, working within the limitations of collage is a natural choice for an architect working within the limitations of the existing built environment. (Maybe an example of one of his projects here?) One is left to wonder, however, about the architect’s attitude toward the vernacular aesthetic of collaged surfaces that happen naturally over time. My own 150-year-old brick home has been partially resurfaced in stone on the outside and countless kinds of laminate on the interior, chopped into four apartments and may very well be gutted in the future by some plucky young family with sleek glass and aluminum. Is it also this kind of Chimera that the artist points to? The show’s namesake, after all, is not just a creature composed of different parts, but a monster. The Chimera was a bad omen, a predictor of storms, shipwrecks, and volcanoes. If Brown’s collages are to function in this way, their message is still unclear. Any future disaster they portend (and the artist’s understanding of his role in it) remains contained and hidden beneath the surface.
Marshall Brown is a licensed and practicing architect, and as such has truly made new spatial configurations. These works feel like playful side projects in which the viewer is hard-pressed to identify and feel the stakes of these reconfigurations. The collages collapse disparate times and landscapes, but the sources of the images are not diverse or recognizable enough to provoke the encounter of two or more alien realities, in the way the Max Ernst asked of the collage medium. Architectural intervention does not happen in a vacuum, the way this work suggests. This speculative architecture does not point anywhere but to an “elsewhere” comprised of parts of contemporary and modern architecture.The “planets” are made from cutouts from glossy pages of architectural journals as opposed to newspapers or history books or tourist photos. This specificity of source keeps the conversation about the discipline of architecture. The speculative forms dislodge the conventions of design, but limit the scope of the impact of these speculative spaces to designers and architects. This is a conversation within the discipline, holding the discipline accountable, moving the discipline forward. It is also disconcerting to see a speculative landscape constituted by architecture which points to wealthy patronage. In this way, these collages have abnegated their responsibility to create a possibility of difference and instead reproduce a reality of the same (Expand here on what same is?). The logic of the recomposition, which could be a moment for criticality, remains strictly formal. It is disappointing to see the result of Brown’s imaginative exercise because, as he reminds the viewer with the embossed license on every collage, he can make real spatial change in the world. If this is an insight into his critical reimagining of possibility, it is lacking criticality.