{"id":13709,"date":"2016-11-10T16:27:08","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T16:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/?post_type=news&p=13709"},"modified":"2019-02-26T18:38:23","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T18:38:23","slug":"matthew-brannon-in-frieze-magazine-novemberdecember-issue","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/thenewobjectivity.com\/KAPLANTEST\/?news=matthew-brannon-in-frieze-magazine-novemberdecember-issue","title":{"rendered":"Matthew Brannon in Frieze Magazine November\/December issue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Matthew Brannon Goes to War<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

BY GEORGE PENDLE<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a copy of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0on a\u00a0table in Matthew Brannon\u2019s studio. It\u2019s folded open to a story about Barack Obama visiting Laos, the first US president to do so. \u2018Did you know more bombs were dropped on Laos than on any country in history?\u2019 Brannon asks. \u2018And yet Americans know so little about it.\u2019<\/p>\n

Brannon has recently come to know a\u00a0lot\u00a0about it. A huge amount, in fact. And he continues to learn more each day, since he\u2019s\u00a0in the midst of a seemingly boundless project that focuses on the Vietnam War. \u2018Concerning Vietnam\u2019 has seen him interview suspicious veterans, visit obscure mid-western artillery museums, dig through reams of declassified documents and devour innumerable books and essays on the subject. Over the past year, this obsession has poured out into his artworks.<\/p>\n

It all appears to be a radical departure from the work for which Brannon is best known: elegant, mid-century-modern-style screen prints, often of luxury consumer items, which are undercut and transfigured by disquietingly acerbic captions. The precise and playful maliciousness of these works, their economy of style and structure, seems quite at odds with tackling a subject of such grim seriousness and hydra-headed complexity as the conflict in Vietnam. So, why\u00a0has Brannon gone to war?<\/p>\n

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\u2018It wasn\u2019t that I chose Vietnam as a\u00a0subject,\u2019 says the artist. \u2018In fact, when I first became interested, the last thing I thought I\u00a0was going to do was make an art project out of it.\u2019 Brannon found himself being drawn to the topic when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Her chemotherapy and radiation treatments saw him shuttling between hospitals and home. As his art practice went into deep freeze, he began reading about Vietnam \u2013 for reasons he can\u2019t quite explain \u2013 and, in the midst of his own personal trauma, he found distraction, fascination and ballast in the central trauma of the American 20th century.<\/p>\n

\u2018When you\u2019re reading about Vietnam, especially when you\u2019re reading from the perspective of veterans, they always talk about the discord of being in this horrifically stressful, frightening, violent landscape and then the otherworldliness of being back in the US. And, in some way, I had a sympathy for that, spending most of my time in hospitals and then trying to work out what to do with my time when I was out of them.\u2019 It wasn\u2019t until he\u2019d read thousands of pages, and his wife\u2019s cancer had receded, that he decided to try and make art about it.<\/p>\n

Concerning Vietnam; Oval Office November 1963 (Kennedy)<\/em>\u00a0(2016) shows a\u00a0Bloody Mary cocktail sitting atop a book, copies of\u00a0Life<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Time<\/em>\u00a0magazine stacked neatly on top of each other, a green map, two telephones, a cigar, a large model sailing ship and various letters strewn around a teal backdrop. The disparate objects make it seem\u00a0like a painting from Brannon\u2019s past, but then you notice what it\u2019s lacking: a caption. In the past, the artist\u2019s captions acted as what he has called \u2018an irritant\u2019. The screen prints drew you in with their illustrative guile and the captions left you spluttering and re-assessing the images\u2019 now-suspect beauty. Devoid of such guidance here, you are left to read the images yourself. Closer inspection reveals that one of the letters is from the US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, announcing the conclusions of a recent trip to Vietnam. It speaks of \u2018favourable military trends\u2019 and \u2018no possibility of a successful coup\u2019. Yet the copy of\u00a0Time<\/em>\u00a0on the desk, dated a month later, has \u2018Military Coup in Vietnam\u2019 splashed across the cover. Whoops. The book the cocktail rests on is about the climactic battle of the First Indochina War \u2013 a disastrous loss for France against the anti-colonial, communist Vietnamese \u2013 that had occurred ten years previously. It\u2019s a warning being used as a\u00a0coaster. Look closer at that cigar, too. The band around it tells you it\u2019s Cuban, and now the back of your brain is patching together the narrative: this is taking place just one\u00a0year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. One emergency has bled into another. It\u2019s as if America has a death wish, and no amount of model boats are going to help. The objects \u2013 rendered flatly, without shadow, seemingly without any weight at all \u2013 are, in fact, freighted with real-world significance and Brannon is carefully curating them to explain the ensuing calamity. Here, the world is about to tip into disaster amidst bad intelligence, willful ignorance of the past and a collection \u00a0of sentimental tchotchkes.<\/p>\n

\u2018Concerning Vietnam\u2019 seems so\u00a0sui generis<\/em>\u00a0that when I tried to think of similar \u2018evidential\u2019 projects \u2013 by which I mean the portrayal of items dense in real-world information \u2013 two very dissimilar examples came to mind. The first was Hans Haacke\u2019s artworks from the 1970s and \u201980s, tracking systems of influence and power by displaying financial records. The second was traditional still-life painting, in particular the table in Hans Holbein\u2019s The Ambassadors (1533), with its collection of odd and obscure objects, none without import. If Brannon\u2019s prints can be called still lifes then they run deep, plumbing the fathoms of research, intent on showing how the most calamitous event in American history since the Civil War can be explained in scraps of paper and desk toys. In the artist\u2019s hands, every knick-knack becomes a memento mori.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ve always been somebody who looks back,\u2019 says Brannon, \u2018and, as a believer in psychoanalysis, I definitely don\u2019t think that looking back is an unproductive strategy.\u2019 The historical constraint of his project has, perversely, allowed him to flourish. Brannon\u2019s colour palette has broadened, as have his screen prints. Some works consist of over 80 screens painstakingly layered on top of one another, the most complex work he\u2019s ever done. Nor has the profundity of the subject matter dulled his wit: take the knowing equivocality of the title of the project, for instance. Nevertheless, the drollness of the past has transformed into a deeper comic resonance. The jibing non-sequiturs have been replaced by a narrative that is both more cogent and more bleakly comic. Lunch Meeting (2015) depicts a delicately sketched map of the Ho Chi Minh trail \u2013 the vital supply route for the North Vietnamese forces \u2013 pinned next to a sandwich order form for President Johnson and his cabinet. The artwork references the Tuesday lunches at which Johnson and McNamara would choose their bombing targets. Without even knowing this, however, the contrast between the trail\u2019s complexity and the simple boxes of the order form suggest the discrepancy between the war\u2019s actuality and the simplistic view of it taken in\u00a0the chambers of\u00a0power.<\/p>\n

Or take Trying to Remember (August 2nd, 1964) (2016), a hand-drawn reconstruction of the USS Maddox, the destroyer which was said to have been attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in 1964, and thus gave America a reason to launch itself into the war. Here, however, it seems so placid, so innocent, ploughing dutifully through the waves into a disastrous future. \u2018I wanted it to be like a doll\u2019s house for old men,\u2019 says Brannon, and it has that playful feeling to it \u2013 even though it was soon to start an inferno in the nursery that would set the rest of the house on fire.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, however, we never see the flames, just the totems and amulets that portend disaster. Desks are the war zones here; violence is hidden beneath political euphemism, folded maps and coffee pots. Ordinarily, art related to the Vietnam War conjures images of polemic: the Art Workers\u2019 Coalition poster And babies (1969), a brutal colour photograph of bodies left behind after the My Lai massacre, or Peter Saul\u2019s hideously psychedelic \u2018Vietnam\u2019 series from the mid-to-late 1960s. Brannon\u2019s project offers quite the opposite: it\u2019s a strikingly bloodless autopsy. And, while parallels to the current misadventure in the Middle East can be easily drawn, Brannon seems keener on seeking understanding than outrage.<\/p>\n

\u2018A number of people have said: \u201cOh, you\u2019re making political art,\u201d and I hesitate to use that word. I think, in its strictest sense, political art would hopefully influence elections, legislation, whereas this is much more a historian\u2019s way of thinking about it.\u2019 There is no doubt that this work demands a lot more from the viewer, too, than expressions of horror. To follow Brannon on his journey requires application and a certain amount of faith in the artist. This is not a role he takes lightly. \u2018Previously, I was trying to make what I thought people wanted to see, to try and feed the machine. Or I was making something to ruin their day. But I\u2019ve lost that in this work. It\u2019s a different kind of responsibility.\u2019<\/p>\n

Brannon has ambitions that his work could move outside the conventional contemporary art venues, and that he could rope journalists, historians and other artists into interacting with it. He is already planning a text counterpoint to his pictures. A deft and erudite writer, he has begun a\u00a0series of essays with titles such as \u2018Michael Herr Doesn\u2019t Want to Talk about Vietnam\u2019, \u2018A\u00a0Short History of Napalm\u2019 and \u2018Lunch with Lyndon\u00a0(Tuesdays 1965\u201368)\u2019. Lectures, sculptures and films will all soon follow. His project could become as diffuse as the Vietnam conflict itself, causing conflagrations far beyond the art world. Brannon chooses to\u00a0embrace this gargantuanism: \u2018I\u2019ve made these bold claims saying it\u2019s a five-year project, a\u00a0ten-year project, just because in the\u00a0art world somebody makes a suite of paintings and, after they show it, it\u2019s like: \u201cThat\u2019s that.\u201d I\u00a0really want to be clear with everyone that that\u2019s not the case here.\u2019<\/p>\n

Matthew Brannon is an artist based in New\u00a0York, USA. Brannon has presented solo\u00a0exhibitions at venues including Casey Kaplan, New York (2015); Marino Marini Museum, Florence, Italy (2013); and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2011). His most recent novel, An Irresponsible Biography of the Actor Laurence Harvey (2014), was published by Onestar Press, Paris. The artist\u2019s solo show, \u2018Vulture\u2019, is at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo, Japan, until 5 November; in autumn 2017, he\u00a0will\u00a0have a solo show at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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