Robert Delford Brown
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Robert Delford-Brown (b. Portland, Colorado 1930) is an American performance artist.
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[edit] Studies and early career
Brown studied at Long Beach College and UCLA from 1948-1952. In 1952 he received his B.A. from UCLA and in 1956 he received his M.A. from there.
From 1955 to 1958 he studied drawing with Howard Warshaw (1920-1977). “When I came out of school in 1950, the art world I was preparing for was gone.” In 1959 Brown moved to Manhattan. “If you aspired toward becoming an artist you had to go to New York.”
Brown’s art career as a first rate iconoclast started shortly thereafter. “In 1963 I met Rhett and life got better.” His wife and art-partner for the next thirty years, Harriet (Rhett) Elsa Gurney once said, “When I met Bob he was 29 and working in a psychiatric ward. A lot of his work comes out of that experience.”
An early significant event for Brown was his participation in Allan Kaprow’s presentation of the musical play entitled "Originale" by the German avantgarde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. This scandalous event was held at Judson Hall in New York City as part of the Second Annual Avant Garde Festival in 1964. Brown created the memorable image of "the mad painter" which was splashed across the pages of local papers and national news magazines.
Next, Brown’s second success d'scandale, the "Meat Show", was staged in 1964 in a large refrigerator unit at the Washington Meat Market….Brown became the first artist to stage a meat performance, renting “tons of meat and gallons of blood” and a refrigerated locker for a blood-spattered happening.
“We went and rented a meat locker, telling the owner that we were making a movie and needed a set. The trucks arrived bringing all this steaming hot meat. We hung it everywhere on hooks. Then we got thousands of yards of lingerie-like sheer fabric and created rooms as in a brothel. It actually looked very erotic. The cops came in to inspect and said we had to have some red lights in the back which made it even more erotic,” said Brown’s wife Rhett.
[edit] Late career
In 1967, Rhett and Robert Brown discovered a branch library building that was up for sale in the West Village. They immediately created a physical place for the headquarters of a work begun in 1964: The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. The building on West 13th Street, referred to as The Great Building Crack-Up, became an architectural landmark that was later featured in the New York Times.
From his Church, Brown continued to create collaborative performance artworks for the next three decades.
His physical collaboration of choice these days is the “Collaborative Action Gluing” where by email and telephone, he arranges for a space and a participative audience of non-artists. This can be in another city or another country. He then shows up, armed with glue, scissors, rubber gloves, colored paper, magazines to cut up and several canvases for the participants to embellish collectively with their unschooled musings, each eventually transformed from a day-glo tabula rasa into a vibrant, swirling testimony to the power of joint action by non-artists, yet at the same time, surprisingly reminiscent of the likes of Miro, Kandinsky and of course, Matisse’s cutouts.
Since the early 1990s he has done much of his work online via the church website, Funkup.com.
His work is represented in the collections of (partial list): The Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado.
Allan Kaprow, credited with originating the Happening movement in the early 1960s, said of Robert Delford-Brown
“
The ecstatic power that has marked Bown's art since the 1960s threw a monkey wrench into the avant garde in those days. He was (and is) a visionary you couldn't ignore or forget. Brown's work is important. He touches a nerve at the core of the social codes that organize not only our behavior but also the limits of our art… Robert Delford Brown's transcendent vision takes on a great significance.”
[edit] The Funkupagan Manifesto
“ We must regenerate ourselves. We must create new rituals and new mythologies to accommodate new found capabilities.
Our launching into outer space, which was considered an impossibility a mere 50 years ago, has already been accomplished. We must now have the courage to continue this exhilarating and frightening adventure without procrastination.
It will be necessary for us to throw overboard outmoded, wasteful ways of living. Humanity has to achieve coherence.
We must have absolute equality across the board in order for everyone to be able to contribute to this enterprise.
We will need all of the intelligence and of the energy we can muster.”
