Nancy Brooks Brody: As if it wasn't there

It is impossible to overemphasize the significance of everyday life—of what may seem incidental—in the building of a career. For example, in the fall of 1991, when Nancy Brooks Brody first showed their drawings: before the end of the exhibition, they had decided to leave their works at the gallery and move away from New York; or when, during those same years, they became a firefighter in the foothills of Mount Rainier and then Mount St. Helens, two of Washington State’s major volcanoes;[1] or again when they devoted a significant portion of their time to the HIV/AIDS epidemic: as their friends fell ill and died, they chose to fight the disease first with ACT UP New York, then with the lesbian feminist activist collective, fierce pussy,[2] while continuing their own artistic practice.

“Being an artist was—when we were doing all that activism it was—making art was something I continued to do and always did, but it was something I kind of did—I don’t want to say the word ‘in secret,’ but it was sort of to the side a little bit.” This was Brody’s explanation, given to the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project, organized by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.[3] “Doing AIDS work and doing activism was so central, and that felt so important, so urgent and vital, that making art felt kind of extraneous in a way,” they added. Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, a shift toward drawing began to emerge, thanks in part to two reams of art paper (BFK Rives) gifted to them a few years earlier by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a childhood sweetheart with whom Brody collaborated for a time.

These works are part of a shift in scale; created in relative isolation and exhibited very little, the artist described them as “secret.” More “diaristic” and more concerned with “storytelling” than the (collective) activist productions intended for public spaces or the large-format silkscreens that Brody was producing at the time, they are the vestiges of images that made their “way in, really unintentionally,” according to the artist, weaving direct observations and childhood memories. The tree motifs in particular draw on scenes of back-burning and fire control methods the artist witnessed on Mount St. Helens. But in the way they are approached, the “trunk” always refers as much to the body as to its states, to stations, pauses between various positions that this very ancient kind of metamorphoses allows.

Above all, Brody’s drawings, which depict possible ways of being in the future through the lens of memory, are unsettling in their mastery of the economy of representation: the great restraint of their figurative style challenges what is usually called their “context.” The question is familiar: once we accept that artistic practice can coexist with catastrophe, what are them images that should be made of the very worst? Some of the bodies (human and vegetal) that Brody created betray the memory of an accident’s aftermath. A parallel can be drawn to Louise Bourgeois: in 1930, the sight of former soldiers in the staff cafeteria of the Louvre, amputees from the First World War given official positions with the museum, made a lasting impression on her. The comparison is not only because the fragmentary motifs also appear in Bourgeois’s work, particularly during the same years of the 1990s, or because for a long time, the two artists lived close to each other in the Meatpacking District, at the crossroads of Chelsea and the West Village, before the aggressive gentrification that the AIDS epidemic fueled in this area of Lower Manhattan.[4]

This “war” was of a different kind to the one Brody experienced: their work is filled with corporeal metaphors shaped by encounters with events that happened off-stage, especially when these are manifested only through stiches of white thread or staples. The artist’s use of abstraction is tactical; they situate it within a critical legacy of minimalism, within the context of a “queer abstraction” that eludes all imperative and the strategic necessity for any minority subject to, depending on the circumstances, make themselves visible.[5] In the muted violence of the act of tearing that preceded these works, all created from modest materials, we must recognize the inverse of care: a consideration for what survives.

Valentin Gleyze