THE UNMYTH OF BRYAN’S WORLD
By Mithu Sen
Even with the chaotic politics of our times, in a moment when the plague-ridden world at large seems to be collapsing, when virtual and “real” modalities seem more limited than ever; one can still happen upon fortunate surprises in life. One can find an unmapped space where the world clock is not set, and all the regions, time zones and historical epochs coexist simultaneously. One such incident was my encounter with Bryan Anthony Moore’s current body of work, Washington BC.
Maps mark our imagination. Being an outsider, but having traveled often in the US, my limited understanding and experience of “America” was fixed upon the East and West coasts of this vast country. It was crucial for me to question this bias. Is this bi-coastal dominance not a form of regional chauvinism? This idea had shaped the myth of America in my consciousness.
Where were the rest of the country’s contemporary artists and their art? Where else was artistic activity that attended significantly to politics taking place? Who are the inter-coastal creators enmeshed within their social contexts and involved within the communities that they inhabit? How does the canvas of an artist (with the strong satirical commentary of art alone), affect the viewers? How is s/he/they even visible, surrounded by a less mainstream community? Who would be interested in a middle-aged white male artist from the Rocky Mountains? I was driven to think about the solitary struggles of an artist sustaining themself in an environment outside the centers of mainstream critical discussion.
Social media has helped me to discover artists and their voices, especially those who are relegated to the “margins” of the art world – socially, politically, intellectually and aesthetically. My curiosity with Bryan and his practice engaged me in a much deeper dialogue so that I could understand (t)his world. It's an un-space where one rediscovers a lost awareness. I found in Bryan, a poet, a rapper, a painter, a humble performance artist, and an art teacher, who despite his brilliance, was hesitant in sharing his interests and practices in different disciplines. But he agreed to share some of his deep political concerns with me. One of them was his experience viewing the ethnographic displays at the American Museum of Natural History, which depict Pacific islanders, Africans, Asians and Native Americans behind glass, in dioramas echoing those of the animals in that institution. But these exhibits do not include any Europeans or Euro-Americans, seemingly classifying all non-Europeans as part of the natural world while whites had somehow risen above it. The cases or cages filled with mannequins akin to the taxidermied animals nearby, depict the “other” – human races as objects to be looked at by a euro-centric public, where the exotica of strangeness and the absent white body was the spectacle. When Bryan contacted the museum, he received an apologetic reply from them. How many of us really notice these things, and then take some degree of accountability and act upon it? This kind of one-sided manipulation between the observer and the observed is so common in life that it can be invisible, and it is too often ignored or accepted. The hesitation and fear that is created by parochial politics that present totalitarian ideas: whether of race, gender, or region, are the same everywhere in the world. Dominance of the mainstream subjugates everyone who falls outside the current definition of “mainstream” and thus into a “margin”. When it comes to art, the mainstream scarcely feels responsible to represent with integrity the complex position of underrepresented artists from outside of the art capitals.
When I asked Bryan, “what is your role as an artist or a citizen?”, this activist, this Navy veteran, avoided a direct answer. He avoided it not to shirk from the question or its gravity; but to say that it is his responsibility to create with integrity, but the system is set up so that the market seems to “define” the artist’s role. I find a subversive sense of humour in this statement and in Bryan’s works in diverse mediums, whether in his rap song “Trump Cuck” or in his series of illustrated artworks on contemporary American myth-history (his word for this is “mythstory”). In his humility or in his resistance to self-categorization, he hesitates to accept that his practice has a fully contemporary language, as his mediums can be viewed as “traditional” – painstaking, extremely skilled watercolor paintings, wooden sculptures or ceramics. This relates to the clichéd and time-tested practice of the gatekeepers to create binaries where there need to be none. These “raw” works have not been through the “cooking” process of the current contemporary jargon, and rather, present a popular history that is remolded, re-contextualised, and re-narrated in an illustrative manner. Moore’s exciting and contemporary way of storytelling creates a network within a visible cloud of ideas. A constellation of connections around the main artwork reconstructs a political position via representational visibility. This reference-cloud radically transforms the subjective narrative from that of a passive painting to that of an active agent, challenging the viewer to consider their relationship to history.
The weight of history is heavy, but it is easy enough to grasp the official stories in the way that they’re usually presented: by narration – describing events, people, places, and the variable factors influencing them. For an artist to simply depict and dramatize this history is, I believe, both easy and facile. History is both a resource and a responsibility, and for a socially responsible artist like Bryan, it is also a narrative that constantly needs to be checked and challenged. How can an artist, with his acute agency and his creative practice, position himself with regards to this corrupt system of calculated propaganda?
In his “national myth-history,” Bryan’s protagonists are transformed with his vocabulary of superhuman-megafauna-pop hybridization, surreally subverted within a prehistoric landscape. His watercolours create dream-like mythological pantheons in irrational situations that are impossibly far away. Bryan doesn’t buy into ideological narratives of history, with his deep empathy for the human situation, he views history as it is taught and transmitted to be a willful distortion. Moore’s work illuminates this distortion, unravelling and vivisecting it, laying it bare, naked. What he presents does not claim to be history, but it does contest all claims that history makes of objective truth. In recalling myth and enmeshing or identifying it with history, he is only externalizing that known and unknown which leads to the veneration of history as truth. Bryan investigates the original myths of the icons and ideas he is dismantling, this deconstruction is not a fragmentation but an aesthetic experiment, interpreting contemporary politics. Leaving none of the comforting tropes intact, whether they be the steering force of history or the bodily constitution of a famed individual, Bryan creates a presence which is not yet present, a cloud between the eye and interpretation, beyond the visible and before invisible, a vague materialization not fully formed, just as the histories of today will be rewritten tomorrow.
Bryan is an avid researcher of history books and a dedicated reader of the classics. He is a deep observer and explorer of nature, his immediate surroundings and natural history. A passionate collector of the world of traces, artifacts, left-overs, remainders and reminders, his collections include sci-fi memorabilia, indigenous masks, multicultural artifacts, political writings and comic books. He possesses a retinue of scientific and prehistoric animal toys with which he creates dioramas and references for a new narrative of unnatural history. Bryan’s toys accompany him as he brings forth blistering satires in the private world of his studio.
Bryan has an innate power to be born again. He is as curious and as liberal as a child, a post-mature infant engaged in the work of the unchristian theory of personal evolution. Playing host to his inner exile, this child-sage-artist often spends his nights reading poetry, but only after reading to his son from the children’s fantasy author John Bellairs. Make-believe stories belong in bed-time rituals, not in the history we tell ourselves and each other.
Mithu Sen
5/7/21
Delhi, India
By Mithu Sen
Even with the chaotic politics of our times, in a moment when the plague-ridden world at large seems to be collapsing, when virtual and “real” modalities seem more limited than ever; one can still happen upon fortunate surprises in life. One can find an unmapped space where the world clock is not set, and all the regions, time zones and historical epochs coexist simultaneously. One such incident was my encounter with Bryan Anthony Moore’s current body of work, Washington BC.
Maps mark our imagination. Being an outsider, but having traveled often in the US, my limited understanding and experience of “America” was fixed upon the East and West coasts of this vast country. It was crucial for me to question this bias. Is this bi-coastal dominance not a form of regional chauvinism? This idea had shaped the myth of America in my consciousness.
Where were the rest of the country’s contemporary artists and their art? Where else was artistic activity that attended significantly to politics taking place? Who are the inter-coastal creators enmeshed within their social contexts and involved within the communities that they inhabit? How does the canvas of an artist (with the strong satirical commentary of art alone), affect the viewers? How is s/he/they even visible, surrounded by a less mainstream community? Who would be interested in a middle-aged white male artist from the Rocky Mountains? I was driven to think about the solitary struggles of an artist sustaining themself in an environment outside the centers of mainstream critical discussion.
Social media has helped me to discover artists and their voices, especially those who are relegated to the “margins” of the art world – socially, politically, intellectually and aesthetically. My curiosity with Bryan and his practice engaged me in a much deeper dialogue so that I could understand (t)his world. It's an un-space where one rediscovers a lost awareness. I found in Bryan, a poet, a rapper, a painter, a humble performance artist, and an art teacher, who despite his brilliance, was hesitant in sharing his interests and practices in different disciplines. But he agreed to share some of his deep political concerns with me. One of them was his experience viewing the ethnographic displays at the American Museum of Natural History, which depict Pacific islanders, Africans, Asians and Native Americans behind glass, in dioramas echoing those of the animals in that institution. But these exhibits do not include any Europeans or Euro-Americans, seemingly classifying all non-Europeans as part of the natural world while whites had somehow risen above it. The cases or cages filled with mannequins akin to the taxidermied animals nearby, depict the “other” – human races as objects to be looked at by a euro-centric public, where the exotica of strangeness and the absent white body was the spectacle. When Bryan contacted the museum, he received an apologetic reply from them. How many of us really notice these things, and then take some degree of accountability and act upon it? This kind of one-sided manipulation between the observer and the observed is so common in life that it can be invisible, and it is too often ignored or accepted. The hesitation and fear that is created by parochial politics that present totalitarian ideas: whether of race, gender, or region, are the same everywhere in the world. Dominance of the mainstream subjugates everyone who falls outside the current definition of “mainstream” and thus into a “margin”. When it comes to art, the mainstream scarcely feels responsible to represent with integrity the complex position of underrepresented artists from outside of the art capitals.
When I asked Bryan, “what is your role as an artist or a citizen?”, this activist, this Navy veteran, avoided a direct answer. He avoided it not to shirk from the question or its gravity; but to say that it is his responsibility to create with integrity, but the system is set up so that the market seems to “define” the artist’s role. I find a subversive sense of humour in this statement and in Bryan’s works in diverse mediums, whether in his rap song “Trump Cuck” or in his series of illustrated artworks on contemporary American myth-history (his word for this is “mythstory”). In his humility or in his resistance to self-categorization, he hesitates to accept that his practice has a fully contemporary language, as his mediums can be viewed as “traditional” – painstaking, extremely skilled watercolor paintings, wooden sculptures or ceramics. This relates to the clichéd and time-tested practice of the gatekeepers to create binaries where there need to be none. These “raw” works have not been through the “cooking” process of the current contemporary jargon, and rather, present a popular history that is remolded, re-contextualised, and re-narrated in an illustrative manner. Moore’s exciting and contemporary way of storytelling creates a network within a visible cloud of ideas. A constellation of connections around the main artwork reconstructs a political position via representational visibility. This reference-cloud radically transforms the subjective narrative from that of a passive painting to that of an active agent, challenging the viewer to consider their relationship to history.
The weight of history is heavy, but it is easy enough to grasp the official stories in the way that they’re usually presented: by narration – describing events, people, places, and the variable factors influencing them. For an artist to simply depict and dramatize this history is, I believe, both easy and facile. History is both a resource and a responsibility, and for a socially responsible artist like Bryan, it is also a narrative that constantly needs to be checked and challenged. How can an artist, with his acute agency and his creative practice, position himself with regards to this corrupt system of calculated propaganda?
In his “national myth-history,” Bryan’s protagonists are transformed with his vocabulary of superhuman-megafauna-pop hybridization, surreally subverted within a prehistoric landscape. His watercolours create dream-like mythological pantheons in irrational situations that are impossibly far away. Bryan doesn’t buy into ideological narratives of history, with his deep empathy for the human situation, he views history as it is taught and transmitted to be a willful distortion. Moore’s work illuminates this distortion, unravelling and vivisecting it, laying it bare, naked. What he presents does not claim to be history, but it does contest all claims that history makes of objective truth. In recalling myth and enmeshing or identifying it with history, he is only externalizing that known and unknown which leads to the veneration of history as truth. Bryan investigates the original myths of the icons and ideas he is dismantling, this deconstruction is not a fragmentation but an aesthetic experiment, interpreting contemporary politics. Leaving none of the comforting tropes intact, whether they be the steering force of history or the bodily constitution of a famed individual, Bryan creates a presence which is not yet present, a cloud between the eye and interpretation, beyond the visible and before invisible, a vague materialization not fully formed, just as the histories of today will be rewritten tomorrow.
Bryan is an avid researcher of history books and a dedicated reader of the classics. He is a deep observer and explorer of nature, his immediate surroundings and natural history. A passionate collector of the world of traces, artifacts, left-overs, remainders and reminders, his collections include sci-fi memorabilia, indigenous masks, multicultural artifacts, political writings and comic books. He possesses a retinue of scientific and prehistoric animal toys with which he creates dioramas and references for a new narrative of unnatural history. Bryan’s toys accompany him as he brings forth blistering satires in the private world of his studio.
Bryan has an innate power to be born again. He is as curious and as liberal as a child, a post-mature infant engaged in the work of the unchristian theory of personal evolution. Playing host to his inner exile, this child-sage-artist often spends his nights reading poetry, but only after reading to his son from the children’s fantasy author John Bellairs. Make-believe stories belong in bed-time rituals, not in the history we tell ourselves and each other.
Mithu Sen
5/7/21
Delhi, India
Mithu Sen is an Indian conceptual artist who works across a range of media. Her practice produces languages that subvert social norms, including those around art production, exhibition, and reception. Mithu’s work is underscored by feminist and anti-capitalist thinking.
Sen has exhibited in galleries and museums in many countries around the world and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. She completed her BFA and MFA from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, India; and a PG Programme (visiting) from the Glasgow School of Art, UK.
She has exhibited and performed widely at museums, institutions, galleries, and biennales/Triennials including, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2016, Tate Modern, London 2013, Queens Museum New York, 2015, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, USA 2014, Peabody Essex Museum, USA 2016, Palais De Tokyo, Paris 2015, Art Unlimited: Basel 2016, 9th Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art 9, Brisbane, 2018; Kochi Muziris Biennale India 2014, Meditations Biennale, Poland 2011, Dhaka Art Summit 2014 among others.
Sen was the first Indian artist to receive the Skoda Award for Best Indian Contemporary Art in 2010, succeeded by the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art in Drawing in 2015, and Performance Artist of the Year by India Today in 2020. She lives and works in New Delhi, India.
Sen has exhibited in galleries and museums in many countries around the world and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. She completed her BFA and MFA from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, India; and a PG Programme (visiting) from the Glasgow School of Art, UK.
She has exhibited and performed widely at museums, institutions, galleries, and biennales/Triennials including, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2016, Tate Modern, London 2013, Queens Museum New York, 2015, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, USA 2014, Peabody Essex Museum, USA 2016, Palais De Tokyo, Paris 2015, Art Unlimited: Basel 2016, 9th Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art 9, Brisbane, 2018; Kochi Muziris Biennale India 2014, Meditations Biennale, Poland 2011, Dhaka Art Summit 2014 among others.
Sen was the first Indian artist to receive the Skoda Award for Best Indian Contemporary Art in 2010, succeeded by the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art in Drawing in 2015, and Performance Artist of the Year by India Today in 2020. She lives and works in New Delhi, India.