PROLIFERATION
| David Brody is an artist whose gentle demeaner and un-peopled landscapes do not immediately suggest a propensity to birth freak media anomalies. His work is immensely pregnant with presence, but he usually achieves this through a highly disciplined process. However, in the odd exchange between his computer and his public wall drawings, David has fathered an uncanny animation which promises to break free of the gravitational force of the art profession and enter into a wider, and wilder, arena.
David Brody's Hyper-Runt is a Christian cross transmogrifying into an endlessly multiplying landscape. It is a frightening and mystifying spectacle. "Proliferation" is one of those creations which will surely find its meaning when the public finds it. In this era of extreme religious touchiness, it is refreshing to encounter a work which offers some distance and reflection on the world's most famous torture device.
In one sense, David's proliferating cross is no different than any of his architectural forms which come about through a fractal-like strategy of reiteration. And what is a cross, but a cruel form of scaffolding --close cousin, perhaps, to prisons and even some sweatshops, mental wards and schools. I have never been to prison, but I have been forced inside a police station or two, and I have spent most of my life as either a ward or a warden of educational institutions.
There seems to be a mute, almost cancerous inevitability to the built environment. Somehow we learn to cope with these mindless machines, these processing plants of living information. But we should never become too comfortable. The ominous beauty of David's work --whether of crosses or sprawling carcasses of concrete-- keeps me a devout registered voter. The work even brings me a little closer to understanding the radically free and compassionate man in whose name that cross is mass-produced.
--Ebon Fisher |
My project for Hyper-Runt, "Proliferation," began
as a pencil drawing on isometric graph paper, which led
to a couple of large wall drawing installations, at the
Bronx River Art Center and at Hallwalls, in Buffalo.
The first installation was accomplished by enlarging
the drawing onto the isometric grid of large sheets of
bubblewrap (each bubble serving as a grid intersection)
and then using this as a template to poke pin holes into
the gallery wall, from which I could eventually reconstruct
the drawing. By the second incarnation, in Buffalo, I
was preparing my templates on the computer, printing
out large images, and poking pin holes as before. The
use of the computer as a drawing tool has initiated a
profound transtion in my practice. What's more, for my
Hallwalls installation I also prepared a virtual 3-D
model of the image in an animation environment and began
to bend my attention back and forth between two and three
dimensions in a way that had, up to then, been only implicit.
So the continual unfolding of this particular recursive
image has also unfolded options in my practice.
What does this ten-generation, triple-branching
cross structure represent? It shows how complexity arises
from simplicity. It shows that, whatever the tool, art
is handmade. It protests the parochial usurpation of
a fundamental formal principle underlying the very structure
of life and thought by the most relentless advertising
campaign in history. It also applauds that history, which
bifurcates (trifurcates?) endlessly into a beautiful
bush of contradiction.
For Hyper-Runt I will be supplying a series
of 5 still images (made in a 2-D environment) that can
be (somewhat crudely) animated in sequence to demonstrate
the outer parameters of "Proliferation." For
the gallery portion, I will supply a 3-D animation about
5 minutes long for projection.
-- David B. Brody, August, 2004 |