Eli Brown
Since 2009
Works in Brooklyn United States of America

BIO
I'm interested in intersections and translations of the body. I work with mixed media and perform gender often.
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EVENT

Censorship: An Open Discussion About Disguising The Provocative


Dates:
Mon May 06, 2013 19:00 - Mon May 06, 2013

Location:
New York, New York
United States of America

Not a Rose, a new book by artist Heide Hatry will be the inspiration for a panel discussion about the relationship of censorship, art, violence and sex. The discussion will feature the artist along with 5 of the contributors to her book: Svetlana Mintcheva, Carolee Scheemann, Jonathan Ames, Anthony Haden-Guest, and Gene Guberman.


OPPORTUNITY

Boris Lurie: NO!


Deadline:
Sat Mar 26, 2011 16:00

The first exhibition in New York of art from the Boris Lurie estate will take place at the Chelsea Art Museum, from 26 March 2011 until 15 May 2011. The show will inaugurate a series of exhibitions devoted to the NO!art Movement and its members and affiliates, as well as other long-neglected or suppressed humanist strains in the art of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The vitriol and fury of Lurie and his cohorts still runs in the veins of their art fifty and more years after it was created; it is as fresh, powerful, and, remarkably, beautiful, as it was in the cultural near-vacuum in which it was created.
Lurie is one of the legendary figures of the East Village avant-garde of the fifties and sixties, a resistor against the institutional structure of art in his day and what he called the “ investment art market” and one of the powerful voices for humanity in an art world officially devoid of political or social awareness. The avant-garde has historically played the role of art’ s conscience, and has, accordingly, been little heeded. Art is, after all, a mode of production, an industry, a market, a fact that only gradually came into being and only fairly recently became transparent and all-consuming. Art itself was long “ the realm of freedom,” the voice of what all men valued, or professed to value, but which an ossified social reality denied us. The avant-garde arose as the fact that art and its promise of a better world was merely the shill, or at best
the dupe, of the real order, the circus if not the bread, became inescapable.
But the real order is resourceful, and has learned to turn even that which resists, or even loathes it, to its ends. When an avant-garde is sufficiently at odds with reality, it is simply ignored; it remains a voice in the wilderness, at least until such time as the wilderness can be developed. As with Dada, or Fluxus, or, more recently, performance
art, that might require decades. It is only now that art history is beginning to assess the many strains of serious, critical, and humane art that dwelled in the shadow of the sanctioned movements of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, now, that is, that what Arthur Danto and others have described as the end of art has rendered the very notion of an
avant-garde pointless. Avant-garde implies a concept of progress, or at least direction, and art in our time is, for good or ill, a stranger to either.
As a deathcamp survivor, Lurie’ s artistic concerns were, understandably, quite different from those of the artists among whom he found himself on his arrival in American after the war. As Sarah Schmerler remarked in her catalogue essay for Lurie’ s 1998 gallery
show, Bleed, 1969, “ Most American artists of the Forties were fresh out of art school. Lurie was fresh out of Buchenwald.” There are deeply humane and inherently European aspects of his work, not to mention aggressively political dimensions, that rendered him rather an alien presence among his fellow artists in the New York of the forties through
the seventies (and beyond). His animus against Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Dada, all movements with which aspects of his own work share certain visual and tactical qualities, is essentially a resistance against the widespread (and typically American) desire to leave the war behind and to forget is ravages in the midst of the
wealth and optimism that victory and consequent economic ascendancy had engendered.
Lurie was by no means stuck in the past, but having lived it, he refused to behave as if it had never happened, or that other horrors were not ever-present or ever-threatening. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, much of Lurie’ s work, such as the infamous Railroad Collage (1963) not only shocked and confused, but even repulsed much of the viewing
public. Some of his juxtapositions of explicit imagery of sexuality against others of brutal death and dehumanization even now defy rational engagement: they are visual aporias that short-ciruit analysis. His Dismembered Women and Pin-Up collage series, among others, at once assert that the objectification of women is violence against women
and that female sexuality is a fundamental and ineradicable force, ideas difficult at best to incorporate in a single work.
Theodor Adorno famously remarked, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Lurie stands among the great artists, figures like Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, and Paul Celan, who have responded in art to the greatest inhumanity ever perpetrated and shown just what poetry after Auschwitz might be, and why it must be. In the battle for the soul and humanity of art, Lurie was a hero of the resistance, the resistance against compromise, indifference, perversion, and co-optation or manipulation by the market. Lurie abhorred and eschewed the art world of his day, and it paid him in kind with its utter disregard. By his choice, almost all of Lurie’ s work remained in his possession at the time of his death. The exhibition will, therefore, constitute a small-scale, but
comprehensive retrospective. It is accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Donald Kuspit, Allan Antliff, and Adrian Dannatt. Lurie’ s own work of fiction, House of Anita, an allegory of the art world and an evocation of the artist’ s own experience in Buchenwald under the guise of an S-M novel, will also be available at the museum.


EVENT

ONE OF A KIND : An Exhibition of Unique Artist's Books


Dates:
Thu Mar 17, 2011 18:00 - Sat Apr 09, 2011

Location:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
United States of America

ONE OF A KIND 


An Exhibition of Unique Artist’s Books
curated by
Heide Hatry
 
March 8 through April 9, 2011
 
Opening Reception
Thursday, March 17, 6 - 9 pm
 
 
 
Pierre Menard Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition 
One Of A Kind, an exhibition of unique artist’s books curated by Heide Hatry.  
For those of us for whom the codex represents the apex of human achievement
and the vessel for all that is greatest in our history, the fact that
the printed book is at best a dubious medium for art, if not an
environment overtly hostile to it, has always been a disappointment. 
Although there have been some glorious marriages of image and text, the vast majority of so-called livres d’artiste are unhappy ones, even many of the most celebrated.  They rarely manage to transcend the aporia created by the juxtaposition of two media fundamentally at odds with each other, the regularity and visual gravity of text and the
irrepressible vitality and multifarious flow of art. Yet the codex has a wholly other life, which, though it was supplanted as the primary medium for the conveyance of information by the advent of
print, has retained the power and aura that we associate with the great
illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages, in the unique artist’s
book.  Untrammeled by the dictates of type or the standards of mass
production and use, the unique artist’s book remains an expressive and
versatile art medium, which is animated by the unique cultural,
historical, and inherent potency of the codex.  Its capacity for visual
narrative and the expression of time in general, the creation and
release of visual tensions, its integration of movement and meditation,
make it a medium distinctly different from any other, and the intimacy
of the codex form determines a relationship to visual material that is
incomparable.
 
We rarely have the opportunity to dwell in the world of the unique
artist’s book, as considerations of security render its purpose almost
impotent in the context of the museum, and its very uniqueness insures
that any individual example is going to have an almost hermetic
history.  It is therefore with great excitement that we announce an
exhibition of unique artist’s books, curated by artist Heide Hatry,
herself a former rare bookseller and maker of unique books.
An exhibition catalogue will be available at the opening reception:
(Heide Hatry, ONE OF A KIND, Unique Artist's Books, 2011. 8.5 x 9 in., 155 pages, 78 images of artist's books and 62 portrait photos of the artists. With a curator's statement, a forword by John Wronoski, and an essay by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve.
 
The first leg of the exhibition will take place at Pierre Menard Gallery
in Cambridge, MA, and will contain work by more than 60 artists using
the book as a medium for a diverse range visual and aesthetic
experience.  The artists involved in this exhibition are: Roberta Allen (US), Tatjana Bergelt (Germany/Finland), Elena Berriolo (US/Italy), Star Black (US) Christine Bofinger (Germany), Dianne Bowen (US), Ian Boyden (US), Dove Bradshaw (US), Eli Brown (US), Inge Bruggeman (US), Kathline Carr (US), Chrissy Conant (US), Steven Daiber (US), George Deem (US), Thorsten Dennerline (US), Peter Downsbrough (US), Debra Drexler(US), Tim Ely (US), Max Gimblett (US/New Zealand), Chie Hasegawa (US), Heide Hatry (Germany/US), Laura Hatry (Germany/Spain), Ric Haynes(US), Anna Helm (Germany), Betty Hirst (US), Richard Humann (US), Iliyan Ivanov (US/Bulgaria), Paul* M. Kaestner(Germany), Kahn & Selesnick (US), Ulrich Klieber (Germany), Bill Knott (US), Bodo Korsig (Germany/US), Rich Kostelanetz (US), Christina Kruse (US/Germany), Andrea Lange (Germany), Nick Lawrence (US), Jean-Jacques Lebel (France), Gregg LeFevre (US), Annette Lemieux (US), Stephen Lipman (US), Larry Miller (US), Kate Millett (US), Roberta Paul (US), Jim Peters (US), Raquel Rabinovich (US), Aviva Rahmani (US), Osmo Rauhala (Finland), Tom Roth (Germany), Jacqueline Rush Lee (US), Elsbeth Sachs (Austria), Cheryl Schainfeld (US), Carolee Schneemann (US), Ilse Schreiber-Noll (Germany/US), Pat Steir(US), Michelle Stuart (US), Aldo Tambellini (US), Sharone Vendriger, (Israel), Maria Viviano (Italy), Jan Wechsler (US), Lewis Warsh (US), Clemens Weiss (Germany/US), Mark Wiener (US), Purvis Young (USA) and Ottfried Zielke (Germany).
 
The One Of A Kind exhibition will then move on to New York City to be shown at the HP Garcia Gallery from April 19 to May 21, with an opening  reception on April 21st.  More information can be found at www.hpgarciagallery.com.
 
Heide Hatry is a German visual artist and curator.  She studied art at various German art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg.  She taught painting at a private art school for 15 years, while simultaneously conducting an international business as an antiquarian bookseller. Since moving to New York in 2003 she has curated numerous exhibitions in Germany, Spain and the United States. She has shown her own work at museums and galleries in those countries as well and edited more than two dozen books and art catalogues.  Her book Skin was published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, in 2005 and Heads and Tales by Charta Art Books, Milan/New York in 2009.  She has produced more than 100 unique artist's books, most of which are today held in private collections and public institutions.
 
Regular gallery hours: Mon - Sat  12 - 6 pm, or by appointment.  Free and open to the public.  
For more information, 617 868 2033, Pierre@pierremenardgallery.com
Curator:  h.hatry@gmail.com,
PR:  marycurtin@comcast.net   617 470 5867
www.marycurtinproductions.com
Pierre Menard Gallery
10 Arrow Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 868-2033
Fax: (617) 868-2024
www.pierremenardgallery.com
Image: Jim Peters