File Note 54: Mel Brimfield

The 1960s were a time when sculpture was heavy and it was predominantly a male preserve. Anthony Caro’s sculpture course at St Martin’s School of Art in 1968 produced the likes of Gilbert and George, Bruce Mclean, Richard Long and a host of others who rebelled against the aesthetic strictures of the time. In America Richard Serra experimented in film with Hand Catching Lead (1968). Bruce Nauman was a pioneer in video, turning the camera on its side or upside down for pieces like Bouncing in a Corner (1969) or Revolving Upside Down (1968). 

In This is Performance Art (2010), a new work by Mel Brimfield, we are introduced to Alex Owens, a modified construct of a fictional character in the 80s movie Flashdance (1983), yearning to become an artist in her own right. We see Owens exercising in front of a television; drawing inspiration from the image of a Donald Judd sculpture fixed on the screen she twirls en pointe. She hasn’t had a formal education and compensates by training obsessively. She is an outsider, a woman and working class, performing in private for a future, fantasy audience. We watch her gleaming, toned thighs pumping away, framed by a black leotard, and try to think formalist thoughts. 

Although it seems unlikely that Alex Owens would be aware of Merce Cunningham’s dance collaborations with John Cage and their relation to minimalist sculpture, the interdisciplinary ethos of the Black Mountain College is central to Brimfield’s practice as an artist and curator. The implication of the interdisciplinary approach is that different areas work together, yet for Brimfield everything becomes a cultural curio, stripped of context, turned inside-out and re-devised. It is a menagerie in which artefacts of all kinds bump up against one another and vie for attention. Her work is burlesque, irreverent and down-to-earth, itself part of a particularly British comic tradition of debunking; puncturing over-inflated egos. You get the impression that she likes Morecambe and Wise more than Gilbert and George.

When video first became accessible to artists, the moving image, in shades-of-grey, reminded them not of cinema but television. It was immediate and accessible. It posed a complex problem for those who wanted to be true to materials. With photography comes the possibility of sustaining the unsustainable, of giving temporary or fleeting events the permanence of sculpture, such as Bruce Nauman’s Fountain (1966 –7) or Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Objects (from the1980s). Brimfield has been true through conspicuous fakery. Rose English, in an early performance Plato’s Chair (1984), paid tacit homage to Tommy Cooper in which the sublime and the ridiculous converge as the magic act is exposed. Brimfield has a gravity defying, juggling routine where the balls reconfigure in the air in a slightly crazed pantomime fantasy act. For Brimfield though, there is a manic and relentless pursuit that can never resolve itself into a finished piece; there is never enough, there will always need to be more. Her work is laugh-out-loud funny and yet her video and performance is always tumbling forward, exercising, training and preparing. Always striving, trying, impossibly, to keep the balls in the air.