Hard Feelings: Stephanie Brooks


by Lauren Berlant

George M. Pullman Professor
Department of English
Chair, Lesbian and Gay Studies Project
Center for Gender Studies

Department of English
University of Chicago

I. Minimalism, Feminism, Sentiment

This essay on Stephanie Brooks' art is also a meditation on affect, emotion, formalism, and feminism, the kinds of thing her art makes you wonder about. Brooks' work
often takes the shape of a series, series not shaped by genre, exactly, but by form: form being a kind of repetition that induces the double-take of recognition
because events become predictable (oh, that sound again, that line, that shape, that feeling). Her work takes up book shapes, poem shapes, forms from ordinary life
that usually induce inattention because of their reliable intelligiblity.
But here they call out from their cool stability toward something else: the kinds of anger and outrage that can trip over pleasure at the edge of a joke. But it
would be easy not to catch this drift, because the works' practice of formal re-enactment often convolutes feeling as it extends form. It recalls work like Jenny Holzer's
or Barbara Kruger's without being much like that work, which is very noisy. Brooks' practice of formalism opens up unusual questions about how engaged art works if it re-enacts
ordinary sights on behalf of interfering with ordinary affects and feelings without manifesting those scenes explicitly. If implicitation weren't a word, it would be invented to
describe the activity of Brooks' body of work. But Brooks' process is a paradox, since the work is so formal and so verbal, so out there and yet so mildly jutting out into and
interfering with space. But what hails your attention often points to retention. I proceed with some examples of her art of extraverted withdrawal, of giving-as-withholding.


Art-history literate viewers of Brooks' work will immediately read its formalism in the context of two traditions. On one side, one sees the mark of Dadaesque deployments of
cliche«d word and image, outrage and iconoclasm, and anti-bourgeois counter-conventionalism; on the other, the minimalist tradition in sculpture and painting, with its emphasis
on affirmation in negation, erasure, pure color, sound, gesture. One looks at her work and can draw a simple line to Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Ann Truitt, for example:
form and formalism, there, represent an anti-sentimental, anti-absorptive refusal of mimetic-affective identification, or at least demand the quieting down of the noise of
emotion in the aesthetic encounter. This mode of artwork tries not to produce an echo in the viewer, but makes an environment where something else resonates.
The aesthetic exchange is therefore never in imitative scale: a large work can induce a small, off-center impact; a cool piece can provoke something hot.
At the same time both of these traditions emphasize something kinetic and intuitive in the aesthetic event, even when the aesthetic event is purely conceptual.
Something happens in the viewer's bodily response, which then has to be shaped using whatever skills of ordering and eloquence--cognitive, emotive--the viewer has.

These two lineages, one hotter and one cooler, each transform when they meet in the Brooks' work, which uses cool form and hot text to interfere with emotion in the service of
a critical anti-sentimentality.


How to create apertures in normative affect and emotion without representing them, to create a space of reflection without overtelling how to do it, to produce affective
release without promising anything about feeling good, feeling right, feeling well, or feeling superior? It is queasy-making, paradox-producing work that engineers both an
unanxious attachment to the object (you usually know what it is) and affective instability in the penumbra around it.
Sentimentality is not what a middlebrow or highbrow consumer of aesthetic theory or art is usually trained to think it is. The cultivated aesthete is trained to look down on
the sentimental as appetitive and mawkish (which comes from the Old Icelandic ma{edh}kr maggot, to signify nauseating), a low emotion that appeals to base fears and desires
without siphoning them through intelligence. Sometimes "sentimental" is tainted with the word commodity to affirm how primitive and base the desires being animated by the
sentimental object are. But in the philsophical and popular tradition a swerve exists between low sentimentality and high sentiment or sensibility. The low is a bodily
response, autonomic; the high may be deemed cultivated or natural, but whatever its source, it is a wellspring both of goodness in the person that enables recognizing what's
good, and of empathic pain that recognizes suffering and injustice. If bad sentimentality grounds you in your body, good sentimentality is a source for compassion, connection,
belonging, recognition. What links these two traditions is the presumption that at the true core of the human subject are emotions that bind persons to other people,
performing reciprocity, the ligament of sociality itself. But Brooks puts a kink in these links.

Another part of what motivates this practice is the feminist context buried in the quietness of form that the work always mobilizes: the art feminist practice of interrupting
norms of realism associated with women's presumed closeness to emotion and embodiment. A long history from Martha Rosler and Laura Mulvey to the Mona Hatoum and Chris Krauss
might be telegraphed here: but Brooks does not take on the project by exploding feminine fantasy-saturated embodiments that shape the problematics of the real.
In BrooksÕ work, the body is absent, except in the body of the voice. Affect and emotion are made impersonal through formalism, and blatant expressivity reveals a hive of
unsaids. But Brooks' training in feminist art practice at the Art Institute of Chicago, and her recent re-deployment of domesticalia (or even better, paraphernalia
(from paraphernalis, meaning 'having to do with a woman's possessions, but not including her dowry'), points to this third, feminist, force of influence.
Still, the cleavage in her work of voice from body makes producing aesthetic and affective reciprocity in the art-event even a challenge.

II. In which the Heart Doesn't Stand in for the Whole

Let's look, for example, at Brooks' valentine. "I love you," (2006)



What is this piece trying to do? It's a funny thing, hardness of heart. This piece reminds me of David Halperin's claim that sex has and should not be seen,
always, or at its best, as a vehicle for securing a "web of mutuality." On the face of it, this heart is caught up and indeed is the very figure of mutuality.
It is a heart, a valentine's heart, shaped as though with a bad instrument, a dull scissor of the kind a child might use. It is recognizable immediately, at least to viewers
who have a history with Valentine's Day. Handmade, it is asymmetrical like a real heart. It has a message on it, from an anonymous sender, to a receiver who remains unnamed:
it needs only an address (To: ) and a signature (Love, ) to make the conventional phrase into a heartfelt transmission from one singular, complex being to another.
But that exchange of singularity is withheld here. Instead, Stephanie Brooks' valentine heart foregrounds, in white ink, the promise of a feminine love that can find a
general you wherever a general you is and will suffuse the general you however you are the moment it reaches you, with love. The card holds you because it does not name you.
On the other hand, it keeps you at a distance for the same reason.

White writing is associated with Luce Irigaray and the project of e 'criture feminine, which associated it with feminine milk, the unmediated inscription of the feminine body
on all of its productions. The feminist tradition from which Stephanie Brook comes thought a lot about that: the impress of femininity on the art object. From that
perspective, in which femininity produces uncanny writing, the valentine feels personal not because we know who wrote it but because the woman who wrote it has a human scrawl,
somewhat girly and somewhat childlike. You cannot not experience that. Love's handwriting impresses the body's imperfect desire on an imperfect heart that marks no limits to
its capaciousness. Whoever you are, wherever you are. It is unconditional love of the sort that makes you wonder and shake your head.

In black, at the bottom, though, the valentine forces yet another double-take. It makes a demand of the receiver, and thus violates valentine norms. Across the bottom margin
the same hand, now black, asserts, "You know who you are and you know what I mean!" Here, the valentine takes on a bossy tone, which is the opposite of the loving, holding,
absorptive exchange promised in the declarative sweetness of the generic "I love you." It makes a demand--know who you are! know what I mean! It also implicitly accuses "you"
of withholding that knowledge, or not acting on it. Someone in the love relation must know who the "I" is, and who the "you" is. This valentine outsources that burden onto the
receiver.
At the same time, by delivering all of this unto "you," the work forces you out of assurance, into a place where you are revealed as incompetent to receive the love you have
just received as simultaneously unconditional and demanding. "Your" place is now marked the place of undeservingness, since you may not know who you are or what "I" meant
when she said "I love you." But wait! Is it a gift or a test that you have already failed by not already being transparent and docile to the desires of the unconditional
lover? This "I love you" is a demand in the guise of a gift. But it remains a gift. It is a perfectly doubled double bind, this heart: the love that keeps on giving and
keeps on taking, all noisy and all sweet. It produces a shared sense of recognition in the iconicity of its construction paper heart form and withholds satisfaction in the
form of its conventional words: convention--normative, dependable, reiterated form--transmits inassimilable affects without breaking the ties that bind.
In other words, this perfect piece enacts what it might mean for something to fray sentimental conventions without breaking aesthetic ones, which themselves are sentimental.
The viewer does and does not know what love is, who s/he is, who the writer is, what "I" means: the very act of recognition takes out the conditions for recognition.
And yet something happens, something in the air is transmitted, though perturbed. What happens is that the feminine scrawl no longer bears the burden of emotional
intelligibility that women are supposed to provide for their beloveds. It intimates something about the violence that is transacted when one kind of being is supposed to
provide emotional intelligibility for another kind of being: it intimates something about the intensity of the demand that there be something simple, like a heart,
in proximity to the unsentimental demand that you be there now, to receive my love. But the recognition of violence, of aggression at the heart of desire, does not break
the suture of intimacy BrooksÕ form first elicits. What's unsaid in the expression binds one closer to the scene of need, demand, reciprocity, love. So the valentine
is not metonymic in the usual way, nor embodied in the usual way, nor emotional in the usual way: but it sustains in form what the language skews.

The intensity of this piece is played out more lightly in Brooks' cognate work on love, Love Songs (2001; a collaboration with Joshua C. Bowes). Lightness is another effect of Brooks' work, but it is not the opposite of seriousness.It does not matter much that the reader of this piece of writing cannot read Brooks'
music and lyrics closely. To be an art of proprioception, of inducing the viewer's body to feel different in space, is the desire of such sculpture. Love Songs is yet another
reenactment of love's vernacular appearance (as is the cruel and funny series the Untitled Love Poems (2005), which strips the love lyric to its grammatical conventions).
Brooks mounts Love Songs with pages open to the songs, on a shelf. Brooks loves the shelf as a minor medium for interrupting space. On it she can prompt an aesthetic exchange
without binding the artwork or the viewer to the scene, as though the laying of the piece here were casual. One imagines that aesthetic and other intimacies are all about
propping, being propped.
But the book of Love Songs was also bound as though to provoke opportunities for distribution and further re-performance. One could leave this work on any piano or music
stand and no one would know that it was never meant to be performed with or as music. So the music on the page represents a tease, a seduction to say and sing aloud
in the theoretical, scientific, and everyday idioms of love. But in the ordinary viewing scene there hovers a desired silence around the words, a desire for the artwork
to be something enchanting and chanted in the reader's head later, as a kind of whisper transmitted between ghosts.
What do we learn about love from Love Songs, the usual thing about fantasy, longing, disappointment, and feminine eloquence about it all? What Brooks provides is not the
usual stuff about the inevitable misrecognition or awkwardness in love, or anything wholly dark. There is something in the form of the Love Songs that lightens everything
it touches: a simple letter from Mom becomes a funny recording of ordinariness; a tragic newspaper story becomes a ballad, and lovely. If they represent love in practice,
Freud and Edmund Burke are love in theory. Freud's claim is that the pleasure principle's purpose is not to secure ecstasy but to use repetition as a kind of pacing to help
manage the appetites from being overwhelming; Edmund Burke's claim is that the greatest beauty induces a feeling of love but not base desire. So both theorists are interested
in what frees one from the claims of appetite. This is not a worry of the vernacular lovers.
The final piece, "Scales," uses personality-testing phrases from the Extraversion part of the "Five Factor Model" test, which also examines degrees of
"Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience." It reminds us to attend to the interest in classification and disorder that also permeates Brooks' work.
This piece is weirdly about the capacity for optimism, for self-knowledge, for loving the world. It reduces love to the capacity to assess multiple, incoherent "I" statements,
but not to be destroyed by that multiplicity.
What makes this a book of love songs, then, is the form: the title is performative. The reader has to figure out whether love is identical to itself across these differently adapted
genres or media. One ends up following the rhythms, distracted from meaning. Extraversion is a good word for the sociability of this piece, therefore. Its focus moves between sciences
of the soul to ordinary exchanges between selves and worlds, where the vulnerability of intimacy is everywhere sensed but given a kind of peace by the predictability of the form,
the way it simply pulls you along the path of the dream that oneÕs deepest, most binding emotions are simple.
The love songs are sweet, in that Keats-ean sense that unheard melodies are sweeter. They are also funny, in that the language is made at once banal and strange under the homogenizing
force of sheet music, which is like a teleprompter forcing you along the continuities and gaps, and because the stacked lyrics interfere with each other as one reads. Also words like
Subaru and bandaid are funny, and statements like "I believe every cloud has a silver lining." Even tragedy is lightened up to poignancy via the love song form's adaptation. The chorus of
"The pleasure principle" turns Freud's text into comedy just by being an unsingable chorus:
"The plea-sure prin-ci-ple is a ten-den-cy op-er-a-ting in the ser-vice of a func-tion whose bus-i-ness it is to free the men-tal ap-pa-ra-tus en-tire-ly from ex-ci-ta-tion or to keep
the a-mount of ex-ci-ta-tion in itcon-stant or to keep it as low as pos-si-ble."
What is the function of lightness, humor, joking at the scene of love? I think it has little to do with Freud's sense that the joke always enacts sexual aggression. I think it has
little to do with "exposing" something dark and ruthless where people are most sincere.
Instead, these love songs that are not to be sung but only imagined as song create a space of quietness amidst the noise of normativity, of demand, of femininity, and of the ordinary
mess of being with humans. The joke is about getting along in the face of something unlikely, after all. It's a test of who's in on the joke/project of love and who can't just can not
get the project/joke. Love and jokes: tests of time and timing. But Brooks' jokes are gentle, like the heart, in that the form of conventionality holds you, sentimentally, while the
affect splits off into surprises that take root and expand into vastly incoherent but not psychotic intensities of anger and pleasure, quietness and laughter, a space of
fierce forgiveness at the mess of it all.


"No hard feelings" is what you say when you're leaving someone or a situation behind: "Hard Feelings" are the name for Brooks' aesthetics of the intimacy that binds.

1. David M. Halperin, "Sex before Sexuality: Pederasty, Politics, and Power in Classical
Athens," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin
Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Plume, 1989), p 49.

2. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in James Strachey, trans.
and ed. with Anna Freud. Vol. 8 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works (1905c.; London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 3-236

Stephanie Brooks at Rhona Hoffman Gallery By James Yood
for Artforum

December 2004

Stephanie Brooks employs the ability of certain strategies associated with Minimalism to yield surprisingly emotional and intimate results. The title of a work such as Daydream painting:holding hands on the Pont Neuf (bedroom) (all works 2004) hints at a lush romanticism and confessional familiarity that initially seems at odds with its prisitne abstract aesthetic. The picture's surface is immaculate, an unperturbed field of light periwinkle blue acrylic on aluminum that reads as cool and aloof. But the dimensions of the painting are exactly those of the window in Brooks' bedroom, while its pale color is an attentive approximation of the Illinois sky. What initially seemed hard-edged and detached suddenly becomes nuanced and personal, more diaristic than analytical, underlining the slippery nature of such distinctions.

Daydream painting:your smilke after we kiss (Metra) hits a similar note, its slightly curved edges mirroring the window on the commuter train Brooks takes to work, its wan and slightly smoky off-white monochrome an evocation of a cloudy Chicago morning. These paintings lend Minimalism a human face. They commemorate stray moments of reflection and fantasy, of the unanticipated and transformative intrusion of the personal into the midst of the mundane, generic everyday life. They become exhilarating in a Proustian manner, modest but profound. This kind of earnest gesture combined with an acknowledgement of the ambiguous limits of such a hard-edged art's ability to encompass genuine emotion also informs Brooks's My idealized library of feminism. Blocks of cherry wood are mounted on the wall, each precisely simulating the shape of a canonical book that the artist admires. It's a system that is at once closed and open, mute and impenetrable as to the identity and content of the specific books, yet ambiguously allusive in offering a masked glimpse of her intellectual life. In A close reading of Poe, Brooks takes the text of the poet's "The Raven" and excises all of it except the letter O. The hundreds of Os that remain are scattered as they would appear across the page, little ejaculatory circles that function as expressions of astonishment. Given the sing-song rhythms and lush theatricality of Poe's poem, this act of selective isolation seems more homage than defangling and reflects Brooks's interest in the interdeterminacy of communication.

In five works from the series "Conversations," a set of pastel-toned screen prints, Brooks juxtaposes two words in crisp and ubiformly rendered speech balloons. The pairings- poetry/prose, beauty/truth, sonnet/horoscope, vulgarity/vulgarity, sorrow/sublimation- are not opposites. Rather, they seem to be fragments from a conversation, complimentary instead of confrontational. Brooks's display presents them as a kind of bemused "he said/she said" exchange that even with identical components (vulgarity/vulgarity) speaks to a fissure in language, to ikts unstable status as a communicative form. Brooks autopsies the ubiquity of clichˇd binaries (poetry/prose, beauty/truth) as well as more curious snippets of human interaction that are specific and contextual (sonnet/horoscope) and sometimes disarmingly evocative (sorrow/sublimation). Within the indeterminate nature of language-verbal and visual, abstract and literary- Brooks finds and deepens an aperture from which the personal and experiential emerge.

ART IN REVIEW; Stephanie Brooks
By Ken Johnson
for the New York Times

September 29, 2000

Conceptually funny and formally clever, the works of Stephanie Brooks also give pause for deeper philosophical reflections. This young Chicago artist's method is to conflate ordinarily unrelated verbal or visual systems and to embody these odd couplings in sleek signs or objects. A pair of illuminated star charts, for example, have constellations labeled by the names of fancy chocolates: ''Black Forest truffle,'' ''apricot cream,'' and so on, bringing together, one might say, celestial and terrestrial versions of the sublime. In a series of blue plastic plaques, white-lettered texts predict emotional developments in the cadences of a weather report: ''Mostly moody in the morning with scattered dramas and a few tears; increasing loneliness in the afternoon.''

Ms. Brooks's works can make you think about the degree to which we may be trapped by familiar categories. We may put a set of smooth, slant-sided wooden objects on the floor into the Minimalist sculpture category until the title -- ''Projects/Ideas/Notes/Budget/ Addresses'' -- magically transforms them into giant file folder tabs. And coming to a set of 12 photographs of ordinary-looking people, titled ''Academics and Seafood Haters,'' one studies the faces to figure out which is which, even as one realizes the absurdity, and potential danger, of such categorization.

Some philosophers might argue that we can never get free of categories; some might point to Ms. Brooks's work as evidence that we can escape at least momentarily through art and laughter. KEN JOHNSON

from Sites Around the City: Art in the Urban Landscape exhibition catalogue, by Heather Lineberry


Stephanie Brooks tweaks familiar signage systems that dictate our behavior in the social and natural environment. For this exhibition, she has designed one of her "stealth art" projects. Dotted around the ASU campus are five signs similar in look to the myriad signs that guide our steps and actions, telling us where to go and what to look at. But the artist's texts are far from the norm and suggest semi-appropriate courses of action. The field outside the Student Recreation Center has been renamed "Angst Field," and the sign suggests that viewers express their angst in a number of ways: write poetry, reinvent yourself, befriend other angst-ridden people, or over-identify with a rock group.

Brooks' signs use wit to draw attention to themselves and their environment. They produce "an awareness of the oft-hidden power of these systems...to wield absurdly subjective power over our emotional lives." Not surprisingly, Brooks usually selects bureaucratic sites for her work, where instructional and regulatory systems are most rampant, whether a university campus, an office, or a city government complex. Earlier work included placing certificates of beauty from the Flower Department around the city of Chicago and a series of physical exercise stations in a park that utilized pop psychology and self-help strategies.

A range of modern and contemporary artists has appropriated signage systems, from Jenny Holzer's truisms to Victor Burgin's study of Isotypes. Brooks' work is similarly subversive in its format, placed both forcefully and vulnerably in the environment, using humor to question the signs that structure our perception and experience, and our complicity.

Heather Lineberry is curator of the Arizona State University Art Museum


Tip of the Week, by Ann Wiens for Chicago's New City


Chicago is currently home to an emerging generation of conceptual artists with finely honed sesnes of humor, and Stephanie Brooks is among their most fluent pratitioners. Brooks has gained notice for her alterations of some of the most ubiquitous traces of order and bureaucracy: a federal tax form that requires one to report levels of emotional, rather than financial achievement; a New York Times stock page listing values of emotional states, not stocks. Here, Brooks continues in this vein. An information board outside the gallery directs one on a thirty-minute trip around Wicker Park that will, if carried out correctly, result in one falling in love and achieving emotional harmony. Inside, the artist presents herself with awards- in the form of standard corporate achievement plaques- for the dates on which she had great ideas, the number of double "o"s, and harboring such characteristics as "see[ing] the big picture" and "ask[ing] penetrating questions." Brooks humanizes the dehumanizing aspects of our categorization-obsessed society, while reminding us that real life is hard to measure in standardized terms.


Last Name First, by Kathryn Hixon


Please fill out your name, social security number date of birth, full address permanent address, color of eyes, height weight favorite food emotional competency and for purposes of security: mother's maiden name

We are continually bombarded with requests for information: brief bits of text and numbers that define and identify ourselves in order to click into the larger social order. Stephanie Brooks isolates the myriad of classifying systems into which we slot ourselves, then recontextualizes these systems so that their accumulated banality falls away. What is left is an awareness of the oft-hidden power of these systems -- which are usually considered simply factual and objective -- to wield absurdly subjective power over our emotional private lives.

Stephanie Brooks appropriates the forms, measuring devices, and public signage which surround us in modern life, and subtly alters their directives. Amongst her recent projects Brooks rewrote the fine print of the familiar IRS tax form, asking for quantification of "lack of satisfaction with your accomplishments, irritability, deep-seeded hate, truth concealed" and "apologies received, appreciation, and gratitude" instead of objective dollar amounts of credit earned and payments made. A New York Times Stock page and most recently an office building directory received similarly surprising twists wherein what were once simple bits of information are now charged with opinion and feeling. In the public sculpture project Feel Good Here, Brooks turned physical exercise stations like those found in urban parks into sites for emotional growth: instead of sit ups and pull-ups, stick figures help illustrate simple step-by-step directions for feeling good about oneself, and communicating well with others.

Brooks continues in her new work to investigate the ways in which seemingly objective presentations of form and language isolate and depersonalize experience, even if they are meant to bring us together. A walking tour of the Wicker Park neighborhood is suggested, in signage placed near the gallery on the public sidewalk. In this section of Chicago which recently evolved into a hip, trendy area of shops and restaurants for increasingly upscale residents, Brooks directs the viewer/participant to engage in such activities as talking to your reflection in a store window to "stop procrastination," or laying down in the street feigning unconsciousness in order to get rescued and possibly fall in love with the rescuer. The dark humor and clever appeal to the inherent irony in these directions is at the core of Brooks's strategy.

In an earlier employment-related work, Brooks fitted a pair of contact lenses with the text "i like - my job." This efficient, continuous reminder for the obsequious -- or perhaps always potentially dissatisfied -- worker is a hilarious send-up of the endless streams of employee - relation - improvement seminars. In a recent work entitled Self-Portrait, Brooks has adopted those faux-brass plaques given as employee awards for excellent behavior to more directly express how people are judged by their bosses. Instead of "sold most widgets in fourth quarter 1997," Brooks' accolades include "asks penetrating questions," "sees the big picture," "motivates subordinates," and "knows when to seek help." In another piece that takes the same plaque form she has a shiny brass light bulb symbolize her "Great ideas," with added plaques that record the dates such thoughts came to her. By using these public displays of personal accomplishment, Brooks gently parodies everyone's incessant desires to please oneself and others, no matter how corny these desires may seem.

Taking these concerns in another related direction, Brooks has focused on the physical appearance of standardized forms, with their regularized lines and boxes and blanks to fill in. She has further abstracted and enlarged them into physical objects in Last Name First and D.O.B. (date of birth) The results look suspiciously like Minimalist sculpture, made by Sol Lewitt or Donald Judd. This similarity is not only formal: In this elegant gesture, Brooks has demonstrated that the Minimalists program to reduce and universalize aesthetic form mirrors the social forces of categorization and objectification used to maintain cultural cohesion.

As sinister as these forces may be, Brooks manages to unsettle their rigid rule in other ways. She has made a ridiculously long steel ruler which seems very familiar, if somewhat unwieldy but with a signature Brooks gesture the system of measurement has changed from feet and inches, to hot dog and cocktail weiner length. The All-American hot dog is symbolic of middle-class taste, and its standardized ubiquity makes it a perfect unit of measure in her subjective scenario. The belligerence of the huge ruler, as well as the stalwart nature of the hot dog itself, are indicative of American stubbornness: Remember those endless attempts to get us to change to the metric system?

Another standard symbol which has become ubiquitous is the pared-down, de-sexed images of the generic person. Brooks has adopted the familiar graphic figures of "woman" and "man" which indicate bathroom locations throughout the world, but has joined them onto one sign. By then labeling it "platonic," she instantly brings back the many specific possibilities of relationships between these stick figures, or rather the real people which they symbolize. This juxtaposition of image and text helps the viewer to more closely inspect the figures, and conclude that Brooks' label is perhaps the only correct one. The circular heads don't even touch the genital-less bodies, so anything more than polite conversation will never pass between the two. In a new series of photographs titled "Boys and their Mothers' Station Wagons," Brooks is taking another type of image, the pleasing personal snap-shot, and setting up more tension between objective classification and subjective specificity.

There is a poignancy in the sincere irony of Stephanie Brooks' artwork that helps to engage the viewer in considering his or her relationship to systems that rule our world; from punching in our personal identification number at the automated teller machine to passing judgment on a famous work of art. Through her surprising shifts of resignification of familiar forms and activities, Brooks wryly encourages us to remain aware of our comfortable complicity within the social order.

Kathryn Hixson is editor of New Art Examiner Magazine


Emotional Signposts, by Fred Camper for The Chicago Reader


A sign apparently bolted to the sidewalk outside Ten In One Gallery does not deliver the tourist information it appears to. Though the top line reads "Information," the second reads "Thirty Minutes To A Better You." Under that, on a street map headed "Historic Wicker Park," a dotted line connects five numbers. On a normal sign, the numbers might represent attractions to visit, but here the numbers are next to phrases like "Ease Your Fears," "Conquer Shyness," "Fall In Love." Next to the map, the numbers head up lines of instructions on behavior. To conquer shyness, for example, one is told to "Ask 25 people what time it is / Start a conversation with each person / Talk about your likes and dislikes."

This is INFORMATION- You Are Here, one of 12 new works by Stephanie Brooks now at Ten In One Gallery. (The others are inside). Many take the form of generic objects- a ruler, a grid of snapshots, an award plaque. Directory looks exactly like the lit-from-behind directories in building lobbies but instead of listing businesses, it lists "apologies," "compliments," "confrontation." Under each item are directions "consolation" is followed by "State the person's name / Empathize / Offer help in some way / Do not feign optimism." In lieu of a floor or room number, each is assigned a "level" corresponding to its difficulty. "State the person's name" is a "one," but "Empathize" is a "six."

Both these works substitute an emotional topography for the objective geographic information one expects from such signs. Whereas the viewer of a building directory or sign mapping a historic neighborhood is being defined only as a receptacle for information, Brooks immediately invokes the vierer's emotional life. "How did she know I was shy?" I thought- though I didn't go on to ask anyone for the time. Most of her instructions are also appropriate, showing a real understanding of the walled-off bundles of nerves so many of us are. Under "Apologies," Begin with 'I'" rates a "one," but "Ask for a hug" is a "ten."

Implicitly Brooks critiques society's instructions as cold, unemotional, dehumanizing; her work also reflects the feminist emphasis on individual emotions. But Brooks herself doesn't see her work that way. A Chicagoan with an MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago, Brooks, 27, told me her work is "about resignifying forms- about information, and how fluid it can be." While she acknowledges that some of her work addresses depersonalization within larger organizations, she expresses no particular alienation from our culture. "I'd love to do advertising," she says. "I think it would be really exciting to come up with a Coke jingle." Growing up in Zanesville, Ohio, she went to Catholic schools for 12 years, then discovered art making as an undergraduate at Ohio University. Where she did "a lot of bad painting in several genres," she says, but also enjoyed graphic design; what helped initiate her present direction was the discovery of a book of international icons- along with readings about postmodernism.

Though Brooks speaks of her life and our culture with equanimity, I can't help but see almost every one of her works as a critique. Twelve color photos of men standing in front of cars parked on the street seem to follow the form of the amateur snapshot of a person proudly displaying a possession. But the cars are all uncool station wagons, a few of them rather battered, and the title for this grid- Boys Who Drive Their Mothers' Station Wagons- makes the work much more than a collection of funky snapshots. Brooks replaces the man-and-car macho pose with a kind of gender fuck: in our culture, boys proud to drive their mothers' station wagons are hardly "real men."

Brooks substitutes an imagined utopia for existing social realities: men abandon the cool-car ideal, and people explore their feelings rather than go on walking tours or visit offices. She also takes an implicit stand against generalization: reading the text in Directory is an individuating experience, since each viewer will respond to the suggested actions differently. Taking the importance of individual reactions further, Brooks scrutinizes even so objective a form of knowledge as measurement.

Girlhole, Boyhole, Cornhole is made up of three boxes in which a tiny hole in the shape of a woman, man or ear of corn has been cut. That all three holes are a fraction of an inch produces an ironic contrast with the sexualizing title: a mostly male preoccupation- an interest in "holes"- has been replaced by these elegant, desexualized forms too small to enter. Hotdog! hints at another male obsession. It's a ten-foot-high metal ruler with two scales, the one on the left is based on the length of a hot dog, the one on the right is based on the length of a coctail wiener. I was reminded of how arbitrary measurement systems can be: since the foot was originally the length of a ruling potentate's foot, why not establish this quintessential American product as a unit of measurement too? That hot dogs are only about five inches long in my mind connected with the ruler's absurd size and with the slang meaning or "wiener" to suggest a joking comment on male insecurities.

Last Name First and D.O.B. are among Brooks's most biting pieces, though she doesn'tsee them that way. Both are horizontal metal constructions, seamless in appearance, with vertical bars that reproduce in greatly enlarged form those toothy fill-in-the-blank spaces where you're supposed to write in your name or date of birth. Loving the appearance of those forms, Brooks wanted to make "beautiful adn simple" work based on the them. But I saw them as a variation on the pieces like Dierctory: these oversized renderings in metal heighten awareness of the way such forms reduce the individual to a name and a number. The large blank slots, almost begging to be filled in, entice the viewer not to "ask for a hug" but to repeat the same mind-numbing task each of us has done a thousand times.

Brooks mentions having won undergraduate awards for the paintings she finds embarrassing today, and in this show she gives herself a few more awards, each with its own ironies. Self Portrait reproduces the form of an "employee of the month" plaque: at the center is Brooks's photograph, and on either side are six small laudatory metal labels: Achieves bottom-line results," "Asks penetrating questions," "Sees the big picture." These praises, with their references to scale, present in relatively straight form the kind of thinking Brooks parodies in Hotdog! But one wonders about excess: Can any employee be this good? Or do those accomplishments represent not real achievement but a corporate fantasy employee, an impossible ideal? Brooks's photograph provides a clue: she looks happy- too happy. Her smile is a little too wide. Brooks says she took alot of photos of herself, seeking that "deer in the headlights" look," to get this one. And the fact she looks zombielike, even a little crazed. But then the attempt to win or live up to such an award would drive almost anyone mad.

Brooks's comments notwithstanding, her work seems unmistakably oppositional. The smooth, seamless surface of her pieces gives them their edge: the strong resemblance between each work and the conventional form on which it's modeled makes makes the differences loom large. But beneath these surfaces lies a concern for the emotional self, as the viewer is reminded of the way that social structures sometimes seek to deny the wholeness of a person, confronting us with forms to fill out, arbitrary systems of measurement, rigid gender expectations, and the impossible demands of the workplace. Some pieces like Directory, may encourage one's emotional side, but others like Self Portrait, reveal how society can quash it. Brooks offers a witty, moving commentary on the way the self can be fragmented by a society that denies each individual's authentic, sensate core.