User:Joseph broghammer

The Cairns Discovering signposts in the mark making of Joseph P. Broghammer

by Mike Krainak – City Weekly Art Critic

Babies, birds, bees and all things Joseph Broghammer. Add to the mélange, cows, clocks, hearts, a circus and a carnival along with other flights of fancy and you begin to get a picture, a drawing to be exact of this Midwestern artist from Omaha, Nebraska. For the past 25 years, Broghammer has developed into one of the region’s most original voices whose mark making can be traced from Bosch, Brueghel and Black to Dali and Magritte and linked to likes of John Graham and Tony Fitzpatrick. Yet, it has only been in the past five yeas or so that this uniquely imaginative work has received official recognition. Two significant solo shows in the past three years have won him the Best Visual Artist and Best Mixed Media Artist in 2006 and Best 2-D artist and Best Solo Show in 2008 competing in the annual Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards. Broghammer’s rather sudden and deserved honors are not without their irony, a characteristic of the artist and his work as well. This was not overnight success as he has participated in more than 40 group shows and a dozen solo exhibits in the Midwest and beyond. However, the cumulative effect of this body of work and its impact on the area indicates that the artist may indeed be at a crossroads. One, when artists reach a peak in their career, as Broghammer certainly has, they must reinvent themselves or risk languishing, and soon familiarity becomes contempt. Not that being a creative force in one’s own community is a negative, but the artists in this region who have been the most influential cast their nets outside the realm which is point number two. The work of Jun Koneko, Kent Bellows, Steve Joy, Keith Jacobshagen and Karen Kunc resonates most in Nebraska because they earned their reputation nationally and brought it home to their comfort zone. Does Broghammer and his edgy, figurative work belong in this upper echelon of significant artists Nebraskans call their own? Perhaps, but not by comparison as each of the above accomplished what they did individually and separately on their own merit. What they have in common, besides their reputation and what made it is three fold: an original and recognizable style and vision, a broad pedigree of awards and exhibitions outside this art scene and documentation of their work that places it in a valid, historical and contemporary context. Broghammer has accomplished the first and is gradually providing the second. The purpose of this essay is to begin to establish the latter. Special emphasis will be made throughout this writing to the artist’s latest and most mature work, the images of which one sees in this book. This “Flock of Joe” as he characteristically has referred to the bird images that dominate here, is actually an accurate representation of these biographical pieces which largely remain mysterious despite their personal background. Joe’s flock was part of his second, significant solo show at the nomadic A Moving Gallery in Omaha called simply “Joseph P. Broghammer.” The “P” could easily stand for poet or prestidigitator because despite the personal nature of his art in general, it is couched in imagery filled with illusion and symbolism. He is loathe to reveal the characters and narratives from his life behind the work believing each finished drawing to be more interesting than what he describes somewhat disingenuously as his “plebian life.” In fact, in an earlier Moving Gallery show of similar work from his “diary,” also present in this book, he said, “The one thing I discovered about myself is that I am a boring average guy.” The same thing cannot be said about his art, an observation also made by Moving Gallery director and artist herself, Vera Mercer, about his second solo exhibit: “These drawings are so different, yes? The crazy, colorful fantasy is still there, but there is a development with a more refined focus in a classical painting style. Yet they are so bold. He is such an original, not the style of the moment.” Mercer is astutely pointing out that Broghammer’s work combines traditional form and medium in a provocative, contemporary manner. The monumental work that dominates here are large portraits of mostly birds in a mixed media of pastel, pencil, charcoal and spray fixative on paper. He categorizes his art as “dry paintings” and, although in the past his mixed media pieces have included elaborate, decorative shadow box frames, these current images fill the frame center stage and are relatively free of the surreal tableaux that has characterized past work. Though one won’t find Broghammer’s flock in the “Art of Bird Illustrations” catalogue, one cannot deny their pictorial beauty and attention to species detail and palette. His pigeons, cardinals and parrots, among others, are bathed in chiaroscuro light that gives each a dramatic effect befitting theme and mood. The artist has also given each an undeniable personality or character beyond a mere “wink, wink, nudge, nudge,” a mask, as it were, that reveals as well as conceals. This persona is then further enhanced by each portrait’s individual iconography which comments on any possible interpretation. Though Broghammer has specific and meaningful events and characters that are represented in each piece, it is fruitless and pointless to attempt to decipher them in that manner. Though created in the private cosmos of the artist, they resonate as symbolic references to a macrocosm of what can simply be called the human condition. Broghammer, at age 45, is a product of that “human condition” that in a creative sense was most influenced by the complexity of Postmodernism which began unofficially in the late 60’s and peaked in the late 80’s. Yet, as a subset of contemporary art, its impact is still felt with its continued emphasis on intermedia, multimedia, installation, conceptual and performance art. Not that any of this holds much interest for Broghammer today either in his own work or that of others. However, Postmodernism’s general rejection of formal purity, medium specificity, and an aesthetic favoring art for art’s sake gave him “permission” as he entered art school at the University of South Dakota to go his own way. That and the good fortune to have an avant garde painting instructor who set him free while others with more experience continued their time honored, classical work at their easels in front of still lifes, figures, landscapes and other traditional exercises. Postmodernism developed into an era art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto described in an essay as “The End of Art.” “Artists could really do anything,” Danto writes in “Unnatural Wonder,” his latest collection of essays, “and it seems as if anyone could be an artist. We had really entered a period of pluralism. There was not one correct way to make art.” At first this depressed him, who like others in the Modern Age looked forward to each new movement in art well into the 60’s. “But bit by bit, I began to feel that it was intoxicating to be free of the tyranny of art history.” This freedom gradually carried over into art schools in a way Broghammer was already benefiting from. “In art schools skills were no longer taught,” Danto says. “The student was treated from the beginning as an artist, and the faculty existed to help the students realize their ideas. Everyone used everything and anything—audio, video, photography, performance, installation. Students could be painters or sculptors if they liked, but the main thing was to find the means to embody the meaning they were interested in conveying.” Though, as with most artists, Broghammer’s “dry paintings” are auto-biographical, the means and influences for his work can be traced to three distinct movements and a few favorite artists. Chief among the former are allegory, magic realism and, of course, surrealism. It can certainly be argued that all of the work in “Cairns” is allegorical in that his objects and narratives all convey a meaning other than and in addition to the literal. Consider for example, Figure A, “The Family March,” a fleeting side show, a parade, left to right, of circus performers that unfolds within its fantastical, carny frame. The POV here is one of a detached observer, and one can’t help noticing that none of the performers, seals, elephants, dogs and horses, trained and dancing, look all that happy or inspired. The title of this spectacle suggests a personal connection, but perhaps it is, instead, a long line of artists or, more recently, politicians parading for their 15 minutes or significance before exiting stage right. Allegory is also apparent in Figure B, “Well-Protected Heart,” but this elaborate show piece, a highlight of his earlier Moving Gallery show, suggests yet another influence as well. Magic Realism, according to art critic Franz Roh, is a style of visual art that “employs various techniques that endow all things, especially ordinary things, with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple ingenuous things.” Magic Realism is characterized by an emphasis on the ordinary object rather than the fantastic, a juxtaposition of forward movement with a sense of distance as opposed to foreshortening subject matter and a use of miniature details even in expansive or monumental works. With “Well-Protected Heart” Broghammer has begun to thrust his subject forward on a larger canvas with a greater attention to accuracy and detail. Yet this is no ordinary heart. Beautifully rendered in purples and reds, it looks ravaged and badly in need of salvage. Barely pumping, this heart has barricaded itself from a world of hurt. As it wears its emotions on its sleeves, this may be the most autobiographical piece in the artist’s oeuvre, or perhaps in any artist who is proud of his scars, personal and professional. This more personal and expressionistic turn in Broghammer’s work as well as a more traditional presentation alludes to the last, major influence, a type of Veristic Surrealism otherwise known as Social Surrealism. The more generic term refers to a form of representational academic art whose intent is to “reveal” the inner, subjective instead of the outer, objective world. More specifically, Social Surrealism uses symbolic images and objects that represent the inner vision of the artist within the context of the collective unconscious. It exposes, examines and often satirizes the hypocrisy of society, making it, in the opinion of some, the most unnerving type of Surrealism. Does Broghammer have this effect or impact on the viewer? Consider Figure C from the earlier show, titled “Chuckles,” which indeed this little devil does evoke images of the movies’ most terrible infant. Baby Chuckles sports red-rimmed eyes, tattoos and casts a menacing shadow of horns, tail and pitchfork. His playroom looks innocent enough but the real clue as to the artist’s sense of humor is the serpent encased in its hellish frame that seems to grow before our very eyes. Even here, the satire is personal and universal both as Broghammer has admitted “playing with my art and ideas not unlike how a small child plays with his toys.” His latest work, as seen in figures D--H, begins in a similar manner. “I start by putting a white piece of paper on the wall. It has to be straight and a clean slate. I look at it and let the white paper tell me where to go. I rarely will start out with an idea before I do the work, and I never pre-sketch. The work sometimes will start out one way and as I draw it, the image will change and become something completely different, and that is okay; it just adds to the living diary of my life.” Which is why he refers to this most mature work as “Cairns,” landmarks that represent “an important moment in my life that I want to remember, whether it was good or bad. They are life lessons that I’m sharing with you. I use birds (and a few other animals) as a canvas or skeleton because they are familiar to us all.” As for his aesthetic, Broghammer’s “Cairns” are one of a kind, pastel drawings. “My intent is to push the medium of pastel and pencil to the point that it takes on an expressive, painterly quality. For this series I chose bold colors and did all the creating, thinking and drawing on the paper.” Besides being an excellent draftsman, his tight control of the mixed media lends a depth and contour to both figure and setting that is difficult to achieve in traditional drawing. Ever the professional, one will never see signs of media residue on the bottom frame typical of pastel and charcoal. As puzzling as “Joe’s Flock” may be, their meaning can be appreciated, if not completely deciphered by examining the clues, the icons according to category found within each framework. Broghammer’s graphic iconography features utensils of all kinds, toys, clothing, logos and other cultural symbols as well as additional animal and nature imagery which contribute to a finished mise en scene. Factor in his choice of species, pose and expression and gradually his aviary begins to reveal its secrets. For example, in figure D, consider the ironically tiled “Great Quadragenerian,” a 40-year-old mallard welded to a set of wheels wearing a merry-go-round headdress from which dangles another flock of birds in miniature. The mallard looks proud and defiant, but, as with many other tell-tale cairns, a little worse for wear, with its patches and tires somewhat deflated. Another similarly encumbered bird is his stunning “Searching for Gold,” figure E, a beautifully illustrated parrot impaled on his simple stand. Unlike the former, this is more minimal in its portrait of a normally mimicking and mocking bird skewered by the promise of a small pot of gold that dangles just out of reach and weighed down by a green block of envy and promises hanging from its neck. Then there are the more obscure “Pigeon Daisy,” figure F and “I Smell a Rat,” figure G. Like others, each is gracefully rendered even as they wear their troubling visage. Whatever their source or inspiration, they are both self-deprecating and over-exposed. In the former, a red-breasted, blue-crested pigeon with the tail of a dog and collar to match squats on a pedestal resembling a crutch. The setting is strewn with toys and other signs of innocence tossed aside, and this pigeon is sporting a wreath of canine teeth which seems to suggest that our artist feels his isn’t getting any younger. Or any more trusting, as “I Smell a Rat” seems to suggest. This piece features a stately white owl emblazoned with a Swiss Arm or Red Cross and a medieval shield tucked under its wing. Like the knife of the same name, our wise, somewhat ruffled figure is prepared for anything with its array of files, scissors and other “points” of interest dangling from its being. The title, however, is duplicitous since this bird is predatory too as its other wing reveals a pair of playing card totaling 21. Perhaps Broghammer’s most accomplished and beguiling work here is figure H, “Candy Cardinal,” a richly detailed and colorful bird too attached to its sweets and treats, which hang from its person, and the spoon that feeds it. Normally one of our most comely and beloved of birds, this cardinal risks gluttony and addiction as its sits on its candy cane leg. “Be careful what you eat, or what eats you,” this morality tale may be saying, which could be two-fold and self-directed. On one level it could be a simple commentary on a nagging weight problem via a sweet tooth. Or, subconsciously, the artist may be acknowledging a deeper indulgence, and perhaps even indolence, while basking in the limelight of recent public attention and reward indicated earlier. Ironically, despite the minute attention to lifelike detail, these larger than life “Cairns” sit stuffed on a precarious perch both honored and vulnerable, not unlike the edgy artist himself; alter egos that reveal all without telling anything. These still lifes sing to the viewer only metaphorically via their cultural codes which are a vital part of their setting, dress and very nature. Though there is a personal story behind his aviary, the artist is reluctant to reveal any of these diary entries, letting the viewer identify and interpret as he sees fit even when the symbols may be deliberately misleading. Ultimately, his signposts are ciphers that expose Broghammer as an illusionist, a provocateur and, above all, an enormous talent. What places him among Nebraska’s elite artists is his original voice. There is simply no one in the region that combines the figurative and the surreal in such an intriguing and stylish manner. His “Cairns” are personal, lyrical, and wonderfully bizarre despite their familiarity. They take advantage of our curiosity and our love of nature. Yet, they have just enough attitude to let us know that we are in his world and on his terms. In short, Broghammer’s classy menagerie casts a spell. Just how wide remains to be seen, but one thing is certain. The further a field he flings his net of influence the greater recognition he will gain at home.