The New Guy

Matt Browning’s first solo show, Home Field Advantage, has
only seven sculptures and a single (finished) one-night-only
performance piece in it, but the glimpse it provides gives a little thrill: This is one of the most promising debuts by a
Seattle artist in a long time.

Take the quiet heart of the show, what appears to be a small scrap
of dark carpet cut out and mounted on the wall as if it were a
painting, apparently stretched over and stapled to an armature the way
a canvas would be. It doesn’t look like much at first. It even seems
like it might be a smug, low-rent hipster take on abstract painting.
Bo-ring. Until you read on the label that it’s made of yarn from
deconstructed baseballs, carefully knitted and lovingly presented. The
artist made this plain little thing painstakingly; the scene conjured
up is of him toiling in a rocking chair by the entrance to a baseball
stadium. This drab-looking rectangle has an amazing quantity of
life.

You wouldn’t guess Browning has a background in fiber arts. His show
is full of sculptures that represent adolescent masculinity by
combining its scrawny, cocky ways with the codes of “adult” masculinity
inherent in cold-eyed, professionalish minimalism and heroic monumental
abstract sculpture. Thrillventure is a long miniature ski jump
pieced together from cut-up downhill skis, standing precariously and
sloping from the gallery wall down to the floor. Small in scale and
sloping in angle, Thrillventure can’t help but double as a thin,
limp dick and a commentary on the social link between physical bulk and
masculine value. (Before the piece is displayed again, it needs to be
brought back up to standards: It collapsed the day before the opening,
and Browning had to reconnect the sections with unsightly material.
Properly, um, getting it up is imperative to the symbolism.)

Following up on the practices of artists like Brian Jungen, who
filter contemporary social situations through “primitive” or tribal
forms (in Jungen’s case, the place of First Peoples in Canadian
culture), Browning segments baseball skins and glues them into the
shape of an animal pelt or a pre-Columbian figure drawing in Trophy
Trophy. He takes the association further, though, because each
leather piece is a small square, like a digital pixel, making the
figure look just as much like a video-game character. Browning is
tracking the cultural transition—which he probably experienced
personally—from baseball to video-game boyhoods.

The Things We Did? It Wasn’t So Much the Thing as It Was That We
Did ‘Em is a contraption made of metal and worn wood that looks
like an innocent device planted in the wilderness (a birdhouse?) but is
actually a beer shotgunning machine. Self-Portrait as Christmas is a funny little thing, a snapshot of the artist mounted on wood the
size of a baseball card. He’s tough-looking but skinny, in need of a
change of clothes and a shave, and the quality of the photograph is so
bad that one of his eyes turned out red, the other green. He’s clearly
no sports hero. In the show, only Room with a View, a row of
cut-out mountains from Busch beer cans mounted on the wall, leaves me
cold. The row of mountains seems neither decorative nor obsessive
enough, too abstract.

Browning is one of the guys, but the one who eyes the group with a
little suspicion. Other artists are positioning their masculinity in
similar ways, especially sculptors in Los Angeles including Sterling
Ruby, Nathan Mabry, and Aaron Curry. Clearly conversant with Ruby’s
clean forms with marked-up surfaces, Browning’s Roughed-Up Gem is a Formica desktop jutting straight out from the wall with no visible
supports (in a reference to Donald Judd’s wall hangings) at the height
of a classroom desk. Nonsense numbers and words referring to crews of
guys (“TEAM BRUCE”) appear to be scratched into the surface, but if you
lean in closer, you see that they are stitched, perfectly, impossibly,
into the surface.

For a performance at the opening, Browning separated himself from
the crowd by pedaling a stationary bicycle attached to a large battery
in order to power the refrigerator for the party’s beer. In reference
to a Chris Burden performance, Browning called it Honest Labor pt.
II, and it mock-raises the question: What does an artist do exactly? Browning is just playing; he already knows the answer.