Frank Bramblett: No Intention at the Woodmere Art Museum

March 7 to June 21, 2015
9210 Germantown Avenue
Philadelphia, PA, 215 247 0476

Attention art materials: if you see Frank Bramblett coming, run! Through four decades of work, the Philadelphia-based artist has slashed, sanded, and frozen his way through pools of paint, loads of marble dust, and acres of canvas. The results he has achieved are on display in the exhibition “No Intention,” at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum through June 21.

I take issue with the exhibition’s title, as it suggests a lack of direction. From his arrival in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, Bramblett has shown a clear intent with every piece he made — but sidestepped the conventional application of brush to canvas. In early works such as Red Wrap (1973), for example, the artist poured acrylic paint into a frame to create both the illusion and the reality of an undulating surface. Shiny pools of paint form a light-to-dark brown gradient that resembles the humps of a Naugahyde couch. The artist took this pour method to extremes in White Face (1974), burying a layered pool of paint in the snow and snapping its frozen edges. The resulting fissures revealed thin, colored lines that frame a buckling white field. Like Jo Baer’s paintings from the early 1970s, Bramblett’s pour paintings push the action from center to extremity.

In pieces such as FeO (1977) Bramblett heaped minerals onto the painted surface, loaded his paint with ferrous oxide sand and scraped it across the canvas in razor-sharp diagonals. The resulting charcoal-gray grit pushes past the edges of the panel support, making the canvas resemble a slab of chipped slate, blurring the line between sculpture and painting.

During the 1980s, Bramblett’s small, abstract work turned large and figurative. Oh No Yoko! Where What Where (1982) filled an entire wall with a frieze-like progression of bodies borrowed from myth and art history. We move through Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864), Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), and Matisse’s Dance (1910) — all laboriously cut from linoleum tiles of varying patterns and colors. It would be tempting to say that in this stage Bramblett was drawn into a trendy post-modern phalanx of appropriation, pattern and decoration, and pop cultural fetish. A closer look reveals that the Bramblett’s labor-intensive “destruction-as-creation” practices from the ‘70s continued to be the driving force in his work. Instead of applying paint to a surface, he applied one surface to another, cheerfully breaking mirrors into shards and cutting hard tiles into precise shapes in order to build a material object.

More recent works embrace the large scale but shift the narrative from grand themes to personal experience. Holes in Dive In (2001) reveal small sea or lakeside photographs showing endless expanses of pebbles and rivulets of water. These tiny windows into natural topography are engulfed by a broad field (90 x 72 inches) of meandering parallel lines made by running a comb-like instrument through a thick layer of pink paint. There is an almost seamless continuity between the photographic documentations of nature and Bramblett’s simulations of the same.

The traditional attitude toward paint is to view regard it as plastic — i.e. a formless substance ready to take on whatever characteristics the painter gives it. Although Bramblett certainly puts his paint and canvas through boot camp, in the end he lets them decide what they will be. Rather than lack of intention, his approach is a confidence that the materials have become so infused with his personality that they tell his story on their own.

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As the first in a projected series at the Woodmere Art Museum, the Triennial of Contemporary Photography is not only an attempt to showcase the diverse currents in photography in the Delaware Valley, but also a purposeful bid to update the museum. Due to a positive change in their financial circumstances, and with an impressive wing designed by Venturi, Scott-Brown soon to begin construction, the Triennial signals a new direction at the Woodmere. Spearheaded by Curator of Collections, Douglass Paschall, it is a sign that the museum wants to change it’s spots in the new century.

The 7 photographers chosen for this invitational were selected from an original pool of 150 and the quality is high. Adding to an already loose thematic, the museum presented by way of historical preface “The Legacy of Philadelphia Photography” as a mini-show in the foyer. This included rare and remarkable photographs from the Woodmere’s collection with some by Eakins and Muybridge. A gorgeous history lesson, the show was something of a distraction to a triennial already pushing the boundaries in its eclecticism.

Several generations of photographers were presented in a way that pitted an old guard against newcomers with a major gap in-between. In fact, the show runs the gamut from modernist work through American journalistic tradition to the contemporary. Larry Fink presents confident journalistic style and his paparazzi-like shot of George Plimpton sitting glum-faced at a table of party people is carefully placed to form the centerpiece in his section of the show. Ray K. Metzker follows in the footsteps of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans; his carefully captured plays of light are mostly street scenes from 1962 and they are delicate, meticulous and a perfect combination of craft and moodiness. Fink and Metzker form the backbone of the show and are worth seeing in their own right but they bring nothing “contemporary” to the table. Indeed, can pictures from 1962 really classify as contemporary?

Leif Skoogfor’s photojournalism from the early seventies is strong work in the Magnum tradition but it is not contemporary either. The great leap across generations to Amanda Tinker, Jessica Todd Harper and Trevor Dixon is abrupt and Charmaine Caire stands out as the only representative born in the fifties. Claire’s work has ironic content and use of the “set-ups” full of objects and toys from popular culture produced as digital prints. In the context of the show, her pictures indicate the departure from the classic “realism” to art photography. The remit here is not “documentation” but playing with the nature of truth in photographic images complicated further by digital manipulation.

Harper’s large family “snapshots” seem to comment on class, money and taste and channel portraiture of the landed gentry of the eighteenth century. It almost seems a red herring that she inserts extra figures digitally in the manner of Jeff Wall. This is part of the painterly aesthetic that photography sometimes mimics these days. Tinker’s and Dixon’s work seems to be the link connecting the “masters” and the early experimental work in the hallway to the present day. Playing with such formalities as focus and scale, Dixon’s pictures are intellectually engaging and strange: images of half-blurred churches and woods evoke the passing of time generally and photography’s past specifically. They also mark a formal difference between optical and photographic vision which is a truly contemporary concern.

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