The Magnificent Seven: Harrell Fletcher
Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo
Jan. 19–Apr. 24, 2010
Benoit Antille
The most recent "outcast" to be invited by the Wattis for the project The Magnificent Seven is Harrell Fletcher, who received his degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1994. Fletcher's anti-traditional approach to visual art and culture expresses itself in socially engaged interdisciplinary projects. When he was teaching at Portland State University, for example, he started a class by asking all of his students to tell their life stories to everyone else in the class. Excursions, walks and trips are some of his strategies. "The way that I work is that I'm often asked to go somewhere to do a project. I use these travel opportunities to learn about the place that I go to. This happens in a few different ways. I might read some books or watch some documentary films about that place and try to figure out a project from that information. Or I might just go there and wander around and talk to some people that I run across. Sometimes I wind up working with the people I meet on a project and am taken deep into their lives." This is the first step. Fletcher then collects documentation that will constitute the body of the work.
Sailing against the sacrosanct originality of the artist and the current need to be unique and innovative, Fletcher claims the notions of lineage, relationship, and heritage for his work. Invited by the Wattis, he decided to dedicate his exhibition to Michael Bravo, the man who initiated him to art when he was a child (Bravo was married to Fletcher's older sister). Born in Oakland in 1943, Bravo is now 67 years old. In contrast to what one would expect, the exhibition is not conceived as a retrospective, and those who expect a chronological display of Bravo's works would be disappointed. It is seen much more as an installation by Fletcher–who is used to working with documents related to individual experiences–using Bravo's career. The exhibition gathers together three types of pieces: Bravo's work, toys made by Bravo for Fletcher, and documents of Bravo's life–such as pictures, letters, and childhood drawings. The story of their relationship is, in fact, the real subject. In a certain way, both Fletcher and Bravo are the "magnificent" dreamers.
In Fletcher's work childhood has always played an important role. For example, the artist produced a project with all the kids from kindergarten to 5th grade at a small grade school in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Childhood is also one of the key motifs of the exhibition, which, on the one hand is connected to their personal experience, with Bravo as an early role model for Fletcher, and on the other hand, it opens up questions on art, creation and the myth of the artist. Each artist's biography starts something like this: "As a child, I remember always having to hold a pen in my hand". This aspect seems to be announced by the title of the show: Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo. It is the narrative structure of a heroic story and, in fact, Bravo was a real hero for the young Harrell. The exhibition superimposes multiple layers that have to be peeled like an onion, to borrow the metaphor made by Günter Grass for his autobiography. Bravo's work is absorbed by Fletcher's installation, itself being also absorbed by Jens Hoffmann's curatorial concept of The Magnificent Seven. Into this kaleidoscopic gaze, identities and memories are mixed in order to communicate one to another. Fletcher's childhood answers to Bravo's childhood.
One of the most interesting pieces in regard to the idea of lineage and education is the Tool Box. This box was made by Bravo for Fletcher when he was a child. At that time, it contained a painting and drawing kit. Everything is lost now, but Bravo filled it for the show with an odd range of new tools-without a clear utility-that he made. He explained to Fletcher that it was dedicated to his daughter. Very tenderly, Bravo seems to address a message to Fletcher and the curator of the show. First, he shows his wish to prolong the line of education through Fletcher and his daughter, but he also demonstrates an awareness of being in a certain way used or manipulated by new artistic approaches, bartering brushes for concepts. It could be thus perceived as a contemporary resurgence of the classical quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns using the frame of Freudian analysis of the father's death.
Michele Fiedler
For the next two years, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts will present a series of exhibitions under the title The Magnificent Seven, in which seven artists have been invited by curator Jens Hoffmann to be involved with the CCA community as lecturers, professors, residents end exhibiting artists. Already two of the artists in this series have presented their projects. The first was a retrospective exhibition of the European artist Tino Sehgal. His constructed situations have been taking place in the Wattis galleries in conjunction with, parallel to or hidden in regularly scheduled exhibitions for the past year, and will continue to do so for the duration of the series.
The second took place last semester during Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas' Capp street residency in the course of which he led a workshop with a group of MFA students. This concluded in a showing of their collectively realized pieces. The nature of the constructed vehicles produced by the students and the artist gave way to an exhibition in the form of a recreational activity, a race, and a barbeque.
The third artist to participate, Harrell Fletcher, has also approached the exhibition format in an unorthodox or unexpected way. Instead of showing a collection of his new work or a survey of the old, he has invited another artist and pays tribute to him with a retrospective of his oeuvre. Serving as both curator and artist, Fletcher invited his ex Brother-in-law Michael Bravo to exhibit at the Wattis Institute. As a curator, Fletcher designed the display of the chosen works, dictated the themes to follow, made the conscious decision to acknowledge the work of a former CCAC student on campus, wrote the wall text and interviewed the artist for the catalogue. As an artist, he chose to display works that had influenced him as a child, shows intimate photographs that record family times spent together, pays homage to a man who influenced greatly his decision to become an artist, wrote stories as wall texts, and used the artist interview format as an opportunity to ask and tell about Bravo's legacy, including what was lost and gained.
Fletcher's practice has a lot to do with other people's histories, documentation, recompilation of stories and showing collections. He often builds creative structures in which collaboration between both art world and non-art world people is encouraged. His curatorial approach is more influenced or interested in the personal, nostalgic or social than art, culture or history. This new exhibition does not part with his former habits; the only difference in this presentation of Michael Bravo's work is that here Fletcher alludes to his own personal story. Bravo's work is presented and a part of his story is recounted, but through both we get to know many intimate details about Fletcher too. Bravo's oeuvre is fragmented between works created for exhibition, sketches, toys, and empirical exercises in artistic creation. These are juxtaposed with vitrines where old pictures of the artists together in a family context give a nostalgic sentiment to the space. This interlocking of the creational and the personal is also very present in both the wall texts and the publication accompanying the exhibition. The latter starts as a professional interview by Fletcher of Bravo, but gets intertwined, halfway through, with the artist-curator's own story in a sentimental way. For instance, Fletcher says: "When you and Sandra got divorced, my family was very sad to see you go", and later asks "What did you think of my decision to become one of your students?" Suddenly Bravo is impelled to talk about his impression of young Harrell as a student in which he admits that at first he did not pay much attention to Harrell, but after noticing his outstanding capabilities as an artist thought, "This kid's gonna go places."
The differences between their practices are evident in the show and contrasts are emphasized in the texts. Both products of the same family, the same school (they both attended CCAC) and the student–professor relationship they shared, they notably part in concept and medium. In a way, this exhibition has an autobiographical undertone of Fletcher through recognition of his childhood hero.
It is a curated exhibition that is both a show and a piece, two layers in the curated program of exhibitions at Wattis. Here artists are invited to produce their work without the limitations of object and time, as well as work outside the frame of the standard solo show while still having a solo show.
Erin Fletcher
Harrell Fletcher is best known for his combination of personal and whimsical elements that produce shows, which encourage thoughtful reflection on the relationships between people. Learning to Love You More, produced with Miranda July in print and Yuri Ono as a website, invited participants to complete assignments. These collected assignments became a project founded as much on the amalgamation of voices as the observation of tender and overlooked aspects of daily humanity. As the featured artist of Jens Hoffmann's Magnificent Seven program, currently on display in the Wattis gallery, Fletcher invites his audience to meditate on the way personal influences can shape and direct one's life. He approaches this subject through first-hand experience with an artist named Michael Bravo.
The subject of this exhibition is Michael Bravo's role as an artistic role model in Fletcher's life. This is an appropriate topic for Fletcher because it couches his work within the experience of his relationships. The exhibition neatly sidesteps a retrospective of Fletcher's life by focusing on the objects and art created by Bravo. Although it is based around many objects made for Fletcher as a child, and adds ephemera recalling their relationship, it also includes prints and sculptures that reveal Bravo's work on a professional level.
Bravo's artwork is not what one expects to see in the Wattis gallery. While well executed and enjoyable, they are not of the conceptual rigor that Hoffmann normally selects. Fletcher's role, rather, gives this exhibition the conceptual depth that makes it appropriate for its place in The Magnificent Seven. Fletcher acts as a curator in this instance, which is not markedly removed from his role as producer in his other works such as Come Together and Blot out the Sun. Unlike many personal stories, the one that unfolds in the Wattis is not a psychological portrait of the artist. It is a reflection on Fletcher's artistic development through the artifacts produced by the person who influenced this development. The exhibition becomes a reflection of Fletcher's practice although we are presented with the physical evidence of Bravo's artwork.
Although the relationship between the two artists is explored empirically instead of sentimentally, viewers can still grasp the very personal core of the exhibition. The audience may be tempted to ask "What is the relationship now?" or to analyze "What happened?" It is admirable that Fletcher's Magnificent Seven project resists such Reality-TV dissections. It refocuses us on the simple moment of influence and presents us with the artifacts of memory. In these objects the audience can find elements of play, whimsy, and imagination that are also found in Fletcher's practice.
Many of my classmates and I remarked on the brightly colored bunches of twigs laid casually throughout the gallery, which appear to be both paintbrushes and bundles of kindling. These are another place where one sees Fletcher's hand; they refocus viewers on his presence and serve as a reminder that the artist expresses himself circularly. Far from being exploitative, he looks for the connections that can be built between people and creates projects that engender reflection or new paths for communication. According to many interviews the artist has given, this leads him on the one hand to act as the conduit for other people's projects. On the other hand it also allows Fletcher to explore and partake in the world in a way that is meaningful for him. It seems fitting for The Magnificent Seven that Fletcher reflects on his own practice by creating an opportunity for the person who was the reason for his entry into the arts.
Liz Glass
Looking back at his twenty-year career, it becomes obvious that the artist Harrell Fletcher is interested in the site as a foundation for his artistic practice. In many of his projects, works and exhibitions spring from the immediate surroundings; Fletcher seems often to choose a site, and (figuratively, of course), pick it up, turn it over, shake it out, and see what objects of interest may spill out of its pockets. In some projects, this has meant culling family photographs and personal items from workers in an office building, and in others holding yard sales of strangers in a gallery space, or painting mural-sized portraits of locals by the side of the freeway. Fletcher's works, which blur the boundaries between artistic creation and curatorial endeavor, would be empty without these particular spaces grounding them, giving them shape, and making them speak.
In his current exhibition at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at CCA, Fletcher anchors his project in a relationship-cum-site. In Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo it is the life-long relationship that Fletcher has with Bravo—his one-time brother-in-law, professor, and role model—that becomes the site of investigation. Selections presents lithographs, paintings, and sculptures by Bravo alongside family photographs, personal ephemera from Bravo's life, hand-made toys and trinkets, and narrative texts that bind the two men together. These objects and artworks merge into a narrative that transforms the exhibition into more than a mere survey of Bravo's eclectic artistic endeavors, and becomes about a shared history. The interest in Selections lies not in the individual or collected works themselves, but in the interplay between objects and site; in this case, the site is the relationship between one artist and another.
All of this is not to short-change the magnetism of the works themselves. Bravo's works are as dynamic as they are idiosyncratic. Perhaps it is because these works do not resemble things that we might usually see in a contemporary space like the Wattis (they are, perhaps, a little bit too bright, a little bit too folksy, a little bit too unselfconscious), but something about this array of Bravo's work is incredibly inviting. Vibrantly colored-prints, oddly hewn sculptures made of collected twigs, sticks and things dragged in from a fishing expedition, and toys that Bravo crafted for Fletcher when he was young serve as anchors in the exhibition. Throughout the space, bundles of painted twigs, bound together with translucent tubes, mark particular spots like trail blazes. Coupled with the texts, written by Fletcher, designed to lead viewers through the personal narrative underlying the exhibition, these markers give off the impression that we are engaged in some sort of quest; moving amongst these objects, we become travelers to this site.
Selections invites us into the geography of this relationship-as-site. As we navigate the terrain of this decades long, mutually significant, but at times strained and distant relationship between Fletcher and Bravo, we are forced to engage with these objects on multiple levels. The personal narrative that underscores Selections diminishes the distance between the viewer and the works; no longer an exhibition of disinterested objects, Selections becomes a sort of personal archaeology. Encased within this context, with the layers of personal narrative surrounding, Bravo's works gain a new strength. Though the works themselves may seem peculiar set in this contemporary space, we are compelled to see them, through Fletcher's framing, as products of the hand, artifacts of a life, and relics of a relationship.
Amanda Hunt
While Harrell Fletcher's Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo greatly risks sentimentality, it somehow neatly manages to avoid it. The exhibition can be described as poignant, and, ultimately, tragic. For his participation in Wattis' Magnificent Seven series, Fletcher, a CCA alum, chose to select and curate works from fellow alumnus, ex-brother-in-law, and former professor Michael Bravo's life works. Selections from… reveals a relationship between two artists that has shifted from a deeply personal, familial one to something more professional, more objectively distanced. One wonders just how close the two men remain in the aftermath of their separation and of the collaboration we are privy to here. There is a melancholy that pervades the exhibition; as the wall text relates many years have elapsed between Bravo and Fletcher's loosely sustained contact, first as family members and later as student and professor. Michael Bravo has remained an aloof mentor to Fletcher over the course of his lifetime, and this curatorial endeavor functions as an attempt to map out their interwoven narratives.
Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo draws from Bravo's personal collection of work—one that inhabits the artist's home—and includes prints, lithographs, and sculpture, among ephemera and snapshots from the artists' conjoined past. Wooden toy ships that were made for Fletcher and his siblings sit, relics of the past, beside an oddly conglomerated sculpture that dangles from the ceiling, while a vast photographic landscape floats nearby a home video of Fletcher playing as a little boy. Resin sticks splashed with vibrant colors are placed haphazardly throughout the galleries, as if Bravo were guiding us through this meandering presentation of work and memory.
Much, if not all, of Harrell Fletcher's artistic practice relies on the connection between people; he seeks the rewards of collaboration by idiosyncratic means. My favorite example of this tendency was found in an excerpt from a video seen on the artist's website, from a project entitled The Sound We Make Together. In 2003, Fletcher invited various groups of people to be filmed conducting their everyday activities within the gallery space. These activities included a Baptist choir rehearsal and kindergartners sitting attentively before their teachers in small plastic chairs. Fletcher has worked extensively in the communities he inhabits since the 90s, engaging the local population to create atypical works that lean more towards a social practice tradition. It makes sense, then, that Fletcher has invited Bravo to collaborate at the Wattis.
In an interview conducted between the two artists for the exhibition, Fletcher reminisces about a stint spent working on a farm after earning his MFA, and how it satisfied his desire to "see the way a different system functioned", allowing it to affect and influence his own art practice. In a sense, Michael Bravo—his art and the man himself—can be understood as a "different system" that Fletcher has tried to reveal, another experience to apply to his personal practice. The tragedy, then, is that perhaps this system is not one meant to be decoded, despite Fletcher's best efforts.
David Kasprzak
The line between art object and artifact is thin at best. One needs only to look at exhibitions like Herzog and De Meuron's Natural History or Jean-Hubert Martin's La Magiciens de la Terre. In contemporary curatorial practice it is certainly not uncommon to find exhibitions that weave a historical narrative into works of art, but it is far more seldom that one comes across an exhibition as personal as Harrell Fletcher curating the works of artist Michael Bravo.
For his exhibition, as part of the Wattis Institute's series of exhibitions titled The Magnificent Seven, polymath Harrell Fletcher takes on the role of autobiographer as much as curator. Fletcher, along with Wattis Director Jens Hoffmann, selected several works by northern California artist Michael Bravo, whose work is as brash and playful as his name might suggest. At first glance, audiences may get the feeling that they are visiting an exhibition of local "folk" art or craft in a small town museum run by a board comprised of Rotary Club ladies, but on closer inspection one realizes there is something much more evocative at play.
Wooden toy boats float on plinths amidst a sea of found-material sculptures, playful illustrations, and vitrines holding yellowed photographs and ephemera. These personal pieces, coupled with the explanatory nature of the consecutive wall-texts, suggest a narrative flow to the exhibitions. As one continues to read and speculate, one discovers two congruent histories forming between Bravo and Fletcher. The two are, in fact, related by marriage.
With this information in mind the viewer moves on to the second and final gallery, where they are confronted with odd, doughnut-like wooden sculptures and lithographs of fish and tackle executed with expert skill. The juggling between the objects of a craftsman and the more abstract works of an artist further confuses the eye and mind. Are they suggesting that the two are one in the same? Could they possibly be created by the same hands? And does one hold more value than the other?
This mode of challenging the art world's preconceived notions and asking the viewer to decide is a method employed by Fletcher on a regular basis. He has a passion for finding the sublime in the mundane and overlooked. Whether it's a man selling rugs or developmentally challenged adults, Fletcher often removes them from their analogous surroundings and places them in a more contradicting sphere. By creating an exhibition from a man selling rugs in a gallery, Fletcher challenges our notions of an art hierarchy and asks us what exactly is an exhibition? Who gets to decide?
Just as The Magnificent Seven's Yul Brynner returns to the small Mexican village on the fringe to finish the job, Harrell Fletcher returns to his relationship with an overlooked paternal figure, not because he has to, but because in doing so he is uncovering and completing a personal mythology that has obviously informed his personal and creative practice. This practice has brought Fletcher to where he is needed to uncover and expose truths and visions that live on the margins of society, not as a savior but as an ally.
Susannah Magers
"I never broke with my Bay Area roots. Galleries, museums, the "world of art"—all were important too, but they were dwarfed by my need to establish contact with and absorb the unheard, unseen, undiluted mass of nature that would provide my fuel for the making of art."
This quote for me encapsulates, if not helps clarify, Michael Bravo's artistic intent and influence, and the genesis of the show, Harrell Fletcher: Selections from the Life and Work of Michael Bravo. Fletcher chose to show Bravo's personal art work in combination with his own objects, toys, etc. mined from his childhood that are also the result of Bravo's handiwork and creative process, and I see that exploration of ideas outside the "world of art" that Bravo references. This is particularly evident for me in the drawings of the lures, such as Terry Man, seemingly random renderings of various objects, which point to what Fletcher cites as the "extreme" nature of some of Bravo's work.
The difference in artistic process that is illuminated in the show literature between Fletcher and Bravo is also of interest, with Fletcher discussing how he tends to work conceptually while Bravo shows a definite "commitment to labor." Both share however, as the show seems to present, a commitment to sharing something deeply and personally invested. Their position as outsiders, as the theme of The Magnificent Seven series suggests, is apparent but not glaringly so. Rather than a struggle with society, the show presents an exercise in recontextualized personal objects that have a past. Filtered as they are through the lens of Fletcher's memory and anecdotal narrative, the wooden boats, tool kit, and other Bravo creations succeed in revealing another dimension of Bravo's practice and the blur between "private" art (intended for a specific audience, in this case that of a child) and art made for viewing in more traditional contexts (for educational and teaching purposes at art schools, or for a gallery show). This anecdotal narrative is found in the form of various (and necessary) wall texts. One gets the sense of Fletcher's voice speaking softly in the background, a guide to the significance of these objects and the exhibition as a whole.
For all that is included of Bravo's work, and despite the presence of a powerful physicality, his voice remains largely silent. This is perhaps intentional in Fletcher's curatorial approach to the exhibition. We are left with this silence, of fond memories conflicting with the realities of the present. The mobile in particular speaks to this, an exploration of and emphasis on the profundity of these hand-made tokens of a now entirely different relationship. Fletcher's accompanying wall text here serves as an example of this dear yet unsettling, removed yet definite existence of emotional attachment: "I only have vague memories of the mobile, but I'm sure it had profound effects on me." We get the sense that while imbued with nostalgia, the mobile (and all the pieces in the show) occupy a now uncertain space. Nevertheless, we leave with the understanding for why these objects were made, used and now given new life as remnants and symbolic, poignant reminders of what happens in the ever-changing course of a relationship.
Charles Moffett
Selections From the Life and Work of Michael Bravo is as much a story of the artist's career as it is a history of his relationship with the show's curator, artist Harrell Fletcher. Having been married to Fletcher's older sister, Sandra, for much of his childhood, his brother-in-law looked up to him as a role model and a mentor. Despite nearly a decade of silence between the two artists after Bravo and Sandra divorced, when it came time for Fletcher to go to college he enrolled at Humboldt State University where Bravo was a professor. Later he would attend California College of the Arts for his MFA, the same institution Bravo received his undergraduate and advanced degrees from. Because of this deep connection, perhaps one that Fletcher feels more than Bravo, a personal aura radiates from the walls, sits in vitrines, and hangs from the ceiling, but it is the organization of the show, not the works, that creates this atmosphere.
In the true spirit of The Magnificent Seven the latest installment of work goes beyond the traditional definition of exhibition-making. To call it a retrospective would be to limit the scope of this collection of art and artifacts. It is a solo-show, but whether it focuses more on the artwork of Michael Bravo or the life of Harrell Fletcher is for the viewer to decide. The artwork is not typical contemporary art gallery fare; it is abstract, but all together it borders on the surreal in the purist sense of the word. Accompanied by objects from the curator's childhood (gifts from Bravo to Fletcher), the amalgamation of art and personal items has stimulated the curator to organize an exhibition that emphasizes the show more than individual works. Toy boats, a mobile, and family photographs from the life Bravo and Fletcher shared are displayed just as prominently, if not more so, as the paintings, sculptures, and prints conceived by the artist.
Subconsciously or consciously the show is a personal narrative, a dialogue between the artists, but one directed by Fletcher. How could it not? It is a student organizing the work of a lifelong teacher, friend, and near father figure, a relationship that has endured its fair share of duress. The galleries of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts contain not only artwork, but also relics from Fletcher's childhood. They are from a time in the younger artist's life that he might be using in order to regain some sort of traction with the man who has served as a central source of inspiration.
Whether it is a personal item or an art object, each has its own story and brought together they epitomize the artist Michael Bravo helped Harrell Fletcher become. While at first mystifying, the work resonates with the viewer after considering the factors that went into organizing the show; the exhibition itself is the work of art that Fletcher has brought to The Magnificent Seven series.
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