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Justin Lieberman
The work of Brian Bress will be featured in the upcoming exhibition California Video at the Getty Museum in L.A. March 15–June 8.
Brian Bress. Courtesy of the artist.At first glance, it would seem that the work of Brian Bress is completely inscrutable. This is a bit odd considering the interpretive translucency of collage, the medium at the heart of his multi-faceted practice. How is it that art with so much figuration, narrative, and cultural referencing seems to resist interpretation, except in terms of the formal concerns of color and composition? Therein lies the clue. Bress works with visual codes whose very familiarity has stripped them of their meaning. He exploits the viewer’s impulse to search for meaning by speaking in a visual language that hovers just on the edge of legibility.
To even begin to decipher what it is that Bress does, it is important to review a bit of the backstory. At the center of the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin was the idea that by eliminating the rhetorical conceits of language, one could arrive at the essential core of what was being spoken. It is often said that this technique—by way of MTV—is the origin of modern video editing. The irony is that Burroughs’s intentions were as political as they were aesthetic. The cut-up technique was meant to expose the hidden messages of advertising and the motives of corrupt politicians. Today the cut-up has been rendered invisible by its absorption into the ubiquitous language of the moving image. We now take it for granted that disparate images rendered into a sequence share a common goal. What would have once seemed a disjunctive mishmash is now received and deciphered intuitively.
In making the juxtapositions in his videos and collages seem so alien, Bress recoups the cut-up—if not for its political purpose, then for its aesthetic potential. They are like advertisements whose products and target demographics remain obscured. By speaking in a language we know, he exploits the fact that we will try to "read" the works. Yet he purposefully fractures his sentences to frustrate this very impulse. We are forced to return to a distanced objectivity. From this stance, we are only capable of interpreting his charged subject matter as compositional elements. This in turn exposes abstraction for what it really is: an elitist game in which the chosen few bestow themselves with a breadth of vision unavailable to the "plebian masses." Yet it is the language of the people that Bress speaks fluently.
Through his work, Bress introduces a kind of narrative noise into the contemporary media forms he parodies. Noise is defined as "any undesirable signal in the transmission of a message" such as the crackling in a radio transmission, static on a television screen, or an inkblot on a newspaper page. Ultimately there is no real difference between signal and noise, save the intent of the transmitter. Noise is a signal the sender does not want to transmit. It is also a signal we do not want to hear.
The work of Brian Bress expands the definition of noise even further by revealing and exploiting the oft-ignored truth that all communication is a negotiation between signal and noise. Through his seamless vacillations between established cultural signals and the narrative noise he creates to disrupt them, he establishes a non-oppositional model of these concepts, one that is free of essentialist ideologies and notions of purity.
