Erotic method Sensual intelligence, a richly eclectic awareness of visual references, a vivid painterly imagination, and a terrific force

of generative energy are all strikingly present in Cecily Browns work. Robust in scale and subject matter, these works flicker at the hallucinatory edge between figural representation and gestural abstraction. A subtle quality of ambivalence animates the surface of these paintings, serving as a ground of emergence, a field of potentialities for awakening perception. Browns painterly imagination works between facture and figure. She suffuses her marks with associative suggestivity. The boundary-loosening condition of arousal charges the atmosphere of her canvases so that limb and lip and tongue and hip, swatch and patch, stroke and line, move into and out of each other, interpenetrating space and substance. The paintings sustain a condition of indeterminate specificity, a state of prolonged tension on the edge of final definition, deferring closure. A nude sits waiting, prize or conquest, aware and eager for attention. Elsewhere two figures embrace, entwined and utterly absorbed in each other. In the scene of an intimate afternoon, they are locked into conversation and exchange, until the line between decorum and abandon gets blurred past all distinction and each knows the other as itself in exploratory dialogue. Browns work is an argument for embodied intelligence, the demonstration of a postCartesian sensibility that integrates the faculties of sensuality and intellect in a wholistic mode of cognition. Aware, alive, sensate, complex, it is energized by the capacity of body to be mind and vice versa so that the very distinction loses all meaning or value. The opposition between intellect and sensuality, with all its overtones of moral judgment, became a philosophical foundation for much of Western thought. Overcoming its institutionalize place is tantamount to overthrowing the basis of much of what passes for knowledge. Descartes did not invent the charge against the flesh, or characterize its capacity for knowing so pejoratively (he didnt have to, Church fathers had done it for him, a millennium earlier, extending a longer legacy of biases against the body). But his differentiation of mind and body thrust a forceful dualism on the modern world. Empirical sciences, mathematics, and logical procedures obtained their legitimacy through a marked distinction between the knowing subject and a supposedly discrete object of knowledge. A young woman sits, against a tree, almost unaware of her posture, absorbed and nonchalant. Her feet are poised with just enough tension to keep the book open in her field of vision, as she lets her glance pause on the draping pages. The mind-body opposition repeats endlessly in the development of the natural and physical sciences, and then passes to the social sciences, also aspiring to disembodied objectivity. Deluded legions of scholars and theologians, pedagogues and philosophers, have practiced in accord with these notions for centuries as if the body were not the mind. Twisted binarisms impose a grotesque distortion on the human condition, structuring a hierarchy into methods of learning, teaching, knowing. How t get beyond

the mind-body split, the subject-object distinctions, the peculiar sense that humanities are soft knowledge and the sciences hard fact? How to assert the primacy of visual knowledge in its own right, not as secondary or illustrational or dependent upon language? The monstrous and dysfunctional distinctions between reason and sensation, logic and interpretation have to be undone. In a room in disarray, a woman sits in an air of casual chaos. The open, halfemptied drawers, spill their contents with a certain abandon, as if in disregard for the codes of order or decorum. Reds and pinks and violets are everywhere in the messy interior, speaking a code of feminine privacy, luxury, and leisure. The old Cartesian paradigms are long gone from the physiological study of brain and mind, but still linger like Newtonian mechanistic models in the popular mainstream. Nonetheless, body knowledge is a well-known phenomenon among the practitioners of performing arts (painting should be counted among these, in company with music and dance) as well as in the crafts and trades where hand and eye still get trained through apprenticeship to journeyman and master. But traditional pedagogy eschews the virtues of embodied learning. The highest levels of academic life and theory scholarly methods are practically defined by their distance from the supposedly baser impulses of production. Lovers embrace in an absorbing struggle, locked into their dialogue, lost to all awareness but their moment to moment interest in each other. Intelligence, the capacity for discernment and perception, is an embodied quality, not an abstraction. The legacy of Cartesian distinctions put a premium on abstracting idea from matter. But the embodied mind is a powerful demonstration of the non-existence of pure abstractions and of the equal impossibility of any essentialized authority of the body. The material condition of knowledge in all forms eschews both. Browns work goes farther as she makes a passionate, significant display of moving beyond the outmoded Cartesian concept of knowledge and towards a cognitive process of knowing. She exposes as obsolete any conviction that something may exist as an object, stable, concrete, discrete and replaces it with an embrace of emergence, where identities and boundaries are in a continual condition of investigation. Such continual invention and play, the deferral of closure, and refusal of hard and stable categories are all tenets of a poststructuralist sensibility, here realized as a method. A double play of mortal imagery, skull and youth, death and children, girls and their fragile existence, poignantly troubles the ephemeral play of an image that sustains and sentences them simultaneously. Painted twice, once in the image of the day, this day, a tea party intimacy, innocent and unawares. As an embodied practice of knowing, painting awakens us to immediacy and mediation simultaneously. The painter makes a vibrant trace of experience as it occurs. Thats what painting is, it cant be any other way. Painting is this kind of knowing, a methodological argument for cognition as a process of exchange between a body disposed to certain

kinds of stimulation and a phenomenal, cultural world available to be processed into perceptible forms. Knowingthe term is thick with new age deconstructive play in the fertile fields of behaviors and unstable practices, rather than certainties. Erotic charge seems to be everywhere in these works, as has been noted and commented on much and elsewhere. But Browns approach is not the libidinal flow of a peinture feminine. Her work is far too self-consciously engaged with the symbolic realm, with the signs and icons of art and visual culture. Her painting isnt defined by the subject matter of sexual intimacy, but by the methodology of its intimate dynamic as a system of production among others. Surface play and figurative reference dissolve through a system of exchange, calling on an inventory of visual sources. Browns painterly economy of erotic method engages the resources of paint in the pleasure principle of return on all investment, savvy and informed. A landscape thrives with life, fecundity, the vibrant spirit of energy abounding and moving between the shape of air and atmosphere and the figures of trees and brush, horizon and space between, all charged with movement and dynamic form. The higher order of compositional organization in Browns work references the grand tradition of theatrical landscapes filled with figures allegorical, historical, or observed. Their imagery calls forth terms that stream from the antique gambol and dalliance, virtue and pursuit, bucolic revels and pastoral delights a kind of visual punning play on scenes of Arcadia. No critical distance, no arch tone of critical appropriation or superiority to her sources is even hinted at in this work. Her dialogue with history is up close and intimate. She pulls her virtuosic brushwork into playful reference forestalling closure. She engages with her sources as if in a lovers provocation to another touch, another exchange, excitement rising with response at the level of the mark, swatch, line of the brush drawn through the wet paint. At the same time, she throws herself into the grand scale, creating the enormous theatrical spaces that reference the traditions of Venetian painters, the monuments of the Baroque. These spectacles are staged under a canopy of trees, in the scenography of rolling hills and opportunistic valleys meeting an obliging shoreline, against the backdrop of a classic vista disappearing into mist. These scenes refer to Titian and Rubens, but also to the moderns, Matisse and Cezanne. Still, they flaunt their contemporary identity in the flash and flicker of surface dynamics. Browns approach to the past is opportunistic, shot through with smart fast drive towards remix and remediation, made anew and for our times, our eyes. A dark room presents a chill and ceremonial scene, the site of some feast or ceremony, now passed. It lies in a state of abandon, cluttered with the residue of an event that might have passed recently or eons ago. The darkness reclaims the space, cloaking its corners, and silver moonlight touches one spot after another. Browns new work can be read in relation to the substantial and growing corpus of her own activity, as well as in relation to the varied predecessors on whose work she draws so eclectically. Everything is staged, self-consciously, with acute awareness of the borrowings and referential play. But unlike the exhausted always-already sensibility of an intermediate generation of painters, Brown has the vibrant enthusiasm of the mid-century

abstractionists finding their way into a loosening of representational rules even as they explored that compelling space where figure and ground, surface invention and legible image, are all called up for investigation. This is work in a hinge space, where the hinge is the dividing line, the defining instant, the moment or element that belongs at once to two or more forms so that it is always describing and being, putting itself at the service of reference and also exuberantly, completely self-realized as a gestural trace. That is a fully contemporary sensibility, even inspired by Gorky and Kandinsky, early Rothko or late Pollock, de Kooning and Krasner, Rivers and Hartigan. Reaching farther back, Browns painterly vitality echoes passages in the canvases of Delacroix. He offered his own model of erotic painting, rapidly produced in a fever of late-night excitement, happening so fast it both shows and is, reads and breathes, references and exists simultaneously. In a punning reference to a Pollock masterwork, the image makes its point with rhythm marked and obvious. The upper parts of the figures disappear from view and depiction mimicking their momentary loss of all awareness of anything except the piston workings of their determined parts in primal, basic engagement with each other. Brown is versed in the feints and snares of mediated culture. Her canvases make a claim for painting in the crowded visual world. Her works seem not so much finished, as paused, looked up from and then left, because the realities of material substrate are such that a canvas reaches a point of surfeit, enough is on it, that any more just layers and covers the living trace of that experiential activity. But the process could go on and on. If the canvas were a living skin, a surface capable of continual replenishment and renewal, redrawn at the refresh rate of an electronic monitor, then the only end would be a final exhaustion of painterly energies. Painting is not outside the world of visual media, but is one of its sites and frames. Embodied and mediated, the erotic method is a way of knowing through the transformation of experience into expression, and Brown is among its most artful and talented practitioners. The sap that runs is life force, energy, some new age version of lan vital, a continual pulse, the very substance of new life coming back into being in spring light and limb, coursing with eager optimism into every branch and fibril, every fingertip and touch, every lip and line the tongue and brush describe.

Johanna Drucker Charlottesville, VA 2006