{"id":1794,"date":"2009-01-19T19:46:21","date_gmt":"2009-01-19T17:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2009-01-19T19:51:12","modified_gmt":"2009-01-19T17:51:12","slug":"brandon-bauer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/19\/brandon-bauer\/","title":{"rendered":"UW-Milwaukee Grad Student feature: Brandon Bauer"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in a series of MFA student features from the graduate program I work in at Peck School of the Arts<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0 the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee<\/a>. These will <\/span><\/span>be cross-posted on the MyArtSpace.com blog<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Creative<\/a>
\nUW-Milwaukee Grad Student features are licensed under a
\n<\/span>Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Brandon Bauer<\/a> is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work explores how the strategy of collage creates or obscures meaning. Brandon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s art has been exhibited in the Aces(s) electronic media festival<\/a> in Pau, France, The European Media Arts Festival<\/a> in Osnabruck, Germany, and at Project 101<\/a> in Paris among several other national and international venues. His work has been produced in DVD editions, used as illustration for various editorial publications and books, and has been published in poster editions. Brandon has recently completed his MA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee<\/a>, and is currently pursuing his MFA with a focus on intermedia. Brandon is an adjunct Time Based Media faculty member at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Talk about your current practice. What do you make and why is that important to you?
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\nIn many ways I consider myself a collage artist, although I have an expanded definition of what collage is or can be. The products of the mediated world are my material starting point. It has only been in the last few years that I have fully embraced the concept of collage as my medium, and recognized the need for me to confront mediated images directly. I became aware in the last few years that I had always been responding to mediated forms in my work, and with that recognition, I found that I needed to work with these forms in a direct way. My recent exhibition Words Are Not Enough<\/a><\/em> at the Inova\/Arts Center Gallery<\/a> in Milwaukee was a critical examination of the products of the media sphere as well as different ways in which to work with them, analyze them, break them down, recombine them, unform them, and manipulate them. The exhibition was an investigation of ideology and the construction of discourse in the media as well as a critique of these operations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>Images and details from the Words Are Not Enough<\/em> exhibition, Inova\/Arts Center Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Fall 2008<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

What got you to this point? What were you doing or making before, and how did that lead you to this kind of production?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>I realized I had always been responding to the media in one way or another, and collage has been a constant component in my work, so in the last few years I decided to really concentrate on these forms, strategies, and methods. I think I first realized I was responding directly to media and mediated images in the 1990\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when the images surfaced of the emaciated prisoners in the camps during the war in the Balkans. After seeing those images I began working on a series that came to be called Hungry Ghosts<\/em>; the series encompassed paintings, drawings, and mixed media works that all depicted tall, withered, cadaverous figures. The collage element came into the works as newspaper pages and headlines buried in the paint so that they could only be seen or revealed by looking closely at the work. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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I Bury the Dead in My Belly<\/em>, from the series Hungry Ghosts<\/em>, mixed media on wood, 60 x 40.5 inches, 2001
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\n<\/strong>The biggest change in my work came as a result of 9\/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those events really made me reassess the role of art and the need to find a more responsive critical practice. Working on an oil painting for a month in the seclusion of the studio was not going to allow me the kind of direct critical response that I felt was necessary in face of the rush to war that occurred. It was actually quite an empowering moment to be an artist, I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the only one to feel that way, and that is what made it so empowering- there was an amazing surge of artistic activity as artists all over the world attempted to put their talents in the service of a critical response to the rush to war by the Bush administration. I was very fortunate to co-edit a book called Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated<\/a><\/em>, that chronicled the worldwide graphic response to the march to war by the United States. The Spanish language version of the book won the Ciutat prize for design in Barcelona for the year 2003. This was the first time that this massive surge of creativity was mounted to try to stop a war before it had even started. Most anti-war art historically has been made during ongoing conflicts, or when specific atrocities came to light, or in the case of graphic works like Goya\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Disasters of War<\/em>, <\/em>or Otto Dix\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Der Krieg,<\/em> made years after the fact. Anyway, it was during this time that I tried to find a more responsive critical practice, and looked for different ways of getting the work out there into the world. I did a number of flyers and stickers to be placed directly on the street, and started doing illustrations for publications like Clamor Magazine<\/a> <\/em>and Earth First!<\/a><\/em>, as well as working with other activist based art groups like Visual Resistance<\/a><\/em> and Just Seeds<\/a><\/em>. All of this made me think more critically about the function of art, and eventually led me to work with media as a material in a more specifically critical way.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated<\/em> cover<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>More Dead and Wounded Everyday<\/em> sticker and placement, created to mark the 1,000 U.S. casualty in the Iraq war, 2004<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>Corpobot<\/em>, Illustration for Clamor Magazine May\/June 2004<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Who inspires you – that you know personally, as well as historically or in contemporary practice?
\n<\/strong>
\nI am constantly inspired by my friends and so many of the people around me and what they do. Colin Matthes<\/a> is a good example. He is insanely productive and an immense talent; his last exhibition, War Fair: Occupation Games for Citizens and Non-Combatants<\/a><\/em>, was astounding – a combination of interactive carnival games as a critique of contemporary warfare. Colin and I collaborated on an exhibition in 2007 called Over There<\/a><\/em>, which brought together work we had both been producing independently as well as collaborative art we made specifically for that show. I think that collaboration opened up avenues and possibilities for both of us that we have continued to expand upon in our own ways. I love collaborative projects in general; that kind of work always motivates me and inspires me.<\/p>\n

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Brandon Bauer and Colin Matthes installing work for the Over There<\/em> exhibition, Brooks Barrow Gallery, Milwaukee WI, September 2007<\/span><\/p>\n

As for historic inspirations, I always come back to the collage and photomontage work of the Dada artists as well as the Neo-Dadaist assemblage work like Rauschenberg’s “combines” and the work of Bruce Connor. I consistently find new ways to appreciate the work from these two periods on many different levels. As for contemporary artists, I am very interested in the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, especially his public monuments, and the work of Cady Noland really intrigues me. I respond to the fearlessness of Hirschhorn’s work, and the fact that he takes the general public seriously as readers of philosophy. I love the innate democratic quality of his public art, and the fact that he is unafraid to confront theory with praxis. I am intrigued by Noland’s work with appropriated materials and her investigation of the undercurrent of violence in the American character. She is an artist whose work I want to spend more time with. My list of inspirations could really go on forever. I try to absorb everything I can, am an omnivorous reader and always hungry visually. Lately I have been reading a lot of Jacques Ranci\u00c3\u00a8re – his analysis of montage informed a lot of the work in my last exhibition, and I have recently picked up some of his non art-related critical writing on democracy, to see where it might lead me.
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\nTell us about your favorite and least favorite works of art from your entire repertoire – why they deserve those titles and what you learned from them.<\/strong><\/div>\n

Least favorite… that is honestly a very difficult question for me because I get something out of everything I make, successful or not. I tend to rework things endlessly so a piece I am not happy about may get cut up and recombined into a new work, or may be worked over until it feels right. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like Colin<\/a> said as we were collaborating on work for the Over There<\/a><\/em> exhibition, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m paraphrasing him: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153either it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be great or I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to run it into the ground- there is no in-between\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s basically it, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m either going to make it work or create an absolute disaster. Usually my unsuccessful pieces get re-purposed or reworked into new pieces. Art is a fluid process for me, and in that way there are no real failures\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I almost wish I would make a spectacular disaster- it may be my greatest work!<\/p>\n

As for my favorite, that’s hard too… I guess I would have to say I really love the work I was doing in 2006, because that work was a point in which all of my concerns started coming together. I am particularly fond of much of the collage work I did then, as well as the video work in the short\/cuts<\/em> series, which was a series of 30 short videos experimenting with a variety of different aspects of the video medium. There was just an openness and honesty in the work I was making then, I was trying to zero in on what motivated me to make work and why, and I think it comes across in those pieces. My current work owes a great debt to that period of focused experimentation.<\/p>\n

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Grassroots Congress<\/em>, mixed media and collage on paper 4 x 6 inches, 2006<\/span><\/p>\n

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IR<\/em>, mixed media and collage on paper 4 x 6 inches, 2006<\/span><\/p>\n

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And<\/em>, mixed media and collage on paper 4 x 6 inches, 2006<\/span>
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\nWhat are you working on right now, and where do you see your work headed next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>Right now I am in the midst of the preparatory work for a rotoscope animation project, and there are a number of threads I touched on in my exhibition Words Are Not Enough<\/em> that I want to continue, expand upon and develop further. I also work with a number of other people on various projects and we have some irons in the fire. I recently contributed to a portfolio project<\/a> through Just Seeds<\/a> about the prison industrial complex that will tour through Canada and has some other exhibition dates slated in the US. I will have a DVD released soon of video collaborations I did with the Milwaukee based experimental noise musician Peter J. Woods<\/a>, and I am involved with ongoing projects for the BATHAS Internationale<\/a>, which is an anonymous participatory umbrella collective project that explores how the modernist avant-garde notion of negation as revolt has been taken up by subcultures in contemporary society. I am in discussions with A. Bill Miller<\/a> of Master-List 2000<\/a> about a BATHAS\/Master-List 2000 net-art collaboration, but that is still in the initial stages. I will have a review of Jacques Ranci\u00c3\u00a8re’s The Future of the Image<\/a> <\/em>published in the next edition of the FATE<\/a> journal discussing its use in foundations level pedagogy. Beyond that my wife and I just had our first baby, so maybe I need to find an art practice that just involves me holding my little baby girl…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the first in a series of MFA student features from the graduate program I work in at Peck School of the Arts,\u00c2\u00a0 the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. These will be cross-posted on the MyArtSpace.com blog. UW-Milwaukee Grad Student features are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License Brandon Bauer is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,3,7,38,9,8,29,25,19,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-art-and-tech","category-me","category-milwaukee-art","category-pop-culture","category-re-blog-tidbits","category-research","category-reviews","category-stimulus","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9blZT-sW","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1707,"url":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/20\/uw-milwaukee-grad-exhibition\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":0},"title":"UW-Milwaukee grad exhibition","author":"nathaniel","date":"20 November 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In "art"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/category\/art\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1747,"url":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/23\/beer-baron-breweries-animated-gifs\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":1},"title":"Beer Baron \/ Breweries animated GIFs","author":"nathaniel","date":"23 December 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a great project by A. Bill Miller and Brandon Bauer in Milwaukee. Say the artists (slightly edited): The work was presented at the Blatz Building in Milwaukee as part of the Make Your Own History group exhibition. This site is more in line with what we originally intended for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "art"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/category\/art\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Blatz Beer Baron","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.master-list2000.com\/abillmiller\/beerbaronsbreweryworkers\/beerbarons-animatedgif\/Brewer-09.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1693,"url":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/27\/sprawl-group-exhibition-in-milwaukee\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":2},"title":"SPRAWL: Group Exhibition in Milwaukee","author":"nathaniel","date":"27 October 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"[November 7-23 2008] [Borg Ward Collective] [823 W. National Ave, Milwaukee, WI] [Opening Nov 7 6-10pm] [Gallery Talk Nov 7, 7pm, Music to Follow] [Gallery Hours Fridays 4-8pm Saturdays 12-5pm, or by appointment: gridworks1@gmail.com] [http:\/\/www.master-list2000.com\/sprawl\/] [Participating Artists]: Ric Stultz, Annushka Gisella Peck, Gina Rymarcsuk, Brandon Bauer, Bathas TV, Paul Fuchs,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "art"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/category\/art\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"SPRAWL digital art exhibition Milwaukee","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/10\/sprawl-postcard-horizontal-02.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1685,"url":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/14\/peck-school-of-the-arts-uwm-open-house-this-saturday-kenilworth-sqare-east-milwaukee-wisconsin\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":3},"title":"Peck School of the Arts, UWM Open House this Saturday. Kenilworth Sqare East, Milwaukee Wisconsin","author":"nathaniel","date":"14 October 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Come check out grad student and faculty art works at the Kenilworth Square East Open House this Saturday, part of Gallery Night and Day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin! I'll be installing a guerrilla version of my award-winning interactive installation, stuttering, to help promote the new Interdisciplinary Arts & Technology program (currently\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "art"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/category\/art\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1866,"url":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/11\/uw-milwaukee-grad-student-feature-mairin-hartt\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":4},"title":"UW-Milwaukee Grad Student feature: Mairin Hartt","author":"nathaniel","date":"11 March 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the second in a series of MFA student features from the graduate program I work in at Peck School of the Arts,\u00c2\u00a0 the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. These will be cross-posted on the MyArtSpace.com blog. UW-Milwaukee Grad Student features are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "art"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/category\/art\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1897,"url":"https:\/\/nathanielstern.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/23\/uw-milwaukee-grad-student-feature-sarah-holden\/","url_meta":{"origin":1794,"position":5},"title":"UW-Milwaukee Grad Student feature: Sarah Holden","author":"nathaniel","date":"23 April 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the third in a series of MFA student features from the graduate program I work in at Peck School of the Arts, the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. These will be cross-posted on the MyArtSpace.com blog. 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