MARTIN BRIEF
Success
ink on paper, 17.5” x 25” drawing size, 35” x 45” paper size, 2011
ink on paper, 17.5” x 25” drawing size,
35” x 45” paper size, 2011
Success is comprised entirely of definitions. It begins with the definition of the word success and is followed by the definition for each of the words in that definition and so on. Each word is defined one time (unless it was used in a new context) and the process continued until there were no new words remaining to define. In the end this “complete” definition includes 4,999 entry words and 5,811 definitions. Read a review of the show by Jessica Baran
Success at Isolation Room by Jessica Baran from the Riverfront Times
Founding Fathers-brand American pragmatism confronts The Apprentice-era febrile careerism in St. Louis-based artist (and 2010 Great Rivers Biennial winner) Martin Brief's obsessive and self-satirizing meditation on the word success. In minuscule uppercase, Brief handwrote verbatim every definition of this ungraspable trophy of a word as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, then proceeded to copy the definitions of every word used in that definition. The outcome is a scrupulously circumscribed square on an otherwise pristine sheet of paper — a secular Dead Sea scroll that, from a distance, looks like flickering television static and elicits the kind of awe inspired by, say, Jesus' portrait inked on a grain of rice. Here, however, form intentionally matches function: An utterly familiar term, as dear to our national ethos as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, slips further from comprehension with every fastidious attempt to grasp it. Squint closely and you'll be rewarded with a fittingly surreal aggregation of fragmentary meanings: "a sum of money"; "a small dissenting group within a larger one"; "various random directions"; "the belief in a super-human controlling power"; "the passage of fluid"; "an organic matter"; "to hunt and kill for food." Substitute three-car garages, country-music stardom, hometown heroism, science fair blue ribbon, hedge-fund ownership, becoming a nun, posing for a centerfold — anything, in short, that our enlightened populace prizes and propagandizes — and it'd come to the same thing. The difference being that Brief has spared us the painstaking labor and given us the tidy parcel of gray haze it all amounts to.
Jessica Baran Jessica Baran is a poet, curator, critic and Director of Curatorial and Program Development at Barrett Barrera Projects and projects+gallery. The author of three poetry collections, she is the former art writer for the Riverfront Times (2008-2012), Assistant Director of White Flag Projects (2008-2011), and Director of fort gondo compound for the arts (2012-2016). She also lectures intermittently at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art and St. Louis University’s Prison Arts & Education program.