“Walk during a few moments very consciously in a certain direction.”
Artist stanley brouwn played a foundational role in the international emergence of Conceptual art during the 1960s. Based in Amsterdam, brouwn transformed the everyday activity of walking into art, in parallel with contemporaries who also used walking as their artistic medium. His refusal to allow images of his work or personal information to be shared made him a famously elusive artist. In 1980, De Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, had the following to say about the artist: “He does not give interviews, does not allow himself to be photographed, and does not permit introductions or explanatory texts in catalogs or at exhibitions. The only thing he shares of himself is his work, and it must speak for itself.”
Brouwn’s self-imposed absence was intended to focus all attention on his practice and process, reinforcing the intellectual goals set forth by Conceptual art and further aligning him with his peers. As a result, while his art has been widely recognized in artistic circles, it largely escaped the notice of a broad public. A 1971 article discussing Brouwn even stated that “the artist increasingly risked walking away from his audience.”
The city of Amsterdam played a significant role in brouwn’s art and served as the backdrop for much of his work. Initially associated with the Dutch Nul group, an offshoot of the German Zero group that sought new relationships between art and reality, brouwn soon destroyed his earliest works—transparent polythene bags filled with trash and hung from the ceiling. He soon became included in various events and publications of the emerging Fluxus movement, which aimed to counter traditional highbrow arts and integrate art into everyday life through performance events. One of brouwn’s early experiments involved scattering pieces of paper on the city’s streets for people biking and walking to leave their traces on. Although brouwn’s approach later changed, he remained devoted to creating works that put individual experiences of the city’s landscape at their center.
Brouwn’s experimental beginnings led to the creation of a thematically consistent body of work that explored and reimagined ideas about space and distance. In This Way Brouwn, his most popular series of artworks, he stationed himself on a street and approached passersby to ask them to write down directions to a nearby destination of his choosing. These many written directions were transformed into artworks stamped with the phrase “This Way Brouwn.” According to brouwn, this project infused the routes in question with the “most primal aspect of our being: the ability to move.” The experience of moving and walking became central to his practice. Through this trailblazing participatory technique, brouwn invited the spectator to become part of the creative process and experience the work through the perspective of the artist who orchestrated it. As a result, even if he sought to remain anonymous, Brouwn remained an omnipresent influence in all his works.
Later in the 1970s, brouwn created a novel measurement system using his own body as the standard to explore how distances are perceived. Combining an abbreviation of his name and units of measurement based on his own body, he introduced the “sb-foot,” “sb-cubit,” and “sb-step.” This system made distance, often seen as an abstract and relative concept, tangible. Rather than focusing on objective reality, brouwn explored how we categorize space and distance, stating, "Every step has its own identity.” His extensive body of work included examinations of shoes and shoe stores, annotated city maps with highlighted routes and scribbled directions, photographic documentation of urban scenes, and more, all centered on the singular and collective experiences of space, distance, and walking.
More than physical manifestations, brouwn’s art embodied the way he viewed life, seamlessly integrating his presence into the urban fabric he navigated and explored. As Brouwn said, “My work is a way of existing, a way of being.”
Isabelle Britto, independent scholar, 2024
Note: opening quote is from “Stanley Brouwn. Art & Project Bulletin #11. 1969 | MoMA,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed June 9, 2024, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/122508.