Trevor Brown – A Graphic Autopsy

Trevor Brown, English-born artist living in Japan since 1993, has to be regarded as one of the central figures of the contemporary underground-art panorama. Indeed, so many up and coming artists seem to owe a lot to his ‘Baby art’ both in terms of inspiration and for what concerns the very content of their artistic production. The mixture of cuteness and perversion which can be found in most of Brown’s works has set a standard which many others seem to try and imitate; not surprisingly, only a few succeed in the task of recreating the successful mixture of a crude and disenchanted outlook on sexuality with a light-hearted and ironic take on the same which makes Trevor Brown’s work so unique. One only needs to look at Brown’s “Medical Fun” in order to enjoy the artist’s incredible versatility which allowed him to pick a very specific subject (art with a medical theme) and to come out with so many different interpretations of the same.

The artist’s peculiar and instantly recognisable style has evolved dramatically through the years, both in terms of medium (from ink drawing to airbrush painting, some sporadic examples of ‘computer art’, then oil painting, etc), content (from pornographic art, Lolitas, dolls, fetish-oriented art, S/M practices, to ‘cuter’ and more ironic subject matters as for his latest work “Li’l Miss Sticky Kiss”) and approach towards the subject matter of his work (his paintings and drawings successfully merging material both adult/fetishistic and playful/ironic/cute in nature). However, regardless of Brown’s work’s many tints, one can always instantly recognize the artist’s unique style.

In its earliest period (mid-eighties), Trevor Brown's art seemed to be influenced by ‘cult’ artists such as Romain Slocombe and some of the members of the French art-collective Bazooka Group (especially Kiki and LouLou Picasso): some members of the Bazooka Group (mainly active from mid 70’s to the early 80’s, and finally back together in a new incarnation since the end of 2002) are rightly considered among the pioneers of the so-called ‘medical art’; not only the medical theme (presented mostly under a fetishistic guise), but also other key elements of the Bazooka Group’s peculiar style (for example, the organic integration of texts within the graphics) recur in Trevor Brown’s earlier works.

Around 1985, Brown started publishing his first photocopy books (“Graphic Autopsy”, “Necro Porno”, etc.) nowadays, of course, nearly impossible to get hold of and proportionally sought after, followed by album covers for cult bands such as Coil and Whitehouse. It is during this period that the artist finally reached a certain degree of notoriety in the underground circuits, especially among the fans of ‘power-electronics’ music.

Approximately in 1992 Brown turns his attention to airbrush painting, and in the following year he decides to move to Tokyo with his partner, teddy-bear artist Konomi Izumi (AKA Hippie Coco). From this moment onwards (and, very arguably, as a direct result of his change of location) Brown’s work gradually assumed a more contrasted tint: the author’s fetishistic take on sexuality and wounding became merged with an increasing childishness in both the style and the subjects of his works. Brown’s never-ending interest in ‘Lolita art’ set the scene for the birth of the artist’s trademark, the ‘sinister innocence’ which I will be discussing in a short while.

It is precisely at this stage of development of his career that the famous human-like dolls begin to make an appearance, so that 1992 has probably to be regarded as a crucial date for the artist. For many, Trevor Brown’s work will be always identified with this specific period of his career (and with the airbrush paintings in particular). However, during the second half of the 90’s (which means at the very same time as most of the airbrush works) the artist also started producing the “Mania” series, photocopy books dedicated to the exploration of a range of fetishes (scat, bondage, female genitalia, etc). These drawings, which represent an evolution of the artist’s earliest style, proved that Brown’s art had not forgotten its former (harsh, adult, sexual, visceral) roots in favour of the newer (cuter?) style: these two different ‘moods’ permeating his work seem to inhabit the same space, the one suddenly replacing the other and even more frequently, overlapping one over the other. This is, in my opinion, the artist’s greatest strength: to never allow the viewer to approach his work from a pre-determined standpoint.

Since the birth of the ‘Babyart’ (a definition nowadays widely used in relation to Brown’s work, but also frequently applied to the works of those artists which have followed Brown’s insights and have tried to mimic elements of his style), most of the artist’s artworks have been built upon a contrast: tenderness and vulnerability are often juxtaposed to harsh violence and sadistic cruelty. The representation of an innocent childhood, for example, is never completely separated from that of a more or less explicit abuse; this is both its ‘stain’ and its ‘beauty mark’. Sexual obsession, the other major thematic pillar upon which Brown’s work is built, sometimes assumes dark, perverted tones, while other times it is presented simply as a playful, painful thing. Brown hides his obscure object of desire in the contrasts of his work.

The turn of the century brought Trevor Brown to experiment with oil painting. In 2001 he published the masterpiece “Medical Fun”, a well-rounded collection of most of his ‘medical’ work. Finally, in 2003, the artist published the magnificent “Crash Candy”, seventh instalment of the “Mania” series, dedicated to car crashes and limited to only 40 copies; meanwhile he also starts working on two forthcoming projects, “Li’l Miss Sticky Kiss” something along the lines of a Trevor Brown’s character with its own brand of products which will be published the following year, and “Eroscape”, a project (now sadly put on hold) which is partially based on the artist’s earlier experiences with ‘computer art’ and which tries to create ‘bodyscapes’ made of multiple penetrations, genitalia and orifices arranged in patterns. Finally, at the end of Spring 2004, Brown also published a magnificent set of 12 silkscreen prints called “Crash Babies”, something of a complementary project to “Crash Candy”: this set, possibly Brown’s artistic peak, is composed of a series of screen-prints depicting orgiastic intercourses among hollowed out (broken?) dolls, presented over a background composed of scenes from different car crashes. This work, stylistically crude and ‘bodily’ as only the “Mania” series before, seems to act as cluster for most of the artist’s declared obsessions: car crashes, trauma, sex, and doll-like humans (or, maybe, human-like dolls?) also acknowledging rather directly the influence of J. G. Ballard’s work over the artist.

One of the central elements of Trevor Brown’s imagery is indeed his fetishization of bruises and wounds; the artist’s paintings and illustrations primarily focus around a representation of unresolved violence by portraying scenes of a (mainly fetishistic and/or sadomasochist) sexual nature in which abuses appear most of the times ‘in limbo’, somehow suspended in time: these have often just taken place, or otherwise seem to be about to happen, but are rarely portrayed in the very moment of their resolution. Bruises, a recurring element to the artist’s work, appear to be a sort of ‘trademark’ for him; no body seems to be immune from the sexual frenzy affecting Trevor Brown’s deflagrating brushes, there is no inch of skin which is left immaculate, and each body-part, each object depicted in the paintings and illustrations of the artist seem to inevitably get caught in a web of repeated traumas. To say it with J.G. Ballard’s words, everything seems to come together in a ‘coronation of wounds’, a multiplication of injuries towards the infinite, an overlapping of bodies and genitalia, a mixture of trauma and juissance.

It is not an easy task to discuss Trevor Brown’s work due to its sometimes ambiguous and obscure characteristics: it depicts situations which run along the borders between a game and real violence, playfulness and aggressiveness, between consent and abuse, between the childishness of the subjects it describes and the adultness of the themes it concerns. There is no direct condemnation, nor a celebration of the subject matters, Brown’s glance over them is clinical, suspended, disenchanted. Bodies (mostly those of child-like dolls) are portrayed in the act of being tortured, sexually violated, penetrated, beaten, opened up; each body-part and each orifice is explored through the use of sex toys or other devices, it is made explicit, no body-part remains immaculate, untouched. Where erotic art celebrates the seduction of what is left partially veiled, Trevor Brown embraces the honesty and transparency of pornography, tearing apart the skin of the girls he portrays as to unveil their true nature, stripping sex bare of the nonsense constituted by the bourgeois ‘seduction’ in order to depict it in its crudity.

As for childhood, S/M practices also undergo a re-writing on behalf of the artist: Brown indeed shares an interest in sadomasochism, bondage and fetishism (“the Mania” series is nothing but a celebration of the artist’s own obsessions); however, in some of his works, Brown strives to characterise each of these themes with a playful and innocent character without ever recurring to a moralising and/or ‘politically correct’ take on the subject: this is particularly evident if we take into consideration pieces such as “Bondage Tape” in which a bondage videotape is turned into a Shibari-like constriction wrapped around a doll’s body (as for traditional Japanese rope bondage) or “Playground”, in which a little girl is tied up by means of her very own toys.

Bodies and body-parts are put under the spotlight by the artist; they seem to merge and connect with the environment, with the background, the other elements and objects which inhabit each of the ‘scenes’ depicted: in doing so they become part of what Deleuze & Guattari would call ‘an assemblage’. Each bruise also connects back to the torture-device which has inscribed it in the piece of skin where it belongs. Each bruise, paraphrasing Genesis P. Orridge’s view of body-modifications (see Juno & Vale 1989) is a ‘diary entry’: it tells a story made of semen and blood.

Bruises, scars, and body-marks, from a sadomasochistic perspective, are often understood in terms of ownership: they seal a contract, representing the brand of the Master on the servant’s skin, bonding the latter to the former. Furthermore they also function as a semi-permanent embodiment of the Master’s fantasy, which becomes inscribed on one of the elements of the fantasy itself (namely, the servant’s body). But bruises may also stand as witnesses of the servant’s own desire, of his/her will to become part of the Master‘s fantasy, of the servant’s very wish to submit to the Master’s (master)plan. If, and I stress ‘if’, we are given a body in ownership by nature at birth, the bruises are witnesses of a trade, a change of ownership which has taken place, a shift in perspective between two individuals, no longer equal in strength and power but tightly bound one to the other.

As in David Cronenberg’s cinema (where bruises and wounds have to be connected to a non-linear view of evolution, the body and life) the work of Trevor Brown explores the possibility of employing our bodies in manners which are not self-evident, or pre-determined. Sexuality is ‘perverted’ from its own natural path while desire rebels against biology and against any form of social control being exerted on the body, assuming polymorph forms and investing each body part with the liberating power of a fibrillating excitement. Sex is, in Brown’s work, bodily, never merely genital. Sexual intercourse stops being limited to the involvement of specific and designated areas of the human body (such as the genitalia, the rectum, the mouth) and is instead made to invest the surface of the human body as a whole. In Brown’s work we have a body ready for (sexual) connections in every inch of its surface, a body which actually asks for these connections to take place, for desire to travel through its own flesh. These are indeed “Bodies without Organs” (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) , structures whose functions have been drastically reconfigured; they rebel to the linear path of a Darwinian evolution (as in the case of the foetus giving birth Brown portrayed in “Answer Me”), they overcome the hegemony of heterosexual (canonical) genital intercourse and instead choose to indulge, explore and experiment all the other possibilities available to them.

In “LoveLove” Brown portrays two Siamese dolls kissing each other in an auto-erotic hug. The two dolls share the arms, the torso and one leg: what is interesting is that their condition seems to be enhancing rather than limiting for their intercourse. Siamese twins are generally considered to be sharing a handicap which limits their existences, until their status is resolved through a surgical intervention: this definitely is not the case in this piece, quite the opposite in fact. Instead of being depicted as two organism deprived of the possibility of being independent one from the other, the dolls seem to be organically merged; one wouldn’t be able to think of them as ‘complete’ if they were to become suddenly separated. The creature composed of these two dolls’ physical and organic interconnection seems the prototype of a new form of human being, one that is erotically self-sufficient, one that is finally ‘whole’…maybe this painting is the nemesis of the Catholic myth of Eve being born from Adam’s rib, a creature born out of an addendum, rather than originating from a separation, from the removal of a piece of Adam’s body, from a scission of sort. The dolls’ Siamese condition appears as a blessing, their being ‘other than human’ (different and detached from human ‘normality’) might be equivalent to be ‘more then human’, better or simply different. The Siamese dolls are making love to themselves and to something different at the same time, they are self-sufficient and yet never egoistic; their intercourse seems to be a rebellion against Nature and the moral code (one should not have intercourse with his siblings and, as for masturbation’s case, with oneself); these dolls alone have the privilege of feeling oneself as Other. This is love, but brought to an exponential level. As in David Cronenberg’s “M. Butterfly” sexuality becomes, in Brown’s art, an arena for experimentation, for subversion and creativity to be ignited and for boundaries and limits to be overcome at once. And, as in Joel Peter Witkin’s photographs, difference is regarded as a portent, not as a disgrace, and its beauty is celebrated and exalted.

It has been stated several time that Trevor Brown’s art is terribly controversial, and this label seems to satisfy both his denigrators (controversial as ‘non politically-correct’) and his fans (controversial as ‘cool’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘hip’). I feel this expression does not represent carefully (and even more, honestly) the contents of the artist’s work; actually this labelling constitutes an oversimplification of the artist’s capacities and originality, it selects one of the themes touched by the Brown’s work (sexuality) and neglects all the other, more complex, hints such as the beauty and the charm of the wounded body, and the theme of the ‘sinister innocence’.

For sure many of Brown’s artworks generate questions and demand for answers which are not directly answered by the artist himself. If while looking at Trevor Brown’s works we look for perversion we might end up encountering the sweet and charming innocence of a child-like doll (as for “Susie”); similarly, if we are seeking politically correctness or a reassuring and tender view of infancy and puberty we might clash against the blood dripping down the tights of “Red”, Brown’s very peculiar take on the tale of Little Red Hood. Brown twists the given nature of objects and transforms them following the guidelines dictated by his own fantasy and by his own obsessions.

The artist has chosen not to reply to the several attacks against his person and his work made by those who see his paintings and illustrations as a degrading portrayal of children, women, and of human dignity in general. But indeed, he has always answered very clearly to those who enquired about his recurring citation of bruises and wounds, explaining with a great deal of precision why these recur so often in his work: bruises are beauty. Beauty is not a perfect, matt, plastic, standardised ideal, but it is rather embodied by a traumatised body, a body that is capable of bearing the weight of the contrast between trauma and attraction, between victimisation and dignity, between violence and eroticism, between lust and innocence. Bruises are shades and, probably more honestly than the lingerie adorning the bodies of so many erotic photographs, they leave a space for interpretation on behalf of the viewer. The body is bare, each situation is shaded. Juissance and La Petit Mort are not synonymous by chance: trauma and orgasm are a matter of standpoints.

There is indeed a terrible beauty and innocence hidden behind the abrasions, the blisters, the black eyes, and the broken body-parts of Brown’s paintings: it is the beauty of suffering, the seduction of trauma, whose elegance and innocence seems to pulsate out from the works of Trevor Brown. The artist allows wounded bodies to regain their charme, their harmony, innocence, and the respect they have been neglected in the eyes of society. One thing for sure, Brown is in love with all his dolls.

We live in a world in which it is essential to be safe and to avoid ‘getting hurt’: we are obsessed with surveillance and crime, since we tend to envision victimisation as the worst possible tragedy which we could be forced to face. The avoidance of trauma is a compulsion, a preoccupation shared by most members of Western society. We live a life whose rhythm is spelt out by insurance companies. Being the victim of theft is tragic enough, but having to endure a violent attack probably is Western society’s scariest nightmare: we are infested with so many representations of violence and victimisation in the realm of the symbolic. The West shares a curious fascination with serial killing which is exemplar of the panic related to violent crime: we are obsessed with this peculiar type of offences, since they escape our capacity of comprehension, they open up a scary perspective on human life, on what being ‘human’ means and what humanity is capable of: far from reinforcing a view of man as the highest step in the evolution of life, serial killing seems to paint in a bestial (and yet, highly sophisticated) tint humanity as a whole. We know how to be monsters. It escapes our logic to see a human being commit a homicide without a reasonable motive (being it starvation, vengeance, or even simple greed). Stranger-killing, the killing which has no motives, is something which we tend to associate to what is beyond human, to ‘pure evil’. This is what makes it so fascinating and disturbing.

There are several excellent examples of this morbid fascination, especially in the world of cinema: some of the most ‘relevant’ (or maybe only some of the most successful?) contemporary movies deal with the theme of serial killing (Ridley Scott’s “Hannibal” and “The Silence of the Lambs”, David Fincher’s “Seven”, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, Mary Harron's “American Psycho”, etc). People seem to seek a catharsis for this atavistic fear, and they manage to do so by exposing themselves to a ‘safe’, limited, and controlled reproduction of trauma, a ‘trauma which doesn’t hurt’. We love being scared of a killer, a rapist, a serial murderer as far as that happens on the television’s screen, as long as it is under control. If we want to push this argument to the extreme we could probably claim that what is at work in here is a ‘snuff movie process’ or a ‘car crash process’: people rarely resist the urge of watching a crime scene or the scene of an accident, although they know they are going to be horrified by what they are about to see. Nevertheless they WANT to see. One faces death through the eyes of another person, and only in these terms that becomes acceptable, and cathartic.

Today’s society screams loud asking for protection: we want to be protected from the Evil that hides outside, we want to be protected from becoming victims. Victimisation is definitely something we are unable to cope with, a stigmatizing happening, a tragic occurrence: victimisation is our worst possible destiny. We do not want to turn into victims. We cannot let that happen, not to us.

It is not my intention to underestimate the burden caused by a sexual attack on its victim, neither I think that people’s fear of crime is unacceptable or unjustified: what I would like to point out, however, is the effect this enormous concern with victimisation has on the actual victims of a crime, especially in the case of violent/sexual attacks. There often is a ‘second abuse’ which the victim has to suffer: it is the weight of eternally being considered ‘victim’, ‘victim and nothing else’, the ‘stain’ that one cannot escape, the ‘immanence’ of the wound; all this is perpetrated by the fact that victims are indeed neglected the possibility to overcome the trauma due to the permanent changes in the behaviour of those who surround them: “shame, she has been ‘spoiled’”…how is one person supposed to deal with a tragedy when all the tragedy’s witness aren’t willing to acknowledge the person in any other light than that of ‘victim’?

As a matter of fact, in Western society victimisation is a ‘taint’, it stains a person depriving him/her of his/her innocence, of his/her ‘normality’ and of his/her previous existence. Nothing will ever be the same anymore starting from the moment in which an abuse takes place: abuses define lives, lives are stained by victimisation. Often, this situation becomes really hard to handle, victimisation turns into a heavy burden to bear. Victims are turned into a sort of ‘bare form of life’, flesh, a name at the bottom of a newspaper’s article, a subject of gossip. Victims will be victims. They are victimised again and again each time somebody whispers their tragic histories in the ear of an unaware listener.

Gaspar Noe’s “Irreversible” (2002) captures some elements of this process of ‘exponential traumatisation’: in order to find a happy ending to his gritty rape tale, we are forced to spin time backwards, we have a rape, and then we have tragedy: there is no catharsis, no happy ending; even vengeance fails miserably. Noe’ suggests that every story has a happy ending if you turn it upside-down, because time, life, everyday experiences, seem to corrupt even the most beautiful and innocent love story. Life seems to be, for the French director, a process of ageing and rotting, a slow decay.

In Trevor Brown’s painting I see something different from pity or disrespect towards the anthropomorphic dolls or victimised individuals portrayed in his paintings. First of all, before accusing the artist of glorifying violence, we may need to ask ourselves if his work is concerned with representing consensual intercourses or not: due to the ambiguous nature of the scenes represented in the paintings, that is a question destined to be left unanswered. A moral view on the subject matter of his works is probably completely absent. One inevitably sees what his/her own eyes want to see: this may seem like an obvious statement, but it is one that definitely applies in this case. The wisest choice is probably to suspend the verdict ourselves and move on, relate to the paintings and drawings from a different standpoint or angle than a merely moral one, abandon the discussion of the goals and responsibilities of art and artists in favour of a process of ‘relating to the artwork’. We should seek a connection to the art, rather than attempting to classify it and explain it.

There is no vulgarity in Brown’s paintings, even in the crudest ones, even in those which have a strongly ‘sexual’ content. Can obscenity be charged with elegance? I think it can. Trevor Brown’s works are charged with beauty and innocence, a sinister one maybe. For ironic it might seem, I believe in Trevor Brown’s work victims are being given back some form of respect: this happens simply though the acknowledgement of their beauty, of their charm, of their being girls, women, children (or dolls maybe) before than simply being ‘victims’.

In the booklet contained in “The Black Box” (2000) I found the letter of an abused girl thanking Trevor Brown for allowing her to deal with the trauma of being raped in her childhood by a man who was later convicted of twelve killings of minors. It is not the first time that I encounter somebody discussing the artist’s work in these terms, as a way to overcome a traumatic event, and as a mean to regain one’s dignity. Alongside the above mentioned letter I read several menaces and insults coming from people who felt offended and outraged by Brown’s work, paired with accusations from the specialized press, threats coming from religious groups and other ‘social’ and ‘humanitarian’ movements battling for Brown’s work to be banned, and for the artist to be convicted for his obscene works. T he fact that he inevitably seem to produce heart-felt reactions, ranging from admiration, thankfulness, to pure hatred and disgust, is a very charming aspect of the artist’s work, Art, I would argue, has among its main tasks that of provoking sensations, ‘affects’ and emotions of ANY kind; this does not mean resorting to ‘shock-tactics’ of sort, but it simply means to try and evoke colours, smells, images and atmospheres. I cannot think of an artwork which hasn’t left me shaken, disturbed, or which hasn’t made me think and which I would classify as worthy. Trevor Brown’s works, with no exception, always leave an impression on me. This is laughter at times, while other times it is a slight shiver on my spine.

Real violence is not hidden underneath the blisters covering Brown’s doll’s skin, neither it can be found behind the carved of the “Crash Babies”; ‘real violence’ is somewhere else, and we should question in the first place why we are so offended by the representation of abuses, sexual practices and violence in art, while we are indeed so willing to face these within the safe environment of TV-news, movies and TV-series. Maybe, we are still investing art of the impossible (and naïve) task of ‘elevating the viewer’s soul’, something which instead we do not expect entertainment (traditionally considered a ‘lower’ form of expression) to do. Censorship is suddenly advocated when our culture (and the artistic forms it promotes) decides to touch on topics such as rape, violence and victimisation. However, we should keep in mind that, like it or not, abuses are still taking place (and with increasing frequency) in the ‘real world’, under our doorsteps, much closer to us than we like to think. To cast these themes aside by means of censorship is an illusory and demagogic solution to a much more complex problem.

Women and men are raped every day, everywhere. Kids are beaten: they are hurt, they get scarred and bruised. Luckily, in some rare occasions, they remain capable of smiling as in Brown’s “Target”.

Albert Hofer, 2004.

This article, compiled/rewritten exclusively for Channel83, is © Albert Hofer 2004, and is based on a chapter (“The Sinister Innocence”) of the MA Cultural Studies dissertation “The Wound and the Mutating Body” submitted at Goldsmiths University in June 2002.

Albert Hofer can be contacted through Channel 83 at these addresses:

• info@channel83.co.uk
• alberthofer@gmail.com

No parts of this document can be reproduced without the authors’ written permission.

A special thanks goes to Trevor Brown for allowing me to write the first version of this article two years ago.

• Trevor Brown’s official website: http://www.babyart.org