A Frank Chat
I'm embarrassing myself with that headline, but here I go interviewing the artist Brooke Frank
Oops
Last week in Cookietown, as part of an analysis of a 1991 pack of Topps baseball cards, I asked a handful of friends (the ones I’d texted most recently) to draw half of an exquisite corpse. Specifically, I asked them for bodies. I would provide a head. What they didn’t know is that the head would, in every instance, be the very boring portrait of unremarkable but persistent journeyman pitcher Dennis Cook from his ‘91 card. The response was great, and I hope everyone had a good time. I was especially amused that Maxine just drew another baseball player.
One of the people I asked was Brooke Frank, who is a painter, friend, and great person to chat with about art and whatever else. She provided some slightly spooky sketches of a figure in a room, and I acknowledged their receipt.
For some reason that I don’t quite understand Brooke only texts on Signal, the third-party, plausibly encrypted, messenger app. Blue WhatsApp. I mostly use it to talk to friends in other countries. Brooke lives in Florida. I don’t know. She’s living her life. And it’s not at all her fault that I forgot to harvest her drawing for the parade of Dennises Cook, add it to last week’s blog. I merely forgot to go back into Signal as I was collecting pictures from other texts.
I felt bad soon after I hit publish, but I think these blogs go out over email and I’m not exactly sure what editing in the moment would have looked like. So instead, and because I had no idea what I was going to write this week, I reached out to Brooke and asked her if I could make it up to her by conducting a full-length interview for the blog. She said sure, so here it is:
Brooky (that’s what you call it when Brooke and Bucky talk)
Bucky Miller: I’m sorry I forgot to include your drawing in my Dennis drawings last week.
Brooke Frank: No worries! I am looking forward to seeing what they were supposed to do though. I had a lot of fun drawing them.
BM: What are they of?
BF: They’re drawings of Barry Newman in Fear Is The Key. I was a little stumped by “draw a body,” but Nick and I had watched that movie last week. He said “just draw something from the movie with the submarine.” For whatever reason the computer in our living room is set up such that taking a screenshot requires typing line commands into “the terminal” so finding scenes to draw that included a full figure took both of us. His foot gets cut off in one but I figured that would be fine.
M: Like, the character’s foot gets cut off in the movie, or you cut it off in the drawing? I haven’t seen Fear Is The Key.
F: Oh in the drawing. Well I guess by the frame in the film and consequently the drawing. Maybe you should give him a foot too.
M: I can give him a foot.
Do you do many exquisite corpses? You’re a renderer, is that fair to say? You render?
F: I think that’s fair to say, yeah. I think that’s truer than it probably seems. I hadn’t really thought about myself as doing many exquisite corpses, but now that you mention it I think that is also a yes. Probably always has been.
M: Like compared to the average American in 2023…
F: Could any collaborative work be an exquisite corpse? Or does it have to be play? I feel like my whole life is an exquisite corpse. Its a pretty big deal if I get to draw a whole body part, and rarer still to decide which part to draw.
I think my preferred collaborative dynamic is banter. I don’t think banter has to be verbal, and I am fairly proficient in visual banter. Shared projects are a fantastic opportunity for banter. I think my paintings are banter-y too, they’re just in a much messier atemporal conversation, with mostly strangers. By which I guess I mean I'm not super clear on where "individual authorship" begins and ends. I think authorship and agency are different. Being really engaged with other people's work and ideas is exciting to me, not distracting.
M: In the exquisite corpse as I understand it, you don’t know what the other end of the collaboration is going to look like until after it’s finished. I can see how you might fudge it and frame any conversation that way. Like right now you have no idea that I’m going to ask you if you’ve ever painted your dog, but here I go asking that question!
F: Yeah exactly. Weirdly, I have only ever drawn my dog. I have a photo of him I might paint but I have done nothing about that yet.
M: I’m not surprised, because while I feel like you make work from what’s around you you’re always kind of stretching what something being around you means. Like maybe it’s a phrase. Maybe it’s a diagram you saw in a book. The text pictures are my favorite I think. They are what I think of when I think of your work. Where do you find the words?
F: Oh gosh, everywhere. I have started this drawing twice since this interview began yesterday.
Things wind up in my paintings and drawings when I want to spend more time thinking about them. That generally involves a feeling of confusion. A bountiful confusion? Lots of messy possible meanings or ideas, often contradictory, which seem like they could spin out from a word or image.
M: Can we talk about the glasses? I know it’s sort of a background project but I like the idea of intense concentration, making a choice, thinking about an image through drawing and painting.
F: You being interested in the glasses drawings and paintings is pretty exciting to me. I think the way you’ve characterized these drawings is dead on, and likely an appropriate description of how drawing and painting work in my life in general.
I draw to figure shit out. I feel like it helps me to pay closer attention to things. Some number of years ago, I found myself standing in an optometrist's office for over an hour trying to pick out new frames, texting hasty, anxious selfies to friends and getting no clarity, so I went back to the studio and just drew the selfies featuring frames I thought were serious contenders. This has become a ritual for years when I've had good enough insurance to get my eyes checked. I can’t remember if I painted the finalists that year or the next, but drawing is sufficient for determining whether or not a pair of glasses is a good enough shape to keep me happy looking at them in the mirror for a year or two, and if I need a tie breaker, painting will allow me to give just as much attention to the subtleties of color and to material/surface.
Your interest them is exciting to me in part because it immediately made me aware of some of the ways I've been editing what parts of my drawing and painting life I think would "make sense" to share publicly. I am drowning in drawings and paintings that had previously seemed "off topic" and I have become increasingly aware of the fact that I am not motivated by topic. My "practice" is more of a methodology to handle my being a curious person who likes to think about things slowly, and with images and materials, my pace is much more elastic — stretching a quick impression into a detailed question, a joke, a diatribe, etc. I don't seem to have the same flexibility in my own writing, so my own writing gets mixed into the paintings, too, to stretch it.
Also I guess I should point out that my use of the words "drawing" and "painting" is pretty messy for a lot of the work I make. I wouldn't really worry about it. I sometimes try to pick them apart from each other, and from everything else, but I think the work is probably more accurate and more interesting if I’m not treating painting and drawing as discrete categories.
M: What’s one of your jokes?
F: This is one I'm circling back to.
I feel like it sounds less funny written than executed, but these images are of panels I made in 2018. The fronts are collaged landscape images that are manipulated with solvents and then worked into with oil paint and metal leaf. The panel itself is MDF and poplar. I painted the poplar sides with oil paint to loosely imitate the poplar woodgrain and then metal leafed the nail heads back in.
The paintings on the front are so normal that people really didn't know what to make of the wacky sides. Material and media jokes; jabs; ridiculous "pointless" exertions of effort in painting; they are pretty exciting to me. But I'm also about one year into making a small painting of a dick drawing in outer space, so I would say my sense of painting humor is pretty varied. I spend a lot of time in the studio making myself laugh.
M: A year on a dick drawing! That in itself is funny. But the audience receives something very blunt. A dick “drawing” in space. Drawing feels like the key here and the thing that’s hard to uh. See with words.
But like process, when is process funny? I was just looking at a Roman Signer book and I feel like he’s an artist where the process being funny is kind of the whole thing. But he’s basically doing Jackass stunts. Process feels way more covert to me in a painting, maybe because I don’t know painting that well on a material level. But you tell me a year spent on a dick drawing in space and I laugh.
F: At this point, a year and two months. And counting. I’ve got a little ways to go still. I agree, though. I don't think it is immediately obvious even to many painters how much space there is to make weird and funny and meaningful choices within the activity of painting (as opposed to within what is produced to be encountered later on by an audience).
I certainly don't think I'm alone in making paintings in which process is one of the primary interests, and artists outside of painting who make process-driven work have always had a special place in my heart. Work which is interesting for whatever it is (a painting, a sculpture, documentation of a performance or otherwise ephemeral gesture) and also highlights whatever hang-ups and preconceptions might still be hanging around art, or art understood within a specific discipline.
The idea of "painting" has been challenged and reworked so many times, but I suspect that many people, painters included, still arrive to view a painting through the lens of the medium's Romantic history. They're not wrong for that. I love spending hours trying to mix a few perfect colors, I love putting the paint down onto a panel or paper and mushing it around until for whatever reason, the sense that the thing is "right" snaps into place. I love chasing that feeling and failing to get there, or coming up short of it and putting the painting aside for a while, trying to figure out a better way to get there. I feel like all of that is pretty Romantic, and admitting to loving those parts of painting feels a little bit like admitting I like mayonnaise. As though I should know better?
But I think that's the magic of where I’ve found myself. I am so moved by all of these self-serious modernist legends, I am so genuinely grateful for the way that they made painting and drawing seem "meaningful" and "important" —since I was going to spend a lot of time doing painting and drawing anyways — and I am also deeply aware of how limited and silly that that self-seriousness is. Its not any smarter to unilaterally reject it all, though. I have landed on poking fun at all the things I love while still loving them.
For better or for worse, though, my Romantic inclinations within my own paintings probably do obscure the goofy and critical parts of what I make. I have had several studio visits where people did not even recognize the dick drawing in the aforementioned dick drawing painting.
M: You don’t strike me as someone who needs everyone to get it, though.
F: Oh for sure. Every single thing you do in any part of your life will resonate with some people and totally miss others. Accepting that makes it a hell of a lot easier to do what you actually want to do. Which I think means I dont spend much time worrying about whether or not I need to make my work "clearer.” I am happy to trust that the folks who do want to look at a painting for a little while will have plenty to think about when they look at my work, and that, taken together, whatever they see will be sufficiently interesting.
I am not claiming my work is disinterested in clarity. It has an internal logic. I am just willing to trust that following my own ideas through a painting, even if they're idiosyncratic, will be sufficient for communicating to a viewer that the painting comes from somewhere, is about something, and was made with care and commitment.
M: Yeah I think that’s clear. Maybe you are your first audience, which in my opinion is a great way to go about it.
F: I hadn't thought of that, but I don't disagree. "Audience" is a funny word, too, isn't it? I worked in theatre for a decade, and I feel like the word "audience" maybe initially seems to mean "person/people who weren't involved in the execution," but it definitely doesn’t exclude them from participation, complicity, or even from having some agency in the experience that’s being constructed. The implied passivity in the words "audience" and "viewer" are interesting to me. I think if I had to choose a different word, "recipient" might be slightly closer — it doesn't specify what they do with whatever they've received, just that it was made and that it is then directed to them.
I could fuss about words all day and I'd still find a hole in almost any of them.
But I definitely don't have a desire to make work that isn't interesting to me. People can sense your boredom in a painting from a mile away. That's probably true for other media as well, but I am best trained to identify it in painting. If you're gonna be bored while painting, I generally want to know why. There are plenty of satisfactory answers, but denial of boredom isn't one of them. Not for me, at least.
M: I would never say “viewer” has passive implications, but maybe that’s because I’m a photographer.
F: I think that’s one of many reasons I like talking to you.
M: I like “participant.” But nobody is gonna get behind that.
F: Right? I don’t think I have to make coloring books in order to acknowledge the power and value of what people arrive to the role of "viewer" with. I guess that’s what's so funny to me. It's absolutely nothing new to say that the audience is important to the art. But still, when you go to a performance in a gallery or in a theatre, people in the "audience" are often constraining their reactions to what they think is an appropriate response to the work.
M: So what’s it like participating down in Florida?
F: Oh Florida. I love Florida so much it hurts. I love making art here and I love the work and artists and spaces I’m surrounded by here. Perhaps more importantly, I love the way that art fits into the rest of Florida. I don’t know anywhere else like it. This place has PROBLEMS but so does everywhere, and there are few problems resolved by bailing on them… Few, not none.
M: How’s art fit? I’m from Arizona, the opposite end of the Sun Belt. I feel like the two places have problems that might mirror each other, but from a distance it seems like Florida got the better end of the art thing.
F: That could be true. South Florida is highly visible within the art thing. There is a lot here. Collectors, collections, spaces, grants, and all of the work that those sorts of things enable. Living and making art is expensive here, and wages are particularly low on average relative to that, though. I'm not convinced that making art anywhere is easy, but I have what I need here. There is a large enough community to always find something new to think about, and it is well-recognized enough that new, wonderful artists and ideas from all over come to visit and stay. It’s always changing.
M: Where in Florida are you?
F: I live in Fort Lauderdale and I have a 30 minute commute to my studio, which is at IS Projects in Miami. I work at IS Projects, too. I can see my studio from the desk where I sit to send work emails and I love it.
M: What’s IS Projects? What do you do for them? I know very little about Miami aside from the Red Grooms sculpture outside Marlins Park and Pollo Tropical.
F: IS Projects is, in short, a printmaking studio founded and owned by my friend Ingrid Schindall. IS Projects offers print/book/paper instruction and facilities access to artists in a variety of ways, and also offers contract and collaborative fine art print and book production. But Ingrid is a founder/cofounder for a handful of other related organizations — two print/book fairs and a client-driven boutique print business, plus all kinds of offsite projects — so I think perhaps a more comprehensive description of IS Projects would be that it is a very large and open gateway into Miami's print and book world, and consequently, the print and book world more broadly.
I am pretty mixed up in all of the print goings-ons here, as a result. It's a small and committed team of us making all of these things happen, so every day is different. I am writing curatorial texts, teaching, installing art, coordinating events, folding chairs, putting scary bugs outside, catching prints, doing portfolio reviews with our interns, and reminding everyone to take breaks and eat lunch as needed. No two days are the same and there's always a sense that we're scheming (for good)!
M: Do you make many multiples?
F: Historically, no. Editioning has been pretty rare for me. I feel like I lose steam with the editioning part pretty quick. We went up to New York to see Ed Ruscha's lecture at IFPDA a few weeks ago and he said that he and his friends got into printmaking in undergrad "for the sport of it.” He might have been talking about a specific process — intaglio, perhaps. I forget. But I thought that was pretty honest, and likely true for many print folks.
The few times I’ve worked in multiple without being required to, it was because I wanted to give the same thing to multiple people.
I am increasingly interested in the lines between an edition, varied edition, and unique works in a series. I might end up making multiples. How identical is identical enough? How unique is unique enough? The answers are generally dogmatic and full of holes.
M: Ruscha makes funny text paintings, as do you. Somehow I never connected him to your work until now.
F: Oh yeah that’s funny — I have always loved his work but I don’t think I realized how much I owed to him until I saw the new MoMA show. I walked out of that show realizing how weird it was that no one had ever mentioned him to me in a studio visit. Is it too obvious or somehow not obvious enough?
M: Your pictures might be more sincere. Or maybe sincere is not exactly the word I want.
F: Maybe at least more recognizably vulnerable about my own weird human place in what I’ve made.
M: Do you know the Royal Road Test? The book where he documents the process and results of throwing a typewriter out of a moving car?
F: It was possibly my favorite thing in that show.
M: I feel like that piece is his sensibility at its most concentrated. The seed of Ruscha. The more I think on it the more I feel like chucking a typewriter from a car is pretty close to your vibe.
F: Oh absolutely.
M: I don’t even know if I’m talking about your art here.
F: Yeah I think on a personal level that connection is much clearer. One of the only things I ever worry about with respect to the perception of my work is that no one will ever draw the connection from Royal Road Test to whatever I'm doing.
M: Isn’t it weird? Trying to get people to see us through the shit we make? Hiding behind it at the same time? It’s confusing. I’ve confused myself now.
F: Extremely confusing and weird! But in some ways I think it’s much more effective.
M: Than?
F: Than by the clothed body I wander around in. Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy to live in this thing. But if I am choosing between a picture of my face and a picture of a painting I made to summarize my existence, I’d probably choose the painting.
M: Even if it is a picture of your face trying on glasses.
F: That’s the scariest part of those drawings to me.
M: The you of it.
F: Yeah. The meatsack me meeting the painting me meeting the indecisive lover of objects.
M: Do you often get scared by your work?
F: Sometimes. Scared mostly of, “how the hell am I gonna explain that?”
M: That’s a better question, a healthier fear than, “will someone like this?”
F: I’m glad you think so. I’m sure plenty of people read statements like that and roll their eyes.
You know, I think of you every time I eat an unwashed grape.
M: Wait why?
F: I thought you once told me you never bothered. Potentially because I was washing grapes. I know this conversation happened at the house on Lightsey but maybe it wasn’t you I was talking to.
M: Could be me.
Are there artists who you think of when you think of jokes? Any guiding lights?
F: John Baldessari is one. The piece Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts). It’s on par with the Royal Road Test for things I worry may never be evident as influences on whatever I’m making and doing.
M: All these California dudes. I guess you like the sunshine. Is art just funnier outside New York? Who can say?
F: Who knows.
M: Baldessari is huge for me too. I come back to the Wrong pictures a lot, or the one with the pencil.
F: The pencil is rad. The image of the dull one causes me psychic harm. I just looked up the Wrong ones and I think this text on them is really perfect:
M: Oh man that fills my heart with joy.
F: I was having the same conversation with my buddy Sebastian in May. I went up to Chicago to see his MFA show and was totally blown away by how thoughtful and joyful his work was, and the work of some of his peers. I hadn’t considered that “not New York” might be part of what made it possible for him to do that in art school. Maybe New York has nothing to do with it and he’s just talented, but we were walking into dry cleaners and he was telling me about trying to include dandelion fluff in his work. I was gobsmacked.
M: Anecdotally, it lines up with my experiences of New York and elsewhere. It feels like there is more “why not” the further you get from centers. Or maybe I’m cynical. Or just tired. But if you don’t consider commercial success a benchmark for your artwork — which I get why someone would but I don’t know how I could — I feel like its possible to access a real desire that exists out there, shared among weirdos all over the the world, to see where “why not” leads.
B: I think a little cynicism goes a long way. I would also note that you are talking about CENTERING commercial success, not just having commercial success or possibly having it. I think plenty of Why Nots have commercial success (Ruscha, Baldessari, etc.) And I am sure they didn’t arrive there and stay there without engaging with it. But I would guess that they are rare examples of artists who could hold onto their initial impulses for making art through whatever the world puts on them. I'm guessing.
Commercial success or otherwise, I absolutely agree. Weirdo artists are abundant. I am delighted to meet them and to see their work. I find them all the time. I talk to them every day. I cannot imagine my life without them and I am very confused, in so many cases, about how academics and institutions frame their work. As though somehow fun and humor and joy don't matter or aren't useful. Isn’t that weird? Humor doesn't negate meaning. Tone and content are different things. I think most artists know this. Good art writers and curators know this. It can't be just me, you, and Baldessari feeling like fun is somehow received with initial skepticism in many art contexts.
M: No it’s definitely not. I’ve heard stories. But it’s not so bad. We’re doing what we do.
F: I love that.
M: I hate to be too negative about New York because I totally understand why people love it, but I’m so much more excited by stuff happening in other places. I think it’s the parking lots.
F: Good lord I love parking lots. And garages. Lots of very important parts of my life took place in parking lots and garages, or at least while looking at them. Way too many to unpack now.
M: Try me. A sampler.
F: Okay, top 3:
1.) I broke up with someone on the top floor of a parking garage once.
2.) I lived in my car in the garage closest to the studio for a good chunk of one summer in undergrad.
3.) I painted that garage from my studio window a semester later because there were two different kinds of bulbs being used, one casting pink light and one casting green light. I was in a directed independent study with a professor who was pretty unstable, who told me that that painting and everything else I had made that semester was, "just a sketch," not a real painting somehow. The semester got way worse but I survived, and I ended up opening my MFA thesis paper with a description of different light sources in my apartment's parking lot, inclusive of the different street lamp bulb hues.
And actually, little known fact, I installed an app-controlled lightbulb in the gallery over one of my paintings for my MFA show. I could subtly change the hue of the white light in the gallery whenever I wanted, 24/7. I had a window space. It was a huge pain in the ass and I'm pretty sure the lead preparator is the only person who ever knew about it.
M: But why not?
F: That’s what I figured!
Egg Risk of the Week
Each week, I close the main section of It’s Probably Fine by sharing an image of an object and assigning it a rating, from 0-10, based on on how much danger it would pose to one chicken egg. Zero means absolute safety, while 10 represents the ultimate Egg Risk. This week, the Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center & Archive:
Egg Risk Rating: 1.2*/10
someone could trick the ceramics research center, for a short amount of time, into thinking the egg was a ceramic egg. the ceramics research center would be forced to protect the egg with archival methods. *this risk is calculated on a short-term basis, and increases with time as the egg struggles to maintain its cover
Bonus
Painting (Thanks to Brooke Frank)
Extra Dennis Cook
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