About

For me, making art has always meant making drawings. Working with pencils, oil sticks or a tablet, drawing allows me to lose and regulate control of my work through compulsive and repetitive mark making. I’ve recently added a step to this process by making photo transfers of drawings and photographs, using a quick and dirty method I’ve honed over time. I scan the most successful version, and manipulate it to my liking as a singular image before including it in an overall composition. This process is repeated with most aspects of my work until the picture is exhausted into near completion. At this point in my practice, images I drew 20 years ago are now being married to recently taken photographs. A faint ultraviolet print of the composition is then made onto canvas. This stands as a guideline for the final drawing made with graphite, colored pencils, oil sticks and pastels. I like to think of the texture or bumps of the canvas as tangible “pixels,” acting as one last surface that both assists and challenges the final mark making process.

The draftsmanship of my drawings shift between laborious detailing and cartoon flatness, to mimicking an object’s real world materiality. Parts of the drawing are made as a reaction to what the ultraviolet print provides, allowing areas to be assigned unexpected surfaces. For instance, multiple layers of colored pencils and oil give skin the appearance of marble, a Victorian coat the consistency of bubble gum, and wood the quality of a warm patina. Selected areas throughout the works are left in UV form, exposing a colorful but disquieting background laced with a sense of dreamy uneasiness. These sections become an integral part of the final outcome, providing an abstracted landscape that pushes against the representational aspects of the work. All of these interplays disturb volume and warp stillness as form and content poetically mingle. They allow me to share the weary yet hopeful, meditative space I fall into while making them.

 Bio

Brian Hubble has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York for over 20 years, with stints in Torbole, Italy and Chicago, IL. He has participated in exhibitions at The Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Italy; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ; and Lévy Gorvy (now LGDR), New York, NY.  His life’s work was realized as an exhibition at The Museum of the Moving Image with I Trusted You: Andy Kaufman on the Edge of Performance, the result of a 16-year study of the life and work of the famed comedian. He has also exhibited at MoMA PS1 in collaboration with The Bruce High Quality Foundation, where he made and gave away postcard size screen printed monochromes from the back of his pickup truck to museum-goers. From 2016-2019, Hubble served as co-founder and director of Unisex Salon, an artist operated gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he mounted a wide range of exhibitions of underrepresented artists. His work has been featured in publications such as Print Magazine, C-Print Journal, and ArtNet. As an editorial artist, his work has been featured in Taschen, The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, The New York Times, M.I.T. Technology Review, Harvard Law Review, and Yale Alumni, amongst many others. He holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he was the recipient of the William Merchant R. French Fellowship. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University (BFA), Edge Hill University in Liverpool, UK, and The Illustration Academy in Richmond, VA.

On I Trusted You: Andy Kaufman at the Edge of Performance at The Museum of the Moving Image

Andy Kaufman’s (1949-1984) imagination was formed by the television experience. As a child he believed a camera was in his bedroom wall, and enacted his first programming. As a performer, he recognized the disorienting nature of the medium, and used it to play at the intersection of reality, falsehood, and entertainment.

One of Kaufman’s oddest productions was for a PBS series called Soundstage: The Andy Kaufman Show which was a parody of late night talk shows. Kaufman’s desk towered 8 feet in the air so he could literally look down on his guests. These props and gestures fed into Kaufman’s obsession with ideas surrounding fame, attention, and the audience’s faith. In a dubious segment called The Has-Been Corner, he idealized “performers” whose heyday was long over. Kaufman presented them on a set that lived somewhere between homage, sincerity and awkwardness, giving them an almost sadistic “second chance.” He instructed stage lighting to blink at inopportune moments to further confuse timing and expectation for both performer and audience. His leverage of anticipation and uncomfortable comedy used particular environments and props to get gut reactions.

Kaufman claimed to have never told a joke. Instead of asking audiences to envision an off-stage scene like the traditional comedian, he asked them to observe him, behaving strangely. Whether they laughed or became enraged, Kaufman seized the joke’s place. He employed sets and props to position himself as the joke his audiences had to interpret. Similar strategies were used by art collectives like Les Arts Incohérents, Dada, 70’s conceptual artists, and writers such as Eugéne Ionesco and Luigi Pirandello. Just as they pointed at art itself as a construct to be exploited, or the absurdism of living life, Kaufman called into question the system of comedy. Although he shared a sensibility with these groups, Kaufman never identified himself as one of them. Nor was he interested in fulfilling the traditional duty of a comic. His risk as a performer working in the field of popular entertainment was refusing to fill the context of stand-up comedy with the expected content, perplexing audiences along the way.

My exhibition at The Museum of the Moving Image explored the short but prolific career of this bizarre performer. The proposal included a recreated set of Soundstage: The Andy Kaufman Show, with consultation from the original show’s production team. Live reenactments of his classic performances as well as obscure performances that were never recorded would take place on the set and ubiquitously throughout the museum. These unknown performances I discovered through research and interviews with Kaufman’s family and friends were only witnessed by small night club audiences more than 40 years ago. Unreleased episodes of television programming from early in Kaufman’s career, videos of classic performances, props provided by the estate, and drawings of the set by the show’s scenic designer would also be on display.

In an effort to emulate Kaufman’s unique sense of authenticity, classic and unrecorded performance reenactments took place at secret times rather than on a public schedule. It caused audiences to wonder in the moment if what they were witnessing was actually part of the exhibition, harkening the truest spirit of Kaufman’s work. A diverse group of collaborators worked through these reenactments in real time, giving them permission to be “an other.” They donned a persona as Andy did, eventuating and exaggerating aspects of him they had hidden in themselves. For instance, viewers might be present when an unannounced performer casually laid out a sleeping bag on the floor, zipped it completely around themselves, and started reading The Great Gatsby by flashlight, while another simultaneously played the congas and sung Kaufman’s rendition of “Cash for the Merchandise.” Whoever was in the museum at that time would have that particular experience. Each day would be unique. Live streams of these happenings would be placed throughout the museum to expand on the revolving in-house studio audience, and on its web site to usher Kaufman into a media he surely would have experimented in. Between performances, the set would exist as an installation that viewers would have walked through freely. Together, they activated the museum as a site that showed how performance was imagined by this enigmatic figure.

Over the years, Andy’s brother Michael and I have had many discussions about the mysticism of Andy, and how his work can be explored today. Examining Kaufman’s ethos through this exhibition was instrumental to our understanding of the strange coordinates that lie between art, comedy, and performance. Reenactments of his works as temporal experiences expanded the language of these disciplines in personal ways, while institutional analysis of his performance history illuminated his role in this regard. At the same time, Kaufman’s relationship to our present moment cannot be understated. He understood the power a stage can provide, and how performance can co-opt truth to stir emotions in an audience. His work serves to disrupt this pattern, and asks us to consider our own (unusual) relationship with reality.