Stanley Brouwn | BROUWNTOYS 4000 AD.

Stanley Brouwn
BROUWNTOYS 4000 AD.
Self-published, 1964
[24 pp.], 11.2 x 9.7 cm., softcover
Edition size unknown

Two sheets of white paper folded in six, of which twenty are mimeographed in blue ink with the same two texts:

"Enlarge the microbes and viruses in the circle 5000.000 times. Give them to your children to play with"

and

"Don't use the Brouwnstoys before the year 4000 A.D.".


"A humorous variation on Breton’s invisible ones was proposed by Stanley Brouwn in the mid-1960s. Breton had likened our relation to the Transparent Ones to that of lower life-forms to us. Brouwn’s piece consists of an empty circle on the printed page. The caption reads ‘Brouwntoys’, and we are informed that this seemingly empty circle contains a thousand billion microbes and bacteria; when enlarged by a factor of five million, these make wonderful toys for children. However, ‘do not use Brouwntoys before the year 4000’. This is one of a number of Fluxus-inspired pieces that Brouwn later disavowed when he subjected his own work to an auto-Stalinist purge."

- Sven Lütticken