Stanley Brouwn | 100 this-way-brouwn-problems for computer I.B.M. 360 model 95

Stanley Brouwn

100 this-way-brouwn-problems for computer I.B.M. 360 model 95

Köln/New York, Germany/USA: Verlag Gebr. König, 1970

[208] pp., 23 x 23 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown 

Since 1972, every catalogue or group exhibition that Stanley Brouwn participated in has featured the line “At the request of the artist there are no photos or bio-bibliographical data” or “At the artist’s request, his birth date is excluded here, and the works are not reproduced”, or some variation thereof. Brouwn also consistently refused to give any interviews about his work. Images of the artist are incredibly rare. 

He was was born in 1935 in the northern South American Republic of Surinam, in the capital city of Paramaribo. At the age of 22 he moved to Amsterdam, the year of his first published work (according to Harry Ruhe’s comprehensive Stanley Brouwn: A Chronology). Brouwn contributed a drawing and a poem to Spiraal 1. The following year he contributed to the next four issues of the periodical. 

In 1960, the artist mailed out invitations declaring the shoe stores of Amsterdam as his art work. Later that same year he began his best-known series - This Way Brouwn. The artist stopped passersby in the street and asked for directions, encouraging them to make a fast sketch explaining a route. He then stamped these drawings with the title, exhibited them and made them into a bookwork. 

His first gallery exhibition (a group show) took place in 1962, at Ruhe’s Galerie A.  The following year he appeared in a television program created by Willem de Ridder and Wim T Schippers. Brouwn is shown placing white sheets of paper on the street, inviting pedestrians to walk over and leave their footprints. 

His first publication was made of pink silk-tissue paper in an edition of 100 copies. Brouwn added lemon juice stains, which eventually dried and could only be seen when heated. A dealer tells the story of selling one of these for just under two thousand pounds, several years ago. After the transaction was made, but before the work could be lovingly packed and shipped, his assistant discarded it, thinking it was waste paper on his boss’ desk. 

Brouwnhairs from 1964 is a 76-page, self-published book in an edition of three. A single hair of the artist’s is pasted onto each page. Lucy Lippard discusses the project in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966 to 1972. Later that same year Brouwn contributed to the first Fluxus Yearbox (miscredited to Stanley Brown) and to Wolf Vostell’s De-coll/age 4. 

By the early 1970s Brouwn had made measurement and his own movements central to his work, systematically counting the distances he had covered. This procedure produced a series of books entirely devoted to a sequence of numbers or text-based measurements, densities or distances. These books have been exhibited in otherwise empty galleries on simple white bookshelves, without any other identifying texts. 

For his third artist book 100 this-way-brouwn problems for computer IBM 360 model 95, the artist poses  questions not to passersby, but to an IBM computer. 

The edition size is unknown, but thought to be around 300 copies. 

"It is a method of perception and action which Stanley Brouwn, on the other hand gives to the IBM computer, model 95 in his book, 100 This Way-Brouwn-Problems for Computer IBM. 360 Model 95, in which Brouwn collects a series of phrases which begin from ‘Show Brouwn the Way in All Cities, Villages, etc.” followed by ‘Show Brouwn the Way From Each Point On a Circle With X at the Centre and a Radius of 1 angstrôm to all other points (1 angstrom = 0.00000001 cm)’ and other similar phrases where the variation of the phrase comes only from the substitution of the scale of 2 to 100 angstrôm. Brouwn’s work consists of cataloging of steps or minimal changes of direction as in his book La Paz, in which he marks a series of walks of different length in the direction of La Paz, Rangoon, Havana, Helsinki, Georgetown, Washington, Warsaw, New Delhi, etc., realized from a point in Schiedam or Amsterdam."

- Germano Celant, "BOOK AS ARTWORK: 1960 - 72”