Student Reviews: Brett Cook
Recap and Reflection of Brett Cook’s “Dialogue for Community and Soul Collaborative Aesthetics: A Dialogue about Community and Soul”
Katie Lee Salis, Washington University
On Wednesday, March 19th, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University, a wide-eyed, scruffy-bearded young man stood in the front of a large lecture hall and asked his audience to breathe with him. “In and out, in and out, in and out,” artist Brett Cook directed his eclectic audience of Washington University art students, professors and fans. Cook, an unabashed teacher, activist, thinker, motivational speaker, photographer, artist, and self-proclaimed icon, discussed the importance of his “unique” and “groundbreaking” artistic endeavors. Cook is the type of artist who believes that the process is more important than the product; the art is in the collaboration, the community and soul of the project, not in the painting or photograph itself. His ideas are interesting and borderline inspiring, but his recent art seems forced and tired.
Cook began as a graffiti artist in San Francisco and produced evocative and meaningful pieces with his spray can in the dark of night. He grew into an art student at the University of California at Berkeley who took his large scale, socially conscious paintings inside and experimented with technique and subject. Cook showed slides of innovative, irreverent and important pieces he was rightfully proud of although made a point to never sign. His evolving art was exciting, different, and filled with potential, but not for long. If you would like to take a look at some of Cook’s art, you can find it on his website.
It must have been the years of experience teaching in various public schools, but Cook articulately explained that he began to look at his art as a vehicle for education, for bringing people together, and for building communities. As I would explain it, he began to take his already meaningful art and sacrificed the visual quality for the trite and hackneyed “sentimental” process behind it. Creating projects such as “block-parties” on the streets of Harlem in which residents were able to color in connect-the-dot images of their neighbors and listen to the latest hip-hop music was interesting and fun but not life-changing, as he often claimed it was. Cook’s stories about making friends with those he has worked with and bringing communities together for a day were touching and heart-warming to say the least, but his purpose morphed from artist to ethnographer; Cook spent time writing essays and giving speeches about his experiences, explaining how certain communities worked and how individuals could relate to each other through these projects.
Today, it seems as if Cook has executed all of the collaborative projects he could possibly think of and is recycling some old ones. The artwork produced through these projects appears commercial, forced and unoriginal. He even noted, in a brief question-answer period at the end of his preachy speech, that he does not simply paint when he feels like it anymore, or go to a community where he feels he is needed, he waits for someone to ask him to grace them with his presence; he waits for someone to come up with an idea bud so that he can bring his special magic formula and help it to grow. I believe that Cook’s name-recognition and growing fame ended up acting as a detriment to the quality of his work. He became so contented with the attention he was receiving that he stopped creating unique works. If Cook didn’t settle on this artistic equation, he might be still creating inspiring pieces and contributing, in a very meaningful way, to the world of contemporary art.
