In Person: Marc Brandenburg On personal archives and the subtle influence of design, music and memory on art-making
By Nisha Merit
MARC BRANDENBURG is not only a chronicler of our times through his art, but also a collector of significant objects spanning the worlds of fashion, music and film. For SLEEK, he has selected seven objects that hold personal memories while also representing a broader understanding of their respective eras, the social and cultural realities in which they are embedded, and the way they ultimately lead back to Brandenburg’s own artistic practice and process as an artist. His work spans graphic art, collage, installation, video and performance. At its core are detailed pencil drawings based on photographs that he captures during his wanderings or samples from magazines, films and books.
“I’m a rather obsessive collector. I collect records, books, films, objects. Even a seemingly useless action figure like Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange says an awful lot about my aesthetic influences. In its rigour, the figure represents one of my absolute favourite looks. Punk and skin head culture drew heavily on this: bowler hats, boots, military influences. But it’s also simply the figure’s detailed design, where every crease makes sense. The film as a whole is a classic and, more than ever in the age of Palantir, highly relevant: total surveillance, control, manipulation of behaviour and moral decay in society.”
What connects all these objects is a certain clarity of design and meaning. Nothing appears unnecessarily overloaded; everything is reduced, focused and precise. It is this quality that is so crucial in Brandenburg’s works: pieces that are both complex and dense, yet arise from something as simple as the line of a pencil. Yet this is also where the glitch sets in. The closer one gets to the structure of what is depicted, the clearer a sense that something isn’t quite right. The image is reversed, the monochrome shifts perception, and yet everything seems perfectly coherent. Like Vivienne Westwood’s muslin T-shirt, now regarded as a cultural icon, which sparked a small revolution in the 1970s. Breasts on a T-shirt shocked the uptight society of the time and gave a new generation an object that was both simple and radical, opening up space for a more open understanding of self, sexuality and society: “This is one of the most famous punk shirts of all time. The 1977 boob motif from Seditionaries, the shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. The two not only shaped my style, but dominated subcultural fashion from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. It wasn’t just clothing; their designs symbolised a completely new attitude.”
