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Painting by John Brown 1972
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While sorting through our art collection, I’ve been looking at an acrylic painting dated 1972, purchased from the artist that year or shortly after. His name was
John C. Brown (1934-2019), who for a few years in the 1970s was a faculty colleague at the
University of Northern Iowa.
I don’t know the title of the painting, if it had one. But no doubt one reason I bought it is because it so strongly pertains to
figure-ground blending or
background matching, as is so commonly observed in
camouflage, both natural and military.
John was originally from
Cedar Falls. He majored in landscape architecture at Iowa State University (Ames), but dropped out in favor of studying art. He completed his BA in Art in 1956 at UNI, then worked for a number of years as a graphic designer and illustrator. He made "studio art" on the side, and was awarded various prizes for his innovative paintings.
At some point he joined the faculty as an instructor of painting. I graduated from the
Rhode Island School of Design at the end of 1971, and was invited to teach at UNI in the following spring semester, and I think he was on the faculty then. In the years that followed, he and I (and others) were among the teachers in a highly unusual, untested approach to art foundations, called the
Visual World Program.
That program had been launched in the fall semester of 1971 by a newly-hired department head from San Francisco, a man named
Kenneth Lash, who had been the Head of Humanities at the
San Francisco Art Institute. A rather odd aspect of this was that Lash was not a visual artist but a writer—a poet and an essayist, whom I had initially met in the summer of 1968 at the
Aspen School of Contemporary Art in Colorado.
Given that the Visual World curriculum was a quasi-subversive departure from standard foundations courses, as detailed in textbooks at the time, it was controversial from the start. Some of the departmental faculty welcomed it, while others were wary, hesitant or confused. The latter complained they were clueless: What was the program all about? What was it supposed to accomplish? How could it be defined? As I recall, when Lash was approached with questions like that, he would typically reply that the program would eventually shape itself, over a year or two, in the process of trying to teach it.
Some of us reached out to other disciplines. We devised activities that stressed creativity (innovation, humor and problem-solving), perceptual psychology, and the interplay of usually disparate fields. We brought in a stage magician to demonstrate
sleight of hand; worked with the physics faculty in making
holograms; learned from biologists about the use by
ethologists of behavioral dummies; explored
stereoscopic vision (including
random dot stereograms); constructed airborne works of art; recreated some of the
Ames Demonstrations, while learning about their historical link to linear perspective; and so on.
There were deliberate efforts to teach as much through physical engagement as through attending lectures. On occasion, oddball contests were arranged, two of which I still remember vididly: the infamous
Rube Goldberg Drawing Machine Contest, and the
Groucho Marx Look-Alike Contest.
There were also eccentric exhibits, one of which was originated by John Brown. He partitioned off a section of the floor space in the gallery, then set free within that space an impressive selection of battery-powered motion toys, of the sort that, if collided with, they would adjust their course and continue to move. The full effect consisted of random collisions of various things, like non-stop vehicle mishaps—which continued for a couple of days, until at last the batteries died.
In 1975, Ken Lash and I co-authored an article that was published in
Leonardo: Journal of the International Society of Arts, Sciences and Technology (published then by Pergamon Press, it was soon after acquired by MIT Press, and continues now as
Leonardo). In that article, titled “The ‘Visual World’ Program at the University of Northern Iowa, USA,” we cited one of John Brown’s most memorable classroom assignments. Known as “the Lemon Experiment,” we described it in the article more or less as follows (although with substantial revison):
A class of twenty students is presented with a shopping bag containing fresh lemons. Each student then selects, randomly, any lemon from the bag. They are told: “Take your lemon with you. Look at it, feel it, smell it. Carry it with you wherever you go, even when you go to sleep. Get to know as much as you can about your lemon without marking, cutting or biting it. Then bring it to class with you when we meet again in two days.”
At the next class meeting, all the lemons are returned to the grocery bag, then spread out on a table top. The students are instructed to retrieve their particular lemons. They are inevitably amazed to find that, with little difficulty, they can indeed identify them. They mostly do this using sight. But some of them, even when blindfolded, can find their lemons by touch and smell. They are left with a new understanding of the rich range of attributes that can be observed and recognized in things that may initially look as if they were indistinguishable.
In a subsequent phase, the students are asked to draw maps of their lemons, which might enable someone else to identify their lemon. Or, in a “lemon substitution” phase, they are asked to create visual puns by purposely misplacing lemons in usually mistaken contexts, such as a “lemon dirigible” or a “lemon pencil sharpener.” They are also assigned to produce a “counterfeit lemon” from any mix of materials (sponges, stuffed socks, or whatever) to explore the possible links between vastly different types of things.Around 1976, I moved on to another university. John Brown stayed on at UNI, but he too eventually left. Looking through old issues of the student newspaper, there is a story from 1975 which reports that his students had constructed a large “floating painting” which they launched on Prexy’s Pond, a pond near the center of campus. Another one, two years later, shows him with one of his classes. They had been asked to design a package in which a raw egg would survive undamaged when the package was dropped from a building.
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John Brown with students
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John died in 2019. According to his obituary, he had been living in the Florida Keys for forty years. Following his experience with the Visual World, he had married (to Pam Quegg) and moved to Colorado, had toured the West in a Volkswagen van, and had sailed down the Mississippi. Having finally settled in Florida, he made a living—or so I heard—by selling handmade teddy bears on the beach. “He lived mindfully,” the obituary says, “and savored each moment with passion.” And, consistent with my own memory, he will be “fondly remembered for his big smile and booming cheerful voice.”
