Robert Breer

I have only just found out that artist Robert Breer died on August 17th 2011. Even though this is still quite recent, I can't help but feel a pang of guilt that I didn't know about this. There is no excuse in the contemporary digital climate, right?

Even though Breer is mostly remembered for his contributions to film and animation, as well as his styrofoam floats (figure 1.), I like to remember his Bucky Fuller-esque floating fibreglass domes at the E.A.T's Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Expo in Japan, 1970.

In my research, Breer often gets tagged as an artist that contributes to the interrogation of the distinctions between painting and art. He's often grouped together with Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, etc - but as the humorous, kinetic counterpart that exists as a failed one liner; sculpture taken off its pedestal and walking (or rather, wheeling) out of the gallery doors. Breer's work is of course, much more than that.

These enormous, slow moving utopian, already reminiscent of the sci-fi space art popular in the 1960s divert from the site-specific installations that resist institutional control of and both celebrate and satirise American culture. In November 2010 Artforum featured an interview with Breer, to which he commented that works at the pavilion were inspired by Jack Burnham's comparison of Breer's work to Japanese zen gardens. Breer's delightful and apt response, 'I thought, how typically American it would be to actually motorize a Zen garden!’



Figure 1. Robert Breer, Floats (1965)



Figure 2. Breer's Floats at the E.A.T Pepsi Pavilion at the World Expo, Osaka 1970


Figure 3. Breer's retrospective exhibition at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art - June 11 - September 25, 2011


Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons, Robert Breer (1980)