Existential angst grounds a number of the pieces. "The Saturated Well of Baptism" is an elevated bowl containing an inconstant floral figure, always rising and forming, but never escaping. It is not even a true object - rather an upswelling of metallic fluid guided by magnets. "The Gulf of Pandemonium" is a low stone well with graded sides, filled with black oil and decorated with loose chains. The one chain that is not loose disappears into the abyss.
A summation of Brudniak's themes came with the "Amuk Id Cathedral," constructed two years ago and shown at sites including Austin's Dougherty Arts Center, the Lynn Good Gallery in Houston, San Antonio's Blue Star Art Space, and the University of Texas-El Paso. He describes the pieces therein as explorations of various facets of psychological function, imbued with iconology from Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. One piece, which has surfaced around Austin several times since, is a confessional in which two participants confess to each other via speaker-equipped fighter helmets; instructions ask the participants to reflect on and articulate their experiences thereafter.
"What I do is take ideas that are personal; I'm not working on a level of trying to say something about, for instance, the AIDS virus or what's going on in Bosnia or the Republican Party right now," he elaborates. "All I want to deal with are issues that have to do with the way I feel. ...I like to make machines that symbolically act as a shaman might use - a rattle or wand or something to take away problems or sins." He has exhibited all over Texas - "except Fort Worth," he notes - and out-of-state sites including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Scottsdale, New York's Alternative Museum, and the Phoenix airport. The San Antonio Museum of Art recently became the second major urban museum to add him to their permanent collection, joining the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Blatant rhetorical question: How does an artist specifically evoke a theme or reaction in a necessarily abstract form of communication such as visuals? For instance, fear.
"Fear is a funny thing; you can boil any bad feeling we have down to fear," Brudniak responds, pointing to a piece in the living room entitled "Ulteriorphobia." At first glance, it appears to be a converted fireplace, centered around a brass panel with indentations left by two hands. "[It's] about fear of anything that's out there, in the ulterior regions. We're basically afraid of what we don't know - anything in the future that might hurt us."
"The first thing that happens when you walk up to the piece is that you know something's going to happen when you put your hands in, because there's a plug and huge electrical cord going up to a key switch; people have this anxiety about putting their hands on it. There's also some religious items, some saints appearing in the concrete, so there's this fear of the ultimate religion and what's going on with life. And there's a series of mirrors inside the hole. You can only see your own eyeball - you can't see what's behind it or around it. So the piece talks about fear, even fear of yourself, what could happen in the future, or what sort of demons lurk inside our own minds and egos."
Eventually he turns the art piece on, and I approach it hands outstretched . . . albeit with a teaspoon of hesitation. Just how big is the shock? What if something malfunctions and I get the Ted Bundy Deluxe Treatment? Do sweaty palms change the effect? Likewise, he has to goad me into touching the demon ensconced within "Penance." Even after careful description and analysis, fear of the unknown viscerally permeates the viewer's reaction to the work. This is the clearest proof yet of the essentially non-verbal mode of communication Brudniak employs. The electrical charge, by the way, is kind of a rush.
Brudniak himself is a dualistic personality. He is a quick-witted and frequently hilarious fellow, yet his creative impulse stems from periods of emotional crisis. He began sculpting in 1981, after the dissolution of both his rock band and an intimate relationship. "I was a musician, trying to be artistic that way, trying to write music more than the average 4/4 12-bar blues bullshit, and got fairly artistic with that," he says. (He presently plays drums in the band Dog Head.) He began sculpting with some clay he received as a gift, but soon decided that medium had been exhausted. He acquired a neon sign transformer and started experimenting with sparks, then Jacob's ladders (ascending sparks between two electrodes), then incorporated the machine and a piece of fruit into "Of Misconception, (The Chiquita Kahoona)." This piece features a banana sending sparks to a staff held by an angel, and is the prototype for work continuing to this day. "I put a lot of craftsmanship and fine materials into it; it was a really therapeutic thing for me, really fun and exciting," he says. "I felt that I was doing something original, like I was doing something nobody had ever done before. Which is probably not true, but at least I felt that way. It spurred me on to try and use electricity and found objects as a medium."
No formal or academic training informs his work - his most recent forays in that field were high-school painting and graphic arts classes. In the latter, he befriended Wesley Archer, who has since found a certain measure of success as a director of The Simpsons. "He had a lot of inspiration for me, because I always liked putting what your ideas are into a visual format. And there was something exciting about the whole Being an Artist thing." Otherwise, he developed through osmosis. "I've kind of relied on going to art museums, and I've got some friends who tend to give me their old art books, but inspiration for me came from seeing the art scene and seeing what was going on in Texas. The influences were not from seeing pictures." Nevertheless, he does point to some artists with whom he has an affinity, such as Duchamp and Dali.
Craftsmanship being paramount in his work, he is quite vociferous about certain "experimental" or base strains of contemporary art. "Art's a free thing, and you should be able to do anything you want; it's freedom of speech really," he says. "What I get a little irritated about is when artists will use sloppy, excessively sloppy methods to get a point across, or really mundane or overused methods. I think it's obvious when you see work that's a rehash. I think trends tend to get in the way of what people are trying to do or say. You saw in New York, and actually everywhere, in the mid to late Eighties, a lot people doing the installation thing.
"To fill a gallery with dirt is so overdone, and since it's an easy thing to do there are a lot of artists trying to get away with doing really simple things to get their point across," he continues. "I think at that point what they're trying to do is get attention instead of getting their point across. Fine art is something that has a little more character to it and a little more effort behind it than to merely make a quick statement - the abstract expressionists would, in 10 minutes, finish a painting and call it their message, but what they were doing was getting across a visual language that worked and was powerful. I think maybe the first pile of dirt may have been a powerful visual thing, but the second, third, fourth, fifth, weren't. I think originality makes art contemporary, and the craftsmanship makes it fine."
Not all Brudniak's works are so mechanistically inclined. He is increasingly working with subversive preservations: animals such as squids and centipedes in antifreeze, placing the luminous green vials in sculptures or elegant boxes. A project involving a mummified squirrel is in the works. There is also the odd bricolage of the "Homologous Monstrosities" sculptures, which weld together animal bones or antlers to found scraps like a clarinet tube. "I still use things like sparks and electricity now, although I'm starting to cut down on the technological things," he says.
In favor of ...
"In favor of things that are less breakable," he laughs. "Things I don't have to repair." n