Mike Brown

“Mike Brown was a stoic who seemed endlessly
unsure whether to laugh or groan, whether to ‘take
up arms against a sea of troubles’ or to toss in the sponge and have a drink or a joint. So instead of doing neither and sitting in the quagmire, he did both.”

Interview by Peter Hill May 2024

Image credit: Mike Brown, You’re welcome, 1982-83, paper collage, plastic toys, plastic flower & acrylic on cotton duck 164 × 122cm. © Estate of Mike Brown. Courtesy Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne

There’s something a bit counter-intuitive about the slim-as-a-paperback Brief Lessons in Rule Breaking from Tate Publishing (London, 2019). In something close to bullet points, it sets out a list of rules for “how to break rules.”

The book is divided into nine sections, starting with “STEAL: Find ideas worth taking (Sherrie Levine, Christian Marclay, Pablo Picasso)” and advancing through “PROBE THE PAIN: Embrace unpleasant emotions and investigate taboo subjects (Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin)” to, near the end, “GO TO EXCESS: Challenge the boundaries of good taste (Sophie Calle, Marlene Dumas, and Jeff Koons)”.

The first thing I do is namecheck the other artists in this mix. They include Tomma Abts, William Blake, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman and Joseph Beuys. The second thing I do is make a mental list of the artists not included. Most people, I’m sure, could proffer at least one rule breaker from whatever artworlds they know best. In my case, it would be Ian Hamilton Finlay from Scotland, whose semi-fictional Join the Saint-Just Vigilantes (1983) carried out his real-life bidding contra the many bureaucracies against whom he had declared war.

And in Australia, for me, it would be Mike Brown, who lived variously around Sydney and Melbourne and for a short while in Aotearoa New Zealand. Many rule-breaking Australian artists – from Bill Henson to Paul Yore and the late, much-missed, Polixeni Papapetrou – have had exhibitions closed, raided or subjected to unwelcome scrutiny in the nation’s ... Subscribe to read this article in full

“Mike Brown was a stoic who seemed endlessly unsure whether to laugh or groan, whether to ‘take up arms against a sea of troubles’ or to toss in the sponge and have a drink or a joint. So instead of doing neither and sitting in the quagmire, he did both.”

“Mike Brown was a stoic who seemed endlessly
unsure whether to laugh or groan, whether to ‘take
up arms against a sea of troubles’ or to toss in the sponge and have a drink or a joint. So instead of doing neither and sitting in the quagmire, he did both.”