Joan Brigham

In these works, steam provides a celebratory and mystical curtain to expose poetry and participatory environmental art happenings.

Steamshuffle, 1987-1992

A public participatory work in collaboration with Christopher Janney, synthesized sound, and Emmett Williams, poetry. Words inscribed on each of nine glass panels become visible as steam creates a surface condensate. Venues included the Muncipal Services Building, Philadelphia PA, sponsored by the University City Science Center and the Philadelphia Arts Council.

STEAM SCREENS, 1979

Installation/performance in the Whitney Museum’s Sculpture Garden. 
By Stan VanDerBeek in collaboration with Joan Brigham.
Computer animation for EUCLIDEAN ILLUSIONS by Richard Weinberg.

The following description was written by Joan Brigham, August 1979:

I use steam as a form of energy—not contained within machines to replace human work—but to be set free within a specific environment for a specific duration of time. By expansion into the non-art spaces containing the audience, the work becomes inseparable from them. It acts to reduce the differences and heighten the similarities. Surfaces, distances, textures and volumes—the factors by which we orient ourselves in time and space—hover like apparitions in mid-air. painted clouds reflect an older wish to grasp itself: unpainted, unframed, unsigned and off its pedestal and into the street. Seen there clouds enhance vision, not obscure it. Steam enters the working day and dreaming night like a dancer onstage, energizing the spaces with continuous movement. And although the energy appears to dissipate by evaporation, it merely changes form according to the laws of energy conservation, and becomes an activating and melding agent for the audience. It places the viewer in a new perceptual mode; a place where there exists a precarious balance between the known and the unknown. The realities of each moment’s perception are in flux; contradictory, insistent and elegant. As the steam changes the audience, the audience changes the steam. A reciprocity is set up in which there is freedom to respond at any level of cognition and perception—from active participation to reflective contemplation. Steam works are events in which response is undictated, in which a single view of reality is unintended. Aesthetic experience is available to everyone; it is the work of the artist to create possibilities for more integrative experiences within contexts which are familiar; streets and plazas. The old meanings are retained and reintegrated into higher levels of awareness. Steam is, for me, a manifestation of the collective dream.

The work at the Whitney Museum is the fourth in a series of collaborations between Stan VanDerBeek and Joan Brigham using live steam as a screen for film images. In steam the film reaches the ultimate point of dematerialization. The audience is able physically to enter the image and the could and become wrapped in a wholly new experience: the size of the droplets maintain the clarity of the image while at the same time extending it laterally into space. Infinite repeatability subject to the winds of chance.

The VanDerBeek/Brigham collaboration began in 1975 with “Fog Mist and Dream” presented at Art Transition, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, followed the next year by “Under Aquarius,” an event held in the Alumni Pool at MIT. There the darkened room was filled with steam on which multiple slide and film images were projected directly above the audience/swimmers while, underwater, strobe lights were installed, cyalume lights floated and were tossed among the swimmers. Underwater video and a sonar sound system completed the setting. The audience was entirely free to participate physically in any way, at any level of perception or cognition it wished, changing the conditions for its responses at will. The following year “Under Aquarius” was presented with some modifications at Hampshire College and included performances by the American Underwater Band of Miami.

The present work at the Whitney Museum is a more developed version of the 1975 work. Here the steam issue is sequenced through a series of pipes to form moving steam waves which catch and refract the film images, formed and reforming them as the waves roll through the stream of projected light.

Click to view a PDF with additional images from Stan VanDerBeek's website.

Centerbeam was a collaborative environmental sculpture by the Fellows of Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, created for documenta 6, Kassel, Germany, 1977; and on the National Mall in Washington, DC, 1978. Brigham created the steam and water mist lines.

(Photographs courtesy MIT Museum)

Under Aquarius, 1976

By Stan VanDerBeek in collaboration with Joan Brigham. An event held in the Alumni Pool at MIT. There the darkened room was filled with steam on which multiple slide and film images were projected directly above the audience/swimmers while, underwater, strobe lights were installed, cyalume lights floated and were tossed among the swimmers. Underwater video and a sonar sound system completed the setting. The audience was entirely free to participate physically in any way, at any level of perception or cognition it wished, changing the conditions for its responses at will.