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TOP ART WRITERS
ON JACK BROGAN: ANDREW BERARDINI, HUNTER DROHOJOWSKA-PHILIP, MICHELLE ISENBERG, CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT, ANDY MOSES and LAWRENCE WESCHLER Editor: Gordy Grundy ANDREW BERARDINI There are those names that grace headlines, but they are truly the minor characters in the actions of history. The ones that truly make the world work, its heartbeat, its visions go from soft wind to hard reality, are so often unheralded, standing next to the name as often as not, and happy simply to make the impossible possible without too much praise (which they so often deem unnecessary to a job well done). I never had the pleasure of meeting Jack Brogan, but I believe he is one of these quiet angels, one whom millions have seen his work and never known his name. We have been all very lucky to have him.
HUNTER DROHOJOWSKA-PHILIP Most of the artists associated with the Light and Space movement of ‘60's Southern California were able to realize their ideas on a greater scale and in greater numbers than could have been possible without the engineering finesse of Jack Brogan. As important, he was genial and accommodating to the temperaments of artists. He didn’t consider his own contributions to be art. He was pleased to be a facilitator of the new. I met Brogan many times and interviewed him at various times but initially learned of his role from Ren Weschler in his brilliant book on Robert Irwin. (Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, 1982)
MICHELLE ISENBERG Way back when, I had just placed a beautiful Peter Alexander sculpture, Cloud Box, with a client. It was a cast polyester resin cube with what appeared to be a cloud formation floating inside of it. At a UCLA event, I was gifted with a smaller version from what I assumed was the same series. There were a few scratches to the perfect piece, so I took it to the only proper and appropriate resource, Jack Brogan. With Jack, one never asked, "How long will it take?" Jack works at his own pace. It is the price of perfection. The sculpture was gorgeous when refinished, as always with Brogan. I took my new prize to the artist, Peter Alexander, to have him sign his work. It wasn't his!
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT The art that wouldn't exist without Jack Brogan's ability to help an artist's vision find material form is very long. In the 1960s, fabricators working for artists were uncommon, while now the collaboration happens routinely. In many ways he's the godfather of a whole field. Today, you might say that fabricators are a dime a dozen; Brogan, on the other hand, is one in a million.
ANDY MOSES I am always happy to speak about Jack Brogan. With my brother Cedd and our business partner Dan Loeb, we presented our first skateboard project to Jack Brogan in 1974, when I was twelve years old. We wanted Jack to help us make a series of injected molded boards that would be totally clear. We could float various materials inside of it. We went to Jack on my father Ed's recommendation. He referred to Jack as the wizard and we knew we needed a wizard. Jack looked at us a little bemused. Nevertheless, he drew up some plans. We quickly realized that we would need about $50,000 just to get started. We were very enterprising kids. Especially Cedd and Dan. Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to raise $50,000 and went back to making the skateboards out of exotic woods. I really first worked with Jack in 2007. I wanted to break away from the linear paintings that I was making at the time. Jack helped me design a special table that would help me achieve these new swirling vortex paintings. I can’t talk about the special table or the process, because I don’t want to give away any of Jack’s secrets. All I can say is that if you can conceive of something, Jack, aka the Wizard, will figure out how to build it.
LAWRENCE WESCHLER Fabricator Jack Brogan’s significance for the history of art in Los Angeles, and especially that of the Light and Space movement, from the latter half of twentieth century on forward, has long shimmered between rumor and legend, though shading deeper and deeper toward the latter with each passing decade. For it gets harder and harder to doubt the centrality of this tall, lanky, soft spoken, consummately (near pathologically) self-effacing Tennessee gentleman’s role in the unfurling of art history around these parts. Self-effacing, perhaps, though hardly lacking in self-assurance, for all along a fierce spine of workmanlike rigor and craftsmanlike pride has been running clean through all that deceptive reticence. Indeed, in the years ahead, the very history of art in Southern California may need to be entirely rewritten—with so much of the so-called “Fetish Finish” of sixties and seventies LA art (a facile sobriquet that, granted, they all resented, though everyone recognized the exactingly precise aesthetic to which the term referred) being seen to come down, not so much to the car or surf or aerospace culture to which it usually gets ascribed, or even to The Light, but rather to the commanding influence (either directly by way of actual manufacture or indirectly by way of towering example) of just one man—“The Man,” as he was often referred to in conversations among them—so much so that with his fast approaching retirement, past age ninety, a veritable era may be seen to be coming to a close: the Era, indeed, of Jack Brogan.
Editor: Gordy Grundy
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