{"id":1505,"date":"2009-04-06T16:18:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T23:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/04\/robert-delford-brown-gone\/"},"modified":"2009-04-06T16:20:50","modified_gmt":"2009-04-06T23:20:50","slug":"robert-delford-brown-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/04\/06\/robert-delford-brown-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Delford Brown Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Robert Delford Brown, \u2018Happenings\u2019 Artist, Dies at 78<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/p>\n

By\u00a0BRUCE WEBER<\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Delford Brown, a painter, sculptor, performance artist and avant-garde philosopher whose exuberantly provocative works challenged orthodoxies of both the art world and the world at large, usually with a big wink, was found dead on March 24 in the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, N.C.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The death has been ruled accidental, Deputy Sheriff Charles Smith of the New Hanover County Sheriff\u2019s office in North Carolina said. The cause appeared to be drowning. Mr. Brown was last seen on March 20, said his stepdaughter, Carol Cone. Mr. Brown, who had had hip surgery and walked with a cane, was known to have been scouting locations for an art project in the river involving a number of rafts, and he is thought to have fallen in.<\/p>\n

A colleague of artists like Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and Nam June Paik, Mr. Brown was a central figure in the anarchic New York art scene of the early 1960s, a participant in \u2014 and instigator of \u2014 events-as-art known as \u201chappenings.\u201d He saw the potential for aesthetic pronouncement in virtually everything. His m\u00e9tier was willful preposterousness, and his work contained both anger and insouciance.<\/p>\n

His raw materials included buildings, pornographic photos and even meat carcasses.<\/p>\n

He often performed in the persona of a religious leader, but dressed in a clown suit with a red nose and antennas hung with ripe bananas. In the end his message to the world was that both spirited individualism and unimpeded creativity must triumph.<\/p>\n

One happening, a 1964 performance of a musical theater piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen called \u201cOriginale,\u201d included, according to\u00a0Time<\/a>\u00a0magazine, \u201ctwo white hens, a chimpanzee, six fish floating in two bowls suspended from the ceiling, a shapely model stripping to her black lace panties and bra, and a young man who squirted himself all over with shaving lather and then jumped into a tub of water.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Robert Delford Brown, \u2018Happenings\u2019 Artist, Dies at 78 By\u00a0BRUCE WEBER Robert Delford Brown, a painter, sculptor, performance artist and avant-garde philosopher whose exuberantly provocative works challenged orthodoxies of both the art world and the world at large, usually with a big wink, was found dead on March 24 in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}