2019. 100 Years of Turbulence
Castlemaine Art Museum
The archive of art and the turbulence of history are worlds that connect in their cosmopolitan art, along with the concept of a postnational culture. That is why their sophisticated quotation of found images are drawn from a rich archive of global visual history, for instance of the Apollo 11 moon landing gathered from NASA’s documentation and equally from the Vietnam War. The artists reorganise and sift both iconic and specific records, and their families’ histories that touched the edges of the panorama of world history. Brown & Green are intensely conscious of the tensions and the ethics of collecting, documenting and representing. With no single event in history to pinpoint for blame, absolution or inspiration, their powerful, constructed tableaux mediate a history pinned in place by indexes of contemporary world-making across panoramic perspectives. As they say: “we have always made paintings that show how the past survives into the present.
 100 Years of Turbulence is a photographic panorama (a picture with a wide view) that links photographs taken across 100 years of catastrophic (and terrible) post-Enlightenment history. The artists have constructed a visual countdown of chaos, trouble, war and what follows, from 1918 to 2018. This artwork is an atlas of conflict and ideas; it links one terrible event to the next and also to apparently unrelated but in fact connected other moments, showing how one conflict leads into another.
The work is made up of old photographs, historical snapshots and drawings that seem to be randomly scattered, but when together tell the story of global conflict over 100 years. Sometimes old photos are overlaid with new photos of the same places, showing us how things have changed (or stayed the same) over time. In other parts of scroll-like, horizontal work, so long it had to be printed in four separate sheets, each themselves of great length, images of conflict and war are placed with images of approximately the same date, in relative peace or continued conflict. The result shows the past reaching towards the present and the present towards the past: the countdown joins 1918 to 2018 in chains of causation and similarity leading towards this photo which is also an atlas in which timelines move from one side of the world to another in a cats cradle of force.
