One Work: Philip Brun Del Re
SERVE, 2023, spray paint on repurposed bar sign, 14.5 x 14.5 in.
[Image description: A square sign on a blue background. The sign is primarily safety orange, framed in lime green trim with a thick, black border. In raised, blue letters the sign reads SERVE. Above and below this text are the fairly visible, rough outlines of removed text, which read WE DO NOT and MINORS.]
I had no idea what to expect, walking into The Last Group Show at Bread & Salt Gallery, last year. As a hodgepodge exhibition consisting of artworks contributed by any and all artists who responded to the gallery’s open call, the possibilities were, by definition, endless. [1] While KBPS’ Julia Dixon-Evans described the floor-to-ceiling menagerie as “an antidote to ultra-minimalist gallery displays,” to me, wandering from room to room felt more like my first day at a new school—so many people to meet, not nearly enough time to meet them. [2] And so, as many freshmen do, instead of spending a little bit of time with every single work, I spent all of my time with one.
It was the fluorescent orange spray paint that first drew me in. The entire background of Philip Brun Del Re’s SERVE (2023) is saturated in thick layers of bright reddish-yellow, the grain of the former plywood bar sign barely peeking through. If you squint, you can read the entire phrase, “WE DO NOT SERVE MINORS.” Because Brun Del Re removed every letter but those that spell “SERVE,” the foreground is dominated by the one word, painted in a stark cyan blue.
In a group show encumbered by maximalist extravagance, SERVE represented something of a refuge. Out of its simplicity erupted complexity. The more I gazed at it, the more every possible association with the word buzzed behind my eyes, eventually congealing together to form something of a single-word manifesto.
First, my mind wandered to the most basic meaning of “serve,” such as waiting on customers as a “server”—my first job. This one seems to be the idea Brun Del Re was going for, based on the caption he wrote for the piece that read “All Welcome No Exceptions.” [3] I thought about businesses exploiting their “right to refuse service.” I thought about public and commercial spaces, whom they were designed to serve and whom they decidedly weren’t.
After staring a little longer, I thought about “indentured servitude” and the transatlantic slave trade, so that the word “serve” stood in for the centuries of capturing, selling, and abusing “servants” and enslaved persons. I thought about the unconscionable process of rendering a person subhuman, in order that they might “serve” a specific purpose. This association is related to perhaps the oldest meaning of the word, from the Proto-Italic serwo-, meaning “guard, shepherd,” which underwent a pejorative development into “slave” between 700 and 450 B.C., forming the Latin servire, meaning to “be devoted; be governed by; be in service.” [4]
What’s interesting about the word “serve” is that, as many offshoot associations as there are for the word—“serves them right” or “you’ve been served”—the most persistent meaning of “serve” over the last several thousand years has remained the same: “to be in the service of, perform a service for.” This is interesting because language is typically more elusive than that. As much time and energy as we spend trying to nail down the discrete definitions of words, once and for all, those definitions tend to age poorly.
Only a few decades ago, for example, English speakers used “awful” to describe something “worthy of awe,” rather than something unfathomably bad. In ancient Rome, decimate meant merely “to kill one in every ten.” According to language historian Dr. Anne Curzan, words have been changing their meaning—sometimes radically—as long as there have been speakers to speak them. [5]
So, I wondered while lingering before SERVE, what’s so sticky about this particular word? Why is it that most (if not all) power structures demand that some groups are subservient to others? Taking Brun Del Re’s broader practice into consideration, I seem to be in good company in asking these kinds of questions.
As a graduate student at San Diego State University, a majority of the Michigan-born, West Coast-based artist’s work in painting, printmaking, and design has seemed to circle back to individual words or phrases. For instance, one of Brun Del Re’s letterpress prints from earlier in the year, DISCOUNT TIRED (2023)—a playful modification to the independent tire and wheel retailer, Discount Tire—assumes a comparably political tone, taking a jab at consumer culture in dutch fireball red on off-white paper. One of Brun Del Re’s risograph prints from the same period omits the word “road” from the phrase “end road work,” so that “END WORK” is printed alone in black against recycled orange card stock.
When asked how he would define graphic design, Brun Del Re described it as a vocabulary, “a way of thinking or organizing thoughts into something that can be perceived easier, get a certain message across.” [6]
From a bird’s eye view, it’s clear that Brun Del Re is participating in a long history of resistance movements, whose use of bold colors, iconic imagery, and familiar slogans subvert those tools' original purpose to advertise, propagandize, and normalize certain systems and behaviors. What makes Brun Del Re’s work unique is its appropriation of signs that are so deeply ingrained in our visual vocabulary—find me a dive bar that doesn’t hang a “We do not serve minors” sign—that it isn’t until he alters them that we realize what they’re really saying. For Brun Del Re, the fact that a business does not serve minors is less interesting than the question of whom they really mean to serve in the first place.
In the end, the power of Brun Del Re’s work hinges on the capaciousness and flexibility of language. As the feminist writer Angela Carter wrote, “Language is power, life, and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.” [7]
—Justin Duyao, HereIn Contributing Editor
Notes:
“The Last Group Show.” Bread & Salt. 2023.
Dixon-Evans, Julia. “San Diego weekend arts events: 'The Last Group Show,' Robert Irwin and 15 years of Soda Bar.” KPBS. November 8, 2023.
Brun Del Re, Philip (@slim_chili). Instagram post. November 9, 2023.
“serve (v.).” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed February 8, 2024.
Curzan, Anne. “What makes a word ‘real’?” TED.com. March, 2014.
Zimmerman, Alexander. “Perception of Graphic Design Featuring: Philip Brun Del Re.” YouTube. 2021.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line.” Writing and Gender. London: Pandora, 1983.