Sydney-based performance art collective Brown Council is the collaboration of Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith, who have created work together since 2005. Their work features prominently in Sydney’s independent contemporary and performance art scene and they have gained considerable national recognition with performances and exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Queensland. Their performances break down the boundaries between art and every-day life and complicate understandings of the roles of the artist and the spectator, often including the audience as participants. This article discusses two interrelated trajectories of Brown Council’s work: their ongoing challenge to definitions of performance, and their consistent engagement with feminist politics. It suggests that Brown Council’s work might best be characterised as postmodern feminist performance art in that it simultaneously draws upon feminist performance art practices of the 1960s, 70s and 80s and reframes these practices using postmodern techniques and a contemporary feminist perspective. A brief overview of Brown Council’s key works below is followed by an interview I conducted with Brown Council’s Diana Smith in November 2013 which provides important insights into the group’s creative processes, thematic concerns and political intent.
In their recent book Multimedia Performance, Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer argue that an ‘aesthetic evolution’ has taken place in contemporary performance (2012: 1). They observe a prevalent use of audio-visual, multi-media and virtual technologies in emergent theatre practice that has contributed to a dramatic shift in the defining features of performance, challenging the notion that the ‘ontology of performance,’ is that it occurs before a live audience in the present moment (Phelan, 1993: 146). Contemporary performance making is frequently multi-disciplinary, integrating elements from visual art, filmmaking and digital media. Conversely, there is a rising presence of performance in art galleries and online spaces reflective of the performative turn that has taken place with increasing momentum in the visual arts over the past half-century (Jones & Stephenson, 1999: 1).
The work of Brown Council is illustrative of some of the complex aesthetic changes taking place in contemporary performance practice. While they classify all of their work as performance, it is only occasionally presented in traditional theatre spaces and more often takes place in galleries, site specific locations and video documentation. Klich and Scheer’s notion of ‘multimedia performance,’ a broad term that incorporates elements that are real and virtual, live and mediatised (2012: 2; 4-5), provides a useful frame for understanding the cross-disciplinary performances of Brown Council, which employ a range of mediatised practices, especially through the use of film and video. Located at the intersection of performance and contemporary art, their practice reflects the growing engagement with performance in Australia’s contemporary art scene, which is also evident in the work of artists such as Julie Rrap, Brian Fuata, Justin Shoulder and Parachutes for Ladies, who have all created performances within a contemporary art context.
Brown Council are also one of a significant number of Australian independent performance companies dealing explicitly with feminism and gender politics. I suggest that there has been a resurgence of feminist themes in contemporary Australian performance. Such resurgence is exemplified in the works of companies such as Finucane & Smith (Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith), The Rabble (Kate Davis and Emma Valente), Sisters Grimm (Declan Greene and Ash Flanders), Post (Zoë Coombs, Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose), and Brown Council. All of these companies combine gender politics with an emphasis on entertainment, comedy, parody and play, reflecting the fusion of politics and pleasure that characterises contemporary feminism.
This dual feminist focus on political critique and humour is prevalent in Brown Council’s early performance-videos such as Milkshake (2007), in which the four members of Brown Council perform a hip hop dance routine to Kelis’ song ‘Milkshake’ wearing skeleton suits and black and white make-up. Half way through the performance, they stop dancing and each drink a litre of milk before recommencing the gyrating dance moves, this time while burping, vomiting and enduring stomach cramps. By literally transforming the female body into a ‘milkshake’ the performance comically critiques the grotesquerie underpinning the construction of women in the mainstream popular music industry. It employs themes and techniques central to feminist performance art highlighting physical pain and endurance, and thereby the role of the artist’s body as spectacle in using performance as a form of cultural critique. However, unlike performance art practices of the 1970s in which the performer’s physical pain evoked shock and horror, here it evokes laughter.
Brown Council’s interest in combining humour and endurance was later developed in the four-hour performance A Comedy (2010), in which the artists, dressed in dunces’ hats, undertook live comedy acts including stand up, a dancing monkey and cream-pie throwing. A Comedy transformed the comic act into a repetitive and gruelling durational performance and placed control in the hands of the audience, who were permitted to choose the order of the show and encouraged to hurl tomatoes at the blindfolded performers. In such works Brown Council deliberately place themselves in vulnerable and humiliating positions to test the spectator’s ethics and capacity for cruelty.
Fig 1. A Comedy, Photograph: William Mansfield.
The reversal of the traditional power dynamic between performer and spectator is an ongoing feature of Brown Council’s performances and was the focus of Performance Fee (2012), a performance-installation presented at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Here the four artists sat blindfolded on stools holding silver money tins against a backdrop that read ‘KISSES $2’ and allowed audience members to procure a kiss once they had paid the fee. The performance critiques the reduction of the artist to the status of anonymous commodity and presents the spectator with an ethical choice as to whether participate or not.
Fig 2. Performance Fee, Photograph: B Wagner.
By transposing the private act of a kiss into a public spectacle, Performance Fee comments upon the absence of genuine human-interaction in the modern world. In contrast, Brown Council’s more recent work Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours (2012) explicitly aimed to engender community through a social engagement with performance. In this work the four members of Brown Council engaged in a performative bake-off and test of endurance, baking every recipe in the Country Women’s Association cookbook over a 90 hour period. The work culminated in an afternoon tea comprising members of the CWA and the contemporary art public, thereby bringing together two disparate groups of people who would otherwise be unlikely ever to come into contact. As a site specific performance event in which the artists undertook activities that sit outside usual definitions of ‘performance’ Mass Action has elements in common with the ‘happenings’ of the 1960. The event’s focus on collaboration and its involvement with the community further supports this comparison (Marsh, 1993: 8-9). However, Mass Action is also a contemporary performance event mediated and framed by live video documentation, twitter feeds, blogging and continual mobile uploads.
Fig 3. Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours, Photograph: Dara Gill.
The focus on collaboration and community in Mass Action recuperates second-wave feminist ideals for contemporary performance. By creating an engagement between two generations of Australian women, Brown Council illustrate the need for intergenerational dialogue and highlight the importance for young women to connect with feminist history, even as they forge new and divergent identities.
This engagement with second wave feminism emerges again in Brown Council’s ongoing project Remembering Barbara Cleveland, the most recent instalment of which is the film-installation This is Barbara Cleveland (2013), a fictional documentary that reconstructs the life and work of a mythical performance artist. The film intertwines documentary style footage of the four members of Brown Council describing Barbara Cleveland’s life and work with Cleveland’s fragmented and poetic ‘performance-lectures’ and (re)constructed images of Cleveland’s performances. The film emulates the visual language of 1970s performance art documentation with black and white shaky footage, extreme close-ups and fast-paced editing.
Fig 4. This is Barbara Cleveland, Video: Elliot Hughes.
Barbara Cleveland is an imaginative creation of the collective minds of Brown Council, yet she also functions as a synecdoche for the female performance artists of Australian history who are largely missing from historical documentation (with the notable exception of Anne Marsh’s Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1962-92). By proposing to ‘exhume’ Cleveland’s memory ‘in an attempt to reinsert her into the history of performance art’ (Brown Council, 2014), Brown Council engage with the second-wave feminist project of using memory as a counter-discourse to history. However, here there is no authentic autobiographical memory being reinscribed into the historical narrative. Rather, This is Barbara Cleveland is a postmodern fictional simulation that deals, not with historical reconstruction as it appears to at first glance, but with the central place of absence and invisibility in the history of performance art. Here, as in each of their performances discussed above, Brown Council appropriate historical performance art traditions and invest them with a contemporary feminist sensibility to challenge spectators to think about their relationship to both feminism and performance.
During the run of This is Barbara Cleveland at Sydney’s Carriageworks in November 2013, I met with Diana Smith to learn more about the processes and politics behind Brown Council’s work.
Sarah: Can you tell me a bit about the background of Brown Council? I understand that the four of you met at art school?
Diana: We were all studying at COFA [the College of Fine Art at the University of New South Wales] and we formed a group called the Drama Club that consisted of about 20 arts students. We did club performances and put on events that students would come to. It was a very organic way of making performance that came out of a desire to be playful and social. There was one time that the four of us decided to collaborate for a short works night and the dynamic between us really worked. We came from different backgrounds: I had done time based art and so had Kate and our interest was in film and video, Kelly had studied painting and Fran was doing art theory. With all of our voices combined we started creating performances for the camera. The first time we did work for the theatre was in 2005 at performance space, and in 2007 we had our first exhibition. We were thinking conceptually because we were at art school, but at the same time our process was often quite intuitive and hap-hazard in the beginning. Since then we have grown up together and we have given each other the confidence to have a strong political voice. Now I think we have a very clear vision of who we are, what we do and what we want to say.
Sarah: How would you describe that vision?
Diana: Gender politics is at the forefront of our interest and certainly feminist ideology or challenging the roles of women in popular culture and within the art world. I think that’s very clearly where our interest lies now. Within our current show, This is Barbara Cleveland, our focus is on how women have been represented throughout history and how they haven’t been represented. The history of performance as a sort of lesser or poorer cousin to contemporary art has also been an interest, and how performance has often been marginalised, or left out of the main histories of Australian art.
Sarah: Where did the name Brown Council come from?
Diana: We liked the term ‘council’ because it’s a collective of people that make decisions. It seems quite serious and also non-gendered. Then ‘brown’ was just to counteract the seriousness of the council. It’s absurd – what could a Brown Council possibly be?
Sarah: Are there any particular theatre makers that have inspired you?
Diana: Early on we were inspired by international companies like Forced Entertainment and The Wooster Group and more locally we were influenced by the Fondue Set and Frumpus and the Sydney Front—although we weren’t around for the Sydney Front we watched their work on tape. Also, artists like Pina Bauch—artists or theatre makers that are playing with an audience or have a very clear conceptual framework.
Sarah: How does your process for creating performance work?
Diana: It depends on the project but usually our process is about coming together around a table and through conversation deciding upon a conceptual rationale or framework. Usually there’s a starting point where we identify a particular area we are interested in exploring and then there’s a very rigorous process of discussion, research and improvisation. We did a work called Portrait of Brown Council by Brown Council (2010) for the Melbourne Art Fair that was about our process. We are very much disassociated from the commercial art world as performance artists and so for that piece we thought about putting ourselves in the centre of the work, which is a pretty old idea, but in the context of the Melbourne Art Fair it felt slightly radical. So we were ‘at work’ wearing our overalls and we sat at a table for two hours every day coming up with ideas for work. That is very much how we do make work. The process starts within a social space and that’s very important. We’re all best friends and if we weren’t such good friends I don’t think we could make the work that we make. That sense of a relationship is very important.
Sarah: Something that emerges from that relationship is a commitment to collaboration and to the idea of the collective. Why is the notion of the collective important to you, and especially the notion of the feminist collective?
Diana: I think it’s become such a powerful way of speaking about politics. As a collective of four women making work, it’s already politicised. We give each other the confidence to be political and to be strong women. Initially it was an organic thing but the idea of collectivity has become so important to what we do. Thinking about how we might make work in a non-hierarchical structure and about how feminist methodology could be applied to practice is something we have been speaking about a lot. Trying to negotiate that with the art world is important. When we have dealt with people in a theatre context it’s often not understood how that functions – they just want to talk to one person who is the director. Although we all bring different skills, our work is always devised collectively.
Sarah: Your work displays a notable interest in interrogating gender politics. Can you articulate what it is that interests you in the theme of gender?
Diana: I think it comes out of lived experience. It comes from looking around and seeing an imbalance and feeling a sense of oppression as a woman, and the invisibility and insipid nature of that oppression. The most obvious problem when we were in our early 20s was within popular culture and that display of sexuality in video clips and films was so present, so we poked fun at that and critiqued those genres. From popular culture, we moved to looking at the world of comedy – from the angry male comic to the’ hysteric female.’ There are always less women in comedy because supposedly ‘women aren’t funny.’ As soon as you look at any area these ridiculous binaries still exist. Things have become more oppressive, in Australia in particular, in terms of our government. There’s just so much to talk about now. That imbalance is just everywhere.
Sarah: I was interested to read in an interview with Brown Council published in Art & Australia that your work has been criticised by your peers for being feminist and by second wave feminists for not being feminist (Ewington, 2012:451). This suggests a clear generational shift around definitions of feminism. Where would you position your work within that generational shift and why do you think you have received such criticisms?
Diana: The work that sparked that discussion was called Dancework (2009). We were invited to be part of an exhibition at Cambelltown (What I Think About When I Think About Dancing), that was about dance in contemporary art so we had a week to develop a piece that was context specific. We thought about what wasn’t being talked about in that show, or what wasn’t being represented, which was about what it means to dance to strip. That’s very much not spoken about and there are taboos around it which raises questions about whether that is an empowered gesture and we were interested in that territory. We found an amazing stripper who we brought to the gallery. We had a stage with a sign that read ‘Brown Council presents Kelly K’ and we hired her in the way that other people had hired her and she did this routine and a lot of people had problems with it. I think we knew that a lot of people would have problems with it because of the second wave perspective that we were objectifying this woman. That anti-pornography, anti-stripping and anti-sex work mentality is what sparked the critique. I think that’s an old-hat perspective.
Sarah: Why do you think your peers would be critical of your work because it is feminist?
Diana: I think that has really changed since we said that a couple of years ago. I think recently, because of what has happened in Australian politics, a lot of women artists are now aligning themselves with feminist politics – whether it’s feminist art or not is another debate – but there has been a real shift.
Sarah: Your work draws on a range of different art forms and genres. Are there any key genres that you are interested in working with?
Diana: It’s changed over time. At the moment we are interested in the genre of performance art and its documentation and mining the discussion in the last 10 years about liveness and how things can slip away and disappear with performance much more easily than in other art forms because it’s in the moment. When we were first starting out with works like Milkshake (2007) or Love and Death in 8 Minutes (2007) we were interested in popular culture and critiquing female posturing in video clips. We are also interested in the everyday – our work Six Minute Soul Mate (2008) for example critiqued the ways in which we perform love, intimacy and romance. At other points we have been very interested in comedy. We spent years researching comedy and then made A Comedy (2010) which ended up being a four hour endurance spectacle. We were really interested in that space of the stand-up comedian, the suspension of social norms and what is OK in that space, and that very direct relationship with an audience. We were interested in what it means to laugh and in the power dynamics of laughter. We would always come back to this Seinfeld quote, ‘to laugh is to be dominated,’ this idea that if you have got an audience laughing, you’ve got them and you can do something with them at that point, which would usually be something political or providing some message that we’re interested in.
Sarah: A central ongoing motif of your work is the theme of endurance. You have created quite a few endurance-based performance pieces, such as A Comedy and Mass Action. Where did this desire to engage with physical endurance emerge from?
Diana: Endurance is one strategy we use in performance to explore certain ideas but I don’t think we ever come to something thinking we’re going to make an endurance performance because we’re interested specifically in endurance – it comes out of an idea. In A Comedy endurance became important because we were playing with the idea of comedic timing. Stand-up comedy is very structured. There is usually a 20 minute set or a routine where the comedian tells a few jokes and it’s very much about timing and rhythm. We became interested in what would happen if you draw that out. If you extend it for four hours and you do it over and over and over again, at what point does it stop being funny and at what point does it start being funny again?
With Mass Action we baked for 90 hours all of the cakes in the CWA cook book which was the longest endurance performance we have ever done. Again, we didn’t come to that thinking ‘let’s do an endurance performance’. We spent a long time with the members of the CWA in different branches, talking to them, researching their history, thinking about what that organisation was and what it meant to us, about our relationship to it as the largest organisation of women in Australia. In a lot of ways they are an incredible feminist group and they just don’t call themselves that. They always talk about the way that they built the CWA on scones and they literally have. They are an incredibly powerful organisation. They make real change in policy and they have basically done that through baking. It was their 90th anniversary in 2012 and we decided as a tribute and also as a critique, we would bake for an hour of every year that they have been going and stretch that out and cook every single cake in their cookbook Jam Drops and Marble Cake, because what these women do is very much about endurance: they are the unsung heroes in the background behind their husbands. We wanted to pay tribute to that unseen work of endurance. Then by stretching it out to 90 hours it becomes sort of grotesque and ugly and horrible when of course it is such a lovely ritual to make a cake and to share it with someone. It’s very feminine in many ways. By pulling it apart and making it into an endurance work that took it to a whole other place. So the use of endurance is always very specific to what we’re trying to say.
Sarah: How would you describe the message of Mass Action?
Diana: It was about looking at the CWA organisation and trying to make a decision about how we, as four young women, might be able to connect to a group of older predominantly rural women, because everything points to the fact that we shouldn’t be able to connect to them. A lot of the women at the CWA are monarchists and many are Christian, which is not our political or religious alignment, but we were interested in how we could come together. Surely there is a way we can have a dialogue between women of different generations and different social and economic backgrounds. It was about trying to find a common language. At the end we had an afternoon tea that consisted of CWA members alongside more typical art audience members and there was a really nice intermingling and nice conversations. Through this ridiculous act of endurance we brought these two communities together, if only for a brief moment in time.
Sarah: The piece also deals with the theme of women’s work and the undervalued nature of women’s work. In that way there were some commonalities with your performance-video Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk (2010) where the four of you stood in a paddock from 6am until 10pm taking turns to hammer a wooden post into the ground.
Diana: Dawn to Dusk was made for a show called ‘The View from Here: 19 perspectives on feminism’ (2010) curated by Victoria Bennett and Clare Rae. We were making it with that context in mind. The video became a symbol of women’s work and collaboration, even though it’s a ridiculous collaboration of hitting a pole into the ground, which is meaningless. It also expresses a frustration around feminism and what it is or what it isn’t and then it also has a comic element with the mallets and the overalls. I should also say that in all of our work you should always question whether or not we actually did it. We’re very much interested in video and the idea of it being a document of a performance – an index or truth that this happened. So when we make video, the spectator should question: did that actually happen? Is it a constructed image? Why do you believe it happened? Does it matter if it happened or not? If we did stand in a field for 12 hours or if we didn’t, what’s the difference?
Sarah: Many of your video works are subject to quite intense control and manipulation via editing procedures and other aspects of mediatisation. On the other hand, in your live works you frequently relinquish control to the audience and place yourselves in a vulnerable position. This was clearly a feature of A Comedy and it is again present in Performance Fee. Of all of your works, this is the one that perhaps creates the most unusual power dynamic between performer and spectator. What kind of spectatorial experience were you hoping to produce or what did you want to make the spectator think about?
Diana: We wanted them to question their relationship to the performer and to the art object in the institution. We wanted to put them in a position where they would question what they would do to another person and whether or not they would pay the right amount, because of course we were blindfolded so we never know. We never know who’s kissing us. What happens in that performance is that there are two levels of spectatorship: there’s a ring of audience members who are just looking and they’re not going to do anything so they are passive, and then there will be someone who comes up and they become the performer. Then there’s a relationship and an exchange and there’s a spectacle relating to who they’ll choose, how they’ll do it, and whether they will pay the right amount.
Sarah: There’s a recurring theme in your work relating to how audiences treat performers: in A Comedy, Performance Fee and also Photo with the Artist (2011), you place yourselves in a vulnerable, humiliating or even painful position, so it’s kind of masochistic. At the same time, there’s a certain power in choosing to adopt the masochistic role and it’s really the audience who are made vulnerable because they are forced to become complicit in their own sadistic actions.
Diana: Yes, the audience may show their weakness because it opens up a space in which they can potentially do things to another human being. It makes them question their particular ethics in that situation. In A Comedy it was about what they would laugh at and how much pain they would inflict upon us; in Performance Fee it was whether they would steal a kiss without us knowing. In Photo with an Artist the spectator stood with us in this ridiculous sideshow act to get their photo taken and give us $5 which was obviously a devaluing of art and it was also about playing out the trope of the poor starving artist begging for money. We are always willing to put ourselves in a humiliating place in order to create a potentially meaningful experience or relationship with an audience member. It seems to be a running theme. It’s not that we set out to humiliate ourselves but it has been strategy we have used over and over again in live performance.
Sarah: Your most recent work, This is Barbara Cleveland (2013), brings together a lot of the thematic strands you have engaged with throughout your work. It deals with the role of the artist and the function of performance as a form of social and cultural critique, especially as it relates to gender and feminism. It also brings in a new theme through its engagement with the idea of cultural memory. What did you want to say with this piece about the relationship between feminism, performance art and cultural memory?
Diana: Firstly, the feminist strand is a continuation of the recovery projects from the 1970s about reinserting artists into history. We wanted to comment on the fact that historically women artists have been left out of the story and consider how that continues to effect contemporary practices. We were interested in the way that fictional histories work as a strategy of critiquing actual histories. We were also influenced by Zoe Leonard’s work with The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1996). Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye made a film about a fictional African American film star and then Zoe Leonard who is a visual artist made an entire archive about this artist who had been left out of history. It was an African-American, lesbian, female story. We were inspired by that idea of reinsertion and the way that it destabilises the historical narrative. In addition to being left out of history, women artists are still underrepresented in galleries and underrepresented in every aspect of cultural and public life. That was our focus and we also wanted to comment on the fact that performance art has been marginalised in Australia.
Sarah: This is Barbara Cleveland deals with the history of performance art in a manner that is simultaneously serious and funny. You illustrate the importance of giving recognition to female performance artists that have been excluded from historical documentation, yet at the same time, you parody the earnest and polemical nature of 1970s feminist performance art in a very amusing way. There are a lot of ‘in-jokes’ and references for viewers familiar with the history of performance art. The images of Barbara Cleveland’s performances are at once familiar. They reminded me especially of the photographs of Carolee Schneemann in art books.
Diana: Yes, there’s an image that we call the ‘Carolee Schneemann image’ where she’s pulling a rope but it looks like Interior Scroll (1975) and there’s a Chris Burden image and a Mike Parr image referencing the performance where he puts his finger in a flame. The scenes where Barbara is trying to catch the tomatoes blindfolded came from the video work we made What do I do (1970-2009) which was a reconfiguration of a Vito Acconci work. The images of her performances all became very ‘1970s.’ This amazing thing happened where one person was performing and another could look through the view finder and say ‘that’s a 70s image’ and ‘that’s not a 70s image.’ This made us realise that there is a clear visual language of the way those images were constructed by artists in that era.
Sarah: There’s also the language of historical documentation.
Diana: Yes, and that’s interesting because when those images were documented it was all so seemingly hap-hazard and in the moment and so many artists talk about how the documentation was never considered that and it was really about the moment, but it really was about the documentation as well, because, let’s face it something like five people were in the room. We had explored some of those ideas in previous works but this was a very embodied experience from performing it to being on camera.
Sarah: It occurred to me while watching the film that your discussion of Barbara Cleveland’s work also functions as a commentary on your own work. There’s a strong self-reflexive quality running throughout the film and of course you have the same initials. To what extent is Barbara Cleveland really Brown Council?
Diana: I think Barbara Cleveland is Brown Council definitely. When we were coming up with the kinds of works she made and how we would embody those for the camera we spent a lot of time thinking that through and finally came to the conclusion that it should all relate to our work, either something that we had done or something that had influenced us. We were intentionally trying to confuse art history and the question of what’s hers and what’s ours. In many ways the piece is a strange portrait of us. All of our anxieties on a personal level are there – that classic thing of being 30 and then all the female artists drop off. How many artists that are our peers will drop off or be forgotten? All of that is present in the work and in our minds at the moment since we’re all at this point in our careers where we’re not emerging artists anymore. We’re at this particular crossroads where we’re thinking what do we do now?
References
Brown Council (2014). This is Brown Council, http://browncouncil.com/ [accessed 17.02.2014]
Ewington, Julie (2012). ‘”Think big, and be loud”: Three generations of Australian female artists,’ Art & Australia Vol. 49, No. 3, Autumn 2012: 450-455
Jones, Amelia & Stephenson, Andrew, eds (1999). Performing the Body/ Performing the Text. London and New York: Routledge
Klich, Rosemary and Scheer, Edward (2012). Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Marsh, Anne (1993). Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-92. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Phelan, Peggy (1993). Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London & New York: Routledge
Performances, Videos & Exhibitions
Brown Council ‘Milkshake’ (2007). Video by William Mansfield, Kings Ari, Melbourne, http://browncouncil.com/works/milkshake [accessed 21/02/2014]
Brown Council Love & Death in 8 Minutes. Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, 18 July – 4 August, 2007
Brown Council (2008). Runaway. Video by William Mansfield, http://browncouncil.com/works/runaway [accessed 21/02/2014]
Brown Council Six Minute Soul Mate. Next Wave Festival, Carlton Hotel, Melbourne, 16-23 May 2008
Brown Council ‘Dance Work.’ Campbelltown Arts Centre, 27 November, 2009
Brown Council (2009). What Do I Do? (1970-2009).Sound & Video by Frederick Rodrigues, video excerpt available at http://vimeo.com/29244198 [accessed 21/02/2014]
Brown Council Big Show. Locksmith Projects, Sydney, 3-19 December, 2009
Brown Council A Comedy. Produced by Performance Space, LiveWorks Festival, Carriageworks, Sydney, 11-14 November, 2010
Brown Council (2010) Work in Progress: Dawn to Dusk. video excerpt available at http://browncouncil.com/works/work-in-progress-dawn-to-dusk [accessed 21/02/2014]
Brown Council Portrait of Brown Council by Brwon Council. Campbelltown Arts Centre, Melbourne Art Fair, 4-8 August, 2010
Brown Council Photo With the Artist. Sydney, 2011
Brown Council Performance Fee: Contemporary Australia: Women. Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), 21 April – 22July, 2012
Brown Council Mass Action: 137 Cakes in 90 Hours. Produced by Performance Space, Country Women’s Association Headquarters, Potts Point, Sydney, 28 August – 1 September 2012
Brown Council This is Barbara Cleveland. Score by Lucy Phelan, Sound & Video by Elliot Hughes, produced by Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, 20 November – 1 December, 2013