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Ellen Brooks’s Flats: One through Eight, 1970, is almost identical to Flats: One through Five, 1969, included in the important Museum of Modern Art exhibition Photography into Sculpture. The 1969 work has been lost or destroyed.

At twenty-four, Brooks was one of the youngest artists in the exhibition. A MOMA press release announcing the show in 1970 was discreet in describing the work’s subject as “couples rolling in the grass.” Clearly, though, the sequence depicts a single couple, and sex—natural, wholesome, unencumbered by guilt or social constraints—is the undisguised subject, making the piece a potent reminder of the social/sexual revolution of the sixties.

Brooks’s work of this period typically incorporated the physical elements she worked with here. Illusionistic, “sculptural” (stuffed cloth) photographic renderings, often of the nude, were combined with found elements like the “leisure turf” used here.

Brooks was a pioneer of the photographic installation: she, Heinecken and Robert E. Brown each did full-scale rooms for a 1970 exhibition at the Downey Museum of Art,¹ and she partially buried life-size figures in the sand for a short exhibition at Venice Beach in 1970. Flats is a kind of miniature, portable installation, more than a sculpture in the formal sense of the word.

1. Continuum (Downey, CA: Downey Museum of Art, 1970). The exhibition, organized by Robert von Sternberg and Darryl Curran, was regionally important for providing early exposure to the work of a number of the artists treated in this book. Significantly, the exhibition was presented at the same time Photography into Sculpture was on view in New York and included six of the same artists. Brooks’s piece in the show, a full-scale seated nude, was censored by museum staff, who threw an orange towel across the figure’s lap. ↩︎