David Henry Nobody JR Exposes Himself
On Instagram, David Henry Brown, Jr. transforms into his performance handle, David Henry Nobody Jr, a human canvas to be decorated with paints, magazine clippings, and bits of food for stunning—and sometimes slightly horrifying—results. The project is called Resemblagè, a portmanteau of the words “resemble” and “collage,” and it is as much work made for social media as it is work influenced by social media. Nobody takes the art of the selfie to surreal extremes, informed by both pop culture and the whimsy of improvisation. His pieces are breathtakingly bizarre. One day, he might appear as President Trump, complete with Cheetos festooned to his head, a nod to meme-like reactions to POTUS’ orange complexion. On another day, he may be painted purple with onions around the eyes and cabbages framing his face, as in “Schizophrenic Salad.”
Sometimes, David Henry Nobody Jr. hits hard on Instagram. A video of him moaning while rubbing an orange and blue foamy mess across his face has racked up more than 1.6 million views. A clip of him sporting a dancing doll appendage drenched in globs of olive green peanut butter earned more than 3.7 million views. Those are outliers as far as social media traffic is concerned, but it’s also a sign that he is onto something. The catch, though, is not only that the artist behind the persona isn’t native to social media, but he wasn’t particularly keen on it at all until relatively recently.
A bad Facebook experience turned Brown off to social media, but he ultimately brought David Henry Nobody Jr. to Instagram and started sharing photos of his older works. Not long after he started using the app, he began documenting sculptures and face-painting projects that he was doing in his studio. Brown noticed an uptick in interaction once he posted photos of himself as the art.
In 2015, he began work on Resemblagè. “It’s basically collaging things on yourself in a performance in front of the camera so that, in a sense, you transform yourself into this other worldly figure and, in a sense, I think you also turn your psyche inside out in a way,” he says by phone from his Brooklyn studio. “You expose some part of you that’s deep inside humans and really ancient. It’s really quite primordial for me sometimes.”
Sometimes another model steps up to pose for an image, but, typically, Brown is at the center of the portraits. In “Quantum Selfie,” he looks like a human statue reaching into unknown darkness. The scene was set with face paint, cardboard, black fabric and shaving cream. “I’m pretty lo-fi on materials,” he says. Still, he likes the images to look as though they could have been computer generated or Photoshopped. That’s part of the illusion. “You’re so accustomed to seeing things mediated that it kind of reinvigorates all this visceral, physical material,” he says.
In “Hamburger Helper Man,” Brown used an estimated eight pounds of ground beef that clung to an armature around his head to build a form that resembled an American grocery store icon, the anthropomorphic gloved hand that appears on boxes of Hamburger Helper. “I love that because that’s me as a sculptor, problem solving,” he says. “As I create the work, I like to say that I become a character that becomes a super problem solver.”
Brown creates inside a live-work space that’s filled with props from past photo shoots. “The pizza I threw out because it got smelly and I saw a roach in here,” he says, referencing the food-as-props. The magazine pages that he uses to collage masks are organized along walls just in case he has a chance to re-shoot an image, which he might want to do because he feels compelled “re-stage” an image, or because he has access to his friend’s Phase One camera and its eighty megapixels. All of his pieces, he says, are “works-in-progress.”
I was interested in not so much celebrities, but the believers, the fanatics, and the fantastic nobodies…”
There’s a fluidity to his art, a sense that nothing is every quite complete. “They’re for sale, but it’s process oriented work,” says Brown, “so I keep the props and sometimes I develop them further.”
In some instances, it takes several tries to best capture the image he wants to present. That was the case for “Cheeto Trump.” Brown didn’t like his first attempt at
satirizing the president. “I showed it to my friends,” he says. “Everybody agreed that it could be stronger. I have homies that I show my stuff too when I’m not sure.”
On other occasions, Brown improvises. That tends to happen most often when he’s using magazine pages to create collaged masks and there is a performance element to it. “You’re not improv-ing on a canvas in front of you,” he says. “You are the artwork and I have to look into the camera and the mirror through the art.”
Still, there’s a part of the process that is like art-on-canvas. “It’s like a painting,” he says, “you keep working on it.” For Brown, the end result is the point where the division between himself and the art is completely blurred, where, he says, “you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.”
Inside Brown’s studio, the past ties to the present and, possibly, to the future. “I like the live-work museum for my own creativity,” he says. “Not only to the present, but I also look to my past for threads and clues and patterns on what is the deeper meaning of my work. Different bodies of work have different relationships and it’s nice to see.”
We project ourselves onto celebrities. Most celebrities are the most boring people, but it’s the viewer, it’s the fantastic nobody, all of us losers, that makes them seem interesting.”
Brown moved to Brooklyn in 1991 and, save for a stint in Europe, has lived there since. He launched his art career around the same time he settled into his adopted hometown. “I didn’t know anyone,” he says. “So, I kind of moved here, got a job, met people and made my way, but I don’t come from the galleries.” Instead, he found an artistic home in underground warehouse spaces that were giving rise to the work of performance artists. Brown made installations and that gave way to performance.
While Brown’s training was as a painter, he admits that figurative painting wasn’t his strength. Through performance art, he was able to compensate for that. He says that he was able to use his body as the figure in a way that he couldn’t accomplish by painting or drawing. Brown’s work often involved him photographed in unusual situations. He spent time dressing as various characters for mall photo shoots. Around the turn of the century, he tracked down Donald Trump for photo ops and posed as high society figure Alex Von Furstenberg (son of fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg) to crash parties and meet luminaries like Puff Daddy and the Clintons. The latter project was the subject of his first solo exhibition.
“I was interested in not so much celebrities, but the believers, the fanatics, and the fantastic nobodies,” says Brown. Indeed, that’s part of the story behind his current handle; Brown spent a decade as part of a performance art collective called the Fantastic Nobodies. He retains Nobody as his last name for art as a nod to that, likening it to the members of the Ramones.
But, back to the “fantastic nobodies” that permeate Brown’s work. He describes them as “somebody who is faking it until they make it.”
Brown adds, “It’s very American in a way. It’s the party crasher dude who is kind of a loser.”
And that ties to the work he does today in that Brown is still working with masks. “The older work is a social mask, where I’m creating a character who is a mask. My character is an illusion and I’m inserting myself into some sort of social construct,” he says. “The new work is a digital mask. When there is a photo of you, especially on the Internet, that is not you. That is a mask of you or a representation of you. It is an illusion. We attribute it to oneself, so, in a way, the technology has changed the context, but the idea is similar.”
In early 2016, Brown was working a full-time job installing art. After work, he would go into the studio, scrunch magazine pages and stick them to his face. During that period, he says, the photos he shared on Instagram improved. The art was interesting and he started making adjustments to the quality of light and photography. Brown’s David Henry Nobody Jr. images steadily gained a following. He got a boost from Instagram itself later on, when some of his video clips made it to the Explore feature and swelled in popularity. But, that kind of visibility has its problems too, attracting trolls Brown will then block. “I’m very protective of my account,” he says, adding that, in some weeks, he’ll go through a streak of days where he’s blocking huge amounts of people.
“The internet is a strange place where… you’re talking through a machine and you’re projecting whatever you want,” he says. In a way, that’s part of Brown’s work too. “We’ve been projecting for a long time. We project ourselves onto celebrities. Most celebrities are the most boring people, but it’s the viewer, it’s the fantastic nobody, all of us losers, that makes them seem interesting.”
But, it’s not always bad attention online and, some of the feedback becomes part of Brown’s process. He acknowledges that he doesn’t always see the full meaning of an image right after he posts it. “The audience helps me see it,” he says. “I watch the response and I learn how the image is communicating. What is it communicating to people? You can kind of gauge it through the comments sometimes.”
In the end, though, Instagram has been a strangely wonderful medium for Brown to explore. It gave him a way to express himself while still being a bit of an outsider in the art world. “On social media, you don’t have to be an art world hot shot,” he says. “If you make creative stuff, people are going to notice and I think that democratization of creativity for the public and bringing it directly to the public has always been super important to me.”
Brown doesn’t shun the gallery world. He shows his work IRL and would like to continue doing so, but he’s flexible about how he shows his work. “I go with the flow he says. “Right now, Instagram is the most creative venue there is.”*
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