Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, Library of America, 2012.
„An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember ("a completely original book" -Edmund White) has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. "Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed- off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance," writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. "These little works... are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits." Assembled by the author's longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist."
Joe Brainard achieved a singular position in the poetry world before his death from AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994. An artist identified with a rarefied strain of Pop art, he was also a poet affiliated with the so-called New York School, a loose collection of wry Francophiles who could be readily described in the mid-’60s as avant-garde without anyone wincing at the designation. Ensconced in the circumscribed world of highbrow, camp-inflected culture, Brainard penned I Remember—a litany of self-regard whose formal rigor sharpens the kind of intimacies that invite readers to feel like coconspirators. The multibook work escaped New York’s narrow precincts to reach a wide (for modern verse) and enthusiastic readership. Along with Ginsberg’s more famous “Howl,” I Remember is the post-1950 poem people who don’t read poetry might know. That major effort, along with other poems, prose pieces, and drawings done over Brainard’s three-decade career, have been gathered in one volume by the Library of America. Smartly edited by his lifelong friend Ron Padgett, the collection demonstrates that this unlikely success was no fluke.
Brainard arrived in New York in 1960, along with fellow Tulsa teens Padgett and Dick Gallup; another Oklahoma pal, Ted Berrigan, soon joined them. He began writing poems, making art, and meeting the people—Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol—who would prove influential in both endeavors. Having settled on the Lower East Side, Brainard began producing collages, drawings, and paintings, appropriating images and texts from popular culture and the city’s street life. In a 1977 interview with poet Tim Dlugos (included in this volume), he recounts being inspired to make altarpieces by the “Puerto Rican religious . . . junk” he found on display. This would prove to be a signature gesture—assimilate, repurpose, and subvert—that would eventually play out, for instance, in an extensive series of collages devoted to the comic-strip character Nancy, in which the spiky-haired imp can be found hiding in the “basket” of a sailor’s pants or spouting non sequiturs while caught in flagrante delicto. Brainard liked to help the pure products of America go even crazier.
If O’Hara was, in the words of critic Marjorie Perloff, a poet among painters, Brainard worked with equal vigor on both teams. His visual and verbal art cross-pollinated, and this was never more evident than in I Remember. Initially published in several editions (I Remember, I Remember More, More I Remember More) by the small press Angel Hair, this serial work has been collected to form an epic incantation. Like some liturgical rite that emphasizes its own trance-inducing music, the 130-page poem rings out with a series of simple declarative statements, each beginning “I remember.” But the length and repetition hardly ever cause our reading to drag. I Remember speeds along, a broken-field, decidedly unchronological dash through the poet’s life that manages to feel both condensed and expansive at the same time: “I remember chalk,” an observation elemental and universal, is closely followed by the more discursive and personal “I remember how much I tried to like Van Gogh. And how much, finally, I did like him. And how much, now, I can’t stand him.”
Drawing on his dadaist and surrealist experiments in art and infusing their juxtapositional impulses with his own calculated offhandedness, Brainard gave birth to a wholly original (and, despite its numerous homages and exemplary employ in a thousand creative-writing classes, near-inimitable) form: the collage memoir.
To note I Remember’s utter freshness when it began appearing in the early ’70s isn’t to discount its antecedents: There’s Whitman’s dithyrambic listing (in his introduction, Paul Auster enumerates Brainard’s myriad topics—more than a hundred entries for “The Body,” fifty for “Holidays,” and “Movies, Movie Stars, T.V., and Pop Music” scoring several dozen); Proust’s obsessional verve for detail (“I remember the very thin pages and red edges of hymn books”); and Christopher Smart’s call-and-response patterning in Jubilate Agno, in which every line starts with either “Let” or “For.” Brainard joined these formal approaches to his quicksilver and utterly congenial sensibility; the poetic thrill in I Remember derives not from inventive imagery or linguistic sport, but rather from the piquant, piercing evocation of Brainard’s charm. He routinely renovates sentimentality with the slightly perverse and still ends up landing sweetly: “I remember playing doctor with Joyce Vantries. I remember her soft white belly. Her large navel. And her little slit between her legs. I remember rubbing my ear against it.” Or he elevates confessional intimacy to self-dramatizing: “I remember, eating out alone in restaurants, trying to look like I have a lot on my mind. (Primarily a matter of subtle mouth and eyebrow contortions.)” Cultural history is digested and crystallized: “I remember movies in school about kids that drink and take drugs and then they have a car wreck and one girl gets killed.” Even though Brainard performs Brainard with great élan, the show never feels ego-driven; his poems could be transcriptions from a late-night talk with a close friend who wanders through matters both striking and banal with equal aplomb, refusing to recognize the difference, but not for a moment failing to entertain you.
If there is a unifying theme that emerges from the poem, it might be the fluidity of the self—the posited truth that our memories, beliefs, and feelings are always in flux and thus ever redefining who and what we are. In the Dlugos interview, Brainard talked about the composition of I Remember: “I have a terrible memory. . . . But then I began to realize that beyond that point there is another level of knowledge that could be triggered off.” The deliberateness of the enterprise, this “triggering,” may seem an odd source for a poem that flows with the insouciance of conversation, but this is the crux of Brainard’s art—the meticulous construction of naturalness:
I remember the first erection I distinctly remember having. It was by the side of a public swimming pool. I was sunning on my back on a towel. I didn’t know what to do, except turn over, so I turned over. But it wouldn’t go away. I got a terrible sunburn. So bad that I had to go see a doctor. I remember how much wearing a shirt hurt.
This casual recollection (which slyly embeds a parable of sexual guilt and punishment—is this the other “level of knowledge”?) registers ingenuously. The speaker is familiar, and the anecdote is, too. The next entries shift sharply:
I remember the organ music from As the World Turns.
I remember white buck shoes with thick pink rubber soles.
Here the lens tightens focus—even as it verges on camp. The details—the cheesy theme from a daytime soap opera and the pavement-eye view of footwear—sit in pointed juxtaposition to the “authentic” memory of adolescent distress. Skillfully mixing tones and points of view, Brainard mimics the randomness of perception, as well as the unpredictability of emotional associations. The reader continues to zig with his zags, as these lines are followed by “I remember living rooms all one color.” We move in a blink from sexual secrets to pop-culture ephemera to sociological précis—the material is always kept in contrapuntal balance. Many entries begin, “I remember thinking . . .” or “I remember a story . . .” or “a daydream.” Memories of memories send us spiraling down the rabbit hole: It’s not just that we are always remembering, Brainard is saying, but that we are always remembering that we remembered.
Weighty as that idea is, it treads lightly through the poem. Brainard’s comedic touch—a deadpan wit that veers toward sincerity rather than sarcasm—marks all of his writing. Reliant on nuances of tone and inflection, it is the kind of graceful, openhearted humor that barely claims its laughter upon reading, yet you recall and recount to others weeks later. In full, the prose poem titled “Ron Padgett”:
Ron Padgett is a poet. He has always been a poet and he always will be a poet. I don’t know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don’t think anyone else does either. It is something deep and mysterious inside of a person that cannot be explained. It is something that no one understands. It is something that no one will ever understand. I asked Ron Padgett once how it came about that he was a poet, and he said, “I don’t know. It is something deep and mysterious inside of me that cannot be explained.”
Traditional tools are at work—alliteration, repetition, formalized diction—while the parodic intent is deftly turned. The coterie-style joke is on aesthetic theorizing and essentialist creeds (O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” is close kin here), but it’s precisely this earnest intellectualism that sparks Brainard’s deeper jest. This is a poet who candidly reports to Dlugos that the poetry of longtime friend John Ashbery is, “you know, over my head. . . . My mind wanders off.” His sophistication was his simplicity.
The Collected Writings makes its case—Brainard surely belongs in this canonical series, in no small part because he represents that peculiarly American aspiration to self-mythologize in the face of an otherwise relentlessly quotidian world. But this is done gently, with affection and a profound sense of commonality with his readers. Sounding playful, sometimes naive notes, Brainard nevertheless advances a serious cause—the enlargement of the self to include all friends, family, movie stars, old high school teachers, anonymous subway riders, great artists, decisive moments, embarrassing scenes, hidden truths, celebrated falsehoods, and Dinah Shore. The welcome sign hung over this concoction of reference and remembering reads “Joe.” Brainard’s artistry can appear as plain as that name, yet all the while giving subtle, human-pitched voice to the many selves swirling beneath." - Albert Mobilio
Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book, Siglio Press, 2008.
„From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and complicated by the incongruity of her presence.
The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of over fifty works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.
In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality.
These works exude a beguiling balance of mischief and innocence, irreverence and wonder, spontaneity and calculation. Together they accumulate into a sophisticated and complex work of great wit and joy, rich with metaphor, and equal parts surprise and subtlety.
The Nancy Book also includes original essays by Ann Lauterbach and Ron Padgett as well as collaborations with luminary poets Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett and James Schuyler.“
„The guileless heroine of Ernie Bushmiller's long-running comic strip Nancy is an unlikely icon in contemporary art, recurring in work by postmodern cartoonists like Bill Griffith and Scott McCloud, in an Andy Warhol painting, and in rock posters by Frank Kozik. But no one put her to better use than Joe Brainard, in whose irreverent, effervescent paintings, drawings, and collages (occasionally produced in collaboration with poet friends like Ron Padgett and Frank O'Hara) Nancy appears as an ashtray; a medical illustration; the subject of pieces by de Kooning, Picasso, and Leonardo; and part of Mt. Rushmore. Updating the old Tijuana Bibles, Brainard also gleefully depicts Nancy in flagrante delicto and tripping on hallucinogens. Brash but never bratty, fanciful without descending into preciousness, Brainard demonstrates a visual perfect-pitch equivalent to that of his miniaturist memoir-poem I Remember. - The New Yorker
„Brainard (1942–94) arrived in New York a few years after the pop-art movement brought comics imagery onto the high-art scene. Thus, his comics-appropriation at first blush seems Johnny-come-lately. But he was using comics differently from how the famous pop artists did, not for aesthetic philosophizing but for self-exploration. Brainard was gay, and he often placed the little girl star of Ernie Bushmiller’s graphically bare-bones comic strip Nancy, an embodiment of innocence nonpareil, in graphic heterosexual situations for never-specified motives that might have included dissipating the power of what he wasn’t attracted by. He also subverted high-art seriousness and cultural solemnity with Nancy by placing her smiling-bulb face on, say, all the nudes descending a staircase in Duchamp’s cubist icon, or in Teddy Roosevelt’s niche on Mount Rushmore. He wrote Dadaist “stories” in which he and Nancy interacted, two of which appear with the 53 Nancy artworks in an album that also attests Brainard’s wit and humility. This is hilarious, not—however personal—self-referential, stuff.“ - Ray Olson
The sly comedian of the New York School, artist and author Joe Brainard managed in his trademark “I Remember” poems to transform autobiography’s obscure intimacies into near-epic epiphanies—“I remember the only time I saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.” The legerdemain was accomplished through deftly discordant juxtaposition, and the same handiwork is hilariously evident in his many collages, especially the more than one hundred devoted to the comic-strip icon Nancy. This volume collects over fifty of these works, including image-text collaborations with Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, and Ted Berrigan, among others. Brainard spin- cycled high and low to produce chuckle inducers like “Picasso Nancy” and “If Nancy Was André Breton at Eighteen Months.” Low and even lower are lubriciously evident in the numerous visual sex jokes, in which, for instance, smiling Nancy’s globular head is set on the splayed and naked body of a porn actress; or she’s made to wave gaily from a young man’s crotch in “If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket.” The campy innuendo is enriched by the inclusion of non sequiturs and otherwise-absurdist bons mots from Brainard’s poet pals. One image (Bill Berkson contributed the text) shows our gal and the imported cartoon character Henry in flagrante delicto as the off-the-wall line “In England ‘wet’ means ‘stupid’” graces the couple’s copulatory bliss (of course, the mouthless Henry’s delight must be inferred). Another image presents Nancy completely dark, as if she were a photo negative; her thought bubble has been filled in by Frank Lima: “I have burned down the sky,” she opines. Brainard was a master of life’s microcomedies, the unheard laughter that courses through any truly alert consciousness. And Nancy, with that bow like a pulsating noodle in her frizzy hair, is as good a Descartes as any for our age.“ – Albert Mobilio
"The artist and writer Joe Brainard (1942 - 1994) has often been celebrated for his good-natured humor, but this seems to me to tell only half the story of a quietly fearless figure. Perhaps this will change, though I wonder how much it can in a world enthralled by immodesty and rampant self-promotion (macho artists working for Louis Vuitton). This small selection of Brainard’s hilarious reworkings of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip character, Nancy, celebrates the recent publication of The Nancy Book, published by Siglio Press, with an essay by Ann Lauterbach and a memoir by Ron Padgett. Along with twenty-five of Brainard’s “If Nancy Was…” drawings and collages, the book includes his collaborations with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler, in which Bushmiller’s rotund, frizzy haired, unflappable heroine appears.
Forming the centerpiece of the show, the “If Nancy…” drawings are so perfect in their balance of humor and precision that categorizing them as major or minor art seems beside the point. “Nancy” is a derogatory slang for a gay man, which, as Lauterbach astutely points out in her essay, became the source of “repeated visual/verbal puns [that] were not motivated by shame, but by its reverse, candor.” Brainard also declared that his favorite flower was the “pansy,” and made numerous works in which they appear.
Accusations and society’s putdowns didn’t stick to Brainard. Without so much as a blink, he transformed the straight world’s little arrows into art. His brilliance was his ability to be joyful and rude, innocent and devilish, to charm us with one hand and smack us with the other. Recognizing that humor can be as stinging as a dip in the ocean, he made his charm synonymous with ferocious wit. Or, as Peter Schjeldahl smartly wrote back in 1969: “Their real identity comes as something of a shock, like a snowball with a rock inside.”
Go and see his drawing of a smiling Nancy pulling up her skirt to reveal that she has a penis (“If Nancy Was A Boy,” 1972). If Henry Darger’s seven Vivian girls (who also had penises) were in a war with the brutal Glandelinians, Brainard’s intrepid “Nancy” goes blithely through the world, unstoppable and exultant. For Nancy, there is no goal, and every moment, however awful, is experienced with a certain gleeful delight, at least on the part of the artist. “If Nancy Was An Ashtray” shows the heroine with an oversized cigarette butt sticking out of her mouth, while “If Nancy Was A Ball” shows her stuck inside a transparent sphere.
Brainard understood that cartoon figures can undergo endless humiliations and, if they bounce back, we will end up laughing. We want so badly to believe in the indomitable individual. Nancy gets knocked over, but never knocked out, and there is no villain, no Road Runner, haunting her, because she isn’t chasing after anything. Brainard’s work is so funny, graceful and enchanting that it is easy not to notice how incredibly inventive it is (“If Nancy Was Just An Old Kleenex”), how easily and lovingly he could work in different styles (Larry Rivers and Willem de Kooning). He can be raucously crude (“If Nancy Was An Underground Comic Character” gives R. Crumb a run for his money) in one work, and sweetly mock a modernist icon in another (“If Nancy Was André Breton At Eighteen Months”).
Brainard was a unique combination of innocence and insolence, and this unlikely but refreshing combination is also true of some of the poets associated with the New York School: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Ron Padgett. Like them, Brainard made everything he did look easy, and this includes his book, the classic I Remember. It is easy to understand why some people still have trouble with their work; they are offended by the possibility that the artist and poet might be having a good time while making art or writing. They don’t need to tell you whether they have suffered or not because, let’s face it, everybody does. That’s the gift Brainard gives us; and it certainly is not the only one.“ – John Yau
Joe Brainard (1942-1994), a New York School poet and artist, made over 100 works, mostly small mixed-media drawings and collages, with the appropriated image of Nancy. A group of 20 pieces from his "If Nancy Was a. . . ," now in the collection of Colby College Art Museum in Maine, plus seven other Nancy works, including an oil and one etching from private collections, illustrate his affection for this can-do gal.
In If Nancy Was President Rosevelt [sic], Brainard has inserted an inked face of Nancy into a photogravure of Mount Rushmore where Theodore Roosevelt’s is usually seen. In If Nancy Was a Building in New York City, her frizzy head is seen among the skyscrapers in a back-lit skyline executed in black gouache.
Brainard, who was gay, probably came to know the term "Nancy-boy" after moving to New York from Oklahoma to hone his already-recognized artistic talent. Both Nancy and "pansy" were frequent motifs in his many collages and small drawings, transformed by him into terms of acceptance and endearment. (Many of his flower drawings remind me instantly of Fantin-Latour’s).
If Nancy Was a Boy shows a grinning Nancy lifting her skirt to show off her penis. If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket has our heroine peeping from a sailor’s pants, the sailor being an appropriated photo shown without his head. Nancy smiles and waves. These works have such an insouciant charm, I suspect even the Pope would chuckle if he saw them.
Brainard knew many artists and used Nancy to parody their work. The results are less satire than homage. A particular favorite was Willem de Kooning, who appears in several Nancys. Larry Rivers and Picasso get the Nancy treatment, too.
"The Nancys" has been organized in celebration of a new book of more than 50 of "The Nancys" being published by the Siglio Press with essays by poets Ron Padgett, who is also from Oklahoma and one of Brainard’s many friends, and Anne Lauterbach, who met him when he was working in collaboration with many of the poets and artists of the New York School.
Poetry lovers probably already know Brainard’s list poem, I Remember, which riffs on his memories as a young boy in Tulsa, Okla., in the 1940s and 1950s. Each line starts with "I remember," and it runs to over 100 pages of calculated nostalgia that is both campy and poignant. It’s one of the few successful long poems of the 20th century and one of the great autobiographies from that period.“ - N.F. Karlins
"For Joe Brainard love hit like a freight train the first time he spied Nancy: “The first time I saw Nancy she was eating a chicken salad sandwich at Joe’s, just around the corner from my father’s hardware store. I didn’t know what to do, she was just so beautiful. So I just stood there, looking. Bright red lips. White oval face. (Soft) big black eyes.” To be clear, Brainard’s talking here about the cartoon character Nancy and the year is 1963. “She was wearing a red dress. There was an empty stool right next to her, so I walked over and sat down. So close, it was impossible to look.” But look he did, for a lifetime -- and thank goodness he left us the evidence.
Actually, who knows when they really crossed paths. But Brainard’s tallish tale, recorded in a brief essay in The Nancy Book out this month from Siglio, certainly conveys the artist’s love for that collection of lines -- nay, for him, that form -- known as Nancy. Few artists present as malleable a trope, and so prolifically, as Brainard does with his riffs on Nancy. All those variations on a theme: “If Nancy Was Rich,”; “If Nancy Was Andre Breton at Eighteen Months”; “If Nancy Was an Acid Freak”; and on and so on --are now elegantly gathered between two pieces of hardcover.
Brainard (1942-1994) grew up in Tulsa but lived most of his adult life in New York City. In high school he met poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup and the three began publishing Beat and Black Mountain poetry as well as work by the then-unknown Ted Berrigan. In 1960 Brainard ditched a full scholarship at the Dayton Art Institute to move to the Lower East Side. There he fused himself with a part of New York already generally teeming with irreverent, free-wheeling, almost anti-academy (certainly unacademic) visual artists and writers, people like Frank O’Hara, Bill Berkson, Alice Notley, and Kenneth Koch, as well as Padgett, Gallup, and Berrigan. Their collaborations with Brainard -- and, more widely speaking, amongst themselves -- are durable representations of a web of friendship and community not unlike the legendary salons of ex-pat Paris during the 20s.
The Nancy work, then, offers up fragments, slices of that existence, with the figure of Nancy acting as a kind of visual refrain. Padgett, in an essay in The Nancy Book, describes Brainard’s love affair in perhaps a more grounded and historically revealing way than Brainard. “In his childhood Joe Brainard was well acquainted with Nancy, long before he started using her in his art,” he writes. “Every Sunday Ernie Bushmiller’s little heroine was delivered to the Brainard family’s home, in the color comics section [the "funny papers"] of the Tulsa Sunday World.”
Lodged in his memory as she was, Nancy sprung into Brainard’s artwork in the early 60s and lingered, popping up all along Brainard’s way until he stopped making art altogether to take up full-time, in John Ashbery’s words, “his two favorite hobbies, smoking and reading Victorian novels.” Nancy became Brainard’s catch-all tool, one of a handful of symbols in this artist’s repertoire, the kind that keeps surfacing and resurfacing, at first perhaps unexpectedly and then, later, with the full support and encouragement of the artist. Think of Dali’s melting clocks, Picasso’s jugglers, Warhol’s Campbell’s cans, or Ray Johnson’s bunnies.
While Johnson was learning how to draw a bunny, in fact, Brainard was somewhere nearby (both lived in New York City and corresponded occasionally) learning how to fit the world into Nancy. And, while the prolific Brainard pumped out stacks of other equally interesting drawings and paintings, he got pretty good at his Nancy act. The Nancy Book’s full of the evidence: There’s “If Nancy Was Art Nouveau” or “If Nancy Had An Afro,” both clear lined drawings that stick to a black and red palette, each “a distilled essence”-- in the words of a sometimes long-winded and winding essay in the book by Anne Lauterbach -- applied to the cartoon girl. There are the sly subversions of “If Nancy Was A Painting By De Kooning” or “If Nancy Was A Boy”, the latter a depiction of Nancy flashing us that penis she’s been hiding under her skirt all this time.
More than most of his contemporaries, Brainard crossed genres, showing little concern for disciplinary boundaries. His writings on art are lucid and whimsical, and his major work of uncategorizable poetry, I Remember, is the written equivalent of the Nancy drawings: with “I Remember” as well, Brainard chooses a formal constant on which to lay his riffs down. “I Remember” is, as the name suggests, a litany of memories, each one a gemmy dollop of profane nostalgia. And there’s some crossover. Brainard writes “I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer.” In The Nancy Book, we find Brainard’s Nancy garbed in a yellow bow and sweater covered with a green vest. She’s smiling like a moon and the caption reads, “If Nancy knew what wearing green and yellow on Thursday meant.”
The success of the Nancy drawings is precisely this fluidity, this ability to contain so much. A range of emotional tones gets made visible, reflecting perhaps Brainard’s own -- and any human being’s -- complexity and wide-ranging concerns. In some ways it’s not surprising that Brainard’s a genre-crosser, integrating text, as he does, so masterfully: He was hanging out with poets like Gallup, Padgett, Berrigan, O’Hara and others. Still, his deft use of text makes these works the antecedents to so many kinds of contemporary work that mixes the sensibility of single-panel cartoons with the depth of fine art (David Shrigley, Raymond Pettibon, and Tucker Nichols come to mind). O’Hara, in fact, wrote of this to Larry Rivers around 1964: “Now I am making some cartoons with Joe Brainard, a 21-year-old assemblagist genius you will like a lot…It is a cartoon revival because Joe Brainard is so astonishingly right in the drawing etc.”
And if Nancy were a critic?
Perhaps she’d say slyly of this book -- as Joe Brainard wrote in his diary on March 29, 1969 -- “Looking through a book of drawings by Holbein I realize several moments of truth. A nose (a line) so nose-like. So line-like. And then I think to myself 'so what?' It’s not going to solve any of my problems. And then I realize that at the very moment of appreciation I had no problems. Then I decide that this is a pretty profound thought. And that I ought to write it down. This is what I have just done. But it doesn’t sound so profound anymore. That’s art for you.” – Jesse Nathan
At the core of every story: the lonely, homely little freak-girl Nancy, who looks like the mutant spawn of Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, and who slogs through her ugly life like Charlie Brown without the crushing self-pity. Nancy's situation could hardly be drearier: Lacking parents of her own (their absence is never addressed), Nancy lives in a loveless arrangement with her single-and-sexy Aunt Fritzi, who offers nothing but scolding and spoonfuls of cod-liver oil. (The one moment of tenderness documented in my well-worn Nancy compilation: Aunt Fritzi's warm feelings upon claiming the $600 tax exemption her annoying dependent affords her.) Despite her grim daily grind, Nancy trudges forth with a smile, buoyed by a scrappy resourcefulness and fleshed out with a full palette of emotions (including ugly ones) that render this oddball optimist closer to Patti Smith than to Ziggy.
Nancy's enduring appeal as an outsider icon is the driving force behind The Nancy Book, a collection of works by assemblage artist and writer Joe Brainard, a contemporary and collaborator of Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara in the mid-'60s New York School, for whom Nancy was a lifelong love. As poet and friend Ann Lauterbach writes in the book's introduction, "Nancy could travel with Joe from his humble roots in Tulsa to the bright complexity of New York City; she could be his virtual companion and sidekick as he negotiated the sophisticated, charged world of such figures as Warhol and O'Hara. Nancy could be inserted into this world, instantly stripping it of its formidable aura, transforming it into an accessible, intimate realm."
Between 1963 and 1978, Brainard created over 100 works involving/appropriating Nancy, including the early-'70s series If Nancy Was..., in which Bushmiller's scrappy lass is set loose in works ranging from the crassly pornographic (If Nancy Made Blue Movies, If Nancy Was a Sailor's Basket) to the ostentatiously artsy (If Nancy Was André Breton at Eighteen Months, If Nancy Was a de Kooning). Best of all are Brainard's free-form Nancy renderings and collages, which sacrifice the punch-line potential of the If Nancy Was... series for a focus on the odd and endless attractiveness of Bushmiller's creation: her slight but sturdy spikes of hair, her set-in-stone Kool-Aid-man smile. "I soon discovered that Nancy was hardly the cream of the crop to anyone else but me," writes Brainard, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. Loving an underdog always feels like a private joy, but Brainard's collected works ensure Nancy's stature among the cream of comics for good.“ – David Schmader
„Nancy is hardly the universal image of beauty. The title character of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip is ungainly, sporting a potato head, hyphen nose, and crenellated hair with protruding mothlike bow. She is always crisply drawn, however, and her smile is strangely reassuring, even as it suggests, Mona Lisa–like, that she might have something to keep quiet about.
In 1963, the year a graphic artist named Harvey Ball first put two dots and a curve inside a circle to create the Smiley Face, another artist began making use of Nancy’s very similar ready-made grin.
Poet and artist Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was living in New York on next to no money, sharing apartments with poet-friends from his hometown (more about them shortly). To conserve art supplies, he made collages, some of them featuring comic strip characters. In one, Nancy shares the frame with colleagues from other strips, running off the top of what appears to be a Japanese real estate ad, while Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae take up space at the bottom of the image.
Before long, Brainard came to recognize what many cartoonists knew then and continue to acknowledge: Nancy is always likable, even when her trademark smile is replaced by a worry-frown and three flying beads of sweat. Blank to the point of being a bit of a Rorschach blot, she never stops seeming friendly, vulnerable, resilient, average, or unassuming.
He would draw and paint her more than 100 times. Nearly half of those works appear in a new collection, The Nancy Book. It’s unclear which of Brainard’s Nancy works led Bushmiller to threaten to sue: the Tijuana Bible in which Nancy and a tubby Crockett Johnson–type character try more than a dozen sexual positions, or the work captioned “If Nancy was an acid freak”? Maybe it was the one where she lifts her skirt to reveal . . .
Brainard, who by all accounts was also immensely likable, was born to a poor, hardworking family in Arkansas. They left soon after; and Joe, the second of four children, grew up in Tulsa. As a youth he won every art contest he entered, and he aspired to be a fashion designer.
In 1959, high school classmate and poet Ron Padgett asked him to be the art editor of The White Dove Review, the small-press poetry magazine he was starting. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, which Padgett documents beautifully in his 2004 memoir, Joe.
With art by Brainard on the cover and postmodern poems by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, and others inside, The White Dove was a forerunner of the mimeo revolution of the early 1960s. Though perhaps not as eager to flout the First Amendment as the magazine Ed Sanders would publish a few years later (Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts), it contained enough earthy obscenities for Padgett’s father to warn the boys about mailing indecent material.
High school ended. Padgett went off to New York to attend Columbia; Brainard won a scholarship to the Dayton Art Institute. But by his first Christmas out of Oklahoma, Brainard had left Ohio for New York.
In fact, within the year several of the poets and artists associated with The White Dove Review had come to the city to live a life in art. First came Ted Berrigan, who had been at the University of Tulsa on the GI Bill; he divided his time between Padgett’s dorm room and Brainard’s storefront apartment on Sixth Street. Next to arrive were Berrigan’s then girlfriend Pat Mitchell (soon to be Padgett’s wife), and Padgett’s high school poet colleague Dick Gallup. It was truly la vie bohème. Padgett recalled that Berrigan, Mitchell, and Gallup “would play cribbage to see who would steal the food for dinner that night.”
In this genteel and literary poverty Brainard experimented endlessly. He painted. He wrote short funny narratives, some showing more influence of amphetamines than others. He came out. (“The only thing that ever bothered me about being queer was that I thought maybe people wouldn’t like me if they knew.”) And he collaborated. In one collage, Nancy appears waving a bone at a doctor. In the speech bubble, Frank O’Hara wrote, “Guess where I found this?!!”
Simultaneously ambitious and self-effacing, he was aware of an important similarity between his sense of how to assemble images and the capacity he noticed in other poets for making order out of words. In a 1978 interview with Anne Waldman in response to her question “What have been influences on your visual work?,” he replied:
Everything that’s visual. Magazines or TV or landscape or paintings by other people. . . . I can go to a party and remember what everyone wore without being conscious of it, without thinking about it. On the other hand, I can read a book but forget it right away. I enjoy reading but that isn’t where my focus is. When I’m reading my focus is there, but my general focus isn’t at all with words. . . . I can see things and it all makes sense in my brain and I can recall things in an order that I could never do with words.
He is in fact a terrific writer. In his best-known work, I Remember, he makes no attempt at ordering his experience, preferring instead to collect his experiences as they came to him, by turns amusing, beautiful, embarrassing, and ordinary. As with his draftsmanship, there is a crisp, cartoonlike quality to his sentences that is instantly recognizable and satisfying even as it zigzags away from the expected next thought: “I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.”
He discovered an opportunity to exercise his dual citizenship as both writer and artist when he more or less invented poetry comics in collaboration with Berrigan and the Padgetts.
At the start of their seminal 1988 semiotics study “How to Read Nancy,” cartoonists Paul Karasick and Mark Newgarden anticipated the hypothetical reply to their title, “You might as well explain how to read a stop sign.” Zippy cartoonist Bill Griffith described this foregone-conclusion quality like so: “You don’t ‘enter’ a Nancy strip, it’s slapped up on a billboard inside your head by a guy wearing pressed overalls and a neatly trimmed moustache.” Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud took the point to the extreme: “Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip ‘Nancy’ is a landmark achievement: A Comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the ‘gag-strip’; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile.”
Bushmiller was 20 when he took over Fritzi Ritz, a strip about a comely flapper with a local film career whose scamp of a niece puts the idea of going Hollywood in her head (think Marion Davies in Show People). Bushmiller’s early strips have the dense and various feel of the great narrative strips of the era currently seeing reprints – Terry and the Pirates, Popeye, Gasoline Alley – but by the mid-’30s, Bushmiller had begun to emphasize visual gags, scale, repetition, and symmetry. In 1938 the strip’s name changed to Nancy, and by 1948, when Brainard was six, the format had jelled: three or four panels, one or two instantly recognizable type-characters from panel to panel, clean lines and lots of empty space.
At his most pared down, Bushmiller is hallowed among cartoonists. Newgarden has written that the qualities he most admires in this work are Bushmiller’s “efficiency, his impeccable visual clarity and the relentless precision of his craft. And above all (perhaps sometimes overlooked in formal appraisals) his literal sense of humor, that is, his insistence on craft and character as absolute servants to his gag, which above all reigns supreme.” Griffith simply sees Nancy as “a kind of ‘definition’ of what comics are,” adding that he reacts to Bushmiller “on two levels simultaneously – the level he thought he was working on (simple gags) and the one he was unaware he was working on (surreal poetry).”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when interviewed for this article Griffith spoke with mixed feelings about Brainard’s appropriations:
While it’s funny enough, I have a squeamish reaction to “fine” artists incorporating comics into their work. . . . Of course, I do it, too . . . but there’s an important distinction between a gallery artist doing Nancy and a cartoonist doing Nancy, I believe. I don’t think I’m ‘slumming’ when I put Nancy into Zippy’s world. Zippy and Nancy coexist in a comics universe and their meeting is natural and on equal footing. Fine artists tend to “appropriate” comics as “material” and “elevate” them into the art world. To me, that’s a dubious proposition. I don’t buy the distinction between “high” art and “low” art. It seems implicit in doing Nancy on canvas in a gallery or museum setting that it’s been “transformed” from its humble origins into something “finer.” Uh-uh.
It is difficult to reconcile that perspective with the facts of Brainard’s existence when he began working with Nancy. But Griffith’s words may apply to the more successful figure Brainard became in the ’70s, the period in which he created most of the work in The Nancy Book. In the first half of the decade, Brainard saw critical and commercial success with four shows at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, the last of which featured an incredible 1,500 collages and drawings. The quality was high, and the quantity was extraordinary. The show prompted People magazine to run a feature titled “Think Tiny, Says Joe Brainard . . .” Back at the start of the decade, in a 1970 interview in the Tulsa World, Brainard announced his plan to do “75 of these [Nancy images] for a show and a book called If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning.” This sounds a little like the highfalutin move of a free rider. But is it?
Brainard didn’t think so. In an interview with the Padgetts from the 1967 collaborative volume Bean Spasms, he contrasted his own approach to collage with that of the Gaudiesque construction artist Niki de Saint-Phalle (1930–2002):
RP: Do you think there’s a similarity between your work and that of Niki de Saint-Phalle?
JB: No, because I don’t think she respects the objects she uses in the same way I do. I place an object in a collage with a beautiful surrounding.
RP: You mean you sort of put the spotlight on the things you use?
JB: Yes.
Respect is a relative term. For Brainard, to respect something meant to present it as beautifully and as vividly as possible. In the same interview, Brainard affirmed that Berrigan, whose 1963 collage masterpiece The Sonnets exemplified T.S. Eliot’s remark that mature poets steal, was the single biggest influence on his work. Another piece in the same collection purported to be an interview between Berrigan and the composer John Cage. It was not:
INTERVIEWER: Do you believe that all good art is unengaging?
CAGE: Yes I do.
INTERVIEWER: Then what about beauty?
CAGE: Many dirty hands have fondled beauty, made it their banner; I’d like to chop off those hands, because I do believe in that banner . . . the difference is that art is beauty, which the Beatniks naturally lack!
INTERVIEWER: The Beatniks, notably Ed Sanders, are being harassed by the police lately. Do you approve?
CAGE: On the contrary. The problem is that the police are unloved. The police in New York are all paranoid . . . they were so hateful for so long that everybody got to hate them, and that just accumulated and built up. The only answer to viciousness is kindness. The trouble is that the younger kids just haven’t realized that you’ve got to make love to the police in order to solve the police problem.
INTERVIEWER: But how do you force love on the police?
CAGE: Make love to the police. We need highly trained squads of lovemakers to go everywhere and make love.
As Berrigan told the story, Cage called John Ashbery immediately after reading the interview to find out whether the put-on was mean-spirited or friendly. “And John Ashbery told John Cage that I was totally for him, that I loved his work, and John said, ‘Oh, Okay.’” The example was not lost on Brainard.
Brainard’s sincere affection and knack for the Bushmilleresque gag makes the best works in The Nancy Book transcend appropriation and parody. “If Nancy Was a Building in New York City” places the silhouette of her sunrise hair in the skyline. “If Nancy Opened Her Mouth So Wide She Fell In” shows a smaller her shouting “Help!” from inside her wide oval mouth. Slightly more outré but still like the funnies: “If Nancy Had an Afro” changes the scale on her ’do. And then there are the ones where Nancy works blue . . .
Ann Lauterbach’s affecting catalogue essay notes that two of Brainard’s most frequently depicted subjects shared their names with derogatory terms for gay men: Nancy and pansies. It should be added that his drawings and paintings of these subjects also reliably provoke smiles. Psychologists differentiate between social smiles, in which the mouth is consciously turned up, and the smile that comes with real feeling, in which the zygomatic muscles pull back the corners of the mouth, the corners of the eyes crinkling. Brainard and Nancy prompt the second kind, time and again. Somewhere between social and authentic smiles is the leniency smile; studies show that when a person is caught committing a minor infraction, flashing this smile tends to reduce the punishment. Nancy and the Mona Lisa know it, and Brainard is not averse to using something like it in his writing too, as in the blank last line of his short prose piece, “Sick Art,” printed below in its entirety:
Mona Lisa’s smile often causes observers to overlook the fact that she has no eyebrows.
One skin specialist offered the suggestion that Leonardo da Vinci’s model was suffering from a skin disease called alopicia. Alopicia is a skin disease in which one has no eyebrows.
On the other hand, many women in those days shaved their eyebrows and Leonardo da Vinci’s model may have just been following the fad.
There is no doubt, however, that Rodin’s “The Thinker” has bunions on both feet.
Today, with modern art, it is not so easy to spot disease and physical disorders.
Many doctors, however, have noticed a strong relationship between various skin diseases and the paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Fungus infections are very common in the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Commissioned to design the cover of the Art News Annual #34 (1968), Brainard had Nancy infiltrate works by everyone from Johns and Warhol (she emerges from a wall of Campbell’s Soup) to Leonardo and Rembrandt (all the faces in The Anatomy Lesson belong to her). The joke stays funny. Nancy keeps smiling.“ – Jordan Davis
I don’t have a definite commodity … I’ve had oil-painting shows that were very realistic, then I’ve done jack-off collages, cut-outs one year and drawings … it’s all been different … People want to buy a Warhol or a person instead of a work. My work’s never become ‘a Brainard’.
Or even a Jainard or a Bernard or a Joe. Here are the last six ‘I remember’s from his sparklingly original and ‘totally great’ (to use one of his own favourite locutions) memoir, I Remember, issued in four instalments between 1970 and 1973, and then collected in a single edition in 1975:
I remember one day in psychology class the teacher asked everyone who had regular bowel movements to raise their hand. I don’t remember if I had regular bowel movements or not but I do remember that I raised my hand.
I remember changing my name to Bo Jainard for about one week.
I remember not being able to pronounce ‘mirror’.
I remember wanting to change my name to Jacques Bernard.
I remember when I used to sign my paintings ‘By Joe’.
I remember a dream of meeting a man made out of a very soft yellow cheese and when I went to shake his hand I just pulled his whole arm off.
Brainard was born in 1942 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he won almost every art prize going. A precocious draftsman, he initially intended to become a fashion designer, and was hailed at 14 by a Tulsa newspaper as a ‘budding Dior’. I Remember suggests he was interested not only in designing women’s clothes, but in wearing them too:
I remember when I went to a ‘come as your favourite person’ party as Marilyn Monroe …
I remember that for my fifth birthday all I wanted was an off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown. I got it. And I wore it to my birthday party.
In 1959 he was approached by a couple of fellow students at Tulsa Central High to be the art director of a magazine they were starting; though it ran for only five issues, White Dove Review succeeded in attracting contributions from a number of the leaders of the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick graduate student in English at the University of Tulsa, Ted Berrigan. Berrigan was soon accompanying Brainard and his fellow editors, the poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, on their forays into Tulsan bohemia, and together they began experimenting with the artistic possibilities unleashed by speed pills such as Benzedrine. Almost overnight, as Padgett records in his illuminating biography, Joe (2004), Brainard’s ambitions shifted from fashion design to avant-garde art. Over the next few years each of the Tulsa Four migrated to New York, where for a while Berrigan and Brainard shared a store-front room on East Sixth Street, one sleeping on the single bed by day, the other by night. They survived by shoplifting and selling their blood for $5 a pint. Things weren’t always easy between them: ‘I remember painting “I HATE TED BERRIGAN” in big black letters all over my white wall.’
The downtown New York art and poetry worlds enjoyed an almost symbiotic relationship in the early 1960s, and their appeal to Brainard and the other Dust Bowl refugees (as Padgett once called them) is often vividly captured in I Remember:
I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.
He even went to the trouble, he tells us, of learning to play bridge in order to get invited to O’Hara’s bridge evenings, which proved to be ‘mostly talk’; it fell not to O’Hara but to his roommate Joe LeSueur (who records the evening in some detail in Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara) to initiate the gawky, shy, stuttering new arrival into the city’s gay scene. ‘I had the feeling,’ LeSueur rejoiced, ‘he had waited all of his 21 years for what we conspired together.’“ – Mark Ford
"For the dream of a universal language of common form is the optimist's dream in modern art, checking and complementing the vision of an art that would testify to modernity's fragmentation, anxiety, and alienation. And just as the pessimist's view drew powerfully on the reservoir of caricature, the optimist's vision has drawn regularly from the comic strip for jokes, puns, and inspiration.
One of my favorite things is a postcard on which is a drawing of Nancy striding purposefully along, a few buildings sketched in the background, the outline of some trees, and two smallish rocks, as if she were just outside city limits. Directly behind her is a large fence on which is a sign, slightly askew, held to the fence by a nail in each corner. The sign says: JOE BRAINARD APRIL 6-25 FISCHBACH 29 W. 57. The speech balloon over Nancy's head reads: I THINK I'LL GO SEE WHAT THAT JOE BRAINARD'S BEEN UP TO THIS YEAR. The reverse of the card is blank: no address, no stamp. I don't know how I came to have it. My guess is Joe gave it to me; he was very quick to give a thing away if he thought someone might want it.
Joe loved: cigarettes, butterflies, tattoos, dolls, charms, postcards, peas.
Joe Brainard's favorite flower was the pansy.
Joe Brainard's favorite cartoon character was Nancy.
Over the course of Brainard's work, both "Nancy" and "pansies" recur, talismans within the shifting foci of style and medium: collage, pencil drawing, gouache, ink, watercolor, oil paint; portrait, landscape, still life. He enjoyed their specific social/cultural puns; they were part of a direct playfulness through which he mediated his identity as a young, shy gay artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma, coming into the charged world of New York poets and artists in the early 1960s.
These repeated visual/verbal puns were not motivated by shame, but rather by its reverse, candor.
Candor: a kind of fearlessness about boundaries.
Or, to put it more clearly, a way in which boundaries, or frames, might be employed to shift habits of thinking. Joe Brainard was a master of such shifts, not only those between so-called "high" and "low" icons and motifs, but also those that collapse assumptions about "normal" social and sexual behavior. Perhaps nowhere in his work is this more evident than in his seminal 1975 book, I Remember, a recounting of his life in which the powerfully universal refrain I remember acts as a linguistic frame for individual events in his life. The narrative arrives as an accumulating list, a series in which internal proximity is not so much chronological as associative. Consider the following early sequence:
I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.
I remember the only time I saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember how much I cried seeing? South Pacific (the movie) three times.
I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.
I remember when I got a five-year pin for not missing a single morning of Sunday school for five years. (Methodist.)
I remember when I went to a "come as your favorite person" party as Marilyn Monroe. The subtlety of this sequence is typical of the book, with its mixture of simple facts, objects, and events within complex emotional fields. The reader, lulled by the recurring cadence, receives each recollected incident at nearly the same pace; no instance appears to be emphasized over any other. Male readers would probably identify with the admission of fearful distress at first physical arousal. Everyone would be interested in the "only time" of a mother's tears: no reason given because none was known. In place of explanation, we get a vivid, sensuous memory: I was eating apricot pie, the two perceptions linked by the rhyme cry/pie. Quickly, a mother crying gives over to "how much I cried" not once, but three times, seeing Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical South Pacific. We could, and do, move on, but many of us will pause to recall that South Pacific is a double love story set during the Second World War, whose main theme is racial and social prejudice. Who knows when in the story Joe cried. Perhaps hearing these lyrics:
You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.
Then another lovely sensuous recollection, of how good water-a simple symbol of purity-tastes after the indulgence of ice cream. Purity is substantiated, as if the water were baptismal: an award for attending Sunday school for five years! A portrait is being drawn of a young, feelingful, obedient, ordinary American boy. And then? I remember when I went to a "come as your favorite person" party as Marilyn Monroe.
In 1969, Brainard wrote to poet Anne Waldman: "I am way, way up these days over a piece I am still writing called I Remember. I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but it is being written. I also feel that it is about everybody else as much as it is about me. And that pleases me. I mean, I feel like I am everybody."
("Poet, be like God," the West Coast poet Jack Spicer wrote.)
The particularity of one person's life fuses with the universality of everyone's.
This is the house that modernism built: think of James Joyce, think of Proust. And then, of course, think of Andy Warhol, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
One of Joe Brainard's favorite artists was the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Morandi could make a simple vase into an object of almost mystical meditation. Brainard also loved the boxes of Joseph Cornell, where ephemera are transformed into often magical, visionary tableaux. In Brainard's choice of favorite things, he seems to have been drawn to forms of containment, in which the unruly or rupturing experiences of life are brought into the kind of reductive clarity that we often associate with classical modalities.
Not surprisingly, along with this gift for distillation, Brainard had an uncanny eye for essential, revelatory detail; these contribute to the vivid immediacy and spontaneity of his work. In essence, such specific distillations can be understood as a form of abstraction, not the abstraction we affiliate with non-representational art, but something perhaps closer to the poetics we have come to associate with the New York School of poetry: an "aesthetics of attention" as critic Marjorie Perloff has said about its most important avatar, Frank O'Hara.
Distillation, specificity, and a keen sense of intimate scale allowed Brainard to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary and, curiously, something like the reverse: he could, with Nancy's help, make the extraordinary seem ordinary.“ - ANN LAUTERBACH
Joe Brainard, I Remember, Granary Books, 1970.
Joe Brainard's I Remember is a literary and artistic cult classic, praised and admired by writers from Paul Auster to John Ashery and Edmund White. As autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain "I remember": "I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail." Brainard's enduring gem of a book has been issued in various forms over the past thirty years. In 1970, Angel Hair books published the first edition of I Remember, which quickly sold out; he wrote two subsequent volumes for Angel Hair, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both of which proved as popular as the original. In 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in New York published Brainard's I Remember Christmas, a new text for which he also contributed a cover design and four drawings. Excerpts from the Angel Hair editions appeared in Interview, Gay Sunshine, The World and the New York Herald. Then in 1975, Full Court Press issued a revised version collecting all three of the Angel Hair volumes and added new material, using the original title I Remember. This complete edition is prefaced by poet and translator Ron Padgett.
I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer.
I remember when, in high school, I used to stuff a sock in my underwear.
I remember that for my fifth birthday all I wanted was an off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown. I got it. And I wore it to my birthday party.
I remember my first sexual experience in a subway. Some guy (I was afraid to look at him) got a hard-on and was rubbing it back and forth against my art. I got very excited and when my stop came I hurried out and home where I tried to do an oil painting using my dick as a brush.
I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old.
Joe Brainard was born on the 11th March 1941 in Salem, Arkansas, but always said he was from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he attended High School. There he became friends with poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup. After a scholarship to the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio proved uncompromising, he moved to New York. At the time of his first solo show at the Alan Gallery in 1965, he said: ‘I guess what I am really interested in is being beautiful’. John Ashbery, in his little essay accompanying the show, commented: ‘It is a long time since anyone was really interested in being beautiful. Other qualities like strength or simplicity or ugliness replaced beauty some time ago. There were those who insisted that beauty was precisely these things. A slab of mud and grit by Dubuffet was beautiful if you looked at it in the right way, but you had to look at it in the right way.’ Looked at another way (the right way?) Brainard’s desire to be beautiful was as much about himself as his art. In his text Self-Portrait: 1971 he wrote ‘WHY I AM A PAINTER: One reason I’m a painter is because I’m not a movie star’. 1
While continuing to show at the Alan-Landau and Fishbach Galleries in New York he published I Remember (1970), with Angel Hair Press. This was Brainard’s first book, though he had already collaborated on comics with, amongst others, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and Harry Mathews, and on books with Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, and Kenward Elmslie, with whom he lived for at least every summer for the rest of his life. His last gallery show took place in 1978, but was followed by two retrospectives: one at the Long Beach Museum in 1980, and another in 1987, at the University of California, San Diego. He spent the latter part of the 80s drawing, writing, and voraciously reading everything of note, but showing no paintings, having convinced himself he was not up to his own rigorous standards (Velázquez). If he no longer painted pictures, he wrote paintings. The following passage is from Imaginary Still Lifes (No.7): ‘I close my eyes. I see a white statue (say 10” high) of David. Alabaster. And pink rose petals. And black velvet. This is a sissy still life. Silly, but pretty. And, in a certain way, almost religious. (‘Eastern’ religious). This still life is secretly smiling.’ 2 Brainard died in New York City on 25th May 1994 from an AIDS-related illness.
Though shy, Brainard was, by all accounts, a charmer with a great sense of humour. Worried about his skinniness, he designed elaborate diet regimes to muscle up. ‘RIGHT NOW: Thinking about how blue the sky is, and how black and white the sun makes everything seem today, eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich on toast and drinking a can of Nutrament (trying to gain weight)’. 3 He remained lithe and handsome. A smoker, Brainard painted, drew, wrote about, and considered the beauty of smoking and its paraphernalia. About one cigarette butt work, James Schuyler wrote: ‘He crams cork-tipped butts into a space until it is stuffed. The pattern has to find itself, except ‘pattern’ is a poor word: a contiguity, like what polishing shows in a slice of granite, the order of randomness.’
I remember Dorothy Collins.
I remember Dorothy Collins’ teeth.
I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.
I remember my grade school art teacher, Mrs Chick, who got so mad at a boy one day she dumped a bucket of water over his head.
I remember Moley, the local freak and notorious queer. He had a very little head that grew out of his body like a mole. No one knew him, but everyone knew who he was. He was always ‘around’.
I remember liver.
How refreshing that an artist who spent most of his life in New York had retrospectives in Southern California. It is helpful to think about Brainard’s work - its humour, it directness - in terms of some Los Angeles artists, if only for a moment, to see that for all its important connections to what is handily referred to as the New York School of painters (Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher) and writers (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie), his work resonates on various frequencies. His little books of drawings and writings can be placed snugly next to Edward Ruscha’s brilliant photographic booklets: both reveal the genius of fearlessly pursuing a banal idea with single-minded thoroughness. William Wegman’s videos with his dogs revel in the same dopey wonders of the ordinary as many of Brainard’s investigations.
Perhaps at his most disarming, Brainard was interested in discerning, as Dave Hickey has written about Jeffrey Vallance, ‘the interrelatedness of just about everything’. Both artists achieved this by situating a peculiar religious fervour at the heart of their work. Where Vallance has found visionary moments in the ‘shroud’ of Blinky the frozen chicken, and the marks of Elvis’ sweat on sky-blue satin, Brainard made vibrantly coloured shrines, riots of colours and flowers and materials buzzing around the Infant of Prague or a small, butterfly Madonna. Brainard was careful to qualify the religious nature of these works, and was quoted by Schuyler as saying: ‘A lot of people said I was making fun of religion ... I’d almost rather be religious.’
These links with the West Coast do not deny a complex, intimate dialogue with Porter, Freilicher, and Katz (as well as Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, and Andy Warhol). The first three were close friends, Warhol a close acquaintance. While the connections between Brainard’s work and the former artists’ are apparent - a love for the everyday and for the real’s real abstractness - his interest in Warhol is not, since too many critics have discussed the goings-on of the New York School and the Factory as if they were happening at different times and in different cities. Although the circles were dissimilar, the cross-pollination was tangible, if complex. On some level, it was the naturalness of homosexuality within these groups which allowed, even solicited interaction. In ‘Andy Warhol’s Sleep Movie’, an essay from 1964 about seeing Sleep, Brainard wrote: ‘I rather enjoy the fact that a boring movie was made on purpose. And really, it’s not so boring to be bored. (Thank you Andy.)’ Brainard continued in another essay, ANDY WARHOL: ANDY DO IT: ‘Andy Warhol’s ‘paintings’ have ‘presence’. Andy Warhol’s ‘paintings’ have ‘face’. I like paintings that have ‘face’ and ‘presence’. I would not like Andy Warhol’s paintings if they didn’t ‘have’ face and presence. Andy Warhol knows what he is doing. Andy Warhol ‘does it’. I like painters who ‘do it’. Andy do it’. 5 Both men were in love with doing it, and with the frolic of popular culture which they knew was as much a part of life as art is, but where Brainard’s work relishes (and is in many ways about) handiwork, Warhol’s Andywork is Factory-made.
I remember when hoody boys wore their blue jeans so low that the principal had to put a limit on that too. I believe it was three inches below the navel.
I remember one football player who wore very light faded blue jeans, and the way he filled them.
I remember when my father would say ‘Keep your hands out from under the covers’ as he said good night. But he said it in a nice way.
I remember the chair I used to put my boogers behind.
I remember ‘queers can’t whistle’.
I remember how many other magazines I had to buy in order to buy one physique magazine.
I remember a girl in school one day who, just out of the blue, went into a long spiel all about how difficult it was to wash her brother’s pants because he didn’t wear underwear.
Like Warhol’s, Brainard’s work gains some of its strength through seriality and repetition. Both artists meditated on the frame-by-frame structure of movies and comics, but where Warhol employed the repetition of grocery store displays and the photobooth, Brainard found seriality even closer at home - in books, turning a page and finding another page, the same and yet so different. Books feature heavily among his early work, including two amazing volumes, gifts for Ron and Pat Padgett. (Although his gallery shows sold well, in his work Brainard thwarted gallery and museum norms by delighting in the artwork as gift.) The Sky Book, (1965), 20-odd pages long, includes a piece of sky on every page - blue sky replacing the suit of a cute 50s bodybuilder, sky appearing out of the blue in a grid of minerals. The work takes a found image and tweaks it lovingly. The simplicity of the act - putting a piece of blue sky where you want it, where Brainard saw it already was - is also its brilliance. 49 S. Main Street (1970), named after the address of the Fairfield Porter home in Southampton, tries to capture in book form the calm, beach ease of that house that was home to so many gifted writers and artists. While the love of the gift is apparent in the care with which Brainard hand-tinted black and white photographs by James Schuyler, the aesthetics of love, its gifts, still make us queasy, hoodwinked too often by the fantasy of Kantian absolutes. Brainard’s books, objects, and paintings are beautiful, but their formal surety (design, palette, conceptualisation) is paired with the equally formal rigours of friendship, care, and love. His gifted draughtsman’s skills were always warmed by his insouciance and sunshine, the true origin of his art.
I remember playing doctor with Joyce Vantries. I remember her soft white belly. Her large navel. And her little slit between her legs. I remember rubbing my ear against it.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember ‘lavender past.’ (He has a ...).
I remember after people are gone thinking of things I should have said but didn’t.
I remember once having to take a pee sample to the doctor and how yellow and warm it was in a jar.
I remember having a crush on a boy in my Spanish class who had a pair of olive green suede shoes with brass buckles just like pair I had. (‘Flagg Brothers’) I never said one word to him the entire year.
I remember seeing my brother bend way over to pull out the bath tub plug naked and realising for the first time that shit came out of a hole instead of a long slit.
In the mid-70s, Brainard showed ‘2,000 to 3,000 miniatures’ at the Fishbach gallery: a collage of playing cards, children’s books, labels, coloured paper, stamps and letters, the works’ number and scale confounded the machinations of the art market. What mattered was the immoderation of attention, intensified by the minute sizes of the objects. (A 1975 article in People Weekly was entitled ‘Think Tiny Says Joe Brainard’.) While he valued the daily, the impromptu, the improvised, his works were never lucky, slapdash, or lackadaisical. Brainard’s deft hand can most easily be seen in his use of cut-outs: in different works, sinuous sea grasses, pansies, roses and morning glories exquisitely arranged in complex layers of colour and shape.
Brainard’s aesthetic encompassed methods often referred to as ‘woman’s work’, including dainty needlework, garden club know-how and canasta shrewdness. This is a queer aesthetic in proximity with, but different from, what is too frequently condescended to as camp. His penmanship is easy to read, fun and direct, but precise as an elementary schoolteacher’s. He loved to read old diaries and ladies’ magazines, which fine-tuned his ear, as they did all of the New York School poets, to the genius of American colloquialisms. For example, he quotes a Mrs Florence Ginn’s reminiscences about her water pump: ‘I have many memories of the old pump - some goods and some bad - but that is the way of life.’ Relish his keen eye for male beauties, but not to the detriment of his admiration for banality or his love of jewels, specifics inseparable from and without which his sexuality, like anyone’s, is as dull as dirt.
Brainard’s work brought into the world an aesthetics of immediacy, unembarrassed introspection, whimsy, and exploration. He never allowed his own doubts, distractions or embarrassment to do anything but inspire him. Whether today’s artists know of his work or not, its perfume has affected them: Vincent Fecteau, Siobhan Liddell, Nicole Eisenmann, David Armstrong, and, most intricately, Jack Pierson, all owe something to Brainard. At root, these artists trust what they see in the people they care about, in the strange material that the sea of daily life washes up, no matter how ephemeral, flimsy or elusive. They have found that, as Brainard put it, ‘Imagination is the Mother of Reality.’ Because the majority of his work is still in private hands, it is easier to point to Brainard’s influence on writers: Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar Press published Brainard’s last book, Nothing to Write Home About, in 1981, and Cooper’s own work recalls the casually poetic daring of Brainard’s prose taken somewhere else entirely. Wayne Koestenbaum, David Trinidad, and Amy Gerstler can be seen to have taken in a deep breath of the pure oxygen with which Brainard’s work blooms. In a late prose poem, he wrote: ‘You see, I’m not asking for anything to change, really. I just want to see as is. If I criticise, it’s through creating: the only way.’
I remember a pinkish-red rubber douche that appeared in the bathroom every now and then, and not knowing what it was, but somehow knowing enough not to ask.
I remember a little boy who said it was more fun to pee together than alone, and so we did, and so it was.
I remember ‘dress up time’ (Running around pulling up girl’s dresses yelling ‘dress up time’).
I remember a fat man who sold insurance. One hot summer day we went to visit him and he was wearing shorts and when he sat down one of his balls hung out.
I remember that it was hard to look at it and hard not to look at it too.
I remember a very early memory of an older girl in a candy store. The man asked her what she wanted and she picked out several things and then he asked her for her money and she said. ‘Oh, I don’t have any money. You just asked me what I wanted, and I told you.’ This impressed me to no end.
It is worth considering why Brainard’s work should be so insistently of the 70s, that strange, variegated, nonchalant decade. What aspects of its racy energy inspired and allowed Brainard’s work? In figuring out the lineage of Brainard’s ability to trust what was in his hands and head, his ability to inhabit now - no small task for anyone - no one should ignore the effect of Frank O’Hara; his is one of the premature deaths that could be said to have ended the 60s, and his posthumous Collected Poems, published in 1971, one of the works that began and defined the 70s. Brainard met O’Hara via Ron Padgett, who studied at Columbia with Kenneth Koch, a close friend of O’Hara’s and fellow poet at Columbia. One of the many things that Koch noted about O’Hara must also have impressed Brainard: ‘his feeling that the silliest idea actually in his head was better than the most profound idea actually in somebody else’s head - which seems obvious once you know it, but how many poets have lived how many total years without ever finding it out?’. 6
One of O’Hara’s last pieces of writing was a cogent introduction to Edwin Denby’s Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets. The two men had been close friends and fellow observers for many years. In the title essay, Denby wrote about seeing dance performed in a way that was intimately applicable and connected to O’Hara’s own aesthetics of the ecstatic: how to take the disjointed wonder called ‘life’ and somehow let it flow through whatever that excitement given the name of ‘art’ is. In the final paragraph of his introduction, O’Hara illuminates Denby’s keen art of attention: ‘Much of this prose is involved with the delineation of sensibility in its experience of time: what happens, and how, if at all? what does each second mean, and how is the span of attention used to make it a longer or shorter experience? Is time in itself beautiful, or is its quality merely decorable or decorous? Somehow, he gives an equation in which attention equals life, or is its only evidence.’ Brainard imbued his work with the excited energy that Denby found in dance and on the streets and that O’Hara expressed in poetry. In his Self-Portrait: 1971, Brainard defines art. ‘ART: Art to me is like walking down the street with someone and saying ‘Don’t you love that building?’ (Too)’. He saw that the stuff of life is the stuff of art, the stuff of art the stuff of life. He allowed it to be there, and he allowed himself to be a part of it.“ - Bruce Hainley
"I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.
Joe Brainard remembered a lot of things and will be remembered as a lot of things: foremost as a master of collage and assemblage, and so, by necessity as well as temperament, an obsessive collector of materials and appropriator of images; also as a painter; a poet; and a friend. John Ashbery, in his introduction to Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, says: "Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist."
Nice Joe Brainard left Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was raised, and later left a scholarship at the Dayton Art Institute, for the excitement of New York City. (So nice was Brainard that he didn't want to hurt the Institute’s feelings by jilting it for the city: he told the administration that his father had contracted cancer and that he had to leave, failing to mention that he would be on the next bus for Manhattan.) Lucky enough to have Tulsa pals Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan, the godfather of second-generation New York School poets, as his New York City welcoming committee, Brainard thrived, living the life of a bohemian artist on the Lower East Side and earning his first solo exhibit four short years after arriving in the city.
Brainard worked at a fever pitch on dozens of pieces simultaneously. As if to highlight the kitsch, the camp, and the love of artifice that so delighted him personally, Brainard chose not to disguise the constituent parts in his assemblage and collage, instead naming works such as "Prell" after the products he had co-opted. Brainard adopted a "no comment" approach to art, allowing whatever meaning accrued in his glued-together worlds to go unexplained. Many collages went untitled, as if the "message" were of no concern and many wound up with provisional titles such as "Good’n Fruity Madonna," reflecting instead the process and materials rather than any will of the artist, reflecting style over content and a refusal on the artist’s part to take the art, or himself, too seriously.
Importantly, in New York, Brainard would also meet the poets who would come to define the era, his future collaborators: Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Bill Berkson, Kenneth Koch, Anne Waldman, and James Schuyler. His collaborations with writers took many forms, from book covers and illustrations to paintings and collages with text provided by poets. Some of the finest and funniest are his collages and comic strips to which he invited a bevy of poets to contribute quips.
Whereas the New York School's poetry bore little resemblance to the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School of painters, Brainard’s work could be seen as an artist’s take on the poet's aesthetic. O’Hara describes his beliefs about poetry in his mock-manifesto "Personism":
You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife, you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."
Similarly, in an interview with the young Anne Waldman, Brainard said:
I don’t ever have an idea. The material does it all. You have a figure and a flower and you add a cityscape and it makes the story. You have control if you want to take it but that’s something I never wanted to do much.
Again, O’Hara:
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
And Brainard:
Most artists are very straight, straight in their seriousness and in what they are trying to do. I think I’m a lot more sensual, a lot more ga-ga than that….
Brainard made art for the same reasons the New York School poets wrote: for the pleasure of it. As he said of collaboration, "it’s fun," and in the late 1960s, Brainard took an interest in the other side of his collaborations, the "fun" of wearing his cohorts' writer pants. The book I Remember is the riotous, poignant, earnest and seemingly random result. Painterly in its vivid details and collagist in its hands-off juxtaposition, it is an accumulative, oblique biography, a portrait of the artist as a young man. It is much, much greater than the mere sum of its parts. Ashbery referred to it, only half-jokingly, as "humane smut." It has that sweet, playful self-possession that pervades Brainard’s work.
A sampler:
I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.
I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember when my father would say "Keep your hands out from under the covers" as he said goodnight. But he said it in a nice way.
I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.
And this, written in naïve 1969:
I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.
In May of 1994, Joe Brainard died of AIDS-related pneumonia. Recently, his childhood friend Ron Padgett wrote a memoir, published by Coffee House Press, about his friendship with Joe Brainard, about growing up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, and about his and Brainard's pursuit of poetry and art in New York City. The book is called Joe.“ – Poets.org
ABOUT JOE BRAINARD
During his childhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a gentle, skinny stutterer who won virtually every art competition he entered and eagerly designed his mother's dresses at her request. In high school he met the equally marginalized young poets Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, and the three published The White Dove Review that featured work by Beat and Black Mountain luminaries and an unknown Ted Berrigan who soon became a close friend.
In late 1960 Joe abandoned a full scholarship at the Dayton Art Institute to move to New York City and live a poor artist's life on the Lower East Side, often subsisting on little but coffee and cigarettes. By 1964, after a lonely but revelatory year in Boston, Joe was back in New York, ensconced in a circle of friends that included renowned and highly regarded artists, writers, and composers, as well a host of younger poets later associated with the St. Marks Poetry Project. He also came to terms with being gay and began a relationship with Kenward Elmslie that, despite other lovers, lasted until the end of his life.
1964 also marked the advent of Joe's artistic success. His first solo exhibition came on the heels of being chosen by Larry Rivers for a group show. For the next fifteen years, in addition to showing his work across the country and internationally to critical acclaim, Joe continued designing book covers for and collaborating with his poet friends, as well as designing sets and costumes for theatrical productions. His own writings -- memoirs, short essays, verbal-visual hybrids, and poems -- were published in small offset and mimeo editions as well as by independent presses Kulchur, Angel Hair, Z Press, and Black Sparrow.
Joe's work ethic and singleness of purpose -- as well as his use of amphetamines -- allowed him to produce art at an astonishing rate. His prodigious output, however, did not diminish the quality of work that critics noted then and continue to recognize for its dazzling beauty, its extraordinary variety and originality, its vitality and wit. For the last fifteen years of his life, before he died of AIDS-induced pneumonia, Joe refused almost every invitation to exhibit or publish. Dissatisfied with his work and wary of complacency, Joe spent his time living a life that demonstrated the same generosity, passion, and sense of purpose that marked his art by devoting himself to reading, to seeing exhibitions and movies, and to his friends.
JOE BRAINARD BY JOHN ASHBERY
Originally published in the catalogue for Joe Brainard: Retrospective, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1997 and reprinted in Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, Granary Books, 2001. Copyright © 1997. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist.
This may present a problem. Think of how many artists, especially those whose work you admire, weren't all that nice. Caravaggio. Degas. Gauguin. De Chirico. Picasso. Pollock. Their art isn't exactly nice either, but the issue seldom arises. In Joe's case, it does. He began around the same time that Pop Art did. With Lichtenstein or Warhol there is a subtext of provocation, though the Pop Artists generally were too cool, too "down" as we used to say, to let this possibility become anything more than unspoken. In Joe's work, one of his pictures of pansies, for instance, there is confrontation without provocation. A pansy is a loaded subject. So is the effortless, seed-packet look of the painting. But there's no apparent effort on the artist's part to cause stress or wonderment in the viewer. With Joe, a certain gratitude mingles in the pleasure he offers us. One can sincerely admire the chic and the implicit nastiness of a Warhol Soup can without ever wanting to cozy up to it, and perhaps that is as it should be, art being, art, a rather distant thing. In the case of Joe one wants to embrace the pansy, so to speak. Make it feel better about being itself, all alone, a silly kind of expression on its face, forced to bear the brunt of its name eternally. They we suddenly realize that it's "doing" for us, that everything will be okay if we just look at it, accept it and let it be itself. And something deeper and more serious than the result of provocation emerges. Joy. Sobriety. Nutty poetry.
There are however no histoires à l'eau de rose here. Nor is Joe's book of "remembers" for family viewing. Some indeed seem to require a new rating for "humane smut" though they are so cleverly interleaved among others like "I remember wondering if I looked queer" and "I remember the rather severe angles of 'Oriental' lampshades" that one can't say for sure. One is "taken aback." The writing and the art are relaxed -- not raging -- in their newness, careful of our feeling, careful not to hurt them by so much as taking them into account. They go about their business of being, which in the end makes us better for having send and lived with them; and better for not feeling indebted to them, thanks to the artist's having gone to unusual lengths for us not to feel that.
Joe was a creature of incredible tact and generosity. He often gave his work to his friends, but before you could feel obliged to him he was already there, having anticipated the problem several moments or paragraphs earlier, and remedying it while somehow managing to deflect your attention from it. Into something else: a compassionate atmosphere, where looking at his pictures and recognizing their references and modest autobiographical aspirations would somehow make you a nicer person without realizing it and having to be grateful. It's for this, I think, that his work is so radical, that we keep returning to it, again and again finding something that is new, bathing in its curative newness. Joe seems to have taken extraordinary pains for us not to know about his work. Either he would create 3,000 tiny works for a show, far too many to take in, or he would abandon art altogether, as he did for the last decade of his life, consecrating his time to his two favorite hobbies, smoking and reading Victorian novels. It's as though in an ultimate gesture of niceness he didn't wasn't us to have the bother of bothering with him. Maybe that's why the work today hits us so hard, sweeping all before it, our hesitations and his, putting us back in the place where we always wanted to be, the delicious chromatic center of the Parcheesi board.“
SAINT JOE BY EDMUND WHITE
Originally published in Art in America, July 1, 1997. Copyright © 1997. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.
Brainard was a gifted artist who also had a large circle of devoted friends. He was born in Arkansas, but moved to New York City in 1960. He produced thousands of art works during the first part of his life, then devoted the last 20 years to reading. He also produced the book I Remember.
When Joe Brainard died in New York City on May 25, 1994, he had been nearly forgotten, except by his legion of friends. Tibor de Nagy Gallery [in New York] recently presented his first major one-man show in nearly two decades, a large exhibition containing samples of a huge body of work, including paintings, drawings, collages and assemblages. The show established that, early on, Brainard shared Warhol's love of product labels and that he enjoyed doing parodies of all sorts of artistic styles and movements long before visual appropriation became fashionable. As Robert Rosenblum puts it in the exhibition catalogue, Brainard gives us "a preview of the nostalgic regressions of so many recent artists, from Duncan Hannah to Mike Kelley." Rosenblum also suggests that "on a totally different wave-length, Damien Hirst's artistic recycling of crushed cigarette butts might look déja vu after we've seen what Joe Brainard quietly did at home with the same theme back in the 1970s."
In his short life (he was just 52 when he died of AIDS), Brainard worked with remarkable intensity and enviable fluency -- and then abruptly stopped and devoted the last 20 years of his life to reading. Before the reading set in (it was something like a disease, the equivalent to Marcel Duchamp's chess-playing), Brainard had managed to do thousands of collages, as well as sets and costumes for the Joffrey Ballet Company and art-and-text collaborations with many New York School poets, including Frank O'Hara, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby and John Ashbery. He also designed the covers for numerous magazines and books of poetry.
Most important, he wrote a completely original book called I Remember, which was reprinted by Penguin in 1995 but which was first launched 25 years earlier in a shorter small-press version. Brainard had discovered a simple but irresistible form. In a text that eventually ran to more that 130 pages, he started each short paragraph with the words, "I Remember," and then recalled an isolated, highly personal memory or an interlocking set of recollections or just the existence of a product or a fad from his youth.
I remember having a crush on a boy in my Spanish class who had a pair of olive green suede shoes with brass buckles just like a pair I had ("Flagg Brothers"). I never said one word to him the entire year.
I remember sweaters thrown over shoulders and sunglasses propped up on heads.
I remember fishnet.
I remember board and brick book shelves.
I remember driving in cars and doing landscape paintings in my head. (I still do that).
The form of I Remember was so delightful and infectious that soon everyone started imitating it. As Brainard's childhood friend, the poet Ron Padgett, writes in his afterword for the 1995 edition: "It is one of the few literary forms that even non-literary people can use." In the early 1970s Kenneth Koch was teaching poetry to children and he found that the "I Remember" format was a natural for kids. Classroom creative-writing textbooks soon took up the idea and by now thousands of teachers have used the device across the country, but few people are even aware of its inventor.
Padgett recalls that Brainard was reading Gertrude Stein in the summer of 1969 when he first started writing I Remember, and there is something of her shrewd naivete in Brainard's wry declarations. Most of the entries he came up with he rejected; the full manuscript runs to over 600 pages. With his usual directness he wrote to a friend at the time he was composing the book that I Remember is "very honest. And accurate. Honesty (for me) is very hard because I suppose I don't really believe there is such a thing, but somehow I think I have managed to do it." He went on to say that he had "practically no memory and so remembering is like pulling teeth. Every now and then, though, when I really get into it, floods of stuff just pour out and shock the you-know-what out of me. But it pours out very crystal clear and orderly."
Paul Auster, the author of The New York Trilogy, seemed to agree when he blurbed the Penguin edition years later: "One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure." Harry Mathews, the American novelist and poet who has lived in France since the 1950s, told the Paris-based avant-garde writer Georges Perec (Life: A User's Manual) about Joe's book, and soon Perec had produced his own Je me souviens. When Perec died, Mathews wrote an obituary for Le Monde titled "Je me souviens Georges Perec" and now Mathews's wife, the French novelist Marie Chaix, is translating Joe's I Remember into French. The form is so reassuring -- with its openness, the mixing of big things with little, the option of linking memories or leaving them discrete -- that I found myself turning to it quite naturally when my French lover, the illustrator Hubert Sorin, died of AIDS three years ago. I was so terrified of forgetting something about him (his quirks, his tastes, his mannerisms, his opinions) that I started an "I Remember" list of my own.
Joe Brainard had been a panhandler for a few years after he arrived in New York in 1960 at the age of 18, fresh from Tulsa, but by the time I met him in the mid-'70s he seemed to be swimming in cash (he was rumored to have a very rich lover from a famous family). This combination of early poverty and more recent wealth meant that he was weirdly naive about money. I remember that he had a big drawer in his nearly empty SoHo loft that was stuffed with thousands of dollars. He loved to invite everyone to dinner in a restaurant, and when he'd set out for the evening he'd fish out of the drawer enough money for ten dinners. "Do you think this is enough?" he'd ask, anxiously. He'd tip the waiter 50 percent, usually, and if one objected that it was too much he'd stutter, "Oh-oh-oh, but he was so nice."
Joe Brainard was both a collector and an antimaterialist. He loved beautiful objects and bought them, but he loved emptiness more and was always giving away his collections and restoring his loft to its primordial spareness. As one of his closest friends told me, "He was like a teenager. It was difficult for him to live in the real world. He'd get rid of everything. His loft was Spartan-too much so. I remember at the end, when he was so ill, the nurse would have to kneel next to his mattress on the floor-it broke my heart."
He loved to give away his work; he must have been the despair of his gallery. He gave me a wonderful collage of a young man in sexy white underpants floating against a blue sky. The man's mouth and the tip of his nose are just visible but his eyes are obscured; he is inscribed inside a bold oval. There is something of Saint Sebastian (that classic gay icon) about him, something of a Bellini madonna (the ethereal figure floating against a cerulean blue), and something of a Leonardo da Vinci anatomical study (the geometry imposed on the body). I used the picture as the cover of the English edition of my novel The Beautiful Room is Empty.
When I met Joe he had already begun his great reading binge. He had a single bed, that mattress on the floor, and a radio tuned to a country-and-western station 24 hours a day. He'd he on his bed all night and read; he'd finish Great Expectations at 3 A.M. and pick up Middlemarch. When he went out he would dress up in his beautiful Armani suits. He'd leave his impeccable, starched white shirts open to his waist and he almost never wore an overcoat, not even in the coldest weather, since someone had once told him he had a great chest. In fact, he was self-conscious about how skinny he was and was always beginning bulking-up schemes that he would quickly abandon.
Joe Brainard was born in Arkansas but was brought up in Tulsa. "I remember," he wrote, "that for my fifth birthday all I wanted was an off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown. I got it. And I wore it to my birthday party." "I remember when I got a five-year pin for not missing a single morning of Sunday School for five years. (Methodist)."
As a teenager in the 1950s he was already friendly with the poets Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan, who were about his age, and with Pat Mitchell, who later became Ron's wife. "I remember giant discussions with Pat and Ron Padgett, and Ted Berrigan, after seeing La Dolce Vita about what all the symbolism meant." Even in high school Ron was publishing a little magazine, The White Dove Review, for which Joe was the art editor (LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg sent them poems). Joe was considered the best artist in school. "I remember when I worked for a department store doing fashion drawings for newspaper ads." Joe's father, who worked on an oil rig, enjoyed drawing as a hobby, and both of Joe's brothers became artists, and his sister now works in a Denver art gallery.
Pat Padgett recalls that when Joe moved to New York he lived in a storefront on the Lower East Side that he later shared with Ted Berrigan. He had friends and patrons back in Tulsa who occasionally sent him 20 or 30 dollars. He sold blood from time to time and worked in a junk-antique store. One day he received a notice for his army physical. "I remember when I got drafted and had to go way downtown to take my physical," Brainard writes. "It was early in the morning. I had an egg for breakfast and I could feel it sitting there in my stomach. After roll call a man looked at me and ordered me to a different line than most of the boys were lined up at. (I had very long hair which was more unusual then than it is now.) The line I was sent to turned out to be the line to see the head doctor. (I was going to ask to see him anyway.) The doctor asked me if I was queer and I said yes. Then he asked me what homosexual experiences I had had and I said none. (It was the truth.) And he believed me. I didn't even have to take my clothes off."
As Pat Padgett recalls, "In high school he had had crushes on boys and girls. But in his family no one ever spoke about personal things. And I certainly didn't think about things like homosexuality. I guess he told Ron and me as soon as it became apparent to him. After he became close with Joe LeSueur, Frank O'Hara and Kenward Elmslie."
Although everyone agrees that Joe felt bad about his scanty education, they all speak of his intelligence and superb instincts. John Ashbery had just come back from years of living in Paris, where he'd been the art critic for the Herald-Tribune, and he was very impressed by Joe's artistic judgment, by "an intelligence disguised by a surface naivete." Kenward Elmslie, who became Joe's best friend and with whom he spent summers in Calais, Vermont, once said that Joe had the finest intuition of anyone he'd ever known. Joe LeSueur agrees that Brainard had a perfect eye and ear. As LeSueur puts it, "I met him when he was nineteen and he already knew everything. He was a true master of collage. He'd do five a day-and he couldn't wait to get on to the next one. He wasn't influenced by anyone. I bought his painting 7-Up for fourteen dollars -- but Joe gave up Pop art of that sort as soon as he saw Warhol's work later."
In his first show at the Alan Gallery in 1965 Brainard did big Puerto-Rican-style altarpieces. Soon afterwards he wrote to James Schuyler that he had had no specific religious intention in mind when he constructed his shrines: "On the other hand, a lot of people said I was making fun of religion which would be even worse. In reviews. I'd almost rather be religious."
Except for the annual summer pilgrimages to Vermont, Joe was faithful to New York, although he once lived briefly in Boston ("I remember when I lived in Boston reading all of Dostoevsky's novels one right after the other") and in Dayton ("I remember when I won a scholarship to the Dayton, Ohio, Art Institute and I didn't like it but I didn't want to hurt their feelings by just quitting so I told them that my father was dying of cancer").
Whereas Pop artists took an adversarial position against everyday images, Joe liked everything, and was himself immensely likeable as a man and as a painter. In a catalogue essay for the recent show, John Ashbery writes: "Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person, and nice as an artist. This may present a problem.... One can sincerely admire the chic and the implicit nastiness of a Warhol soup can without ever wanting to cozy up to it, and perhaps that is as it should be, art being art, a rather distant thing. In the case of Joe one wants to embrace the pansy, so to speak. Make it feel better about being itself, all alone, a silly kind of expression on its face, forced to bear the brunt of its name eternally."
Joe drew a coffee cup with a 1930s illustrator's abstract smartness, or turned out an Ingres-like pencil portrait of Pat as a young woman, or composed a breakfast still life in the comfortable, life-enhancing, pleasurable mode of Fairfield Porter (one of his idols). He did a huge gouache-collage of hundreds of flowers arranged in a "Garden," or he painted a sumptuous, 4-foot-tall gouache of a "Madonna with Daffodils." He crammed cigarette butts into small, intricate patterns. (Brainard was as staunch a defender of smoking as Fran Lebowitz.) Sleek athletes in underpants (often with parts of their bodies replaced by bits of blue sky) recall the innocence of physique magazines of the 1950s: "I remember how many other magazines I had to buy in order to buy one physique magazine," he wrote.
One series of small oils was devoted to Kenward Elmslie's dog Whippoorwill. In one canvas, just 9 inches by 12, painted in 1975, the lean white dog is shown crouched on very green grass before a small white clapboard house; it's called Whippoorwill's World as a funny allusion to Wyeth's painting, but the humor is gentle, not sarcastic, and it does nothing to detract from the sheer beauty of the image.
Brainard often alluded to other artists (in his 1968 cover for an ARTnews annual, the head of the comic-strip character Nancy is shown collaged onto Goya's Nude Maja, Manet's Olympia, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and de Kooning's Woman, and she cavorts through a Mondrian abstraction, a Johns Target and a series of Donald Judd boxes). But his own style has no antecedents and only one real parallel -- Donald Evans. Like the art of Evans, whose oeuvre consisted of several thousand meticulously painted postage stamps of fictive nations, each of which corresponded, as Bruce Chatwin observed, "to a phase, a friendship, a mood, or a preoccupation," Joe's work was also often miniature, gently parodic and personal. Brainard's brother John told me that Joe and Evans were friends and exchanged letters and that Evans, who died in 1977, signed and gave a stamp to Joe as well as a book about his work.
The one event in Brainard's life that puzzles everyone is why he quit painting. When I mentioned the parallel with Duchamp's virtual "silence" as a painter from the 1920s to his death in the 1960s, Pat Padgett laughed and said, "Yeah, but Duchamp was not a very good painter. He may have been a brilliant thinker but he had little talent. Whereas Joe had a good hand and could do anything. And yet Joe thought he wasn't good enough to do great easel painting, which for him was the ultimate form. I think Joe felt that no one after the Abstract Expressionists had come up to their level and that disparity tormented him."
Joe LeSueur added, "I think that at first he was excited by fame and was thrilled by all the attention he got. But then he saw that success doesn't bring much happiness. After all, he knew the most famous poets of the day -- Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara -- and his friendship with them convinced him that success isn't such a big deal. Then he came off speed; he'd been on amphetamines for years and during those years his hands couldn't work fast enough. He must have seen he couldn't go on like that." Another friend told me that Joe had freaked out when he saw little men and after the mid-1970s he'd never done speed again. "Anyway," LeSueur concluded, "he'd already created a huge, totally original body of work. Maybe he felt satisfied with his achievement."
Ron Padgett believes Brainard was too hard on himself. "Towards the end of his painting days he wanted to do lace as well as Velazquez, a gentleman's waistcoat as vividly as Raeburn, a horse as solidly as Stubbs, a cherry as convincingly as Manet. When he couldn't always reach those impossible heights he just stopped." Everyone agrees that the fact he'd had a considerable fortune settled on him permitted him to stop painting; in that sense the money was bad for him. Curiously, he didn't seem to miss the creative act.
The poet Bill Berkson said, "Joe had a difficult time coming off speed. There were times when he seemed nervous, laughing bizarrely at some private joke. Ted Berrigan would tease him and ask, `Why don't you want to be great like de Kooning?' Joe would demur, but he probably did mean to be great in his own sweet way, like Joseph Cornell. He liked to show people doing dumb, everydayish things -- that's why he liked Sluggo and Nancy. And in that way his art was a lot like John Ashbery's poems."
Actor Keith McDermott, whom Brainard fell in love with in 1979 and remained close to, remembers that Joe was surprised by his positive HIV status. "I thought he'd commit suicide, but no, he became very docile and just did whatever the doctors said." John Brainard was with his brother constantly from December 1993 till Joe's death the following May. "He stayed from December to March in the hospital, then he lived in my apartment. He was very accepting of illness and death. Only in September 1993 did he tell me he had AIDS, but at that time he said it was okay with him, he knew much younger people who were dying or who had died. He felt he had had enough time. Though he went through a lot of pain, he suffered it very bravely." At his memorial ceremony several speakers called him "saintly."
I myself always mentally compared him to Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin -- he was that unworldly and Christlike, Joe was the only person I've ever known that I'd try to talk and act like when I was with him. My imitations were embarrassing and never successful, but the urge to delete all phoniness and really took at the surrounding world with a fresh eye and to shower everyone with generosity was so compelling that by the end of an evening with Joe I was even unconsciously imitating his stutter. Joe's personal style was certainly hypnotic.“
Joe Brainard web page
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.