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Excerpt from
JOE BRAINARD & NANCY
BY ANN LAUTERBACH
Originally published in The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard, Siglio Press. Copyright © 2008 the author. All rights reserved.
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.1
Favorite Things
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.2
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."3
("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.
In Brainard, candor was coupled with an almost uncanny knack for distillation. To distill is not to simplify, but to locate an essence. All of Brainard's works have this quality of distilled essence.
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.
Footnotes
- Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art Popular Culture (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1991), p. 154. This exhaustive exhibition catalogue is
invaluable.
- Joe Brainard, I Remember (New York: Granary Books, 2001), p. 8. This combines
earlier editions, published in 1970, 1972, 1975 by Angel Hair Books, The Museum of
Modern Art, and Full Court Press.
- Quoted in Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House
Press, 2004), p. 146.
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