Joe Brainard (March 11, 1942 – May 25, 1994) was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes. In particular, Brainard broke new ground in using comics as a poetic medium in his collaborations with other New York School poets. He is best known for his memoir I Remember, of which Paul Auster said: "It is ... one of the few totally original books I have ever read."[1]
Brainard became friends with Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and Ted Berrigan during high school while working on the literary journal The White Dove Review, which was printed five times during 1959/1960. The 18-year-old Brainard joined the journal as its art editor after fellow Central High classmate Padgett sent Brainard an anonymous Christmas card praising his work.
After high school, the artist re-united with the White Dove boys in New York City shortly after leaving the Dayton Art Institute.[4][5]
Brainard began his career during the early Pop Art era, and while his work has a certain affinity with Pop Art, it does not fit the definition of the genre:
Brainard knew and admired Warhol (Brainard sat for a Warhol screen test in 1964) ... but he was never a Pop artist in the strict sense. Warhol and Lichtenstein maintained an ironic distance from their subject matter. Brainard's relationship to the material world of popular culture was one of affection or amusement or both. Moreover, he was too protean to be stuck with Pop or any other label. In what now would be considered Postmodern fashion, he drew his materials and images from everywhere.
The inimitability of Brainard's work is located partly in its resistance to categorization, in its breadth, and in its rapport with and awe of the quotidian:
Joe Brainard is one of those unclassifiable artists ... who do several things well. In his case this resulted not in separate compartments but a unified whole. ... The same qualities shine forth in all that he produced: clarity, bold simplicity, accuracy of execution and feeling, humor, casual elegance, a charm that invites his audience in rather than keeping them at arm's length, and something grander but determinedly low key and offhand, a sense of the ordinary as sacramental.
Particularly in the collages, drawings and small works on paper, Brainard transformed the everyday into something revelatory:
[Brainard] 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.
Joe Brainard's I Remember radically departs from the conventions of the traditional memoir. His deft juxtapositions of the banal with the revelatory, the very particular with the apparently universal accumulate into a complex depiction of his childhood in the 1940s and '50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the '60s and '70s in New York City. I Remember has inspired many homages and adaptations. As the poet and critic Geoffrey O'Brien wrote in the The New York Review of Books, I Remember "revealed [Brainard] as the inventor of an altogether new sort of book. The work eventually became globally popular and a widely used text for writing workshops."[9]
Publications
I Remember (Angel Hair, 1970)
I Remember More (Angel Hair, 1972)
More I Remember More (Angel Hair, 1973)
I Remember Christmas (Museum of Modern Art, 1973)
I Remember (first collected edition, Full Court Press, 1975)
I Remember (new edition, Penguin, 1995)
I Remember (new edition, Granary Books, 2001, 4th printing 2005)
Selected Writings (Kulchur, 1971)
Bolinas Journal (Big Sky, 1971)
Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (Siamese Banana, 1971)
Some Things (C Press, New York, 1964), with Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan
The Baby Book (Boke Press, 1965), with Kenward Elmslie
Bean Spasms (Kulchur, 1967) with Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett
The 1967 Game Calendar (Boke Press, 1967), with Kenward Elmslie
100,000 Fleeing Hilda (Boke Press, 1967), with Ron Padgett
The Drunken Boat (privately printed, nd), with Ted Berrigan
The Champ (Black Sparrow, 1968), with Kenward Elmslie
Album (Kulchur, 1969), with Kenward Elmslie
Recent Visitors (Best & Co./Boke Press, 1971), with Bill Berkson
Neil Young (The Coach House Press, 1971), with Tom Clark
Sufferin' Succotash/Kiss My Ass (Adventures in Poetry, 1971), with Ron Padgett/Michael Brownstein)
Self-Portrait (Siamese Banana, 1972) with Anne Waldman
Shiny Ride (Boke Press, 1972), with Kenward Elmslie
The Class of '47 (Bouwerie Editions, 1973; SUNY Buffalo Art Gallery, 2007), with Robert Creeley
The Vermont Notebook (1975), with John Ashbery
I Love You, de Kooning (Bolinas, Calif.: Yanagi Broadside late 1970s), with Bill Berkson
1984 Comics (Marz Verlag, 1983), collaborations with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, Peter Schjeldahl, James Schuyler, and Tony Towle
Sung Sex (Kulchur, 1989), with Kenward Elmslie
Pay Dirt (Bamberger Books, 1992), with Kenward Elmslie
Solo exhibitions
2022
a box of hearts and other works, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
2019
100 Works, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
2012
Painting the Way I Wish I Could Talk, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
2008
The Nancys, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York The Nancys, Colby College, Waterville, ME
2007
The Erotic Work, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Joe Brainard: People of the World: Relax! UBA Art Galleries, Buffalo, NY "If Nancy Was ...", Fischbach Gallery, NY
2005
35 Pictures and Some Words, Brazos Project, Houston, TX
2004
Selected Work, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
2001
Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; traveled to Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV Selected Work, Tibor de Nagy, New York
1997
A Retrospective, Tibor de Nagy, New York
1987
Mandeville Gallery, University of California, San Diego, CA
1980
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
1978
Joe Brainard: Fête d'Hiver, Root Art Center, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
1976
FIAC, Paris, France Coventry Gallery, Paddington, Australia Suzette Schochett Gallery, Newport, RI E.G. Gallery, Kansas City, KS Vick Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
1975
Fischbach Gallery, New York; also 1974, 1972 and 1971
1973
102 Works on Paper, 1966–1972, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT
1972
New York Cultural Center, New York School of Visual Arts, New York
Selected Collections include Berkeley Art Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, Baron Guy de Rothschild, Fogg Museum, Harvard; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, Time-Life, Inc,. Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. The Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD also has a large archive of works by and about Brainard collected by Robert Butts from 1960 to 1992.[11]
His work in theater included set designs for Frank O'Hara's The General Returns from One Place to Another and LeRoi Jones's The Baptism. Brainard also did sets and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance Troupe and the Joffrey Ballet Company.
Notes
^Brainard, Joe (2001). I Remember. New York City: Granary Books. p. Back cover. I Remember is a masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure. In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul and permanently alters the way we look at the world. I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read.
^Lewallen, Constance M. (2001). "Acts of Generosity". In Constance M. Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (pp. 5–44). New York City: Granary Books, Inc.
^Hello Joe: A Tribute to Joe Brainard. Pressed Wafer, 2, 85–87.
^Lauterbach, Ann. (2008). Joe Brainard & Nancy. In The Nancy Book (pp. 7–24). Los Angeles: Siglio Press.