Joe Brainard’s Art 9781474436687

Citation preview

Joe Brainard’s Art

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Joe Brainard’s Art

Edited by Yasmine Shamma

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Yasmine Shamma, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 3666 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3668 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3669 4 (epub) The right of Yasmine Shamma to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: Joe Brainard’s Collage Aesthetic Yasmine Shamma Part I: Reflections and Recollections 1 Joe, A Funny Nickname Alice Notley 2 Joe Brainard: Tenderness and Gristle Anne Waldman 3 Smoking Joe John Brainard 4 Artist Statement John Ashbery 5 Vulnerability in Joe Brainard’s Work Edmund Berrigan Part II: Joe Brainard’s Visions and Visuals 6 Joe Brainard: The Madonna of the Future Nathan Kernan 7 Boom: Joe Brainard 1961–1963 Ron Padgett 8 Joe Brainard’s Still-Life Poetics Jess Cotton Part III: Brainard and Others 9 “Men with a Pair of Scissors”: Joe Brainard and John Ashbery’s Eclecticism Rona Cran

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41 69 80

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Contents

10 The Friendly Way: Crafting Community in Joe Brainard’s Poetry Brian Glavey 11 Codes and Wounds: Exposure and Inviolability in the Work of Joe Brainard and Frank Bidart Anna Smaill 12 I Wonder: In Dialogue, On Dialogue Andrew Epstein and Andy Fitch Part IV: Brainard’s Books 13 “Fuck Work”: The Reciprocity of Labor and Pleasure in Joe Brainard’s Writing Nick Sturm 14 A Queer Poetics of the Normal: Joe Brainard, Clothing, and Girlish Femininity Kimberly Lamm 15 The Memoir of Disappearance: Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal Timothy Keane

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Afterword Marjorie Perloff

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the contributors who made this book possible. Responses were overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and everyone worked so generously towards a timeline to ensure the production of this collection would be strong and smooth. Geoff Ward and Reader 2 offered insight that encouraged a reshaping of this book to incorporate art criticism, and Edinburgh University Press has been incredibly generous and accommodating towards that end. My editor, Michelle Houston, has been warm, enthusiastic, and understanding, while staying with this project through all kinds of developments over the course of two years. Ersev Ersoy has been patient and organized in ensuring the final production. Thanks too to the late John Ashbery, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, John Brainard, and Ron Padgett for their contributions, which have infused this collection with personal and poetic well-informed thoughts and feelings. The estate of Joe Brainard, directed by Ron Padgett, has been very prompt and courteous providing permissions to reprint many of the illustrations herein, and has generously done so free of charge. Library of America, too, has been very supportive of this book, with Reggie Hui helping to streamline the many requests for rights. This book is written mostly as a tribute—academic and otherwise— to Joe Brainard, with thanks to him for his own generosity of spirit in his painting and writing for an audience whose bounds he may not have known, but who he treated with the nostalgia and humbling friendship of stranger kindness.

Permissions Cover image reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard. Excerpt from John Ashbery, “Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid.” Copyright © 1977, 2004 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author’s estate.

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Acknowledgements

Excerpt from John Ashbery, “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein.” Copyright © 1957, 2004 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author’s estate. Excerpt from John Ashbery, statement for the catalogue of his collage show, September 4, 2008, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Copyright © John Ashbery 2008. Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist. Excerpt from Bill Berkson, Foreword to Jenni Quilter, Neon in Daylight: New York School Painters and Poets (New York: Rizzoli, 2014). Reprinted by permission of Rizzoli on behalf of the author. Excerpts from “The Second Hour of the Night” and “In Memory of Joe Brainard” from Desire by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 1997 by Frank Bidart. Excerpts from “Eileen West” and “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” from In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990 by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 1990 by Frank Bidart. All reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All material reprinted from The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett and Paul Auster (Library of America, 2012) is copyright © 2012 by the estate of Joe Brainard. Reprinted with permission of the Library of America, . All rights reserved. Joe Brainard in collaboration with John Ashbery, from The Great Explosion Mystery (from C Comics 2) (1966). Ink on paper, 13 x 10 inches. Courtesy of Joe Brainard Archive, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard to John Ashbery, undated letter (postmarked November 28, 1983). Collection of John Ashbery; used by permission of the estates of Joe Brainard and John Ashbery and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard in collaboration with Ted Berrigan, Untitled (American Flag) (1962). Mixed media, 12 x 16 inches. Collection of Ron and Patricia Padgett. Joe Brainard, Black K (1963). Mixed media collage, 19½ x 14½ inches. Owner anonymous. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard, Carte Postale (1978). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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Joe Brainard, Cinzano (1974). Oil on canvas, 48 x 36½ inches. Collection of Anne Dunn. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard, Human Pear (1977). 4403 pixels. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard, If Nancy Knew What Wearing Green and Yellow Meant (1972). Gouache and ink on paper, 12 x 9 inches. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard, If Nancy Opened Her Mouth So Wide She Fell In (1972). Gouache and ink on paper. Joe Brainard, If Nancy Was a Boy (1972). Gouache and ink on paper, 11 x 8 inches. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard, Madonna with Daffodils (1966). Mixed media collage, 54¼ x 22¼ inches. Collection of Kenward Elmslie. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard, Parnasssus Butterfly (n.d.). Collage. Reproduced by permission of Herbert Leibowitz, Editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Acquired 1976. Joe Brainard, Shadow Box (1964). Mixed media collage with assemblage. Photograph by Los Angeles Modern Auctions. Joe Brainard, The World’s Wishes (n.d.). Collage. From the estate of Anselm and Edmund Berrigan. Joe Brainard, Untitled (“The Avant Garde”), ARTnews Annual 34 (1968). Offset lithography, 2 pages, 9 x 12 inches each. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard, Untitled (1960). Mixed media collage, 25 x 22½ inches. Collection of E. G. Schempf. Joe Brainard, Untitled (1962). Gouache, 23 x 17½ inches. Collection of Ron and Patricia Padgett. Joe Brainard, Untitled (1964–5). Assemblage, 48 x 23½ inches. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard, Untitled (A Sturdy Craft) (1975). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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Acknowledgements

Joe Brainard, Untitled (Boom) for Some Bombs (1963). Mixed media collage, gouache, and ink, 11 x 8½ inches. Collection of Ron and Patricia Padgett. Joe Brainard, Untitled (c. 1968), Box 9, Folder 13, Joe Brainard Archive, Mandeville Special Collections and Archives, University of California San Diego. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard. Excerpt from email conversation with David Kermani. Reprinted by permission of David Kermani. Joe Brainard, Untitled (Cigarette Butts) (1973). Collage, gouache, and ink on paper, 7⅜ x 5½ in. Joe Brainard, Untitled (Heinz) (1977). Mixed-media collage. Joe Brainard, Untitled (Matchbook Flowers and Butterfly) (1975). Collage on matchbook. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Joe Brainard, Untitled (1975). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. John Ashbery, Chutes and Ladders I (for Joe Brainard) (2008). Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. John Ashbery, Diffusion of Knowledge (c. 1972). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. John Ashbery, Popeye Steps Out—for Joe Brainard (2016). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. John Ashbery, The Checkered Game of Life—for Joe Brainard (2016). Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Yale Joel, Joe Brainard in his Loft (1975). Photograph. Reproduced by permission of John Brainard.

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Notes on Contributors

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, NY, in 1927. His books of poetry include Breezeway; Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, which was awarded the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards both nationally and internationally, in 2011 he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and in 2012 he received a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House. He lived in New York until his death, aged ninety, in 2017. Edmund Berrigan is the author of two books of poetry, Disarming Matter (Owl Press, 1999) and Glad Stone Children (Farfalla, 2008), and a memoir, Can It! (Letter Machine Editions, 2013). He edited Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Sub Press, 2009), and is co-editor with Anselm Berrigan and Alice Notley of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2005) and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California, 2010). John Brainard, younger brother of Joe Brainard, was born in Tulsa, OK in 1954, and moved to New York following graduation from the University of Tulsa, in 1976. He initially worked as an illustrator and designer for print media, then as a graphics art director for NBC News throughout the 1980s, before eventually transitioning to scenic art direction for television and film. He began a gradual return to fine art in the 1990s before relocating to Paris in 2005. Since then, he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Paris, New York, London, Italy, and the Netherlands. He continues to live and work in Paris.

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Notes on Contributors

Jess Cotton teaches in the English Department at UCL, where she completed her doctorate in 2018. Her thesis examines the role of the child in postwar American poetics and its relation to gender, affect, citizenship, and visual culture. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Ambit, Harper’s, Reading Elizabeth Bishop, Modernist Cultures, Oxford Poetry, Poetry London, and The White Review. Rona Cran is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Birmingham, where she is also the Director of the American and Canadian Studies Centre. She is the author of Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan (Ashgate, 2014), and has also published articles on William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Richard Yates. She is currently writing a cultural history of New York City from the counterculture to the AIDS crisis, called Multiple Voices, which explores the relationship between urban change and the poetry written during the period. She is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Andrew Epstein is Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture and Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Contemporary Literature, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Comparative Literature Studies, Wallace Stevens Journal, Journal of Modern Literature, and many others, and he blogs about the New York School of poetry at Locus Solus. Andy Fitch’s most recent books are Sixty Morning Talks, Sixty Morning Walks, Sixty Morning Wlaks and (with Amaranth Borsuk) As We Know. With Cristiana Baik, he recently assembled the Letter Machine Book of Interviews. He has dialogic books forthcoming from 1913 Press and Nightboat Books. He edits Essay Press and teaches in the University of Wyoming’s MFA program. Brian Glavey is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford, 2016). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literature, Criticism, Modernism/Modernity, PMLA, and The Year’s Work in Nerd Studies.

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Tim Keane is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York. He specializes in modernist and late modernist European and “New York School” autobiography, poetics, and visual art. His most recently published peer-reviewed article is on painter George Schneeman’s collaborations with the New York School poets. A guest writer at Hyperallergic Weekend since 2013, he has written on the art and writing of figures such as Francis Picabia, Frank O’Hara, Robert Motherwell, Elaine de Kooning, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ray Johnson, and Ed Sanders. Nathan Kernan is an art writer and poet who lives in New York. He edited the Diary of James Schuyler (Black Sparrow Press, 1997) and is currently working on a biography of Schuyler. He also serves as president of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, a nonprofit exhibition space in lower Manhattan. Kimberly Lamm is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She recently published her first book, Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing and is starting up another project on contemporary women poets Barbara Guest, Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, and Ann Lauterbach, tentatively titled “A Sense of Arrangement: Feminist Aesthetics in Contemporary Poetry.” Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, AZ in 1945 and grew up in Needles, CA in the Mojave Desert. She was educated at the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and the Writers Workshop, University of Iowa. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 1970s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 1990s. She is the recipient of various prizes and awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award (for Mysteries of Small Houses, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the Griffin Prize (for Disobedience), the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize (for Grave of Light, Selected Poems 1970–2005), and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a collagiste and cover artist. Above all she is a full-time poet, at this point an internationalist and haunter of Paris, remaining an American, an ex-New Yorker, and a desert denizen. Her most recent book is Certain Magical Acts, from Penguin.

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Notes on Contributors

Ron Padgett’s How Long was Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has collaborated with artists Jim Dine, George Schneeman, Joe Brainard, Bertrand Dorny, and Alex Katz. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson. Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University and Florence Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. She is the author of many books and articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Poetry and Poetics, including Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977), The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition 1994), Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), 21st Century Modernism (2002), and Unoriginal Genius: Writing by Other Means in the New Century (2011). Her most recent book (April 2016) is Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, which enlarges on the theme of her 2004 memoir The Vienna Paradox. Circling the Canon: The Collected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff, 1969–2016 will be published in two volumes by the University of New Mexico Press in 2019. Yasmine Shamma is Research Fellow in English at Durham University. She has published articles treating twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and interviews with New York School poets, and is the author of Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry. She is currently at work on a new project on refugee senses of home. Anna Smaill’s books are The Chimes (2015), which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and The Violinist in Spring (2005). Essays on British and New Zealand poetry have appeared in JNZL, A History of New Zealand Literature (2016), the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013), and elsewhere. An interview with Frank Bidart appeared in The Wolf magazine (2009). She is a lecturer in the English Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. Nick Sturm is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His poems, collaborations, and essays have

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appeared or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, PEN, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Foundation, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. His scholarly and archival work can be traced at his blog Crystal Set. His first book of poems, How We Light, is being reissued by Big Lucks in 2018. Anne Waldman is the author of over forty-five books of poetry, most recently Trickster Feminism, published by Penguin 2018, a book of protest and survival. She is the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), a 1,000-page feminist “cultural intervention” taking on war and patriarchy which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press, 2016), is a long prose poem written in response to William Blake’s Book of Thel. Other recent books include Gossamurmur (Penguin Poets, 2013) an allegory about the rescue of poetry’s oral archive, and Jaguar Harmonics (Post-Apollo, 2015) an account of an all-night shamanic ceremony. She has been deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly and Allen Ginsberg often referred to her as his “spiritual wife.” She received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. She is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial award and of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013–14), and is former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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Introduction: Joe Brainard’s Collage Aesthetic Yasmine Shamma

I remember my first day in New York City. Very bold and only slightly blind to the possible trouble of living in what my mother called the “big rotten apple” on minimum wage, I found myself sitting on Herbert Leibowitz’s sofa in his pink living room. I had written to him from DC, and managed to convince him that though there was no vacancy, I would be the perfect assistant his poetry journal Parnassus wasn’t looking for. The small yet established poetry review journal was, until this very year (2019), run out of an apartment attached to Herb’s own home on the Upper West Side. I sat in the living room preparing to convince Herb of my usability, while he prepared croissants and coffee. The first thing I noticed was the pink walls. The second was Joe Brainard’s collage. Both Brainard and Herb seemed to me dedicated to pursuing art forms that explored kinship, balance, enthusiasm, and love. And both taught me many things, but perhaps the most lasting was about the relationship of art to poetry. I asked Herb about the work that hung above his piano, and he told me of Brainard the artist. Years later, I found myself at a desk in Emory University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library (now known as the Rose Library), looking through a folder titled “Notes to Train Ride.” Anticipating total immersion in Ted Berrigan’s poetry, I was instead quickly entranced by the poetry of Brainard’s correspondences. He explained to a publisher that the cover of the book-length poem should be “true red”: “About the red, I think it ought to be simply a true red: Light enough to be bright, dark enough to be brilliant. Like (off to my right) the red stripes on a package of ‘Tareyton’ cigarettes.” In this tactile, sensitive, and practical description of a color, Brainard exudes both an understanding and an illumination of the general tendency of the New York School at large to balance whimsically serious concerns with ordinary, found

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Yasmine Shamma

Figure I.1 Joe Brainard, Parnassus Butterfly (n.d.). Collage. Reproduced by permission of Herbert Leibowitz, Editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Acquired 1976.

materials. The binary terms “light” and “dark” also carry alternative, less concrete meanings no doubt readily played in Brainard’s manipulation of them. Here Brainard, an artist, shows himself to be deeply engaged as simpatico and literary critic. By encouraging the simultaneous senses of lightness and darkness embodied in his often cited favorite color “red,” he even engages the publisher and editor to explore the depths of the found and snatched, making good of the economic scarcity that this group of artists inhabited, which plays in bright tension with the cultural depth of the canon they so willfully inherited. And though he was a poor, relatively “minor” artist while alive, Brainard’s own opus demonstrates that he was a poet and artist who understood this tension, as it is manifest in the rich complexity of his seemingly simple works.

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The surrounding materials at Emory suggested that Brainard’s art reaches beyond the edges of the small mimeographs, book covers, and canvases. The New York School art historian might be familiar with Brainard’s “Nancy” comic subversions, his “Pansy” series, his “Madonna” series, his “Postcard” series, his miniature art, or his collage works. Until now, much has been said about his art and very little about his writing. Indeed, the New York School reader tends to first encounter Joe Brainard’s work as literally marginal—as his illustrations line and bind New York School poetry publications, from The Anthology of New York Poets to C Magazine to Berrigan’s The Sonnets to Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire.1 Brainard having moved to New York City as part of a Tulsa cohort of friends that included Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan most centrally, it is no coincidence that his opus is so intimately intertwined with theirs. Throughout Ron Padgett’s informative and intimate biography, Joe,2 Padgett exposes the sincere vulnerability, kindness, and modesty of Brainard’s lifetime work, as person and artist. And throughout related interviews and articles, one hears the refrain: Brainard was, as John Ashbery tells us at the time of Brainard’s death, “nice”: “Joe was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist.”3 Anna Smaill’s chapter in this book, “Codes and Wounds,” complicates this niceness by asking how “Brainard’s character is relevant not solely in its own right, but for the mystifying way it manifests in his art.” Brian Glavey’s chapter usefully and provocatively argues that “there is nothing saccharine or straightforward about Brainard’s interest in niceness,” exploring its power while also implying it to be a strategy of inclusivity that veers towards the lyrical I’s erasure. Anne Waldman’s poetic contribution also points to the ways in which Brainard’s self is effaced in even his most intimate, “tender,” works, musing on the thought of Brainard, “funny to be another person, amused by persons, contradictory, how unconscious you become inside another person then unreal.” Indeed inclusivity may have been Brainard’s most compassionate concern. In conversation with James Schuyler, he explains feeling frustrated with another painter’s work: He really is a terribly good painter. There is only one thing wrong for me, and that is, as corny as it may sound, that he just doesn’t give enough. One feels very excluded. At least, I do. Although, I suppose, this might be good. Actually, I think he’s very good. His paintings are certainly flawless. (If that’s good.) Actually, the way I figure it is that

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Yasmine Shamma there are all different “kinds” of painters, and he’s just one of those kinds of painters you don’t get attached to. I mean, I certainly never think about him.4

As this introduction’s lead-in suggests, Brainard’s art is precisely the kind one gets “attached to.” And as the essays and reflections within this book agree, there “certainly” is a lot of “thinking about him.” The chapters within this collection range in tone and form accordingly. These poets, scholars, and critics reflect on Brainard’s art and poetry in often intersecting ways, showing new and old audiences alike that above all, Brainard’s inclusivity—often enmeshed in the art of collage—is, as Notley calls it, “beautiful.”

Collaging Brainard In collaging together reflections from his peers and research by his academic admirers, old and new, this book features essays, prose pieces, and dialogues which share a respect for the many forms of Brainard’s textual and visual productions. When the Library of America published Brainard’s Collected Writing, it seemed an invitation for popular and critical attention to shift towards sustained studies of Brainard’s poetry. Joe Brainard’s Art therefore responds to both the Collected Writing and Brainard’s visual contributions to twentieth-century art, often at the same time. Themes surface throughout these chapters. One such theme is that of collage, as contributors repeatedly suggest that Brainard’s art explores the possibilities of collaboration and collage, and ultimately the possibility of collaboration to function as collage. John Ashbery’s reprinted reflection makes this point by way of prelude, as he tells the story of his own interest in collage as one which is also an ongoing conversation with Brainard himself. Rona Cran’s chapter explores Brainard’s influence on Ashbery and vice versa alongside errors, “presence, and partnership,” all as evidenced within collage. Ashbery explains that collage is an attractive mode because “we’re all suckers for these appurtenances of daily life.” Alice Notley’s chapter explains that she, too, made her collages in response to his. She usefully informs us that Brainard always meant for his collages to “fall apart,” as their fragility is part of the already-made aspect of them. She writes, “Collages are made of the most worn, fragile, degradable materials—they will fall apart—is it that the most beautiful things are like that.” In exploring collage as a poetic mode, Marjorie Perloff begins her “Collage and Poetry”5 with a definition: “The word collage

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comes from the French verb coller and refers literally to ‘pasting, sticking, or gluing, as in the application of wallpaper. In French, collage is also idiomatic for an ‘illicit’ sexual union, two unrelated ‘items,’ being pasted or stuck together.” Perloff’s analysis of collage and its relationship to poetry is distinct in its insistence on the “illicit” nuances of collage. She argues that “collage always involves the transfer of materials from one context to another.” Alternative definitions of collage continue into recent publications, with Jed Perl recently writing of “collage or assembly” as “sprawling” throughout his New Art City:6 To define the limits of collage was almost to violate it. Collage was high art. It was also popular art. It could be two-dimensional. It could also be three-dimensional, as Picasso had first demonstrated. . . . Collage, indeed, was too restrictive a term to define such a sprawling subject. A more expansive term might be that which the Museum of Modern Art took as the title for its 1961 survey of these developments, “The Art of Assemblage.”7

Brainard attended this “Art of Assemblage” show in his first year in New York City. This was a year in which he’d left art school and taken up his own self-created arts residency in the city. Perhaps as a result of attending this show, Brainard was inclined to refer to his works more frequently as “assemblages” than as collages.8 While “assemblage” tends to involve actual three-dimensional objects,9 collages draw more attention to the two-dimensional visual construction of objects—offering flatter surfaces to an audience—much like poems. According to Perl, assemblage is the larger, more encompassing of the terms. As Stephen Fredman explains: Postwar assemblage often moves beyond purely formal concerns to stage interactions among the clusters of associations accruing to the mundane objects it employs. These interactions partake of the whole range of rhetorical devices developed by poetry, such as metaphor, analogy, and irony. Complementing this associational and rhetorical density, the temporal traces borne by objects within an assemblage also take it beyond formalism: “When paper is soiled or lacerated, when cloth is worn, stained, or torn, when wood is split, weathered, or patterned with peeling coats of paint, when metal is bent or rusted, they gain connotations which unmarked materials lack” (Seitz 84). In this sense, the materials of assemblage become like words, whose temporality, or “materiality,” derives from their usage over centuries, during which they acquire layers of connotations on their own and in relation to other words. Overall, assemblage involves a poetics

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Yasmine Shamma by virtue of its objects which bear traces of time and associations with prior functions, and by virtue of rhetorical interchange it sets up between objects.10

Fredman usefully distinguishes that assemblage depends on the utilization and combination of tangible, three-dimensional objects onto a canvas, plane, or space (such as would allow for the apprehension of “bending,” “rusting,” “tearing,” etc). In the case of Brainard’s works, he fabricates this utilization by combining multiple created and selfauthored images onto a single page (take, for example, the Pansies series). In this way, the majority of Brainard’s assemblages may be understood as collages. Yet these collages still explore the “poetics” that Fredman attributes to assemblages, as Perloff points out that collage itself always must involve a gluing together of things from different realms, enforcing a conversation between unlike things, while also having a conversation with others—without referencing normative logic, or for that matter, a clear, heroic “I.” Indeed throughout her rendering of “collage” as a term and practice, Perloff offers usefully mutating definitions as she encourages their applicability to the medium of poetry. I expound and dwell on Perloff’s nuanced understanding of decentralized power as central to the collage aesthetic because it informs Joe Brainard’s Art. This collection of essays and pieces steadily explores Brainard’s art as anti-heroic, humble, and lyric. In Brainard’s art, the readerly audience is repeatedly offered sets of “relations” “among the presented elements.” It is perhaps not surprising that many of the chapters within this collection consider Brainard’s tendency towards collage, as collage as a term and practice lends itself to an understanding of Brainard’s art and poetry, and to his influence on the second-generation poets he worked, lived, loved, moved, and studied alongside. Reflecting on Brainard’s art and poetry in a conversation with chapters within this book—in Brainard’s own favored conversational mode—Andrew Epstein and Andy Fitch’s “I Wonder” within this collection wonders and wanders this very point, asking if Brainard’s tendency towards a collage aesthetic is, while indulgent in a “haptic pleasure,” also gesturing towards an awareness of “exactly how dark things really are.” Nathan Kernan’s useful and informed consideration of Brainard as twentieth-century artist makes a longer point of considering Brainard’s oscillations, exploring the ways in which he “made art that traverses media, from assemblage to collage, to drawing, to painting, back to collage, back to drawing—with imagery that to some extent changed accordingly,” as a way of not “getting stuck.” While Kernan explores Brainard’s movement through modes, the chapters within this collection tend to repeatedly insinuate that if

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there was a favored one, it was that of collage. To continue to quote Perloff, “It is as if the individual units are ‘always already’ collaged to begin with.” Matches, 1975, for example, features a mess of lit and unlit matches coming out of a matchbox, alongside a receipt. The fact that matches are implicitly part of another process—one of energy, change, consumption, consumerism (as implied in the addendum of the receipt), and often destruction, is, according to Perloff’s definition, “always already” within the object itself. Brainard’s work pays tribute to the “always already” of this everyday object without emphasizing any one process in favor of another. The “Matches” series continues with matches taking on new, organic, forms, returning to tree-like materials in flowers, as in Figure I.2.

Figure I.2 Joe Brainard, Untitled (Matchbook Flowers and Butterfly) (1975). Collage on matchbook. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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Brainard’s more popular subversions of Ernie Bushmiller’s own popular Nancy comic strip (of the 1930s), oscillates between mixing mediums and explicitly partaking in collage’s techniques. Though he often utilizes the restricted medium of oil paint to re-render Nancy, his manipulated comics gesture towards a cut-and-paste methodology in their act of manipulating. If Nancy Opened Her Mouth So Wide She Fell In is produced exclusively of oil paint on canvas, but the implication of the piece— which features a miniature Nancy inside the inflated mouth of an angry Nancy—is of a collaged comic.11 Essays by Brainard’s peers (and this tends to be the trend in Brainard studies to date) constitute an entire book devoted to examining the nuances of Brainard’s Nancy, titled The Nancy Book.12 In a review of the book, Jordan Davis reminds us that collage was, in Brainard’s case, often a financially motivated employed medium: 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. . . . 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.13

Again, in conversation regarding the chosen forms of New York School artists, we confront the issue of necessity. Poverty becomes a shaping force on this movement so reminiscent of Arte Povera, and Padgett’s aforementioned biography, along with his chapter within this book, make a point of not romanticizing this poverty which Brainard so clearly inhabited. Yet the use of found materials— a variation on a Duchampian theme—permits Brainard’s work to be engaged with domestic, socio-economic, and contemporary artistic realms simultaneously, perhaps at the cost of his own health at times. Brainard’s Nancy comics form what may be his best-known series, yet are rarely thought of as collages rather than subversions. While many of the Nancy comics are actual collages, many others, including the aforementioned If Nancy Opened her Mouth So Wide She Fell In, are not. Yet in his manipulation of “Nancy,” Brainard offers two reproductions of the popular figure, evoking a sense of multiplication through layering images. This is a tactic he also explores throughout his Pansies series. Brainard seems to have specialized in the utilization of physical found material, as he recycles remembered, domestic, and popular materials into many of his other works.

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This book’s own cover comes features one such utilization. In Untitled 2 (Tattoo) (1972), a penciled ink on paper features a drawing of a male torso covered in typical tattooed symbols: from hearts to butterflies to dice to flowers to stars to names. The torso appears rendered in delicate detail, and the symbols which cover it contrast in being starkly cartoonesque. The two styles are so disjunctive that upon first glance one could assume that store-bought tattoos had been glued to an old painting of a torso. In terms of collage, the medium in which, according to Perloff, things are “pasted” or “stuck” together, these symbols serve as an almost cohesive and totally constructed kitsch decal layered atop a neo-classical body.14 In this way, the total image is made of multiple ones, “stuck” together and pasted atop a nostalgic rendering of a human body. The symbols of the decal work in conversation with each other (many first names of Brainard’s peers are doodled over hearts), but the conversation they are having with the body is, though initially visually cacophonous, theoretically single and unified. Throughout Brainard’s works, sets of images come together from different semantic fields to encourage an assembly in its audience’s mind—much in the way of Imagism. Though the title, Untitled (Tattoo 2), offers the directive “tattoo” in parentheses, the tattoos themselves appear less “marked in the skin” (the etymological root of “tattoo”), and more collaged; stuck-on. Brainard’s tendency to repeatedly fuse together ordinary objects from different realms throughout his career as an artist in New York City intimates that he might be considered as having always been a collage artist, experimenting with varying nuances of the medium throughout his life and work. Whether explicitly working within the medium of collage, or creating pieces that eventually became part of a series, Brainard’s work repeatedly emphasizes what Perloff calls, “coordination rather than subordination, likeness and difference rather than logic or sequence or even qualification.” Jess Cotton’s chapter explores these juxtapositions as uniquely queer “still-life techniques” and considers the ways these techniques complicate the relation between pictorial image and poetic abstraction, creating new possibilities for both the image and poetics wherein identifications emerge not in resemblance but in a crossing of genres. Indeed the mode infiltrates his productions, often embodying this crossing of genres. The utilization of domestic, simple, “functional” images, the pasting together of objects from opposing realms in opposing styles, the subversive rendering of cut and pasted children’s

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comics, and the offering of illustrations alongside poetry—all of these are simultaneously forms of collage and collaboration—in line with the neo-Dadaist movement from which Brainard created,15 and the celebration of assemblage that commenced in tangent with his New York City residency. Quoting O’Hara, Perl writes of the “quick switches” within his poetry, calling them “the stuff of collage.” Perl ties together the influence of the city and the inherent democracy within the medium of collage, explaining: “The fascination of collage, at least for artists, was twofold. Collage was almost the inevitable expression of democratic experience, of the constantly decomposing and recomposing experience of the city. . . . Collage was, in a far more visceral way than painting, a mirror of the city.” (284) The emphasis on the “visceral,” “democratic,” “decomposing,” “recomposing,” and “mirror”-like elements of collage are all repeatedly echoed in Brainard’s letters to Padgett. A letter dated June 15, 1963, underlines Brainard’s interest in the freedom from the binary which the disjunctive medium of collage permits: I’m so terribly happy and all over the work I did: 10 large (15 x 20) painting collages. You might laugh if I say it, but for once you’ll be wrong in doing so, they are without a doubt the greatest things ever seen. And considerably different from my other new work you saw. They totally destroy all normal sense of perspective, logic, art, realism, etc. by way of contrast. (A giant hand emerging illogically into a pool of color) (yellow nude men swimming in purple) (a little girl in pink swatting [sic] on top of a giant ink splash).16

Hyperbolic enthusiasm for the new art aside, in his praise of the medium of collage, Brainard here even offers the beginning of a collage poetics (or, to borrow Perl’s term, a “quick switching”), describing imagery separated or cut and pasted together through disjunctive parenthetical spaces. In her complications of Brainard’s collages, contributor Kimberly Lamm explores the ways in which this cut and pasting mode is uniquely queer, especially when explored poetically. Lamm explains: “I Remember establishes how Brainard uses repetition, seriality, juxtaposition, pace, and scale to flatten the hierarchies of experience to make the queer normal and the normal queer.” Waldman’s piece and Glavey’s chapter also suggest that this utilization of the ordinary is inherently queer in aesthetic, with Glavey arguing that “What his work makes visible is that scenes of ordinariness can become the objects of intense attachments—and even of powerfully queer identifications and desires.”

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In discussing Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Perloff explains that collage carries with it socio-political implications: “Collage, in this scheme of things, is a ‘degraded’ or ‘alienated’ version of earlier (and presumably superior) genres, an index to the aporias of capitalism.” Nick Sturm’s chapter explores the collage-like effects of these economics more fully, considering the “performative contingency” of “Brainard’s arrangements of dailiness” as one which “mixes visual elements and text to induce a kind of narrative collage of the anxieties and joys of being an artist”—“anxieties and joys” which, Sturm argues in his work on Bolinas Journal, are enmeshed in the political and economic complications of work-as-labor. Timothy Keane, too, considers Bolinas Journal, but in his rendering, the work utilizes the juxtapositional qualities of collage by “refusing the restorative ends of conversational memoir,” and in so doing, Keane explains, it “finds selfhood” in “ephemeral, discarded, and diminutive objects.” Keane’s chapter on Brainard’s tendencies towards memoir argues that such juxtaposition generates “uncertainties” that “allow the memoir to reflexively build itself by manipulating composite materials and through formal gamesmanship.”

Influence Are Brainard’s manipulations collage or collection? His obsessive affinity for collecting and layering the ordinary finds its visual manifestation in the multiple collages and series for which he has become known (the aforementioned Nancy series, Pansies series, Madonna series and Postcard series, for example)—all of which are essentially series of series. To add to and expand the list, the prosaic posy on display in works such as I Remember also relentlessly layers the ordinary. As Glavey explains, “It is difficult to celebrate the ordinary without rendering it either extraordinary on the one hand or uninteresting on the other, but this is precisely Brainard’s project.” Brainard’s best known poem embodies this project. I Remember not only engages in layering, but in repetition, too. As the things remembered accumulate, they take on, as Padgett remarks, a sense of cumulative weight. Reflecting on a review of his Japanese City, Brainard tells Padgett: “It doesn’t mean much, but there are four words I like: energies, repeated, multiplied, and radiance.”17 “Energies, repeated, multiplied, and radiance”—these four favored words play into Brainard’s poetry. Consider I Remember and other diary-like pieces (Self-Portrait: 1971, Some Drawings of Some Notes

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to Myself, “Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises)”, and the mixed art/prose diary piece Bolinas Journal (CW 359–3; 255–62; 461–3; 285–333)). Brainard’s particular, aggregating, light, and sincere mode of assembly trickles into the verbal and formal elements of these written pieces with “energy,” “repetition,” “multiplication,” and eventual “radiance” informing his general bodies of art and writing, both of which collect subjective experience through material souvenirs— whether represented in the (red) cherry, butterfly, and jacks that line the cover of the Anthology of the New York Poets,18 or the memory of drinking water after ice cream. In this way, even his illustrations and own writings are collaborative—as they incorporate the materials of the contemporary within miniature and subjective representations of a time’s felt space. A New York Times review by John Russell goes so far as to categorize Brainard’s penchant for collective collages as “diarist.” Of Brainard’s most “wildly popular show,”19 which included 1,500 collages and visual works, Russell writes: Brainard is a born diarist. No moment of the day is dead to him. With his nimble fingers and even nimbler wit, he has cobbled up an untold number (3,000 some say) of tiny works of art for his new show. They include . . . still life, manipulations of familiar objects (books of matches, luggage labels, pieces of string), one-line jokes written out in a misleading childish hand, and annotated records of specific moments—pathetic, hilarious, ironical—in his own life. Most of the works are no bigger than a postcard . . . we sense throughout the show an ongoing energy which insists that images are there to tease, provoke and give pleasure. In Mr. Brainard’s hands they do all three of these things. This is the wittiest show of the winter. (Qtd. in Joe 222)

This commentary accounts for Brainard’s miniature work, a phase which took over his life in material and immaterial ways (it was accompanied by daily consumption of amphetamines, and his loft at Greene Street came to be overtaken by “islands” of material).20 Implicitly, even Brainard’s miniature work is obsessively one of collection. In I Remember, one person’s “remembered” world is miniaturized to the size of a book, but offered the opportunity to “compound” through interlaced syntactical and imagistic tactics. The eventual effect is one of proliferation: soliciting an understanding of “what is large in what is small.” This proliferation is actually explicitly enacted in Brainard’s additions to I Remember: He added

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I Remember More, More I Remember More, and I Remember Christmas to the eventual complete work (published as a compilation by Full Court Press in 1975). Asked about the relationship of his writing to writing, Brainard humbly responds to praise of I Remember: AW: Would you talk about your relationship to writers—it seems closer than your relationship to other artists—and also your own writing? JB: I think I’m closer to writers in terms of understanding, in terms of attitude. Painters are kind of straight ahead. They see in one direction—well that’s not always true, of course. And I think I write because I know a lot of writers. AW: But you’re the one who’s influenced other writers. You certainly influenced my early little prose works—the ministories in No Hassles. JB: That’s hard for me to believe. It seems like that form already existed. AW: Well it’s more the attitude with the material. You’re very original. I Remember, for example. JB: Well I Remember is not an original idea. What’s original perhaps is that I actually did it and hopefully I did it well and that counts for a lot. AW: Also what you remember is, admittedly, special, but also speaks to and about everyone at a particular time. JB: But there was no idea to do it. I just started one day while lying out in the sun in Vermont. It was another attempt to let my head be free and see where it would take me and then I just did it for one day and I showed it to people and they liked it so then I just kept going. But I hadn’t planned to write a whole book.21

Here Waldman offers Brainard the praise of being influential and “original.” Perhaps in line with his characteristic “niceness,” Brainard modestly22 dismisses the former while wholly rejecting the latter. But in the process, Waldman offers an analysis of the seemingly subjective I Remember (in title and content): it “speaks to and about everyone at a particular time.” While I Remember lends itself quite easily to a consideration of the role of time in writing (i.e. memory), it also, as Waldman hints here, speaks to the particularities of place, as the things, people and events remembered all are located within I Remember—rooted in specific periods in Brainard’s otherwise transient life. She also suggests that Brainard’s work speaks to “everyone” in a “particular”—that is, it contains a largeness in its smallness, or a “brilliance” in its “lightness.” This is especially true

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when the poetry is less seemingly connected. For example, towards its end, the poem reads: I remember red hands from falling down on gravel driveways. I remember searching for something you know is there, but isn’t. I remember infuriating finger cuts from pieces of paper. I remember (ouch!) bare feet on hot summer sidewalks. I remember once on T.V. news an egg being fried on the sidewalk as an example of just how hot the heat wave we were having really was. I remember my mother talking about women who shouldn’t wear slacks. I remember taking baths with my brother Jim when we were very young, back to back. I remember inching myself down to water that was too hot. I remember the “tornado” way the last of the water has of swirling down the drain so noisily.23

There is a strong urge to quote this poem, cut up, in sentences, as each “remembered” thing contains a whole sense of softness about the past. But that urge must be restrained, as the apprehension of the poem’s total layering effect relies on its being read as a whole, or at least in sections, as above. Just as Berrigan’s tendency to recycle and reposition lines throughout his The Sonnets offers a sense of reification, Brainard’s movement between seemingly disconnected memories is one which heavily manipulates imagistic and often linguistic echo. This occurs in the aforementioned “icebox” example quite obviously. In this later section of I Remember, we are offered an evolving and intertwined memory of “hands” and “heat”: from remembered “red hands” to “finger cuts” to “(ouch!) bare feet on hot summer sidewalks.” The “(ouch!)” teases its following reader into thinking it will continue to be about hands, but instead moves to feet and subsequent heat. As we enter the “heat” portion of the section, we are offered a fried egg, “slack,” “backs” and “tornadoes” as distracting and unrelated images—here all tied together in their relationship to the hot elements they are all positioned within. Through this unique verbal mode of cutting and pasting, Brainard offers his own memory as a collaging space through which the relationship between ordinary, and often “small” things and actions can be largely apprehended. In this way, Brainard’s best-known text invites more attention to the verb of its title than its subject. The act of “remembering” is repeatedly offered as one which might be plural (“I remember, when relatives come visit, a cot”). Brainard’s interview commentary with

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Waldman postdates an earlier comment he made to her in a letter, while also echoing her own notes on the book-length poem in her chapter. Throughout all of these comments, there is the suggestion that Brainard always intended the work to be inclusive, aiming to contain multitudes within its seemingly subjective lines: 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 that it is because of me that 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. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.24

Bordering for a rare moment on unbridled ambition, Brainard blends the reference to being like “God writing the Bible” with his aforementioned modesty (“it won’t last”). The work did end up becoming one which speaks to and can be “about” “everybody.” Testimony to this sits in the publication of many imitations and tributes to I Remember: Kenneth Koch draws upon Brainard’s method and praises it in his Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?;25 Koch, Jimmy Schuyler, Berrigan, and Padgett all reference I Remember in many of their subsequent works;26 and Waldman writes an entire poem in the “I Remember” mode (“Arrested”).27 And as the record of his influence indicates, Brainard’s collecting, collaging, collaborating, and obsessing proclivities ultimately multiply in his influence on the writing of New York School poets. Thus, while Brainard’s work very obviously occupies the literal margins of New York School Poetry, it also subtly and figuratively influences its aesthetic margins—repeatedly encouraging an expansion through contraction, or gluing. Brainard’s “assemblages” offer a structuring trope through which a fuller understanding of the particularly urban, recycled, poor, messy, and often collaborative constitutions of New York School productions may be achieved. From his collaborations on Train Ride and other works, to his early and later collages, to his poetry, Brainard recycles the material of his inhabited spaces to participate in an overarching aesthetics of collage. Padgett’s chapter within this book focuses on the relatively under-considered years of 1961–3, reminding the reader that often, these aesthetic decisions were financially informed, with Brainard’s own poverty yielding certain career and life turns, perhaps the most impressive of all being his utilization of found materials. And yet, one never feels poor as audience to Brainard’s art. Its depths, sometimes found, “glued-together,” snatched, erased, painted, patched, and deceptively diminutive, linger perhaps

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because they disguise themselves as minor, infiltrating the seemingly small porosity of us all. I remember asking John Ashbery about Joe Brainard. Out of the doorway in the corner of the room, David Kermani smiled: “Everything he touched just sparkled.” So to return to the beginning before departing into what will be an unknown future of Brainard criticism, to know Joe Brainard’s art, is to become viscerally attached. The sparkle lingers, perhaps precisely because it masquerades itself as small, “nice,” “tender” to borrow Waldman’s phrase, “saintly,” to borrow Notley’s. Giving enough, including everyone often at the expense of his own self, his paintings and prose are the types of pieces one “gets attached to.” This collection of chapters showcases the ways in which a sampling of invested scholars and poets “think about him,” while also provoking new readers and audiences to “get attached” to the mesmerizing and enduring sparkle of Brainard’s art.

Notes 1. This is a limited list. Brainard illustrated multiple works, many of which will be referred to throughout this chapter. Ron Padgett, Great Balls of Fire (New York City: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). 2. Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (New York: Coffee House Press, 2004). 3. John Ashbery, “Introduction to Joe Brainard: Retrospective (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1997); rpt. in Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 257. 4. James Schuyler, Selected Art Writings (Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), p. 79. 5. Marjorie Perloff, “Collage and Poetry,” for Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1, 384–7; Stein, vol. 4, 306–10, (accessed October 25, 2018). 6. Jed Perl’s comprehensive New Art City: Manhattan at Midcentury (New York: Random House, 2005) makes no mention of Brainard, but frequent mention of O’Hara. It also makes the case for the term “collage” to be interchangeable with “ready-made” (345). 7. Ibid. pp. 285–6. 8. Padgett explains that in a July 9, 1963 letter from Brainard, Brainard used the word “assemblage”: “The word assemblage had come into common use after an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called ‘The Art of Assemblage’ that Joe, Pat, and I had seen together in 1961” (Padgett, Joe, 55).

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9. “The concept of assemblage was given wide public currency by the exhibition The Art of Assemblage at MOMA, New York, in 1961. This included works by nearly 140 international artists, including Braque, Joseph Cornell, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters. Several of the works shown were in fact collages, but the breadth of styles and artists included reflects the wide application of the term and the sometimes fine distinction between assemblage and collage.” (Philip Cooper, “Assemblage,” “From Grove Art Online,” Oxford Art Online (Oxford University Press, 2009) (accessed June 1, 2015)). 10. Stephen Fredman, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 15. 11. Brainard’s affinity for collaboration was perhaps inspired by this initial project. He later created multiple comic strip series with poets. Cran’s recent makes this point: “The idiosyncratic Brainard, ‘painter among poets,’ distanced himself from the seriousness and machismo of the New York art scene, and popularized the comic-strip cartoon as a collaborative medium” (214). 12. The 2008 published Nancy Book pays extensive tribute to the Nancy Series, which consists of manipulations of Ernie Bushmiller’s 1930’s “Nancy” comic strip (though we might be reminded that even Bushmiller acquired the original “Nancy” image from someone else—Larry Whittington, who featured her in Fritzi Ritz). (Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio, 2008)). 13. Jordan Davis, “He Fancied Nancy,” Poetry Foundation, (accessed June 1, 2015). 14. This body is noticeably less muscular than the one rendered in the 1970 Untitled (Tattoo). Perhaps as a second draft, Untitled 2 (Tattoo), crops out the “illicit” sexual innuendo of pubic hair and so limits its allusiveness (perhaps unintended) to the Belvedere Torso, and includes a less symmetrical and more haphazard set of symbols. 15. Barbara Rose, one of the first to employ the phrase “neo-Dada” explains its characteristics in her “A B C Art,” (Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 274–300): “One might as easily construe the new, reserved, impersonality and self-effacing anonymity as a reaction against the self-indulgence of an unbridled subjectivity, as much as one might see it in terms of a formal reaction to the excesses of painterliness” (274). 16. Padgett, Joe, p. 54. 17. Ibid. p. 118. 18. Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (eds.), Anthology of New York Poets (New York: Random House, 1970). 19. Padget, Joe, p. 222.

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20. A letter quoted in Joe from Kenward Elmslie to Padgett notes: “Joe has turned into a total maniac, there are pathways in his loft, surrounded by material sorted out according to some conceptual scheme heavily influenced by Rube Goldberg—he’s doing ‘theatres’ and tiny cut-out foods that fit into aspirin tins” (219). 21. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 512. 22. He even dismisses Waldman’s claim that he is “modest”: “I think I am a little modest. . . . But it’s easy enough to be modest, because you never know what people think or you never know where you are—I mean, it’s hard for me to assume that if I go to an opening anyone’s going to know who I am. I still can’t do that. It’s always a surprise when someone says ‘I love your work,’ just out of the blue. I think I’m aware there are people who do, but I can never quite accept it as a fact, so it’s still like starting all over every time.” Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 505. 23. Ibid. pp. 125–6. 24. Padgett, Joe, p. 146. 25. Kenneth Koch, Rose Where Did You Get that Red? (New York: Random House, 1973). 26. Whether by title or by imitation, as in Koch’s first line of “The Circus”: “I remember when I wrote The Circus” (The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006), p. 97). 27. Anne Waldman, “Arrested,” In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2003, vol. 1 (New York: Coffee House Press, 2008), p. 378.

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Chapter 1

Joe, A Funny Nickname Alice Notley

I think of Joe’s work as being beautiful, first ; it seems to me now my first impression, or feeling of it, was of my being allowed, finally, to experience what I thought of as beautiful, as beautiful. Nothing was standing between me and it, as in most art there’s an abstract conversation going on between the artist and the subject: like, can this be beautiful?, or, this is my taste or obsession presented to you according to where I come in the history of art, what my talent is for, what I think about (or have been taught.) With Joe, it was very visceral: This is so beautiful, you’ve always known it was beautiful, I’m letting you be there. It was about pleasure. So then if it was really funny (like the Nancys), perhaps more than beautiful, that was the same thing. Joe once gave me and Ted two original Ernie Bushmiller Nancy frames, and Ted then tended to think of them as being by Joe. I guess they were, in a sense. The one that became mine, in which Nancy is walking below the speech balloon containing the words “They have such funny nicknames for the stars!” was “chosen” by Joe to stand alone. Ted’s was of Aunt Fritzi and Sluggo staring wordlessly at a rhinoceros in a zoo. I’m saying Joe had an incredible eye, and an amazing line, perhaps as good as Bushmiller’s. And there was his lettering : Ted saying that Andy Warhol said, “Joe’s lettering is getting really good!” But it was his sensitivity to lavish and gaudy, tacky and colorful things that really got to me, the beauty of the assemblages. It’s possible that all of us who made collages as non-professionals were responding to the rush of what he let us show we liked. I think I made my first collages responding to his—it’s hard to remember. I had no interest in collaboration, except for with myself and what I might be capable of; I liked the fact that I could sit and work on something like a collage without worrying about whether it was good or not, because Joe could take care of the being good part in his work. He is really

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really good. And the assemblages are exactly for beauty, as the portrait drawings are for exploiting physical skill that makes you, the viewer, gasp. But they’re like those How-To-Draw books, too; I had one once, but had no patience for it—I learned a thing or two about drawing noses. My point is that he got his ideas and obsessions from what he genuinely liked; and if you’re looking at it—a Brainard— and like the subject too, you’re just skewered. I’m emphasizing the visual art. I don’t feel quite as connected to his writing, though I know I can “catch” his style at the slightest exposure. I do remember, when I was first getting together with Ted in 1969, that Ted got a letter from Joe, whom I hadn’t met, containing some pills, some money, and the opening pages in manuscript of I Remember. I read it with lights going on over my head, and that was about his choices of the remembered—the selection as for a collage. This, this, this—and I could remember most of what he was remembering, too. It was a generational experience of objects, nuances, and noticing. But also it was this thingness in daylight that was getting to me, though Joe’s work can have dark light in it (I’m looking at a rather abstract painting on my wall that was obviously made at night, containing Ted’s words “on the sock-marble”). Joe said, in effect, that he learned how to choose carefully from Joseph Cornell’s work. But choosing was his style, and in conversation you watched him choose what to say to you. I can’t choose anything myself but would aspire at this late age to have more care. There are a lot of possible anecdotes, there’s sadness, and being glad we came to have contact in a one-to-one way—had our own friendship. I visited him two weeks before he died and he gave me a tiny drawing of a daffodil, so tiny that I have lost it, and therefore have to mention it to make sure it existed. It was about an inch wide, on a torn scrap, in possibly shaky pencil. I still have a Maori wedding necklace he gave me in 1970, leather, beads, and cowrie shells, brown, green, orange, and white. He put it around my neck after making an unsuccessful (it must have been my fault) drawing of me I never saw again. Joe always made art, even when he wasn’t officially doing so, even when he gave it up. Whatever he did and said was like art, at least when I saw him. I know I have to mention the fact that he intended for his collages to fall apart. I still don’t know what to do about this, and as for my own I definitely don’t want them to fall apart but know they will. Collages are made of the most worn, fragile, degradable materials— they will fall apart—is it that the most beautiful things are like that? And you’re supposed to accept it? I never saw Joe’s Japanese City,

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an immense assemblage that had already fallen apart when I met him. I used to stare at Prell at Kenward Elmslie’s parties and wonder about Japanese City. Joe seemed to be embracing that what he made couldn’t be owned forever, even culturally, though he accepted money and praise (and didn’t really get all that much of either). Ted and I had a small assemblage of Joe’s that fell apart; and Ted assigned me the task of making it into another one. Not fixing it, but making something else out of it. I don’t think I managed to, but it’s possible, also, that it’s the basis of something by me that one of my friends now has, that I don’t recognize as starting from Joe. I should say something here about Joe’s paintings but nothing crucial is coming to mind. I keep seeing a painting of Kenward’s dog Whippoorwill in my head. That is, Joe could paint a dog alone and get away with it; but in everyone’s family someone painted favorite dogs. As if he could do that too, paint that thing that ordinary people like, because they love their dogs. I’m sitting next to a small Our Lady of Guadelupe purchased, I think, by Joe in Mexico and given to Ted. I realize I think of it now as being by Joe. But there are at least four works really made by him in my immediate proximity—I guess we will never break up. Whenever we saw each other, he would put the label of my top or blouse, which was always sticking out, back under the garment. His hand would suddenly be on the back of my neck, sliding the label of my top down again to be hidden. Then he would smile.

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Chapter 2

Joe Brainard: Tenderness and Gristle Anne Waldman

Joe Brainard had a delicate nuanced loving amused frustrated way with paint he was frustrated but he had a way he would start up and start up he had his hero de Kooning not in mind but above his head he would start and not fail but he was thinking big in small frame and all the de Koonings could wreath inside Joe’s wide spirit. And he found big way in drawings and collage and commentary, memoir is too weak pedestrian word for the insouciant brilliant shimmering honest line breath in memory, “takes” of memory he’s amused by and remembered in all their gristle. How entertaining that is. You were in referent to what? Poetry, love, hybrid with another. In “I Love You de Kooning” he draws a hint of woman a referent that is funny that is flattering, and the words are Bill Berkson’s fabled friend. Look, that is like furniture and woman that is a mountain, an alembic of energy. Bold black line = a woman’s breasts. A mark on the void, a joke: “You bet!” In “de Kooning Nancy” Nancy comes to birth in cloud of chaos. He drew me in a formal drawing portrait young worried I look like a teen male pop star I won’t name. Static of face, frozen for time. But the other drawings; best sense of what my body might be looking like to him. Light and shadow. And he tried me in paint. I remember how he wrecked it, took out the face, there was some red paint I remember frustration. I would suggest, beg, maybe try again? Painting was the challenge of the big gesture of saying I am here. I know what I am doing, masterfully. Paint was a trickster always slipping off, a thief, and I was saying to both of us tender and vulnerable, I’ll be a better poet, but assuredly you, Joe, can paint. You are painting. And then paint was getting in the way. Talk about Jasper, about Andy, about Alex Katz, about May Ray about Jane Freilicher. What is the equivalent in poetry? If you loved them you became intimidated I said. I said you are the eye which could see the little things so much better, not always big sweep. You

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are a genius. They seemed to vibrate even more. About Joan Mitchell. I remember thinking how to be a woman in big paint would need even more nerve; we talked about nerve. Her tough talk smart mouth. Big her reach. Joe a saint of modesty. Self-portraits (his) (of himself) sweet beauties. Know thyself well before you start singing. “I remember in Dayton, Ohio, the art fair in the park where they made me take down all my naked self-portraits.” And in another guise nude, head hidden odalisque, and remember trust felt in being seen, being caught glance of being loved by Joe Brainard. I felt like I was making it along side him. Was I really sleeping? He caught me many times in life, hidden, was hiding my love in him, many ways you catch a person’s heart. Joe Brainard had grace and innocence with words, you could never stop the way he gets it right the flavor of the time, the ethos—caught mind-stream of time—sweep and minutia of time, mood, and let us be honest, this is Joe Brainard no one else who remembers this way, speaking. Joe would work a tan, lathered with oil in the summer grass, he would work at it and then it wouldn’t matter so much staying inside reading, or going pale with books, and book afire in his steady hand could be an attention span then reading and before lying in the grass and on a chaise longue that too, another side of reading and writing outside, a piece of a turf integrated with memory and dailyness, outside and inside-the-house ritual. And screen door bangs for a cigarette a drink of soda with ice you hear it in the glass. Summer is ice in a glass. Correspondence, collaboration. The Vermont Notebook with John Ashbery. We are in a house, it is the largess of lover and friend. Then you go in get pale in the winter, in a city. Joe Brainard said he would forget what he read but it was doing of it, ritual salvation, practice to be somewhere else being that description and with all the anatomy of persons and their psychology. An entertainment, heartbreak, in the moment, in the hours. I understood later how you didn’t remember what you write in the un-attachment of Joe. But you were on to something as you wrote me re: I Remember, you said you had assurance and you were having a vision in that and like unconditional thinking it is coming along, pouring out from you. When you find it, how generous to freely associate. Funny to be another person, amused by persons, contradictory, how unconscious you become inside another person then unreal. And the peculiar mores and details of all you notice and hiding queer and then discovery, curiosity and it is sex you are thinking of. “They are our puppets in art and we are safe.” They are “so real” and you can be sad with them. The body as desire. You spend more days lasting in books, a kind of cover for melancholia

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Anne Waldman

or purpose, because in books you have purpose, you are going to be the mechanism that meets half way. A spring and a lock. Reading books by English lady authors, way to follow the day is through an English lady author and her weathers. And wit and self-deprecating melancholia. One way conversations. What was the pressure to be and what rippling never to brag about it. I have a portrait of a dog Whipoorwill painted in a cloud of confetti and that is the mind of this hound, a heavenly confetti. It bounces and it is the thought of a dog bouncing as he meditates resting to leap. Painted like a dream creature. And with the gristle of a master. We are all the dog here in a pasture of fantasy. We are all dogs in a small portrait painted in a summer in Vermont. I call the painting “Whipoorwill Buddha”. It is July. Restless and stammering and gift bearing.

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Chapter 3

Smoking Joe John Brainard

Of all the “things” as images and images as things that Joe was passionate about, from pansies, to NANCY, to Madonnas and Catholic shrines, to white briefs, to sailors’ tattoos, to buttons and beads and all manner of ephemera, I would venture that none held greater grasp or pride of place than cigarettes. Joe loved cigarettes. He loved smoking them (as much as he, like most ardent smokers, myself included, may have tried repeatedly to cut down or quit), he was addicted and attached and enamoured of cigarettes. Most smokers simply smoke cigarettes, enough said; but in Joe’s case they were elevated—glorified, venerated to a stature to rival Bogart. He didn’t just smoke cigarettes; he drew them, painted them, collaged them, wrote of them, made them not just an aspect of his life but of his art as well. Of all the things Joe carried in his valise of go-to subjects, it was cigarettes and cigarette butts and loaded ashtrays to which he returned again and again. In one of his very early collages from 1961–2, a package of Chesterfields and a scattering of loose cutout smokes take the stage possibly for the first time, and subsequently they would feature repeatedly. All-over “fields” of tightly arranged butts would be a frequent motif, as would the familiar triangular Cinzano ashtray, with its blue-and-white logo and smattering of ashes and butts. (This ashtray was there to be found in the banker’s box labeled “favorite things” in his unmistakable all caps, when I cleared out Joe’s Greene Street loft after his death. I still have it. Why this particular ashtray was so special to Joe is anyone’s guess, but I think of it as iconic, and one of the many oil-painted renderings of it hangs in my Paris apartment.) There is a handsome pen and ink drawing of a flattened package of Tareyton (Joe’s long-time brand) in the book The Champ, written by Kenward Elmslie with illustrations by Joe, from 1968, and another

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butts-in-ashtray brush drawing in Sung Sex, another collaboration with Kenward, from 1989. Also on my walls are two of his all-over butts pieces, one rendered in subtle pencil with only a hint of beige filters, the other more boldly painted in gouache then cut out, collagestyle. And of course there are more versions and variations along these lines than I can even begin to know of. When Joe had the opportunity to do a series of etchings, one was of all-over butts, the other that ubiquitous loaded Cinzano ashtray. The same tri-cornered Cinzano ashtray is repeated sixteen times in Cinzano, from 1974, with each image rendered in oil on canvas in a slightly different way, each one showing a unique character. In a case of overlapping two favourite subjects, NANCY becomes a smoker in one piece, an ashtray in another, and pops out of a pack of Tareyton in yet another.

Figure 3.1 Joe Brainard, Untitled (Cigarette Butts) (1973). Collage, gouache, and ink on paper, 7⅜ x 5½ in.

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In “Ultra-New Realism, Self-Portrait” (1972), Joe holds a pencil in one hand—in the other, a cigarette. Of course it is only natural that Joe, being such a master and proponent of elevating the everyday object, would include in his repertoire things that were virtually always in his sightline. He did smoke a lot. In one “journal” piece Joe wrote; Tuesday, March 23rd, 1971 I just knew this morning when I asked the deli man for three packs of cigarettes instead of the usual two that he was going to say something and he did. He said “You sure smoke a lot son.” And I said “Oh, I don’t smoke all of these.” And he said “Well, who does?” But by then everything was in the bag and paid for so I didn’t have to continue my lie. He’d really be shocked if he knew that at night I buy more cigarettes at a different deli. Well, everybody deserves one or two things not to have to be careful about, I figure. And smoking is one of mine.

The subject would be broached time and again in other writings as well, including in “I Remember”, where many memories relate, such as “I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. Up on a hill. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Ron Padgett.” And “I remember collecting cigarette butts from the urns in front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.” Then there is the brilliant little satirical snippet from 1963: Smoke More The only thing wrong with people is that they don’t smoke enough. I smoke four packs a day and am proud of it. Why not? We all know that we are not going to die of cancer tomorrow, or the next day, and/or the next day as a matter of fact, so what is all the worry about? I’ve been smoking four packs a day ever since I was fourteen years old and am proud of it. And even if I did get cancer it wouldn’t really matter. If you are going to do something you may as well do it right. Another thing I can’t stand are people who smoke menthol cigarettes. I don’t know exactly why but there is something wrong about it. There are so many different kinds of cigarettes that it is hard to know which kind to smoke. It is easier to decide if you first discard the possibility of menthol and then decide between filters and nonfilters. It is mostly a matter of taste. I smoke filter cigarettes, but as I said, it is mostly a matter of taste.

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John Brainard If there is one thing I can’t stand it is people who don’t smoke at all. There is no excuse. Some people say that it is too expensive but if someone really wants to smoke bad enough they can and will.

When that piece appeared in an article about Joe in ARTnews magazine, he sent a copy back to the family in Tulsa, but with a little note attached to attest that the “Smoke More” piece was written tongue in cheek. A teenager at the time, I couldn’t have cared less how it was to be taken, I was simply enthralled that my brother was in a magazine. I was also pleased to see, in the same article, a reproduction of a painting, in gouache, that compiled several elements, all meticulously rendered, including a cracker, a few french fries, the Disney dog Goofy, a butterfly, a mushroom, an ice cube, a piece of chocolate, a few cigarette butts, and a small copy of one of my childhood school photos. Years later I would see the original hanging in Kenward’s house, and recount the story of my young pride. Soon after, Kenward generously offered it to me as a gift, and now I see it every day. Today, of course, smoking is largely out of favour and frowned on in general, especially in the U.S. (lucky for me, it is a little less bedevilled in France) and no doubt with good reason. But it was so much a part of Joe, his person and his art, that I hope all would put aside today’s prejudice against smoking, for Joe’s sake. (Just try to imagine Bogey without his cigarettes, after all!) Even his doctor, in the last months of Joe’s life, said “. . . if you want to smoke, go ahead and smoke—that’s not what’s going to kill you.” I certainly couldn’t begin to count the number of cigarettes we smoked together, Joe and I, in the times we got together, usually for dinner in downtown restaurants, with drinks (and perhaps a joint now and then) beforehand (and often afterwards) in the loft. Though the times, the talks, and the company are unforgettable, smokes we took for granted. The memorable ones would come later. In those last months, from the Autumn of ’93 until May ’94, smoking was virtually the only pleasure still available for Joe. During the many weeks at NYU Medical Center Hospice, it became a ritual; bundling up to make the trek downstairs to huddle together under the entry awning just outside for a cigarette. Sometimes we might be just the two; other times three, or four; Pat Padgett with her skinny brown cigarillos, and/or Annie Lauterbach, me, and Joe. I’m not sure why these little fragments of the day became so special to me, but I remember that I’d never been more glad that

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I smoked too. It felt somehow intimate, something shared, even if measured in minutes. Passers-by wouldn’t even have noticed us probably; Joe never succumbed to hospital garb, and despite the horrible abnormality of what was happening, it could feel almost normal, something natural and dear. Whether we talked or were quiet, or what, if we did talk, was said, was of little consequence; we were simply sharing something that was a part of us. Something that, bless his heart, was a big part of Joe; the sweet soul, gifted artist, generous friend, beloved brother. When I see him now in memory’s eye, he’s smoking a cigarette. Of course.

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Chapter 4

Artist Statement John Ashbery

I started making collages when I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1940s. I forget exactly when or why I began, but it was no doubt a response to the collage novels of Max Ernst and the partly collaged Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque (and later to the collages of Schwitters and Joseph Cornell.) In the early 1950s I also began using collage elements in my poems; some are entirely collage. Why did I do this? More important, why did great artistic minds like Picasso, Gris, and Braque suddenly feel the urge to incorporate bits of everyday ephemera like newspaper clippings into their highminded classical work? Well, perhaps to bring it down to earth a little and make it more realist, in a certain sense. But no doubt also to introduce life, which is a mixed-media affair, into their paintings. As one studies them, one’s attention keeps shifting from the ebb and flow of angular or rounded forms to the printed texts in the newspapers, announcing perhaps a furniture sale or a crime that was the talk of Paris for a week. We’re all suckers for these appurtenances of daily life. Most of the collages I did at Harvard are lost. Years later, in the early 1970s, I would visit Kenward Elmslie and Joe Brainard in the summer at Kenward’s lovely house in Vermont. After dinner and a certain amount of wine we would sit around the table, cutting up old magazines and splicing them back together for our own amusement. I got into the habit of using postcards, whose sense of the picturesque can be skewed, even while the often blithely disconnected messages on the back contribute to the narrative of how life was really lived back then. (At one point I was going to use collaged postcards for the outline of a novel, but that project never got off the ground.) I did a few more collages in the later 1970s. Then three years ago, when the possibility of a show of them arose, I went through

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shoeboxes of old postcards and found an envelope filled with materials cut out and collected by Joe, which he sent me for one of my birthdays in the early 1990s; each year, in fact, he used to send me either postcards or other paper souvenirs, often with an injunction to use them in collages. I was delighted to make use of some of them, especially in a collage called Chutes and Ladders, which I’ve dedicated to Joe. Looking at these colorful disjecta membra, I can almost feel the warmth of his amused, affectionate gaze, and hear his apologetic stammer as he tactfully pointed out the obvious places where they belonged. So these fragments are really about him, and record the atmosphere of a wonderful friendship that lasted far too short a time.

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Chapter 5

Vulnerability in Joe Brainard’s Work Edmund Berrigan

What I tend to walk away with most from the works of Joe Brainard’s that I’ve encountered is joy, but also a sense of vulnerability and most often both. Though Brainard has several methods of work—from collage to assemblage, pen and ink drawings to book jacket designs—I always find the work to be very identifiably his. The difference may be the kind of feeling that his work projects—as opposed to a clear footprint of style or material, there is a personality trace that remains. What I also find intriguing is that he transmits those characteristics in both his writing and his visual art. His writing comes across as matter-of-fact, yet he often reveals content that is very sensitive—I’m thinking particularly of the passages in I Remember1 that detail his early sexual experiences with men. But Brainard’s moments of candor are well balanced by his gift for visual detail. At other times, I Remember reads almost like a yard sale: I remember the tiger lilies alongside the house. I found a dime among them once. I remember a very little doll I lost under the front porch and never found.

I Remember brilliantly combines mnemonic devices with the list form. The reader is always in the present looking at the past, which is the exact experience of reading moment to moment. The book can therefore functionally start at any point that you pick it up. As an early reader I was sometimes flummoxed by the sheer amount of detail he could recall. What strikes me now is the precision; he is excellent at identifying “key log” details that open

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up for the reader a personalized version of the ensuing chain of events. For example: I remember the sound of the ice cream man coming. I remember once losing my nickel in the grass before he made it to my house. I remember that life was just as serious then as it is now.

For a long time the entry I would go back to the most, and had memorized, was the very last one. It takes the form of a childhood anxiety dream: 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.

I’ve always associated the idea of a man made out of cheese with the idea of man in the moon, and the moon being made of cheese. Whatever the association, rather than the remarkable fact of the encounter, it’s the formality of the handshake, and the subsequent accidental dismemberment, that refocuses the encounter back on Joe and the anxiety in the moment. The moment is as naked as dreams will be, and shows formality, anxiety, and damage, yet is likely to leave readers with a smile on their face. Brainard’s candor provides an inviting entry point into his work, but he’s also reticent and deliberate, so that even in instances where indulgence is being handled, it bears a careful framework. Each entry feels both spontaneous and crafted—but with the hand of an artist who is shaping the detail without over-focusing on his own reaction unless the recollection of that emotion is the key detail. Obviously, vulnerability isn’t always being showcased but access to this level of detail, and certainly in the cases of the early sexual experiences, feels extremely vulnerable, and creates the feeling inside of me as a reader. Or in the case of his male nudes, as a viewer. In the intro to The Erotic Work,2 Nathan Kernan speculates that “Perhaps it was not only the physical beauty of the male chest that was sexy to Joe, but the paradigm of openness that its deliberate exposure represented to a very shy young gay man.”3 Kernan also mentions that Brainard’s male nude figures came primarily from adult magazines. The poses in that case would be more likely to portray invitation. Brainard’s self-reflections and erotic idealizations don’t

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Edmund Berrigan

attempt a false or a broken innocence—they are generally playful idealizations, mostly solo nudes, and they bear a light touch, remaining more suggestive of sex than graphically displaying it. Interestingly, the comic collaborations shown in The Nancy Book4 do provide a format that conjures sex, perhaps partly because the panel nature generates sequential arrangements, and partly because the collaborative aspect requires relinquishment of control. The artwork collected in The Nancy Book uses the recurring character device as a vehicle to conjure a more diverse subject matter. The figure of Little Nancy, borrowed from the Ernie Bushmiller comic, almost functions as Brainard’s Virgil—leading him through comic but serious (and thus ordinary) exploratory depictions of materials, situations, and iconic artworks that are radically changed simply by adding (often, but not always) the smiling face of Nancy. The comic format lends itself to personification and allowed Brainard to push his subject matter further out. There are several works that reference being queer, often engaged in an extended conversation with one another, including the rendering of Nancy “wearing green and yellow on Thursdays” a phrase which also constitutes an entry in I Remember. The phrase depicts a coded identification of queerhood, dated to high school in the I Remember passage. If Nancy was a Boy shows Nancy (with a smiling face) raising her skirt to reveal male genitalia, and balancing a delicate bravado with the shock of open display. The cartoon aspect creates a safe vehicle for the presentation. Of the collaborative Nancy comics, those with Bill Berkson and Ted Berrigan contain more illustrative sexual content, while the one with Ron Padgett feels very far away from it. Of the three, the writing in Berrigan’s is the most sparse and unified in the sense of acting as comic-book writing in the context of the comic itself. In the collaborations with Berkson and Padgett the writing to varying degrees is more simultaneously poetic. The drawing in the Berkson work depicts sex graphically, but the writing seems to be deliberately unaware of the content. The collaboration with Padgett uses animals as a recurring visual element, and the writing exists both on the periphery and at times directly commenting on the visuals. The Nancy series comes close at times to aligning Brainard with Pop Art in terms of the repetition of a famous image, but Brainard’s work always seemed to be deeply connected to his personality, and ultimately doesn’t reach for the stylization, mechanism, or ambition of Pop Art. The Nancy Book includes several works that represent Nancy rendered in the style of the artists Leonardo da Vinci, Willem de

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Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Pablo Picasso. There are cutouts, such as Nancy portraits and profiles applied to a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. The appearance of Nancy in these works is always humorous, and conveys a light-handed approach from the artist, but perhaps also points to an anxiety behind the method. As Ann Lauterbach mentions in her essay in The Nancy Book, Brainard stopped making artworks for the public at a certain point, for reasons perhaps connected to doubts about a sense of his own placement within the hierarchy of the commercialized and historical conversations around art. Whether or not it’s true that Brainard felt that way, he left behind a large body of work, much of which doesn’t fall into any particular category, except perhaps into that of the joy of making things. One

Figure 5.1 Joe Brainard, The World’s Wishes (n.d.). Collage. From the estate of Anselm and Edmund Berrigan.

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Edmund Berrigan

of my favorite Brainard works is a small collage that has been in the possession of my family since my childhood. It is composed of many small colored squares that seem to be either cut or ripped, and among the words displayed is the phrase “The World’s Wishes.” The most prominent image is a giant claw, possibly from a drawing of a werewolf, with blood on the finger tips. From then until now it’s borne the same sense of mystery for me—one that I’m not in a hurry to unlock. The work as a whole resembles a page from a comic book, the colors are brilliant despite the fading materials, and the claw is just kind of there, disembodied, possibly showing a grim fate, but also isolated in a way that gives it a serenity. It’s strangely idealized, and could be an internal or an external representation, vulnerable to possibility.

Notes 1. Joe Brainard, I Remember (New York: Granary Books, 2001). 2. Nathan Kernan, The Erotic Work (New York: Tibor De Nagy Gallery, 2007). 3. Kernan, The Erotic Work, introduction. 4. Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2008).

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Chapter 6

Joe Brainard: The Madonna of the Future Nathan Kernan

On June 2, 1966, the poet and art critic James Schuyler paid a visit to Joe Brainard’s studio to take notes for an article on Brainard’s work for ARTnews. The article when it appeared in April 1967 was heralded by a cover reproducing of one of Brainard’s riotously colorful and spatially paradoxical “Garden” gouaches. In an art world hungry then as now for the next new thing, the twenty-five-year old Brainard, after just one solo show at the short-lived Alan Gallery, was having what his friend Andy Warhol would have called his (first) fifteen minutes of fame. Schuyler’s original notes, constrained into short lines by the spiral-bound notebook he habitually used, have the shape and flavor of unintentional poetry: At Joe B’s June 2 ’66 A white romantic T-shirt on a bed of flowers, and an unromantic pair of jockey shorts. One thinks of da Vinci painting rags dipped in plaster, perfecting the way he painted folds. But Brainard is less abstract, & would be inclined to paint the rags themselves1

James Schuyler and Joe Brainard met in 1964, and immediately became close friends. They shared an approach that, in one sense or another, aspired to present the “thing itself,” “the rags themselves”

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Nathan Kernan

Figure 6.1 Joe Brainard, cover of ARTnews (1967).

as the work of art. For the poet, that meant words used in such a way that their meanings were one with their sound and shape. Or as he put it in “The Morning of the Poem,” “How the thing said/Is in the words, how/The words are themselves/The thing said.”2 His poem “Fabergé,” written in the late 1950s, expounded in metaphorical terms a more radical equivalency: “Here, just for you, is a rose made out of a real rose.”3 I hold Schuyler’s oeuvre is partly just that: a poem made out of words transcribing experience as directly as possible, where the poem and the word and the thing or experience are the same—an impossible ideal, but which in one sense he would approach in “The Payne Whitney Poems,” where, as he writes, “Now, this moment/flows out of me/down the pen and/writes.”4

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For Brainard, as a visual artist, the “thing itself” meant something rather different, or several things at different times, inasmuch as his multivalent work of the 1960s and 70s encompasses a number of different looks and media. In oil paintings of the 1970s (to work backwards) he was inspired by Fairfield Porter, among others, to paint simple motifs from direct observation in a relatively straightforward way. But I am more interested here in earlier work, from the 1960s—assemblages, collages, ink drawings and comic strips—whose relation to the idea of “the thing itself” may be harder to pin down. Brainard has been seen, loved, and often dismissed as a “special case.” What is not always fully appreciated is how prescient his work looks today. Looking around at various aspects of the current visual art scene, ours looks more and more like a Joe Brainard world. Today there are art stars of the international gallery, auction, fair, and museum circuit, whose work includes: witty, cartoon-like illustrations on paper (Raymond Pettibon, David Shrigley, Amy Sillman); intimately scaled paintings of “cultish” or personal imagery (Elizabeth Peyton, Paul P., Thomas Trosch, Duncan Hannah, Keith Mayerson); text-based works with explicitly or implicitly queer content (René Ricard, Larry Johnson). There are artists who take assemblage to extremes of personal meaning and material extravagance (Mike Kelley, David Altmejd, Tracey Emin, Kai Althoff, Iza Genzken, Damien Hirst); artists who make a point of inconsistency in their output (Richard Prince, Ugo Rondinone, Jiri Georg Dokoupil); artists who exploit ideas of generosity, transience, and disappearance (Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Tino Seghal, Rirkrit Tiravanija). I will look at only a few of these artists in the course of this essay. In borrowing the title “The Madonna of the Future” I do not mean, of course, to suggest a corollary between Brainard and the hapless artist in Henry James’s story, whose unseen masterwork, despite all his passionate talk of it, was never begun. But rather to suggest that Brainard’s works of the 1960s and 70s, including but not only his “Madonnas,” have come to take on new relevance in relation to some of the art of recent years. Still, Henry James, with his lifelong fascination with artists’ and writers’ lives, could have made a Jamesian “case” of Brainard’s own career trajectory: his early struggles, subsequent success, and further struggles with success, leading to his eventual decision to stop painting altogether. Born in Salem, Arkansas in 1942, Brainard grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a prodigy, winning every art prize in high school and drawing advertising illustrations for the local department store. He also contributed covers and illustrations to The White

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Dove Review, the high school literary magazine started by his friends Ron Padgett and Dick Gallup, which led to them all becoming close to Ted Berrigan, who was then in graduate school in Tulsa. Brainard won a scholarship to the Dayton Art Institute and attended for about a month before dropping out and following Padgett, Berrigan, and Padgett’s wife Pat Mitchell to New York in 1960 to live the life of an artist. Brainard was self-taught and came of age as an artist as a new generation of Pop and minimal artists, who tended to be ten to fifteen years older than him, were challenging the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Brainard said that he had had no previous exposure to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art images in 1962 when he painted Seven-Up, his painterly image of the Seven-Up soft drink logo, and other similar works, and that when he first saw Warhol’s soup cans and Claes Oldenburg’s own papier-mâché 7-Up he “was kind of shocked.” Brainard’s interest, however, was not in the actual bottle but “just the labels,”5 which connects this work to the printed ephemera he would use in collages. As he wrote to a Tulsa patron at this time, he felt that his paintings of “Pasted and painted labels . . . denote truth, the way things are.”6 Brainard’s logos and labels represented “realism” for him in that moment. If for Andy Warhol, Pop Art was famously about “liking things,”7 it may not have been in opposition to disliking, as one might assume, but rather to loving. Judging from his work, it was indeed “things” that Warhol liked: not people or emotions or beauty or light or space or landscape or any of the larger concerns, overt or implied, of his predecessors, the passionate Abstract Expressionists. His statement expresses a rather wistful truth, revealing of the difference between Warhol and, not only the Abstract Expressionists, but also an artist like Brainard, who, despite also using popular imagery, clearly relishes in a painterly way the swoop and dash of the 7-Up lettering and the exuberant bubbles rising above; and who, in contrast to Warhol’s cool distance, never abandoned an ethos of spontaneity and improvisation adopted from the Abstract Expressionists (and the New York School). In Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and others, people become things—icons. In Brainard’s work, the opposite happens: icons, both literal religious icons of the Virgin Mary, and pop icons like Nancy, become—not human exactly, but are “de-iconized” and restored to being “the rags themselves,” and thereby objects of empathy. Joe Brainard’s art has always been hard to categorize, not only because it seems to straddle the poles of Pop and Expressionism,

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Figure 6.2 Joe Brainard, Seven-Up (1962).

but also because, as he said, he never created “a definite commodity.”8 He made art that traverses media, from assemblage to collage, to drawing, to painting, back to collage, back to drawing— with imagery that to some extent changed accordingly. Most artists, now as then, develop a signature style, image or technique (or a technique that becomes an image) and stick to it, going to the studio every day and manufacturing the product. There is nothing wrong with this: it’s called having a career. But Joe Brainard had no career in that sense, and he was aware of this difference. Whenever a career threatened to engulf him he changed gears; and finally he stopped making art altogether. Today there are a more than a few artists who move radically between media and types of imagery trying to avoid a single identifiable product—I am thinking of Prince, Dokoupil, Kelley, Rondinone, and others—and while they can sometimes seem to make a career out of having no “career,”

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so to speak, the seeming multiplicity of “authors” in these artists’ work is one reason Brainard’s can appear to be as much of this moment as of his own. The generally small scale of Brainard’s artwork, the predominance of work on paper, and his eschewal of a conventional career follow from his close relationship to the New York Poets—his being one himself, in fact. He knew fellow visual artists, of course (Katz, Porter, Warhol, Freilicher especially), but he was really of the downtown poetry world. Hijacked by poets as in a sense he was, any potential bigness in his work was distilled (as poetry is) into the smallest possible space. It would be trite to call his collages “visual poems,” yet the use of verbal collage of one kind or another was and remains one of the clearest common elements shared by the disparate New York School poets—and collage was the visual language that Brainard came most early and naturally to make his own. Collage and painting seem to have coexisted in Brainard’s output from the early 1960s, but after Seven-Up and similar paintings of 1962, during and following an eight-month sojourn in Boston in 1963, he began to concentrate on his amazing series of assemblages of the mid-1960s. In their plenitude of disparate objects, Brainard’s early assemblages can be superficially reminiscent of those of Robert Rauschenberg or Bruce Conner. Old dolls, plastic flowers, taxidermied animals, plaster religious figures, newspaper pages, strings of beads are some elements common to all. However Brainard’s tone is quite different. While Rauschenberg presents the disparate and odd objects dispassionately, and Conner seems to be in search of a mood of creepy morbidity and decay, Brainard is clearly choosing objects and making juxtapositions that delight him. While works such as Untitled 1964–5 maintain a Rauschenbergian disparity of objects, with Tide boxes and deer antlers, a flag and other objects, religious figurines are conspicuously plentiful among the visual cacophony, pointing toward a theme that would dominate a series of subsequent works. A year later, Brainard changed tack to make objects that were more unified formally or thematically, such as the predominently blue-green-hued Prell (1965), whose strongly vertical and additive construction creates a shrine, with at its center a Pietà. Brainard’s sculptural work culminated in the vast and ambitious Japanese City. The work, sprawling on the floor and also extending up a wall, is what we would now call an installation rather than an assemblage, and takes the work in yet another direction, of thematic unity and a “rational” visual organization that suggests a shop display, or a taxonomic exhaustiveness.

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Figure 6.3 Joe Brainard, Untitled (1964–5). Assemblage, 48 x 23½ inches. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard.

Anticipating his later “Ten Imaginary Still Lifes,” Brainard verbally conjured up one of these bedazzling assemblages in a 1963 letter to Ted Berrigan: The upper half, the larger, is a ½ circular alcove with a plaster cast of Mary with dead full-grown Jesus in lap with a little red plastic

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Nathan Kernan wcardinal on his head, and a wonderland spreads out at their feet of red roses, giant purple orchids, lilies, etc. etc. with lots of birds and butterflies, and behind all this is a blue blue sky with clouds and mean black birds. And surrounding all this is a stained glass window of all possible colors including two pieces of pear inlay, with two angels singing to a centered LUCKY STRIKE big circle; at the edge rosaries are draped and a yellow bird flies on the top right hand corner. And below this is a secret door which is an orange to yellow with pink sunset, with a black monster of a bird carrying a human baby of long ago in its beak; and there’s also a black wooden cross, and part of the words “Season’s Greetings” in fluorescent orange-red. This door opens up to a purple-lined box containing 12 bride-and-grooms.9

As an example of one of the many different ways the New York Poets also used collage technique, this may be the place to quote James Schuyler’s “Fabergé”—his own virtual assemblage—in full. (The quotation marks are in the original—making it a poem made out of a real poem.) Fabergé “I keep my diamond necklace in a pond of sparkling water for invisibility. “My rubies in Algae Pond are like an alligator’s adenoids. “My opals—the evening cloud slipped in my pocket and I felt it and vice-versa. “Out of all the cabs I didn’t take (a bit of a saver) I paved a street with gold. It was quite a short street, sort of a dollhouse cul-de-sac. “And there are a lot of other pretties I could tell about— ivory horses carved inside bone dice; coral monkeys too tiny to touch; a piece of jade so big you might mistake it for the tundra and a length of chalcedony as long as the Alcan Highway which is the Alcan Highway. It is solidified liquid chalcedony. “Here, just for you, is a rose made out of a real rose and the dewdrop nestled in a rosy petal that has the delicate five-o’clock-shadow fuzz—blue—is not a tear. I have nothing to cry about now I have you.”10

For both Schuyler and John Ashbery, collage—which most often meant borrowing existing texts or fragments and combining them, or folding them in with their own or other texts—had become central to their poetry long before either had met Brainard. Schuyler wrote his first purely collaged poem (taken from old issues of the National

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Geographic; unpublished) in December 1951, immediately after his release from the mental hospital in which he wrote “Salute.” It therefore comes at the very beginning of his poetic oeuvre, is in fact one of the first twelve or thirteen documented poems he wrote and sent out. In October of the following year he and John Ashbery saw a Kurt Schwitters exhibition together which inspired the two of them to make pictorial collages, and Ashbery to compose a verbal/pictorial collage using lines of text cut from magazines, “‘Controls’” (the title, like the stanzas of “Fabergé,” is given within quotation marks). As collagists, Schuyler and Brainard shared a practice of making work using material that was overlooked or mundane—even trash—but which at the same time held secret or residual “passion” and beauty—like the diamond necklace invisible in a glass of water which Schuyler puts in “Fabergé.” June 28, 1970: In a letter to Brainard from Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay, James Schuyler wrote: As soon as I got here I started to make you a trash book out of an address book I had never used. I thought it would take about an hour, but who could guess that an address book, such a little itty bitty address book, could have so many pages? Or that one’s trash runs out so soon? A trash book, in case you’re wondering, is something like a scrap book, only, well, you put trash in it.11

A few days later he writes, “Yesterday I finished your little trash book. I’m rather pleased with it. Partly because of its nothingness, partly because I didn’t think anybody else would think of making one for you.”12 I do not know whether this collage book has survived, but fortunately Schuyler also created its literary counterpart. Schuyler’s poem “The Trash Book,” which he wrote that summer and dedicated to Brainard, is a collage of observations and phenomena which it would be impossible to fit into any physical book: a “smear” of landscape; a half-remembered remark; and concluding with an “involuntary memory” from 1942—the year of Brainard’s birth and Schuyler’s father’s death—when Schuyler was flunking out of college in West Virginia, desperately lonely, and would often walk to a roadhouse called “Emily’s” to drink beer; the memory residing in “the quiver/of the word” beer; itself evoking a Pop Art image, an advertising sign: The Trash Book for Joe Brainard Then I do not know what

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Nathan Kernan to paste next in the Trash Book: grass, pretending to be a smear maybe or that stump there that knows now it will never grow up to be some pencils or a yacht even. A piece of voice saying (it sounds like) “I thought her did.” Or the hum that hangs in only my left ear. Or, “Beer” not beer, all wet, the quiver of the word one night in 1942 looking at a cardboard girl sitting on a moon in West Virginia. She smiled and sipped her Miller’s.13

For Brainard as for Schuyler, the notion of “trash” encompassed several things: the seemingly insignificant and ephemeral; actual thrownaway litter; and that which the dominant culture deemed “trashy,” that is, kitsch—fake jewelry, cheap religious figurines, saccharine popular imagery—whose inherent beauty and preciousness the ingenuous eye of the artist or poet miraculously restored. Dominant in Brainard’s iconography of the mid-sixties were his “Madonnas” and “Gardens,” often combined: the image of the Madonna and Child taken from one famous Renaissance painting or another engulfed by a profusion of painted and collaged flowers. Seeing them at the time, it would have been impossible for anyone familiar with even just the titles of Jean Genet’s novels not to think immediately: “Our Lady of the Flowers,” and see Brainard’s image as the perfect embodiment of the expression, divorced from its specific fictional context but not its queer implications. The image becomes a piece of language, and a quotation: “Our Lady of the Flowers” (although no Brainard work bore that title as far as I know). Genet’s novel, Notre Dame des Fleurs, first published in English by Grove Press in 1963, takes for granted the fluid identities (gender and otherwise) of Genet himself (the book’s “narrator” in the Proustian sense), and his characters: the drag prostitute Divine; her pimp Darling Daintyfoot; and the eponymous Our Lady of the Flowers—a beautiful teenage (male) murderer but not a drag queen. I’m sure Joe read it, since he recorded reading other books by Genet, and that on some level he associated his image with the title and the idea (if not the fictional content) of the book. So at the time (perhaps even

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Figure 6.4 Joe Brainard, Madonna with Daffodils (1966). Mixed media collage, 54¼ x 22¼ inches. Collection of Kenward Elmslie. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard.

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more so than now) Brainard’s Madonnas were read among informed people, and Brainard himself, as an image calling forth this specifically gay reference, with its subtext of cross-dressing and gender fluidity. The Madonna image becomes almost a kind of ideogram, although the image itself (what it depicts) is not intrinsically gay or even sexual—only through verbal transliteration does it become so. This also holds true for several subsequent specifically queer-coded ideograms in his work, including pansies, butterflies, and the Nancy comic strip character. Of course another way of referring to the Madonna (as Brainard did in the letter above) is as “Mary”—which, like “Nancy,” is a camp designation for a male homosexual. While both terms are now passé, they had different connotations: “Nancy Boy” was often derogatory and used by non-gays; while “Mary” tended to be used jokingly by gay men themselves to refer to each other among friends. I do not say that “gay identity” was the primary meaning or motivation behind Brainard’s Madonnas, or his fields of flowers, or his pansies, or his Nancy cartoon works. I am not sure how he thought of it actually. But it is present in the works of this very shy man, who when he first began to use the Mary image, in 1963, was not out. (This was of course well before AIDS—and his sense of being gay was one of sexual and cultural affirmation; there is none of the anger or political content that informs later gay artists like David Wojnarowicz or Frank Moore.) In the related group of works from the mid-60s, called “Gardens,” in which masses of different kinds of flowers cluster together on a page without the Madonna, Brainard wittily and with a typically subtle or hidden riposte defuses a tenet of high Modernism, in this case the “overall” composition—they are “color field” paintings with a vengeance, countering the huge, bland stained works on cotton duck by artists of that school, coming into prominence in the early 1960s. Violating another taboo, they are blatantly, provocatively decorative. There is a too-muchness about them, caused partly by a disorienting sense of spatial ambiguity, when so many different flowers in different sizes jostle one another in close proximity. So full are they of subtle changes of scale that the eye can never rest or quite take everything in. A “Gestalt” effect makes the largest flowers disappear into the “background” (there is no background) only to be perceived individually after being directly stared at for a long while. The surprised recognition is like something one repeatedly experiences reading Brainard’s great text work, I Remember. If one were to say that the floral Madonnas, the Gardens, and the over-the-top assemblages—Brainard’s three major bodies of work of

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the early to mid 1960s—share a camp, drag queen sensibility, just what would that mean? Susan Sontag’s famous essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” can seem somewhat dated today, simply because—as she predicted—time and changing perceptions have transposed many of her examples from camp to the mainstream, and vice-versa. Nonetheless many of her aperçus hold: The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. . . . In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. . . . Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. . . . Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. . . . Camp is a tender feeling. (Here one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which— when it is not just Camp—embodies an attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.) Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles . . . 14

Perhaps the word “camp” is no longer useful, but the tendency that Sontag sought to define is real. Can we call it something else? Who are some of the artists of today who we might characterize as embodying whatever our new term is (how about Brainardism?): Mike Kelley; Damien Hirst; Richard Prince; Tracey Emin; Raymond Pettibon—are we living in a golden age of Brainardism? (I must add that Jeff Koons, “more flat and more dry . . . more detached, ultimately nihilistic” is not a Brainardist.) Even without the explicit, if coded, reference to drag and gender fluidity through evoking the title of Genet’s book, Brainard’s 1960s assemblages, with their draped beads and necklaces, flowers, figurines, bottles, and general theatricality conjure up a camp vision, like an imaginary drag queen’s dressing room.The drag aura that Brainard’s mid-60s collages and assemblages project is not so much related to traditional cross-dressing female impersonators of his time, much less Genet’s, but rather anticipates the gender-bending, wildly flamboyant look of the San Francisco drag troupe the Cockettes of the early 1970s. The visual style and anarchic performance mode of the Cockettes are now being reappraised in several museum exhibitions including Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, organized by the Walker Art Center in 2015. Brainard’s assemblage Untitled (Native American) (1964), with its made-up male face engulfed by

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a headdress of purple and pink orchids and roses, could almost pass for a representation of Cockette star Hibiscus (but without his trademark beard). Whether Brainard later became aware of or interested in the Cockettes is doubtful, although he lived in Bolinas for several weeks in 1971, during the time they were active in the city. Bolinas is only twenty miles from San Francisco, but a world away from its urban culture. Brainard was staying with heterosexual poet friends, and did not go into the city more than a couple of times, as we know from his wonderful Bolinas Diary. Brainard sometimes minimized the possible influence of Puerto Rican street “shrines” on his religious-themed assemblages, preferring to cite shop windows in general, which, he said, are naturally arranged as centralized shrines. “When you start building something it’s very natural to build it like an altar.”15 But in a later interview, he did acknowledge “Puerto Rican religious . . . junk . . . and Catholic [stores]” of the pre-gentrified East Village as an influence.16 To a transplant from Tulsa, the proliferation and flamboyance of such images was new, and he took pleasure in them in an immediate and non-ironic—albeit “camp”—way. He intended no deliberate religious content to be part of the works, but added, “On the other hand, a lot of people said I was making fun of religion, which would be even worse. . . . I’d almost rather be religious.”17 As James Schuyler wrote, “A part of the reason for his using so many religious articles is the passion (often all but residual) they project or contain and their beauty, as in pink-and-blue-tinted plaster images, which someone else might see as a debasement.”18 The concept of residual feelings— “passion”—inhering in an object, and the beauty of “debasement” are themes central to the later work of Mike Kelley. After his assemblages and collages, possibly Brainard’s largest, most significant and forward-looking body of work are his drawings. Brainard’s drawing style was virtuosic, equal to all moods and genres, from the important “suites” of high-contrast black ink drawings, like those in his collaboration with John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook, his illustrations for Ted Berrigan’s Living with Chris, Kenward Elmslie’s The Champ, and Ron Padgett’s Sufferin Succotash; to his many comic strip collaborations with poet friends; his erotic and tattoo drawings; and his witty, extended set of variations on the theme of the Ernie Bushmiller’s cartoon character Nancy. The list of nineteen poets who collaborated with Brainard on comic strips for Ted Berrigan’s C Comics No. 1 and C Comics No. 2 is, despite some missing names, more representative than not of the downtown poetry scene of the mid-1960s. Brainard subsequently

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produced other, sometimes more polished, comic strip collaborations, but the ones in C have a special character of audacity, youthful energy, and sheer silly inventiveness, both visual and verbal. The box and the grid of comic strip convention were made to be broken out of, and Brainard and the poets did so with relish. C magazine generally, and C Comics in particular, exhibit something of the irreverence and energy of an underground “zine” put together by a bunch of high-school students—the arty, misfit ones—to counter the assumptions and pieties passed down by teachers and adults. Of course C comes by this quite directly, as the descendant of Padgett and Brainard’s own high school magazine, the White Dove Review, to which Berrigan also contributed. With references to many different graphic idioms, and deadpan, funny, irreverent, non-sequitur-studded (possibly drug-influenced) texts, and casual home-published-looking presentation, C Comics (in common with the rest of Brainard’s huge and varied graphic output—fliers, announcements, and other ephemeral sheets) feels similar to the self-published books of LA artist Raymond Pettibon from the 1980s, and later drawings by him and contemporary artists such as Mike Kelley, David Shrigley, and others. There is a Brainardian look to these artists’ knowingly “dumb” and edgy work, pared down to black and white and the desperate necessity of adolescence, which grew out of and still feels connected to underground band posters, quirky zines and cartoons, and other high school publications. Brainard’s first few “Nancy” works date from 1963, but his Nancy-olatry really got going with two extended collaborations in C Comics, “Nancy” with Bill Berkson appearing in C Comics No. 1 (1964), and “The Nancy Book” with Ron Padgett in C Comics No. 2. From then on, Brainard’s Nancy works only gathered momentum as he continued to work with the character in drawings, collages, and paintings into the early 1970s. Nancy becomes a bemused, put-upon Everygirl. Her demeanor and poise remain steadily cheerful even as she is subjected to an acid trip, is cast in a porn film, used as an ashtray (orally raped by an outsized cigarette butt), undergoes genital reassignment, is pulled and fragmented into distorted shapes in the style of de Kooning, and suffers numerous other indignities. Nancy is the secular, demotic counterpart to the classically serene Mary image in Joe’s work: his two iconic human subjects, both female, occupy opposing poles in the imagination. Yet it is Nancy whom her creator tests with a series of martyrdoms that seem destined to qualify her for sainthood. In thinking of the tone of Joe’s Nancys (and for that matter, the Madonnas) I am reminded a little bit of Richard Prince’s series of “Nurse” paintings—another rather flat, affectless female

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character who is put through a variety of changes and situations. Take-offs on a curious sub-genre of soft-core porn, Prince’s paintings mimic the covers of pulp paperbacks, showing a nurse in white cap and exaggeratedly large white face mask, dripping with painterly blood smears, with titles like Millionaire Nurse, Nurse on Trial, Man Crazy Nurse, Runaway Nurse, Nurse in Hollywood and so on. Prince’s series of de Kooning Woman parodies, from the same period as the Nurses (the early 2000s), also make me think of Brainard, who made at least four Nancys in the style of Willem de Kooning (his painting hero). In addition to comic strip collaborations, Brainard illustrated countless individual books for poet friends, including Ron Padgett, Michael Brownstein, Kenward Elmslie, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Anne Waldman, and others. He also published several small artist books himself incorporating drawing and his own writings. But Brainard never illustrated his own text masterpiece I Remember. That is not surprising—the text is complete in itself and calls for no illustration. Yet at the same time one could almost say that the major suites of illustrations to The Champ, The Vermont Notebook, Living with Chris, and others function as “virtual” illustrations to I Remember. They do not correspond in any direct way to either the texts they accompany or, of course, I Remember, but do employ the same kind of random association that is the generating mechanism of I Remember. More than its specific memories, I Remember explores a process of thought, the mind intent upon trying to forget itself in order to capture something it already knows. “I have a terrible memory,” Joe said in discussing the writing of I Remember. “I can’t remember anything, but then I began to realize that beyond that point there is another level of knowledge that could be triggered off. . . . then I sort of used up that and there kept being more and different layers of things that were hidden. It isn’t really there spontaneously. I was unaware . . . that all that was retained. . . . It isn’t nostalgic at all, because I’m not nostalgic.”19 The very disparate subjects and styles of the drawings in The Vermont Notebook and other suites, and their seemingly random sequencing, suggest the artist’s eye lighting on one thing after another and seeing in each a mini-epiphany, similar to what he described experiencing writing I Remember. The diversity of subjects rebounds to become part of the content of each individual drawing; each “cancels out” the other, as Joe said.20 Nearly half of the forty-eight drawings that accompany John Ashbery’s book-length poem The Vermont Notebook depict what

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might be called, in one sense or another, pre-existing imagery: from TV screen, to comic book cell, to decorated cocktail napkin, to illustrative diagram, to a porn magazine spread, to a “found” Polaroid photograph, etc., they are pictures of pictures. In the context of these clear borrowings, many of the other drawings, even those which may in fact be straightforward, observed subjects, also have the feeling of being second-hand in some way: a suburban house that seems like a real estate ad, the fluff blown from a dandelion that could be from a greeting card . . . The “Pictures Generation” artist Richard Prince has implied that the highest accolade for one of his own works is when it achieves “that sent-away-for look,”21 a look that seems to describe Brainard’s drawings in The Vermont Notebook and other works. That they have this look is due not only to the borrowed imagery, but also because Brainard did indeed “send away” for them—within himself, to the same process of attentive, unforced thought that brought forth the revelations of I Remember. John Ashbery may have been thinking specifically of their collaboration on The Vermont Notebook, when he wrote that Brainard’s “works are about themselves—their subjects—and the distance between him and them is also a subject, whose nature is self-narration.”22 In the late 1960s and 1970s, when Ashbery and Schuyler and other friends visited Brainard and Elmslie at their farmhouse in Vermont, they spent many a hilarious (stoned) evening poring over and making collages using old Women’s Day and other magazines, and it could be that some of Brainard’s Vermont Notebook and other drawings were also taken from illustrations in magazines (Cobb salad, anyone?). In a quaint pre-internet age, magazines were primary sources for the dissemination of images and Brainard’s drawing suites are, to quote Roland Barthes in another context, “a tissue of quotations, drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”23 Magazines served as inspiration also for the loosely defined group of artists known as the “Pictures Generation,” who came of age in the 1970s. Richard Prince (b. 1949) in particular, when he first moved to New York, had a “day job” with a clippings service, cutting out the articles in magazines and discarding the advertisements. Of course the ads were visually the most interesting part of the magazines, and Prince re-photographed them and they became the basis for his earliest works, the “Gangs.” He retained a love for magazines and later said of his own multifarious oeuvre: “I always thought my work would look like a giant magazine. There’d be a joke section, a photography section, a painting section . . .”24

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The ephemeral nature of magazines adheres not only to the sources of certain of Brainard’s drawings, but also to their fate, in that many were destined to go right back into magazines—the homemade, stapled underground magazines of his poet friends, especially Ted Berrigan’s C: A Journal of Poetry, but also Larry Fagin’s Adventures in Poetry, Lewis Warsh and Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair, Peter Schjeldahl’s Mother, Bill Berkson’s Big Sky and many others. It was on C, however, that Brainard made the greatest mark—eleven of the magazine’s fourteen regular published issues (counting C Comics No. 1 and 2) have covers by Brainard (the only one that isn’t is by Warhol; the first two issues have non-pictorial covers), while number seven has a sequence of no fewer than six covers by Brainard.

Figure 6.5 Joe Brainard in collaboration with John Ashbery, from The Great Explosion Mystery (from C Comics 2) (1966). Ink on paper, 13 x 10 inches. Courtesy of Joe Brainard Archive, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard.

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In the 1970s Brainard became interested in making what he called “jack-off” collages and drawings—erotic works, including a significant subset depicting male torsos adorned with multiple tattoos whose traditional imagery seems to have quotation marks around it: butterflies, hearts, dice, lips. (Genet: “I have seen boys tattooed with the Eagle, the Frigate, the Naval Anchor, the Serpent, the Wild Pansy, the Stars, the Moon, and the Sun. Those who were most charged with blazons had them up to their neck and higher. These figures adorned the torsos of a new chivalry.”)25 The sources for many of Brainard’s male nudes were so-called physique magazines, in which photographs of nude or scantily clothed muscular young men were disingenuously marketed as figure studies for artists to work from. In the pre-Stonewall and pre-Playgirl or Blueboy 1950s and ’60s, such magazines provided masturbatory fantasies for many gay men. To satisfy the prying eyes of the U.S. Postal Service and lend credence to the fiction that the magazines had the innocent purpose of providing source material for artists, the models were posed in classical ways, holding spears or swords, or reclining in genital-displaying sprawls inspired by the Barberini Faun. The Brainard versions manage to have it both ways, and introduce a witty and subversive reversal by using them for the purpose for which they were ostensibly intended: making art; while at the same time acknowledging and depicting them as what they really were: soft core porn. That he would do so, offhandedly acknowledging the multiple layers of his own interest in them, is another manifestation of his generosity and prescience. If Brainard was on the surface a joyful, intuitive, and optimistic artist, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) was a dystopian and highly analytical one, yet both created diverse bodies of work derived, essentially, from mid-American upbringings and with very personal takes on popular culture. Memory is probably their most significant common theme, including (and if one can speak of “institutional memory,” might one also posit such a thing as) “object memory”—the memories and associations that inhere in physical objects. The title of a famous work by Mike Kelley from 1987, an assemblage of used stuffed children’s toys, is More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid. The idea of once-beloved objects retaining reservoirs of latent emotion—love hours—is powerful and re-echoes to Brainard’s assemblages of the 1960s and subsequent work. The two artists shared an interest in the transformational potential of what might be termed abject subject matter—the embarrassments and sad detritus of childhood: stuffed toys, comic strips, kitsch, and somehow tied to these, embarrassing bodily functions; and they had similar, illustration-y, high-contrast styles of drawing in heavy black ink. The similarity between, say, an

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ink drawing of a stuffed toy by Kelley and one by Brainard may be accidental, but maybe their underlying motivations weren’t so very different after all. Kelley’s series of assemblages (made from 2000 to 2010), which he called “Memory Ware” revived a folk art technique of pressing multitudinous small objects into a pulpy dark medium which hardens into a solid. Kelley applied the technique both to free-standing sculptures and, mostly, to flat panels. The latter become large “paintings” or collages, wherein the accumulated buttons, pieces of jewelry (necklaces, chains, pearls, brooches, fake gems), crockery shards, shells, become an all-over painting (the works are assembled by predominant color) filled with individual incidents: a pearl necklace snaking down one edge, tiny details of watch faces and political badges. The works in their quality of densely impacted imagery, wherein the details are lost in the whole, but are then periodically recaptured as one looks again and focuses more closely, point back to similar qualities in Brainard’s “Gardens” and “Madonnas.” Moreover, in their preponderance of memory-evoking “camp” objects— necklaces, jewels, dolls, toys, etc.—they are reminiscent of Brainard’s early assemblages, albeit translated to (more or less) two dimensions. Where Brainard’s assemblages foreshadow Cockette visual style, Kelley has in fact acknowledged the troupe as an influence.26 Brainard’s writing and his visual art are components of a single artistic oeuvre, but their relationship to each other may not be self-evident. I Remember is certainly an “assemblage,” of elements “found” in his consciousness, yet comprises not only amusing childhood impressions whose ingenuous tone may relate to that of the collages, but also real-time self-examination, and graphic sexual and bodily embarrassments and humiliations, which seem to have no overt counterpart in his visual art (such as the unwanted sexual encounter with the “very fat and ugly and really very disgusting” butcher described early in I Remember).27 In his 2011 book Humiliation, poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum posits a surprising correlation between humilation and the physical act of folding: “I don’t know why I’m convinced that humiliation resembles a fold, but I can’t erase this conviction. Through the action of folding, the outer and inner realms change places. Think of a defendant, in a trial, seeing his or her underwear presented by the prosecutor. An object that should be private and unseen is suddenly visible.”28 Perhaps one can’t make too much of this, despite whatever part “folding” (or unfolding) may play in the act of creating assemblage and collage, yet the echo of James Schuyler’s studio visit is uncanny: “An unromantic pair/of jockey shorts. One/thinks of da Vinci/painting rags dipped in/plaster, perfecting the way/he painted folds.”

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The whole of Mike Kelley’s multivalent oeuvre, grounded as it is in memories of a suburban misfit’s embarrassments and epiphanies—from the reimagining of a lost school play interpolated from a single photograph in a high school yearbook, to a composite model of every school he ever attended, to recreations of Superman’s encapsulated lost homeland Kandor— might be taken as “memory ware,” or one big visual iteration of I Remember, especially its physically embarrassing and awkward moments. Arguably, the oeuvres of both Brainard and Kelley come to associate the primacy of memory with the condition of being alive, thus also invoking the annihilation of memory, which is death. ‘In an artwork you’re always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.’—Damien Hirst29

Figure 6.6 Joe Brainard, Cinzano (1974). Oil on canvas, 48 x 36½ inches. Collection of Anne Dunn. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard.

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Cinzano (1974), Joe Brainard’s largest oil painting at four by three feet, is actually an assembly of sixteen smaller paintings, arranged as a grid of four rows of four, each depicting a triangular porcelain restaurant ashtray bearing the Cinzano vermouth logo and holding three or four cigarette butts. The image is the same but the painting style is somewhat different in each panel, a theme with variations, suggesting a succession of days or hours or parties or meals or conversations with friends. While the repetition of the image is suggestive of Warhol, the distinctive and painterly treatment of each panel gives an effect totally unlike Warhol. Damien Hirst’s statement about ashtrays echos the faux-naïve tone of Brainard’s own writings. Brainard’s provocative (essay? prose poem?) “Smoke More” was apparently inspired by a wish that his friends would indeed smoke more cigarettes so as to be able to send the butts to him to use in collages and assemblages. As he wrote to Ron and Pat Padgett in 1966: I just want to know if you are still smoking Kents and if so if you would save the butts and send them to me. Or, as a matter of fact, as long as you are smoking any kind of filter cigarettes I’d like you to send them to me. I am on butts again and will be for some time. I am using them as a solid mass to surround a single object. Example: teddy bear. But it is very slow. I smoke as much as I possibly can already, but a day of smoking does not amount to much area-wise . . . 30

Cigarette butts are a leitmotiv in Brainard’s work. Brainard was a heavy smoker in his youth, and cigarettes, cigarette packages, individual cigarette butts, and ashtrays full of them feature prominently throughout his oeuvre. “Smoke More” led off his artist’s book The Cigarette Book, a collection of drawings and writings, and acknowledges their lethal nature: “The only thing that is wrong with people is that they don’t smoke enough. I smoke four packs a day and am proud of it. Why not? We all know that we are not going to die of cancer tomorrow, or the next day, and/or the next day as a matter of fact—so what is all the worry about?”31 One of his earliest mature works is the collage Untitled (Big Chesterfield) (1961–2), using packaging from that defunct brand. In assemblages from the mid-60s cigarette butts are sometimes massed by the hundreds, as described in the letter above. Gathered in this way they become more than the sum of their parts, prefiguring Damien Hirst’s giant ashtray sculptures filled with pungent cigarette butts.

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Brainard’s hundreds of individual drawings of cigarette butts, while un-emphatically drawn, become emotionally charged by sheer repetition: bent, exhausted, stubbed out: they present an ambivalent image of post-coital sexual satiety (or possibly dysfunction); of long nights’ conversations and confidences and betrayals in bars or Lower East Side apartments. When gathered into accumulations or piled in ashtrays they can suggest or symbolize the inexorable passage of time: another hour, day—another pleasure or perhaps dolor—passed and “dead” . . . but with the implication that a fresh cigarette is always waiting in the pack. Whenever I see one of Brainard’s cigarette drawings I think of Frank O’Hara’s famous lines, “oh god it’s wonderful/ to get out of bed/and drink too much coffee/and smoke too many cigarettes/and love you so much.”32 Cigarette butts are markers of the passage of time—single-stroke units, like the marks a prisoner makes on the wall of his cell to measure the days. Cigarettes are the solace and currency of prisoners and soldiers —those hyper-masculine (tattooed) gay archetypes—and the executed convict’s final pleasure, final breath. “The cigarette is the prisoner’s gentle companion. He thinks of it more than of his absent wife. His charming friendship with it is largely due to the elegance of its shape and the gestures it requires of his fingers and body” (Genet).33 They are tools of seduction and feint for vamps, wronged women, femmes fatales—and drag queens—in many a Hollywood—and underground—movie; and burn there (a slow burn) in scenes of love, lust, resistance, and boredom in real time like candle-clocks. The sexual suggestiveness of cigarette “butts” is not limited to their somewhat phallic appearance. A simple-minded pun adds a notion of reversal or fluidity of sexual roles: phallus equals anus; active is passive; penetrator is penetrated. Like the Pansy, the Nancy, the Butterfly and the Our Lady of the Flowers images, the Butts through purely linguistic association can be signifiers of “polymorphous perversity,” metamorphosis itself, and on a more mundane level, the gay subculture. Cigarette butts are the lowest of the low—squashed—extinguished— dirty—degraded—they are beneath our notice—trash. In the 1950s when Brainard was growing up, and the mid-1960s, when he made these works, the culture as a whole regarded homosexuals in much the same terms. But even without that additional, probably unconscious association, to embrace them, to make art of them (and not just their graphically appealing labels) was a defiant gesture. The cigarette butt, lowly, tubular, and truncated, is the ugly caterpillar that metamorphoses into, is completed by, the glorious butterfly.

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Butterflies appear regularly and unapologetically in Brainard’s work, but not, indeed, as frequently or prominently as cigarette butts—or flowers. Even for him they might have seemed a little . . . redundant. Joe may have felt there was no need for him to make a major statement with butterflies—mariposa that he was—while the many flowers in his work, in their colorful loveliness and transience, stood in for them in a way. Perhaps straight male artists can use the butterfly image with more piquancy and effectiveness than a gay artist. Damien Hirst is a provocateur. A significant component of his artistic practice—one might say one of his mediums—is shock and awe: whole animals encased in formaldehyde; “paintings” consisting of a surface of dead flies; a human skull encrusted with a fortune in diamonds; and his newest Gesamtkunstwerk, a collection of monumental luxury artifacts salvaged from an entirely fictional lost civilization. In a way his life work could be viewed as an attempt to carry out the impossible project of Schuyler’s “Fabergé” literally (or should we say, literal-mindedly?). Here is a shark made out of a real shark. He deliberately courts enormous themes: life and death and (im)mortality. As such his goals, practice, and persona could not be less like Brainard’s, whose personal and professional modesty was legendary, and who cultivated an esthetic of smallness. Still: Hirst creates giant ashtrays filled with a mountain of normalsized, extinguished cigarette butts, and writes about ashtrays and cigarette butts in a way that exalts their significance, with a fauxnaïveté that sounds like Brainard. The butterfly is an even more prominent archetype in Hirst’s work. In his oeuvre’s welter of unexpected images and biological specimens the metamorphosis of “butt” into “butterfly” is not made explicit, but is perhaps implied. Again, Hirst’s presumed heterosexuality lends this potentially queer motif a certain piquancy: on enormous panels covered with hundreds of luminous and vividly colored butterfly wings arranged like tesserae, he creates mandalas and other symmetrical and centrifugal images with the jewel brilliance of stained glass windows. The result is a delirious, disorienting, swirling beauty similar, though on a much larger scale, to Brainard’s Gardens and Madonnas, encompassing some of the same half-acknowledged religious connotations. Brainard’s last gallery show in his lifetime, at Fischbach Gallery in 1975, included over 1,500 collages. Some were tiny, but all were fully realized, and all were sold for low prices, or given away to friends. A few years later he simply stopped making or showing art (except for a late series of wash drawings in collaboration with his

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partner Kenward Elmslie in 1989) and as legend has it, spent the rest of his life reading novels. There is an oft-published photograph of Brainard’s Greene Street loft in 1975 when he was at the height of making the collages for his Fischbach exhibition, showing the floor nearly covered with heaps of paper scraps (arranged by color), source material for collages. The floor of the loft appears now, in retrospect, an installation piece: a tranche of the continuous flow of material that he loved and collected and recombined and sent out. By the late 1970s Brainard had also published over one hundred book covers, illustrations, fliers, or announcements for his poet friends’ books, periodicals, and readings, probably at no charge. I view all these sheets—the collages, illustrations, announcements, magazine pages, etc., so freely given—as comparable in a certain way to Félix González-Torres’s stacks of printed posters or piles of wrapped candies offered in gallery and museum exhibitions for viewers to take away. Gonzáles-Torres (1957–96) used a light

Figure 6.7 Yale Joel, Joe Brainard in his Loft (1975). Photograph. Reproduced by permission of John Brainard.

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touch to draw attention to the transience and fragility of life, to counter disappearance with generosity in the face of his own AIDS diagnosis. His strings of light bulbs festooned artlessly across gallery ceilings, his beaded curtains drawn across white-cube spaces, speak poetically and un-emphatically of theatricality emptied and bleached like an over-exposed photo, vacant nightclubs, the presence of an absent performance. His stacks of printed posters and broadsides, which form impressive rectangular solids like the minimalist sculptures of Carl Andre and others when first set out, gradually shrink and disappear as gallery-goers heed the explicit instructions to take away the individual sheets. So too the wrapped hard candies piled up in gallery corners or formed into small mountains on the floor like Robert Smithson works, are also intended to disappear as visitors help themselves (but, like the paper stacks, are replenished periodically). Gonzáles-Torres’s queering of 1970s Minimalist prototypes reminds me of Brainard’s own queer versions of Conceptual Art in some of his late writings. An artist of his time, Brainard was familiar with notions of “the dematerialization of the art object” as explored in Lucy Lippard’s anthology of that title (1973), describing works by Yoko Ono, Lee Lozano (who also “retired” from art-making), and others presented simply as texts proposing actions or evoking objects. His text pieces, “Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises)” and “Ten Imaginary Still Lifes” (collected 1981) could well be gentle parodies of Ono or Lozano, or simply of general tendencies of the time. But of course they were serious too, as Joe generally was. By the time I visited it, Joe’s loft was bare. He appeared to have no possessions and his stated ideal was a simplicity of life comparable to Gandhi’s. In hindsight, the freedom and generosity with which Brainard distributed his works feels as intrinsic to it as the actual assemblages, paintings, writings, collages, or drawings. In the parable that was both his life and his art, Joe Brainard gave away himself.

Notes 1. James Schuyler, unpublished holograph notebook, private collection. 2. James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993), 268. Used with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the James Schuyler Literary Trust. © The James Schuyler Literary Trust.

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3. Schuyler, Collected Poems, 1993, 13. Used with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the James Schuyler Literary Trust. © The James Schuyler Literary Trust 4. Schuyler, Collected Poems, 254. Used with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the James Schuyler Literary Trust. © The James Schuyler Literary Trust. 5. Joe Brainard and Tim Dlugos, “The Joe Brainard Interview,” originally published in Little Caesar 10, 1980, reprinted in The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (New York: The Library of America, 2012), p. 497. 6. Joe Brainard, letter to Sue Schempf, January, 1962, unpublished. Courtesy the Estate of Joe Brainard. 7. Andy Warhol and G. R. Swenson, “‘What is Pop Art?” Answers from 8 Painters, Part I’ (interview), ARTnews, November 1963; reprinted in Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962–1987 (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), p. 16. 8. Brainard and Dlugos, “The Joe Brainard Interview,” p. 498. 9. Joe Brainard, “Letter to Ted Berrigan,” May 20, 1963, Published in C magazine Number 2, June 1963 (n.p.). Courtesy the estate of Joe Brainard. 10. Schuyler, Collected Poems, 12–13. Used with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the James Schuyler Literary Trust. © The James Schuyler Literary Trust. 11. William Corbett (ed.), Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951–1991 (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2004), p. 298. 12. Ibid. pp. 304–5. 13. Schuyler, Collected Poems, 99–100. Used with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the James Schuyler Literary Trust. © The James Schuyler Literary Trust. 14. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” published in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Noonday Press, 1966), pp. 283, 291–2. 15. Ron and Pat Padgett, “An Interview with Joe Brainard’ (c. 1964), Bean Spasms (New York: Kulchur, 1967); reprinted in Constance M. Lewallen et al., Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, ex. cat. (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, and New York: Granary Books, Inc., 2001), p. 96. 16. Brainard and Dlugos, “The Joe Brainard Interview,” 493 (ellipses in the original). 17. James Schuyler, “Joe Brainard: Notes and Quotes,’ ARTnews, April 1967; reprinted in Simon Pettet (ed.), James Schuyler, Selected Art Writings (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), p. 76. 18. Ibid. 19. Brainard and Dlugos, “The Joe Brainard Interview,” p. 499.

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20. Joe Brainard, “Diary for Friday, May 9, 1969,” New Work (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973); reprinted in Brainard, Collected Writings, 236. He was speaking specifically of his drawings illustrating Ron Padgett and David Shapiro’s An Anthology of New York Poets (New York: Random House, 1970). 21. Richard Prince, “Interview with Larry Clark,” in Lisa Phillips et al., Richard Prince, ex. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), p. 174. 22. John Ashbery, “Brainard-Freeman Notebooks,” Gegenschein Quarterly, 1975; reprinted in Joe Brainard: Selections from the Butts Collection at UCSD (San Diego: Mandeville Gallery, University of California at San Diego, 1987), n.p. 23. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146. 24. Quoted in Roger Taylor, “Prince,” World Art Magazine, 1993: 71. 25. Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967), p. 176. 26. Eva Meyer-Hermann, “Interview with Mike Kelley,” November 7, 2011, in Eva Meyer-Hermann and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Mike Kelley, ex. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum and Munich, London, New York: Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2012), p. 368. 27. Joe Brainard, I Remember, reprinted in Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 8. 28. Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation (New York: Picador, 2011), p. 15. 29. “Damien Hirst Quotes,” n.d., BrainyQuote.com, (accessed November 29, 2017). 30. Joe Brainard, “Letter to Ron and Pat Padgett, February, 1966,” in Lewallen et al., Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, pp. 107–8. 31. Joe Brainard, The Cigarette Book (New York: Siamese Banana, 1972); reprinted in Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 419. 32. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 179. 33. Genet, Miracle of the Rose, p. 18.

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Chapter 7

Boom: Joe Brainard 1961–1963 Ron Padgett

Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life and work, 1961 and 1962—just after he moved at age eighteen to New York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who, having moved to New York about the same time as he, were nearby. His few surviving letters to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of brief, perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters and postcards has surfaced, providing important details on this period. The correspondence was addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to him. The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows. At some point she bought one of his collages (Figure 7.1), a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come fifteen years later.

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Figure 7.1 Joe Brainard, Untitled (1960). Mixed media collage, 25 x 22½ inches. Collection of E. G. Schempf.

Joe had a few other patrons as well, among them Ella Rengers, whom he had befriended during his brief stay at the Dayton Art Institute in the autumn of 1960 (a few months before he moved to New York City), and Tulsans Faye and Dave Rich, about whom I know nothing. At one point Joe told Schempf that the total patronage amounted to $25 per month, which was enough to cover exactly half the rent of the ratty two-room storefront he was living in by January 21 of 1961, a place that had neither tub nor hot water. Joe set about making the grungy place habitable, battling the cockroaches, cleaning its big plate glass window, placing plants in the window,

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and adding a large white pull-down shade for privacy and at least a hint of spiffiness. Here, at 210 East 6th Street, his friend, the poet Ted Berrigan, soon arrived from Tulsa. They alternated sleeping on the single bed, Ted during the day and Joe at night. On January 28 Joe mailed Schempf the first of what would become repeated reminders (Figure 7.2, for example) about his $5 monthly installment.

Figure 7.2 Joe Brainard, Untitled (May 1961). Collage and ink, 11 x 8½ inches. Collection of E. G. Schempf.

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This one he signed “Joe Brainard, Maker of charts,” “Needer of money,” “Hater of snow,” “Lover of money,” “Liker of N.Y.,” and “Wanter of money.” Meanwhile, he plunged into the extraordinary visual art treasures of the city—its museums, art galleries, and movie theaters. By February 14 he had begun attending a life drawing class twice a week, an indication of his interest in what he called “a new direction: realism,” a turnabout that came as a shock to him. One wonders, however, about how much realism was in what he described as an enormous collage he had just done on his wall. By April he was back in Tulsa, where he joined local artist Nylajo Harvey and her husband Bob on a car trip to Mexico, where they stayed for at least several weeks, visiting Nylajo’s expatriate artist friend John Nevin, who was living in Marfil, a ghost town near Guanajuato. Joe wrote to Schempf (on March 11, his nineteenth birthday): “Loving Mexico; my new work; & life in general. Also, me.” On May 12 he mailed Schempf an illustrated letter saying that he was back in Tulsa for two weeks, that he was having a quick show there of work from New York and Mexico, that once back in New York he would enroll in art school, and that she should remember to send him the usual five dollars. It seems odd that, being in Tulsa, he would not have met with her or even mentioned the possibility of a meeting. He sent her another reminder in late June, as he urgently needed rent ($24) and deposit money for a new apartment, this one a fifthfloor walkup at 93 First Avenue. With such a low rent, he felt he would be able to save money for art school. Until his letters to Schempf came to light, I did not remember Joe’s wanting to go to art school back then. I also did not recall his having patrons other than Ellen Rengers. My impression was that he had made a more definite break with Tulsa and had rejected the idea of going to art school. By the third week of July he had moved and had resumed painting, studying art history, going to lectures (on what subjects we do not know) twice a week, and reading a lot (books such as R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of Art). Of his own paintings, Joe mentioned their “mysterious feeling, almost expressing fear.” A month later he wrote Schempf that he had been doing mostly oil paintings, but the medium was proving too expensive, and that he wanted to attend the Art Students League to study under Robert Brackman. Because the school did not accept scholarship requests until the student had been enrolled for three months, he needed his patron money more than ever. His own work was getting stronger, but he felt “so anxious to develop” and he knew that “school will help so much.”

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In September he started class at the Art Students League, and in the first week made what he thought was serious progress. Brackman enthusiastically praised his drawings. Joe was working toward what he called “an intellectual personal form of realism.” In characterizing contemporary art as “a form of chaos, a transformation period between Abstract Expressionism and God knows what,” he might have been describing his own transformational period at the time. In any case, New York was the right place for him to be: “Always something new and great to see and do. It’s so stimulating; I don’t see how I could ever live in Tulsa again. It’s a big evil depressing city at times too; especially in my area. I never knew people could be so lost and the world so cruel. Every day I see two-year-old kids using words I don’t even use. And bloody drunken bums lying in the street half nude. I can’t walk two blocks any time of the day without beggars (lots of ’em) grabbing your arm and pleading for ten cents or a cigarette. Also queers and dope addicts all over the place. It really isn’t so dangerous, just damn depressing.” But ultimately “I feel at home here; I can really be myself. I’m happy.” That is, he feels free to be himself, though he hasn’t quite figured out who that self is, namely that he is queer, though from his I Remember we learn that he had intimations of it as far back as high school. Meanwhile his patrons grew casual about remembering to send their monthly installments, so he had sold his books, clothes, and blood, was eating little, and had to walk everywhere—to museums, galleries, and more than fifty blocks to school—and when his few friends left town to go home for Christmas, he was so lonely he drank six whiskey sours and spent all night and the next morning doing his first piece of writing, later titled “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night, Year 1961 Age 19 Almost 20; Homage to George,” in which he described how he had broken away from the constraints of life back in Tulsa. He also talked about his attitude toward money, a necessity whose tyranny he hated. A week later he told Schempf, “I know how valuable my time is and I plan to never ever get a job again.” (As unrealistic as this desire sounds, it pretty much came true.) And though he had broken from Tulsa, he was still attached to it: “I want Tulsa to see what I’m doing.” I think he meant that he wanted certain people there to see his new work, for in other letters he showed little respect for the level of taste among Tulsa’s art lovers, many of whom bought art mainly to decorate their homes. At various points Joe tried, unsuccessfully, to clarify what he meant by the “realism” he was pursuing. In its most elementary form it’s

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simply classically trained draftsmanship and figurative art, though with the figuration placed in an abstract setting or transformed by surprising colors, but by early January of 1962 he referred to using “pasted and painted labels . . . . They denote truth, the way things are . . . . I have found that so many great works of art are disturbing because they ‘face up to things’ in the way they really are.” His defense of this form of realism was in response to Schempf’s criticism of some of his new work. “I’m finding my work more beautiful every day because of its ‘truth.’ I find truth to be the highest, and perhaps the wildest, form of beauty. I hope you’ll see this in my newest work . . . that it will demonstrate a new concept of beauty, and a new concept of form and composition which is highly original.” This is not the tentative voice of the Joe I knew in high school, who had been docile, self-effacing, and eager to please others. Approaching his twentieth birthday, he had now embraced the life he had chosen: “I’ll probably [be] a kid all my life; which suits me. I mean, I don’t want to take on all the responsibilities of being ‘mature’ . . . I already feel I’m mature in the ways I want to be mature in; self-dependent, a purpose for living or a reason for not committing suicide, and faith in myself.” Besides, he is chock-full of ideas about his work: “Didn’t go to bed last night at all, and I’m dead tired, but too excited about the work I’ve been doing the past few weeks to really be sleepy.” Later that month (March), his attachment to Tulsa resurfaced, when he was disappointed to learn that Philbrook, the local museum, had accepted only one of his pieces for their Oklahoma Annual show, rejecting the four others he had submitted. Nevertheless, he hoped “to make it home for a couple weeks this summer.” Home. At this point Schempf offered him a show in her frame shop, for which he planned on sending her about thirty pieces, mostly small ones. He hoped to be back in Tulsa in early June, but he wouldn’t be able to stay more than two weeks, for he had “work to do and a thousand new ideas. I’ve never heard of an artist being overly creative, but this seems to be my problem. I have so many different ideas all at once, that I can’t get them all done, nor really develop any one of them.” In an artist who was so heavily visual and instinctive in his grasp of form—“though subject matter does exist in my work, form does dominate”—all his talk about ideas sounds unusual until we consider that he is spending most of his time with no one to talk with except himself and that by this point he was occasionally using the Desoxyn (a pep pill) supplied by Berrigan, which also might explain his all-night painting sprees. During this entire period Joe and Ted collaborated on a number of poem-pictures. When Schempf saw the ones that had words typed

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Figure 7.3 Joe Brainard in collaboration with Ted Berrigan, Untitled (American Flag) (1962). Mixed media, 12 x 16 inches. Collection of Ron and Patricia Padgett.

and scribbled on images of American flags, she was so offended that she cancelled Joe’s exhibition at her frame shop, giving the work to artist Bob Bartholic for him to show at his gallery. Figure 7.3 shows one collaborative flag from 1962, though I don’t know if it was among the ones Schempf disliked so much. Joe replied to Schempf, defending his work: “I’m an artist and paint what I must. I am to be criticized for this? I adore America and these collages are my comment on it. My flags were done with love of spirit in mind. . . . I could never think of them as unpatriotic . . . . Believe me, the American flag has a deep meaning to me too.” He continues: “To call my collages trash is downright cruel. I have no intention of shocking the world. I only want to live in and with it, and to create from it. My intentions are of the finest, and I deserve to be admired for this . . . I can not be false in order to please.” He concludes his letter feeling rueful that he and Schempf have such different views, but he will not back down. He promises to repay her $54 she’s given him, as well as the $11.50 she spent on shipping. Schempf’s son recently told me that after this she never bought another painting from Joe—and it’s likely she stopped sending the stipend—but that later in her life she regretted having been so narrow-minded.

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Joe almost never dated his letters, but one of them, perhaps his final one to Schempf, mentions his attending a Swedish film festival at the Museum of Modern Art, a series that started on October 10, 1962, and ran for three months. The letter begins, “It sure was nice hearing from you. (I’m pretending you wrote me a letter.)” Then he goes on for a number of pages talking as usual about his life and work, as if there had never been a major rift with her. For example, “With oils, I’ve been doing still lifes, women, and self-portraits. Before that, working mostly with collages, I got deeply into pure abstraction. (For the first time in my life.) And per usual, many side tracks and branches.” This moving back and forth between media and styles proved typical of the rest of his artistic life. By the end of 1962 Joe was feeling that for personal and artistic reasons he needed to make a radical change. His artistic direction had become unclear, and, though he never mentioned it, his sexual

Figure 7.4 Joe Brainard, Untitled (1962). Gouache, 23 x 17½ inches. Collection of Ron and Patricia Padgett.

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orientation remained unclear. He decided to move to a city where he knew no one and where he had neither lodging nor a job. On January 9, 1963, after giving or lending friends the few artworks he hadn’t sold or destroyed, and taking with him only one suitcase and a small amount of money, he took a bus to Boston. The approximately ten months he spent there were fraught with loneliness, poverty (to the point of begging and picking up used cigarette butts off the street), depression (sometimes expressed in a semidelirium), and virtual starvation, though eventually he did manage to get part-time work with an advertising agency and at one point at a map company. During those ten months, he began making collages and small assemblages that led him to feel, as he put it in an excited letter to Berrigan, dated May 20, that he had “grown three inches,” and in June in a letter to my wife Pat he called his new work “the greatest things ever seen.”

Figure 7.5 Joe Brainard, Untitled (Boom) for Some Bombs (1963). Mixed media collage, gouache, and ink, 11 x 8½ inches. Collection of Ron and Patricia Padgett.

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By then the pull of New York had reasserted itself, and he vowed to return as soon as he had saved enough money for an apartment there. It turned out that extra money remained scarce, but in October he came back anyway, staying with Pat and me in our one-bedroom apartment on West 88th Street, sleeping on the living room couch. We three got along very well, even though—or perhaps because— now there was something different about him, a confidence or determination, though entirely without swagger. He was also without any privacy or work space, so the pieces he created on 88th Street were quite small. By late December, thanks to Ted, he began sharing an apartment on East 9th Street with the poet Tony Towle. There, with more space, Joe quickly created a startling number of assemblages, haunting,

Figure 7.6 Joe Brainard, Black K (1963). Mixed media collage, 19½ x 14½ inches. Owner anonymous. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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hallucinatory, and beautiful. One of them was built on a toy piano— it had only eight keys—painted baby blue, from which rose a gloved wrist holding an ice cream cone a snake was ascending, along with toy figurines of two Vikings, one of them climbing the wrist, which he gave (or sold for very little) to Frank O’Hara. The assemblages he created in 1963 and 1964 went into his first solo exhibition in New York, at the Alan Gallery, in January of 1965. His subsequent exhibitions over the years also had coherent themes or media: small collages, drawings, oil paintings, cut-outs, or what he called “gardens.” Years later he acknowledged that he never created a signature style, but I think that can be seen as something of a signature syle in itself. In any case, by 1964 his work had taken on a new power. Joe had come into his own as an artist, but it would not have happened without the courage, persistence, and exploration of the few previous years.

Acknowledgments I owe a great debt to E. G. Schempf, who generously provided not only copies of Joe’s letters to Sue Schempf and other crucial information but also invaluable help improving my amateur photographs of Joe’s work. Thanks also go to Siobhán Padgett, George Kaiser, Patricia Padgett, Bill Bamberger, Bill Zavatsky, Bill Katz, Christine Rogers, and Wayne Padgett, who provided help and advice along the way. —R.P.

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Chapter 8

Joe Brainard’s Still-Life Poetics Jess Cotton

In his 1964 Shadow Box, Joe Brainard draws upon the enclosed hermetic miniature worlds of Joseph Cornell, opening up his realms of glass-enclosed innocence to an aesthetics of childish irreverence and queer pleasure

Figure 8.1 Joe Brainard, Shadow Box (1964). Mixed media collage with assemblage. Photograph by Los Angeles Modern Auctions.

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Where Cornell’s shadow boxes lock art into the atemporal world of dreams, Brainard’s more provisional art work, with its wooden blue frame and paint that drips down its façade, does not so much enclose the dark childlike figure at its center as open it up to a more everyday and curious kind of wonderment. On the reverse side of the box is a lovingly creased packet of Marlboro cigarettes, a recurrent motif and material of so much of Brainard’s work, atop of which perch a plastic globe and two dinosaur figurines. It draws his own work into proximity with Cornell’s childlike way of seeing, whilst making that innocent world more tangible and intimate with our own. The work is exemplary of Brainard’s disarmingly simple and playful reinventions of the minor traditions in which he moves. It demonstrates his expansive sense of the pliability of objects, the plasticity of commodity forms and of his ability to draw out a more tactile affect from within the still genre. In Brainard’s work, re-imagining the still life is a way of making possible a fluid subject-object relation that challenges the configuration of otherness and which celebrates the difference or the animacy that is contained within the still. Linda Cathcart argues that “the still life as a subject is the most deliberate in all art” for it only exists in the arrangements that the artist creates “in actuality or in the mind, or through the lens of a camera.”1 But in Brainard’s work, there is little deliberation or contrivance. The subject is constantly becomingobject and in its constant becomings, it directs us back to the body as a vital site for re-visualizing queer identities and finding new ways of imagining materiality. The images consequently acquire a tenderness and a textuality that disrupts the the optic logic of modern visuality and privileges a more tactile and embodied way of seeing. If form is the response to an aesthetic question, then Brainard’s still lifes might be thought of as ways of reminding the viewer that the art object is not something that we merely look through, but which we look with. In Brainard’s still lifes, an analogy is drawn between queer bodies and object-becoming that is seen as generative precisely because it finds vitality in passivity and the feminized affects that are traditionally viewed as aesthetically subordinate. Still life is, as Elisha Cohn writes, “an aesthetics of suspended development.”2 To dwell in still life is to occupy a feminine space and temporality associated with inactivity and laborlessness. The male viewer or male artist who partakes in this space and who takes pleasure in its sensuous detail has consequently, as Norman Bryson argues, been seen as putting his masculinity at risk.3 Brainard remarked that he would always be more of a Cornell or a Man Ray than a de Kooning or an Alex Katz.4 Which is to say that he would always see himself in a somewhat tangential relation to the

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art and poetry world. With one foot playfully outside, he refuses to settle for any one particular style or form. It is this tangential relation that gives his work freedom to move on its own terms between genres, disciplines, and traditions—creating work that is insistently juxtapositional and which, in this constant desire for such relation, draws closely to its object, to its subject, and to us. So that Brainard’s work is, in part, defined by the kinds of in-between movement and minimalism that characterizes the minor traditions in which he works and which allows us to see, as Gertrude Stein writes, that “If anything is natural enough it is not surprising.”5 This quality of surprise, which emerges from constantly contesting the boundaries of the natural within an everyday context (so that a comic child or a bunch of flowers might emerge unexpectedly from a used cigarette packet, creating an art that is defiantly conceived in the present tense) arises from the “shock and non-recognition” of identity which is so vital to Brainard’s work. For it is in conceiving art as a kind of constant unraveling, and in willingly accepting a lack of identity, that Brainard suggests that the artist or writer might discover new things about themselves in the moment of composition. The art itself is consequently alive to those gradual changes—to the feeling of one’s singularity and eccentricity emerging when one paints or writes oneself as another—and in being so charmed into the merits of this fluid notion of subjecthood, these changes and surprises become our own. For Brainard, art is transformative in its capacity to reveal a different kind of “truth” that emerges from, as he writes in a letter to Sue Schempf, his patron of the early 1960s, “the wildest, form of beauty.”6 His work draws out an eccentricity or a cuteness that serves to level aesthetic judgment, demonstrating how it is imbricated in mid-century culture with the commodity, and thus to redefine the idea of beauty as it is aesthetically known. In unraveling the analogy between the aesthetic judgment of beauty and the moral judgment of the good, Brainard radically expands the parameters of taste so that that which is traditionally thought of as against the good life (which is continually evoked in his work by the illicit pleasure of smoking) becomes, through a serial strategy of infinite variety, the focus of beauty in his work (through an endlessly inventive reimagining of the afterlife of cigarette butts).7 Beauty is conceived in his work not as the locus of the good but rather as a source of pleasure, of a jouissance whose destructiveness is neutralized by bringing it into proximity with embodied objects. Brainard’s art thus unravels the subject-object dualism according to which, as Leo Bersani notes, “the desire to know the other is inseparable from the need to master

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the other.”8 Brainard’s work is absent of any will-to-power or mastery and it is in this refiguration of the power/knowledge bind that objects are able to emerge on their own terms, through a more haptic and embodied way of seeing, which emerges when we accept the object’s particular unknowability. In the shadow box, as in many of his assemblages, Brainard’s work edges towards, though finally draws away from an aesthetics of kitsch:9 “Quite tacky with dignity,” is how he puts it in a prose sketch “A State of Flowers.”10 This ability to keep kitsch in play is nonetheless central to Brainard’s concerns, for it is in brushing up against sentimentality that he is able to refigure the parameters of taste, seducing us into a different kind of aesthetic valuation, one in which the wildness of beauty and the homeliness of the cute allow us to have our objects (and subjects) both ways at once. Whilst Clement Greenberg famously contests that kitsch is incommensurable with avant-garde aesthetic practice, in Brainard’s intimate and accommodating way of seeing, cute and kitsch become the locus of avantgarde affiliations.11 Brainard’s work effectively turns a modernist avant-garde assault on the sentimentality of commodity culture on its head so as to suggest that an aesthetic production of the cute and the kitsch is precisely where the mid-century avant-garde will need to draw its energies.12 This art, which is seemingly effortless and without any apparent agenda, other that to demonstrate how art might yield new kinds of pleasure, opens up new ways of seeing by undercutting the sharp distinctions in modernist aesthetics between good and bad taste, making that which is traditionally deemed undesirable, desirable, and which thus has significant implications for how desire is thought to inform aesthetic practice. Brainard’s work draws out the feminine and subordinate positions on which the cute depends for its affect so as to suggest how the fetishization of powerlessness that is inscribed in the cute object might be transformed into a vital passivity that allows us to see the object more clearly.13 Brainard’s relation to the “cute” might be read as a particularly queer one. Queer identity has been enabled, as Elisa Glick and Kevin Floyd have persuasively argued, by a simultaneous embracing of, and distancing from, commodity aesthetics.14 The intensity with which objects are imagined in Brainard’s work and the closeness that is materialized in it suggests an embeddedness that draws out analogies with bodily presence, and the queer body in particular. His work creates a constantly oscillating movement between a haptic and visual way of looking, between a closeness and distance to the work that gives it an erotic quality and allows its objects, as John Ashbery notes,

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to “bathe in curative newness.”15 Brainard’s work is curative in the sense that it pushes back against a mediated seriality that reduces objects to commercial products and which prevents us from being intimate with them. It is curative in the sense that it eschews notions of the good life which, as Sara Ahmed notes, are bound up with “the historic privileging of heterosexual conduct” and “reciprocal forms of aspiration.”16 This curative dynamics in Brainard’s art might be thought of as indicative of its queerness in as much as it takes asocial pleasures as exemplary and recasts them as the premise of intimacy and sociality on which the work depends. The attentiveness to the art (or the destructive jouissance) of smoking in Brainard’s work is exemplary of this kind of asociality in its refusal to let go of “childish” delights, or to kick the habit.17 In Brainard’s work, the cigarette butt is the locus of a kind of wild beauty that is demonstrative of the possibility of all non-productive objects (and subjects) to signify otherwise and to take on curious and contiguous afterlives. The creation of new kinds of intimacy is dependent on a different valuation of pleasure, one that draws out new possible relations between sexuality and aesthetic forms. In drawing out the kitschiness of aesthetic production, whilst refusing to view such aesthetics in bad taste, Brainard is unmistakably working within a camp sensibility, one that is invested in a performativity of identity and in a revaluation of “waste” material. This materialism undercuts the purity and aesthetic distance of modernism and “recycles” its cultural value, recentering the bodies and affects that are exorcised from the masculine abstraction it sponsors. Susan Sontag argues that queer artists have a particularly important role to play in the formation of the avant-garde at mid-century. For “they are creators of sensibilities,” a word which, she notes, “is one of the hardest things to talk about” because, like affect, it resists definition and preserves a vital ambiguity through which the parameters of taste are expanded and modified.18 To recast the cute as avant-garde, or rather to locate cuteness in avant-garde practice, is to acknowledge how minor aesthetic positions are associated with, and negotiated through, the marginal status and ambiguous affects of the feminine and the childlike. It is also to acknowledge the intimate relation between feminine and queer subjects and the rise of consumer aesthetics. In Brainard’s work, it is in becoming proximate with commodities and in dramatizing subjectivity in the moment of consumption that a seductive proliferation of selves is enabled, one that emerges as a kind of production line of identity (as is exemplified in the use of the camera as a queer technology of self in I Remember) that capitalism sponsors.

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Though he was a voracious collector of ephemera and bric-abrac, which he turned into his dazzling assemblages, Brainard’s work has nothing in common with the inexorable logic of the collection and the impenetrable totality that it gestures towards. His work is interested rather in a more contingent, accumulative, and textural logic, which has the effect of making us more attentive to its detail. In homing in on detail that we can “microscopically indulge in,” as he writes in his chapbook Nothing To Write Home About (1981), he creates a kind of art that, in sponsoring intimacy, does not cast the object as the subject’s other but which is rather invested in the ways in which a loss of boundaries of self might allow for the circulation of indeterminate erotic expression.19 In at once making taste the subject of the art work and (good) taste beside the point, Brainard’s seductive egalitarian vision opens up the possibility of seeing queer subjects and objects anew by drawing them into new proximities through the use of collage, assemblage, serial forms, and still life. Brainard’s work takes up familiar objects (cigarettes, matches, underpants) and sexually loaded subjects (pansies, a two-and-a-half year old child smoking, an androgynous comic child-character called Nancy) to demonstrate the possibility of their continual re-definition and to allow us to see queer (and child) subjects in ways that are generally occluded from cultural representation. The ability to posit such provocative images as If Nancy was an Ashtray depends not on the ability to shock but rather on the carefully calibrated lightness of the work, which does not allow us to take it too seriously, and which thus has the effect, as Paul de Man writes of irony, of troubling definitional language and traditional reading practices, blurring generic categories; but which, unlike irony, does not seek to distance itself from its subject.20 The faux-naïveté of Brainard’s style, which is exemplified in his queer reinvention of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip heroine, makes for the closest kind of reading, one which, as he suggests in the array of sexual encounters in the Nancy Book, is a kind of candidness that has the effect of neutralizing aesthetic distinctions and sexual perversions, opening up the boundaries of the self so as to rethink how pleasures are conceived in and through aesthetic forms. The fauxnaïve is so important to Brainard’s work because it privileges a more affective kind of seeing, and it implicitly suggests that a subordinate position (one that is typically occupied by feminine and queer subjects) might have a better purchase on reality because it understands the importance of emotion in informing how we see, which is lost in more totalizing and abstract modes of thought. Faux-naïveté allows

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for a greater attention to detail, for a kind of easiness that is also a vital form of attentiveness, as is suggested by the following passage from a diary entry, “Saturday, December the 11th, 1965,” whereby the permissiveness and suggestiveness—the queerness—of W. H. Auden’s work is what allows for a different model of reading—one that is predicated on simplicity—and which, in turn, materializes the objects concerned: I put in my new light bulb and walked around on my four new scatter rugs so they won’t be quite so bright. I have four new scatter rugs. I watered my plants and changed my sweater and sat down in my director’s chair and read The Platonic Blow by W. H. Auden. I was surprise at how easy it was to read.21

The repetition of the phrase serves, as in Stein’s work, to bring the object more fully into view, to make it idiosyncratic and thus more “like people,” as Ashbery writes in a review of Stein’s work.22 In the passage, this illumination-through-materialization seems predicated on the easiness of a camp kind of humor and on the multiplicity of relationships and formless friendships which, as Foucault argues, the “desirability of homosexuality” brings into view.23 Brainard’s art demonstrates that a breaking down of the body’s boundaries need not destroy the self, unless that selfhood holds tight to an inviolable, self-sufficient image of itself. In his work, by constantly oscillating between a closeness and distance to his subject matter, he opens up the body and the object to constant difference or to repetition as gradual change, as in Stein’s version of it. In drawing out the formlessness of certain aesthetic and bodily boundaries, Brainard is able to suggest a more “personal” way of seeing which, much like the miniature, retains the frisson of intimacy. A work that is imbued with queer intimacies, as Brainard’s is, is one that is invested in creating a more porous kind of relationality, one that has the “capacity to desire” as Bersani contends, the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to, without conceiving of them as boundary violations.24 Brainard is interested in art that is animate and tactile, that emerges from and feeds back into the world. His is a kind of art that fits like a glove (to adopt an analogy that is offered on the flyer he designed for his 1974 reading with Patti Smith) or which is so close to the body that it might be tattooed onto it (as in the image that accompanies his 1971 reading with Bill Berkson). This principle of tactile intimacy informs the collaborative spirit of Brainard’s work and it allows for a kind of art that is conceived at the point where two objects (or two bodies) touch. This

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aesthetics recognizes, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, that “people [and objects] are different from each other,” and it allows for that difference by revealing how, when in proximity, these embodied objects open up new potential virtualities of relation.25 Brainard’s work enthuses—it is, as he notes in an interview, driven by no more complex logic than that which he takes pleasure in. As Edmund White notes: 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.26

The pleasurable circulation of affect and value in his work is characteristic of an art form which, as Roland Barthes notes, exceeds its demand, which is “so radically ambiguous (ambiguous to the root) that the text never succumbs to the good conscience (and bad faith) of parody (of castrating laughter, of ‘the comical that makes us laugh’).”27 Brainard’s work creates a far more subtle effect than parody; it takes the comical as its subject rather than its tone. The subversiveness of the work is equivalent to the warmth with which it imbues its objects and subjects, and which throws a spanner in the work of the kind of critical distance that modern art, and particularly irony, inspires in its viewer. Humor, like style, is one of Brainard’s subjects and it is masterfully achieved through cultivating just the right amount of distance between the artist or writer and his work, as Brainard suggests in one of his “mini essays”: HUMOR “The man who slips on a banana peel may not think it’s very funny, but it is.”28

In fact, most of Brainard’s work is a way of closing the gap between the artist and his object, of pressing up so close against an object that the work takes on its contours and makes it almost impossible to see it “objectively” and thus to “interpret” it. This particular brand of lightness also depends on the contingent nature of the art work and its modes of circulation. Wayne Koestenbaum notes that James Schuyler’s work has an insistent modesty to it that refuses the kind of monumentality that ensures that art or poetry lasts and thus exists paradoxically in spite of itself.29 The same might be said to be true of the work of Brainard, who is interested in art that is “controlled . . . but never contrived,” that exists by virtue of its precarious production, by its laborlessness

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and its receptivity to constant detour as new ideas arise.30 Brainard’s work depends on a constant unsettling of the boundaries between abstraction and materialism, between poetry and painting, life and art, and it is in this constantly oscillating relation that he might be said to create what Sontag famously refers to as an “erotics of art,” which unravels the terms of criticism through which art and literature are traditionally thought.31 Brainard’s in-between, warm aesthetics might consequently be best read through a mode of haptic criticism which recognizes, as Lisa Roffel argues, how “desires take myriad forms and are materialised in the relationship between eroticism and the mundane labour it takes to get through life.”32 Haptic criticism, which, as Laura Marks notes, sponsors a tactile form of knowledge, has the advantage of “warming up” our cultural tendency to take a distance from the work of art and it allows us to see how Brainard’s work “maintain(s) a flow between sensuous closeness and symbolic distance” that allows for the freshness of continual (re)encounter.33 The possibility of sublime attentiveness to objects—to the wild beauty—that we see, for example, in Brainard’s still life Matches (1975) is predicated on attending to the intimacy of the objects’ arrangement, so that the focus of the work comes to center at the point where the matches touch. The precedent that is placed on the haptic in Brainard’s art allows us to see the particular value of each object’s difference and how their contingent arrangement is the form that the work takes. This contiguous arrangement might be thought of as continuous with the continual reinvention of style in Brainard’s work, which is made apparent in the animate patterning of cigarette butts in his 1972 work, Untitled (Cigarettes). Alongside this work, we might consider Brainard’s poetic abstraction, from one of his seventeen “mini-essays,” whereby matches are seen as continuous with Brainard’s restless artistic curiosity that leads him to continually experiment with new forms: It seems I am always looking for matches.34

In Brainard’s work, smoking—as his mock-manifesto “Smoke More” suggests—is libidinally and aesthetically invested. It is a metonym for the transformation of cultural surplus value into art and it is also indicative of the negative value of queer pleasure. To opt in to the destructive pleasure of smoking is to relinquish notions of control, legalization, and containment, or any notion of individual agency or a will-to-power. For smoking, as Avital Ronnell argues, “open(s) up the gulf of extra-erotic, extra-epistemic desire”35 The pleasure that

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it incites arises neither in the subject itself nor in the commodity but rather in the transformative space between them where the boundaries of gender and the division between the public and the private are constantly being conceptually shifted. By making cigarettes the motif and media of his work, Brainard suggests the importance of a non-exhaustive serial kind of pleasure. As his playfully conceptual, constantly deferred “Next to Last Cigarette” (1970) implies, smoking for Brainard is connected to an inexhaustible sequentiality that is predicated on the illusion of an ending. It is thus the metaphor-made-material par excellence of his work, which is always revealing itself in and through new mediums and styles. Smoking enables, it might even be said to create, as can be seen in his smoke-filled nude self-portrait, “Joe Brainard with Cigarette” (1972), the fantasy by which different sexual encounters might occur or different sexual identities might be brought into being. The nude is candid, as opposed to erotic, and it warmly invites the viewer to partake in this candidness—to share a cigarette with Brainard— which might be the iconic gesture of his work. Precisely because the cigarette is an undifferentiated product, one commodity in a neverending series, as Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno makes clear, to constantly imagine “the last cigarette” is to infinitely defer the possibility of ever satisfying desire. Smoking, as Richard Klein notes, shortcircuits the economy of the pleasure principle so that it “seems to run desire backward” and in this backward movement might be thought to evoke the atemporal nature of queer desire.36 Through the centrality of their role in advertisements and in cinema, their ability to define and redefine gender roles, cigarettes are deeply embedded in the aesthetics of the modern image and also, as Robyn Schiffman argues, in the history of queer identity.37 The irreverence with which Brainard pictorially and poetically imagines smoking is demonstrative of how gender and social boundaries might be shifted and re-occupied. The cigarette, as an emblem of feminine modernity, is used to embody shifting lines of identity in his work. In laying modernity momentarily to rest in the time of the still, envisaged as a languorous cigarette puff, pleasure is produced in the tangible space that is opened up between subject and object. The still time of smoking, as Judith Brown notes, allows for “a space devoted to nothing, to the nothing that simultaneously opens up one perceptual dimension while shutting off another.” It is in this negative space that the smoker can move “out of the material world of demands, responsibilities, and attention to productivity” and imagine one that is run along less productive, more pleasurable lines.38 The

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pleasure of smoking is intimately bound up with ways of embodying images and thus also with ways of un-reifying sexual desire. In rematerializing the commodified object, Brainard’s work destabilizes the border between production and consumption and, therefore, the ways that public and private images are produced and brought into circulation. Re-materializing the image articulates the possibility of creating new relations between pleasure and knowledge, between a subject’s desire and the objects through which it makes its presence felt. This re-materialization is crucial because it is in creating a more contingent relation between object and subject, image and text that the borderlines between reification and the gendered body might be redrawn so as to allow for a more fluid notion of identity and for an indeterminate erotic relation that is dispersed between bodies and things. To smoke is at once to perform desire and to play with the idea of the “natural” and the “innocent” as cultural ideals. So that, as Brainard writes in another of his “mini-essays,” we might see how, in a typically playful linguistic slippage, “there is nothing . . . more beautiful than a beautiful butt.”39 The unlikeliness of Brainard’s interest in these typically under-appreciated cast-off objects in the history of art is what makes the care and attention he bestows upon them all the more striking. It prompts us to look a little more intently and haptically at that which we think we know so well: the off-centered loop of a smoke ring; the imprinting of a brand on the cigarette’s body; the way it emerges so seductively from its packet. As Brainard notes elsewhere, “I bet I’m one of the few people in the world who appreciate cigarette butts.”40 It is the unlikeness of his subject matter combined with the pleasure he takes in revealing his objects to us that makes his work so startlingly original. The pleasures that cigarettes afford allow for an art of repetition-as-gradual-change as is exemplified in Brainard’s series of ashtray paintings, Cinzano (1974). Part of the inventiveness of his still lifes lies in his ability to make objects look unlike themselves, to create difference from within a series, ensuring that, as Brainard suggests, an object is never too-object-like, or too close to its name, for the reification of objects reduces their capacity to signify otherwise: I must say I’ve done a very good job filling up this “ashtray” ashtray. (So obviously an ashtray it’s almost embarrassing.) ((To say nothing of then labeling it “ashtray.”))41

Brainard’s repeated resistance to titling his art pieces (his work is frequently untitled, with the object in parentheses) reinforces the sense that his work serves not to consolidate an object but rather to reveal new sides to it, to unravel its previous associations so as to

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make it more pliable to new variations. In painting the ashtray over and over again, Brainard draws out a different element each time, varying the abstraction of its logo, shifting the tones and colors and distinction of the foreground and the background. The painting is a reminder that Brainard was working during a period when minimalism and conceptualism sought to reduce art to its elemental forms, which becomes in Brainard’s hands an excuse to make those elemental forms endlessly inventive. The result is twelve different varieties of the same image and thus twelve different potential realities: a still life as a series or a series that is in the process of becoming still life. Brainard uses a serial form to undo the seriality of the commodified object so that the capacity to see the object anew is seen to depend on bypassing the increasing commodification of art through a practice that accounts for the object’s detail and its embodiment. To conceive of art as a never-ending, though constantly reinventing, series ensures that the pleasure Brainard takes—and that we take—in his work is endlessly renewed. This aesthetics or poetics of seriality works by drawing out repetition-as-change, which opens up serial logic to accommodate difference. So that what we are ultimately reminded of in these twelve ways of looking at an ashtray is the human presence that the object is imbued with, of the hand that will place a cigarette on the ashtray, and the hand that paints the ashtray into being. In recasting the forms of seriality that dominated the 1960s minimalist art scene, Brainard demonstrates how that which looks the same might nonetheless yield infinite difference, a premise that is central to his aesthetic practice and the principal strategy through which he recasts the terms of autobiography in his minor masterpiece, I Remember (1975). As in Stein’s work, repetition-as-difference allows for a more provisional notion of identity that makes the subject less defined by its past and therefore less governable. Masterpieces, as Stein contends, exist by virtue of not having any identity.42 This model of producing minor masterpieces, which is so central to the ephemerality and originality of Brainard’s work, allows for a collaborative notion of self, as is evidenced in his 1963 Self-Portrait (with poems by Ted Berrigan). This collaborative self-portrait, like so much of Brainard’s work, exposes the fallacy of the idea of a discreet inviolable self, demonstrating how individual identity is enabled by the touching of different bodies, as is suggested by the overlapping hands in the bottom half of the painting. The generosity of Brainard’s style allows for a porosity of authorship, as in his collaborative self-portrait with Anne Waldman, and his endlessly expansive accumulative portrait of self in I Remember, which is, as he concedes, though ostensibility a self-portrait, as much about everybody else as it is about his own experience.43

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Nowhere is a collaborative relation between image and text, subject and object more apparent than in Brainard’s “Ten Imaginary Still Lifes,” a sequence of textual images or words in the process of becoming image that he wrote in the winter of 1972–3. Wendy Steiner notes “the ability of painting to be utterly abstract and the corresponding inability of literature to be so, since it is composed of words that have preexisting meanings.”44 It is in drawing out the complexity of the concept of abstraction that Brainard shows how difference might be brought into the space of the abstract image. As Brainard notes in the eighth of his “Eleven Exercises,” “He who delves into the abstract is asking for it,” for abstraction is not any one thing.45 Stein writes that “the minute painting gets abstract it gets pornographic. That is a fact.”46 By painting in words, and thus moving the abstract back to the borders of the figurative, Brainard is able to recover the erotic from the pornographic. His art consequently becomes a kind of “speaking image” that is in proximity with the way that words are uttered and thus with bodily presence. If, as O’Hara flippantly suggests in his mock-manifesto, “Personism,” “Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet,” it is in positioning himself between poetic abstraction and pictorial impression that Brainard suggests a way of bringing art closer to life by at once emphasizing and lessening the space between himself and his work.47 This is achieved principally by bringing the body back into the fold of the image so that the abstract is forced to wrestle with that embodiment and with the presence of detail. “Ten Imaginary Still Lifes” opens up the borders between poetry and painting to allow for a more impressionistic kind of art. Brainard often remarked that he wished to paint and to write the way he wished “we could talk.”48 In this still life series in words, he suggests the potential inventiveness of a conversational kind of art, a form that, precisely because it is latent, preserves the object’s capacity for continual reinvention. In one of the still lifes (which all open with a closing of the eyes, which suggests a different kind of visuality coming into view), smoking seems to be the prerequisite for creating what Brainard terms a “still life with a story” or rather a still life with the human presence that has historically been exorcised from that painterly space that emerged with the rise of consumerism: I close my eyes. I see . . . upon the corner of a black lacquered end table I see a clear crystal ashtray, containing a long white cigarette butt, crushed up into the figure “Z.” Pink smears along the filter’s edge implicates a woman. And now I can smell blue smoke in the air,

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lingering from a most recent exit, perhaps in a huff. A dozen dark red roses in a very tall vase completes this elegant—if icy—still life. A still life with a story. And probably a sad one.49

It is in imagining how human presence colors the objects in the scene that Brainard transforms, with a sweeping brushstroke of words, the “icy” still life into a scene of warmth and closeness that fails to be contained by its description. Brainard is interested in how words create new kinds of pictorial impression and how objects might be transformed by poetic abstraction. What this allows for is an expansion of artistic space that draws out a different kind of visuality, one that depends on a constant oscillation between the haptic and the optical. Brainard’s art, which is at once intimate and endlessly expansive, and which is conceived as an extension of the everyday intimacies out of which it materializes, does away with the idea of art as a distant thing to be looked at. It is nearly impossible to look in a spectatorial way at his work, in part because it refuses to be an object and in part because it draws out the animacy of Brainard’s own affective relation to the objects and bodies that inform his practice. This principle of openness can be seen clearly in his 1975 work Untitled (Sardines). In the painting, the scintillating surface of the fish, which are tightly packed into a glass jar, serves to create a greater sense of the materiality of the transparency of the glass, a transparency which, as in his 1967 work, Untitled (Still Life), makes the glass more receptive to the objects that it contains so that transparency becomes its form. The painting might be read as a nod to O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” (1955), in which he remarks on the oddity of the title of Mike Goldberg’s painting “Sardines,” which no longer has any sardines in it, and which prompts a reflection on the role of words in mediating Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art forms, whereby the object is at once central to the art work and continually disappearing from view. Suspended space is a site that allows for a deterritorialized corporeality and a dispersal of sexuality across the surface of the body which takes the viewer beyond the symbolic. Because still life has historically coupled female domestic labor with object culture and imposed a low value upon them, to reoccupy this space as a queer male artist is to posit a different kind of relation between gender, aesthetics, and work. Still life, as a genre, is intimately related, as Victor Stoichita argues, to a notion of the parergon (para = against; ergon = work), as a space that exists outside of work, or which troubles its boundaries, as that which is both a supplement to labor and in conflict with it. More importantly, for Brainard’s concerns, it works at and shifts the

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aesthetic boundary, transforming that limit, as Stoichita notes, into art.50 Brainard’s smallness or “niceness,” his lack of artfulness, is what makes his work so hard to categorize and which also ensures his outsiderly status vis-à-vis the art market. As the most adaptive and pliable of genres, as its twentieth-century incarnations readily demonstrate, still life presents an aesthetic arena in which Brainard is able to create art that is at once vital in its passivity and positioned in a tangential relation to mainstream art production. In drawing out the pliability of the genre, Brainard suggests the radical instability of the ostensibly “still” subject and the embodiment of that which has historically been conceived as inanimate. Traversing traditional aesthetic categories, Brainard’s approach to still life might be thought of as explicitly queer in its desire to resist freezing time into a single moment and in drawing out a “continuing movement” from within the still. In Brainard’s work, still life is the most conducive genre for troubling the status of the art-work-as-object and for suggesting new relations between art forms and the context in which they are read. An investment in the multiple genealogies of object culture is thus also, by implication, a divestment of the sanctity of art institutions. In at once focusing on the male body and resisting a masculine construction of visuality, Brainard suggests how his own labor passes into the objects that surround and animate him, and that this labor is also a form of care. This care is essential to a queer way of looking at objects and bodies alike for it refuses to exclude the male body from feminine space and thus resists the anxieties that surround effeminacy in modern culture. In seeking to bring pleasure and intimacy within the remit of art, Brainard draws out the distinction that Hannah Arendt makes between labor and work, between human effort that disappears without trace and that which results in the material realization of a more enduring product.51 Brainard’s collaborative or “friendly” way of making art ensures that his work’s method of circulation and appreciation remains independent of its market value. As he notes in interview, he does not “have a definite commodity and that’s the only way to make money. I change every year, and it’s very slow” so “My work’s never become ‘a Brainard.’”52 For precisely that reason, he is able, as Ashbery notes, to run rings around most commercial artists, creating objects from nothing and an art form that refuses to compromise on what it chooses to see.53 In so resisting the urge to turn art into a commodity and by making objects impossibly proximate to bodies, Brainard’s work allows us to conceive of a world in which other material attachments and forms of intimacy become possible. This embodied way of seeing the object is exemplified in his collage Human Pear (1977), in which

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the fruit’s natural curvature is made, through a haptic way of looking (which, as Marks argues, is always an erotic way of looking) to appear as a musculature definition of a male bottom, reminding us that the butt is one of the most beautiful things in art. In an “art note,” Brainard suggests that what still life allows him to see is the difference in similarity, as a particular kind of attuning to the overlooked which prompts one to look again: Painting a pear today, it occurs to me that what painting is really all about for me (at its best) is discovery. The discovery of that third slight “bump” alongside the disappearing edge of the pear, which I had originally assumed to be an almost straight line again. An almost straight line again, but with, a particular difference.54

Figure 8.2 Joe Brainard, Human Pear (1977). 4403 pixels. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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The capacity for the object to be embodied, to signify otherwise, depends on its fundamental non-identity, which enables its receptivity to the embodied looks of others. In his 1977 mixed-medium collage Untitled (Heinz), a pear is analogously positioned against an outline of a phallus which is imprinted with the words “HEINZ” and superimposed on a male torso that is probably Xeroxed from a pornographic magazine. The abstraction of desire contained in the Xeroxed pornographic photograph becomes, in its proximity with objects, the space in which queer desire is made material. The playful transformation of the phallus into a commodity is thus revivified by overlaying it with an embodied object, which invites our touch, and which thus reanimates the body and remobilizes desire. When Brainard brings the male body into art, he does so by presenting us with a detail, or by making visible on its surface other bodies

Figure 8.3 Joe Brainard, Untitled (Heinz) (1977). Mixed-media collage.

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that it has come into contact with. In this act of inscription, the body is removed from the circuit of objectification and becomes an affective site on which difference is made manifest. By bringing the body back into the fold of the image, Brainard is able to point to more bodily kinds of knowledge, or “animacies” that allow for the radical unknowability of the object and which thus refuse the configurations that create otherness.55 The presentation of the body as a surface that is marked by animacies is exemplified in a 1972 drawing, Untitled (Tattoo), in which the male body is marked by the objects with which it has been made proximate over time. This embodied way of seeing is exemplified by the purple eye that is inscribed on the base of the torso so that seeing becomes inseparable from bodily knowledge. To see with one’s body is to cofound aesthetic, racial, and sexual categories and to bring the erotic back into the field of vision. Brainard’s tender, detailed images of the body-as-object neutralize our capacity to objectify by revealing how the body, like the butterfly that is inscribed on its surface in Nude with Tattoo (1974), becomes the site of transformation. For Jack Halberstam, this “radical passivity” allows for a femininity with difference, which is to say, for a way of inhabiting the body that is neither passive nor active.56 This passivity is radical precisely because it allows for the variousness of identities and sexualities to emerge from within the image and for a queer way of seeing that destabilizes traditional distinctions between subject and object, stasis and movement, life and death. By situating his artistic practice on a constantly oscillating boundary between aesthetic forms, Brainard is able to suggest a more promiscuous sense of art production, one in which visibility is not the only means of participating in the visual, but which is rather a means of constantly readjusting and recalibrating one’s relation to the transformative artistic period in which he emerged as an artist, between, as he notes, “Abstract Expressionism and God knows what,” a transformation that he makes material in his own work.57 By drawing out the paradoxical forms of object-becoming latent in the still life, Brainard is able to trouble the modern concept of the art object and to suggest a more proximate model of artistic production and circulation. Stephen Rodefer notes that Brainard is the most “visually literate of the New York School of poets and painters” and that he “effectively harmoniz(es) linguistic and visual materials.” It is precisely by working through the paradox of visual literacy that he most fully draws out the principles of intimacy and collaboration that are latent in the coterie’s aesthetic practice.58 The intimate terms of his writing must consequently be viewed in and through the context of those friendships that inscribes itself into his work and which inflect its ephemeral production and its terms of address. This visual literacy and fluid interchange between word and

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image, abstraction and figuration, self, object and collaborative portraiture is central to Brainard’s promiscuous methods. For by refusing to settle for either form, he is able to suggest new relations between them and new forms that go beyond the medium and form specific, opening out to an aesthetics that is constantly making “side tracks and branches” into something new.

Notes 1. Linda Cathcart, American Still Life: 1945–1983 (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum/Harper & Row, New York, 1983), p. 10. 2. Elisha Cohn, Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 6. 3. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 177. 4. Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: The Library of America, 2012), p. 219. 5. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (London: Virago, 1985), p. 150. 6. Ron Padgett, “Joe Brainard in 1961–32” (accessed October 25, 2018). 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 180. 8. Leo Bersani, “Father Knows Best,” Raritan vol. 29 no. 4, rp. in Thoughts and Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 3. 9. There are, however, abundant examples in Brainard’s work that do classify as kitsch, among which I take his 1962 work Untitled (Save), 1963 work Untitled Assemblage (Marilyn) and 1966 work Madonna with Flowers IV to be exemplary. 10. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 483. 11. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 5–21. 12. Brainard is by no means alone in so challenging contemporary avantgarde aesthetics. Indeed his work has much in common with, and emerges in the context of, the other members of the New York School. But his work does seem to offer something original in its combination of a homely mode of production, a refusal to settle for any one form, and an embracing of an aesthetics of cute, as is most clearly seen in his 1968 cover of ARTnews, in which his iconic figure of cute Nancy emerges from various juxtaposed scenes from the history of modern art, unraveling their distinctiveness in the process. 13. For more on the relationship between femininity, commodity aesthetics, and the cute, see Lori Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics:

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14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

99

Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: NYU Press, 1996), pp. 185–206. For more on the historical linkage between homosexuality identity and commodity forms, see: John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharan Thompson (eds.), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Elisa Glick, Materializing Queer Desire (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press, 2009). John Ashbery, “Joe Brainard” in Constance M. Lewallen (ed.), Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (New York: Berkeley and Granary Books, 2001), p. 2. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 90–1. For more on the relationship between the language of willfulness, queer identity, and addiction, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will” in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 130–42. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 290. Michel Foucault, Ethics Vol. 1: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 138. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 165. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 205. John Ashbery, Selected Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 12. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Foucault, Ethics Vol.1, p. 136. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 94. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 22. Edmund White, Arts and Letters (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2004), p. 239. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Will and Wang, 1975), p. 9. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 464. Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), p. 116. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 153. Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 14. Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, and Kevin Floyd, “Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ vol. 18, no. 1 (2012): 129. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. xiii.

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34. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 295. 35. Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 33. 36. Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 45. 37. Robyn L. Schiffman, “Toward a Queer History of Smoking,” in Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (eds.), Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 304–8. 38. Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5. 39. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 246. 40. Ibid. p. 346. 41. Ibid. 42. Gertrude Stein, “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?,” Writings, 1932–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 358. 43. Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), p. 146. 44. Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric, pp. 65–6. 45. Brainard, Nothing to Write Home About, p. 12. 46. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (London: Vintage, 1973), p. 131. 47. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 498. 48. Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman, Self-Portrait (New York: Siamese Banana Press, 1972), p. 13. 49. Brainard, Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, p. 454. 50. Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Metapainting (London: Harvey Miller, 2015), pp. 22, 26. 51. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 79–92. 52. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 498. 53. John Ashbery, ARTnews 70, no. 7, Nov. 1971: 14. 54. Brainard, Nothing to Write Home About, p. 39. 55. For more on this term see: Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 56. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 144. 57. Padgett, “Joe Brainard in 1961–63,” (accessed October 25, 2018). 58. Stephen Rodefer, Joe Brainard: Selections from the Butts Collection at UCSD (San Diego: Mandeville Gallery, University of California at San Diego, 1987), p. 2.

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Chapter 9

“Men with a Pair of Scissors”: Joe Brainard and John Ashbery’s Eclecticism Rona Cran

Bill Berkson: When Poetry . . . Ted Berrigan: . . . meets Painting . . . BB: . . . one begins to wonder . . . TB and BB (in unison): . . . about Art! (Much laughter.)1

i. For the numerous writers and artists affiliated with the term “New York School,” from Frank O’Hara to Eileen Myles, the act of collaboration provided a means of affirming personal and poetic connections with one another, with the focus primarily on the companionable processes of writing or making art collectively. The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery was officially inaugurated in the same year that Frank O’Hara, the central figure of the first generation of New York School poets, was killed, in the summer of 1966, and it provided an overlapping space of production and practice in which to enact O’Hara’s creative legacy, as well as a locus of collaborative solidarity for the emerging second generation of New York poets and artists. Over the next decade, as this informal group of writers and artists with shared interests, outlooks, and backgrounds worked to move beyond the primacy of the singular art object, they produced numerous collaborative books, and hundreds of collaborative poems and artworks, as the result of frequent poetry partnerships, poet-artist partnerships, anonymized production of collaborative books, mass writing events, and, underpinning it all,

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close friendships. These works, and the processes that produced them, demonstrated collaborative practice to be a ground-breaking and influential aesthetic phenomenon that forces us to rethink the nature of authorship. While the results of such collaborations were often remarkable in a number of ways, their creators were generally less concerned with ambitions of aesthetic perfection than with suggesting that mistakes or inconsistencies were best understood as evidence of progress and creative development—and, indeed, evidence of the artists’ presence or partnership in (rather than behind) the work. In many cases, errors were held in special admiration, emblematic of Susan Sontag’s suggestion that a work’s vitality lies in its attitude to error. As she writes in “Against Interpretation” (1966), “perhaps the way one tells how alive a particular art form is, is by the latitude it gives for making mistakes in it, and still being good.”2 For Joe Brainard, for example, “error is seen as a trace of development rather than an imperfection,”3 as well as being a key part of his anti-capitalist outlook, whilst for Ron Padgett, unintended, even avoidable, errors were a source of delight. In his introduction to Granary Books’ 2012 facsimile of Bean Spasms, his 1967 collaboration with Ted Berrigan and Brainard, Padgett recalls publisher Lita Hornick leaving the printing of the book to a “printer’s representative she had happened onto,” for whom “quality was not a consideration.”4 As a result, the finished text featured irregular inking and was punctuated with typographical errors. Hornick, who was uninterested in the commercial aspects of publishing, had a policy never to reprint anything, and so the errors and irregularities remained—and Padgett “loved it.” This assertion is typical of the creative attitudes of a collective whose primary concern, when collaborating, was what poet Larry Fagin called “the sheer joy of the activity. Thumbing your nose at formality.”5 This emphasis on joy, informality, and the embrace of the accidental was (and, indeed, still is) central to the work of Joe Brainard and his friend John Ashbery, both separately and in collaboration with one another. Both were keen collaborators, whose own work emerged out of the cooperative, experimental scene described above. The world of poet-artist and artist-poet friendships, Brainard’s desire to draw “for” words and to avoid “illustrating” (see below), and Ashbery’s approach to poetry as a combination of gestures, actions, perceptions, discussions, and audience reactions, made the two ideal collaborators for one another. Brainard described Ashbery as his favorite poet (though in classic Brainard fashion qualified this by

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also including Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Kenward Elmslie, and “a lot of people too”).6 In addition to a mutual admiration of each other’s work, Brainard and Ashbery also had a penchant for movies and getting stoned on hash brownies. This chapter will examine their creative, collaborative relationship, exploring a number of key parallels in their outlook and ideas, from the significance of their cross-disciplinary friendships to their propensity for giving their work as gifts. I will then suggest that the commonalities between these two joyful, gentle artists, and the informal, below-the-radar work that they completed together, established a framework for collaboration that transcended Brainard’s death, embodied, ultimately, in Ashbery’s twenty-first-century collages. On the understanding that collage itself is always a form of collaboration, I will argue that in creating a sequence of Brainard-esque collages using materials that Brainard himself had provided him with, Ashbery attempts to continue Brainard’s lifelong process of non-traditional self-portraiture, as well as portraiture of others. Carter Ratcliff persuasively suggests that “just as Brainard’s Nancy pictures are about more than Nancy, so his pencil portraits of friends are not only about them. They are about the act of paying close, even obsessive attention to someone else.”7 Brainard’s portraits of Kenward Elmslie’s whippet, Whippoorwill, are a case in point: writing to Fairfield Porter in 1973, he discussed how rewarding it felt to learn “(inch by inch) Whippoorwill’s anatomy so totally unscientifically . . . I feel that were I to dissect him there would be no surprises.”8 I want to argue that Ashbery’s collages pay a similar “close, even obsessive attention” to Brainard—they are an unscientific but meticulously crafted conjuration of his friend, whose presence seems so vigorous because he remains, to an extent, an active collaborator. Ashbery counted numerous artists amongst his friends. In 2013, the Loretta Howard Gallery put on an exhibition entitled John Ashbery Collects: Poet Among Things, which invited viewers to experience the “living collage” which is Ashbery’s house in Hudson, New York. Embellishing the gallery walls with trompe-l’oeil paintings of doorframes and windowsills, and even a grand piano, curators Adam Fitzgerald and Emily Skillings made public a version of Ashbery’s art-filled home, displaying pieces of vintage bric-abrac, ceramic pots, a decoupage paperweight covered with postage stamps, sheet music, a flier of Sylvester the Cat speaking French, various well-thumbed books by Ronald Firbank, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein, among others, and, of course, selected pieces from Ashbery’s art collection. To call this an art collection, however, is to

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mislabel it as something far more cold and pecuniary than of course it is—many of these artists were or are Ashbery’s personal friends, and after the show their work returned to his home in Hudson, resuming, as Holland Cotter, reviewing the show for the New York Times, remarked, “their roles in an art-filled life that has been so much, and so movingly, of a piece.”9 In addition to highlighting the art-filled nature of Ashbery’s life, the Loretta Howard show also revealed how many artworks in his immediate environment either are collages or mimic collage techniques, including works by Joseph Cornell, Henry Darger, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Anne Ryan, Pierre Martory, Trevor Winkfield, Tom Burckhardt, R. B. Kitaj, and Joe Brainard. Brainard, as has been discussed elsewhere in this book, must surely hold the record for textual and visual collaborative activities during the 1960s and 1970s: his conversational aesthetic both shaped and provided the imagery for numerous publications, from poetry collections to flyers advertising readings at St. Mark’s Church. He relished the informal and illuminating practice of connecting (or disconnecting) images and words, describing the process of working collaboratively with writers as both “fun” and “arduous,” and as requiring a lot of compromises and a willingness “to totally fail and not be embarrassed by it.”10 In a journal entry written in 1969 he reflected that “most of his friends” were poets, and that he was “especially good” at “‘drawing for’ words,” adding: “I don’t like that word ‘illustrating.’” In the same entry, he mused: Doing cover designs and drawings for books and poems is something else entirely. This I love doing. And I do it very well. I know how to work with or against words in a good way. I don’t think I ever fall into the “elegant” trap. Or the “arty” trap. (Too beautiful.) (For the coffee table.) (Etc.) There is always something slightly unprofessional about my graphic work. Which is probably the best thing about it.11 (italics added)

For Brainard, clearly, there was something troubling or off-putting about artworks (and viewers) that sought perfection, in the traditional sense, and that took themselves too seriously. The chance to be “unprofessional” was important. He wrote elsewhere in his diary in 1969, for example, that he felt “pretty much off art for art’s sake,” expressing surprise that “there are that many people left who still love art that much. I feel something much lighter in the air. Fun. No bullshit.”12 To his eye and imagination, even the smallest, most

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everyday-ish detail could spark a wealth of new connections. Speaking to Anne Waldman, he asserted: 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. I mean if a story came out I’d sort of follow it, but I never want to read or make a story deliberately.13

Ashbery, too, will hint at a narrative (in both his poems and his collages), but shies away from making stories deliberately: “When one goes at ideas directly,” he says, “with hammer and tongs as it were, ideas tend to elude one in a poem. I think they only come back when one pretends not to be paying attention to one, like a cat that will rub against your leg.”14 Neither offers explanations or explications. Instead, in Brainard’s visual art, and in Ashbery’s poetry and art, we are repeatedly offered multiple sets of relations among the presented elements, and a charming yet iconoclastic impulse to find an alternative interpretation of what it means to be avant-garde. Ashbery’s poetry has always subverted readerly expectations of what poetry should be (or should reveal), demanding that the reader find ways of understanding his work other than straightforward or traditional critical analysis, eschewing New Critical-style “symbolhunting.”15 Ashbery seems to ask that the reader of his work give precedence to the same principle to which he adheres as a writer, and to which Brainard adheres as an artist—namely, to value the processes of reading or looking over any definitive answers that the poetry or artwork may or may not yield. Interviewing Ashbery in 1981, Alfred Poulin Jr. commented on the resemblances between his work and “collage painting,” remarking that “one is not prepared for the kinds of juxtapositions that occur in many of the poems.” Ashbery replied by pointing out: “I don’t think one is prepared for juxtapositions in general is one? And yet one is constantly being faced with them.”16 His reply is suggestive of his desire, and ability, to account for the environment out of which his poems emerged, as well as to constantly renew the form (“to stretch poetry rather than to level it”), ambitions that the collage practice has enabled across the arts for more than a century. Brainard’s cover of the ARTnews Annual 34 in 1968, which Ashbery co-edited alongside Thomas Hess, explores a similar desire to “stretch” art, and to account for it in an egalitarian way. For the cover, Brainard re-envisioned sixteen icons from the history of art

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as Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller’s cartoon heroine: he refigured Nancy as Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase, as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, as Rembrandt’s observers of a public autopsy, as emerging out of a Jackson Pollock, emerging out of Carlo Carrà’s Interventionist Manifesto, and so on. Brainard’s cover marries the history of art with an iconoclastic impulse to take it apart, highbrow culture with the everyday, calling into question the hierarchies of iconography. As Brian Glavey observes in The Wallflower Avant-Garde, “the cover serves as a picture-perfect illustration of Ashbery’s shy take on the avant-garde, literally transforming the history of Western art into a playground for a bunch of nancies.”17 There is a gleeful recklessness to this subversive transformation which speaks to Ashbery’s essay on “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” contained within the 1968 Annual, in which he praises the beauty of “reckless things,” and argues that “recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing.”18 Both the ARTnews cover and Ashbery’s poetry succeed in situating themselves as simultaneously imbricated with and at a remove from the allusions that inspire them, embodying Donald Revell’s suggestion “that the imagination is not an inward quality in search of expression, but, rather, an event that occurs when perception contacts the world with the force of desire in the form of words or paint or sounds.”19 This buoyant, responsive, non-serious outlook is evident throughout Brainard’s work, in which Ashbery (arguing that “everything will be okay if we just look at it, accept it and let it be itself”) discovers “Joy. Sobriety. Nutty poetry.”20 This discovery applies equally to Ashbery’s own poetry and collages, which (in keeping with the New York School spirit) refuse to explain themselves—and which are also full of joy, sobriety, and nutty poetry. It applies, too, to Brainard and Ashbery’s semi-collaborative publication The Vermont Notebook (1975), which Nick Sturm hilariously but astutely suggests resembles what might happen if “Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lena Dunham made a movie, or if Bruce Springsteen and Prince made an album.”21 The Notebook, which was published in 1975 but was overshadowed by the stunning success of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, is a highly entertaining formal experiment. Partly written on a bus, it is both of and about its environment, a twentieth-century urban pastoral that calls attention to the umbrous corners of ordinary and artistic life in capitalist America. It makes extensive use of lists, in a nod partly to Whitman and partly to Proust, but also as a way of separating out individual fragments whilst at the same time bringing each element together to form a new whole—as in traditional visual

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collage. It also collages found texts, recycles old poems (by Ashbery), blends intellect with kitsch, mixes homoeroticism with consumerist impulses (and attendant anxieties), and presents, throughout, multifaceted intersections between word and image. Critics productively dispute the nature of the relationship between the latter—are they adjacent? Are they facing?—as well as the nature of the text itself (is it a “riff on the American travelogue” or a “wastebasket for all the extraneous poetic matter ruled out by its famed contemporary [Self-Portrait]?”).22 Of course, the sheer variability and illogicality of the text enables multiple readings to exist simultaneously. Throughout it, Brainard’s deadpan drawings exuberantly interrupt Ashbery’s prose poetry, sometimes obliquely, sometimes in reference to it, but in ceaseless interplay. The cumulative effect of Brainard’s drawings and Ashbery’s text is the brilliant encapsulation of Bill Berkson’s observation that “no one knows for certain when poetry or painting began or whether originally both were parts of some elaborate dance event.”23 Ashbery and Brainard produced the text and images separately, and in sequence: Brainard produced his drawings in response to Ashbery’s writing by “trying to relate at certain points but in factual ways not emotional ways,” as he told Anne Waldman.24 In the resulting Notebook the poetry and the drawings seem to move both with and against each other, as in “some elaborate dance event” (or even dance-off). Whilst the Notebook is not a straightforward or “true” collaboration, given the separateness with which the images and text were produced, it indicates, nevertheless, Fagin’s conception of the “sheer joy of the activity” of collaborating—a joy, the Notebook suggests, that can be experienced, or created, even if the collaboration takes place with the collaborators at a temporal and physical remove from one another. The “sheer joy of the activity” can be read another way, too: as an extension out of the writer and activist Paul Goodman’s conception of the purpose of “integrated art,” which had been a key influence on New York School creativity ever since O’Hara read Goodman’s essay in the early 1950s. Goodman suggests that [a]n aim, one might almost say the chief aim, of integrated art is to heighten the everyday; to bathe the world in such a light of imagination and criticism that the persons who are living in it without meaning or feeling suddenly find that it is meaningful and exciting to live in it.25

For both Ashbery and Brainard, joyful art and/or writing always gives rise to meaning and excitement, arising from a spirit of generosity;

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from an effort, in other words, to give the reader or the viewer all the pleasure that they desire. As Ron Padgett recalled, Brainard “was a superb gift-giver—not because his gifts were expensive, but because they were just right for you.”26 Nathan Kernan, reviewing the Brainard retrospective, also called attention to his gift-giving capacities, writing: “Brainard’s art is profoundly generous, and his concern is often simply to give the viewer more of whatever would offer the most visual pleasure . . . he seemed to make each work a new beginning, and a visual gift to be enjoyed on its own intrinsic merits.”27 Such an assessment can be applied, too, to Ashbery’s collages, as I will discuss—and whilst his poetry rarely emphasizes visual pleasure or experience, Ashbery nevertheless offers it up to his readers as an opportunity for communicative and nourishing engagement. He takes issue with the suggestion that his poetry fails, on some level, to communicate with his readers, arguing that his “intention is to communicate,” and that “a poem that communicates something that’s already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.”28 As he affirmed in an interview with Travis Nichols, with regard to reading his work, “any way in should be taken”; his poetry is written in order “to satisfy the particular hunger that poetry and only poetry can supply, that kind of satisfying meal, as it were.”29 In this sense, Ashbery’s poetry is intended as a form of sustenance: he writes with the idea of satisfying a particular need—a need that is not his own. Like Brainard, he resists the autonomy of modernism in order to try to involve readers as directly and authentically as possible. This compulsion for creative giving is of a piece with a creative lineage shared by two of Brainard and Ashbery’s heroes, Frank O’Hara and Joseph Cornell, many of whose works were “for” someone else, in keeping with what Cornell referred to as the “necessity of approaching own work in a spontaneous spirit of giving first” [sic].30 Like Cornell and O’Hara, both of whose work is to a large extent meticulously crafted out of everyday fragments lifted from the environment in which they lived, Ashbery and Brainard both exemplify an appreciation for the passing on and sharing of ordinary yet beautiful things, and a zest for the chance accrual of meaning that occurs when old objects find new homes. When Ashbery turned seriously to the art of collage in the twenty-first century, as I will discuss in the next section, it was to extend and elaborate on the possibilities offered by collaborative, generous art, in order to revive a sustained, decades-long gift exchange between with Brainard, which had begun in Vermont in the 1970s and which continued after Brainard’s death.

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ii. John Ashbery made his professional debut as an artist in 2008, exhibiting a collection of collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The exhibition was Ashbery’s first show, but, as John Yau observed, “if . . . you didn’t suspect that [Ashbery] might be a man with a pair of scissors . . . then you probably haven’t read a single thing he has written.”31 His sustained interest in the collage process is evident in much of his fragmentary, accumulative poetry, from The Tennis Court Oath (1962) onwards. Like writers as diverse as Nelson Algren, Gay Talese, and David Bowie, Ashbery has always made extensive but private use of collage as a way of thinking through ideas. It “stimulates” his writing, he says: “there’s no fear of having my energy drained away.”32 He is, as John Yau notes, an “enthusiast who gets excited by all manner of things, from the loftiest realms of high culture to the weirdest currents of popular culture,”33 and these collages, in which such lofty realms and weird currents are often simultaneously visible, are emblematic of the creative processes by which they have been made. In other words, to paraphrase what Ashbery said of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, they are chronicles of the creative acts that produce them.34 They draw attention to the elements that make up a life—and at least until recently, whether or not they would ever be seen by anyone else was largely irrelevant. In keeping with Brainard’s aesthetic, Ashbery’s collages permit the presentation of sophisticated ideas that succeed in resisting grandeur. Visually, they are accessible and democratic, hinting at secrets whilst never retreating into obscurity. They are ludic and hypnotic, and in fact (like Brainard’s collages) Ashbery’s 1957 assessment of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation could easily have been written about them: Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for awhile in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names. And, just as with people, there is no real escape from them: one feels that if one were to close the book one would shortly re-encounter the Stanzas in life, under another guise.35

Ashbery’s collages are (or do) all of these things: this paragraph might well be a template for them. They provoke mental meandering,

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and are simultaneously mementos of a life and compelling works of art in their own right, enabling Ashbery to explore “the fated nature of the encounter”36 with which he has always been fascinated. And the encounter which the collages primarily explore, of course, is that with Joe Brainard, to whose work the above paragraph also applies. Featuring cartoon figures, knowing art-historical and queer jokes, camp imagery, visual puns, and board games, the collages deliberately call attention to the specifics of Brainard’s body of work. In addition to two collages dating back to the late 1940s, made when Ashbery was a student at Harvard, the 2008 exhibition also included a number of works dating from the 1970s—some of which were lost for a time, and then, years later, re-discovered. These 1970s collages had been made in Vermont, at Kenward Elmslie’s house, where Brainard used to spend his summers, and where Ashbery himself (and many other poets and artists) would pay extended visits. In keeping with the collaborative ethos of those varied artists and writers associated with the New York School, many of whom also spent time in Vermont, collage-making at Elmslie’s house often occurred collectively and companionably, not to mention impulsively: “after dinner and a certain amount of wine,” Ashbery recalls, “we would sit around the table, cutting up old magazines and splicing them back together for our own amusement.”37 As for many of the New York School group, this kind of collaboration was less about making art/poetry than it was about connecting with friends: the collages were made for the sake of making them, and for their beauty, their creators never “thinking anyone else would see them or be interested.”38 They were typical, in this sense, of Brainard and Ashbery’s interest in creating art that was inherently valuable as art, but that resisted monetization, as well as being emblematic of the spirit of fun with which these two important artists infused their work. Ashbery made (and still makes) his collages primarily “using postcards, whose sense of the picturesque can be skewed.”39 This was a creative approach that Joe Brainard both initially inspired and then enthusiastically endorsed and encouraged in Ashbery, over a period of many years, regularly sending him “either postcards or other paper souvenirs, often with an injunction to use them in collages.”40 It is also of a piece with the ecology of Ashbery’s poetics, which has always been based around the recycling of materials, whether his own unpublished works or the scraps sent to him by Brainard. When the prospect of an exhibition of his work first arose, Ashbery “went through shoeboxes of old postcards and found an envelope filled

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with materials cut out and collected by Joe,” which he had sent him for one of his birthdays in the early 1990s.41 The 2008 exhibition, as well as subsequent shows at Tibor de Nagy in 2011, 2015, and 2016–17, featured new, original collages by Ashbery that included some of these materials, several of which were dedicated to or made “for” Joe Brainard. In the most recent exhibition, the gallery also included a vitrine designed to shed further light on Ashbery’s creative processes. In addition to a small pair of ornate scissors and a photograph of Ashbery at work on the collages, the vitrine included some of the Brainard material, along with a manila envelope dated 28 November 1983 and a handwritten letter from him:42 Dear John, Actually, I’m finding it rather hard (a heavy trip) going back through all this stuff again.* Then too, most what I have seems to have more to do with the color and texture and character of paper, as opposed to imagery, which I expect you’d be more interested in. Correct me if I’m wrong. At any rate—if this small sampling is of any use to you, let me know, and more will follow. Love, Joe *But anything for you!’

The tone of this letter is suggestive, in its subtle way, of the melancholy and frustration that Brainard was experiencing personally in late 1983, discussed in Ron Padgett’s brilliant memoir, Joe— stemming from a combination of grief following the death of Ted Berrigan in July of that year, a sense of being out of step with his friends Ron and Pat (Padgett), both of whom were working full time, and an unspecified feeling that this period was “a very frustrating time in life” for him.43 Nevertheless, Brainard seems to indicate, in his nostalgia for a lost era of creativity and collaboration, that the period in question—those evenings in the 1970s around Elmslie’s dining table—was one of joy; joy that, in the present circumstances in which the letter was written, had since been lost. By 1983 Brainard was, for a number of reasons discussed elsewhere in this volume, producing less and less art, and he would soon stop making it entirely, choosing to spend the last years of his life “consecrating his time to his two favorite hobbies, smoking and reading Victorian novels” (he died on May 25, 1994 at the age of 52).44 For Ashbery, perhaps sensing the sorrow and creative frustrations of his friend and former collaborator, this letter

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Figure 9.1 Joe Brainard to John Ashbery, undated letter (postmarked November 28, 1983). Collection of John Ashbery; used by permission of the estates of Joe Brainard and John Ashbery and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

(or at least the later rediscovery of it) may have marked the beginning of an ambition to carry on Brainard’s work. In its reminder of Brainard’s love of color, texture, and “character of paper,” it can certainly be viewed as an invitation to a poet to consider these things instead of, or alongside, poetic imagery. Writing in the exhibition catalogue that accompanied his 2008 show, Ashbery described the experience of looking at the “colorful disjecta membra” that Brainard had sent him and that he had

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Figure 9.2 John Ashbery, Chutes and Ladders I (for Joe Brainard) (2008). Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

subsequently transformed into miniature works of art entirely in keeping with Brainard’s own collages: I can almost feel the warmth of his amused, affectionate gaze, and hear his apologetic stammer as he tactfully pointed out the obvious places where [the fragments] belonged. So these fragments are really about him, and record the atmosphere of a wonderful friendship that lasted far too short a time.45

In addition to combining those fragments selected for and sent to him by the living Brainard with Ashbery’s own selections, the collages embody their shared impulses and inspirations: conscious objects such as images of birds and children, superheroes and cities, Renaissance figures and cartoons encounter each other in media ranging from postcards to board games to simple scraps of paper. Some collages, from 2008 and since, are dedicated to Brainard. Chutes and Ladders (for Joe Brainard) (Figure 9.2), for example, features an extensive collection of images associated with Brainard, from pansies to children’s illustrations to cartoons, pasted

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onto a copy of an old chutes and ladders board game, on which both chutes and ladders are rendered markedly unobtrusive by the pasted images. The vicissitudes of the game—climbing upwards before being forced to slip back down again—are subordinated to imagery that hints at key sets of relations among the presented elements, an important feature of both Brainard and Ashbery’s work, discussed earlier. An image of two little boys posing together with a bunch of pink flowers at the bottom of the collage, for example, finds an echo in a much smaller drawing of two men wearing green berets and clinking beer glasses in the top left corner, diminished, perhaps, by experience. Other images—such as “the naughty boy”—are doubled or repeated, whilst still others find resonances across the board: cartoon monsters and a topless mermaid “siren” again suggest experience meeting innocence, a further echo of the chutes among the ladders.

Figure 9.3 John Ashbery, The Checkered Game of Life—for Joe Brainard (2016). Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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The Checkered Game of Life—for Joe Brainard (2016) riffs on a similar premise, this time using a Chinese checkers board. Once again, images of cartoons and children are superimposed onto the board game (the dragons around the edge remain prominent), along with images of sailing ships, a hand-drawn image of a garden gate (reminiscent of the world of L. M. Montgomery), a picture of some net curtains, and a picture of oak leaves and acorns. Once again there are suggestions of innocence and experience here, but also of the audacity of travel and the vicissitudes of life (a “checkered game”). Both of these collages evoke and embody ideas seen in several of Brainard’s 1970s collages, such as Carte Postale (1978), which features birds, leaves, a sun, and a postage stamp; Untitled (1975), which features a motor vehicle in front of a Holiday Inn sign, beneath a series of crescent moons and black and white stars; or Untitled (A Sturdy Craft) (1975), in which a sailing ship presides over a checked and lined page (it looks like it may have been ripped from an arithmetic book), above a semi-obscured fish and a trailing piece of seaweed.

Figure 9.4 Joe Brainard, Carte Postale (1978). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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Figure 9.5 Joe Brainard, Untitled, (1975). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

Other collages evoke Brainard as a collaborator, rather than a dedicatee. Brainard’s most famous works—the Nancy series and his pansy paintings—are both inside jokes, riffing on pejorative terms for gay men. Ashbery enables Brainard’s subversive humor to continue, often selecting queer or camp images from the fragments Brainard sent to him and recycling them by placing them prominently in the collages. By exhibiting work made alongside Brainard, he also revivifies some of his lifelong concerns with ideas of cultural capital, the policing of public discourse, and the subjective nature of what constituted the underground, or the unofficial (as well as Brainard’s own wariness, discussed below, of the institutionalization of his own work). The insouciant 1972 collage Diffusion of Knowledge (Figure 9.3), for example, features two colorful All-American comic-book heroes (The Fighting American and The Guardian) collaged onto a postcard of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., but it is deliberately unclear whether they are energetically defending the august institution or attacking it. The collage also speaks to Brainard’s emphasis on the value of error in art, discussed in the first section. It features some overlapping of color in the background, where during the printing

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Figure 9.6 Joe Brainard, Untitled (A Sturdy Craft) (1975). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

process the registration of the different color plates was out of sync. David Kermani, Ashbery’s partner, recently confirmed that the collage should have been considered a “reject” because of this—but, of course, was ultimately deemed more valuable because of it.46 Witty, intelligent, deceptively simple, irreverent, and charming, Ashbery’s collages are so closely related to the work Brainard produced during his life that he could almost have made them himself. They are full of the same generosity and compassion with which Ashbery characterized Brainard: “looking at his pictures and recognizing their

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Figure 9.7 John Ashbery, Diffusion of Knowledge (c. 1972). Collage. Reprinted by permission of the estate of the artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

references and modest autobiographical aspirations would somehow make you a nicer person without realizing it and having to be grateful.”47 And yet they are never derivative. Brainard’s creative presence is acknowledged and credited, rather than disguised, and in keeping with his lifelong sense of heightened self-awareness, he seems as present in the process of making the collages as he is in the finished creations. In making the collages, Ashbery puts himself “back in the place where,” as he wrote in his piece for the Joe Brainard retrospective, he “always wanted to be, the delicious chromatic center of the Parcheesi board.”48 Ashbery’s collages go beyond tribute or memorialization, in their effort to record and sustain not just a “wonderful friendship,” but an extraordinary career (Brainard’s) that is always at risk of seeming marginal. Perhaps, indeed, Ashbery wishes to claim a degree of Brainard’s marginality for himself, and to retreat from the dominant culture which increasingly embraces his poetry. The collages enact a collaboration with Brainard that is ongoing, transcending both time and Brainard’s mortality. Ashbery’s collages—each one a communal gesture—reach out to Brainard’s delicate, intelligent, labor-intensive artwork (he would create thousands of tiny works for a single show), which requires engagement from and exchange with the viewer. They illuminate the creative, collaborative relationship that existed between the two, and shed new light on their shared aesthetic—a

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suggestive, screwball aesthetic characterized by inventiveness, eclecticism, and lightness of touch, that seeks connections and troubles boundaries, and that fuses the written word with the visual image in a variety of ways. Ashbery’s collages work to resist the finality of Brainard’s premature death, which in spite of the increased attention paid to him critically cannot be mitigated by academic books or institutional archives; however well-intentioned, these serve rather to emphasize the conclusiveness of Brainard’s passing. As Ron Padgett recalls, and as Ashbery has noted elsewhere, during his life Brainard himself was at pains to ensure that his work was not widely known, working to resist his institutionalization: “seeing his work placed in an institutional archive was perhaps too much like having his spirit put in a bottle. Too final.”49 Brainard, who (as noted above) “liked drawing ‘for’ words,” always distanced himself from the seriousness and machismo of the New York art scene, taking “extraordinary pains for us not to know about his art.”50 Hating the idea of any of his works becoming “a Joe Brainard,” he took seriously Ashbery’s observation that “artists are no fun once they have been discovered,” and certainly seems to have concurred with his view that a “true Avant-Garde” must exist in a state of unconsolidated cultural instability.51 Whilst Ashbery’s collages by their very nature—small, and still reasonably obscure—retain that sense of unconsolidated cultural instability, they are each nevertheless a step in the direction of the wider revelation of Brainard’s art: they urge whoever views them to discover Joe Brainard, and to take the time to get to know his art. Taking up his position in a lineage of gift-giving collagists, beginning with Joseph Cornell, Ashbery’s gift is Brainard himself. Ashbery is often interested, in his poetry, in the notion of absent origins and how to depict or evoke them. He works to discover what we are missing. His use of ellipses, missing words, swift transitions, disjunctive syntax, partial erasure, and illogical constructions often serves to indicate present absences in his work, which exist centrally if elusively. With regard to the long poem “Litany” in As We Know (1979), for example, Ashbery said that his intention was to “direct the reader’s attention to the white space between the columns.”52 “They Dream Only Of America,” from The Tennis Court Oath (1962), moves rapidly between a host of collaged identities, suggestive of a search for a center which is not there. In “Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid” from Houseboat Days (1977), he speaks of the luxury of Just being, not alive but being, at the center, The perfumed, patterned center.53

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As John Keeling argues, Ashbery demonstrates that he is “open to the interstices that keep alive the otherness of experience in order to cultivate that which is living, mysterious, and ongoing,” whether or not we can see it.54 His poetry repeatedly emphasizes the importance of polyphonic, polyvisual experience, warning against the comfort and ease of the singular perspective (just as the collaborative artists and poets associated with St. Mark’s Church disavowed the singular art object). As he said to Poulin in 1981, many of his poems are “about the experience of experience . . . the way a happening or experience filters through to me.”55 His collages, then, can be viewed as the experience of his experiences with Brainard. Brainard lives, mysteriously, at their center, a radical presence that is “not alive but being.” Ashbery’s collages—mercurial synchronies emerging out of a still-unfolding oeuvre—suggest the possibility of Brainard’s continuing existence, less as an artifact than as a collaborator. Thomas Brockelman’s suggestion that “collage attempts to embody a kind of immediate presence beyond the necessity of representation”56 is helpful here, as is Rosalind Krauss’s conception of collage as a system that “inaugurates a play of differences which is both about and sustained by an absent origin.”57 If we view Brainard as that “immediate” (but not directly represented) presence, and, indeed, as the “absent origin” of many of Ashbery’s collages, it becomes clear that, both formally and theoretically, Brainard is key to the collages. Simultaneously present and absent, his position in the collages could be understood as the kind of “third voice” that collaboration often produces, identified or exploited by collagists and collaborators from T. S. Eliot to William Burroughs to Larry Fagin.58 The collages seem to enable us to hear the conversations that took place between Brainard and Ashbery back in Vermont, after dinner, in the summers of the 1970s—goofy chatter that calls to mind Frank O’Hara’s idea of poetry being between two people rather than two pages. Un-serious, as yet culturally unconsolidated, Brainard-and-yet-not-Brainard, they too evoke the feeling of time passing, of things happening, of a “plot,” though it would be difficult to say precisely what is going on. Sometimes the story has the logic of a dream . . . while at other times it becomes startlingly clear for a moment, as though a change in the wind had suddenly enabled us to hear a conversation that was taking place some distance away.59

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Notes 1. Bill Berkson and Ted Berrigan, “a cross-country telephone conversation late one night in the early 1980s.” Quoted in Bill Berkson, Foreword to Jenni Quilter, Neon in Daylight: New York School Painters and Poets (New York: Rizzoli, 2014), pp. 8–10. 2. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, [1966] (1990), p. 12. 3. Jenni Quilter, “The Love of Looking: Collaborations between Artists and Writers,” in Painters and Poets: Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York: Tibor de Nagy, 2011), p. 78. 4. Lita Hornick was the publisher and acquisitions editor at Kulchur Press. Ron Padgett, “A Note on Bean Spasms,” in Bean Spasms (New York: Granary Press, 2012), n.p. 5. Larry Fagin, interviewed by Daniel Kane, New York, January 26, 1998. Quoted in Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 157–8. 6. Brainard, interview with Tim Duglos, September 26, 1977, in Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (Library of America, 2012), p. 504. 7. Carter Ratcliff, “Joe Brainard’s Quiet Dazzle,” in Constance Lewallen (ed.), Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (University of California: Berkeley Art Museum, and New York City: Granary Books, 2001), pp. 48–69, 55. 8. Brainard to Fairfield Porter, Vermont, summer 1973. Quoted in Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, p. 115. 9. Holland Cotter, “John Ashbery Collects”: “Poet Among Things,” New York Times, October 25, 2013. 10. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 513. 11. Ibid. pp. 248–9. 12. Brainard, Diary, Sunday March 19, 1969, quoted in Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, p. 78. 13. Brainard, interviewed by Anne Waldman, Rocky Ledge 3 (November/ December 1979): 42. 14. Ashbery, interviewed by Daniel Kane, Teachers and Writers 30, no. 5 (May/June 1999): 14. 15. David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 157. 16. A. Poulin Jr., “The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery,” Michigan Quarterly Review vol. 20, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 242–55. 17. Brian Glavey, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 138.

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18. John Ashbery, “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” ARTNews Annual 34 (1968). 19. Donald Revell, “Purists Will Object: Some Meditations on Influence,” in Susan Schultz (ed.), The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), pp. 91–100. 20. John Ashbery, “Joe Brainard,” in Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, 1. 21. Nick Sturm, “i said ok wow’ (blog): (accessed October 25, 2018). 22. For discussions about The Vermont Notebook see: Glavey; Ellen Levy, Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Susan Rosenbaum, “‘Permeation, Ventilation, Occlusion’: Reading John Ashbery and Joe Brainard’s The Vermont Notebook in the Tradition of Surrealist Collaboration,” in Mark Silverberg (ed.), New York School Collaborations: the Color of Vowels (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 59–89; Christopher Schmidt, “The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook,” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3 (autumn 2012): 71–102; and Andrew Lee DuBois, Jr., Ashbery’s Forms of Attention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). 23. Berkson, quoted in Quilter, p. 10. 24. Brainard, interviewed by Anne Waldman, p. 42. 25. Paul Goodman, “Advance-Guard Writing, 1900–1950,” The Kenyon Review 13:3 (Summer 1951): 357–80. 26. Ron Padgett, quoted in Holly Wall, “The World Is Yours: A Portrait Of Joe Brainard,” This Land, February 12, 2012, (accessed October 25, 2018). 27. Nathan Kernan, review of Joe Brainard exhibition, Berkeley Art Museum, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 143, no. 1178 (May 2001): 312–23 (322). 28. Ashbery, in Janet Bloom and Robert Losada, “Craft Interview with John Ashbery,” New York Quarterly 9 (Winter 1972): 11–33. 29. John Ashbery in conversation with Travis Nichols, The Believer vol. 7, no. 2 (February 2009): 51–6 (56). 30. Joseph Cornell, Diary Entry, September 1, 1953, Cornell Papers, AAA; Series 3, Box 6, fol. 22. Cornell’s works “for” other people include Beyond the Blue Peninsula (for Emily Dickinson), A Parrot for Juan Gris, A Keepsake for John Donne, and Variétés Apollinaris (for Guillaume Apollinaire). O’Hara’s “for” poems include “For the Chinese New Year & For Bill Berkson,” “Song for Lotta,” “Snapshot for Boris Pasternak,” “Sonnet for Larry Rivers and His Sister,” “For James

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31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

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Dean,” “For Bob Rauschenberg,” “For a Dolphin,” “Biotherm (For Bill Berkson),” “For David Schubert,” and “Little Elegy for Antonio Machado.” This list does not include the many “to” poems that he also wrote. John Yau, “John Ashbery: Collages: They Knew What They Wanted,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 10, 2008, n.p. Holland Cotter, “The Poetry of Scissors and Glue,” New York Times, 8 September 2008, n.p. Yau, “John Ashbery,” n.p. Ashbery, introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1971] 1995), pp. viii–ix. Ashbery, “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,” Poetry 90, no. 4 (July 1957). Reprinted in Selected Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), pp. 11–15 (12). Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poetry (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 160. John Ashbery, statement for catalogue of his Collage show, 9/4/08, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. Copyright © John Ashbery 2008. All rights reserved. Ashbery, quoted in Cotter, “The Poetry of Scissors and Glue.” Ashbery, statement for catalogue of his Collage show. Ibid. Ibid. Joe Brainard, undated letter to John Ashbery. Postmarked November 28, 1983. Collection of John Ashbery; used by permission. Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), pp. 268–9. John Ashbery, “Joe Brainard,” originally published in the catalogue for Joe Brainard: Retrospective, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1997, reprinted in Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, pp. 1–2 (2). Ashbery, statement for catalogue of his Collage show. David Kermani, email conversation with the author, March 31, 2016. Ashbery, “Joe Brainard,” pp. 1–2. Ashbery, “Joe Brainard,” p. 2. Padgett, Joe, p. 281. Ashbery, “Joe Brainard,” p. 2. Ashbery, “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” ARTnews Annual, October 1968. Ashbery, interview with Peter Stitt, quoted in John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 227. Ashbery, Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin, 1979), pp. 72–88. John Keeling, “The Moment Unravels: Reading John Ashbery’s ‘Litany,’” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 38, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 125–51 (151).

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55. Poulin Jr., “The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery,” pp. 242–55. 56. Thomas Brockelman, The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Post Modern (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 1. 57. Rosalind Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” October 16 (1981), p. 20. 58. See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (London: Faber, 1922); William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (New York: Viking, 1967); Larry Fagin, interview with Daniel Kane, New York, January 26, 1998, quoted in Kane, All Poets Welcome, pp. 157–8. 59. Ashbery, “The Impossible,” p. 12.

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Chapter 10

The Friendly Way: Crafting Community in Joe Brainard’s Poetry Brian Glavey

In the middle of “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” Frank Bidart commemorates his lost friend with a puzzle about his poetry: “When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies/and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way, // you said It’s a code.” Ultimately, Bidart’s response to this conundrum is a deeply personal one: “You were a code/I yearned to decipher.—’1 In the end it is less the poem than the friend that eludes him. Bidart’s poem is an especially moving but also fairly representative example of the way that Brainard’s admirers reacted to his AIDS-related death in 1994. As numerous recent critics have noted, for years the nearly unanimous response to his loss was a kind of literal hagiography, a celebration of his beatific gentleness and generosity often explicitly framed in terms of saintliness: “purity/and sweetness self-gathered,” as Bidart puts it in his elegy. This remarkable quality was something Brainard himself aspired toward in the years running up to his death. As Alice Notley wrote to him in 1993, after learning of his declining health, “I was very affected by our lunch together last June. Your presence lingered with me a long time; because you really had become so good. I suppose you always were but it was something I hadn’t myself known how to think about or how to talk about before.” She concludes, “You must be a saint.”2 This saintly rhetoric has often been interpreted as a relatively straightforward way of appreciating Brainard’s friendship. But noteworthy about responses such as Bidart’s and Notley’s is the way they stress that Brainard’s exquisite goodness is not straightforward at all. It is on the contrary something that needs to be deciphered, that is difficult to put words to, a challenge to think or talk about. Brainard’s friendliness, in other words, is presented as a distinctly hermeneutic and even literary problem.

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Even as “In Memory of Joe Brainard” participates in the biographical canonization of Brainard and his sweetness and light, the elegy might be said to reverse the poles of the most common version of such readings. Several recent critics have cautioned that these pervasively personal reactions to Brainard’s work might in the end distract from the work itself, collapsing the distinction between the artist and his art. But Bidart does not in the end treat the text as a person; instead he treats the person as a text. Brainard’s friendliness should not be treated as a simple explanation of his work, since it itself is a cipher in need of explication. Friendliness might even be taken as an aesthetic category in itself, one that toggles between the artist and his work in ways that are complicated and worth examining. The characteristics that enamored readers have often taken as essential qualities of Brainard’s character—gentleness, sweetness, tact—and that they have often projected onto the texts themselves are not essences but effects. Bidart, rather than reading Brainard’s work as a product of the self-evident goodness of his autobiographical self, reads the absence wrought by Brainard’s loss as already present within that work. Brainard’s poems, in all their casual whimsy, are thus a sort of proleptic elegy. This same temporality unfolds in Bidart’s “A Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c. 350–325 bc,” a poem that, though originally composed as a birthday gift for his friend during the summer of 1992, already locates Brainard’s eventual loss at the heart of their friendship, presenting friendship in almost Derridean terms: o, my friends, there is no friend.3 Brainard’s friendly way, in other words, is serious business. It is worth noting, however, that it is far from self-evident that the same is true of his Friendly Way, a text that on the surface appears emblematically silly. Bidart’s choice of this particular text as the marker of Brainard’s loss and the cipher for his desire is an interesting and arguably an idiosyncratic one. Indeed, that he chooses a poetic text at all, rather than a visual work, is telling, considering the fact that his friend was likely better known by most as a painter among poets. But even among his collected works, The Friendly Way, a short mimeographed chapbook that Brainard published in 1972, seems an unlikely candidate for such honors.4 A seemingly minor work by a seemingly minor writer, it would appear to lack the gravitas expected of an elegy for a departed friend, let alone of a meditation on the catastrophe of the AIDS crisis. The Friendly Way is unusual in that it is not a text directly rooted in Brainard’s distinctively honest voice; it is instead a collage of found texts culled from issues of Women’s Household, a low-budget arts and crafts magazine filled with recipes

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and patterns for doll clothes. The “country voices” it presents do not necessarily strike one as encrypting any deeper truths: “What a beautiful spring day this has been! I went to the cemetery where my mother is buried and the tiny squirrels were so thick I could hardly drive without hitting one.” “I have many memories of the old pump—some good, and some bad—but that is the way of life.” “Things we see from car windows are remembered for many years.” “When day is done one finds too frequently that not much else is.” “At times I’d get discouraged, but Dr. Comstock would poo-poo me with, ‘You’re living today aren’t you?’ He had such a keen sense of humor.”5

Bidart’s struggle to find words for these words is a testament to his belief in their complexity, a belief that might be said to run counter to their superficial randomness as well as to the commonly held notion that Brainard’s writings are defined by the appealing simplicity of their self-expression. “In Memory of Joe Brainard” insists that The Friendly Way is a work not to be understood at face value but within a lineage of modernist experimentation, a collage of fragmentary voices wedded together into an enigmatic unity that necessitates a complicated process of interpretation to be deciphered, a kind of goofball The Waste Land. In what follows I would like to take Bidart’s insight seriously and consider The Friendly Way as a central text for understanding Brainard’s poetics, one that might shed light on more famous works such as I Remember. The text functions as illustrative for several reasons. Some of these are aesthetic or formal: as a found-text collage, The Friendly Way is a work that bridges the gap between Brainard’s verbal and his visual aesthetics. But unlike his comics, which might be said to function similarly, it is almost strictly textual, its only illustration the typically adorable dog and cherries on its cover. In several different senses, it is a work that illustrates Brainard’s attitude toward working with—and giving priority—to his materials, whether these are words or images. The Friendly Way suggests that writing for Brainard is always a kind of collage. This orientation is underscored by the nature of the source material from which it is crafted. A magazine devoted to “homemaking,” Women’s Household is organized in large measure around needlework and other

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Figure 10.1 Joe Brainard, The Friendly Way (New York: Siamese Banana, 1972).

forms of craftwork. As a member of a queer, urban avant-garde, we might expect Brainard to be dismissive of such apparent kitsch, but The Friendly Way’s appropriation of this material emphasizes on the contrary the overlap between the kind of world-making at the heart of Brainard’s aesthetic cohort and these feminized forms of making that fill the pages of these women’s magazines. The Friendly Way’s relation to these magazines also enables it to offer a slightly different approach to the question of Brainard’s aesthetic of friendliness, one not immediately organized around his own distinctive voice and rooted in a social world that is not directly his own. In this regard

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Brainard’s coy statement to Bidart is accurate: The Friendly Way is a fascinating work in part because, unlike other more direct works, it encodes the forms of sociability in which he is always interested. * Studies of postwar American poetry, with its various coteries and cliques, have always told stories about friendship. Recent work in the field, however, has demonstrated that this tendency is not merely a matter of sorting poets into their respective schools and rivalries. Instead, as Andrew Epstein, Lytle Shaw, Daniel Kane and others have all shown, friendship is not only the context for the poetry of this period but often its raw material and subject matter.6 Taking these dynamics seriously— not merely as accidents of biography but as central to the aesthetic and philosophical project of the writers in question—has helped call attention to the way that poets’ personal allegiances and rivalries provide a forum for thinking about individuality, creativity, and personal autonomy in relation to the consensus culture of cold war America. As Benjamin Lee explains, attending to the small-scale social networks and “intimate communities” is fruitful in part as a means of “grounding our thinking about the self in social context, or about individual agency in relation to larger systems.”7 For the poets of the New York School in particular, friendship takes on a vital importance as a form of resistance, a means of creating a sort of queerly utopian community in the midst of a culture that often viewed its participants with animosity. Work in this vein resonates with the queer utopian impulses one finds in Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life.” In this influential late interview, Foucault famously asserts that “the development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.” Existing outside institutionalized forms of relationality—marriage, family, work—homosexuality necessitates utopian forms of creativity. “Two men of noticeably different ages—what code would allow them to communicate?” he asks. “They have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.”8 Foucault conjectures that it is the non-paradigmizable quality of these modes of relationality that make homosexuality threatening: not queer sex but the possibility of queer friendship. Brainard offers his own explication of these issues in “The Gay Way,” a brief “play” that opens with stage directions conjuring “Two young men (BOB and DICK) . . . in bed together, asleep. Arm in arm, their bodies are covered from the waists down with a white sheet.” When the curtain rises it appears to be the coziness of their embrace, along with the threat of male nudity,

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that engenders the hatred of the audience. Same-sex desire and even sex itself become on the contrary objects of amusement: “As the indignant audience storms out of the theatre shouting ‘God damn pansies!’ and ‘We want our money back!’ the play continues behind the curtain as DICK gets out of bed and joins BOB on the floor for some very wild love making (use your imagination here) much to the amusement of the stagehands who, you see, are the real audience.”9 Friendship, according to this queer account, can itself become a form of avant-gardism, of a kind of creativity that upends and disturbs the norms and expectations of the straight world. With this in mind it is worth pushing back against an understandable tendency in recent scholarship to bracket Brainard’s investment in his friendships in order to make the case for the importance of his work. Andy Fitch’s Pop Poetics is the most thorough example of this approach, sidestepping accounts of Brainard’s modesty and kindness to argue for his work’s avant-gardist and even high modernist credentials. One might expect that the warmth, accessibility, and direct personal content of Brainard’s work would disqualify it from this austere lineage. For Fitch, however, such dismissals stem from a scholarly fixation on a reductive divide separating poetic forms that are expressivist and affectively charged from those that are constructivist and critical. This binaristic mindset has rendered illegible not only Brainard’s work but the work of a broader strain of contemporary writing that refuses to choose sides between language and lyricism, often by exploring a seemingly contradictory conflation of “first-person transparency and algorithmic artifice.”10 A work like I Remember offers a perfect example of such a pop poetics: on the one hand it is, as Fitch makes clear, serial, accretive, and driven by a portable, meme-like constraint. And yet on the other hand I Remember is also a work that is provocatively easy to enjoy. The complexity and ambition of this combination comes into especially clear focus in Fitch’s account once we disentangle Brainard from the immediate context of his New York School peers in order to read his work in relation to other traditions: historical avant-garde movements such as Dada and futurism, for instance, and, most importantly, the work of Andy Warhol. Fitch explores Brainard’s transformation of Pop Art into pop poetics within the context of art historical debates about seriality. But of course, Warhol’s Popism is not only a question of form. As Jonathan Flatley has illuminated, one of its defining features was Warhol’s capacity for liking things, and much of his work might be understood as a pedagogical experiment in expanding the capacity both to like and to be like other things.

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Pop, Flatley argues, represents “an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms could find a home.”11 The goal of this work is to sustain forms of collectivity—and, in particular, marginalized forms of erotic attachment—that might be made to feel valuable. The fact that Brainard very much resonated with this aspect of Warhol’s project is evident in his text “Andy Warhol: Andy Do It,” a brief work that nonetheless manages to repeat the sentence “I like Andy Warhol” some fourteen times in a row. Of course, the difference between Warhol and Brainard’s relation to liking is that Warhol’s pursued the project of proliferating likeness with a sense of cool and ironic passivity. Brainard quite directly courts the affection and approbation of his readers. Throughout his journals and letters Brainard links his queerness with his desire to be liked: “The only thing that ever bothered me about being queer,” he writes in “Self-Portrait: 1971,” “was that I thought people wouldn’t like me if they knew” (359). Brainard’s transformation of this stigma into a grounds for feeling liked by and like other people is an exemplary achievement of queer performativity. Of course, to associate Brainard’s desire to be liked with queerness bristles against the latter term’s fierce commitment to anti-normativity. Much of queer theory’s animating impulses stem from its refusal not only of homophobia but of the assimilationist ethos driving a certain segment of the gay rights movement. By emphasizing not only the trouble with normal but also the normalness of trouble, however, Brainard develops a particularly powerful conception of queerness conceptualized in terms of positive rather than negative affect. The way these affects are mobilized is at the heart of Brainard’s poetics of coterie, though, interestingly, his version of such an aesthetic differs from that of his peers. His creation of alternative kinship and allegiances is not aimed at creating a context for his own canonization, as Libbie Rifkin suggests about the coterie function of Ted Berrigan’s poems. Nor does it have the ambitious pedagogical and curatorial dynamic that one finds in Frank O’Hara’s. Rather, Brainard’s works conjure a kind of coterie in order to create a social space to disappear within. Brainard’s texts establish a social network in order to then allow the poet to become dispersed within it, to queerly deflect attention from his own self as a way of mediating other people’s anxieties and embarrassment. For an example of the way his poetry not only reflects its social network but also works to sustain it, consider “Little-Known Facts about People,” and an undated poster on the same theme:

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Figure 10.2 Joe Brainard, Untitled (c. 1968), Box 9, Folder 13, Joe Brainard Archive, Mandeville Special Collections and Archives, University of California San Diego. By permission of the estate of Joe Brainard.

‘Did you know that Kenneth Koch’s wife Janice used to be an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landing on a highway./When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap dancer. Did you know that Kenward’s grandfather was Joseph Pulitzer”; “Did you know that the first poems John Ashbery ever had published were in Poetry magazine under the name of Joel Symington?/Did you know that Bill Berkson was on the ‘100 Best Dressed Men’ list of 1967?”12 Directly tied to the occasion of its composition, this text reads like a sort of party game, a test of how well you know your friends designed to consolidate the relations that are its subject. An undated poster version of “Little-Known Facts” underscores the

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queerness of this sociability (see Figure 10.2). Six panels depict a man and woman engaged in a passionate embrace. The panels alternate between the thoughts of the man and the woman, each presented in a thought bubble above their kiss. In the midst of their passion, both partners are apparently distracted by more pressing questions: “Did you know that Bill Berkson was once bat boy for the Yankees?” * Transplanted from the immediate coterie context of literary journals and poetry readings and into the heart of heterosexuality, Brainard’s illustration of “Little-Known Facts” might be seen as an attempt to make room for queer networks of affiliation in the flush but distracted face of heteronormativity. The work as such transfigures the ubiquitous heterosexual kiss into a campy occasion for celebrating his friends. Much the same could be said of The Friendly Way, a work created as kind of cut-up of a magazine dedicated to a certain normative vision of the heterosexual good life. It is, after all, a magazine created by and for housewives, devoted “to any subjects pertaining to homemaking.” Brainard’s attitude toward the way the magazine performs a version of this domesticity appears to be something like camp. The initial context for Brainard’s work was the entertainment of his friends during their annual summers in Calais, Vermont: Ron Padgett recalls that, in the summer of 1971, Brainard “was making found poems (‘one-liners,’ as he called them) from Women’s Household” and other magazines. “These periodicals,” Padgett explains, “consisted mainly of letters from rural women, some of them shut-ins, letters with sentences that sometimes came off sounding peculiar.”13 “Along with playing cards, roulette, backgammon, charades, mah-jongg, and croquet,” Padgett continues, “reading these letters [from Women’s Household] aloud after dinner had been one of our summer rituals in Vermont, and although marijuana intensified their effect, even Pat [Padgett], who did not smoke it, found them hilarious.”14 Women’s Household was a low-budget monthly published by Tower Press in Danvers, Massachusetts, a small outfit that put out other magazines with titles such as Stitch ’n’ Sew and Popular Needlework (“Join other friendly needlework ladies!”). Although nominally devoted to “homemaking,” the chief subject of these letters was in a sense friendliness, a fact signaled by the magazine’s subtitle, which would find its way into Brainard’s title as well: “Where good and friendly neighbors meet.” Women’s Household comprises not just letters but poems, recipes, tatting and needlework patterns, pictures of pets and requests for book trades and tips on missing

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Figure 10.3 Women’s Household, July 1968.

persons. All of these are shared not only for their own sake but to foster correspondence: the readers who contribute seek to connect with women (and some men: the magazine contains “a male side of the mail” section as well) with similar interests. Women wrote seeking pen pals from specific states, with specific hobbies, and even with specific names or birthdays. One section solicits letters and postcards to be sent to shut-ins. In another monthly feature one reader submits a personal problem that other readers then weigh in on. All of these texts take up a remarkably consistent tone: the seemingly superficial but quintessentially American argot of neighborliness that so interested Brainard and his friend John Ashbery. Bill Berkson, when he wasn’t chasing bats for the Yankees, once remarked that Brainard “liked to show people doing dumb, everydayish

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things—that’s why he liked Sluggo and Nancy. And in that way his art was a lot like John Ashbery’s poems.”15 It is easy to see why the language of Women’s Household would appeal to this sensibility: “I know how busy you are at this time of year—but won’t you dust off your hands for a few minutes and take time out with your new neighbor from Connecticut?” (6) “Once again, it’s time to say ‘Howdy to all the readers and to my new friends who have come knockin’ at my door through this little magazine’” (19).16 It’s not exactly clear what sort of procedure Brainard employed to select the sentences that would become part of his collage. Some of these are indeed peculiar when lifted from their original context (and likely a bit peculiar to begin with), sentences like “Our swordfish just had eleven babies and I’m not at all sure what to do with them,” which Brainard draws from a letter written by a woman introducing herself and her hobbies: “Hi Gals! I am fascinated with all your hobbies and interests, and after closing the cover on the magazine, I feel as though I am positively boring,” she begins, before going on to relate: “We recently acquired an aquarium stocked with various tropical beauties but I must admit my knowledge of fish is painfully slim. Our swordfish just had eleven babies and I’m not at all sure what to do with them.”17 For the most part, however, his selections tilt toward the dumb and everydayish, a smorgasbord of clichés, platitudes, and random personal reminiscences that trade in a kind of chummy optimism. “When we get up in the morning we have two choices; to be optimistic and cheerful or to be pessimistic and gloomy,” for instance.18 The effect, in other words, is not simply one of defamiliarization: it is not a text comprised exclusively of outrageous juxtapositions. Rather, it is a collage of hackneyed palaver peppered with a few moments of more pronounced oddity. That Brainard’s selections are not on the whole more exaggerated or zany complicates the notion that his relation to the magazine is primarily a matter of camp. But it also undercuts the sense—suggested by Padgett’s anecdote—that the effect of Brainard’s compilation was to highlight the ridiculousness of his material. On the contrary, the goal seems to be something like highlighting what we might think of the ordinary weirdness of the women’s language, perhaps of American English in general, without transfiguring it into something extraordinary. There are reasons beyond Brainard’s celebrated niceness to interpret the relation between Brainard’s work and his source material as one of identification rather than something more dismissive. Brainard’s queerness is often mediated, after all, by identifications with feminized figures like flowers and Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. But

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one striking thing about the sentences that fill The Friendly Way is arguably that they are hard to differentiate from the sentences that fill the rest of Brainard’s oeuvre. In their colloquial triviality, such statements resemble the kind of gee-whiz wisdom that fills Brainard’s Collected Writings, which is full of other “one-liners” such as “Perhaps in our mad scramble to keep our heads above water we miss the point”; “For once in my life, today, I dropped an open-faced peanut butter sandwich that landed right side up”; “Dance, according to the United States Post Office, is ‘Poetry in motion.’”19 Consider Brainard’s “Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises),” which explicitly assumes the practical tones of the sort of self-help column that one might find in a publication like Women’s Household: “If you drink black coffee switch to regular (or vice versa) until you find yourself enjoying your new way of coffee just as much as your old way. Or, if you simply cannot make the adjustment you will find yourself drinking less coffee, which is O.K. too, because, you know, it’s not very good for you. // Conclusion: Sometimes to lose is to win.”20 The invocation of this sort of self-help rhetoric was not an uncommon feature of the poetry of Brainard’s cohort. Notley’s “The Prophet,” for instance, is constructed largely of lessons such as “Don’t brood over how you may have behaved last night. If you/ Can’t remember that much about it, don’t ask anyone else about it/ Except a little, in case you were wonderful in your abandon.”21 What is most distinctive about Brainard’s incorporation of such gestures, however, is the zero-sum logic that promises in almost any situation that everyone will be a winner: “From your head pick out the one person you would most like to make out with. Now call this person up for a date. He or she will probably say ‘No,’ but at least you will have tried. Will have the satisfaction of having tried. And then you can blame ‘life’ for your frustrations, instead of yourself.” Such exercises make a point of addressing everyone: “The next time you are making out with someone, try casually suggesting that perhaps it might be fun to adjourn into the closet. Conclusion (For straights): New areas break down old fences. Conclusion (for gays): Everything is full circle.”22 Work of this sort is devoted to the romantic notion that poetry is wrapped up with the project of making its authors and readers into better people. The improvements promised are not in line with the elevations of liberal humanism, however, but far more quotidian: switch to decaf, go on a diet. That Brainard—who spent much of his summers in Vermont trying to put on weight and improve his appearance—should find Women’s Household resonant is not surprising.

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What is perhaps surprising is the way that Brainard treats the sorts of normativity and ordinariness at work in such advice. It is difficult to celebrate the ordinary without rendering it either extraordinary on the one hand or uninteresting on the other, but this is precisely Brainard’s project. What his work makes visible is that scenes of ordinariness can become the objects of intense attachments—and even of powerfully queer identifications and desires. Such unruly feelings are perfectly at home in homemaking magazines. Indeed, Women’s Household is a poignant example of the sorts of “intimate publics” that Lauren Berlant associates with the unfinished business of sentimentalism in the United States. Such publics, she explains, are concerned with the “vernacular sense of belonging to community,” and with “foreground[ing] affective and emotional attachments located in fantasies of the common, the everyday, and a sense of ordinariness.”23 Berlant’s work on the affective politics of these publics helps explain how the desire for belonging becomes a desire for conventionality—a desire for ordinariness—that should not be shamed as simply conservative or retrograde. Instead, we might amplify a kind of utopian desire within the performance of these conventionalities, a performance which encodes an acknowledgment that the promise of the good life represented there is never fulfilled. Brainard’s poetry draws out the queer feelings that exist within the ordinary and even points toward the possibility for a kind of queerness that is linked to an ambivalent desire for normativity itself. As he quips: “If I’m as normal as I think I am, then we’re all a bunch of weirdos.”24 His works testify not only to what Michael Warner calls the trouble with normal; they also speak to the normality of trouble. Brainard himself gestures toward the relation between a desire for ordinariness and his queerness in a 1969 letter that describes the origins of I Remember to 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 that it is because of me that 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. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I’m enjoying it while I can.25

Brainard traces a fascinating affective trajectory around the pleasure to be had from feeling common, starting from a point of transcendence—“way, way up,” feeling like God writing the Bible— before returning to a sublunary context. Elsewhere Brainard points to

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the sort of redemption that comes from achieving this sort of exemplarity in writing: “I am thinking about the difference—the possibility of the difference—of writing about yourself as ‘me’ as opposed to ‘a human being.’ And I suspect that yes, there is a difference. And that, tho I pretend to write about myself as ‘me,’ I am secretly more aware of myself (writing-wise) as ‘a human being.’ And that this may well be my salvation!” But the particular elation that comes from being able to write this way, from being able to take dictation from everyone, is tellingly made to seem rather commonplace: a form of pleasantness to which everyone ought to have access. It is a nice feeling, Brainard explains in his letter to Waldman. Of course, Brainard certainly realizes that not everyone gets to feel this way, that feeling this form of commonness is precisely what is largely denied to him by a homophobic culture. For Brainard to imagine, in the summer of Stonewall, that everybody is queer is a pointed and moving feat of imagination. * There is nothing saccharine or straightforward about Brainard’s interest in niceness. Indeed, his investment in these sorts of minor aesthetic categories—“contentment rather than elation, glumness rather than despair, horniness instead of passion, and, everywhere, a non-existential, completely ordinary loneliness,” to borrow Dan Chiasson’s catalogue—arguably marks his work as especially vital right now, at a moment when critical vocabularies are shifting.26 Indeed, Brainard’s work might be a singularly exemplary instance of all three of the minor aesthetic categories that Sianne Ngai has identified as central to our contemporary moment. Blending the conceptualism of the interesting with the hyped-up affect of the cute and the zany, I Remember, for instance, might be seen as a kind of conceptual machine for producing minor affects.27 Brainard’s exploration of minorness makes him a highly productive figure for thinking about the aesthetic possibilities of late capitalism. Daniel Worden makes just such an argument about Brainard’s work, noting that “the warmth, kindness, and authenticity so often described as integral to Brainard’s writing emanates” not from its imbrication within specific coteries of feeling, “but instead as a feeling of individual dissolution and valuelessness,” a sensibility he ties to “an anti-capitalist aesthetic.”28 Worden’s insight is especially helpful: Brainard’s work does, it seems to me, hinge on a kind of “individual dissolution” that needs to be understood in part against the backdrop of the intensified commodification of everyday life in the second half of the twentieth

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century. But—again—it is worth noting that this dissolution is itself mediated through his attachments to his friends. Writing in particular for Brainard functions as a way of taking on the liberating quality of a sort of minorness—the nice feeling of feeling like everybody instead of yourself. It is probable that Brainard is able to achieve this quality in his written work in part because he never thought of himself as particular good at writing. Time and again he describes his poetry in explicitly social terms. As he tells Anne Waldman, “I think I write because I know a lot of writers.”29 This deferral to his friends is evident even in his masterpiece I Remember. Despite its anaphoric first-person-singular, the book is social through and through, tied in rather direct ways to Brainard’s friends. His annual move to Calais inaugurated a season of letterwriting as he kept in touch with his friends in New York City and elsewhere. I Remember is very much a piece of such correspondence. Having never learned to type, Brainard composed the work longhand and then meticulously copied out each new revision in his distinctive block-capital script. The manuscript of I Remember is thus visually indistinguishable from the letters in which he described its progress: the same cartoonish capitals, the same wide-ruled loose leaf, the same atrocious spelling. But the work is connected with the correspondence in other ways as well. In another letter to Schuyler written as he was awaiting the first proofs from Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair Press in 1970, Brainard confesses his excitement about publishing the book (his first) and expresses his gratitude to his friend: “If you hadn’t been here to appreciate it, I would never have carried it out/on so far. So—I thank you.” Whether explicitly collaborative or not, all of Brainard’s work was rooted in his relations with his friends. But writing even more than visual art was dependent for Brainard upon the encouragement of others. “I had no intentions of being a writer,” he explains in an interview with Tim Dlugos, “Everything was against me. I had no vocabulary. I can’t spell. I’m inarticulate. I have sort of learned to use that. But this happened because all my friends are writers. I wrote a short story, the first thing I remember writing, and I showed it to Ted [Berrigan] and he said, ‘It’s very good.’ So I kept at it.”30 Writing for Brainard is a way of being with his friends, and, more so than in relation to his visual art, he is able to pursue it without ambitions of greatness. In a certain sense this sensibility might offer another explanation for his interest in a magazine like Women’s Household. Even outside of his writing, Brainard’s predilection for “minor” forms such as collage—he aspired to oil painting but was

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never satisfied with the results—suggest that his way of relating to his materials, and his resistance to any discourse of mastery or seriousness, are connected in fundamental ways to the handmade modes of creation associated less with fine art than with the feminized—and thus undervalued—realm of arts and crafts. Indeed, it is not such a stretch to think of the mimeographed magazines put together by Brainard and his colleagues as kissing cousins to low-budget needlework magazines. Both circulate as a means to create specific social worlds for people who feel marginalized from the mainstream public; both put a powerful faith in the ability of making things by hand as a way to infuse everyday life with beauty and creativity; and both are committed to an ethos of (sometimes competitive) collaboration. The similarities connecting Brainard’s work and the crafts in the magazine corroborate Worden’s insight into the way his work resists the capitalist imperatives that saturated the art world. To think of his writing in relation to craft (not only in the MFA workshop sense but in the sense of arts and crafts as well) is to see another way in which his friendly aesthetic enters into the form of his work. As Brainard expresses on numerous occasions, the creation of works tends to be driven by his materials: “I don’t ever have an idea. The material does it all. . . . You have control if you want it but that’s something I never wanted to do much.”31 Or elsewhere: “Working on my Spanish construction again it occurred to me how much I rely on ‘the work’ itself to tell me what to do. So often when I work I just ‘do a lot of stuff’ all over what I am doing (a painting, a collage, a construction, etc.) until something I do tells me what to do.”32 It might be that part of what is interesting about Brainard’s poetry in particular is the way that this craft-orientation is imported form the plastic into the verbal arts. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written movingly about the way that the experience of working with textiles can transform the way one relates with texts, creating the possibility of a kind of reparative aesthetic that resonates with Brainard’s own. “The craft aspect of art making—or, more simply put, of thing making—does seem (doesn’t it) to be an exceptionally fruitful place for exploring those middle ranges of agency,” she explains, differentiating this sense of craft from her relation to writing, one defined by a demand for mastery altogether out of the question. But really I think anyone who’s verbally quick at all—verbally and conceptually— is liable to develop such grandiose illusions of magical omnipotence in relation to language—exactly because, unlike making things, speech and writing and conceptual thought impose no material obstacles to a fantasy of instant, limitless efficacy.

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Brainard’s texts are powerful in part because he does treat them like textiles: objects woven together in ways that absolve themselves from fantasies of mastery. One gets an especially strong sense of this from his handwriting, which, as I noted above, remains constant in his writing and in his drawings. Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself is such a curious work in part because Brainard’s notes are already drawings. Writing is, in other words, already a form of draughtmanship for Brainard. Writing, in other words, is a means for Brainard to dissolve fantasies of mastery, to identify with a kind of minor-key ordinariness that engenders positive if not revolutionary feelings. In doing so, Brainard employs an aesthetic that I have elsewhere described as a kind of wallflower avant-gardism, a queer performativity that solicits forms of attachment in part through strategies of shy withdrawal.33 Such bashful attractiveness is visible throughout Brainard’s Collected Writings. Consider, for example, the way that “Poem” (c. 1972) reconfigures lyric confession as a kind of lyric shrug: Sometimes everything seems so oh, I don’t know.34

With its generic title, “Poem” borrows its studied nonchalance from Brainard’s friend O’Hara, who often entitled his works “Poem,” suggesting at one and the same time that the text in question exemplified a casual brilliance that did not aspire to the formality of a more specific designation and that at the same time it might in some ways be exemplary of Poetry in general. Brainard’s poem makes both of these gestures. Like so much of his work, it refuses to be taken seriously. But it is also striking in that, among Brainard’s journal entries, one-liners, and uncategorizable paragraphs, “Poem” is one of the few Brainard poems that looks like a poem, that is explicitly recognizable as lyric. Aspiring at first to a kind of imagist concentration, the contracting lines promise a confessional profundity before thinking better of it. But even as it dissolves into its noncommittal demurral, its lyricism consolidates around the triple rhyme so/oh/know, providing a sense of an ending even as the poem becomes so slight as to disappear. ‘Poem” provides a useful gloss on the friendly way of Brainard’s writing, a way that, as I have argued elsewhere, has less to do with being nice than it does with making nice, both in the sense that its humane affability appears to be contagious, and more importantly

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in the way that it performs a certain set of gestures with the explicit intent of making others feel comfortable and creative.35 Much has been made of Brainard’s generosity but it might be that another commonly cited attribute offers a more illuminating perspective on his achievement: his tact. According to Roland Barthes, tact is an important embodiment of a queer neutrality that quietly opts out of binary oppositions rather than trying to undo them: “I would suggest calling the nonviolent refusal of reduction, the parrying of generality by inventive, unexpected, nonparadigmizable behavior, the elegant and discreet flight from dogmatism, in short, the principle of tact, I would call it, all being said: sweetness.”36 Such sweetness, such tact involves a refusal to impose definitions or mastery. It gestures to codes without promising to decipher them. It is, as Bidart shows in relation to The Friendly Way, a sweetness worth taking seriously.

Notes 1. Frank Bidart, “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” in Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 13. 2. Alice Notley, letter dated 16 November, 1993. Box 5, Folder 17, Joe Brainard Archive, Mandeville Special Collections and Archives, University of California San Diego. 3. See Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997). 4. Joe Brainard, The Friendly Way (New York: Siamese Banana, 1972). 5. Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: Library of America, 2012), p. 400. 6. See, for instance, Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and “Angel Hair Magazine, The Second-Generation New York School, and the Poetics of Sociability,” in Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006), pp. 90–121; and Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006). 7. Benjamin Lee, “Frank O’Hara and the Turn to Friendship,” Criticism 49 (2007): 244. 8. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 136. 9. Brainard, Collected Writings, pp. 389–90. 10. Andy Fitch, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), p. 28.

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11. Jonathan Flatley, “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” October 132 (Spring 2010): 72. 12. Brainard, Collected Writings, pp. 228, 229. 13. Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), p. 183. In his memoir, Padgett does not mention The Friendly Way but rather cites “Joe’s ‘From Women’s Househould July 1971’.” 14. Ibid. p. 183. Padgett’s catalog of games, and his note that Ashbery was also a visitor during this period, underline the numerous similarities that connect The Friendly Way with his collaboration with Ashbery from a few years later, The Vermont Notebook. 15. Quoted in Edmund White, Arts and Letters (San Francisco: Cleis, 2004), p. 241. 16. Women’s Household, July 1968: 6, 19. 17. Brainard, Collected Writings, 398. Women’s Household, May 1971: 54. 18. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 402. 19. Ibid. pp. 416, 353, 464. 20. Ibid. p. 462. 21. Alice Notely, “The Prophet,” in Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2005 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), p. 94. 22. Brainard, Collected Writings, pp. 461–2. 23. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 10. 24. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 457. 25. Quoted in Padgett, Joe, p. 146. 26. Dan Chiasson, “Joe Brainard’s Odes to the Survivable Past,” New Yorker, June 20, 2012. 27. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 28. Daniel Worden, “Joe Brainard’s Grid, or, The Matter of Comics,” Nonsite 15, January 16, 2015, (accessed October 25, 2018). 29. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 512. 30. Ibid. p. 498. 31. Ibid. p. 511. 32. Ibid. p. 239. 33. Brian Glavey, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 34. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 435. 35. Brian Glavey, “Friending Joe Brainard,” Criticism (forthcoming). 36. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosaline Kraus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 36.

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Chapter 11

Codes and Wounds: Exposure and Inviolability in the Work of Joe Brainard and Frank Bidart Anna Smaill

One of the most striking elements of Joe Brainard’s legacy is the degree to which his artwork and poetry has become synonymous with a near-hagiographic exposition of his personality. It is rare to encounter a discussion of Brainard’s work that does not first engage with his personal character and social persona. A 2001 special edition of the journal Pressed Wafer published in conjunction with the Berkeley Art Museum’s traveling iteration of the 1997 exhibition “Joe Brainard: A Retrospective” contains several personal testimonies from Brainard’s friends, including several well-known figures from the New York School. The opening statement of John Ashbery’s essay establishes the tone: “Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person, and nice as an artist.”1 The testimonies present a unanimous vision of Joe Brainard as selfeffacing, generous, gentle, and kind. Anecdotes recall his generosity with money, his readiness to provide artwork for collaborative projects, and an almost baroque social thoughtfulness.2 In Pop Poetics, a rigorous revaluation of Brainard’s poetic oeuvre within the context of Pop Art, Andy Fitch points out: “Given the overall frequency with which Brainard’s beatific ‘niceness’ gets mentioned throughout this Pressed Wafer compilation, one may in fact assume that the term does not fit this poet, so much as it defines him.”3 “Nice,” as William Corbett notes in his Pressed Wafer contribution, “may be a surprising word to celebrate a late twentieth century New York artist.”4 It is, in fact, a surprising word to celebrate any artist. What is not a surprise, then, is that recent revaluations of Brainard have sought to problematize or nuance this default description. Andy Fitch outlines the reductive tendencies of the dominant biographical

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reading of Brainard. Our inability to separate Brainard from visions of his “niceness” and “kindness” has, he argues, obscured an understanding of the true experimental rigor and canniness of Brainard’s abstract poetics and aided his relegation to the fringes and margins of the New York school. Fitch also suggests that assumptions about Brainard’s disposition might not, in fact, stand up to biographical scrutiny. He points to repeated instances in Brainard’s writing that reveal a blunt, even brutal, candor trained not only on his own life, but on those of his friends. As he states, “Brainard’s unflagging ‘kindness’ proves difficult to reconcile with his emphatic ‘honesty.’”5 Brian Glavey takes a different approach in qualifying our understanding of Brainard’s famed congeniality. For Glavey, Brainard is the forerunner of a “vanguard of nice,” a broader aesthetic that reflects what he terms a “wallflower avant-garde.” This is a mode that draws together art and life not via shock, estrangement, or defamiliarization (that more typical arsenal of the avant-garde) but through a form of conciliatory reticence—an embrace of the banal, the silly, and the ostensibly trivial. Thus a wall of pansies imbued with perspective-free friendliness and accessibility might draw the reader into an ambivalent but generative sociability.6 David Bergman similarly reveals the potential complexity of “niceness.” As he points out, Ashbery’s well-known testimonial draws on the fluid historical definition of the word; the “nice” invidual might be “shy, precise, wanton, foolish, and ignorant.” Indeed, “the term is hardly the straitjacket that Fitch fears it might be.”7 Yet while the desire to undermine Brainard’s niceness or to reposition it as an aesthetic strategy has fired a necessary revaluation of his work, we should not ignore the repeated attention paid by Brainard’s contemporaries to the exact nexus of his art and social persona. It is the unusual overlap between selfhood and artwork that unremittingly surfaces in recollections and testimonials. As Ashbery’s comments make clear, Brainard’s personal generosity is perhaps less unusual than the transparency it suggests between his self and his art: the fact that he is “Nice as a person, and nice as an artist” (italics mine). In this equation, Brainard’s character is relevant not solely in its own right, but for the mystifying way it manifests in his art. Via a close reading of Brainard’s connection with and influence on the poet Frank Bidart, this chapter will argue that it is this encoding of the personal within the aesthetic that sustains the enduring allure and piquancy of his work. This reading also suggests a further analogical link between Brainard’s work and the power of the unbroken code—its sustained, withheld, perhaps inviolable, promise. *

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The development of Joe Brainard’s oeuvre was continually defined by a self-willed intersection between aesthetics and autobiography. His poetry, journals, notebooks, and other prose works are notable for their deployment of exhaustive, often seemingly trivial, first-hand detail. While acknowledging Brainard’s performativity and the slippery apparatus of his first-person voice, it’s important to note his firm claim on systematic autobiographical examination as a necessary part of his aesthetic strategy. In a 1961 journal entry entitled “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night,” written when he was nineteen, Brainard writes: “I know beauty; which is really just truth. . . . But though I know beauty, I can’t express it until I’ve undressed. Have so much undressing to do.”8 For Brainard, “undressing” refers to a stringent and meticulous process of self-appraisal, a process that mirrors and enables what he sets out to achieve in his art: What I am trying for, I think, is accuracy. That is to say, “the way things look.” To me. This is really very hard to do. And, I imagine, impossible. . . . In much the same way, I am writing this diary now. I am telling you simply what I see, what I am doing, and what I am thinking. I have nothing that I know of in particular to say, but I hope that, through trying to be honest and open, I will “find” something to say. (CW 243)

Rather than confessional acts that shore up the symbolic structure of selfhood, Brainard treated the recording of autobiographical detail— along with the incidental feints and non-sequiturs of real-time thought—as a tool through which to chasten or undo individual ego. “[T]rying to be honest and open” prioritizes a moment-to-moment evocation of perceived reality, a commitment to the physical objects and incidents that make up the present moment. As such, it suggests a stripping away of subjective affect, and thus a loss of overarching personal narrative—two elements so necessary for the construction of ego. Though “effortless” is an adjective frequently used to describe Brainard’s work, such acts of exposure have their own self-excoriating rigor. Brainard’s journals retain frequent reminders of the difficulty of such “undressing.” He explains: “Being ‘open’ is not so easy. Nor is being honest. Nor is being simple. Or being direct” (CW 243). In order to establish the faux-naïve simplicity that he cultivates in his prose, for example, Brainard frequently cautions or chastises himself against the dangers of affectation or stylization, the habit of slipping into fixed poses. “I will try not to do this so much,” he writes,

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“This putting you on . . . I will try not to be coy. I promise” (CW 243). Brainard’s determination to employ immediacy as a tool for self-effacement is present also in his tendency to accord material and process primacy over individual ego or control. As he states: 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 a story. You have control if you want to take it but that’s something I never wanted to do much. (CW 514)

The drive to remove the intellectual preconceptions that obscure “the way things look” paradoxically ensures, however, that—in his prose, as in his artwork—Brainard remains constantly in the picture, both as a recording figure (“I am telling you simply what I see, what I am doing, and what I am thinking” (243)) and as a vessel for constant change. His oeuvre thus presents an oddly contradictory slippage between self-obsession and self-effacement, a cultivation of egolessness that manifests as a focus on the most trivial manifestations of personal life. Brainard was acutely aware that this stance was a potential liability. His taste for work that “‘stoop’[s] . . . to the moment”9 in order to strip away subjective bias and record “the way things look” can be linked directly to his commitment to stylistic transition. It is this eclecticism that Brainard blamed for his failure to achieve real critical or commercial success in his lifetime: 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.” (CW 514)

It is a rueful sentiment echoed elsewhere: “I can see myself as a Cornell or a Man Ray, but somehow I doubt that I’ll ever be a de Kooning or an Alex Katz” (CW 219).10 In his retrospective essay on the artist, John Ashbery clearly concurs that Brainard’s interdependent relationship between life and art presented a specific obstacle for ego and reputation. Immediately after his description of the pleasant overlap between Brainard’s life and art he issues a caveat. “This could be a problem,” he writes. “Think of all the artists, especially those whose work you admire, who weren’t all that nice. Caravaggio. Degas. Gauguin. De Chirico. Picasso. Pollock. Their art isn’t exactly nice either, but the issue seldom arises” (258).

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Ashbery makes it clear that for great artists (or “those whose work you admire”), the exact intersection of personality and artistic production is not relevant. The issue does not arise, it is implied, because we do not go to art for biographical detail. Ashbery’s comment suggests an equation in which reputation coincides with the extinction of personality (or at least the extinction of its relevance in the work), one not dissimilar to Eliot’s expectations of modernist impersonality. That such artists are not transparently available in their art has, in fact, allowed the elevation of their names into signs that stand in, metonymically, for the fact of their historical existence. For Ashbery, as the article makes clear, Brainard’s contingent and permanently foregrounded selfhood is what renders him, permanently, “Joe.”11 However, what takes place in Brainard’s work is not simply an act of self-willed exposure. His work frequently straddles the grey area between controlled revelation and unwitting transparency. In Brainard’s journals and notebooks the impulse to “open up” and to undo ego can be seen, frequently, to come into direct opposition with a stronger, and perhaps primary, impulse—the deep and seemingly ineradicable drive to be liked. Honesty might not be the best policy, it transpires, when it risks social alienation and the loss of sought-after approval. Where Fitch points to a “dialectical tension between kindness and honesty”12 in Brainard’s work, I would suggest that the more accurate faultline is that between honesty and the desire to be liked. Revealing private details about a friend might be reconcilable with the latter, particularly in a social group committed to “tracking abstract structures of interpersonal and intercultural exchange,”13 as Fitch puts it, but revealing embarrassing or humbling details about one’s own life is potentially more fraught. This tension frequently shapes the texture of Brainard’s prose. For all their stated ambition of complete honesty, the journals often perform a back and forth movement of concealment and exposure. In one “Self-Portrait” of many he notes: “The only thing that ever bothered me about being queer was that I thought maybe people wouldn’t like me if they knew” (CW 359). The act of revelation is frequently staged as a triumph of the former impulse over the latter. In one example, Brainard hooks the reader with the admission that “I’ve been playing ‘the truth game’ with myself for several years now (in my writing) but there are several areas I avoid talking about” (CW 339), before going on to admit that he has neglected thus far to tell the reader that he borrows money from his partner Kenward Elmslie, that he takes speed in order to increase his impressive productivity, and that he habitually exaggerates. He has omitted these

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facts because they hurt his pride; he has been embarrassed by them. Yet the bathetic deadpan of each of these admissions carefully works to undermine our sense of any real anxiety at stake. In discussion with Tim Dlugos in an interview conducted in 1977, Brainard talks about the character of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the place in which he was raised. He describes the city as follows: It’s very new, and it’s a very sweet city, ’cause everyone’s sort of like the way people are in the Middle West. You know how that is? . . . Well, they don’t cause trouble. Everything’s smoothed over, so it’s a very pleasant life. And it’s surprisingly smooth, I mean there’s no drama, it seemed to me. (CW 489–90)14

Such a mode relates, I suggest, directly to Brainard’s own method of reconciling his drive toward revelation with his hunger for social approval. The characteristic style Brainard achieves is a revelation that in turn smooths, that renders affectless and thus effortless. Brainard’s work does not “cause trouble.” As Ashbery notes, “it is careful of our feelings, careful not to hurt them by so much as taking them into account.”15 In a related fashion, moments in I Remember that might typically signal trauma are often surprisingly trauma-free. Recollecting, for example, his desire for an “off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown” for his fifth birthday—hardly a typical request for a Midwestern schoolboy in the late forties—Brainard remembers that “I got it. And I wore it to my birthday party” (CW 7). In another group of memories that deal with nascent sexual awareness, Brainard recalls his father’s remonstration against masturbation. As if to guard against any readerly embarrassment on his behalf, however, he assures us of his father’s good will: “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.”16 Brainard’s practice here suggests a form of disappearing act. He seeks to efface the emotional impact of his own presence. Yet, if we return to Ashbery’s retrospective analysis of Brainard’s art we begin to see a paradox. If Brainard’s modesty, his disinclination to trouble or disturb his viewer is his ultimate act of effacement, it is also where he becomes the most indelibly visible. By attempting to oversee his acts of revelation, Brainard effectively reveals himself further—he reveals his desire to be liked. Thus it is not the concerted act of revelation that leads to Brainard’s unmasking, it is the desire to be liked in spite of these revelations. In his description of a viewer’s interaction with Brainard’s pansies, Ashbery describes the “effortless,

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seedpacket look” of the painting. As he writes: “There’s no apparent effort on the artist’s part to cause stress or wonderment in the viewer.” Quite the reverse, in fact. As Ashbery suggests, Brainard expends considerable effort to render a “smoothed over” and “pleasant” surface, precisely in order to avoid troubling the viewer. Yet, by a strange alchemy, this extra-aesthetic desire finds its way into or is inadvertently encoded within the artwork; it colors our experience of the painting. In Ashbery’s words, “a certain gratitude mingles in the pleasure he offers us.”17 Thus Brainard’s personality, the gratitude or neediness that drives his self-effacement, becomes an intimate presence, almost a residue in the painting itself. It’s possible to see a sort of humid symbiosis here between self and art, an inadvertent seepage between autobiography and artwork. It is this which, according to Ashbery, propels the viewer’s unexpected, perhaps unprecedently social impulse towards the painting: “One wants to embrace the pansy, so to speak. Make it feel better about being itself, all alone.”18 We are led, here, to a different level of exposure. What Ashbery describes is not a willed revelation of those elements of self that are ostensibly embarrassing, but the uncontrolled exposure of a selfhood incompletely dressed in the transfiguring material of art. It is Ashbery’s awareness of those traits that Brainard is unable to mask that potentially enables him to sum up the artwork, and its impact, so precisely. While Ashbery is aware of the unique outcome of Brainard’s aesthetic, his essay also sounds a clear note of ambivalence. We might assume that Ashbery would never tolerate such a rent in his self-protective veneer. As he suggests in his lecture “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” one must cultivate “an attitude which neither accepts nor rejects acceptance but is independent of it.”19 Such independence seems a far cry from the intermingled gratitude and pleasure of Brainard’s art. It’s important to note that Brainard was not invulnerable to the shame of personal exposure. As Ron Padgett notes in his introduction to the Collected Writings, Brainard “strongly preferred that people not think they had him all figured out, compartmentalized, ‘in their pocket,’ as he put it” (CW xiv). Brainard’s reaction to a related moment is recorded in his journals in a rare moment of emotional elevation. Here Brainard describes his response to an offhand comment made by his friend, the poet Joanne Kyger: “Joanne really hit me over the head last night when she handed Bob an already lit cigarette ‘Joe’s style’” (CW 303). Brainard characteristically goes on to downplay his shock. He explains, “It’s not being put in someone’s pocket I mind so much. It’s just that it doesn’t mean anything to hand someone a personally lit cigarette if it’s expected of you”

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(CW 303). However, the violence of his initial reaction (“Joanne really hit me over the head”) does not quite plausibly correspond with a concern that predictability might undermine the value of his generosity. Rather, we might read between the lines and link the impact of his shock with the shame of his exposure—the fact that Joanne Kyger has seen, and thus in some way seen through, his very personal mode of generosity. Thus Brainard courts and potentially falls prey to an exposure that renders him vulnerable to a specific kind of shame—a shame that arises out of accidental nakedness and is potentially compounded by social rebuff. When the transformational mask of art slips it not only unveils autobiographical truth, it also places the artist at a unique and immediate risk of audience rejection. This vulnerability in Brainard’s work and life goes some way toward explaining the aesthetic and personal pull that it presented for the poet Frank Bidart. * Three years after Joe Brainard’s death of AIDS-related illness, the poet Frank Bidart published a handful of poems addressed to the artist in his 1997 collection Desire. The most explicitly elegiac poem of these, “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” seeks to describe the ineffable charm of Brainard’s work. The speaker, addressing Brainard’s memory, specifically struggles “to find words for the moral sense that unifies and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way.”20 The poem implies a search for critical aesthetic terms, perhaps an insight into a metaphysical preoccupation of the sort that drives Bidart’s own poetry. However, instead of a critical or philosophical explanation, the speaker (and the reader) is confronted with the undeniably personal and social fact of Brainard’s presence. The artist’s speaking voice enters the poem to supply the cryptic answer to Bidart’s conundrum: “It’s a code” (13). The poem then performs a deft circuit between art and life—Bidart’s animating desire to understand Brainard’s work becomes analogous with his desire to understand Brainard as an individual, as well as for his unfulfilled and unreciprocated desire for Brainard himself: You were a code I yearned to decipher.— (13)

This symbiotic connection between Brainard’s personality and his artwork is reinforced elsewhere in the poem. The moral sense that “sweetens” Brainard’s writing is—for Bidart—inseparable from the

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personal traits described earlier in the poem, Brainard’s “purity/and sweetness” (13). Brainard and Bidart were born three years apart, and grew up in Tulsa and Southern California, respectively. In interview, Bidart has admitted his unfulfilled romantic love for Brainard. As he states: “We were not lovers, but it was more than a friendship. There was a sweetness of spirit in him that was very extraordinary, and I definitely was in love with him.”21 While Brainard’s influence can be seen to emerge at a stylistic level in Bidart’s later work—a fact reinforced in a recent interview with Hilton Als—at the time of their meeting, they appeared to inhabit markedly different aesthetic realms.22 As a poet and painter, Brainard, as discussed, constantly embraced transition, moving flexibly and frenetically between forms and projects. Bidart’s poetry, on the other hand, is driven by a longing for fixed states, a hunger for a singular, necessary form that will overwhelm and eradicate the dazzling profusion of existential choice. Where Brainard’s work is willingly shaped by quotidian textures and incidental objects—from a 1965 assemblage that incorporated a dozen Prell shampoo bottles, to I Remember’s loving paeans to sensory detail— Bidart’s poetry frequently records a sense of the oppression, even the tyranny, of the physical world.23 Where Brainard purposefully downplays personal suffering in the service of a near-camp playfulness, the insights gained in Bidart’s poetry, as he states, “usually fee[l] either static . . . painful—or both.”24 In fact, Brainard could well be describing the fraught and hardwon texture of Bidart’s poetry when he says, of Abstract Expressionist painters, that they “think, and [they] work from an area that has no boundaries, so it’s very tough and [they]’ve got to be very serious about it, and dedicated to an ideal.” In describing himself, he writes, “I’m sort of the reverse of that.”25 We gain a useful perspective on Bidart’s interest in and love for Brainard when we look at one of the unifying tropes of Bidart’s work: Bidart’s poetry frequently agonizes over the tension resulting from the apprehension of an inescapable dualism. His work enacts, for example, the agon between family and personal freedom, or between desire and social mores. Perhaps most relevant in the context of his connection with Brainard, however, are the poems that explore a different dualism—that between the goals of artistic expression and the inhibiting facticity of the body, autobiography, and chance event. The pathos of a wound that might be traced between self and art is a focus of many of Bidart’s poems. Perhaps the most well-known is “Ellen West,” which follows the life of a young anorexic woman and her struggle with the “givens” of her gender and body. At the crux of her struggle, West perceives a parallel between her own experience

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and that of her favourite singer, the famous soprano Maria Callas. Both West and Callas have suffered the experience of being trapped within an oppressive and burdensome physicality, a dualism exaggerated for Callas by the material burdens of opera’s stagecraft. West imagines that her own solution to such physical oppression—systematic self-starvation—is Callas’s also. West imagines Callas similarly striving to free herself, and her expressive capabililities, from the trappings of flesh. Yet, as the poem reveals, for Callas, the pursuit ultimately has the opposite effect. Callas’s weight loss begins to eat away at her voice: “the top notes became/shrill, unreliable—at last,/ usually not there at all . . .”26 In the poem, West describes a startling moment during Callas’s performance of the aria “Vissi d’Arte.” Here, fighting the tatters of her vocal range, Callas’s subjection to art and her entrapment in the physical body blend together. Callas is seen to embody Tosca in a way that uncontrollably exposes her own particular, autobiographical pain. As West observes: I felt I was watching autobiography— an art; skill; virtuosity miles distant from the usual soprano’s athleticism,— the usual musician’s dream of virtuosity without content . . . (115)

The experience of “watching/autobiography,” of seeing the mask slip to reveal the vulnerable figure of the artist, is the focus of other poems also. In “The Second Hour of the Night,” a long poem from Bidart’s 1997 collection Desire, we briefly follow the career downturn of the famous Shakespearean actor Henriette Constance Smithson. After Smithson breaks her leg in an accident, she is “visibly/ robbed of confidence and ease of movement” and the ongoing disability prevents her from disappearing entirely behind the mask of character. Bidart draws attention to the social shame that may result from art’s slippage into autobiography. Smithson’s return to the stage results in a “humiliating” benefit performance after which she voluntarily decides to end her career: 27 After Ophelia’s death, which a few years earlier at her debut harrowed the heart of Paris, the cruel audience did not recall her to the stage once (29)

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As with Callas, Smithson’s crime is an inability to effect the complete separation of art and self. The actor’s goal of disappearing within her character is hampered by the inescapable residue of autobiography. Here then, we begin to see a compelling echo of the often inadvertent mutuality between personality and aesthetic in Joe Brainard’s work. The fact that it might be all too easy to see through “Joe’s style” to the lingering autobiographical stain of “gratitude” accords, albeit on a more modest scale, with the humiliation experienced by Callas and Smithson. The hampering, and potentially damaging affect that such transparency might have on both ego and artistic reputation is stated by Ashbery and Brainard, and—in fact—more recently echoed by Fitch. Yet through a continued parallel reading of Bidart and Brainard’s work we might begin to see that shame is not the only possible outcome of such exposure. In fact Bidart’s fascination with these moments helps us to understand the ethical and aesthetic choice presented by this specific moment of aesthetic shame, but also the unexpected and enduring artistic appeal and worth it might represent. It has been noted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and echoed by Douglas Crimp, that as an emotional affect, shame is deeply ambivalent, capable of both delineating and undoing individual identity. As Douglas Crimp states, shame is also uniquely contagious. To witness someone being shamed is to enter a state of temporary unity with this person, an experience that ultimately results in increased isolation: “In the act of taking on the shame that is properly someone else’s, I simultaneously feel my utter separateness from even that person whose shame it initially was.”28 According to Sedgwick, the act of casting shame on someone else is always both performative and cyclic. Though in this act we attempt to rid ourselves of our own shame this is a flawed and temporary endeavor: shame lingers.29 As Crimp has it, “shame is not so easily shed, so simply projected: it manages also to persist as one’s own.” The corrosive performative fluidity of shame is, nevertheless, what allows its unexpected power in “articulating collectivities of the shamed”30. Michael Warner highlights the communality of shame’s cyclic cruelty: “the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.”31 These readings of shame suggest, then, a momentary connection that has the power in turn to initiate a chain of mutually implicated negation. Yet Bidart’s work presents a different model of reactivity, one that will in turn allow us a new reading of the unique enactment of shame and shaming in Brainard’s work. Bidart, in several poems,

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suggests that the act of choosing or accepting self-sacrifice—either as a pagan scapegoat, a failed artist, or an unrequited lover—might short-circuit the self-fulfilling and -perpetuating cycle of both guilt and shame. It is a dynamic illustrated by Bidart’s depiction of the sacrificial dancer of Le Sacre du Printemps in “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky.” Here, by willingly shouldering guilt, the dancer smooths and softens its contagion, undoing its cyclic continuation: she accepts their guilt,— . . . THEIR GUILT THAT THEY DO NOT KNOW EXISTS (35).

The motif of willing self-sacrifice most clearly crystallizes in Bidart’s work in his 1997 collection Desire. Here the double bind of shame is mirrored in and manifested through the double bind of unfulfilled desire. The lesson that emerges throughout the collection is that in accepting the self-shattering and potentially shameful state of unfulfilled desire, one might achieve a release that transforms and mysteriously strengthens the self. The lesson is most carefully delineated in Bidart’s elegy “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” in which he rehearses and enacts the lessons taught him by the artist. In this poem, Bidart examines the way in which Brainard’s wounded nature—the wound that might figure for the unhealed seam between art and life, between aesthetic ambition and the hunger for approval, as between the drive toward honesty and the aversion toward shame—in fact ensures and encodes his unalloyed “sweetness,” the very quality that itself snares Bidart on the hook of unrequited love. The crucial detail that the poem reveals is that Brainard has somehow “CHOSEN” the “vast, oceanic/bruise” that implies both his impending death as well as the shamed or wounded quality of his nature. It is through the act of choice that Brainard transmutes hurt, transforming it into “purity and sweetness” and thereby gathering and taming what was originally “vast, oceanic.” Choosing one’s wound, Bidart suggests, undoes the implications of victimhood, and ensures freedom from the weight of blame or resentment. It also cuts off a potential cycle of recrimination and blame. As the speaker states, “you had somehow erased within you not only/meanness, but anger, the desire to punish/the universe” (13). The self-reflexive act of willingly becoming both the agent and victim of shame thus undoes a caustic collectivity and offers a different mode of transformation to that suggested by Sedgwick and Crimp.

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Reading Brainard from this perspective allows a new visibility to the willing sacrifice at work in his self-exposure. One of the qualities of Brainard’s autobiographical long poem I Remember noted above is the affectlessness of its method of revelation. Brainard discusses sex, the body, defecation, humiliating social encounters, and his own disappointing IQ, yet he does so with a tonal smoothness that appears to repudiate the possibility of embarrassment. David Bergman argues that this quality in his work is evidence of “emotional indifference.” He writes: “Embarrassment requires a level of engagement that Brainard does not possess—rather he clings to the habits of politeness in which he was groomed.”32 While I agree that Brainard certainly hopes to eradicate embarrassment so as to render his work as absorptive as possible, his explicitness is not, as Bergman contends “a function of his absence of shame.”33 On the contrary, it’s possible to see that Brainard has an acutely tuned sense of shame, but is willing to efface it in order to avoid alienating his reader. In a 1969 journal entry, in the same year in which he began work on I Remember, Brainard talks about his own sexual predilections with ostensible candor. He goes on to describe a very specific economy of embarrassment: I am not embarrassing myself. I guess I just have to assume that if I am not embarrassing myself, I am not embarrassing you. And, actually, being embarrassed isn’t so bad. I don’t mind it. Being embarrassed. So again I must assume that if I don’t mind it you don’t mind it either. (CW 246)

While initially Brainard denies embarrassment, out of concern that such a statement might not sufficiently assuage a reader he approaches the problem from another angle, denying the discomfort of this emotion. A note of ambivalence creeps in. Is he in fact, unembarrassed, or is he simply willing to put up with this embarrassment? What is clear in this dynamic is that Brainard’s own feelings—his embarrassment or putative lack thereof—are not primary in the equation. Both arguments are brought to bear to reassure himself that it’s possible for a reader to encounter his work without any embarrassment, either on his behalf, or their own. Thus, what we witness is Brainard’s willingness to efface his own emotional affect in the interests of the reader. Both Bergman and Ashbery recognize that Brainard’s effort to expunge obligation or dismay is central to the emotional release we experience in reading his prose or viewing his art. John Ashbery

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notes in his viewer’s imagined apprehension of Brainard’s pansy: “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.”34 Bergman also notes that Brainard’s sporting revelation of his low IQ in I Remember allows us to “confront our own doubts about our intelligence or own failures to measure up not just on IQ tests but in any of the infinite challenges we face.”35 Similarly by owning his personal sexual blunderings, Brainard “frees readers to acknowledge their own good-natured cluelessness.”36 Neither critic acknowledges, however, that such acts might involve a willing acceptance of shame. The acceptance and internalization of the bruise is crucial, as Bidart’s work reveals to us. This is not simply because it closes shame’s self-perpetuating circuit, but for two further reasons: because it offers a hook that draws in the viewer or audience of art, and because it might allow personal utterance to approach a kind of immortality. We are drawn closer by vulnerability. As Bidart states in interview: I think that one thing one looks for in the art of every period is the vulnerable voice. Is a voice that is connected to the inner life, that seems to be a revelation of the soul. And that does give a kind of immortality to that art, because it speaks to one in a very different culture; a very different culture from that in which it initially existed. And this really does dovetail into the idea of impersonality.37

Perhaps the most precise evidence supplied by Bidart in support of this argument is included in his own description of his 1997 poem “Borges and I.” In this text Bidart attempts to communicate what he understands by the poem’s recurring axiom—one that arguably comes to represent his ars poetica—“We fill pre-existing forms, and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”38 Bidart concludes his explanation with an anecdote. He describes listening to Alice Raveau’s recording of the aria “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice” from Christoph Gluck’s opera Orphée and Eurydice. [T]he extreme slowness of the Raveau recording, conducted by Henri Tomasi, could be accused of being “Romantic.” But the effect of the tempo here is to emphasize the implacable presence of the formal repetitions, not to allow the pulse to shift with unpredictable rushes of human feeling. It is as if time ceases. At the very end, Raveau runs out of breath, and can only manage a rather strangled tone; the conductor does not speed up even momentarily to help her. The aria itself goes for the jugular (“Eurydice! Eurydice!” followed by

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silence; then “Mortel silence! Vaine esperance! Quelle souffrance!”) just as I think that all great art, whether Classic or Romantic, must. The recording embodies this with aesthetic means that are almost demonic in their single-mindedness and severity.39

Here, perhaps even more than in Ellen West’s discussion of Maria Callas, Bidart provides an exemplar of the vulnerable performer. Raveau’s incarnation as Orpheus demands several levels of submission. She must first temporarily sacrifice her own identity so as to inhabit that of Orpheus; in addition, entering the role of a man demands that Raveau give up, temporarily, the identity guaranteed by her own gender. The performer’s vulnerability to the determinations of given form is further emphasized by the “implacable presence of the formal repetitions,” and what Bidart earlier refers to as “the relentless tread of [the aria’s] unfolding.” In addition, Raveau must defer to the conductor’s ongoing control, her personal expression subordinated to his interpretation. As Bidart implies, the power balance in this relationship contains an overtone of sadism: “the conductor does not speed up even momentarily to help her.” What ultimately occurs in this equation is that Raveau’s concealment within her character is compromised—rather than aesthetic effortlessness, her personal physical limitations cause her to run out of breath, and to strangle the aria’s tone. Yet what occurs at this final level of dispossession is a strange form of metamorphosis. Raveau’s performance moves beyond the immediate frame of its temporal occasion, and becomes for Bidart, “revelatory.” The personal suffering that has marked the interpretation and recording somehow also guarantees its artistic value, and the valuable insight it offers into the nature of art itself. Where other recordings are more accurate to the period of composition, they are accurate stylistically; Raveau’s recording reveals what Bidart identifies as a deeper truth of musical form. The extreme self-shattering enacted in Raveau’s performance reveals, then, a final transformative merging of the extremely personal with the impersonal. The argument that Bidart appears to advance is that the metamorphic power of self-sacrifice lives in its ability to inhabit a paradox. The peculiarity of a reflexivity that asks one to stand adjacent or in opposition to personal existence—a drive that cannot be apprehended via logic or reason—is thus glossed by Bidart as a space that is both “self and not self,” that is at once personal and impersonal. Acts of self-sacrifice in Bidart’s work are accordingly figured in the unlocking of a previously hidden or secret space or an expansive moment of stillness and calm. In the poem “In Memory

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of Joe Brainard,” the mysterious act of self-acceptance transmutes Brainard’s wound into “purity and/sweetness.” Yet such self-acceptance is also what guarantees its potent element of concealment— in Brainard’s terms it is what renders self into “code.” Thus it is the willingness to sacrifice selfhood that ensures that Brainard’s sweetness is permanently desired and sought after and yet remains ultimately out of the speaker’s grasp. It is this specific quality, the unbreakability of the code of both his art and self that, according to Bidart, allows Brainard to transcend death, and undoes death’s negations of sight, taste and touch: everything not achieved, not tasted, seen again, touched—; . . .the undecipherable code unbroken even as the soul learns once again the body it loves and hates is made of earth, and will betray it. (13)

We come full circle. The fragility of the boundary between Brainard’s art and life has—according to Brainard himself, to John Ashbery and more recently to Andy Fitch—appeared to condemn the artist to a perpetually minor and fringe status. The often uncontrolled mutuality of his art and life have arguably worked to ensure he remained forever “Joe” rather than “a Brainard.” However, if we are to take the argument presented by Frank Bidart’s poetry seriously, it is Brainard’s acceptance of this, his willing adhesion to the specific ineluctable pathos of self-exposure, that short-circuits the cycle of shame and opens the possibility most broadly for audience and reader transformation. Brainard’s utterance becomes so personal that it approaches the impersonal. Or, as he writes himself, in a letter to Anne Waldman, “I 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.”40 As Bidart contends, the coded nexus, the ragged—potentially wounded—edge between self and art and personal and impersonal in Brainard’s work, is both what inspires and thwarts the viewer’s desire as well as what renders the art itself unbroken and enduring.

Notes 1. John Ashbery, Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 257.

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2. See Tom Clark, “My Joe Brainards,” Pressed Wafer 2 (March 2001); Tom Carey, “Joe B.’ Pressed Wafer 2 (March 2001). 3. Andy Fitch, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), p. 7. 4. William Corbett, “Introduction to ‘Hello Joe’ Tribute,” Pressed Wafer 2 (March 2001): 85–7, 85. 5. Fitch, Pop Poetics, p. 11. 6. See Brian Glavey, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 141–9. 7. David Bergman, The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 155. 8. Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (New York: The Library of America, 2002), p. 137. Hereafter abbreviated CW. Further references are cited parenthetically in text. 9. Here Brainard is describing his predilection for humility and lack of preconception in other artists, but the descriptor clearly applies also to his own work. See CW 480. 10. Asked later in life about a perceived similarity to Cornell, Brainard’s comments reveal, however, that his prioritization of flux over a fixed and thus marketable selfhood may have also put paid to the ambition to be “a Cornell”: “I like him, but his things are not painterly. Even my collages are painterly. He also has a set set of symbols to tell stories with. I have symbols too, but they aren’t a set set. They come with the materials” (CW 514). 11. Ashbery, Selected Prose, pp. 257–8. 12. Fitch, Pop Poetics, p. 12. 13. Ibid. p. 17. 14. In some fashion, it is possible to see that Brainard’s life—or his recollections of it—are also “surprisingly smooth.” Following a pleasant childhood (“I was popular, and it was very nice, and I was a good artist and everything,” Brainard had a few years when he was “homely as a board fence, skinny, stuttered, and a total misfit” (CW 490). Yet these years were quickly followed by his meeting with Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Dick Gallup. Likewise, the staggered move of the “Tulsa Four” to New York was very swiftly followed by entry into Frank O’Hara’s coterie. 15. Ashbery, Selected Prose, p. 258. 16. As David Bergman notes, this niceness—the mode of smoothing the uncomfortable revelation—continues into the intimation of death that is raised in one of the following memories, when he remembers “one very cold and black night on the beach alone with Frank O’Hara. He ran into the ocean naked and it scared me to death.” As Bergman writes, “The banality of the language—‘scared me to death’—deflates the sense of doom. I hear him parroting that maternal

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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cliché as children tend to do (but in a nice way).” Bergman, The Poetry of Disturbance, p. 154. Ibid. p. 258. Ibid. John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 393. Frank Bidart, Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 13. Andrew Rathmann and Danielle Allen, “An Interview with Frank Bidart,” in Liam Rector and Tree Swenson (eds.), On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 68–86 (85–6). Hilton Als, “Frank Bidart’s Poetry of Saying the Unsaid,” The New Yorker, September 11, 2017. For one example, see “California Plush,” a poem in which the kitsch detail of a local bar (“captain’s chairs,/plastic doilies, papier-mache bas relief wall ballerinas,/German memorial plates”) seems to mock the speaker’s own threateningly unfixed existential status. Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 136. Rathmann and Allen, “An Interview with Frank Bidart,” p. 75. As he goes on to state, “I don’t think my experience of the sensation of insight comes to me through playfulness” (p. 75). CW, p. 502. Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90, p. 114. Bidart, Desire, p. 29. Donald Crimp, “Mario Montez, For Shame,” in David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (eds.), Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 63–75 (72). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1993): 1–16 (4). Donald Crimp, “Mario Montez, For Shame,” p. 72. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 35. Bergman, The Poetry of Disturbance, p. 160. Ibid. Ashbery, Selected Prose, p. 258. Bergman, The Poetry of Disturbance, p. 157. Ibid. p. 160. Frank Bidart, telephone interview, July 14, 2009. Bidart, Desire, pp. 9–10. Frank Bidart, “Pre-Existing Forms: We Fill Them and When We Fill Them We Change Them and Are Changed,” Salmagundi, 128/129 (2000): 108–22 (122). Qtd. in Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), p. 146.

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Bibliography Als, Hilton, “Frank Bidart’s Poetry of Saying the Unsaid,” The New Yorker, September 11, 2017. Ashbery, John, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957–1987 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Ashbery, John, Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Bergman, David, The Poetry of Disturbance: The Discomforts of Postwar American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Bidart, Frank, In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). Bidart, Frank, Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). Bidart, Frank, “Pre-Existing Forms: We Fill Them and When We Fill Them We Change Them and Are Changed,” Salmagundi, 128/129 (2000): 108–22. Bidart, Frank, Watching the Spring Festival (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Bidart, Frank, telephone interview, July 14, 2009. Brainard, Joe, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: The Library of America, 2002). Equi, Elaine, and David Trinidad (eds.), “Hello Joe,” Pressed Wafer 2, March 2001. Fitch, Andy, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012). Glavey, Brian, The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Halperin, David M., and Valerie Traub (eds.), Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Padgett, Ron, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004). Rector, Liam, and Tree Swenson (eds.), On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1993): 1–16. Warner, Michael, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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Chapter 12

I Wonder: In Dialogue, On Dialogue Andrew Epstein and Andy Fitch

I wonder about everybody writing about Joe Brainard at one point calling him “Joe,” and now they don’t anymore. I wonder how Joe Brainard would’ve felt wondering whether to call someone he’d never met “Joe.” I wonder what room remains in critical work to mourn this passing of “Joe” (which that work itself perhaps brought about), or I wonder if/what John Ashbery, before he himself died, ever would’ve thought about anything like this. I’m thinking (to bring this back to Joe Brainard) about thoughts that never reach articulation, or more importantly, what to make with them. I wonder, basically, what we’re starting the day after Valentine’s . . . I wonder if there is any way around this very Brainard-specific paradox: how can we think and write critically about an artist who—as the essays in this volume show over and over—was so resolutely against monumentality, formality, professionalism, careerism, and academic protocols and high seriousness. Wordsworth says “our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—/ We murder to dissect.” Can one write about Brainard’s work without doing violence to what makes it so fresh and enduring, strange and inimitable, in the first place? I wonder also about Joe Brainard’s mode of loving his audience a bit less (or just less desperately) than most, why that attracts us (especially some of “us”) so much, or how his poetics collapse so fast when they do start pandering. Or Ron Padgett’s reflective treatment in “Joe Brainard’s Boom” gets me wondering about niceness as (in part) a shy person’s negotiation (internal, external) of violence. Or Rona Cran’s “Men with Pair of Scissors” piece makes me reimagine collage-making after dinner (stoned) at Kenward Elmslie’s Vermont place as its own small-scale utopian (so more internally fraught than it appears) negotiation of violence still not long after Stonewall. Or Alice Notley’s line, “I know I have to mention the

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fact that he intended for his collages to fall apart” seems a nexus of so many violences. So even with our meddling intellect sometimes rhyming “murder” and “dissect,” I’ll sense Joe Brainard beckoning us to wonder forwards about say those dinners at Kenward’s, about the Padgetts sometimes being there, about if/when/why queers + straights commingling = queer. I wonder if we can relate the stance you just identified—one based on diffidence, shyness, on not caring too much, all as a reflex to violent threat—to that signature Brainard tonality, which appears to be insouciant, childlike, and innocent but is also at some level a calculated effect, a move in a (deadly serious) game. I wonder if we have adequately defined faux-naïveté as an aesthetic position or stylistic choice. I wonder why people, including me, love it so much, finding that tone or outlook appealing and fun, pleasurable and fresh. I wonder if we (as critics, as readers) have identified and theorized, with enough precision and depth, faux-naïveté as a mode driving a great deal of wonderful writing, art, music, and so on. It stands at the very heart of Joe Brainard’s work and also feels central to so many others, from Gertrude Stein to Jean Dubuffet to Andy Warhol, Kenneth Koch and Ron Padgett to Lydia Davis. I wonder what makes it so attractive and enduring—whether it has something to do with the powerful tug of childhood, a longing for lost simplicity, a return to more innocent ways of writing and thinking and viewing the world. I also wonder if it is sometimes, or always, a pose—a performance of not-knowing, where one pretends to be less sophisticated than one actually is. I don’t know whether it is a problem if that is true, or if it makes this stance less attractive, or maybe, somehow, more. I wonder if all this wondering that you and I are doing is an echo of Brainard-esque negative capability—the not-knowing-for-sure which runs so delightfully through Brainard’s work. In that sense, perhaps our project is trying to put into critical practice what Brian Glavey identifies as Brainard’s fascination with “tact,” after Roland Barthes— a form of “queer neutrality that quietly opts out of binary oppositions rather than trying to undo them,” refusing reduction, fleeing dogmatism. I wonder if our wondering about Brainard—rather than answering, mastering, or defining—is commensurate with this element of his oeuvre. I’d like to think so. But I also can’t escape the question of the previous paragraph, and do wonder if what we’re doing is also, at the same time, a performance or pose of naïveté. I wonder about posing mostly for yourself. I wonder about proactive posing. I wonder which of us still theorize sociability mostly when alone. I wonder of course about Joe Brainard smoking. I wonder about

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Joe Brainard, and then a particular critical community, sniffing out the bottom nature of every single cigarette butt. I sense possibilities for friendship. I’ll wonder, while people theorize Joe Brainard’s affect-laden touch, why we often pretend Andy Warhol has no affect. I wonder about Andy Warhol still never having friends. I wonder, “following” Nathan Kernan: if Felix González-Torres queers Minimalist prototypes, if Joe Brainard queers Conceptual art, then, again, what we’re doing (should do). I wonder if Joe Brainard liked “West End Girls” (still no real feel for that specific moment in New York—with no neighbors in my distant suburb dying). I wonder (“following” Jess Cotton now) about looking to criticism like looking for intimacy. I wonder about criticism conceived of as where two “bodies” touch. I also of course wonder about Morrissey’s “Please keep me in mind.” I wonder too how much of successful theorizing, successful criticism, concerns cuteness, cute concepts, cute titles before the colon. I’ll always appreciate Wayne Koestenbaum letting me know scholarly prose could feel more sexy. I hope Jess Cotton, Rona Cran, Brian Glavey don’t mind me mentioning their name is cute. I get nervous when Jess Cotton quotes Joe Brainard’s banana-peel joke (too cutesy for me). I wonder about my particular prudery once wishing Joe Brainard never had tested these limits and gone cutesy. I remember now all the (cool, smart) poets and scholars telling me it would be too cute to write about Joe Brainard. I also wonder, “following” Jess Cotton, about causality (sorry) as “a still life as a series or a series that is in the process of becoming still life.” I wonder about all the cute typos scholars cut (straying here to Rona Cran: “suggesting that mistakes or inconsistencies were best understood as evidence of progress and creative growth”). Or I’ll wonder how many of us fantasize turning critical typos into a “creative” project. Finally, Jess, I’d love to work together sometime on transforming feminized fetishized representations of powerlessness into vital passivity (hopefully this will include some drawings). “I wonder just how much other people think the things I think,” Joe Brainard writes in “Diary 1969.” “I wonder/if Jan or Helen or Babe ever think about me,” Ted Berrigan writes in “Personal Poem #2.” “I/wonder if Dave Bearden still dislikes me. I wonder/if people talk about me secretly. I wonder if/I’m too old. I wonder if I’m fooling myself/about pills. I wonder what’s in the icebox./I wonder if Ron or Pat bought any toilet paper this morning.” Frank O’Hara closes “Personal Poem” by writing: “I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is/thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi/and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go/back to work happy at the thought

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possibly so.” In “Flowers,” Alice Notley writes, “I wonder if this is an obnoxious poem/I wonder if it’s really understood that/Poetry and I are its subject.” At the end of his gut-wrenching poem “The Circus,” which is about memories of writing another poem twenty years earlier that was also called “The Circus,” Kenneth Koch writes “And this is not as good a poem as The Circus/And I wonder if any good will come of either of them all the same.” “I wonder how much longer I can keep writing poems and pretend not to be a poet,” Joe Brainard writes in “December 22, 1970.” At one point in Midwinter Day, Bernadette Mayer writes, “I wonder why we write at all.” I wonder why nobody here points out John Ashbery’s (lovely) collages being a billion times flatter. I feel this least with 1972’s Diffusion of Knowledge. I wonder what advice Joe Brainard gave on that. I do appreciate, in 2008’s Chutes and Ladders, the central pansy-head’s James Schuyler sailor’s-basketed salute (The Checkered Game of Life gives a boy scout). I do appreciate how the numbers really “break down” in Popeye Steps Out. I do wonder (letting out the dogs now, crunching last night’s pawprints from this rented Colorado backyard), when you read about Joe Brainard, which lines make you (make everyone) feel your shy, humble, handmade side (for me, from Brian Glavey: “Having never learned to type, Brainard composed the work longhand and then meticulously copied out each new revision in his distinctive block-capital script”). Or I do wonder, when Jess Cotton presents Joe Brainard always as an artist-poet, his work inherently juxtapositional, desiring relation, drawing closer to its object, to its subject, to us, with all involved discovering new perspectives on themselves within this moment of composition . . . . Or I do wonder, with Jess Cotton sounding so smart, whether she also has a haptic relation to the word “haptic.” Or then even with Joe Brainard’s “Dear John” letters: “Then too, most of what I have seems to have more to do with the color and texture and character of paper as opposed to imagery . . .” I wonder if there is an inherent link between the ethos of the New York School, broadly understood, and the act (or pose) of wondering— as John Ashbery says, “for this is action, this not being sure.” It is not like we have much choice in the matter. As Gertrude Stein writes, “She would not wonder if this were not thunder it should not thunder and she would not wonder. She would not wonder if this were not thunder.” But thunder it does. I wonder if the fact that spring is already here and not there will affect (or infect) the mood and shape of our paragraphs, our parallel graphs. I wonder if the joy of juxtaposition, the sheer delight and haptic pleasure of weaving disparate

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things together (recalling the root of texture), which seems to be at the heart of Brainard’s collage aesthetic—if not all collage—can be thought of as just another example, alongside wonder, of what Frank O’Hara calls a “nebulous/healthy reaction to our native dark.” For all his sunniness and good cheer, Brainard knows exactly how dark things really are. “I wonder” also appears in A Fish Called Wanda. “I wonder” of course sounds more like wandering when Del Shannon slips in “wah wah wah wah.” “I Wonder U” by Prince (probably my favorite) just goes: I, how you say, I wonder you, I wonder you I, how you say, I wonder you, I wonder you I, dream of you, for all time, for all time Though, you are far, I wonder you, you’re on the mind

I wonder if Joe Brainard’s “lifeworld” could include that song. I wonder “with” Nick Sturm about our own devotional labors, about care, anxious self-flagellation, about sharing pleasures of one who works against work (who generates literature as a byproduct to one’s resistance to labor), and also “with” Nick Sturm about experiential time-management, about putting off the work (sometimes the work of thinking?) to produce the work, and then also about “I should do this/I should do that,” and all framed (how lovely) to look like a photograph. But then I also wonder about Joe Brainard at one point really stopping, then also about Joe Brainard’s relationship to all the people who really do “nothing.” But later I’ll relax a bit when Timothy Keane introduces Ray Johnson’s “nothings,” though then just as I settle into stably identified critical reading again: “Years later, Johnson’s untimely death following a wintertime leap off the Long Island Bridge . . .” I also do still wonder about had we stuck to our original plan of getting high to write this or just to talk, like Joe Brainard probably would. I wonder about all those edibles (gummies) hard in a shed back home right now. I wonder too, after reading Nick Sturm on Brainard’s ambivalence about labor, whether what we are doing here “counts” as “work.” I wonder whether our collaboration is a by-product of a “Bartlebyesque refusal” to work in the conventional sense, and if Brainard would nod and “get it.” I wonder whether writers and artists and scholars often find it hard to draw a bright line between work and pleasure. Different kinds of work are still work. Collaboration can be fun but, as Emerson says, “conversation is an evanescent relation,

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no more.” I wonder why I never noticed that the word collaboration contains the word labor. “Collaborating on the spot is hard. Like pulling teeth,” Brainard wrote in a diary. “There are sacrifices to be made. And really ‘getting together’ only happens for a moment or so. If one is lucky. There is a lot of push and pull. Perhaps what is interesting about collaborating is simply the act of trying to collaborate. The tension. The tension of trying.” I wonder about the pantheon of adjectives used in so many enlightening discussions of Brainard—modest, small, minor, quiet, tiny, miniature. We hear about his “esthetic of smallness,” his “air of unimportance.” The title of the People magazine feature on Brainard that appeared at perhaps the peak of his modest fame? “Think Tiny, Says Joe Brainard—And a Show of 1,000 Miniatures is the Result.” I wonder if Brainard’s smallness can, or should, be re-framed as a strength, as amounting, paradoxically, to a bigness. Paul Auster writes of I Remember: Brainard “begins and ends small, but the cumulative force of so many small, exquisitely rendered observations turns his book into something great.” I wonder if devotion to the small can also be a philosophical and political position of great power. I wonder if Brainard would have felt kinship with this passage by William James: “I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms. . . . The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.” I can imagine Brainard digging this sentiment, though I suspect he might’ve recoiled from “the eternal forces of truth” and shied away from James’s celebration of the beleaguered little guy’s triumph at the end. But maybe what we are seeing now is history putting Brainard the underdog, long dead, on top anyway. I wonder again here about Claes Oldenburg’s: I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top . . . I am for an art that a kid licks after peeling away the wrapper . . . I am for an art that coils and grunts like a wrestler.

I wonder still (coiling back to Anna Smaill) why I ever got so hung up on people prioritizing Joe Brainard’s niceness. But I’ll also still wonder what present-day poetries as structurally sophisticated as

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I Remember could look like. I also wonder when I ever started talking about “rigor,” but also almost always remember wishing conversations could contain a bit more. I’ve felt forthcoming eclipsing shame for several straight days opening this essay collection, desperately disassociated (for years, probably) from anything I’d ever written in a “critical” vein. I wonder which writers I’d like better if I knew they felt that way. I’ll sense strong shameful relief seeing people I admire (people we all depended on to write this book) getting trashed for the moment instead of me. I often wonder how Marjorie Perloff feels. I’ll wonder about Joe Brainard, in a parallel universe, teaching some nighttime college class called “Non-Oedipal Criticism.” I feel such strong relief knowing I’ll call Chris Schmidt after reading today. I remember (really) discussing dissertations late one night at a diner after a restaurant closed. I wonder why he’s not (no I wish he was) in here. And I really wish for none of this to come across as “against” Anna Smaill. I’m touched anyone still finds value in a “white male” poet writing “I have nothing that I know of in particular to say, but I hope that, through trying to be honest and open, I will ‘find’ something to say.” I could see all of “I wonder” coming out of that. And I wonder, finally, if the offer I put on a house today will get accepted. I wonder if everybody’s broker always says in advance: “There’s no way this offer is going to get accepted.” I wonder whether Brainard’s obsessions with habits and pursuits now universally viewed as very unhealthy, if not deadly—extreme sunbathing and cigarette smoking—date him as a figure of the 1960s and 1970s as much as the aesthetic choices he makes in his art and writing. I remember how big a deal it was to “lay out” and “get a tan” in high school. I wonder about the precise moment that practice finally died. John Ashbery titled one of his late books Where Shall I Wander, which makes me think of “I Wonder as I Wander” and Del Shannon and the closeness of those two crucial words. I wonder why the crooked way can never be made straight, why so much that’s offered is not accepted, why no pleasure is pure, why Brainard wrote things like “life can get pretty scary if you don’t watch out,” but so many still tend to think of him as a “happy,” “nice” “saint.” I wonder about those qualities Ron Padgett says his own “perennial optimism” caused him to once overlook in his friend—“the seriousness of the downs,” the “gravity of some of Joe’s bouts of insecurity, uncertainty, and despondency.” I know Brainard claimed he “wasn’t very political” and “never felt very strongly about a cause,” (“if I don’t like something I just tend to ignore it”), but I wonder what he would have thought, or done, about high school kids getting slaughtered, again,

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in their school by yet another semi-automatic rifle. I wonder what to do with all we ignore, yes, but also what we cannot ignore. I wonder why, on such an utterly perfect spring day, these March mosquitoes have to already be such a flitting, prickling nuisance. I wonder (circling now to Kimberly Lamm’s smart piece) who actually experiences “standard temporalities of sexual development in which the sexuality of the adult is wholly distinct from that of the child.” I wonder if, as someone pretty straight, I can discuss the huge embodied relief I first felt encountering Joe Brainard’s “possibility of an aesthetic practice that gives queer desire access to the normal.” Or if “Nancy’s decidedly normal, slightly dykey, always-perky girlishness undermines the hyper heterosexual masculinity that subtends avant-garde aesthetic practices of the late twentieth century,” I wonder what Joe Brainard’s gayness helped restore in me. I wonder sometimes, collaborating with men friends, about the “endless possibilities” this opens up, but then how much I also need to collaborate with my women friends. I wonder about all the different productive crushes. I wonder, thanks to your “laying out” memories (primal scene, of course, for I Remember, with baby oil) about this happylooking tan cow a girl hugs on my Organic Valley milk carton. But I’d also love, more critically, to see some more intensely philosophical speculation starting from the jackoff collages. I wonder if we can extend what Lamm calls Brainard’s “queer poetics of the normal” to his distinctive version of everyday-life aesthetics—that long lineage of quotidian poetics which stretches from, say, Whitman and Baudelaire to Williams and Joyce to Beckett and O’Hara and beyond: how he not only makes queer sexuality normal, but also queers the everyday, the average, the ordinary, the boring, the normal. It seems so perfect that Brainard taught a course called “Elusive Realism.” Reading work by and about Brainard, I wonder if I should be collecting and salvaging more of the flotsam and jetsam, the everyday crap, of my own passing days. I wonder what forms those acts of collecting can or should take. “Brainard is a born diarist,” a New York Times review of his work once observed. “No moment of the day is dead to him.” I wonder again about the gains and costs of devising a critical approach that’s well-suited to the object of study, attuned to its peculiarities, commensurate with its rhythms, its textures, its weirdness. I remember a professor in college half-joking, half-criticizing an essay I wrote on Absalom! Absalom! because it seemed to mirror its subject, with unusually long, convoluted Faulkneresque sentences. I didn’t realize I had done this, but was kind of proud I had. I think of

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how my mother used to shift her voice when speaking on the phone with different people, unconsciously mimicking accents on the other end of the line. As Paul Auster writes, in I Remember “the memories keep coming at us, relentlessly and without pause, one after the other with no strictures regarding chronology or place.” I worry about why the annual azalea explosion is happening so early here this year, wonder how long it will last this time. In class today, it seemed more moving than ever when we spoke of how James Schuyler tries to capture an everyday moment only to find it always slipping away as it is happening, as he describes it. After his big show of stunning flower paintings, Brainard confided in his diary that “I’m not really that interested in gardens anymore.” I wonder, along similar lines, what else you work on each day right now. I wonder how our wondering seeps into those projects. For me, for this week, for Rachel Galvin: I wonder when adynaton (here with “Esthétique du mal’s” serialized, asymptotic, kaleidoscopically structured adynaton perhaps the most elaborate case) needs to fail at first, needs to evade possibilities not only for first-degree but also second-degree charismatic poetic authority, and how/when wartime temporalities might discourage or encourage such a project. For Reverend Liz Theoharis: I’ll admit your claim that “God hates poverty” left me wondering why, then, most species, humans included, probably have faced conditions of scarcity akin to poverty throughout life’s history (but I get that your book also makes theological moves I don’t fully grasp— here, for instance, reframing poverty not as some supposed individual sin or problem, but as society’s systemic sin or problem). For Bhanu Kapil: I think both my question and your response began by wondering how discharge might become possible through site-specific engagements both in India and the U.S. At some point Ban does declare it a “mistake” to perform, let’s say, one’s critique of the British far-right to a California audience—but then one notebook entry articulates the value in writing about England far from England, in approaching Englishness as this thing that decays, and watching it decay. For Michael Hardt: Well under the sign of “experiential joy,” I wonder if we could tap one of its more SM veins—perhaps by bringing in your preceding investigations of how power, even as it seeks to colonize subjectivities, might end up prompting previously untapped “constellations of resistance and refusals to submit to command.” So here could you

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sketch a historically specific scene in which, “as our past collective intelligence is concretized in digital algorithms, intelligent machines become essential parts of our bodies and minds to compose machinic assemblage”? I wonder, still in terms of labor, not how much money Kenward gave Joe Brainard, but when in life various individuals would have to get the money in order for it to help them get their work done. I wonder when an “oddball” getting rich just makes that person more private. I wonder, more publicly, whether Kenward and James Merrill felt made from the start. I wonder about Joe Brainard’s “bodhisattva days” crossing Great Gatsby with Fox and His Friends (both also concluding on a young man’s body). I wonder no doubt most of all what precisely the dogs think before running upstairs to scratch then settle then “study” with me for a few hours. I wonder who else feels extra rich because of dogs (so muddy with the thaw today). I’ve even caught myself wondering whether they would have been friends with Whippoorwill. I wonder, again, about labor and pleasure, and if there is something “slightly unprofessional” about this project we’re doing and whether that is “the best thing about it,” to quote something Brainard said about his own work. That phrase is quoted in these pages by Rona Cran, when she explains Brainard’s impatience with “visual perfection” and mastery, his affection for the rough and ragged pleasures of error and accident, ragged contours and lack of polish. Brainard actually said that sort of thing pretty often: for example, about his (wonderful) cover for the Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Brainard’s friends Ron Padgett and David Shapiro in 1970: It is a white cover with red words and objects. Floating objects. . . . Somewhat by accident, I have broken every rule of good design. (Which pleases me.) This happened, I think, because I did the cover very slowly. Object by object. Over a period of five or six days. With no (or little) finished project in mind. One object or one word told me where the next object or word would go. Allowing little room for “dash” or “inspiration.” The result is clean and unprofessional in a good way. And cheerful.

One object I deeply love is the old copy of that same anthology which David Shapiro signed and handed to me just after I defended my dissertation, that day so long ago. I like hearing that Brainard seems to be spreading into the rest of your work, your life, these days too. Whippoorwill, the white whippet, would likely have loved your

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dogs; Brainard writes that “Whippoorwill is stretched out on the grass to the left of my feet. In his own way I suppose he is sunbathing too. He does seem to love it.” I wonder how to categorize this slowmotion game of ping-pong, our slowly sending these paragraphs, these “floating objects,” back and forth, west to east and back again, and (slightly less) why I feel the need to. I wonder though if I mentioned skipping “AWP” in Tampa, flying instead to Miami, basically sprinting now to the Institute of Contemporary Art (past somebody’s discarded velcro wallet, trampled tangerine peels) for thirty-five minutes before my in-laws arrive for our Little Havana tour celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, because my father-in-law’s parents went to the real Havana for their own honeymoon (because Donald Trump cancelled our plans taking them to real Havana). I wonder, amid all this shattered (nothing scary about it) Midtown glass, if I’ve mentioned ongoing vision problems getting much worse now, though now appreciating scent (I mean active sense, not passive smell) restored with warmth, just before first raindrops. I wonder for how long all cool U.S. sneaker culture probably has come from Miami. I wonder also, now on the jog back, about a Port-au-Prince-based painter I really admire claiming to dismantle the “Western subject,” and about 60s artists (OK, Hélio Oiticica’s seashells, a bit before Joe Brainard’s) living out that subject, and who went farther. I wonder if it’s time to build a canon of writers and artists who like things, who are enthusiasts, and to flesh out what they share. Some critics, like Brian Glavey here and Jonathan Flatley in his new book Like Andy Warhol have helped us begin thinking critically about liking as an aesthetic stance, an affective mode. I like David Herd’s very interesting book on the subject, Enthusiast!, and especially like that apt exclamation point in the title. Brainard went so far as to define art as “a way of showing my appreciation of things I like.” In the early 60s Brainard also wrote two poems called “I Like” and a fascinating, prescient early prose piece on Andy Warhol (around 1963) that seems to understand things about Warhol’s aesthetic of liking, and his obsession with repetition, way ahead of the art historians and critics. In “Andy Warhol: Andy Do It,” Brainard writes, “I sure do like the way his ideas look. Andy Warhol’s ideas look great! Andy Warhol paints Andy Warhols. And I like that. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol. I like Andy Warhol,” and so on for many lines, and then writes “I find Andy Warhols to be spectacular, grand, clean, courageous, great to look at, and likeable. I like Andy Warhol. And there is more to be

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said. I like Andy Warhol.” I wonder if the Warhol critical industry has taken note of Brainard’s piece, though I doubt it. I like writing this while looking out at the white sand and waves of the Gulf of Mexico. Yesterday, I listened to some recordings of Brainard reading his work and watched recent footage of some famous friends and fans reading his writing: people like Paul Auster, Frank Bidart, Harry Mathews, Ron Padgett. I wrote in a notebook “Realizing that I like listening to Joe Brainard read and I like listening to people read Joe Brainard.” I like Miami and institutes of contemporary art but don’t like at all hearing about your vision problems. Brainard wrote in a diary: “If I have anything to ‘say’ tonight (a bit drunk) it is probably just this: to like all you can when you can.” I wonder what this conversation would be like if we’d chosen “I like” instead of “I wonder” as our constraint. I wonder about Florida residents yourselves vacationing “down at the Gulf of Mexico.” I wonder if a copy of The Vermont Notebook exists on Marco Island. I wonder if John Ashbery and Joe Brainard ever knew or loved anybody on Marco (they mock its “developers’” no-doubt delusional or cynical or sinister eco-friendly claims) like I do. I wonder if they ever would have gotten the one other person I know who has lived on Marco, who sold Avon products here, in the mid-60s I imagine, before his academic career. Or with the Gulf basically Florida’s Midwest, I wonder what only Midwestern people get about Joe Brainard (and I can wonder, if you want me to, whether the opposite is also true). I wonder about “Vermont” as Joe Brainard’s place to pass. Or I’ll wonder about the two draw-ers, Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, perhaps once discussing the Midwest (seated someplace loud, somebody feeling lost, on drugs or something). Or I get to Brian Glavey’s “does not in the end treat the text as a person; instead he treats the person as a text.” I’ve reached friendliness as “an aesthetic category.” I have arrived at “gentleness, sweetness, tact,” as “not essences but effects.” I pause on “goofball wasteland.” I wonder about creating social-network space to disappear within, to deflect attention from his own self as a way of mediating other people’s anxieties and embarrassment. I wonder about Joe Brainard, about Brian Glavey, about you of course celebrating the ordinary without rendering it extraordinary or uninteresting. He starts describing Women’s Household as a form for channeling powerfully queer identifications and desires. He keeps reaching towards the (potentially normative, but repressed) queer feelings that do exist within the ordinary, the (potentially poignant, but progressively repressed) deeply ambivalent desire for normativity itself. He states then that

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to imagine, still in Stonewall’s summer, everyone as queer, presents a pointed and moving feat of imagination. He makes me wonder, when we encounter the “I remember” phrase, how much we prepare for our mom (a loaded reference point for sure) to tell us something ancient about ourselves. He makes me wonder whether criticism ever could remember in a mother tongue. He makes me wonder whether criticism ever can shyly just look away. He makes me wonder why, when I had the chance, I never took one of Eve’s classes. I glance down at my Brian Glavey notes one last time and think I spot the word “cupcake.” I wonder why “goofball wasteland” seems like it would be a particularly apt description of Florida, if not America. Just now taking a walk on the chilly beach, when I should’ve been writing this, I thought of Nick Sturm discussing that moment where Brainard weighs whether to work on art versus going to the beach in Bolinas with Bill Berkson (“Bill just called. It’s the beach for me. Fuck work”). I wonder now, with a twinge of regret, whether I should have found more room for Brainard in my study of the aesthetics of everyday life, since it becomes clearer to me each day how well his own brand of elusive realism, his tireless, joyous methods of queering the everyday, fits in with the mode I explored there. Like others I discuss (A. R. Ammons, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler), he loves fashioning experiments and projects of attention driven by selfimposed constraints. “A lot of times,” he said, “I set up something for me to do. Like I’ll say ‘I’m going to paint a peach’ . . . or if I’m writing I’ll say ‘I’m going to sit outside and describe what’s around me,’ or ‘I’ll try to write very short stories,’ or some kind of project. And that was a project.” I wonder (still) about the magnetic pull of projects. After a student of mine, a poet, told me she’s memorizing poems, one at a time, I’ve spent the last week trying to memorize Wallace Stevens’s moving late poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” for small reason, each day getting a couple lines down. I’m still wondering what you meant, weeks ago now, about how Brainard’s poetics collapse quickly when they start pandering. In one of his everyday-life projects, “Wednesday, July 7th, 1971,” Brainard spends an entire bus trip to Vermont writing in a notebook (surprisingly reminiscent of what Ron Silliman would do a few years later on the Bay Area subway in his prose poem “BART”). Wondering, Brainard writes “I don’t wonder why I’m telling you all of this. I wonder if you’re wondering why I’m telling you all of this. (?)” I wonder then what it would take to discuss my real-life big question from this week, which concerns my “digestive system” in Florida.

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Though I do wonder what all this pesticide does to Marco’s little lizards. I do wonder why the sea has felt so “foul” the last couple trips (with red tide of course just the most immediate, innocuous, vacationreinforcing even while complaining response). Or in terms of what Joe Brainard wondered from the Vermont bus, I did finally, that last morning in Miami, while everyone packed (always packing the night before), understand “second-order” philosophy as no diminishment (no diminutive, really). That probably helps explain hating “wonder” as a noun. I wonder what makes Brainard’s attempts at radical honesty and inclusivity in his writing so arresting, innovative, and complicated. I wonder about all that we’ve managed to include in this conversation and even more so about how much (nearly everything) that we’ve also left out. I wonder what the critical or scholarly equivalent for “TMI” would be. To be honest, this weird and wonderful monthlong immersion in the world of Brainard has left me with a deeper sense of awe at his not-actually-“modest”-at-all achievement, and a bit mad at myself for not fully recognizing it before. I wonder if we could count on one hand other figures as distinctive, as gifted, as interesting, as important in both visual art and writing as Joe Brainard is. I wonder, after all this wondering, what makes Brainard’s fierce and loving attention to the ordinary sui generis, so moving, so delightful. When Ashbery wrote about Brainard’s ravishing flower paintings, he too was left wondering: “The effect is always of profusion and of strangeness beyond that. What is a flower, one begins to wonder? A beautiful, living thing that at first seems to promise meaning . . . but remains meaningless. . . . Here they merely continue, each as beautiful as the others, but only beautiful, with nothing behind it, and yet . . .” I wonder (here recalling John Ashbery’s description of Joe Brainard’s works as “about themselves—their subjects—and the distance between him and them is also a subject, whose nature is selfnarration”) about self-narration as always approaching death, as perhaps resisting but nonetheless rehearsing death. I’ll wonder about dead people forever retelling themselves about themselves (as still a far too dramatic description of death). I’ll wonder, personally approaching Joe Brainard’s pansies, about “easeful Death,” side by side filling the field (as in life). I’ll wonder (perhaps especially flying home, biting into an apple’s bruise) why death doesn’t directly shape more people’s basic value standards (or just how/why we ever would apply the term “success” to somebody still living). Or just from Timothy Keane’s second section:

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I’ll wonder why I consider prose recording “wish-fulfillment fantasies, psychological projections on to other people, frequent unspoken asides and non-sequiturs and accounts of how the passage of time and the willful ego are suspended during art-making” perfectly normal I’ll wonder if I’ve been better off not knowing (until now) about “the anti-memoir” I’ll love though: “truant behaviors that take precedence over the fact-finding and historicizing responsibilities of traditional autobiography” I’ll love the fragmented: “these nonlinear, open-ended playtime normally restricted to childhood” I’ll always really love: “‘My body is free of its image-repertoire,’ writes Barthes about the photographs, ‘only when it establishes its work space.’” I cannot help loving: “self-embarrassment through a discourse around spontaneity and impulsiveness” Of course I’ll love questions: “Are the itemized one-way ticket and . . . incongruous cut-out about an assassinated leader hinting at a kind of self-erasure or suicide?” I’ll just love Joe Brainard’s prose: “A lot of being inside your own head here [in Bolinas],” he writes, “A lot of talk about it. And a lot of talk about inside other people’s heads too.” Of course I’ll just love feeling you can face death “from the firstperson to other individuals and back to . . . first-person in a loop that leaves nothing resolved . . . within such half-completed dialogues, cross-cut angles, tentative observations, sudden reversals and philosophical aporia” But mostly I just love Joe Brainard (the real person, I think), from the backseat, feeling “abstractly sad and alone,” still holding Bobbie Creeley’s hand. I wonder about his lost “baroque pearl and emerald pendant from the Italian renaissance” maybe still in the sea off Bolinas. I wonder how it can suddenly be mid-March, past the ides already, the day for amateur drunks to wear green and cause havoc in college towns and city streets. I wonder why I feel anxious about having the last word in this exchange, this evanescent relation, which feels like it shouldn’t really come to a close. I went into this not feeling terribly worried about the question that seems to nag so many Brainardiacs—why he stopped writing, why he walked away from all that manic feverish art-making, why the last piece in the Collected Writings was written sixteen long years before he died. But now I admit

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to finding the loss, the waning of inspiration, the plain old silence, deeply sad, while also completely understandable. “We keep coming back and coming back/To the real,” Wallace Stevens writes in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “to the hotel instead of the hymns/That fall upon it out of the wind.” I nodded with recognition at Timothy Keane coming back and coming back to erasure, disappearance, dislocation, and desolation in his reading of Brainard. It is almost painful to leave this strip of beautiful beach and dunes behind. I confess my eyes welled up the other day when I heard Paul Auster recite the closing lines of Brainard’s very early, prescient piece “Back in Tulsa Again”: “I wept, that is, I continued weeping. I continued weeping for the rest of my life.” But, still, there’s always so much more possible: “baffling combustions are everywhere,” as Joe’s friend Ted said. All the scraps and fragments of the real still out there, waiting for someone to pick them up, hold them to the light—ready to be stitched together in new, dazzling combinations. I wonder if any single passage can sum Joe Brainard up, but for me, today, this one comes close: what might have been a different tomorrow today in this dream of being awake (past and present) and silly with being alive.

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Chapter 13

“Fuck Work”: The Reciprocity of Labor and Pleasure in Joe Brainard’s Writing Nick Sturm

“I remember when I worked in a snack bar,” writes Brainard in I Remember, “and how much I hated people who ordered malts.”1 As an artist who friends recall as a diligent, hard worker, Brainard’s annoyance at his position within this scene of mid-century American consumption shows a different side of his relationship to work than those embodied in his painstakingly detailed collages and assemblages. Those of us who have worked in hospitality or service industries might sympathize with Brainard’s casual resentment of his well-meaning customers. In Brainard’s memory, whatever sense of duty or good feeling was supposedly engrained in this act of wage labor had little appeal to him. Though his relationship to the labor of aesthetic production was fraught, Brainard was no slacker, or at least not when it came to producing art. This humorous yet palpable statement of resentment about working at the snack bar offers a lens through which to view Brainard’s ongoing critique of work as service. Especially in Brainard’s early writing, from I Remember (1970, 1972, 1973) to Bolinas Journal (1971) to Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (1971), the everyday activities described in these books— constructed as sites of both work and pleasure (school projects, poetry readings, trips to the beach, parties, to-do lists)—speak to Brainard’s career-long obsession and ambivalence with the activity and attendant anxieties of labor, and specifically with artistic labor. Within a socioeconomic system that exchanges wages for labor, Brainard, like many artists, refused to comply with the social contract that standardizes the separation between the utilitarian value of work and the affective transformations of aesthetic and bodily pleasure. “[W]e are

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the ones that don’t really labor away time and energy for our money,” Brainard writes of himself and his friends in “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night.” Instead, “we work in antique shops at night where we can read” and unlike “most ‘working men’ [who find] value in the material object of the dollar in itself,” Brainard commits himself to the “desire to not work but only paint, to see the world, to be big for myself, to do everything, to love and be loved freely, to know beyond the practice and ‘safe,’ to paint honestly therefore to them uglily, to spend what little money I have foolishly, and to not prepare for the future.”2 Written at age nineteen, this litany of free-wheeling antimaterialism would echo across Brainard’s oeuvre, a body of work that humorously and graciously reframes the artist’s relationship to labor and pleasure. But while Brainard wants “to not work but only paint,” what are we to make of his sentiment, in the same piece of writing, that “I seldom ‘enjoy’ the process of painting. It’s hard work”? This enjambment of work as service and work as aesthetic production remains unresolved across Brainard’s oeuvre, offering a compelling critique of labor from a celebrated artist more often associated with apolitical pleasure than a Bartleby-esque refusal. As Richard Deming shows, Brainard’s ambitious work ethic and his art’s “emphasis on labor, attention, and gratitude” produces a devotional aura full of humor and free of Pop Art’s ironized repetitions. “Devotion is a practice, an activity,” writes Deming, and rather than Andy Warhol’s machine-like coolness or his friend Ted Berrigan’s goofy sketches, “the devotion of [Brainard’s] art is to the act of devotion itself.”3 Brainard’s 1975 Fischbach Gallery show, a comic, fanciful flood of 1,500 miniatures, is testament enough to his meticulousness. But devotional labor is often a simultaneous articulation of commitment and uncertainty, an act of attentive care that is also an anxiety-ridden self-flagellation. The latter quality is what Lee Wohlfert’s review of the Fischbach show in People describes as Brainard’s “rigorous logic,” the seemingly endless transformation of “pack-rat clutter” into his aesthetic “obsessions.”4 Brainard’s devotion is a description of the practice that opens up the time for such obsessions to emerge, be arranged, and materialize. More than anything else it is capital’s demands on one’s time, that rigid separation of the day as a continual imbalance of labor and non-labor, work life and personal life, that makes Brainard’s customer’s desire for the malt so unbearable. For an artist to work, unfettered free time, that vague access to leisure, friendship, and non-production, is essential. As artist Joe Scanlan describes, free time “is strangely private in that it is often spent socializing. . . .

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It is so fiercely guarded because much of our best work would not get made without the vague, inexplicable, sideways approach to working that free time affords.”5 Brainard’s writing is a record of his immersion and resistance to free time as an aesthetic resource. I Remember, Bolinas Journal, and Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself are the most compelling diaristic archives of how Brainard lived during his so-called “free time.” Each of these texts acts as an account of his interests and activities as a visual artist and fellow traveler in the communities of post-war American poetry that allows us to track Brainard’s relationship to various forms of emotional, social, sexual, and aesthetic labor. The diaristic Bolinas Journal is simultaneously a vacation scrapbook and a publishing project. It exhibits the writer as a collector of shared pleasures, as one who works against work, generating literature as a by-product of one’s resistance to traditional labor. I Remember and Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself extend Brainard’s simultaneous refusal of and devotion to the labor of art, collecting memories and daily jottings that accumulate into prismatic examples of the reciprocity between work and pleasure. The centrality of the attempt to gather and make use of one’s free time in Bolinas Journal and Some Drawings shows the extent to which Brainard’s writing was a necessary parallel to his visual art practices, offering a representational space of experimental time management and reflection, exemplified by I Remember, in which pleasurably putting off the work of art becomes a method for producing the work itself. This process is central to Brainard’s writing and recalls Arthur Danto’s assessment that the history of aesthetics from Plato to Kant has led to a naturalized belief “that art is a kind of ontological vacation place from our defining concerns as human.”6 With these books in mind, we can see how Brainard’s writing acts as a critique of the negative division of free time and the value of labor perpetuated by aesthetic philosophers throughout Western civilization. Along with what Brainard’s soda-fountain supervisor might call his bad customer service attitude, Brainard was not naturally privy to the systematic efficiency of utilitarian models of labor, nor was he much interested in myths of self-fulfillment via hard work. Indeed, I Remember is peppered with lines that give a distinct shape to his early relationship to work. I remember a backdrop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.7

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I remember reading twelve books every summer so as to get a “certificate” from the local library. I didn’t give a shit about reading but I loved getting certificates. I remember picking books with big print and lots of pictures.8

Confounded by efficiency and uninterested in vacant narratives of hard work as a reward unto itself, Brainard’s sense of labor’s purpose is more organized around idiosyncratic aesthetic processes and the gratification of recognition than traditional values such as honor, integrity, or industriousness. Both memories are charming in their portrayal of Brainard’s ability or inability to fathom a shortcut that will minimize the time required to complete the assigned task. One imagines Brainard’s childhood reading certificates stacking up, only to be replaced by his own more serious self-made summer reading lists later in life. Other kinds of shortcuts appear throughout I Remember, such as “I remember two years of cheating in Spanish class by lightly penciling in the translations of words”9 and I remember . . . [m]y favorite 25 cent [cent symbol] photo machine. Favorite because it got stuck, and continued making pictures of me for what seemed like hours, until a nearby clerk became suspicious and called the manager over to turn the thing off.10

If cutting corners in class and delighting in loopholes at the department store was a habit for Brainard, his memory of painting the backdrop for the school play holds a different value. Even though Brainard recognizes a more efficient means of creating the backdrop, nothing in the entry’s construction suggests he would have taken the easier step if he had the opportunity. Finding meaningful fulfillment in the intricate process of hand-painting each brick, Brainard seems to be proud of having made more work for himself. Making art, he suggests, is more difficult; in fact, it should be more difficult than efficient. Both in his visual art and his writing, it is Brainard’s aesthetic sense of the glimmering underside of consumerism, not materialism or capitalistic labor as an end-in-itself, that motivates his aesthetic. The objects lining the store shelves—shampoo, soda bottles, clothing— like the objects that he would use in his intricate pop assemblages, attract Brainard’s attention for their aesthetic value—a color, a line, a texture—and not for their use value. One of Brainard’s early jobs in New York City working at “a neighborhood bric-a-brac shop” offered just such an opportunity to observe and rearrange the store’s

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trove of “fascinating old objects.”11 Against the listless labor of the part-time job, the impressions made by this hodgepodge of material things induces a kind of reverie as they accumulate in Brainard’s imagination. It makes sense that his lists of objects would mix with fantasies and daydreams, which figure prominently in I Remember. The quintessential occupation of free time, these fantasies and daydreams are the sexual-aesthetic foundation of Brainard’s sense of being an artist, or at least the kind of interesting, likeable person he wishes himself to be. From “daydreams of being a very smart dresser” to “fantasies of opening up an antique store, with only very selective objects, displayed sparsely in an ‘art gallery’ sort of way,” Brainard’s catalog of wistful diversions and desires shows his commitment to the work of producing aesthetic pleasure.12 However, Brainard’s leaning and loafing was rarely at his ease. I Remember is laced with anxieties about his romantic and intellectual abilities, as well as his capacity as an artist: “I remember when I thought that I was a great artist.”13 Despite his litany of memories about art contest awards, his scholarship to the Dayton Art Institute, and his intimate standing among the leading artists of his time, this matter-of-fact admission reveals a deep-seated uncertainty about his role and future as an artist. Of course, similar to his refusal of industriousness as a value in-itself, Brainard might not have been much interested in greatness as an aesthetic ambition. His tendency to retain “mistakes” in his drawings and comics by prominently scratching out a portion of the work and using arrows to actually point out errors shows that anxieties about messing up or not being good enough were a pivotal part of his aesthetic process. These built-in mistakes are a way for Brainard to show his work, to represent the labor of, in a sense, not being “great,” while also functioning as a meaningful trace of Brainard’s resistance to completeness and perfection as aesthetic values, a value he shared with painters such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol and writers such as Alice Notley. Such anxieties about art-making did not exist in a vacuum for Brainard, and worked to fuel what Ron Padgett calls “his continuing self-improvement drive,”14 or what Brainard more often refers to as “trying,” that reciprocal process of internal motivation and revelation mixed with a tendency of coming-up-short. “What I want most is to open up,” he writes in “Autobiography,” “I keep trying.”15 Trying figures in I Remember only as an occasional humorous or embarrassing moment for Brainard, such as when “I tried to do an oil painting using my dick as a brush.”16 Like the cross-outs in Brainard’s drawings, trying is an attempt at something, a pleasurable

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experiment or impulsive trying-out. But to try, with its meanings of effort and difficulty, appears in more complicated terms throughout Brainard’s writings. An image-text in the little-discussed BrainardFreeman Notebooks (1975), Self-Portrait, adds to the sense of Brainard’s approach to trying. In the social context of Self-Portrait, “trying” suggests both the unfavorable quality of being one who tries too hard, either to please or to impress, and the vaguer sense of “trying to” do something which remains unnamed; for example, “Actually I’m trying . . . to be a great artist.” The implication is that Brainard is, in fact, not trying too hard to please or impress, and that the impression of him exerting himself or putting on airs is a misunderstanding between him and the “people” he is addressing. As a self-portrait, the piece suggests that Brainard self-identifies with a kind of passivity that, stopping short of laziness, is more like a carefree indifference, or a protective nonchalance. Should Brainard feel uncertain or out of place in social situations, this humorous stance acts as a performative defense mechanism, a deflective self-portrait closer to contemporary Twitter usage than John Ashbery’s luxuriously digressive anti-self-portrait “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

Figure 13.1 Joe Brainard, Self-Portrait, from Brainard-Freeman Notebooks (1975).

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The “people” misinterpreting Brainard in Self-Portrait are likely a surrogate for his relationship with the larger art world and gallery scene, which he grew increasingly uninterested in throughout his career. “Most of the students agree that the art scene has gotten too big, too serious, too sacred, too self-important and too expensive,” says Brainard in a 1975 issue of People, the same year Self-Portrait was published. There is nothing jaded about Brainard’s critique, especially if we read it in the context of “trying.” If the art scene is where everyone is expending their time protecting their own best interests, garnering too much attention, and becoming nepotistic, Brainard has chosen the alternative of not trying, of eschewing celebrity and prized recognition in favor of a reserved wit and devotional attention. John Ashbery says about Brainard that “[h]is modesty is the modesty of the gods.”17 Like the gods, Brainard preferred to take a step back from the labor-heavy competiveness of the New York art world. In other words, he would rather go on vacation. He did just that in the spring of 1971, taking an extended trip to Bolinas, California during which Brainard kept a notebook soon after published as Bolinas Journal, the first book on Bill Berkson’s Big Sky Books. To call Brainard’s Bolinas trip a vacation is not quite right, at least according to the colloquial understanding of a vacation as a break from work. Brainard certainly plays with stereotypical vacation narratives throughout Bolinas Journal, but does so with a sharp suspicion of the cultural capital of vacation as a fantastic escape from labor and day-to-day identity into a realm of relaxation and leisure. The narrative arc of Bolinas Journal follows a few typical travel narrative genre markers, beginning with the act of packing a suitcase (“TRAVEL LIGHT!” Brainard playfully advises), to a flirty romance, parties, self-discovery and the book’s memorable last line, “My idea of how to leave a place gracefully is to “disappear’.”18 But from the beginning of the trip, even on the airplane ride from New York to San Francisco, that magical act of exiting one overdetermined world and entering another unknown and freeing world, Brainard expresses reservations about the lure of the vacation’s fantasy-hold. “California. You know, I’ve never been to California before. Not that things will be that different, but—well—one can hope. Wish. Try.”19 Doubtful of the immediate transformative effects of spending time in the fabled arts communities of Northern California, yet hopeful that this new place might yield exciting, unanticipated experiences, Brainard relies on his familiar, pragmatic devotion to the act of trying. Bolinas Journal will not be the story of a vacation then, but a diaristic record of the labor of trying, of living and working in an uncharted environment, replete

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with access to that necessary, inexplicable ingredient for art-making: free time. The writing in Bolinas Journal is the same frank, self-conscious, funny, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes totally glowing prose as in I Remember. What sets Bolinas Journal apart from Brainard’s serial work and other one-off projects is its focus on pleasure-aswork and work-as-pleasure as Brainard obsesses over and flames his own anxieties about “work,” the labor of producing art, and the “works,” the art itself. We also find questions about sexuality and community in Bolinas Journal, about what it means to work as an artist in an unfamiliar social environment, or what a community of artists is or does, especially since Bolinas is often referred to as the West Coast hub of the New York School. When Brainard decides to rent a house in Bolinas, which he comes to share with Philip Whalen, rather than continue traveling around California, he surprises himself fully out of the fantasy of the traditional vacation at the same time that he acquiesces, “Can’t believe it. . . . So much for ‘seeing’ California. Well—I’m not a very good traveler anyway.” “I like a clean shirt every morning. And work,” Brainard continues, “I really need to work a lot. And that’s hard to do when you’re moving around. (And then there’s Gordon).”20 By forgoing the traditional vacation-as-exploration narrative and settling down in a temporary home, Brainard simultaneously avoids the anxiety of being a wayfaring artist and re-emphasizes his dependence on the unproductive habits that, should the right work not follow, are one of the reasons why Brainard took the trip to California in the first place. Though Brainard is less certain that his skittery relationship with artist Gordon Baldwin will please either of them, he does look forward to how Bolinas might affect his work ethic. But I do feel very optimistic about being able to do some good work here. And being able to relax more here. And take things as they come more here. I’m tired of fighting life. I’d just like to sink in a bit and get cozy. Really don’t know why I push myself so. God only knows life is short enough without rushing through it. Gordon is still looking for a rock I guess. I guess I’ll go shave.21

The subtle contradictions between these lines are typical of Brainard’s introspectiveness in Bolinas Journal, as his conviction to go with the flow and settle into the Bolinas lifestyle immediately gives way to hesitation, suggested by the repetition of the tepid

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(and undoing) “I guess.” Brainard is less unenthusiastic than he is unsure of his own emotional and aesthetic motivations, airing out his uncertainties in the self-reflexive space of the journal in order to confirm his feelings. But Brainard’s half-heartedness seems to have the potential to lull him into inactivity, or worse, the passivity of being able to only accomplish basic tasks of self-maintenance, like shaving. As soon as the potential of doing “good work” jumps into his mind, marking the idealized and desired differentiation between life in Bolinas and life in New York City, the possibility of that work is immediately at risk. It makes sense that a trip to Bolinas involving so many new and old friends and so many appealing distractions would test Brainard’s resolution to get working. He found a venerable model for his Bolinas aspirations in Robert Creeley, whom Brainard lived with at the beginning of his trip. “I really do admire Bob Creeley,” says Brainard, “So much alive (‘in’ and digging) and really trying. Trying is great. And knowing you are trying must be even greater.”22 Again, a commitment to trying is what catches Brainard’s attention as Creeley’s ambition and instigating presence provide a kind of aesthetic guidance for the work ahead, however indeterminate the labor may be. And with the “love possibility” of the ever-present Gordon occupying his attention, and surrounded by accomplished artists whose confidence he himself rarely embodies, time and self-certainty were always at stake. This is not to suggest that Brainard lacked motivation that season in Bolinas, but that in Bolinas Journal his attention, at least tangentially, is often focused on complicated measurements of how to divvy up labor and pleasure in a way that feels genuine to him, or at the very least does not stress him out. Despite the eventual fumbling consummation of his relationship with Gordon, Brainard’s assertion that “at least I really tried” marks a reliance on the value of putting in the work, so to say, in his attempt to step out of his comfort zone romantically in Bolinas.23 He even tests his sexuality in an intimate exchange with Joanne Kyger, going on to describe homosexuality as a kind of dependency: “I’m not sure how much sex was on my mind, except that it was. But we didn’t. Being queer isn’t an easy habit to break. And usually, I have no desire to.”24 Even if he is typically uninterested in trying to experiment with heterosexuality, describing homosexuality as a “habit” signals a vexed internal crisis for Brainard, or at least an uncomfortable alignment of sexuality and routine that extends Brainard’s uncertainty with his aesthetic labor into a more painful uncertainty about his identity and desires. The negative connotation of habit, and breaking a habit, are strong here, and the implication

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that he might be able to, or even be interested in, working through or working on his “habit” in order to undo it, shows how ingrained Brainard’s insecurities were in his writing. Perhaps there is a pathos for him in logging an anxiety about his sexuality, but it could also be that Brainard’s representation of his fling with Kyger is an extension of the attempt to use the trip, and the journal’s capacity to narrativize, as an opportunity to unsettle his routine, both aesthetically and sexually. Like Creeley, Brainard wanted to know that he was trying. But not so hard that he’d be seen as working. However, in sexy, sunny Bolinas, Brainard’s continual attempt to recommit to the labor of aesthetic production could tend to get off track at the slightest pleasurable distraction. Don’t know if I want to work today or go to the beach with Bill. Getting lazy about shaving. Bill just called. It’s the beach for me. Fuck work.25

Already looking for a reason to put off working on his art, Berkson’s phone call becomes the validating instigation Brainard needs to relinquish his self-imposed uncertainty and commit to a leisurely day on the beach. Of course, there is nothing surprising or shameful about allowing oneself to relax and enjoy the beach on vacation, but Brainard’s determined refusal, “Fuck work,” hits a more rebellious tone than elsewhere in Bolinas Journal. Brainard’s sudden happy-go-lucky defiance marks the release he needs as he fully gives over to the carefree lifestyle of the Northern California beach town. His accounts of parties, acid trips, fooling around (the connotation of sexual labor in “fuck work” merits note) and the Brainard-esque musings he makes while stoned are a testament that he lived up to and extended his refusal of work, at least to a degree. If early on in Bolinas Journal Brainard is tracking his struggle to find a balance between work and pleasure, he quickly moves into a comfortable rhythm that generates meaningful reciprocity between art-making and leisure. Got up feeling great at eight. Plan to sun until eleven. Then work. “Work” today will be collaborating on a flyer and some posters with Joanne and Bobbie for their reading a week from Tuesday. Such a beautiful day!26

By softly regimenting the day between pleasure and work, Brainard evokes a palpably happier tone than in his description of deciding to go to the beach with Berkson. The scare quotes around work marks

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this mutual labor less as “actual” work and more as a pleasing, productive use of free time among friends, a situation that Brainard surely felt contented and happy in. With the burden lessened, and leisure balanced with labor, work becomes a specific project with an immediate aesthetic and social value rather than the vague, ominous obligation of getting started on “good work,” which, if left undone, would assure continued uncertainty about his abilities as an artist. Brainard’s ability to get to work in Bolinas Journal serves as a counter to his other “vacation” text, “Jamaica 1968,” a diaristic account of a trip to Jamaica with Kenward Elmslie and Jane Freilicher, among others. In “Jamaica 1968,” Brainard is repeatedly unmoored and unable to work as he finds himself overwhelmed by the paradisical Caribbean setting and sharp, disturbing socio-economic disparity between his countryside lodging, serving mostly white tourists, and the city. Padgett writes that Brainard was uncomfortable with the two maids assigned to their vacation home, finding himself feeling awkward and anxious that another person would see to his daily needs.27 His discomfort with his status as a privileged vacationer transfers to his feeling about work, as he finds himself unmoored and disconnected, unable to make any progress on a cover for Ted Berrigan’s Many Happy Returns. “It’s hard to get down to brass tacks here because I don’t really feel like I’m here. I feel like I am in no place in particular.”28 Making use of his free time while traveling, however ambivalently or indirectly, would not become possible for Brainard until Bolinas Journal. The centrality of collaboration as a mutual exchange of labor and pleasure in Bolinas Journal indicates one of the reasons why Brainard was capable of activating the vacation travel-log as usable form. Collaborating with friends and artists was a significant practice for Brainard, a prolific collaborator whose many co-authored and co-drawn works appear as images in the text of Bolinas Journal, including a fragment of the flyer he makes for Kyger and Bobbie Creeley. In fact, Bolinas Journal acts as a scrapbook of the visual artwork Brainard produced during his few months in Bolinas with images of casual interior sketches, comics, a gorgeous portrait of Berkson and drawings and writings by friends such as Anne Waldman and Berrigan acting as accompaniments to his journal entries. Brainard’s negotiation of labor and pleasure is everywhere apparent in the book via these interstitial images acting as physical traces of the work completed in Bolinas. News of Brainard’s industriousness even arrives from New York in a reproduction of Waldman’s typed poem “On Seeing Joe’s Show” that he received in the mail while in

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Bolinas, which refers to Brainard’s April 1971 show at the Fischbach Gallery, noting “Just think of all the man hours/(WORK)/to make something so so so beautiful/this must be art/it is art.”29 Waldman’s enthusiastic support and recognition of Brainard’s devotional labor in producing and arranging his show would have served as welcome motivation to him in the midst of his Bolinas trip. The pleasure of Waldman’s acknowledgment transfers directly to Brainard’s aesthetic practices in Bolinas, where even the beach becomes a site of aesthetic labor for Brainard, as he begins working on a series of small collages with stuff from the beach. . . . It’s fun. And relaxing. As the materials used dominate the work. (The results) I mean—what I choose to pick up off the beach is where I am “in” the works most. Otherwise they just more or less fit themselves together. Like a puzzle.30

With the beach now simultaneously a site of work and pleasure, this quintessential space of leisurely free time also becomes a place where Brainard sees himself as an artist, as the materials he picks up there begin to hold an aesthetic, self-conditioning power. Work and pleasure are fully merged here, and the ease with which Brainard chooses the materials makes for the kind of devotional, attentive labor he prefers. Brainard may say “Fuck work,” but nevertheless put the work in. The irony of Brainard’s obsession with work in Bolinas Journal is that the writing itself, not excluding the interstitial images, is the work that Brainard undertook while in Bolinas. Understanding Bolinas Journal as a book directly tied to a negotiation of labor and pleasure helps to counteract Marjorie Perloff’s description of the book as “boring,” an assessment that misses the archival thrust and exuberant tonal quality embedded in Brainard’s arrangements of dailiness.31 The performative contingency of the work, which mixes visual elements and text to induce a kind of narrative collage of the anxieties and joys of being an artist, accumulates with a frayed elegance into a personal, social, and aesthetic account of work and leisure among the Second Generation New York school writers. If Perloff’s assessment that “there is something missing here: perhaps the larger world beyond the little in-group where feeling is all” applies to Bolinas Journal, her statement that Brainard’s writing amounts to something “not exactly profound” perhaps applies to the little-discussed book Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself.32 A slim, side-stapled, seven-page mimeograph production published by Siamese Banana Press in 1971, the book is exactly what the title

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suggests—a collection of drawings by Brainard of notes, reminders, and to-do lists that he wrote to himself, such as a drawing of a piece of torn, lined paper that reads “I have what people want,” with a word after “have” scratched out. Another piece, New Life, is again a drawing of lined paper, this time two sheets with a torn fold in the upper left-hand corner to keep them together, which make up a list of self-improvement and “health” tips, like “One pack of cig. a day,” “Read more,” “No cheap sex novels,” and “Use dictionary,” the latter of which is underlined twice. The final drawing, an untitled note torn from a ringed pocket notebook, simply lists “Shine Shoes,” “Quarters in Bottle,” “Genet” and “Cut Out,” which can, quite startlingly, be read as an itemized abbreviation of O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” in which a shoe shine, bank account, Genet, and death— or “cutting out”—all appear. Perloff would be correct to describe Some Drawings, like much of Brainard’s writing, as not profound, though profundity rarely concerned him. Rather, Some Drawings, like many of Brainard’s short works, such as The Cigarette Book, is a unique dismissal of genre (the book is both a collection of drawings and a collection of writings) that complicates simple notions of illustration. It dismisses the profound for a devotional attention that, far from being inconsequential, is an elegant reshaping of the New York School aesthetics of dailiness. Rather than a narrativized index of social and cultural markers, as in “The Day Lady Died,” for example, Brainard’s dailiness articulates an itemized routine stripped of narrative momentum and attendant cultural capital. He quite simply lists things, enigmatic and mundane, in a self-conscious construction of his own identity as a “worker,” or at least someone who gets things done from time to time. Some Drawings is unique among Brainard’s works for its photographic quality—each note is drawn exactly as it appears, supposedly, with torn edges, crossed-out items and Brainard’s distinct, large, all-caps handwriting, as if each page were a photograph of the original note. There is no interpretative representation, no aesthetic flair or added context, only these brief notes, without explanation, floating on the page. The book is a delight for the strange and straightforward simplicity of the items on Brainard’s lists, which are as enigmatic as they are representative of the social and aesthetic contours of the younger New York school poets. Though the entirety of Some Drawings inherently relates to the routines of daily labor, one piece in particular, Things to Do Before I Move, stands out for the social and aesthetic specificity of what it lists.

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Figure 13.2 Joe Brainard, Things to Do Before I Move, from Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (1971).

The title Things to Do Before I Move puts this piece in dialogue with Ted Berrigan’s poems “Things to Do in Anne’s Room,” “Things to Do in New York City,” “Things to Do in Providence,” “Things to Do on Speed,” and “10 Things I Do Every Day,” works that are often cited as representative of a Second Generation New York School ethos. O’Hara’s posthumous appearance in quotes at the top of the list furthers this aesthetic lineage and reveals a hierarchy to Brainard’s sense of obligation. Among all the things to do before he moves, calling the mover falls far below working on a piece about O’Hara, a poet whom Brainard collaborated with and greatly admired. Indeed, we should read Things to Do Before I Move in the vein of O’Hara’s

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“I do this, I do that” poems, but with the Brainard-esque twist “I should do this, I should do that,” a variation that reflects his simultaneous anxiety about and refusal of a work of art’s completion. Like any to-do list, the items on Brainard’s list touch on a range of required and desired actions, jotted down as a means of keeping track of one’s responsibilities. The short-handedness of each item reflects how self-evident they were to Brainard—of course he, but only he, knows exactly what he means by “Write Sandy.” Reframed as an image-text in Brainard’s drawing, the pleasure for the reader lies in the enigmatic yet still resolutely common meaning each item entails. From small aesthetic tasks like designing a cover for Raymond DiPalma’s little magazine Doones to major obligations like calling the mover, Brainard’s list acts as an account of the work necessary to keep up with his day-to-day responsibilities. The array of writers and personalities included—working on a piece about O’Hara, reminding himself to say “yes” to Kulchur publisher Lita Hornick, a prompt to write to Sandy Berriga—turn Brainard’s list into a snapshot inventory of a day in the life of a New York School artist. As Alice Notley writes in “Your Dailiness,” her own critique of the poetics of the everyday, “We intermingle.”33 Whether or not Brainard finished all the tasks on his to-do lists is less important than the fact that Things to Do Before I Move includes a reminder to complete the book in which Things to Do Before I Move appears, suggesting that Brainard really did keep his shoulder to the wheel. Some Drawings acts as a photographic record of Brainard’s work, but also as a critique of aesthetic labor that separates itself from the social and personal pleasures of dailiness. The to-do list is evidence of both what one does with their time and what one does in order to make time, and what Brainard is interested in doing with that time is not simply to make art, socialize, and get ahead of the next task. As a book, Some Drawings is the attempt to trace the production of free time, framing free time in the material, writerly space of the to-do list, and refusing to differentiate the daily impermanence of the to-do list from the aesthetic labor of making art. While Berrigan’s “Things to Do” poems blend the dailiness of the to-do list with moments of lyric levity and digression, Brainard’s Things to Do Before I Move retains the singular format of the to-do list via its photographic quality, disallowing the representational or expressive quality of language to accumulate beyond the words listed. However, and simultaneously, the items on Brainard’s list generate a range of associations, marked most prominently by the nonsequitur, all caps “BELT” at the bottom of the drawing. Though the

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implication is that Brainard is reminding himself to pack his belt, or perhaps to buy a new belt, we can also read “BELT” as an aesthetic reminder of what is necessary in order to hold his work, as well as his life, together. Like Bolinas Journal, Some Drawings catalogues and puts on display the experiential and material traces of an artist for whom the reciprocity of labor and pleasure is central, not as a narrative of aesthetic revelation, but as a commitment to art as a process of resisting traditional labor that generated as much humor and passion as it did ambivalence and anxiety. It is hard to imagine Plato or Kant agreeing that art is a practice of both trying and not trying, and enjoying it all the same, much less announcing “Fuck work” and spending the day on the beach. Brainard’s writing gives us the pleasurable opportunity to do just that.

Notes 1. Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (Library of America, 2012), p. 16. 2. Ibid. pp. 142–6. 3. Richard Deming, “Everyday Devotions: The Art of Joe Brainard,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2008): 75–87. 4. Lee Wohlfert, “Joe Brainard’s collages come in one size—petite,” People Weekly, December 22, 1975: 72. 5. Joe Scanlan, “Free Time: An Introduction,” Art Journal 70.2 (2011): 24–6. 6. Arthur Danto, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” Grand Street 4.3 (Spring 1985): 178. 7. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 21. 8. Ibid. p. 50. 9. Ibid. p. 91. 10. Ibid. p. 92. 11. Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), p. 27. 12. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 95. 13. Ibid. p. 13. 14. Padgett, Joe, p. 189. 15. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 265. 16. Ibid. p. 7. 17. John Ashbery, “Introduction” to Brainard-Freeman Notebooks, ed. Phil Smith (New York: Gegenschein, 1975). 18. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 333. 19. Ibid. p. 289.

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Ibid. p. 292. Ibid. pp. 292–5. Ibid. p. 292. Ibid. p. 296. Ibid. p. 299. Ibid. p. 296. Ibid. pp. 306–8. Padgett, Joe, p. 130. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 222. Ibid. p. 301. Ibid. p. 314. Marjorie Perloff, “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,” (accessed January 12, 2017). 32. Ibid. 33. Alice Notley, “Your Dailiness” from Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), p. 19.

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Chapter 14

A Queer Poetics of the Normal: Joe Brainard, Clothing, and Girlish Femininity Kimberly Lamm

About two thirds of the way into I Remember (1975), Joe Brainard writes, “I remember Belmondo’s bare ass (a movie ‘first’) in a ter-/rible ‘art’ movie called, I think, Leda.”1 This is one of many lines from I Remember in which Brainard signals his investment in making queer sexuality central to his work. Here he does so by refusing the prestige of “high art” and placing images that signify as queer within the lived textures of what is recognized as normal American culture. Not only does he describe Claude Chabrol’s 1959 New Wave film Leda as a “ter-/rible ‘art’ film,” but what lays the foundation for making the cinematic citation of “Belmondo’s bare ass” part of the poem’s landscape of the everyday is his choice to have the cinematic flash of male flesh preceded by the things that compose a picnic: marshmallows, condiments, napkins, the utensils (their colors, materials, and textures), and “digging around in ice cold water for an orange/ soda pop.”2 Appearing just after this visceral search, the image of “Belmondo’s bare ass” works as an allusion to Pop Art’s portrayal of queer sexuality, where sex, body parts, and desire are hinged unabashedly to consumer culture and acts of visual consumption. Collaging picnic food to an erotic cinematic fragment, this sequence from I Remember exemplifies Brainard’s consistent emphasis on making queer sexuality normal. Traditionally, and some would say habitually, queer has been positioned beyond quotidian realities and is therefore by definition not normal.3 The anti-normativity embedded into the definition of the queer is what makes it so vital and compelling. But one of the things that stands out about Brainard’s work is that it brings together the objects that compose American middle-class consumer culture in the latter half of the twentieth century—the world

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of things that defined normal in the cultural imagination—with depictions of queer sexuality so as to make them an integral part of the normal’s landscape of recognition. What I am calling the “queer ordinary” in Brainard’s work hinges upon his representation of the visual appearances of commodities, which highlights his participation in and contribution to Pop Art and its attention to a commodified visual culture to which ostensibly everybody has access. I Remember also brings queer sexuality into the normal by highlighting how strange—queer—everyone’s sexuality is, but also by evoking the commodity forms and cultural practices associated with girlish femininity—fashion and clothing in particular. In this essay, I argue that images of fashionable clothing let Brainard show how femininity is wielded to police the sexual desires and practices of queer men, but in turn, how crucial attending to the devaluation of femininity is for creating a queer poetics of the normal. I Remember is dense with detailed depictions of clothing’s shapes, details, designs, and colors. In the following sequence, Brainard lets his memory follow the connections among celebrity images, clothing, and fashion, and highlights the fact that fashionable clothing is consistently assumed to be proximate to feminization: I remember a lot of movie star nose jobs rumours. I remember the cherries on Marilyn Monroe’s dress playing paddle-ball in The Misfits. I remember in a musical movie about a fashion designer, a black velvet bat winged suit with a rhinestone cobweb on back. I remember slightly “sissy” pants on Italian boys in art movies.4

The “Italian boys in art movies” connects back to Leda and “Belmondo’s bare ass.” But the adjective of “sissy,” which accuses whomever or whatever it describes as too feminine, weak, and delicate, also attaches to the other images of popular culture and fashion, not just the pants of Italian boys on screen: the cosmetic surgery of celebrities, the cute pattern of cherries on Monroe’s dress, and elaborate costumes in a movie about a fashion designer. Perhaps, in addition to signifying feminization, these images link together in Brainard’s memory as imperfections (which rumours of “nose jobs” indirectly signify) and “misfits.” The imagery and associative logic in memory sequences like this one illustrate that for Brainard, girlish femininity provided a way to hinge the normal and the queer together. That is, Brainard makes the queer normal

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and the normal queer by revealing the stigmas that attach to girlish femininity and suggesting the ways in which the accusation of “sissiness” has been wielded to police and shame the sexual practices and desires of queer men. In what follows, I analyse how Brainard composed I Remember to address and include “everybody” and thereby highlight sexuality’s collective and queer dimensions. Because Brainard’s investment in creating a poem that will represent the queer dimensions of sexuality that everybody shares is haunted by the knowledge that queer is most often excluded from the category of the normal, my analysis then turns to an exploration of the specific connection between femininity and shame. This exploration continues in the essay’s penultimate section, which tells the story of how Brainard was, in the words of Ron Padgett, “shamed out of fashion design” and became a “real artist,” a category that links artistic ambition to masculine privilege to transcend over mass culture, the everyday, and the feminization attached to both.5 The final section turns to Brainard’s visual engagement with the comic book character Nancy, which playfully moves between great masculine art and girly mass culture—crystalizing his efforts to make the queer normal and the normal queer.

Everybody’s (queer) sexualities In a letter he wrote to Anne Waldman in 1969, Brainard described the experience of composing I Remember: 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 because of me that 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. And it’s a nice feeling. It won’t last. But I am enjoying it while I can.6

This often-cited letter suggests that the process of writing I Remember was like the poem itself. An extended portrait in language, I Remember connects Brainard’s self-representation to the lives of others. It evokes Brainard’s distinct personality and voice, his particular sensibilities and way of seeing, but it also expands far beyond him to include “everybody”—both the collectivity “everybody” identifies and the shared sense of normalcy it implies. While feeling like “God writing the Bible” attests to Brainard’s epic ambitions—which the

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length of the poem manifests—the smaller and more interesting feeling he registers is the pleasure of being part of a poem that is “about everybody else.” His colloquial, intimate tone—“it’s a nice feeling”— conveys the comfort of composing a poetic text that extends beyond the self. And yet, when Brainard writes that this pleasant feeling “won’t last,” he lets us consider the possibility that punitive perceptions of queer sexuality bar him from remaining part of “everybody” and the collective sense of normality for which “everybody” figures. Brainard plays with “I” as a recognizable site of subjective utterance to which “everybody” speaking the language has access. And beginning every line with the statement “I remember” contributes significantly to the poem’s ability to move between individuality and collectivity, “Joe Brainard” and “everybody.” From that opening declaration of the self in the act of remembering, the lines of Brainard’s poem extend outward: sometimes into short one-line statements about remembering singular events and distinct objects, and sometimes into longer elastic lines that open into detailed vignettes and stories. The lines then circle back to the first person pronoun that is the poem’s subjective and collective anchor. Equalizing and normalizing each of Brainard’s memories, the repetition of “I remember” flattens the hierarchies of experience, allows them to be shared. Even if readers do not share Brainard’s specific memories or recognize the cultural landscape he selects from with such tender precision, the repetition of “I remember” compels them to compose their own collection of memories and adopt Brainard’s crisp focus on sensuous details as their own. As I Remember builds into its serial pattern—a formal enactment of Brainard’s interest in the everyday and the normal—the statement “I remember” begins to emblematize what Andy Fitch identifies as the poem’s “fusion of relaxed, vernacular record and austere algorithmic design.”7 As the center of the poem’s fixed, regularized pattern, this simple declaration functions like a particular definition of the norm—a standard of measurement and a form of averaging. As the poem’s stable ground, “I Remember” helps make Brainard’s portrayal of the unique, exceptional, and queer possible. As Ann Lauterbach explains, Brainard was a master of “shifting between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ icons and motifs, but also those that collapse assumptions about ‘normal’ social and sexual behaviour.”8 “I remember” helps create this shift. Brainard brings his focus on the collectivity of “everybody” to his portrayal of sexuality. Present from the beginning of the poem, many of Brainard’s lines render sexual feelings, objects, and encounters. Often Brainard represents sexuality from the perspective of a child’s

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curiosity, and these depictions evoke how strange, awkward, and even queer sexuality—any sexuality—can be. In the second stanza of I Remember, Brainard recalls “the kick I used to get going through my parents’/ drawers looking for rubbers” (Peacock).”9 While the parents’ rubbers are evidence of sex, Brainard is focused on the sexual thrill of his curious gaze, the “kick” of sneaking into his parents’ private spaces and looking for (not even necessarily finding) their rubbers. And by focusing on the particular brand—Peacock—Brainard highlights how consumer culture shapes sexuality into recognizable forms. Like an open drawer, the brand name “Peacock” becomes a threshold for seeing into sex. Soon after this memory of voyeuristic pleasures, Brainard writes about a sexual encounter as an adult: 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 arm. 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 brush.10

The first portrayal of sex with another man, this memory illustrates the connection Brainard creates between his artwork and sexuality. Making his penis into a paintbrush, Brainard graphically enacts the desire to make his artwork touch and be touched by his sexual desires. But the conflation of the penis and the paintbrush is so literal it is over the top, and indirectly attests to the impediments placed on queer artists to represent their sexuality in and through their artwork. Brainard placed this memory near the poem’s beginning, proximate to the childhood memory of looking through his parents’ drawers. This choice suggests Brainard’s attention to the fluid movement of memory, its inherent disregard for standard temporalities of sexual development in which the sexuality of the adult is wholly distinct from that of the child. By placing the memory near the poem’s beginning, Brainard draws attention to the fact that there is not one particular moment in I Remember in which his queer sexuality is revealed or discovered. That is, Brainard’s representations of sex with men are not set against normal heterosexual experiences, nor are they poetic enactments of “coming out.” Instead, Brainard places the multiple iterations of sexuality—encounters, body parts, fantasies, and identifications—on a queer continuum that encompasses the normal and the relationality normality represents. Memory is one of those iterations of sexuality and crucial to the queer continuum Brainard creates. In his introduction to Brainard’s

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collected writings, Paul Auster describes the sheer quantity and quick pace of the poem’s lines and stanzas, and argues that Brainard lets memory’s associative logic shape the composition: “The memories keep coming at us,” Auster writes, “relentlessly and without pause, one after the other with no strictures regarding chronology or place.”11 Auster goes on to outline the categories Brainard writes about in I Remember: from “Family,” “Food,” “Clothing,” to “Objects and Products,” “Sex,” “Jokes and Common Expressions,” “Friends and Acquaintances.”12 While helpful for seeing the kinds of experiences I Remember includes, Auster’s catalog is too regimented. It does not account for the ways the stanzas echo each other or how Brainard lets a detail of one stanza—an image, phrase, name, or feeling—spill into another and become central to it. Moreover, by placing “sex” into its own isolated category, Auster limits the possibility of seeing that sexual desires are imbricated with the act of writing and following memory’s associative logic.

I remember shame If the sexuality of memory is cut from readings of I Remember, we are less likely to see how shame—and particularly the shame that has historically attached to queer sexual practices and desires—is part of Brainard’s themes and composition. Here is poignant example of shame’s elusive but importance appearance in I Remember: I remember once when I was very young my mother put tiny metal clamps in her hair to make waves, and I said I wanted some too, so she put some in my hair too. And then, forgetting I had them on, I went outside to play. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I do remember rushing back into the house, humiliated.13

In a poem that begins every stanza with “I remember,” the statement “I don’t remember” stands out. It is easy to imagine that in the gap between leaving the house with “metal clamps” in his hair and returning home humiliated is a queer epithet that stained his selfimage with shame, for not only were the tools of feminine beauty in his hair—signaling the aspiration to look like a girl—he forgot he was wearing them. Earlier in I Remember, Brainard writes of a memory that explicitly links curly hair to the threat of feminization: “I remember a story about how when I was very young I got/ a pair of scissors and cut all my curls off because a boy down the street told

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me that curls were sissy.”14 While this memory can be transposed on to the one with metal clamps, it seems right that that the specific shame-inducing incident was forgotten, as shame is an affective response to someone else witnessing the differences between the self and the ideal images it is expected to embody—in this case, the masculinity of proper boyhood.15 In Eve Sedgwick’s discussion of the role shame played in Andy Warhol’s self-presentation, she argues that shame is not “a discrete intrapsychic structure.”16 It is instead a diffuse affect that attaches itself to, shapes, and intensifies almost any part of the self.17 Understood as a connective tissue of identity, shame becomes impossible to extricate, resistant to the most earnest of recovery efforts, because it is “integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed.”18 This expansive definition of shame is helpful for seeing how Brainard weaves shame into I Remember, allowing it to animate and move through the poem’s associative logic of memory and sexuality. If we return to the poem’s opening sequence, we can see shame influencing Brainard’s representation of sexual identity: I remember the kick I used to get going through my parents’ drawers looking for rubbers. (Peacock.) I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world. I remember pink dress shirts. And bola ties. I remember when a kid told me that those sour clover-like leaves we used to eat (with little yellow flowers) tasted so sour because dogs peed on them. I remember that didn’t stop me from eating them. I remember the first drawing I remember doing. It was of a bride with a very long train. I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. Up on a hill. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Ron Padgett. I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.19

Moving backward from this line in which Brainard recalls thinking his “first erections” were symptoms of a “terrible disease or something,” we can see the connections he creates among sexuality, shame, and disgust. A publicly recognized disease like polio is an accessible metaphor of bodily abnormalities, and, more to the point, bodily states perceived to be so, like first erections, or homosexuality. Brainard’s prominently placed images of clothes—particularly the pink shirts and the image of a bride with a long train—become linked to the connection between sexuality and disease. When worn by boys

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and men, clothes associated with femininity (like hair pins that create curls) can represent the threat of being called a sissy and the shame of being seen as someone with the abnormal desire to identify with girlish femininity. While Brainard does not deny these shameful associations, neither does he concede to shame’s logic or its damage. As this sequence of memories attests, he continued to consume, without disgust, the flowers the dogs purportedly peed on, and placed the memory of his first drawing—a bride in a wedding dress, femininity’s ultimate sartorial fantasy—next to the memory of smoking his first cigarette with a friend, a normal form of boyish rebellion. The connection between shame and femininity has a long history. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1915), Sigmund Freud offers a psychoanalytic account of this connection. Freud argues that sexuality is not absent from childhood (as is commonly assumed) but at its center—a template upon which adult sexuality will write itself. In childhood, according to Freud, there is a wide array of sexual sensations and experiences that take place beyond genitalia. He focuses on the auto-erotics of thumb sucking, and places continual stress on the mouth and anus as sites of sexual pleasure. Disgust and shame, however, “stamp” the sexual use of the anus as a perversion.20 That is, they keep the sexual instincts within the bonds of the genitals, though sexual normalcy never fully materializes. Freud reports that women are expected to renounce sexual perversities in order to align with the category of the normal, properly feminine woman. Freud makes this clear in the last of the three essays, “The Transformations of Puberty,” where he delineates his account of the paths by which masculine men and feminine women are produced. Until puberty, Freud argues, autoerotic activity for boys and girls are the same. The similarity is so pronounced that he argues that the sexuality of little girls is “wholly masculine.”21 At puberty, significant differences arise. For boys, the project of directing sexuality to the genital is straightforward. For girls, it is, according to Freud, “involut[ed].”22 In direct proportion to the increase in boys’ libidos, girls experience a “fresh wave of repression,” which means renouncing their “piece[s] of masculine sexuality” out of the picture.23 Girls become proficient in the skills of sexual repression, and internalize those primary “inhibitions of sexuality”—disgust and shame—with far greater ease. Reading Three Essays, a picture emerges: that of women performing the crucial work of giving sexuality its “final, normal shape” and narrowing the “pursuit of pleasure,” so it “comes under sway of the reproductive function.”24 The figure of the properly feminine heterosexual woman in Three Essays

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is responsible for maintaining sexual normalcy by warding off the threat of disgust and shame. In her feminist reading of Three Essays, Griselda Pollock argues that the connection between shame and femininity Freud identifies is not natural to girls, but has been produced by patriarchal culture. Pollock explains that Freud’s argument about puberty “simply shows that as girls emerge into womanhood their access to sexuality is censored so that what they experience as sexuality is its shaming, its silencing, its unspeakability.”25 Drawing upon two of Freud’s own arguments—prior to puberty, sexuality is indistinguishable in the two sexes, and the sexual drives are fundamentally active—Pollock argues that the link Freud creates between women and shame is actually a cultural inscription of passivity onto the female body. She states Freud’s assumption that the girl-child is inclined to shame “smack[s] of a retrospective projection down the reversible tunnel from the social world to the susceptible, other-oriented child” who “if female” is shaped by women caretakers “acting as society’s agents of gendering and policing.”26 That is, the feminine characteristics Freud attributes to puberty’s production of gender deflects the cultural imposition of castration, patriarchy’s insistence upon the lower value of girls and women, and the expectation that girls repress their sexual expression and police themselves through shame. If Pollock’s feminist reading of Freud’s Three Essays demonstrates how shame attaches to assumptions about what women should be—easily shamed—then Brainard’s representation of queer sexuality struggles with the expectation that men will not identify with girls and women. In a telling memory that perhaps attests to the internalization of this expectation, Brainard writes, “I remember wondering why, since I am queer, I wouldn’t rather be a girl.”27

Schools of art and fashion Many of the memories Brainard composed in I Remember take place in the schools of his American childhood. As he renders scenes and events from elementary school and high school, it is clear that the social worlds within educational institutions are places where sexuality acquires definition and where normality of heterosexuality is established and policed. Near the conclusion of the poem, Brainard creates a sequence of memories that represent school as a site where the normal functions as a standard of measurement, which Brainard connects to his interest in language and writing and his attraction to small spaces, shapes, and material objects:

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I remember when, walking single file from class to class, getting out of line was pretty serious. I remember pencil boxes with a little ruler and a little compass in a little drawer. I remember diagramming sentences. And arithmetic cards, more than I remember arithmetic.28

The memory of a “single file” line can be read figuratively as the school’s emphasis on producing and policing a norm. Indeed, in Brainard’s many representations of school in I Remember, it is hard not to sense the stigma of feminization and the imminent threat of shame that so could easily attach to a boy who “got out of line,” who relished girly things and liked to draw, design, and wear women’s clothing. School, clothing, and sexuality are often linked together in I Remember. When Brainard writes “I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer,” we see the visual dimension of his memories.29 He also evokes a high school world of norms and rules, the shame that can be wielded through them, and the threat of being teased for being “queer”—i.e., sissy and girly, weird, faggy, and feminine. The threat of feminization implied by “queer” is underscored by the lines that precede and follow from this high school memory of the way queer was identified through green and yellow clothing. I remember how much I used to stutter. I remember how much, in high school, I wanted to be handsome and popular. 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.30

The stigma and shame of “queer” becomes associated with social awkwardness (stuttering), the desire to be recognized in a positive light (“handsome and popular”), and a masculinity confirmed by big genitals as evidence of sexual prowess (“sock in my underwear”). Attending the Dayton Art Institute was conducive to Brainard’s artwork, his sexuality, and the creating relationships between the two, but he also encountered another set of normalizing restraints. As he writes in I Remember, “I remember in Dayton, Ohio, the art fair in the park where they made me take down all of my naked self-portraits.”31

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These self-portraits, as Padgett explains, were “depictions of his own body, seen through his eyes as he lay propped up in bed working, sometimes naked.”32 They are also key documents in the development of Brainard’s particular talent for “self-disclosure.”33 The censorship of these paintings certainly attests to a homophobic discomfort with queer self-representation that Brainard quietly but consistently defied throughout his work, but focusing exclusively on the ways in which Brainard defied American homophobia makes his more subtle representations of queer sexuality harder to see. Early in I Remember, Brainard remembers some visual details of his room in Dayton, and this memory leads into a few of the poem’s many references to fashion and clothing: I remember the linoleum floors of my Dayton, Ohio, room. A white puffy floral design on dark red. I remember sack dresses. I remember when a fish-tail dress I designed was published in “Katy Keene” comics.34

Katy Keene comics are an important reference in I Remember, as it highlights his artwork’s affinity with both comics and fashion illustration. Created in 1945 by cartoonist Bill Woggon, Katy Keene was a glamorous college student turned fashion model and star performer who first appeared as a side feature in various Archie comics.35 The interactive dimensions of the Katy Keene comics— Woggon invited readers to send in their clothing illustrations, and consistently incorporated their designs into Keene’s paper doll outfits—has strong connections to Brainard’s address to “everybody” in I Remember and his invitation to viewers to thread their own memories into his. After the memory of the Katy Keene comics, Brainard lists memories of pieces of clothing with recognizable names. He creates this list through a series of short, orderly lines that evoke sartorial objects lined up in closets. Brainard is not remembering these articles of clothing as things to wear but as images with shapes and styles that their names reference: I remember box suits. I remember pill box hats. I remember round cards. I remember squaw dresses. I remember big fat ties with fish on them.

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I remember the first ballpoint pens. They skipped, and deposited little balls of ink that would accumulate on the point. I remember rainbow pads.36

It makes sense, given his desire to be a fashion designer, and his emphasis on the visuality of clothing, that Brainard would make the materials of drawing and writing—ball point pens and rainbow pads of paper—part of this list. Like Andy Warhol, Brainard aspired to be a fashion designer. Padgett confirms this aspiration and writes about the fact that Brainard worked part-time as a fashion designer in high school: “His ink drawings—conventional illustrations that were as good as those by professional commercial artists—appeared regularly in local newspaper advertisements for Vandever’s, a large department store, and for Seidenbach’s, one of Tulsa’s finest clothiers.”37 Padgett also cites a newspaper article that focuses on Brainard’s entries to the Tulsa State Fair. Titled “Fair First Is Budding Dior,” the point of the article is that Brainard had a “flair for designing women’s clothing.”38 The article quotes Brainard’s mother, Marie Brainard. She explains that her son designed many of the clothes she has made for herself and shows that fashionable clothing is an interest they shared: “He always looks for the unusual in design and even helps me pick accessories which will go well with his design. There’s only one area of disagreement between us and that is on shoes. Joe thinks it’s terribly unfashionable when I wear anything other than spiked heels.”39 This charming anecdote could be read as an example of the “erotically invested affirmation” that Sedgwick argues is the ground of valuing—rather than erasing—queer kids.40 Padgett, however, wonders if this collaboration is normal—“It sounds to me that initially Marie and Joe’s relationship was as much mother-daughter as mother-son”—and suggests that it was perversely created by his mother’s desires.41 With a hint of relief, Padgett reports that Brainard gave up this abnormal (queer) collaboration with his mother for serious artistic collaborations with his male mentors and peers. Meeting Ted Berrigan and encountering his work helped Brainard become a serious artist. A graduate student at the University of Tulsa, Berrigan welcomed Brainard and Padgett into his coterie of “artists, writers, folk music lovers, and general renegades,” the young men who came to be known as the Tulsa poets.42 This coterie took their modern artists seriously, and Padgett places artists whose names were on their lips (“Pollock, Rimbaud, Goya, Joyce, de Kooning, Shaw, Picasso, Stevens”) against the names of fashion designers (“Chanel, Givenchy,

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or Dior”).43 Not qualifying as “high art,” fashion becomes a waste of Brainard’s talent, a limitation on his attempt to be “great.”44 Padgett’s rendition of their encounter with the Tulsa Poets and their devotion to this constellation of great artists underscores a familiar masculinization of artistic practice—one that prides itself on its distinction from the feminized realms of mass culture. Indeed, testifying to the fact that Brainard was “quickly shamed out of fashion design,” the story Padgett tells is right in line with a concept of modernism linked to a form of masculinity that signals its importance by distinguishing itself from lower and feminized forms of cultural production, which fashion illustrates quite easily. Though Brainard was “shamed out of fashion design,” he did not relinquish his love for fashionable clothing. It is consistently woven into I Remember, creating an imaginative and material world of shapes, designs, and colors that allowed Brainard to represent his identification with feminized forms of adornment and the aesthetic dimensions of his sexuality. The following passage is a complicated and multi-dimensional memory of daydreams that crystalize the intimate and complicated connections in Brainard’s work among fabric, fashion, and the sensuous dimensions of girly femininity: I remember early fragments of daydreams of being a girl. Mostly I remember fabric. Satins and taffetas against flesh. I in particular remember yards and yards of royal blue taffeta (a very full evening dress, no doubt) all bunched up and rubbing between my thighs, by big hands. This period of fantasizing about being a girl wasn’t at all sexual in terms of “sex.” The kick I got didn’t come from being with a man, it came from feeling like a woman. (Girl.) These fantasies, all so much one to me now, were all very crunched up and fetus-like. “Close.” An orgy of fabric of flesh and friction (close-ups of details). But nothing much “happened.”45

This memory represents Brainard’s strong affinity with women and girls, enacts the sensuous pleasures attributed to femininity and fabric, and defies the heterosexual masculinity that undergirds “great” and “serious” artistic practice. Since Brainard was “shamed out of fashion design,” and that shaming relied upon deep assumptions about femininity’s lower value, it is interesting that he describes his fantasies as “crunched up and fetus-like” and ends the passage by stating that “nothing much ‘happened.’”46 These statements suggest that this fantasy remained nascent for Brainard, an originary but underdeveloped part of his work—though not forever. In a cryptic

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formulation, Brainard writes that these fantasies are “all so much one to me now.”47 Passages in I Remember show Brainard imagining an artistic lineage that is not premised upon the exclusion of femininity. Post-war American poetry—the New York School in particular—contributed to this imagining. A few memories register a strong desire to be recognized by the male poets associated with the New York School but not at the price of getting “shamed out of” his attraction to fashion, clothing, and femininity. Early in the poem, Brainard recalls wanting, for his fifth birthday, “an/ off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown. I got it. And I wore/it to my birthday party.”48 In the next line, Brainard writes of “a dream [he] had recently where John Ashbery/ said that my Mondrian period paintings were even better than/ Mondrian.”49 The desire to fashion one’s image through fashionable clothing—an act almost always linked to feminization—becomes connected to the dream of praise from an older artist and a secure place within an artistic lineage. Brainard’s dream that Ashbery will recognize his artwork as “better than/ Mondrian” expresses a desire to have his early attraction to clothing, fashion, and sartorial display—represented by the “black satin evening gown” he wore on his birthday—become recognized as well. Frank O’Hara was key to this imaginative project. After reciting memories of living penniless in Boston, Brainard states: “I Remember The Day Marilyn Monroe Died,” an explicit allusion to O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” (1959) and its homage to Billie Holiday.50 By rewriting the title of O’Hara’s most well known poems, Brainard places his own work in direct dialogue with this poem about fantasies of intimacy. The next sequence describes meeting O’Hara on the streets of New York. Brainard pays particular attention to his physical appearance—his clothes and their connotations—to register his enamored identification with him: 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.51

Brainard transforms “sissy” from a queer epithet that threatens shame to a sign of attraction that points to the possibility of an aesthetic practice that gives queer desire access to the normal.

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Nancy: a normal queer girl The depth of Brainard’s interest in girlish femininity becomes clearer when I Remember is set in relationship to visual artwork that features “Nancy”: the collage series If Nancy Was (1972) in particular. Composed when Brainard was writing I Remember, If Nancy Was makes the central character in Ernst Bushmiller Jr.’s popular weekly comic strip that began in the 1930s a malleable figure that allows Brainard to reflect in visual form upon the distinctions between high art and mass culture, and, less explicitly, the shame attributed to queer sexuality and its connection to the repression of girlish femininity dominant American heterosexual masculinity requires. With Nancy’s perky, always happy face and her simple, regularized form, Brainard created a visual poetics that highlights his strategies for bringing the queer and the normal together. As Lauterbach insightfully writes, “Nancy is Joe’s transitional object, in the sense that through her, what is exceptional about him specifically, not only about his gayness, is rendered common, ordinary.”52 In many of the pieces that feature Nancy, Brainard makes her part of paintings by male artists. He lets Nancy interrupt the icons of the Western art historical canon and thereby draw attention to its presumed distance from mass culture, femininity, and queer sexuality. For Nancy’s decidedly normal, slightly dykey, always-perky girlishness undermines the hyper heterosexual masculinity that subtends avant-garde aesthetic practices of the late twentieth century. Nancy is key to understanding how Brainard makes his artwork a site for imagining a world of everyday queers. Nancy is as everyday as the newspapers in which her story was told and as ordinary as the squares that framed her adventures. As a child, Brainard saw Bushmiller’s comic in the Tulsa Sunday World.53 After moving to New York City, he continued to follow the comic in the New York Post and started incorporating her image into his artwork in 1963. Nancy’s face is composed with simple shapes: two black circles for eyes, a straight line for her nose, and curved lines for her mouth and eyebrows. Her helmet of spiked jet-black hair expands her already round face. Just above her eyebrows, there is always a big bow in her hair. Bushmiller’s Nancy developed from Fritzi Ritz, a comic originally created by Larry Whittington. Fritzi Ritz was a flapper pursuing an acting career in Hollywood. Her niece, a little girl named Nancy, came to live with her in Los Angeles. Fritzi Ritz became Nancy in 1938. When Bushmiller took over Fritzi Ritz, he paid a lot of

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attention the details of his star’s clothes. Though his line became more streamlined when he brought Nancy to the forefront of his comic, his focus on sartorial details continued. Bushmiller consistently portrays Nancy in what resembles a schoolgirl uniform: a white jumper with a pleated skirt. She wears this jumper over a black short-sleeved top that is buttoned up to a little white collar that matches her white sleeves. Her shoes are simple white shapes that resemble clogs. Seeing Nancy in frames with Aunt Fritzi—tall, glamorous, curvy, and fashionable—it is clear that she is a prepubescent girl. As the editors of the book Nancy is Happy state, “With her chubby cheeks, chunky physique, frizzy helmet of hair, and disconcerting black stare, Nancy did not seem like prime star material—especially compared to the curvy and cute Fritzi.”54 Not pretty, Nancy is ordinary, cute in a tomboyish way. Her round form does not fit into the grammars of clearly discernible gender difference. It is pretty clear that for Brainard, these characteristics translated into a malleability upon which he seized. Many of Brainard’s collages imaginatively expand Nancy’s physical form. Her body becomes a ball. Her hair becomes a large Afro, part of the New York City skyline, an illustration of Art Noveau’s curvy forms. Brainard transposes her friendly face onto a stamp, a blackand-white photograph of André Breton, a sketch of Mount Rushmore. He also represents Nancy through the stylistic signatures of post-war art. In If Nancy Was a Drawing by Larry Rivers she appears in the midst of a rapid walk that Brainard has drawn with a soft sketch. In If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning Brainard composes her form with the flat forms and rough painterly gestures of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I. The “if” in the title of this series is part of Brainard’s interest in transformation. It represents contingency and possibility, an attention to what unfolds and becomes rather than what is assured or has to be. Lauterbach takes the suggestions of “if” even further: “If is a powerful little word, lifting reality into suspension.”55 If Nancy Was is about visualizing all that Nancy could become, lifting the reality of sexuality into suspension. If Nancy Was a Boy is important for seeing how the imaginative malleability Brainard brings to Nancy’s image connects to his exploration of queer sexuality. Brainard has placed Nancy at the center of a white piece of paper. She is small, about two inches tall. Without shame, Nancy is pulling up her red pleated skirt from its hem to reveal her straight bare legs and little penis. Under Nancy’s shoes, Brainard has created a series of red lines that echo the red underside of Nancy’s skirt and the bow in her hair. In small, incremental steps,

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Figure 14.1 Joe Brainard, If Nancy Was a Boy (1972). Gouache and ink on paper, 11 x 8 inches. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

these red lines get longer until they arrive at the title, which Brainard has composed in capital letters and black ink. Following Freud’s analysis of puberty as the period of sexual development in which boys and girls place themselves on the hierarchal scales of gender and sexuality, we could say that If Nancy Was a Boy portrays a girl who has yet to realize she does not have a penis and clearly does not understand that she is expected to experience her sexuality as shameful. Brainard brings the charm of this ignorance to another collage, If Nancy Knew What Wearing Green and Yellow on Thursday Meant, which connects to the following lines from I Remember: “I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer.”56 A close-up of Nancy’s face, her bow and collar are yellow and her sweater is green. Her friendly smile defies the epithet of queer to maintain heterosexuality as the norm.

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Figure 14.2 Joe Brainard, If Nancy Knew What Wearing Green and Yellow Meant (1972). Gouache and ink on paper, 12 x 9 inches. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

If Nancy is oblivious to the connection between sexuality and shame, Brainard is not, and in many of the Nancy collages, he works within this tension, utilizing it to place queer sexuality in the realm of the normal without excising the shame with which it has been historically associated. For example, in If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket, Brainard placed Nancy within an image of a sailor’s body whose head has been cropped from the frame. She appears in the pocket at the front of his pants, right next to his “basket,” greeting the world of queer desire with a friendly, welcoming wave. And in If Nancy Was an Underground Comic Book Character, Brainard depicts Nancy inserting a dildo into her mouth while masturbating and then, in the next sequence inserting the dildo into her asshole. Nancy’s malleability as a girlish visual form allows her to emblematize the desire for and the visual shock of penetration. There are echoes of this penetration in If Nancy Was an Ashtray, an image in which Brainard has

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placed a cigarette butt right in Nancy’s mouth. He repeats the theme of waste and denigration in If Nancy Was Just an Old Kleenex: made out of a dirty and wrinkled piece of tissue paper, Nancy’s face has been composed of what looks to be traces of feces and sperm. In one of Brainard’s best Nancy pieces, he places her image in an arrangement of canonical paintings that appeared together on the 1968 cover of ARTnews Annual. Nancy pops up in paintings by Henri Matisse, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Francsico de Goya, Peter Paul Rubens, Leonardo Da Vinci, Francis Picabia, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Willem De Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Of this collage, Lauterbach writes, “This is Brainard at his most joyously subversive: defrocking the Holy canon while simultaneously inserting himself via Nancy (and so the rest of us ordinary folk) into it.”57 With Nancy embodying the ordinary, this collage links back to Brainard’s introduction to the great masters of Western painting and poetry through the Tulsa poets. By placing Nancy in the frame of their images, Brainard does not deny that these masters are great, but connects them to the aesthetic possibilities of femininity.

Figure 14.3 Joe Brainard, Untitled (“The Avant Garde”), ARTnews Annual 34 (1968). Offset lithography, 2 pages, 9 x 12 inches each. Used by permission of the estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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The humorous impact of this collage comes from the stark differences between the flat consistency of Nancy’s image and the visual complexity and density of the paintings in which she has been playfully inserted. The cut-out of her face looks weird superimposed on Willem de Kooning’s Woman I, but it is imaginatively productive. The automated flatness of Nancy’s face draws attention to the depth De Kooning is able to create with his thick slashes and swirls of painted color. In the bottom right-hand corner of the collage, Brainard depicts Nancy drowning in the depths of a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Her hands are up and her mouth is open; it looks like she is calling out for help. The thought balloon above her simply states “The Avant-Garde” in capital letters, and it is not clear whether Nancy is accusing the avant-garde of something or is appealing to them for help. These differences are offset by stylish affinity between Nancy’s flat form, limited color palette, and simple lines and Warhol’s soup cans, Jasper Johns’ targets, Mondrian’s squares, and even Matisse’s lyrical renditions of women’s clothes. Nancy slides into these images with a certain amount of ease. She becomes a witty commentary on the simplicity of their compositions and highlights their affinity with mass culture. Whether Nancy’s cartoon image disrupts or mirrors the paintings in which she appears, it is clear that her all-American girly normalcy is a deliberate mismatch for the high seriousness of these canonical paintings. With her bright, cheery face, Nancy brings their high modernist seriousness down to the girly earth and carries the everyday world of comics into the frame of the paintings, transforms them into a pattern of normalcy. They are no longer sacred, awe-inspiring images, but imaginative spaces through which Nancy goes about her normal, everyday business, giving them a bright and cartoony accessibility. Lauterbach argues that Nancy figures for Brainard’s “humble roots” and became his “virtual companion and side-kick” as he negotiated the complex sophistication of the New York art world. As she writes, “Nancy could be inserted into this world, instantly stripping it of its formidable aura, transforming it into an accessible, intimate realm. Nancy could be the agent of an accommodating, domestic nearness and hereness.”58 In “The Origins of Brainard’s Nancy,” Padgett speculates about why the comic figure was so attractive to the artist. Drawing from the insights of Brainard’s brothers (both of whom are artists), Padgett writes: “from a visual point of view he admired Bushmiller’s clean, bold line and his disposition of solid blacks against white.”59 Padgett admits that there are other “far more complicated” reasons

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that Brainard found Nancy a source of perpetual fascination, which he leaves to others to pursue. Without naming Brainard’s sexuality, or explicitly identifying the fact that “Nancy” is a name for queer boys and men and an epithet wielded to shame them, Padgett makes the claim that it is unlikely that Brainard “heard the term ‘Nancy’ or ‘Nancy-boy’” as a young boy in Tulsa in the 1950s, though of course he would have heard “all sorts of derogatory language . . . on the playground and in the locker room.”60 It is in New York, Padgett argues, that Brainard probably first heard the term “Nancy,” the time when “Joe’s circle of friends widened to include gay men.”61 What Padgett seems to deliberately miss is that Brainard might be bringing Nancy back to his childhood and the derogatory homophobic language he heard in its spaces. Padgett also seems to sidestep the possibility that while Brainard’s “circle of friends widened to include gay men,” his artwork suggests that he was grappling with the presumptive masculine heterosexuality that undergirds artistic lineages, is perpetually linked to artistic greatness, and distinguishes itself from the shamefully low value of girlish femininity.

Notes 1. Joe Brainard, I Remember, in The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: Library of America, [1974] 2012), pp. 5–134. 2. Brainard, I Remember, p. 111. 3. My ideas about queer sexuality and normality are indebted to Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson (eds.), Queer Theory without Antinormativity, a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, particularly, “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” differences 26.1 (2015): 1–25. 4. Brainard, I Remember, p. 111. 5. Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), p. 12. 6. Qtd. in ibid. p. 146. 7. Andy Fitch, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), p. 9. 8. Ann Lauterbach, “Joe Brainard & Nancy,” in Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2003), p. 8. 9. Brainard, I Remember, p. 5. 10. Ibid. p. 7. 11. Paul Auster, “Introduction,” in Brainard, Collected Writings, p. xxiii. 12. Ibid. pp. xix–xxiii.

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13. Brainard, I Remember, p. 107. 14. Ibid. p. 44. 15. Donald Campbell, “The Shame Shield in Sexual Abuse,” in Claire Pajaczowska and Ivan Ward (eds.), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 76. 16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Warhol’s Shyness/ Warhol’s Whiteness,” in J. Doyle, J. Flatley, and J. Munoz (eds.), Pop Out: Queer Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 141. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. p. 142. 19. Brainard, I Remember, p. 4. 20. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press, [1905] 1961), p. 151. 21. Ibid. p. 219. 22. Ibid. p. 207. 23. Ibid. p. 221. 24. Ibid. pp. 207, 197. 25. Griselda Pollock, “The Visual Poetics of Shame: A Feminist Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905),” in Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward (eds.), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 123. 26. Ibid. p. 124. 27. Brainard, I Remember, p. 45. 28. Ibid. p. 128. 29. Ibid. p. 6. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. p. 42. 32. Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard, p. 14. 33. Ibid. p. 24. 34. Brainard, I Remember, p. 9. 35. Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: The History of [female] Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), p. 15. 36. Brainard, I Remember, p. 9. 37. Padgett, Joe, p. 12. 38. Ibid. p. 10. 39. Ibid. p. 12. 40. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Social Text 29 (1991): 26. 41. Padgett, Joe, p. 12. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.

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222 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Kimberly Lamm Brainard, I Remember, p. 95. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. Ibid. p. 11. Ibid. Lauterbach, “Joe Brainard & Nancy,” p. 11. Ron Padgett, “The Origins of Joe Brainard’s Nancy,” in The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2003), p. 27. K. Thompson et al., “Introduction,” in Nancy is Happy (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2012), n.p. Lauterbach, “Joe Brainard & Nancy,” p. 20. Brainard, I Remember, p. 6. Lauterbach, “Joe Brainard & Nancy,” p. 23. Ibid. p. 13. Padgett, “Origins,” p. 30. Ibid. p. 30. Ibid.

Bibliography Auster, Paul, “Introduction,” in The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: The Library of America, 2012), pp. xvii–xxviii. Brainard, Joe, I Remember, in Ron Padgett (ed.), The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (New York: The Library of America, [1974] 2012), pp. 5–134. Campbell, Donald, “The Shame Shield in Sexual Abuse,” in Claire Pajaczowska and Ivan Ward (eds.), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 75–91. Fitch, Andy, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012). Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press [1905] 1961). Lauterbach, Ann, “Joe Brainard & Nancy,” in Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2003), pp. 7–24. Robbins, Trina, From Girls to Grrrlz: The History of [female] Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999). Padgett, Ron, “The Origins of Joe Brainard’s Nancy,” in The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2003), pp. 27–30. Padgett, Ron, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004).

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Pollock, Griselda, “The Visual Poetics of Shame: A Feminist Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905),” in Claire Pajaczowska and Ivan Ward (eds.), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Social Text 29 (1991): 18–27. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Queer Performativity: Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness,” in J. Doyle, J. Flatley, and J. Munoz (eds.), Pop Out: Queer Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 134–43. Thompson, K. et al., “Introduction,” in Nancy is Happy (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2012), n.p. Wiegman, Robyn, and Elizabeth Wilson, “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26.1 (2015): 1–25.

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Chapter 15

The Memoir of Disappearance: Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal Timothy Keane

Joe Brainard’s negative spaces The two-part frontispiece in Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal includes the author’s handwritten New York-to-San Francisco flight itinerary. The illustration contains the inscription “1-way” scrawled above a drawing of his suitcase. The case’s dimensions are itemized above a handwritten self-reminder to “Travel Light.” On the facing page, a cut-and-pasted newspaper photograph shows fastidiously arranged personal belongings which include sandals, eyeglasses, a small cast iron pot, a rice bowl. The newspaper clipping’s caption soberly indicates these items were, “Gandhi’s worldly possessions at the time of his death,” evoking a paradoxical human absence and human presence. Below the photo of Gandhi’s austere belongings, Brainard has inscribed another handwritten note-to-self, “Packing Inspiration (And Living Inspiration).” The Gandhi collage is notable for its ominous references to disappearance and to death, and challenges critical assumptions about the overall affirmative tenor of Brainard’s art and writing. Such a prefiguration of self-erasure is, in fact, no anomaly. Even within the ebullient and incantatory poetics of I Remember, Brainard explores how identity and selfhood find expression in decentered literary self-portraiture predicated on dispersal, dislocation, and fragmentation, conditions that, as I will show, predominate in Bolinas Journal. Brainard’s concern for the social and cultural obstacles to selfknowledge, self-portraiture, and memoir are central to his visual and textual poetics. Originating in memories about suburban life in the 1950s and building on the rebellious spirit of the mid-to-late

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Figure 15.1 Joe Brainard, Packing Inspiration (and Living Inspiration).

1960s, I Remember exploited and violated unofficial cultural norms regarding secrecy and disclosure. Itemizing deeply personal revelations that lacking redemptive intention, I Remember situates individuality, in the form of the recurring subjective first-person “I,” in contention with the consumerist plethora and social barrages of postwar America, elements outside “I” that are the predicates in that memoir’s serialized declarative sentences. Dispensing with the cohering principles behind linear historicism, I Remember accentuates the chaos of memory and destabilizing existential interactions with what William Carlos Williams calls “the pure products of America gone crazy”—Sloppy Joes, Nehru jackets, Tupperware, Creamsicles,

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hickies, Buicks. I Remember also depicts this autobiographical “I” contending with politically charged institutions such as the heteronormative patriarchal family, various oppressive educational systems and cliquish subcultures that aim to reshape individuality to serve their own reductive ends. If, America, as John Updike ideologically proposes, “is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” then Brainard’s I Remember reclaims that pleasure-granting authority from American institutions, manufacturers, and advertisers, and delivers it back to the individualizing first-person subject. The narrator of I Remember subverts the various commodities and prepackaged lifestyles; the autobiographical voice “talks back to” the normalizing establishment, as the memoir randomly curates and reframes those shiny objects and daily rituals proffered by American Happiness Incorporated. Building on the oppositional relation between “I” and “other” established in I Remember, Brainard takes this pressurizing and fracturing of identity into much darker terrain in the enclosed, recessive, uncertain and clipped prose and miscellaneous graphics of Bolinas Journal, a work which, as critic Andy Fitch has noted, develops through “nihilistic creative-destruction” and a “dialectical tension between kindness and honesty” which upends the commonly held critical notions of Brainard as an embodiment of benign “niceness” and as a perennially “static” poet of “beneficent calm.”1 In upending presumptions about his autobiographical transparency and benign personality, Bolinas Journal records and invokes hollowness, collapse, erasure, and disappearance. Brainard’s edgy negativism sets him apart from the second-generation New York School poets who were friends and collaborators and with whom he is often compared by critics. Frequently, Brainard’s attenuated and stripped-down autobiographical methods implicitly question the humanistic ideal about a viably expressive self, an ideal that still underwrites many autobiographical productions. In subtly undermining his own autobiographical aims, Brainard deploys aesthetic strategies ushered in by two slightly older generation New York-based artists and writers—Robert Rauschenberg and Ray Johnson—figures far better known than many of the poets and artists in Brainard’s inner circle. Reaching their creative peaks and critical notoriety around the time Brainard settled in downtown Manhattan in the early-to-mid 1960s, Rauschenberg and Johnson had both rebelled against their Bauhaus-oriented teacher Josef Albers while also rejecting the egocentric “allover” canvases of postwar Abstract Expressionism still

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in vogue in downtown New York when Brainard arrived there. In rejecting these inherited expansive forms of Modernism, Rauschenberg and Johnson paved the way for many other young artists like Brainard. Rauschenberg and Johnson spent their eclectic careers inventing idiosyncratic collagist methods that balanced gnomic abstraction, subdued lyricism and obscure self-portraiture. To do so, both figures appropriated elements from popular culture and combined these with objects and detritus from their respective daily lives in New York City. They then integrated those materials into markedly personal creations, often using a stark presentation and a small scale, within which self-portraiture occurs through allusion, indirection, and chance. Rauschenberg’s widely exhibited collagist paintings and inharmonious combines were initially shocking to New York gallery visitors who found their “incoherence” and “lack of inevitability” left them so “dissociated” as to feel “marooned” from meaning.2 Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning Drawing” (1953) famously removed the content within a drawing by a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism, an emblematic stripping of personality from an artwork. The gesture also conveyed a biting critique of the commoditized artist-self. In his self-portraits, Rauschenberg was equally driven by subversive techniques of erasure, opaque self-representation, and virtualized absence. His collage Untitled [self-portrait for Dwan poster] (1965) features layered blurred photographs of the artist’s face overlain with semi-translucent tape and juxtaposed with drawings of assorted everyday objects concomitant with artistic labor: a pencil, a scissor, and a drinking glass. Working on a much smaller scale than Rauschenberg and employing copious written texts alongside visual art, the collagist Ray Johnson advanced a similarly enigmatic self-fashioning as did his contemporary Rauschenberg, using pop, visual, and textual combinations that, ironically, trafficked in opacity. Johnson’s mail art circulated widely among New York artists and writers for decades, with at least one such missive reaching Brainard, who, per its directives, added art and text to it and mailed it back to Johnson.3 These mail art letters produced a form of communal self-identification through collage, cryptographs, puns, and gossip. Johnson created collages on corporate and civic letterhead, or used silhouetted cutouts of his own head filled in with abstract designs, advertisement and newspaper clippings and original drawings, typewritten verse, to-do lists, and abrupt confessions mailed out to New York addressees. Through this mutable “Correspondance Art,” Johnson slyly positioned his social milieu and his peers as at

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once integral to his individualizing labors and as a superfluous distraction from that self-productivity, a pattern of cooperation and resistance to social life that maintains throughout Brainard’s work, too. The inimitable individuality of Johnson’s mail art, letters, and collages derives from how it concretely traces the eclipses, fissures, and hollowness caused by words, names, places, addresses, and myriad other purported forms of social anchorage and personal identification. In his most radical attempt to show a disappeared self within a socially determined context, Johnson retooled Allen Kaprow’s theatrical “happenings” and partly renamed them “nothings.” In one such event, Johnson’s eager invitees showed up at the prescribed venue to find that the host was absent, that no staged production was ever going to commence, and that the collective befuddlement and unexpected camaraderie among the gatherers constituted a sort of socialized content which Johnson termed a “not nothing.” Years later, Johnson’s untimely death following a wintertime leap off a Long Island bridge came to be interpreted by some as a work of performance art unto itself, a formalized swan song coded into various images, texts, dates, and numbers which Johnson left behind. Though the extent to which Brainard was influenced by Rauschenberg and Johnson remains an open question, his Bolinas Journal shares many crucial attributes with their vanguard projects. Firstly, Bolinas Journal contains a sustained, if implied, critique of artists’ sociability and personal transparency. Following Rauschenberg and Johnson, Bolinas Journal levels distinctions between highbrow and pop materials while demonstrating a virtuosic reintegration of the everyday-banal, the mass-produced, and the lyrical and idiosyncratic gesture. And most significantly, Bolinas Journal demonstrates Brainard’s temperamental aversion to producing a transparent self or to creating a stable and assertive literary self-portrait, opting instead, like Rauschenberg and Johnson, for a private and hermetic mode that works indirectly toward autobiographical withdrawal, erasure, and disappearance. In addition to having come of age in the era of outliers like Rauschenberg and Johnson, Brainard, in writing Bolinas Journal, confronts a form of American postwar autobiographies by writers, a model that his unclassifiable hybrid work implicitly rejects. The spare, self-reflective private discourse of Bolinas Journal situates the graphic memoir in direct opposition to the self-dramatizing travelogues and writer autobiographies famous in that era, like James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1956), and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). In sharp contrast, Joe Brainard’s stripped down, self-contained Bolinas

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Journal shows the solitary writer and introspective artist engaging with emptiness, dislocation, and even desolation through the prism of humdrum days and nights during an uneventful month-long sojourn in Bolinas. Shadowed by purposelessness and fragmentary relationships, the narrator and portraitist in Bolinas Journal dissipates and disappears within his own texts and images, consumed by a claustrophobic and incestuous coterie of fellow poets and artists and adrift in a semirural landscape inhospitable to Brainard’s urbanized sensibility.

Bolinas Journal as anti-memoir Brainard’s original intentions for retreating to California in the spring of 1971 remain murky. The near-breakdowns and self-abnegations in Bolinas Journal conflict with the apparently positive circumstances of his life. For eight years he had been in a romantic partnership and open relationship with poet and librettist Kenward Elsmlie. In 1970, the first volume of I Remember, which had circulated in manuscript and mimeographed formats, had finally been published as a book by Angel Hair Press, and its free-wheeling poetics were galvanizing readers beyond New York circles. On the eve of his departure for California, he enjoyed his first solo exhibition of cutouts at the prestigious Fischbach Gallery in midtown Manhattan. That show won widespread critical acclaim and an unprecedented visibility in a competitive and rapidly changing New York art market. Writing in New York magazine, critic John Gruen called Brainard’s artwork “exquisite Mozartian” and poet-friends back in New York mailed to California their personalized accolades after visiting the exhibition.4 In 1971, Brainard, who had relocated to the East Coast from Tulsa, Oklahoma ten years earlier, had finally arrived, living as an openly gay artist and writer facing a promising career in the epicenter of the Lower East Side’s collaborative community, where he generously lent his talents to making handbills, posters, and book jackets for his wide circle of friends. At the time Brainard decided to head to California, his lover Kenward Elmslie was in Brazil seeking to generate backing for his most recent play The Grass Harp. Having impulsively spent a recent windfall on “an ancient Roman ring and a Chinese bracelet,” Brainard sold part of his book collection and bought himself a oneway ticket to San Francisco.5 As memorialized in Bolinas Journal, Brainard is ensconced for about five weeks in Bolinas, renting a house which he has to himself

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while schmoozing with fellow-poets, including his close friend Bill Berkson, as well as Robert and Bobbie Creeley, Joanne Kyger, and Philip Whalen, along with visits from poet friends like Diane di Prima, Lewis MacAdams, Philip Whalen, and Ted Berrigan, and day trips to drop in on others, including Robert Duncan and his partner, the collagist Jess in San Francisco. Brainard’s chief host and most trusted interlocutor on the West Coast is Bill Berkson. Like many artists, writers, and freethinkers coming to grips with the end of the tumultuous 1960s, Berkson had left the East Coast and relocated to the sleepy, coastal town of Bolinas located in Mill Valley north of San Francisco. Berkson’s starring role in the Bolinas Journal has its real-life corollary in the dissemination and preservation of Brainard’s memoir. In late 1971, Berkson published it as the inaugural title in his fledging publishing venture, Big Sky Books. In formal terms, the memoir seems ill-suited to publication. Unlike the entirely literary openness of I Remember, Bolinas Journal is a private notebook interwoven with random drawings, comics, portraits, handwritten notes and poems, diagrams, maps, and illustrations, providing no direct link about the connection between the graphics and the prose entries. As a text meant to be read and viewed, Bolinas Journal hovers between private diary and public object. Equally problematic, the autobiography produces an image of a “Joe Brainard” who is disquieted and withdrawn rather than consistent and assertive. To borrow the taxonomy of André Malraux, Bolinas Journal can best be approached as an anti-memoir. In anti-memoir, humanistic constructs such as selfhood and subjectivity are questioned rather than affirmed. In this vein Bolinas Journal focuses on disconnected episodes of cognitive dissonance, diminished self-control, and the prodigious sway of eroticism, longing, and regret. In response to such crises and absences, the prose records wish-fulfillment fantasies, psychological projections on to other people, frequent unspoken asides and non-sequiturs and accounts of how the passage of time and the willful ego are suspended during art-making. The memoir explores arts of subtraction for their formal and ethical potentials. “About drawing people,” Brainard writes, “A lot has to be put in before it can be taken out. (Just occurred to me how maybe true that is of life too)”6—a remark that mirrors Rauschenberg’s accounts of his “Erased De Kooning Drawing.” Bolinas Journal follows this paradoxical formula of addition as subtraction. As Brainard makes claims and then retracts them, judges and doubts, asserts and then questions, the prose enacts what Paul De Man calls the “de-facement” of the subject in autobiography, producing

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a memoir that “demonstrates . . . the impossibility of closure and totalization.” 7 The Journal attends only to the fragmentary, the incomplete, and the uncertain qualities in his Bolinas retreat. Built on such fragments and on indeterminate events that fail to develop into even partial stories, his anti-memoir circumvents the holistic imperative. Unlike humanism . . . it [twentieth century anti-memoir] is no longer a question of standardizing the individual’s memory to fit a cultural model but, on the contrary, of working with fragments that do not conform to the stereotype out of which the subject can fashion an idiosyncratic ensemble of metaphors where he will find himself (again) or get lost. 8 [italics mine]

Strange juxtapositions, emotional swerves, and paradoxical statements form the “ensemble of metaphors” in which Brainard “gets lost.” An account about a work in progress in Bolinas reveals how the working ideal around an “idiosyncratic ensemble of metaphors” applies to the aesthetic of the overall text: I’ve been working on a series of small collages with stuff from the beach. Set into little wooden boxes you get in Chinatown. Fortune cookie boxes. (Each toothpick has a dumb fortune wrapped around it.) It’s fun. And relaxing. As the materials used dominate the work. (The results.) 9

The emphasis falls on the miniature raw materials that form a selfportrait by proxy. Refusing the restorative ends of conventional memoir, Bolinas Journal, like Brainard’s aforementioned collages, finds selfhood in such ephemeral, discarded, and diminutive objects. “I’ve been building little houses in my head,” Brainard writes, “Simple houses that even I could build.”10 These small-scale and idiomatic materials allow him to “not always know exactly what you are doing.”11 Of course, Brainard knew quite well what he was doing. In a revealing interview he explains that he began writing such autobiography as an extension of studio practices akin to breaks in childhood play. In describing that genesis, he emphasizes the conjectural and speculative biases in his writing: A lot of times when I’m not painting—or even I’m painting—I set up something for me to do. Like I’ll say, “I’m going to paint a peach” or “I’ll write very short stories” . . . or some kind of project. And that

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was the project. I decided one day that I would lay out in the sun and close my eyes and try to remember and just write down whatever I remembered, free-floating.12

These remarks link autobiographical writing with daydreaming and free association (“eyes closed,” “free floating”), truant behaviors that take precedence over the fact-finding and historicizing responsibilities of traditional autobiography. These observations on experimental autobiography privilege the subconscious (“free floating”) and play (“just write down whatever”). The anti-memoirs recapture, within a mature autobiography, these nonlinear, open-ended playtimes normally restricted to childhood. Such pre-rational and provisional states of consciousness are privileged by artists and writers such as Brainard and have their parallels in other experimental autobiographical projects. For instance, in Manhood, the French writer Michel Leiris aims to reintroduce “the miraculous chaos of childhood” into adulthood. Leiris dispenses with chronology in order to track ex-temporal experiences. To do so he focuses on fetish objects, including words and language itself, reshaping the experienced past so that it serves a libidinously charged present moment of composition rather than producing a coherent history. In addition to being associated with his childhood, Leiris explores how memoir revives and cultivates the erotic charges of the lived past through its language-based selection of objects and spaces. Memoir occurs “between those two poles of my concern [which] were, on the one hand, my ‘moon’ (as I had been taught to call my posterior in baby talk) and on the other my ‘little machine’ (the name my mother gave to my genitals).”13 In an analogous anti-memoir, Roland Barthes studies photographs of himself in provisional poses as he works in his office and studio, writing, doodling, and shuffling papers. Reflecting on the three photos, Barthes notes that the physical situations summon egoless states akin to childhood play. Barthes explains how these in-between moments dispel the anxious, specular illusion about himself as a unified, definitive whole. “My body is free of its image-repertoire,” writes Barthes about the photographs, “only when it establishes its work space. This space is the same everywhere, patiently adapted to the pleasure of painting, writing, sorting.”14 Barthes implies that only in creative gestures can individual consciousness escape the preprogrammed “image repertoire,” imposed by language and culture. Though using a quasi-adolescent diction and a plain-speaking vernacular, Bolinas Journal shares the same investment in fetish objects and the suspension of will as French stylists like Leiris and Barthes.

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In Journals (1973) Brainard, expressing a Barthes-like discontent with the “image-repertoire” of autobiography, writes about the narrowness of the adult first-person voice. “I (God am I tired of ‘I’)” he writes, while adding, “I am thinking about the difference—the possibility of the difference—of writing about yourself as ‘me’ as opposed to ‘a human being.’”15 In order to break through this stalemate over the ossified first-person construct, Brainard, like Leiris and Barthes, resorts to self-embarrassment through a discourse around spontaneity and impulsiveness. Spurning empiricism, Bolinas Journal valorizes childlike modes of consciousness such as dreaming, wishing, fantasizing, creating, worrying, group play—epistemological avenues traditionally closed off by autobiographical discourse. These premises yield formal choices that shape the dreamlike text. One such ubiquitous technique is juxtaposition. Brainard, as virtuoso collagist, had cultivated juxtaposition as a dissociative strategy prior to writing Bolinas Journal. Textual and visual contrasts serve what Andy Fitch calls Brainard’s construction of an “idiosyncratic homemade subjectivity.” 16 In this respect, the two-part frontispiece featuring the photo of Gandhi’s belongings once again proves clarifying (Figure 15.1). The decentering that occurs through the competing or clashing images situates meaning in neither the drawing of Brainard’s suitcase and buoyant handwritten itinerary nor in the death-haunted photo of Gandhi’s belongings with its somber newsprint. That incongruity becomes an elision—a void or an absence—an unsettling note on which to begin a travel diary. Meaning, if it exists at all, resides in the tension between the competing frontispiece images. The preairport diary notation and graph-like personal inventory alongside the drawing-and-newspaper photo about Gandhi focuses attention on the assembled and improvised nature of the memoir. The work begins in a gestural idiom rather than a representational one. The memoir declares itself an associative and metaphoric game rather than a realist document. And implied questions abound. Has Brainard already departed for Bolinas? Why the “1-way” ticket? Is he abandoning a desultory past and present in New York for another, equally indeterminate future in California? Are the itemized one-way ticket and the incongruous cut-out about an assassinated leader hinting at a kind of self-erasure or suicide? These uncertainties generated by juxtaposition allow the memoir to reflexively build itself by manipulating composite materials and through formal gamesmanship. Brainard’s fictive memoir focuses on its own unfolding, a practice that dates back to Marcel Proust’s narrating-reader-turned-writer in Remembrance of Things Past. Closer

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to Brainard’s era, William Burroughs’ auto-generative memoir My Education: A Book of Dreams demonstrates how uninterrupted, compulsive dream interpretation replaces narrating a coherent “real” or “waking” life. Thus Brainard’s autobiographical texts resemble interior monologues opening in medias res, ushering the reader into their random references and associations while the narrating firstperson voice casually remarks on disappointments and excitements. At every juncture, the juxtapositions and equivocations leave meaning and truth unresolved. “If it’s possible to feel good and bad at the same time that’s how I feel today,” Brainard writes at one characteristically baffling point, “And I do. So I guess it is.”17 A recognizable autobiographic “self” dissolves in rhetorical impetuosity. Subjectivity is cut adrift in uncertainties, hesitations, and incompletions. That hermeneutical unsteadiness involves the writer and artist “playing with our sense of continuity and the vertical and horizontal lines of comic frames urge on [the] narrative which has a fragmented funhouse glee.”18. Ann Lauterbach points out that Brainard’s patchwork method and compound imagery open up “a way in which boundaries, or frames might be employed to shift habits of thinking [about selfhood].”19 In Bolinas Journal, this “shift of habit” is thematized. The trip to California is an alienating “shift” in self-perspective. “A lot of being inside your own head here [in Bolinas],” he writes, “A lot of talk about it. And a lot of talk about inside other people’s heads too.” 20 Self-analysis is vertiginous and disorienting. The boundaries between self and others collapse. Brainard struggles through an autobiographical hall of mirrors as the questing self finds inverted reflections in those around him . This lends to the diary-keeping a compensatory agenda and the curt entries tirelessly shift focus, from the first person to other individuals and back to the first person in a loop that leaves nothing resolved. The journal darts from one discrete scene and halfdescribed mood to another. Thus the journal’s restive prose relegates its narrator into psychic shadows cast on him by other personalities. One such journal entry describes a previous evening spent dropping acid, and Brainard consigns himself to a walk-on role: Bill [Berkson]. I knew Bill wanted to be having a more “heady” trip than he was having, so I was a bit anxious for him. But he was nice to be with anyway. Such thick air you glide through. Philip [Whalen], what little I was around him, was just too loud for me. (Talk.)21

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These social disjunctions contribute to the literary self-effacement. Rather than progressing as a protagonist within the diary’s narration, the purported subject circles round himself, hemmed in by conflicted and nuanced social observations so abridged that they bristle with bewilderment, as in the journal entry about acid-dropping with Berkson and Whalen. There Brainard’s attention shifts in rapid-fire succession. The scene opens with attention on Bill Berkson, in and of himself (“Bill”), then turns to that figure as if he were a character in a drama (“Bill wanted”). The insight that Berkson craves more from the drug-taking experience than it offers shifts unexpectedly to Brainard’s projective anxiety about Bill’s disappointment (“I knew Bill wanted”), ricocheting further to a childlike précis of Berkson’s affect in wake of that disappointment (“he was nice to be with anyway”), then just as quickly veering into other random observations: the simultaneously literal and figurative “thickness” of the room’s air, Philip Whalen’s peculiarly scarce presence, the snap summary of Whalen’s ostentatiousness, before terminating in a parenthetically framed gnomic utterance about writer’s block: “(Talk)(page!).” Brainard’s subjectivity percolates somewhere within such half-completed dialogues, cross-cut angles, tentative observations, sudden reversals, and philosophical aporia.

Autobiographical impasse: this “trying to be honest” writing Bolinas Journal is a record of a simmering midlife crisis disguised as an offhand diary and sketchbook. The texts-and-images seem to focus on surfaces; the prose condenses complex adult experiences and thoughts into brusque judgments and compact syntax. Despite its brevities, this compressed style produces startling insights. In one entry that critiques mythologies about romance, the childlike prose draws convoluted and philosophical conclusions. “That’s pretty corny, I know to believe that love and happiness can be ‘found.’ But I guess I do. (Especially when I don’t think about it I do.)”22 The critique demonstrates a sophisticated understanding about how conventional definitions of love as a recoverable or found object motivate behavior and thwarted expectation. The self-awareness is equally incisive. Mindful about formulaic thinking around findable love, Brainard admits that the cliché’s seductiveness wins him over, not least when the subject denies that very belief in it.

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The feigned innocence in such deceptively simple and discontinuous moments preserves the work’s most deep-seated significances. The memoir channels the child’s nonchalance, infusing an erotic and dramatic veneer into the everyday often missing from a sophisticated exposition. In the monotony of a local laundromat, Brainard gives free rein to such unrestricted candor about desire: A beautiful boy walks by with a guitar. A little girl wants a quarter. Giving her a nickel, [sic] she mumbles “motherfucker” and walks away. Another beauty is heading for the hardware store. Bolinas in the daytime can be too much too. Another one (help) enters the laundromat.23

There are no causal transitions between these changes in mood. The rudimentary sentences replicate their split-second influences on the desiring body, reenacting rather than explaining the vicissitudes of lust. Further, the scene transforms an onerous domestic task into an ex-temporal space for pleasure as the laundromat becomes a perch from which to scout out Bolinas’s prospects (the “beautiful boy”). Despite the distracting panhandler whose gender (“girl”) differentiates her from the random Bolinas “boys,” the prose pivots back to its libidinous play. The text barely registers the girl’s spitefulness. The visual plethora—“another beauty” and “another one” produces childlike gushing—“too much too.” The omission of surface description is telling. In bypassing the physical details about each of the three men, the prose communicates the indescribable whimsicality essential to desire. Instead of harnessing experiences and moments in order to dissect them through detached, abstract discussions about the past experience, Bolinas Journal serves as a neutral ground for painting such affective states, voicing free-flowing impulses and distractions as they occur in real life, as disconnected events, even if those discrete moments are unintelligible in relation to one another. The journal authenticates desire’s pre-linguistic grip on consciousness. By situating desire above reason, need over want, and wishes over intentions, the text showcases the self-subject unmoored in an unsettled sea of possibilities, potentials, and happenstances. Indeed Bolinas Journal draws on a self-absorption so all-consuming that the memoir occasionally risks signifying little outside its author’s consciousness and the various objects of a perturbed, restless desire. Writing about how such an over-determined libido threatens literary meaning, critic Leo Bersani theorizes that in certain forms

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of gay autobiographical writing, “narcissistic plenitude is incompatible with self-knowledge [because] we can know ourselves (we can know anything) only differentially. We infer who or what we are from what desire tells us we lack.” 24 In Bolinas Journal Brainard intuits this narcissistic “plenitude” and concedes that the unfolding memoir constantly doubles back on subjective frustrations and deficiencies, further proving Bersani’s thesis that “Identity is the erotic modality of a lack.” 25 In an unusually poignant episode of such privation, Brainard describes a car ride in which he feels “abstractly sad and alone.” An empathetic Bobbie Creeley, wife of Robert Creeley, seated in the front, extends her hand to Brainard for the remainder of the drive. What triggers the sense of absence goes uninvestigated. Though consoled, Brainard confesses feeling exposed by the empathy, commenting, “Nice to know you can still be embarrassed.”26 The nominative evasion—switching first-person “I” to second-person “you”—shields the subject from the awkward exposure, the need to be comforted. Such scenes of need and vulnerability abound, revealing the subject to itself through panic attacks and semi-paralyses, beset by selfaccusation, darkened by perceived failures, unsure about talent and ambition, pessimistic about relationships, and socially unenthused. Interpersonal encounters are rarely unqualifiedly affirmative or fulfilling. Here and there the memoir depicts others with caustic wit. Writing on Philip Whalen’s affected mannerisms, Brainard quips, “Sweet the way Philip seems to enjoy feeling put upon.” 27 Other personalities—peers, lovers, visitors, rivals, prospects—predominate. A trip to Napa debunks the assumed value of journaling and stereotypical travelogue, as the excursion is reduced to “exhausting but fun. Well— interesting. And something more travel bookish to write about for a chance.” 28 On the one hand, Brainard is intimidated by what he sees as his own failed self-actualization, and these failings lead him to project achievement or confidence into diverse poet-acquaintances. Then that unsound presumption exacerbates an imagined ostracism. Such neurotic projections lead to snarky comments even when observing trusted friends. “Bill [Berkson]. Bill seems in great shape. Eager. What a great thing to be. Eager.”29 The inference is that Berkson’s physical and psychological fitness are personal rebukes. The rare personal encounters that enrich experience are couched in understated tones that neutralize their significance. Writing on Lewis MacAdams he observes him unattractively, “gliding through life touching things.”30 Ordinary visits from guests frequently lead to renewed self-belittlement. “Tom and Angela Clark look great,” he writes. “And Juliet. Great and healthy

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and comfortable and satisfied. As tho they don’t need anything. Or anyone . . . I don’t see how I can fit into any of this. (?).”31 The passage illustrates how misgivings disrupt writing, producing a halted or stalled self-portrait. Proximity to others sows more doubts. “A few rough moments with Bobbie,”32 he notes, leaving causes tantalizingly blank. A sexual tryst on the beach with a “boring” bisexual leads to the dismissive remark, “They [women] can have him.”33Among fellow writers, seething insecurities lead to melodramatic autobiographical eruptions. Recalling Joanne Kyger’s quip about lighting a cigarette in “Joe’s style,” the witticism strikes like a wholesale repudiation. “It’s not being put in someone’s pocket I mind so much,” he writes defensively, “It’s just that it doesn’t mean anything to hand someone a personally lit cigarette if it’s expected of you.”34 Participation and wariness go hand in hand. Though transitory and balanced by an abiding humor, these dissonances indicate Brainard’s general alienation from Bolinas. As he prepares to moderate a poetry reading, another wave of futility overcomes him, undermining simple pleasures: Cloudy day today. Surprising not depressing tho. Very pretty in fact. Must start writing introductions for Joanne and Bobbie’s reading today. Always a problem, what an introduction should “do.”35

The initial claims to happiness—“not depressing,” “pretty”—collapse as he conforms to the role of public moderator, an onerous task intensified by the conceit of the “introduction.” Surrounded by others, Brainard laments a lack of intimacy. Loneliness becomes an overbearing presence. Far away from the anomie of New York City, the same quiet desperation haunts him. “It’s the same ol’ me at night,” Brainard writes, “Lonely. Desperate. Melodramatic.” 36 Many passages record the aftermath of gatherings, underscoring the writer’s solitude and privation, as if journal writing aggravates rather than pacifies the lack. In one entry, following a group dinner, he finds himself dizzyingly alone and impulsively telephones friends, first his newfound lover, who rejects the entreaties, and then Joanne Kyger and Bill Berkson, who agree to call on him. The journal entry ends without a resolution, sustaining the autobiographical angst as the diarist histrionically notes that, “Tonight is even more of a this is it night than usual,” 37 proving critic Henry Staten’s famous insight that in certain writing, “Mourning is the horizon of all desire.”38 Brainard’s “horizon” of “mourning” triggered by unfulfilled sexual

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desire produces an autobiographical diction centering around absences, gaps, and losses. Excitements and deflations coincide. “Seems that Michael (a new love possibility in my head) is going with the Gibson House cook. Oh well.”39 Sizing up another potential lover, the writer pessimistically retreats into the platitude, “Always better to be surprised than disappointed.”40 At times, the meditations on love require him to scrutinize diction; the memoir reflects on language. In perhaps the most psychologically penetrating passage, Brainard confronts himself over whether the constant pursuit of “love” in Bolinas is “A way to avoid it,”41 noting the finality of the concept and preferring the “being ‘available’” intrinsic to the quest. Although these incompletions and vacuums cause restlessness, Brainard finds curious pleasure in writing about them. Elmslie’s perennial absence further enriches and complicates this sublimated mourning. When he receives a phone call from Elmslie, the emotional fallout gradually unravels him: “Strange telephone call . . . No not strange. Moving. Had me drunk and unhappy too. And wondering how much longer I can take it.”42 Amatory successes are tinged with defeat and the unclear antecedent for “it” only underscores the unresolvable nature of the problem. The sexual relationship with a local blond sculptor named Gordon Baldwin inspires and debases. Following a clumsy courtship and neurotic dithering, Brainard finally consummates the affair, registering rejection within its actualization: “Gordon did imply that we should get together again, but I think he was just being nice,”43 and, later, “Obviously I’m getting desperate [about Baldwin].”44 Dislocation comes to define selfhood. Contemplating settling in Bolinas, he constantly discards the notion. “It [Bolinas] makes me nervous,” he writes, “being in a place I know I’m not going to be in for long,” and he appears cornered by Bolinas, which he calls “such a basic place.”45 Having linked creative productivity with romantic fulfillment and with neither goal feasible, he decides, again, that were he to remain in Bolinas, “Everything I fear will someday catch up to me too fast here,” namely, “the ‘why’ of art” and “the ‘I give up’ of finding love and happiness.”46 These impasses lead to mounting concerns about writing’s epistemological worth. Gradually the journal entries question the work’s originating premise, questioning its implicit claims to truth, dolefully dismissing “this kind of [autobiographical] writing” and reinforcing that snap judgment by placing journal writing into scare quotes: “This ‘trying to be honest’ kind of writing.”47 Occurring within a setting that has increasingly estranged the self from itself, this

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disconnection from the authenticating potential in diarist prose writing suggests more than the usual passing qualms about whether that paradoxically private/public genre produces “honesty.” As faith in the enterprise ebbs, there are grasps at self-enlightenment, as in the lukewarm premonition that he is “getting closer and closer to a point (a place) in my head I call the truth,” but these are quickly mooted. “[N]ow I am beginning to doubt that very point (That very place).”48 The autobiographical potential dissipates. The Journal surrenders to an irrefutable sense of absence that it has desperately tried to forestall. “I mean what I’ve been working towards [in Bolinas Journal],” Brainard writes, “just isn’t there anymore. (Zap.)”49

Autobiographical disappearance: “the why of art” Few American avant-garde writers of the last century so depend on the autobiographical first-person “I” persona in life-writing as does Joe Brainard. Yet nearly all Brainard’s autobiographical writings convey alarmed recognition about the restrictions and inadequacies of the first person in capturing the complexities of a constantly shifting sense of identity. In his single-page prose essay “Autobiography,” written before his Bolinas trip, he records basic facts about himself: birth and hometown, vocations in writing and painting, gay identity. Then this disjointed “autobiography” unfolds through agitated descriptions about self-loathing and confessions that he craves romance but “needs to please people too much” and, even though he is “crazy about people,” he ultimately wants to get beyond himself. “What I want most is to open up.”50 In Bolinas Journal, this same need to “open up,” personal identity continues unabated. Yet the desire finds no relief in the prose “honesty” and its first-person voice. Such reservations boil over in Bolinas Journal. As Brainard’s prose comes up against the limits of a purely literary self-portrait, Bolinas Journal overcomes them through twenty-four hybrid-visual-texual artworks. These graphics involve miscellaneous genres—comic collaborations, portrait drawings, improvised maps, collagist found art, handbill illustrations and proofs, art and poetry by peers. They extend Brainard’s vision of autobiography as a multigenre, mixed media enterprise. The graphics reconfigure subjectivity into spatial terms. Through them selfhood is open-ended and indeterminate. In contrast to the prose discourse which frets about socialization and assimilation, the visual-textual works punctuate that overall crisis with arbitrary escapes and whimsical fantasies as alternative

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modes of being in Bolinas. These hybrids replicate the collaborative, spontaneous ethics of childhood play and contest memoir’s roots in realism, turning Bolinas Journal against the “true” or “real,” the responsibility implied in Freud’s well-known formulation that “the opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.”51 Childhood serves as an exemplary model within which the adult autobiographer reclaims fluid, nonlinear, unrestricted forms of consciousness and individuality through wishing, daydreaming, and role-playing. “A child’s play is determined by wishes,” Freud famously writes, “the wish to be big and grown up. . . . With the adult, the case is different. On the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to go on playing or phantasying any longer, but to act in the real world.”52 By contrast, the prose journals testify to the limits Brainard reaches as an actor within the “real world” of Bolinas. The stay produces anomie and dislocation, even among those who “know” him. Selfhood never coalesces into definitive singularity. Critic Geoffrey Hartman says “[traditional] literature is the elaboration of the specular name” adding that certain avant-garde writers respond to this artificial “elaboration” by resisting that elaboration. Brainard proceeds from this knowledge that any singularizing “real” “I” is, ultimately, predicated on an illusory unity and deceptive self-coherence, and the Journal ultimately rejects the “[autobiographical] quest for a specular yet totally elusive identity, for some unique reduction to one place, one time, one bed, one fixative spectral event.”53 Brainard’s autobiographical ambition to elide any single normalized identity develops from larger sociologically determined efforts about which Bolinas Journal provides important testimony. Extensive histories and biographies about postwar movements in art and poetry in the United States show that normalizing and institutionally based definitions of reality, selfhood, and adulthood were anathema to Brainard’s fellow poets and artists. An underlying ideal motivating most serious avant-garde movements in the twentieth century, including the various non-institutionalized postwar Bay Area and downtown New York coteries, was a fundamental mission to reintegrate art-making and daily life. Put another way, artistic communities such as the one that arose in Bolinas in the mid-1960s sought to unravel institutionally and economically imposed divides between art-making and how American daily life was organized and structured. Daniel Kane’s examination of this ethos in the poetry scene based on the Lower East Side elucidates motives and values at work in Brainard’s social experimentations and autobiographical poetics in Bolinas:

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Framing poetry [and art] as a communal effort parallels communitybuilding work of the 1960s and changes established notions of what constitutes authorship and literary production . . . and alternative to the more conservative and aesthetically formalist verse culture dominant in the universities and lecture halls.54

The importance placed on communal production reveals the degree to which Brainard and his peers sought to radically redefine authorship and, by extension, redefine cultural identity. Certain factions in the postwar New York avant-garde thwarted what Marxists would call the “surplus value” in art. Brainard and his cohorts affirmed the Marxian “use value” of their work, revealing how art and writing are acts of community-building in a semi-cooperative economy, as opposed to an art-making that produces objects to be fixed commodities in a marketplace serving critics, consumers and collectors. Collaborations were central to this effort, as were DIY methods for reproduction and intramural distributions of art and poetry, such as artist-run galleries and low-cost mimeograph publication. Collaborations like Bolinas Journal trouble the very concepts of an artwork’s provenance and a sole authorial claim; Brainard and his peers often dispensed with singular authorship in favor of works created through interpersonal consciousness and teamwork, resembling the transactional openness of childhood play. Within alternative artistic communities like the Lower East Side in New York City and in Bolinas, as well as countless regions in between that bicoastal axis, consciousness-expanding experiences that replicated the oceanic feelings realized within art, music, dance, and lyric poetry were pursued as daily practices. These involved dismantling restrictive hierarchies, intermingling highbrow and popular idioms, studying non-Western philosophies and religions, experimenting with sexual mores and psychoactive drugs, crossing media and genres for artistic and poetic collaborations—communal undertakings that have, in the past several decades, been derisively caricatured in books, TV shows, and films by a reactionary late capitalist U.S. political culture predicated on corporate-driven myths about unqualified individualism. Remarking on these principled aesthetic actions and redefinitions of selfhood and subjectivity through art, Bill Berkson links the postwar New York School to European Modernists like Paul Valéry, who viewed art as an engagement with an intrinsic otherness wherein the “poem is written by someone other than the poet and addressed to someone other than the reader” so that “otherness” remains as “a welcome intimation of the impersonality factor that regularly keeps . . . the

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call of letters duly scrambled.” 55 In Bolinas Journal Brainard adheres to this ethic of otherness by negotiating his oblique, coded selfportraiture through the self-fragmenting prose journal and through the collaborative graphic works that are documented, diagrammed, and illustrated inside the memoir. These works within Bolinas Journal produce the openness and availability to others Brainard repeatedly aspires to in the autobiography’s prose. They invent unique visual and textual vocabularies for inter-subjectivity in which authorship and selfhood extends beyond the singular. Brainard designates a bawdy adaptation of Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” comics within Bolinas Journal “a page from that cartoon Bill and I did.” 56 The three-paneled comic episode deploys role-play and fantasy while slyly suggesting the libidinous freedoms within their Bolinas circle. The topmost panel features a seated Nancy facing her upright boy friend “Sluggo Smith,” ogling one another from a short distance. The pairing could be surrogates for either Brainard and Berkson, or for any other complementary friends or lovers named in Bolinas Journal. The characters’ visual trajectories are designated by crisscrossing dotted lines, noting Nancy’s eyes trained on Sluggo’s kneecap while her opposite number fixes his gaze downward between Nancy’s legs. Complicating the comic’s intrinsic confusions about identity, the names of four Bolinas friends are written on the lines of each visual trajectory—“Bobbie” [Creeley] and “Gordon” [Baldwin] corresponding to Nancy’s gaze and “Tom” [Clark] and “Joanne” [Kyger] corresponding to Sluggo’s. The middle panel contains a female victim’s courtroom testimony, in the idiom of pulp fiction, about her kidnapping and the bottom panel depicts Nancy and Sluggo’s genitals in corresponding stages of arousal. The comic’s insider jokes and gamesmanship, its juxtaposition of personal names and narrative genres, its role-play and sexual innuendos, all happen beyond interpretation. In co-opting the seemingly “innocent” version of America represented by Bushmiller’s popular suburban ingénue, Nancy, and infusing it with popular fictional and pornographic pastiches, the Bolinas collaboration redefines art, literature, and personality in inter-subjective terms. Brainard and Berkson, presented as distinct entities in the prose journals, figuratively merge within the collaborative freeform comic strip. Imaginary portraits of Brainard by others parallel the intermittent prose self-portraiture in the journals. These conscript others into co-creating the memoir, further undermining the construct of the single author. Poet Philip Whalen’s angular, tapered drawing of Brainard’s head depicts him in intense concentration. Whalen’s

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calligraphic iterations of the word “Dog” and a gracefully penned imagistic poem balance the totemic severity in his drawing of Brainard.57 The portrait itself has a doubling quality. Its intermingling of language and figuration distinguishes Brainard as a writer who paints and a painter who writes. The memoirist-as-artist appears in habeas corpus, in the body of works illustrated or reproduced within Bolinas Journal. Brainard describes work on three-dimensional collages and one illustrative insert contains a mockup of these “beach boxes” made of wood, feather, plastic, and tar.58 Their evocative, abstractly drawn collage boxes link the topography of Bolinas with Brainard’s aesthetic productivity during his residency there. His portrait of a bearded, longhaired, messianic-looking Berkson faces a facsimile reproduction of an Anne Waldman poem, “On Seeing Joe’s Show,” a portrait-in-verse and homage to Brainard’s New York exhibition of cutouts based on flowers.59 These works transform the absent figure of Brainard into an aesthetic actor. He is paradoxically visible within the disappearing act of creation exemplified by Brainard’s portrait of Berkson and Waldman’s poem about Brainard’s floral cutouts. Likewise, Brainard vanishes into his full-page handwritten notes about his work on portraits of Joanne Kyger and Bobbie Creeley. These notes describe the women’s idiosyncratic traits culled from when Brainard worked on their portraits.60 They conjure up lost moments in which the consciousness and attention of the artist and his models intersect. In another significant example of inter-subjective portraiture, the memoir reproduces three versions of illustrated flyers Brainard created while in Bolinas to publicize a double-billed Ted Berrigan-Robert Creeley reading at the venue “Intersection” in San Francisco.61 The reading, scheduled for July 20, happens after Brainard’s July 6 departure, so these graphics stand as souvenirs of presence—Brainard’s creation of them in Bolinas—and as testimonies to him in absentia. The visual-textual hybrid art drawing around the brief and intense sexual relationship with Gordon Baldwin bring these hybrid self-portraitures to a striking culmination. In a still-life contour drawing of Baldwin’s bouquet of nasturtiums, Brainard translates the vicissitudes of their romantic entanglement, charted throughout the prose journals, into visual corollaries, as the floral stalks, suggestive of phalli, rise, droop, bend, and blossom within the vase.62 Similarly, his still life drawing of his lover’s Bolinas kitchen conflates domesticity and eroticism, closeness and distance. Long-handled cooking implements with protruding bases dangle from a wall above a cabinet lined with longnecked bottles.63 In restaging the relationship to Baldwin textually and

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visually the memoir disseminates Brainard’s identity into Baldwin’s unpeopled living space, summoning presence through evocations of absence. In one of the final prose entries, he recalls a rock-climbing mishap at the Bolinas shore in which his “baroque pearl and emerald pendant from the Italian renaissance” fell from the necklace, was crushed against rock and lost in the water.64 The accident leaves his chest visibly wounded; in response, Baldwin gifts Brainard a lapis pin. The lost pendant and lapis pin are illustrated within a drawing of found objects.65 In both the prose and the visual art these objects stand in for Brainard. They function as symbols of possession and dispossession, much like the suitcase and Gandhi belongings within the journal’s frontispiece. In the concluding sentence of Bolinas Journal, Brainard reflects one final time on autobiographical language around vanishing, and then enacts that condition as a mode of presence, noting, “My idea of how to leave a place gracefully is to ‘disappear.’”66

Notes 1. Andy Fitch, Pop Poetics: Reframing Joe Brainard (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), pp. 9–12. 2. Jed Perl, New Art City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 358. 3. Richard Feigen Gallery, Please Return To. Mail Art from the Ray Johnson Archive, May 14–October 2, 2015. 4. Rod Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), p. 173. 5. Ibid. p. 178. 6. Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, ed. Ron Padgett (New York: Library of America, [1974] 2012), p. 209. 7. Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 71. 8. Michel Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait (New York: New York University Press, 1991), p. 197. 9. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 314. 10. Ibid. p. 319. 11. Ibid. p. 328. 12. Ibid. p. 499. 13. Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 12–13. 14. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 38–9. 15. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 439. 16. Fitch, Pop Poetics, p. 18.

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17. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 295. 18. Jenni Quilter, “The Love of Looking: Collaborations Between Artists and Writers,” in Painters & Poets (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 2012), p. 78. 19. Ann Lauterbach, “Joe Brainard and Nancy,” in The Nancy Book (Los Angeles: Siglio Books, 200), p. 11. 20. Brainard. Collected Writings, p. 291. 21. Ibid. p. 321. 22. Ibid. p. 306. 23. Ibid. p. 309. 24. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 141. 25. Ibid. p. 141. 26. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 306. 27. Ibid. p. 310. 28. Ibid. p. 313. 29. Ibid. p. 289. 30. Ibid. p. 319. 31. Ibid. p. 291. 32. Ibid. p. 319. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. p. 303. 35. Ibid. p. 314. 36. Ibid. p. 297. 37. Ibid. p. 298. 38. Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: From Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001), p. xi. 39. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 302. 40. Ibid. p. 291. 41. Ibid. p. 312. 42. Ibid. p. 318. 43. Ibid. p. 295. 44. Ibid. p. 297. 45. Ibid. pp. 306, 325. 46. Ibid. p. 303. 47. Ibid. p. 313. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. p. 265. 51. Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”, in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 437. 52. Ibid. p. 438. 53. Geoffrey H. Hartmann, Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Phhilosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 100. 54. Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. xiv.

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55. Bill Berkson, “Foreword,” in Jenni Quilter (ed.), New York School Painters and Poets (New York: Rizzoli, 2014), pp. 8–9. 56. Brainard, Collected Writings, p. 307. 57. Ibid. p. 322. 58. Ibid. p. 320. 59. Ibid. pp. 300–1. 60. Ibid. pp. 316–17. 61. Ibid. pp. 330–1. 62. Ibid. p. 294. 63. Ibid. p. 326. 64. Ibid. p. 328. 65. Ibid. p. 327. 66. Ibid. p. 333.

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Afterword: Joe Brainard’s Art Marjorie Perloff

Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist. This could be a problem. Think of all the artists, especially those whose work you admire, who weren’t all that nice. Caravaggio, Degas, Gauguin, De Chirico, Picasso, Pollock . . . In his art, “there is confrontation without provocation . . . With Joe, our relief and gratitude mingle in the pleasure he offers us.” John Ashbery (1997)1

The Library of America’s 2012 publication of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard has happily ushered in a new phase of Brainard studies. Thanks to Ron Padgett, the collection’s editor and a close friend, Brainard—once regarded primarily as a brilliant and witty cartoonist, collagist, collaborator (with Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara and other New York School poets) and author of the unique “memoir” I Remember—emerges as a complex and subtle artist, whose seeming “lightness of being” masks tensions only now beginning to be explored. The essays in this collection testify to this “new” Joe Brainard. As Brian Glavey puts it in The Friendly Way, Brainard’s “exquisite goodness,” the near-saintliness so often remarked upon, is “not straightforward at all. It is on the contrary something that needs to be deciphered, that is difficult to put into words . . . a distinctly hermeneutic and even literary problem.” Brainard’s fabled “friendliness,” Glavey argues, comparing Brainard to his fellow queer poet Frank Bidart, “takes on a vital importance as a form of resistance, a means of creating a sort of queerly utopian community in the midst of a culture that often viewed its participants with animosity.” Anna Smaill similarly studies the curious tension, in Brainard’s journals and notebooks, between “the impulse to ‘open up’ and to undo ego” versus

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“a stronger, and perhaps primary, impulse—the deep and seemingly ineradicable drive to be liked.” The revelation of private details about a friend might be appealing to others, but telling the truth about one’s own life is potentially more dangerous. “For all their stated ambition of complete honesty, the journals often perform a back and forth movement of concealment and exposure.” I think Smaill’s is a very fruitful lead, one that is underscored by the pressing questions raised in Andrew Epstein and Andy Fitch’s poetically conceived dialogue “I wonder.” Is Brainard’s fabled “niceness” a “genuine” character trait or “a calculated effect, a move in a (deadly serious) game”? “I wonder,” write Epstein and Fitch, “if we have adequately defined faux-naïveté as an aesthetic position or stylistic choice.” And they go on to show that “for all his sunniness and good cheer, Brainard knows exactly how dark things really are.” All the essays gathered here make this point in one way or another. Ron Padgett’s biographical essay about the two difficult years 1961–3—the years between Brainard’s arrival in New York at age eighteen and his move to Boston in 1963—as gleaned from the hitherto unknown correspondence with Sue Schempf, a Tulsa friend and sometime patron, who owned a frame shop/gallery and sent young Joe money in exchange for prospective paintings and collages, is revealing. In these years, Brainard, still closeted, had not yet found his métier. He lived in extreme poverty and frequent hopelessness—a mood that gave way to renewed energy and optimism when, having returned to New York, he had his first solo exhibition at the Alan Gallery in 1965. From then on, as Kimberly Lamm shows us in “A Queer Poetics,” Brainard’s cartoons, paintings, collages, and writings are populated by images of “girlish femininity”—a femininity “wielded to police the sexual desires and practices of queer men,” but in turn crucial in “creating a queer poetics of the normal.” That poetics, Lamm argues, is studiedly oblique. Bolinas Journal, for example, is, in Tim Keane’s words, “a record of a simmering midlife crisis disguised as an offhand diary and sketchbook.” The focus on surfaces, the refusal to “analyze or theorize about causes,” is a way of avoiding the expression of conflicted feelings about one’s relationships with others. In his introduction to the Collected Writings, Paul Auster talks of “the author’s courage in revealing things about himself (often sexual) that most of us would be too embarrassed to include” (xix) and observes that Brainard “seduces us with his gentleness, his lack of pomposity, his imperturbable interest in everything the world offers up to him” (xxiv). But to reread I Remember vis-à-vis the essays in this book is to

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notice that the poet’s seeming gentleness also has a hard edge—specifically when it comes to Joe’s negative feelings about his parents. Indeed, Auster’s thematic categories—family, food, clothes, movies, school and church, holidays, sex, jokes, and so on—don’t quite get at the memoir’s tension between the bemused acceptance of everyday objects and activities, however banal and kitschy, and the aloofness, indeed coldness, the narrator displays toward his parents and other relatives. It is not just a matter of sexual difference: think of Proust’s Marcel and his adoration of Maman, think of Hart Crane’s Grace and Allen Ginsberg’s Naomi in “Kaddish.” The relationship of gay men to their mothers is often very close and loving. But not in I Remember. The technique of I Remember is, of course, to use repetition—the anaphoric opening of each strophe, the repetitive syntax and rhythm, the generally flat tone—to equalize highly unlike items: the metonymic or collage principle. But when we reconsider the individual entries, we notice striking differences. Consider, to begin with, the items that lovingly characterize the world of children and teenagers in midcentury America—items by no means related only to middleclass Tulsa, Oklahoma, but designed to define a particular moment in the America of the postwar. As a New Yorker, born ten years before Brainard, I myself experience a shock of recognition when I confront sentences like the following (taken out of order): I remember when girls wore cardigan sweaters backwards. I remember thin gold chains with one little pearl hanging from them. I remember loafers with pennies in them. I remember very long gloves. I remember peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I remember jeweled sweaters with fur collars open to the waist. I remember bright orange canned peaches. I remember pedal pushers. I remember when pink grapefruit was a big treat. I remember roller skate keys.

Until I read that last sentence, I had completely forgotten that there was such a thing as a roller-skate key, but as soon as the item was named it brought back graphic memories of skating on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale, New York, and looking for that dirty oily key to tighten the wheels and adjust the mechanism of my skates. Again, I had completely forgotten the fashion of wearing cardigan sweaters backwards—a fashion that was de rigueur in my teen

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years, as were those loafers with pennies in them, pedal pushers, with their peculiar length a few inches below the knee, and the extra long white rayon gloves (to the elbow) worn at dances. And yes, canned peaches were indeed bright orange, pink grapefruit was a special treat, and the more affluent high school girls had those rather lumpy looking jeweled sweaters. You couldn’t, moreover, wear just any jewelry: the fashion was “thin gold chains with one little pearl hanging from them.” No novel or film of the period—and it was a distinct period, all over by the mid-sixties—captures more accurately the adolescent desire, in the conformist early Cold War years, to be different— which meant, of course, to be like everyone else. Films about the fifties invariably focus on girls in very high heels, sporting lots of red lipstick, endlessly smoking long cigarettes. But these generalized cliché images of “the fifties” pale besides Brainard’s precise details. The examples multiply—“I remember green grass knee stains” and “I remember Dole pineapple rings on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top and sometimes a cherry on top of that.” That is exactly what those appetizers looked like! The memories of food, clothing, and décor are complemented by memories of the lingo and phraseology of the period—again, by no means peculiar to Tulsa or the Midwest but wholly 1950s: I remember “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” I remember when I was very young saying “hubba-hubba” whenever I saw a red-headed lady because my father liked red-heads and it was always good for a laugh. I remember “Mommy, Mommy, I don’t like my little brother.” “Shut up, Mary Anne, and eat what I tell you to!” (That’s a Mary Anne joke). I remember a plate that hung on the wall above the T.V. set that said “God Bless our Mortgaged Home.” I remember “onesies” and “twosies” and “threesies” and “baskets” and “pig pens” and “Over the fences” and “around the worlds” and “pats” and “double pats.” I remember “number one” and “number two.” I remember “Snap, crackle, and pop.” I remember “See you later alligator!” I remember, when someone says something that rhymes, “You’re a poet, and didn’t even know it, but your feet show it. They’re Longfellows!” I remember “does she or doesn’t she?”

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“How much is that doggie in the window?/The one with the waggly tail?” I myself remember vividly the little girl next door named Janey being shown off by her parents as a musical prodigy for being able to remember the lyrics of that absurd popular song. Brainard’s ear for proverbial sayings, jump-rope rhymes, adspeak, yearbook jingles, and coy bathroom references to “Number one. Number two,” is as keen as his eye. The valence of these remembered phrases, interestingly enough, is ambiguous. Are they associated with happiness or pain? The joy of such vivid remembering, bringing as it does the present into the past, is much stronger than the things themselves, which are usually no more pleasant than unpleasant. “I remember white buck shoes with thick pink rubber soles”: such memories merely are and we can appropriate them as we like. But then there is that other remembered set of experiences, by no means everyday but related to sexuality and ranging from the trivia of “I remember how little your dick is, getting out of a wet bathing suit” to the many images of actual or imaginary sexual encounters like “I remember sexual fantasies in white tile shower rooms. Hard and slippery. Abstract and steamy. Wet body to wet body. Slippery, fast, and squeaky.” In the course of I Remember Brainard pulls no punches in calling up the most comic as well as painful memories of sexual play, masturbation, fantasy, and frustration, as in: I remember when everything is going along just swell (“pant-pant”) and then all of a sudden neither one of you knows for sure what to “do” next. (Mutual hesitation.) That if not acted upon quickly can be a real, pardon the pun, “downer.”

If it were just a matter of juxtaposing the description of such episodes with the everyday world of food, clothing, home décor and school rituals, we could call Brainard’s book A Portrait of the Artist as Emerging Queer. But what complicates the picture—and this has not, so far as I know, been discussed—is, given the tolerance and good humor of the poet’s object relations, how unloving the family portraits are. Indeed, what Auster rightly calls “the imperturbable interest in everything the world offers up to [Brainard]” seems to come to a full stop when Mom and Dad are concerned. Here are some successive memories of Mother: I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie. I remember trying to visualize my mother and father actually fucking.

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I remember thinking that my mother and father were ugly naked. I remember when I was very young getting what I now assume to have been an enema. I just remember having to turn over and my mother sticking this glass thing with a rubber ball on top (also pink-red) up my butt and being scared to death. I remember once my mother parading a bunch of women through the bathroom as I was taking a shit. Never have I been so embarrassed! I remember cold cream on my mother’s face. I remember my mother’s telling stories about funny things I’d do and how The stories got funnier each time they were told. I remember my mother picking up tiny specks of lint off things. I remember my mother cornering me into corners to squeeze out blackheads. (Hurt like hell.) I remember (hurt like hell) Saturday night washings of fingernails to scalp.

Nowhere here is there the slightest note of the charm, wit, or affection reserved for friends, school chums or fellow artists. For example: I remember Frank O’Hara’s walk. Light and sassy. With a slight bounce and a slight bounce and a slight twist. It was a beautiful walk. Confident. “I don’t care” and sometimes “I know you are looking.”

No specks of lint to be removed here. There is a whole series of such fond O’Hara moments, designed to make the reader smile in complicity and admiration. But when it comes to mother and father, indeed to home in general, a certain nastiness kicks in—a mean streak of which Brainard himself seems not to be wholly aware. Did the artist’s mother really have no endearing traits or amusing tics? Or is she only to be remembered as that authority figure seen “cornering me into corners to squeeze out blackheads”? If other people’s physical traits and clothing provide the author with such droll and kitschy imagery—e.g. “Gina Lollobrigida’s very tiny waist in Trapeze”—why does he invoke the “ugliness” of his parents’ nude bodies? Perhaps the artistic silence of Brainard’s last fifteen years has something to do with the artist’s refusal to grow up, his predilection for children playing absurd or demonic roles, as in his own versions of Nancy. Maturity tends to bring a modicum of forgiveness along with the recognition that, after all, one does bear some resemblance to one’s forebears. But Brainard remains, in this regard, a hater just as, in Nick Sturm’s very interesting account, he loathed work. His

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contempt for the very idea of a formal job strikes me as a limitation in empathy for what most others, his own friends included, were day by day. The desire not to grow up also relates Brainard to another great collagiste, Joseph Cornell. Jess Cotton’s essay on still life takes up the relationship between Brainard’s Shadow Box and the Cornell boxes and finds definite links between the two artists’s modes of juxtaposition, even though in the case of Shadow Box, “the quality of surprise, which emerges from constantly contesting the boundaries of the natural within an everyday context (so that a comic child or a bunch of flowers might emerge unexpectedly from a used cigarette packet, creating an art that is defiantly conceived in the present tense) arises from the ‘shock and non-recognition’ of identity which is so vital to Brainard’s work.” The gentle fantasy of Cornell’s starry skies, ballerinas, and rubber balls gives way, in Brainard’s case, to the foregrounding of the funny but also cruel surprises often inherent in linguistic and visual materials. And it is the insistence on the natural as stimulus for artifice that made Brainard such an important model for younger artists. Nathan Kernan’s “The Madonna of the Future” lays out this terrain: Kernan is wholly convincing in showing how such artists as Raymond Pettibon and Amy Sillman have produced their cartoon-like illustrations on paper under the sign of Brainard, as have assemblage artists like Mike Kelley and Tracey Emin. Or again the “bad boy” pose of Brainard’s “cigarette-butt” compositions prefigures, so Kernan shows, Damien Hirst’s giant ashtray sculptures. Whether or not we find the adulation of cigarettes and the denigration of working irritating—and I must confess I do—there is no doubt that as a conceptual artist, the Brainard who turned Nancy into an ashtray bearing a penis-as-filtered-cigarette in her mouth was decidedly ahead of his time. One fellow artist who understood this clearly was John Ashbery. Rona Cran argues that Ashbery’s own late collages, exhibited in recent years, pay a “‘close, even obsessive attention’ to Brainard— they are an unscientific but meticulously crafted conjuration of his friend, whose presence is so vigorous because he remains, to an extent, an active collaborator.” Both artists, Cran shows, regularly subvert readerly expectations; both—and this is important—“value the processes of reading or looking over any definitive answers that the poetry or artwork may or may not yield.” In the exhibition catalogue that accompanied his 2008 show, Ashbery describes, so Cran tells us, “the experience of looking at the ‘colorful disjecta membra’ that Brainard had sent him and that he had subsequently transformed into miniature works of art entirely in

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keeping with Brainard’s own collages.” “These fragments,” Ashbery acknowledges, “are really about him.” It is a great tribute. But Cran also understands the irony of the situation: Ashbery’s collages work to resist the finality of Brainard’s premature death, which in spite of the increased attention paid to him critically cannot be mitigated by academic books or institutional archives; however well-intentioned, these serve rather to emphasize the conclusiveness of Brainard’s passing.

That sad “conclusiveness” was very much with me as I read my way through the essays in Yasmine Shamma’s collection. Yet it is the very fragmentary quality of Brainard’s work—its tentativeness and lack of finish—that makes him such a natural for the twenty-first century. An artificer of the natural whose time has surely come.

Notes 1. John Ashbery, “Introduction,” in Joe Brainard: Retrospective (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1997); rpt. in Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 257.

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Index

Note: page references in italics indicate images; ‘n’ indicates chapter notes; ‘coll.’ = collaboration.

Abstract Expressionism, 44, 73, 93, 154, 226–7 abstraction, 9, 76, 84, 88, 91–3, 96, 98, 227 aesthetics, 6, 10, 15, 81–4, 86–8, 90, 93–4, 98, 98n12, 111, 120–1, 130–1, 140, 143, 169, 177, 195, 212, 213, 244 autobiography/selfhood and, 147–61, 162n10, 226 labor and, 183–7, 191, 194, 195, 197–8 Ahmed, Sara, 84 AIDS, 52, 66, 127, 128; see also Brainard, Joe: death Alan Gallery, New York City, solo exhibition (1965), 41, 79, 249 Albers, Josef, 226 Als, Hilton, 154 Andre, Carl, 66 “Andy Warhol: Andy Do It,” 133, 175–6 Anthology of the New York Poets, Brainard’s cover (1970), 12, 174 anxieties, 11, 35, 37, 94, 109, 151, 183, 184, 187, 190, 192, 194, 197, 198, 235 Arendt, Hannah, 94 Art Students League, Brainard’s art classes, 72–3 Arte Povera, 8 ARTnews Annual 34 (1968) “The Invisible Avant-Garde” essay (John Ashbery), 108 Untitled (“The Avant-Garde”) cover, 98n12, 107–8, 218, 218–19 ARTnews magazine cover and article (1967), 41–2, 42, 60 “Smoke More” (1963), 29–30, 62 Ashbery, John, 3, 4, 16, 25, 32–3, 48–9, 54, 57, 84, 86, 94, 103–22, 136–7, 145n14, 146, 147, 149–52, 158–9, 161, 165, 168, 171, 178, 189, 213, 248, 254–5 Brainard’s letters to, 113, 114, 168

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As We Know, “Litany” (1979), 121 The Checkered Game of Life—for Joe Brainard (2016), 116, 117 Chutes and Ladders I (for Joe Brainard) (2008), 33, 115, 115–16, 168 Diffusion of Knowledge (c.1972), 118, 120, 168 The Great Explosion Mystery, from C Comics 2, coll. with Brainard (1966), 58 Houseboat Days, “Fantasia on The Nut-Brown Maid” (1977), 121–2 Popeye Steps Out – for Joe Brainard (2016), 168 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), 108, 109 The Tennis Court Oath, “They Dream Only Of America” (1962), 121 “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” 108, 152 The Vermont Notebook, coll. with Brainard, 25, 54, 56–7, 108–9, 145n14, 176 ashtrays, 27–8, 61–4, 90–1 assemblage, 10–12, 15, 21–3, 43, 46–7, 52–4, 60, 62, 77–9, 85, 186, 233 The Art of Assemblage exhibition, MoMA (1961), 5, 16n8, 17n9 definitions, 5–6, 16n8, 17n9 see also Japanese City; Prell (1965); Shadow Box (1964); Untitled (1964–5); Untitled (Cigarettes) (1972); Untitled (Native American) (1964) Auden, W. H., 86 Auster, Paul, 170, 173, 180, 205, 249–50, 252 authorship, 242 autobiography, 91, 120, 128, 147–61, 162n10, 224–8, 230–45; see also memoir; selfhood “Autobiography,” 187, 240 avant-garde(ism), 83–4, 98n12, 107, 108, 121, 132, 147, 218, 219, 240–2

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Index “Back in Tulsa Again,” 180 Baldwin, Gordon, 190, 239, 243, 244–5 Barthes, Roland, 57, 87, 144, 166, 232–3 Bartholic, Bob, 75 Bauhaus, 226 Bean Spasms, coll. with Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett (1967), 104 beauty, 21–2, 82, 88, 108, 112, 142, 148, 205 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 200, 201 Bergman, David, 147, 158–9, 163n16 Berkeley Art Museums, University of California, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (1997), 110, 120, 146, 149, 151, 248 Berkson, Bill, 24, 36, 55, 86, 109, 136–7, 177, 192, 230, 234–5, 237, 238, 243 Berlant, Lauren, 139 Berriga, Sandy, 196, 197 Berrigan, Edmund, 34–8 Berrigan, Ted, 1, 3, 14, 15, 21, 22, 36, 44, 55, 58, 71, 74–5, 77, 78, 105, 113, 133, 141, 180, 193, 196, 211, 244 Bean Spasms, coll. with Brainard and Ron Padgett (1967), 104 Brainard’s letters to, 22, 47–8, 77 C: A Journal of Poetry, coll. with Brainard, 58 C Comics No. 1 and 2, coll. with Brainard, 54–5, 58, 58 Living with Chris, coll. with Brainard, 54, 56 Many Happy Returns, coll. with Brainard, 193 The Sonnets, 14 “Things to Do” poems, 196, 197 “Train Ride,” coll. with Brainard, 1, 15 Untitled (American Flag), coll. with Brainard (1962), 75, 75 Bersani, Leo, 82, 86, 236–7 Bidart, Frank, 127–9, 131, 144, 153–61, 163n24, 248 “Borges and I,” 159 “California Plush,” 163n23 “Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c. 350–325 bc,” 128 Desire, 153, 155, 157 “Ellen West,” 154–5 “In Memory of Joe Brainard,” 127–9, 131, 144, 153, 157, 160–1 “The Second Hour of the Night,” 155–6 “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” 157 Black K (1963), 78, 78–9 board games, 115–17 body, the, 9, 17n14, 86, 94, 96–7 Bolinas, California, Brainard in, 54, 189–94, 229–30, 234, 237–44 Bolinas Journal (1971), 11, 12, 54, 183, 185, 189–94, 198, 224–45, 249 Packing Inspiration (and Living Inspiration), frontispiece, 224, 225, 233

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Boston, Brainard in, 46, 69, 77–8, 249 Brackman, Robert, 72–3 Brainard, Joe anxieties, 11, 35, 37, 94, 109, 151, 183, 184, 187, 190, 192, 194, 197, 198, 235 at art school, 44, 70, 72–3, 209–10 in Bolinas, California, 54, 189–94, 229–30, 234, 237–44; see also Bolinas Journal (1971) in Boston, 46, 69, 77–8, 249 on contemporary art, 73 conversations recorded with, 3–4, 11, 14–15, 107, 109 death, 3, 22, 30–1, 105, 113, 121, 127, 179–80, 255 drug use, 12, 74, 105, 135, 150, 234–5 early years, 43–4, 162n14, 186, 208–13, 220 family, 69, 220, 250, 252 “favourite things” box, 27 films, interest in, 105 finances, 8, 15, 69–75, 71, 77–8, 249 friendliness, 128–31, 144, 147, 248 generosity, 65–6, 109–10, 119, 127, 144, 146, 153 gift-giving, 33, 110, 121 honesty, 150–1, 178, 235–40, 249 humor, 87, 118, 184 inclusivity, 3–4, 15, 178 interviews, 14–15, 54, 87, 94, 141, 231 kindness, 146–7 liked, desire to be, 133, 150, 157 maturity, 74, 253–4 in Mexico, 72 modesty, 3, 6, 13, 15, 18n22, 87, 178, 189 niceness, 3, 13, 16, 94, 120, 137, 140, 146–7, 149, 163n16, 165, 170, 171, 226 patronage, 44, 69–70, 72–5 reading, 25–6, 50, 65, 72, 107, 113 saintliness, 127, 146, 171, 248 in San Francisco, 53, 54, 189, 224, 229–30, 244 schooling, 44, 208–13, 216 shame, 152–3, 156–61, 171, 202, 205–9, 212, 213, 214, 215–17, 220 stopping art making, 37, 45, 64–5, 113, 169, 253 sunbathing, 171, 175 sweetness, 144, 153–4, 157 in Vermont, 57, 112, 113, 122, 135, 138, 141, 165, 177 vulnerability, 34–8, 153, 159, 237 see also Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The; journals; labor (work); letters; New York City, Brainard in; notebooks; smoking Brainard, John (brother), 27–31 Brainard, Marie (mother), 211, 250, 252–3

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Index

Brainard-Freeman Notebooks (1975), Self-Portrait, 188, 188–9 “Brainardism,” 53 Braque, Georges, 32 Brockelman, Thomas, 122 Brown, Judith, 89 Bryson, Norman, 81 Burroughs, William, My Education: A Book of Dreams, 234 Bushmiller, Ernie, Nancy comic strip, 8, 17n12, 21, 85, 214–15, 220 butterflies, 7, 7, 52, 63–4 C: A Journal of Poetry, coll. with Ted Berrigan, 58 C Comics No. 1 and 2, coll. with Ted Berrigan, 54–5, 58, 58 The Great Explosion Mystery, from C Comics 2, coll. with John Ashbery (1966), 58 Callas, Maria, 155–6, 160 camp, 53–4, 60, 84, 135, 137 Carrà, Carlo, 107 Carte Postale (1978), 117, 117 Cathcart, Linda, 81 censorship, 209–10 Chabrol, Claude, Leda (1959), 200, 201 Champ, The, coll. with Kenward Elmslie (1968), 27, 54, 56 Chesterfields (cigarettes), 27 Chiasson, Dan, 140 Cigarette Book, The (1972), 62, 195 “Smoke More” (1963), 29–30, 62, 88 cigarette butts, 27–8, 30, 61, 62–3, 82, 84, 88, 90, 167, 218, 254 Cinzano (1974), 28, 61, 62, 90 Cinzano ashtrays, 27, 28 Clark, Tom, 243 clothing, fashionable, 201, 206, 208–13, 215, 250–1; see also fashion design Cockettes (drag troupe), 53–4, 60 Cohn, Elisha, 81 collaboration, 4, 10, 12, 15, 17n11, 25, 36, 54–5, 74–5, 87, 91–2, 103–22, 142, 169–70, 193, 241–2 collaborative poetry, 104, 106–8, 121–2, 241–2 see also Bean Spasms, coll. with Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett (1967); C: A Journal of Poetry, coll. with Ted Berrigan; C Comics No. 1 and 2, coll. with Ted Berrigan; The Great Explosion Mystery, from C Comics 2, coll. with John Ashbery (1966); Champ, The, coll. with Kenward Elmslie (1968); Living with Chris, coll. with Ted Berrigan; Many Happy Returns, coll. with Ted Berrigan; Self-Portrait (with poems by Ted Berrigan) (1963); Sufferin Succotash, coll. with Ron Padgett; Sung

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Sex, coll. with Kenward Elmslie; “Train Ride,” coll. with Ted Berrigan; Untitled (American Flag), coll. with Ted Berrigan (1962); Vermont Notebook, The, coll. with John Ashbery collage, 4, 6, 8–12, 15, 22, 24, 27, 28, 32–3, 43, 57, 64–5, 69, 77, 105–6, 111–22, 137, 141–2, 169, 227, 255 cutting and pasting, 8, 9–10, 14 definitions, 4–5, 16n6, 17n9, 122 and poetry, relationship between, 4–5, 9, 10, 14, 32, 46–9, 107–9, 111, 128–30 see also Black K (1963); Carte Postale (1978); Friendly Way, The (1972); Madonna with Daffodils (1966); Parnassus Butterfly (n.d.); Shadow Box (1964); Untitled (“The Avant Garde”), ARTnews Annual 34 (1968); Untitled (1960); Untitled (1975); Untitled (Big Chesterfield) (1961–2); Untitled (A Sturdy Craft) (1975); Untitled (Cigarette Butts) (1973); Untitled (Heinz) (1977); Untitled (Matchbook Flowers and Butterfly) (1975); Untitled (May 1961); Untitled (Boom) for Some Bombs (1963); World’s Wishes, The (n.d.) Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The, eds. Ron Padgett and Paul Auster (Library of America; 2012), 3, 4, 22, 25, 34–6, 62, 73, 138, 141–3, 147, 152, 179, 231–2, 248 introduction by Paul Auster, 170, 173, 180, 205, 249–50, 252 see also journals; notebooks; “Andy Warhol: Andy Do It”; “Autobiography”; Bolinas Journal (1971); Friendly Way, The (1972); “The Gay Way”; “I Like”; I Remember; “Jamaica 1968”; “LittleKnown Facts about People”; “Nothing To Write Home About”; “Poem”; “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night, Year 1961 Age 19 Almost 20; Homage to George”; Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (1971); “Smoke More” piece (1963); “A State of the Flowers Report”; “Ten Imaginary Still Lifes”; “Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises)”; Vermont Notebook, The, coll. with John Ashbery collecting, 11–12, 15, 33, 85 Collingwood, R.G., Principles of Art, 72 color, Brainard on, 1–2, 65, 114–15 comics, 8, 17n11, 36, 43, 54–5; see also Bushmiller, Ernie, Nancy comic strip; C Comics No. 1 and 2; “Nancy” series; Woggon, Bill, Katy Keene comics commodification, 90, 91, 96, 140, 201, 227

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Index Conner, Bruce, 46 consumerism, 92–3, 186, 200–1, 204 Corbett, William, 146 Cornell, Joseph, 22, 32, 80–1, 110, 162n10, 254 correspondence see letters Cotter, Holland, 106 Cotton, Jess, 9, 80–100, 167, 168, 254 Cran, Rona, 4, 17n11, 103–26, 167, 174, 254–5 Creeley, Bobbie (wife), 179, 192, 193, 230, 237, 238, 243, 244 Creeley, Robert (husband), 191, 230, 237, 244 Crichton, Charles, A Fish Called Wanda (1988), 169 Crimp, Douglas, 156 cuteness, 82–4, 98n12, 167 Danto, Arthur, 185 Davis, Jordan, 8 Dayton Art Institute, Brainard at, 44, 70, 209–10 de Kooning, Willem, 24, 37, 55–6, 215 “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (Robert Rauschenberg; 1953), 227, 230 “I Love You de Kooning” (Brainard), 24 If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning (Brainard; 1972), 24, 215 Woman I, 215, 219 death (theme), 61–3, 162n16, 178–9, 224 Deming, Richard, 184 desire, 10, 25, 83, 86, 88–90, 96, 132, 139, 153–4, 238–9, 249 DiPalma, Raymond, Doones little magazine, 196, 197 disappearance, 224, 228, 240–5 Dlugos, Tim, 141, 151 drag (cross-dressing), 50, 53–4 drawings see ink drawings Duchamp, Marcel, 37, 108 Nude Descending a Staircase, 37 Duncan, Robert, 230 eclecticism, 121–2 ego, 148–50 Elmslie, Kenward, 18n20, 23, 27, 30, 32, 57, 65, 105, 112, 113, 150, 165, 174, 193, 229, 239 The Champ, coll. with Brainard (1968), 27, 54, 56 Sung Sex, coll. with Brainard, 28 house in Vermont, 57, 112, 113, 122, 135, 138, 141, 165, 177 Whippoorwill (dog), 26, 105, 174–5 embarrassment, 59–61, 106, 133, 150–1, 158, 176, 179, 187, 233, 237, 249, 253 Epstein, Andrew, 6, 131, 165–80, 249 Ernst, Max, 32

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259

eroticism, 59, 90, 92, 95–6 essays see mini essays; “Autobiography” Fagin, Larry, 58, 104 fashion design, 202, 211–12 fashionable clothing, 201, 206, 208–13, 215, 250–1 faux-naïveté, 62, 64, 85–6, 166, 249 femininity, 84, 89, 97, 205–9, 212–20 girlish, 201–2, 207, 214, 217, 220, 249 Fishback Gallery, New York solo exhibition (1971), 194, 229 solo exhibition (1975), 64, 184 Fitch, Andy, 6, 132, 146–7, 150, 161, 165–80, 203, 226, 233, 249 Pop Poetics, 132, 146 Fitzgerald, Adam, 105 Flatley, Jonathan, 132–3 flowers see “Garden” series; “Pansy” series; “Madonna” series Floyd, Kevin, 83 folding, 60 Foucault, Michel, 86, 131 “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 131 found materials, 1–2, 8–9, 15, 84, 129–30; see also collecting; recycling; trash Fredman, Stephen, 5–6 free time, 184–5, 187, 190, 194, 197 Freilicher, Jane, 193 Freud, Sigmund, 241 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1915), 207–8, 216 friendliness, 128–31, 144, 147, 248 Friendly Way, The (1972), 127–31, 130, 135, 138, 144, 145n14, 153 friendship, 3, 22, 32–3, 41, 69, 105–6, 112, 127, 131–5, 141, 146, 167 Gallery, The, Tulsa, solo exhibition (1960), 69 Gallup, Dick, 44 Galvin, Rachel, 173 Gandhi, Mahatma, 224, 225, 233 “Gardens” series, 41, 42, 50, 52, 60, 64, 79, 173; see also “Madonna” series “Gay Way, The,” 131–2 gayness see camp; homosexuality; queerness gender, 50–3, 89, 93 generosity, 65–6, 109–10, 119, 127, 144, 146, 153 Genet, Jean, 50, 53, 59, 63 Notre Dame des Fleurs, 50 Glavey, Brian, 3, 10, 11, 108, 127–45, 147, 166, 167, 168, 176, 177 The Wallflower Avant-Garde, 108 Glick, Elisa, 83 Goldberg, Mike, 93 Goldberg, Rube, 18n20 González-Torres, Félix, 65–6 Goodman, Paul, 109

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260

Index

Greenberg, Clement, 83 Gruen, John, 229

installation, 46, 65 irony, 85, 87

Halberstam, Jack, 97 handwriting, 143, 195 haptics, 6, 83, 88, 93, 95, 168 Hardt, Michael, 173 Hartman, Geoffrey, 241 Harvey, Bob, 72 Harvey, Nylajo, 72 Hess, Thomas, 107 heteronormativity, 135, 212, 226 heterosexuality, 64, 135, 191, 208, 216, 220 Hirst, Damien, 61–2, 64 homophobia, 133, 140, 209–10, 220 homosexuality, 35, 52, 59, 63–4, 118, 131, 151, 172, 191, 206, 236–7, 249, 252 honesty, 150–1, 178, 235–40, 249 Hornick, Lita, 104, 196, 197 Human Pear (1977), 94–6, 95 humor, 87, 118, 184; see also wit

“Jamaica 1968,” 193 James, Henry, 43 James, William, 170 Japanese City (1966), 11, 22–3, 46 “Joe Brainard with Cigarette” (1972), 89 Joel, Yale, Joe Brainard in his Loft (1975), 65 Johns, Jasper, in Brainard’s If Nancy Was series (1972), 218, 219 Johnson, Ray, 169, 226–7 “Correspondence Art,” 227–8 journals, 11–12, 29–30, 69, 86, 106, 133, 148, 150–2, 162n9, 162n10, 162n14, 167–8, 170, 172, 176, 185, 241, 248–9; see also Bolinas Journal (1971); C: A Journal of Poetry, coll. with Ted Berrigan; notebooks joyfulness, 34, 37, 109–10 junk, 54 juxtaposition, 9, 10, 11, 107, 168–9, 233–4, 252, 254

“I Like,” 175 “I Love You de Kooning,” 24 I Remember (1970), 10, 11, 12–15, 22, 25, 29, 34–6, 52, 56, 60, 61, 73, 84, 91, 129, 132, 139–41, 151, 158–9, 170–1, 173, 183, 185–8, 200–20, 224–6, 229, 249–52 iconography, 44, 46–8, 47, 50, 54, 55, 107–8 identity, 52, 82–4, 89–91, 96, 156, 160, 191, 195, 206, 224, 226, 240, 245, 254 If Nancy Was series (1972), 214 If Nancy Knew What Wearing Green and Yellow Meant, 216–17, 217 If Nancy Opened Her Mouth So Wide She Fell In, 8 If Nancy Was a Boy, 36, 215–16, 216 If Nancy Was a Drawing by Larry Rivers, 215 If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning, 24, 215 If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket, 217 If Nancy Was an Ashtray, 85, 217–18 If Nancy Was an Underground Comic Book Character, 217 If Nancy Was Just an Old Kleenex, 218 inclusivity, 3–4, 15, 178 ink drawings, 24, 27, 28, 43, 54, 57–8; see also The Great Explosion Mystery, from C Comics 2, coll. with John Ashbery (1966); Sufferin Succotash, coll. with Ron Padgett; Sung Sex, coll. with Kenward Elmslie; Untitled (“Little-Known Facts about People”) (c.1968); Untitled (Boom) for Some Bombs (1963); Untitled (May 1961); Untitled (Tattoo) (1970/72); Untitled (Cigarette Butts) (1973)

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Kane, Daniel, 131, 241 Kapil, Bhanu, 173 Kaprow, Allen, 228 Keane, Timothy, 11, 169, 178–80, 224–45, 249 Keeling, John, 122 Kelley, Mike, 54, 59–61 “Memory Ware” assemblages, 59–61 More Love Hours than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), 59 Kermani, David, 16, 119 Kernan, Nathan, 6, 35, 41–68, 110, 167, 254 The Erotic Work, 35 kindness, 146–7 kitsch, 50, 83, 130 Klein, Richard, 89 Koch, Kenneth, 15, 18n26 Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?, 15 “The Circus,” 18n26, 168 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 60, 87 Humiliation, 60 Koons, Jeff, 53 Krauss, Rosalind, 122 Kyger, Joanne, 152–3, 191–2, 193, 230, 238, 243, 244 labor (work), 169–70, 174, 177, 183–98, 253–4 trying/self-improvement, 187–92, 188, 198 Lamm, Kimberly, 10, 172, 200–20, 249 Lauterbach, Ann, 30, 37, 203, 214, 215, 218, 219, 234 layering, 8–9, 11, 14

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Index Lee, Benjamin, 131 Leibowitz, Herbert, 1 Leiris, Michel, Manhood, 232–3 Leonardo da Vinci, 36, 108 lettering, 21 letters, Brainard’s, 1, 25, 44, 69, 76, 133, 141 to Anne Waldman, 14–15, 25, 139–41, 161, 202 to and from James Schuyler, 49, 141 to John Ashbery, 113, 114, 168 to Ron Padgett, 10, 16n8, 62 to Sue Schempf, 69, 71–6, 72, 82 to Ted Berrigan, 22, 47–8, 77 liking things, 44, 132, 175–6 Lippard, Lucy, 66 lists, 108, 187, 195–8, 196, 210–11 “Little-Known Facts about People,” 133–5, 134 Living with Chris, coll. with Ted Berrigan, 54, 56 Loretta Howard Gallery, John Ashbery Collects: Poet Among Things exhibition (2013), 105–6 love, 1, 24–5, 235–6, 239 Lozano, Lee, 66 MacAdams, Lewis, 238 “Madonnas” series, 11, 50–3, 55–6, 60, 63, 64 Madonna with Daffodils (1966), 50, 51 mail art, 227–8 male torsos, 9, 17n14, 35–6, 59, 96; see also, Nude with Tattoo (1974); Untitled (Heinz) (1977); Untitled (Tattoo) (1970/72); Untitled 2 (Tattoo) (1972) Malraux, André, 230 Man, Paul de, 85, 230–1 Many Happy Returns, coll. with Ted Berrigan, 193 Marks, Laura, 87, 95 Marxism, 241 masculinity, 63, 81, 84, 94–5, 211–12 mass culture see popular culture Matches (1975), 7, 7–8 Matisse, Henri, in Brainard’s If Nancy Was series (1972), 218, 219 Mayer, Bernadette, 168 memoir, 11, 24, 224, 229–35; see also autobiography; Bolinas Journal (1971) memory, 14, 24, 59–61, 173, 186–7, 201, 204–6, 224–5, 250–2 Merrill, James, 174 mini essays, 87–8, 90 miniature art, 12, 170, 184 minimalism, 44, 66, 82, 91 Mitchell, Joan, 25 modernism, 52, 110, 212, 227 modesty, 3, 6, 13, 15, 18n22, 87, 178, 189

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Mondrian, Piet, in Brainard’s If Nancy Was series (1972), 218, 219 Morrissey, 167 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 29 Museum of Modern Art, New York The Art of Assemblage exhibition (1961), 5, 16n8, 17n9 Swedish film festival (1962), 76 “Nancy” character series, 8, 17n12, 21, 24, 28, 37, 44, 52, 55–6, 63, 85, 105, 108, 118, 172, 202, 214–20, 243, 254 The Nancy Book, 8, 17n12, 36–7, 55, 85 Untitled (“The Avant Garde”) cover for ARTnews Annual 34 (1968), 98n12, 107–8, 218, 218–19 see also If Nancy Was series (1972) Napa, Brainard’s trip to, 237 neo-Dadaism, 10, 17n15 Nevin, John, 72 New York City, Brainard in, 3, 5, 8, 10, 44, 69–79, 121, 162n14, 186–7, 189, 219, 226–7, 229, 238, 242, 249 93 First Avenue, apartment, 72 210 East 6th Street storefront apartment, 70–1 East 9th Street apartment, 78–9 Greene Street loft, 12, 27, 65, 65–6 West 88th Street, Brainard at Padgett home, 78 New York magazine, 229 New York Post, 214 New York School, 1–3, 8, 15, 44, 97, 98n12, 103, 109, 112, 146–7, 168, 190, 195, 197, 242 Second Generation, 194, 196, 226 New York School Poets, 15, 46, 48, 54–5, 103, 108, 131, 132, 213, 241 Anthology of the New York Poets, Brainard’s cover (1970), 12, 174 New York Times, The, 12, 106, 172 “Next to Last Cigarette” (1970), 89 Ngai, Sianne, 140 Nichols, Travis, 110 normativity, 133, 139, 172, 177, 200–5, 208–11, 213–20, 226; see also heteronormativity notebooks, 148, 150, 177, 189, 195, 248–9; see also, Brainard-Freeman Notebooks (1975); The Vermont Notebook, coll. with John Ashbery; journals “Nothing To Write Home About,” 85 Notley, Alice, 4, 16, 21–3, 127, 138, 165–6 “Flowers,” 168 “The Prophet,” 138 “Your Dailiness,” 197 Nude with Tattoo (1974), 97

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262

Index

O’Hara, Frank, 10, 16n6, 63, 79, 92, 93, 103, 105, 109, 110, 111, 122, 143, 162n14, 162n16, 167, 169, 195, 196, 197, 213, 253 “Personal Poem,” 167–8 “Personism,” 92 “The Day Lady Died,” 195, 213 “Why I Am Not a Painter,” 93 Oldenburg, Claes, 44, 170 Ono, Yoko, 66 ordinary, the, 10, 11, 139, 143, 172, 176, 178, 218 packaging, 44 Padgett, Pat, 30, 44, 62, 77, 113, 135 Padgett, Ron, 3, 8, 11, 15, 16n8, 18n20, 29, 36, 44, 54, 55, 62, 69–79, 104, 105, 110, 113, 121, 135, 145n14, 152, 165, 171, 187, 202, 210, 211, 212, 248, 249 Bean Spasms, coll. with Brainard and Ted Berrigan (1967), 104 Brainard’s letters to, 10, 16n8, 62 Joe (biography), 3, 8, 18n20, 113 Sufferin Succotash, coll. with Brainard, 54 “The Origins of Brainard’s Nancy,” 219–20 see also Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The painting 24–5, 43, 46, 72, 141–2; see also, ARTnews magazine: cover and article (1967); Cinzano 1974; If Nancy Was series (1972); Madonna with Daffodils (1966); Seven-Up (1962); Untitled (Boom) for Some Bombs (1963); Untitled (1962); Untitled (Cigarette Butts) (1973); Untitled (Sardines) (1975) “Pansy” series, 8, 52, 63, 115, 118, 147, 151–2, 159, 178 ARTnews magazine: cover and article (1967), 41–2, 42, 60 Parnassus (poetry journal), 1 Parnassus Butterfly (n.d.), 1, 2 People magazine, 170, 184, 189 Perl, Jed, 5, 10, 16n6 New Art City, 5, 16n6 Perloff, Marjorie, 4–5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 171, 194–5, 248–55 Pettibon, Raymond, 55 Philbrook museum, Oklahoma Annual Show, 74 Picasso, Pablo, 32, 37 “Pictures Generation” (group), 57 “Poem” (c. 1972), 143 poetics, 5–6, 9, 10, 91, 112, 129, 132, 165, 241; see also aesthetics poetry, 4, 11–12, 15, 24, 46, 54–5, 127–44, 148 and art, relationship between, 1–2, 4, 6, 11

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C: A Journal of Poetry, coll. with Ted Berrigan, 58 collaborative, 104, 106–8, 121–2, 241–2 and collage, relationship between, 4–6, 9, 10, 14, 32, 46–9, 107–9, 111, 128–30 see also Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-theBowery, 103, 122 Pollock, Griselda, “The Visual Poetics of Shame,” 208 Pollock, Jackson, 107, 219 Pop Art, 36, 44, 49, 93, 132–3, 184, 200–1 popular culture, 59, 111, 201, 202, 212, 214, 219, 227; see also consumerism Porter, Fairfield, 43, 105 “Postcard” series, 11, 32–3, 69, 112–13 Carte Postale (1978), 117, 117 Poulin, Alfred, Jr., 107, 122 Pound, Ezra, Cantos, 11 Prell (1965), 23, 46 Pressed Wafer (journal), 146 Prince, Richard, 55–6, 57 Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, 233–4 Puerto Rican religious culture, 54 “queer ordinary,” 201–5 queerness, 10, 36, 50–2, 64, 66, 73, 76–7, 81, 83–6, 89–90, 93–7, 131–3, 135, 137, 139–40, 144, 150, 166, 172, 176–7, 191, 200–20, 249; see also camp; homosexuality Ratcliff, Carter, 105 Rauschenberg, Robert, 46, 226–7 “Erased De Kooning Drawing” (1953), 227, 230 Untitled [self-portrait for Dwan poster] (1965), 227 Raveau, Alice, 159–60 ready-mades, 16n6 realism, 44, 72, 73–4, 172, 177 recycling, 8, 14, 15, 84, 112 red, 1–2, 12 Rembrandt van Rijn, 107 Rengers, Ella/Ellen, 70, 72 repetition, 10, 11–12, 91, 175, 184, 190–1, 203, 250 Revell, Donald, 108 Rich, Faye and Dave, 70 Rifkin, Libbie, 133 Rivers, Larry, 37 Rodefer, Stephen, 97 Ronnell, Avital, 88 Rose, Barbara, 17n15 rubbish see trash Russell, John, 12

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Index saintliness, 127, 146, 171, 248 San Francisco, Brainard in, 53, 54, 189, 224, 229–30, 244 Scanlan, Joe, 184–5 Schempf, Sue, 69–75, 82, 249 Brainard’s letters to, 69, 71–6, 72, 82 Schiffman, Robyn, 89 Schmidt, Christ, 171 Schuyler, James (Jimmy), 3, 15, 41, 48–50, 54, 57, 60, 87, 141, 173 “Fabergé,” 42, 48, 49, 64 letters between Brainard and, 49, 141 “Morning of the Poem,” 42 “Salute,” 49 “The Payne Whitney Poems,” 42 “The Trash Book,” 49–50 Schwitters, Kurt, 32, 49 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 86, 142, 156, 206, 211 selfhood, 11, 86, 147–61, 162n10, 224, 226, 230, 231, 234, 239–43; see also autobiography self-portraiture, 25, 91, 105, 209–10, 224, 243–4 Self-Portrait (with poems by Ted Berrigan) (1963), 91 Self-Portrait, from Brainard-Freeman Notebooks (1975), 188, 188–9 Self-Portrait: 1971 (1971), 11, 133 “Self-Portrait on Christmas Night, Year 1961 Age 19 Almost 20; Homage to George,” 73, 148–9, 184 Ultra-New Realism, Self-Portrait (1972), 29 Seven-Up (1962), 44–6, 45 sex, 34–6, 63, 132, 191, 192, 204, 205 sexuality, 84, 93, 172, 190–2, 200–10, 212, 214–17, 220, 252 Shadow Box (1964), 80, 80–3, 254 Shamma, Yasmine, 1–18 shame, 152–3, 156–61, 171, 202, 205–9, 212–17, 220 Shapiro, David, 175 Shaw, Lytle, 131 shrines, 27, 46, 54 Silliman, Ron, 177 silliness, 55, 128, 147 Skillings, Emily, 105 Smaill, Anna, 3, 170–1, 146–61, 248 Smith, Patti, 86 Smithson, Henriette Constance, 155–6 Smithson, Robert, 66 “Smoke More” (1963), 29–30, 62, 88 smoking, 27–31, 62, 81, 82, 84, 88–92, 166–7, 171; see also ashtrays; cigarette butts; Cinzano (1974); Matches (1975); Untitled (Big Chesterfield) (1961–2), Untitled (Cigarettes) (1972) Some Drawings of Some Notes to Myself (1971), 11–12, 143, 183, 185, 194–8

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263

Things to Do Before I Move, 195–8, 196 Sontag, Susan, 84, 88 “Against Interpretation,” 104 “Notes on ‘Camp’,” 53 “State of the Flowers Report, A,” 83 Staten, Henry, 239 Stein, Gertrude, 81, 86, 91, 111, 168 Stanzas in Meditation, 111 Steiner, Wendy, 92 Stevens, Wallace, 180 still-lifes, 80–98, 244–5, 254; see also smoking; Untitled (Still Life) (1967) Stoichita, Victor, 93–4 Stonewall, 59, 140, 165, 177 Sturm, Nick, 11, 108, 169, 177, 183–98 Sufferin Succotash, coll. with Ron Padgett, 54 Sung Sex, coll. with Kenward Elmslie, 28 Svevo, Italo, Confessions of Zeno, 89 sweetness, 144, 153–4, 157 tact, 166 Tareyton cigarettes, 27, 28, 28 taste, 82–3, 85 “Ten Imaginary Still Lifes,” 47, 66, 92 Theoharis, Liz, Reverend, 173 “thing itself” concept, 42–4 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 111, 113, 114–15 “Towards a Better Life (Eleven Exercises),” 12, 66, 92, 138 Towle, Tony, 78 “Train Ride,” coll. with Ted Berrigan, 1, 15 trash, 49–50, 63, 84 Tulsa, Oklahoma, 29, 30, 43–4, 69–75, 162n14, 186, 208–13, 220, 250–1 Tulsa Poets, 3, 211–12, 218 Tulsa State Fair, article on Brainard, 211 Tulsa Sunday World, 214 Ultra-New Realism, Self-Portrait (1972), 29 Untitled (1960), 69–70, 70 Untitled (1962), 76 Untitled (1964–5), 46, 47 Untitled (1975), 117, 118 Untitled (American Flag), coll. with Ted Berrigan (1962), 75, 75 Untitled (“The Avant Garde”), ARTnews Annual 34 (1968), 98n12, 107–8, 218, 218–19 Untitled (Big Chesterfield) (1961–2), 62 Untitled (Boom) for Some Bombs (1963), 77, 77 Untitled (Cigarette Butts) (1973), 28, 28 Untitled (Cigarettes) (1972), 88 Untitled (Heinz) (1977), 96, 96 Untitled (“Little-Known Facts about People”) (c.1968), 133–5, 134 Untitled (Matchbook Flowers and Butterfly) (1975), 7, 7

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264

Index

Untitled (May 1961), 71, 71–2 Untitled (Native American) (1964), 53–4 Untitled (Sardines) (1975), 93 Untitled (Still Life) (1967), 93 Untitled 2 (Tattoo) (1972), 9, 17n14 Untitled (Tattoo) (1970/72), 17n14, 97 Untitled (A Sturdy Craft) (1975), 117, 119 untitling of artworks, 90–1 Updike, John, 226 Valéry, Paul, 242 Vermont, Brainard and Kenward Elmslie in, 57, 112, 113, 122, 135, 138, 141, 165, 177 Vermont Notebook, The, coll. with John Ashbery, 25, 54, 56–7, 108–9, 145n14, 176 violence, 165–6 vulnerability, 3, 24, 34–8, 153, 159, 237 Waldman, Anne, 3, 10, 13, 14–15, 16, 18n22, 24–6, 91, 107, 109, 139–41, 161, 193, 202 “Arrested,” 15 Brainard’s letters to, 14–15, 25, 139–41, 161, 202 “On Seeing Joe’s Show,” 193–4, 244 Walker Art Center, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2015), 53–4

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Warhol, Andy, 21, 41, 44, 58, 62, 132–3, 167, 175, 184, 206, 211 in Brainard’s If Nancy Was series (1972), 218, 219 Warner, Michael, 139, 156 Warsh, Lewis, 141 West, Ellen, 154–5, 160 Whalen, Philip, 190, 230, 234–5, 237, 243–4 Whippoorwill (Kenward Elmslie’s dog), 26, 105, 174–5 White, Edmund, 87 White Dove Review, The (school literary magazine), 43–4, 55, 69 Whittington, Larry, Fritzi Ritz comic strip, 214–15 Williams, William Carlos, 225 wit, 12, 26, 189, 237, 253 Woggon, Bill, Katy Keene comics, 210 Wohlfert, Lee, 184 Women’s Household magazine, 128–30, 135–8, 136, 141, 176 wondering, 165–80 Worden, Daniel, 140–2 Wordsworth, William, 165 work see labor World’s Wishes, The (n.d.), 37, 38 writings see Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The Yau, John, 111

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