Cat Dawson on Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard, Matches, 1975, mixed media collage with gouache, 6 ¾ x 4 ¾ inches (17.1 x 12.1 cm). © Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Joe Brainard, Matches, 1975, mixed media collage with gouache, 6 ¾ x 4 ¾ inches (17.1 x 12.1 cm). © Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Post-war America saw the notable development of many close relationships between painters and poets. Joe Brainard remains among the few figures of that fruitful period remembered for shifting deftly between visual and narrative media, and for playing both roles successfully. Living in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s, Brainard became part of a thriving group of creative thinkers – visual artists and poets, many of them gay men – whose very public work made intimate address its central concern. Yet legal and social mandate required these men to obfuscate the details of their most intimate associations and desires, lest they expose themselves as gay. Collage became a defining mode of expression for these artists.

We associate particular concepts with certain words and images, but the flexible medium of collage allows artists to recontextualize both image and text, producing new connections and meanings. Brainard’s Matches (1975) features a horseracing ticket pasted beneath a book of matches, mostly spent, with gouache dampening or accentuating particular elements of the composition. The combination of the spent matches and ticket imply the duration of an activity – perhaps a day at the track – and thus the artwork becomes an eminently recognizable record of a moment of leisure passed.

Joe Brainard, Untitled, 1978, graphite with acrylic on paper, 6 x 4 inches (15.2 x 10.2 cm). © Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Joe Brainard, Untitled, 1978, graphite with acrylic on paper, 6 x 4 inches (15.2 x 10.2 cm). © Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

Brainard’s greatest strength lay in the production of artworks that, like Matches, suggest a familiarity or intimacy that cannot be completely articulated. In Untitled (1978), Brainard cultivates a sense of intimacy among artist, object, and audience with what appears to be an outgoing letter to a universal recipient – you. That the recipient of the letter is simply you implicates a romantic relationship, without regard to the gender of the recipient. This presents a subtle challenge to the fixedness of normative male–female sexuality. By producing a work that looks like a letter, Brainard situates himself within the vernacular of mail art – a network of mostly gay male artists and their patrons, which began to circulate small-scale work through the United States Postal Service during the post-war period. Untitled, in particular, points to the artist’s lasting interest in fostering community through communication, whether subtle or overt.

Joe Brainard, Untitled (XXX…), 1977, mixed media collage, 4 x 3 inches (10.2 x 7.6 cm). © Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott
Joe Brainard, Untitled (XXX…), 1977, mixed media collage, 4 x 3 inches (10.2 x 7.6 cm). © Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York / Photo: Ellen McDermott

In Untitled (XXX…) (1977), Brainard has collaged a blue heart and a strip of handwritten X’s over assorted patterned papers. We assume that this strip of X’s stands in for an emotive message, but the meaning of this message is not communicated and cannot be accessed; the X’s only insinuate intimate expression to the viewer. The jumble of collaged papers serving as background displays both decorative floral patterns and straitlaced grids, a formal juxtaposition that produces a subtle tension underneath the opaque X’s. It is through careful consideration of these three works as a whole that we can come to understand how Brainard, engaged as he was with questions of language, intimacy, and communication, found the conceptual mobility of collage and universally-addressed language so compelling as he traversed the challenges of what could and could not be said.

Joe Brainard Biography

Joe Brainard (b. 1942, Salem, AR; d. 1994, New York, NY) was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In high school, Brainard produced an art and literary magazine entitled The White Dove Review with Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Ted Berrigan and Patricia Mitchell. After graduation, Brainard was granted a full scholarship to attend the Dayton Art Institute, where he studied for a few months. Brainard first moved to New York City at the age of 19: he quickly became associated with a community of New York School poets and painters with whom he often collaborated artistically, including Frank O’Hara, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher and, later, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. He most frequently collaborated with the writer Kenward Elmslie, his longtime partner. Brainard was selected by Larry Rivers to participate in a group show at the Finch College Museum (1964), and his first solo exhibition took place at the Alan Gallery, New York (1964). Other recent solo exhibitions were held at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (1973); Fischbach Gallery, New York (1975, 2007); Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1997, 2001, 2007, 2008, 2012); and the University of Buffalo Art Galleries, New York (2007). Brainard’s work may be found in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. More information about his work can be found at www.joebrainard.org.

Cat Dawson Biography
Cat Dawson is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in art of the American post-war postmodern. Her particular interests include the interplay between text and language, conceptual art and theories of the body, mid-century painting and the sexuality of abstraction, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation is on sexuality and difference in American post-war painting.