Joe Brainard at P.S. 1 and Tibor de Nagy - Brief Article

In the 1960s and '70s, Joe Brainard (1942-1994), a writer and visual artist closely affiliated with the poets of the New York School, created a sprawling and heterodox body of work that included collage, assemblage, drawing, painting and book design. Brainard's art might fairly be described as insouciant, small scale, lavish in its provision of visual pleasure and, often, frankly illustrative--not exactly a recipe for success in the era of Minimalist and Conceptual ascendancy. He carved out a respectable niche nevertheless, but his work was nearly forgotten after he retreated from the art world around 1980. Then, in the late 1990s, a small retrospective at Tibor de Nagy helped to spark renewed interest in his art, which has a quality of otherness, in the sense of John Ashbery's "other traditions," that seems to dovetail with the zeitgeist. Recently, New Yorkers had the opportunity to apprise themselves of Brainard's oeuvre in two shows: a retrospective at P.S. 1 and a smaller show of selected works at Tibor de Nagy.

A typical Brainard, if such a thing could be postulated, would surely be a mixed-medium collage that incorporates found materials. He made hundreds of these throughout his career, and they were amply represented at both venues. When it came to the effluvia of late capitalism--dimestore gewgaws, matchbooks, sewing notions and all manner of printed ephemera, from soft-core porn to Con Edison envelopes--Brainard was a doting magpie, and his collages showcase the near-unnerving dexterity with which he was able to manipulate these materials. For example, in several collages from the mid-'60s (one on view at Tibor de Nagy and two, done in collaboration with Frank O'Hara, at P.S. 1), Brainard used postage stamps as the kernels of elegant, complex, Bauhausian compositions of nested rectangles. The orange-red and greenish blue of the stamps are the anchoring refrains in perfectly "off" color schemes of mustard yellow, olive green and dull burgundy.

While the Tibor de Nagy show was composed mainly of these mixed-medium collages and other works on paper, the P.S. 1 retrospective (which originated at the Berkeley Art Museum) necessarily cast a wider net. Pride of place in the exhibition's main gallery was given to Brainard's best-known works: his hotly colored flower collages of the late '60s, whose dense compositions have been read by several critics as sly allusions to Abstract Expressionist all-overness. A generous excerpt from Brainard's "Nancy" series was also prominently displayed in the main gallery. For these paintings, drawings and collages, Brainard appropriated the impish title character from a comic strip and depicted her, with a sort of daffy obsessiveness, in an array of styles and situations. In one drawing, for example, Nancy appears as an Art Nouveau diva, while in another she is the angry inhabitant of a bisected human liver in an old-fashioned anatomical illustration. The wit and graphic acuity evident in the "Nancy" series were further exemplified in Brainard's comic strips, chapbook illustrations and book-cover designs, which were exhibited together in a side gallery.

A group of campy mid-'60s assemblages, also on view in their own small gallery, had a louche, glittery quality that recalled the esthetic of the Ridiculous Theater or Brigid Berlin's spangled, hypertrophied scrapbooks. These works seemed worlds away from a series of bucolic oil paintings, dating from the mid-'70s, that were clearly influenced by Fairfield Porter. And yet the poisonous, saturated greenness of the best of the assemblages, Prell, was echoed by the warm, grassy, acid green that predominated in the oils, so that the assemblage and the paintings might be seen as components of a career-long exploration of the potentialities of a single color. These two recent shows illuminated the extent to which Brainard's art was energized by certain traditional oppositions--such as Ab-Ex machismo and Pop effeteness, or street vulgarity and WASP restraint--and by the fugitive reconciliations that he was able to locate within them.

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