JOE

Joe Brainard seems to have been drawn to forms of containment, in which the unruly or rupturing experiences of life are brought into the kind of reductive clarity that we often associate with classical modalities . . . . Not surprisingly, along with this gift for distillation, Brainard had an uncanny eye for essential, revelatorydetail; these contribute to the vivid immediacy and spontaneity of his work. In essence, such specific distillations can be understood as a form of abstraction, not the abstraction we affiliate with nonrepresentational art, but something perhaps closer to the poetics we have come to associate with the New York School of poetry: an"aesthetics of attention" as critic Marjorie Perloff has said about its most important avatar, Frank O'Hara . . . . Distillation, specificity, and a keen sense of intimate scale allowed Brainard to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary and, curiously, something like the reverse; he could make the extraordinary seem ordinary.

-- Ann Lauterbach, The Nancy Book


A JOE BRAINARD SAMPLING:


WHAT'S COOKING?

I went to a bake sale in a neighboring town one evening and I
bought some exceptionally delicious bars. I happened to know one
of the ladies that was selling things at the sale so the next day I
called her up and asked her if she could find out for me who made
those bars so I could ask for the recipe. She laughed and laughed.
They were so moist and delicious.

POEM

Sometimes
everything
seems
so
oh, I don't know.

NIGHT

Day, you have gone
and done it again.

TREES

Have you ever stopped to wonder what the world would be life
without any trees? Just a big brown ball.

Do you know how many trees there are in the world? Nobody
does.

There is nothing I love more than trees. Except people and
flowers. (Some people, and some flowers.) Of course, not all trees
are perfect either.


VAN GOGH

Who is Van Gogh?

Van Gogh is a famous painter whose paintings are full of inner
turmoil and bright colors.

Perhaps Van Gosh's most famous painting is "Starry Night": a
landscape painting full of inner turmoil and bright colors.

There are many different sides to Van Gogh, the man.

When Van Gogh fell in love with a girl who didn't return his
love he cut off his ear and gave it to her as a present. It isn't hard
to imagine her reaction.

Van Gogh's portrait of a mailman with a red beard is probably
one of the most sensitive paintings of a mailman ever painted.

It is interesting to note that Van Gogh himself had a red beard.

When Van Gogh was alive nobody liked his paintings except
his brother Theo. Today people flock to see his exhibitions.

Van Gogh once said of himself: "There is something inside of
me -- what is it?"

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