The Library of America has just published “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,” edited by Brainard’s friend and biographer, the poet Ron Padgett. Brainard is one of those figures—in his art, his writing, and, one gathers, his person—whose primary genius was to give long-sought relief from overbearing works of art, pieces of writing, and people. For their friendliness, their air of openness, their distaste for guile and pretense, Brainard’s productions have a soothing quality; the other “New York School” writers and artists seem almost reverent and self-serious next to him.

He is better known as an artist: a maker of frisky collages, a painter of exquisite male nudes, an assembler of miniatures. But he wrote beautifully, especially in his iconic connect-the-dots memoir, “I Remember.” This is the book that launched a thousand creative writing exercises, but its simple form—a hundred and fifty-five paragraphs of various lengths, all beginning with the phrase “I Remember”—is still, when you revisit it, a stark surprise. I would make a case for “I Remember” as one of the twenty or so most important American autobiographies, important for its air of unimportance and for its mingling of cultural bric-a-brac with sexual frankness and self-revelation.

The word “nice” is usually reserved for faint praise, but niceness too needs a bard, and in Brainard it found one. His writing specializes in the exploration of the minor emotions often slighted by “serious” writers: contentment rather than elation, glumness rather than despair, horniness instead of passion, and, everywhere, a non-existential, completely ordinary loneliness. Joe was one of the nicest artists I have ever known,” wrote his friend John Ashbery. “Nice in person and also nice as an artist.”

Brainard moved to New York in 1963 at the age of twenty-one. Growing up in Tulsa, he had won every local art competition. His drawings were used in newspaper ads for local stores. His parents, who were not at all like the parents most gay, artistic teen-agers in the fifties had to endure, kept a scrapbook of his prizes. Mr. Brainard, externally interchangeable with the other working-class fathers in the neighborhood, had in fact dreamed of being an artist himself. Brainard designed his mother’s dresses; once she sewed her little boy an evening dress to wear. When high school became deeply un-fun in all the apportioned ways, a group of graduate students at the University of Tulsa (among them the poet Ted Berrigan, later an important friend), recognizing Brainard and his cohort for the eager culture-sponges they were, invited them into their rooms and told them about Jackson Pollock.

Brainard’s work, which often arranges into tart collage the stock images from a fifties childhood, is partly about managing the somewhat inconvenient reality of his survivable past: plausible parents, some artsy friends, zero tragedy. It was no picnic growing up gay in Tulsa, I’m sure; but what set him apart was the fact that things had actually not gone all that badly for him. His air of gratitude must have seemed an eerie novelty in the New York art scene of the time, where demiurges like Pollock and Willem de Kooning had made the idea of greatness salient and a group of upstarts—Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns—were swinging for the fences.

His art could be confused for Pop, but it had none of the superciliousness and smugness that makes ninety-nine per cent of Pop so aggravating. He writes in his diary of wanting to paint “an arrangement of Modern Americanized bottled, wrapped or boxed items” such as the “7-Up bottle, Pioneer Instant Coffee and a Tareyton dual cigarette.” He said he sought “the real,” associating reality with whatever seemed least likely to make it into a painting or collage. This is an important and quite radical definition of “the real,” one he shared with John Ashbery and others. It makes Brainard’s compositions, so jammed with bric-a-brac, hard to classify: neither “ironic” nor “sincere,” neither campy nor cool.

Most people will buy this book for “I Remember” and discover, as I did, hundreds of pages of other stuff Brainard did along the way: diary and journal entries, cartoons, poems, and, my favorite, “Some Drawings of Some Notes To Myself.” These are mainly to-do lists and lists of resolutions of various kinds; you have to imagine the items in one piece entitled “New Life” written, in Brainard’s cartoonish handwriting, on two pieces of drawn looseleaf paper:




The list continues; the final item on it pertains not to “life” but to “art”:


We all know what happens to lists like these: creatures of the moment, like mayflies or rainbows, they vanish as soon as their instant of anxiety and good intentions passes. Brainard drew these little self-improvement curricula for the same reason other artists paint sunsets: because they are so short lived. They suggest the comic ways art compensates for life’s failures; my guess is the only resolution in “New Life” he kept was to use the dictionary. How much better, safer, and more achievable “art” seems when compared with the obstacles “life” throws in our way. Here is Brainard’s “Queer Bars” in its entirety:

After an unsuccessful night, going around to queer bars, I come home, and say to myself, “Art.”

By the mid-seventies Brainard had started making his extraordinary “miniatures,” perhaps his best-known works. Like aerated collages, these compositions organized thousands of matchbook-sized images (some of these tiny images were themselves collages) into rank and file, with lots of space in between. Fifteen hundred of these little works were exhibited in one show. The effect was to force the viewer to inspect, one item at a time and at the intimate range usually reserved for acts of close-up reading, the enormous yield of Brainard’s imagination. You had, on the one hand, tininess, and on the other, plenitude: the experience was of being drawn in over and over to find, in these small images, the even smaller images they contained. Brainard, who had a taste for absorption that led him, in his last ten years, to give up making art and devote himself to chain smoking and reading Victorian novels, had found a form of art that resembled both activities.

Whenever I’ve seen one of these assemblages in person, I am struck by the fact that people treat them like enormous pages, “reading” them left to right, one row at a time. Once you get that close to something, you expect a revelation; but many of the images themselves (sugar packets, goldfish bowls, a window, a TV) are so intentionally banal that you must divorce the idea of intimacy from the idea of intensity.

The exact verbal equivalent of these multiple-miniature compositions was “I Remember.” Here is a representative passage from the book:

I remember little records with big holes (45’s) and being able to carry a whole stack of them between thumb and forefinger.

I remember chipped beef and gravy on toast.

I remember, in Boston, figuring out that a street with lots of antique shops might be good for cruising, and so I did a lot of walking up and down it (“window shopping”), but, as I was afraid to look at anybody, I didn’t do too well. (The understatement of the year.) So home I’d go with my “handy work”; often aided by men’s wear ads in back issues of Playboy magazine. Which was no easy feat, considering how carefully men’s fashion photos avoid any hint of a body underneath. (Underwear ads the most infuriating of all.) However, they did slip up now and then. Like once I remember a very sexy two-page bathing suit spread that got a lot of use. And (in reference to “no easy feat”) that was long before it ever occurred to me that a little soap and water, or Vaseline, or something, might help.

I remember (early New York City days) seeing a man close off one side of his nostrils with a finger, while blowing snot out of the other nostril onto the street. (Shocking.)

I remember seeing an old lady pee in a subway car recently and it wasn’t shocking at all, I’m sorry to say. One does learn to draw blanks: a compliment to nothing.

I remember French bikinis.

I remember DDT.

Every new item forces a slight adjustment of our established sympathies, a little up or a little down. Cultural boilerplate alternates with the most extraordinary confidences and intimacies, so that we can no longer tell what’s what. How odd that Vaseline, the waste byproduct of oil rigs, has become synonymous with all kinds of sex. Much of “I Remember” I remember, since it provides a cultural highlight reel, from chipped beef to DDT; and yet the details accumulate into a picture of the completely unique soul Joe Brainard seems to have been.

Joe Brainard’s “Untitled (Bicycle Ace),” 1975. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.