Joe Brainard: The Nancy Book - Hardcover

Joe Brainard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 097995620X ISBN 13: 9780979956201

Publisher: Siglio, 2008

Synopsis

From 1963 to 1978, Joe Brainard created more than 100 artworks that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into a variety of astonishing situations. The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of more than 50 works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Brainard (1942-1994) left Tulsa at eighteen for New York City and soon became a part of the thriving downtown art scene and the New York School of poets and painters. Over his career, Brainard created a prodigious body of work, distinguished by its breadth, originality, and rare alchemy of sensuality and precision, sophistication and sweetness. Admired for his writing as well as his visual art, Brainard wrote the legendary and beloved memoir I REMEMBER, which was hailed as "a masterpiece" by Paul Auster and inspired George Perec's Je me souviens. Brainard's drawings, assemblages, collages, and paintings are in private and museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of America Art, and a major travelling retrospective was organized by the Berkeley Art Museum in 2001 and included a stop at MOMA P.S 1.

From Booklist

Brainard (1942–94) arrived in New York a few years after the pop-art movement brought comics imagery onto the high-art scene. Thus, his comics-appropriation at first blush seems Johnny-come-lately. But he was using comics differently from how the famous pop artists did, not for aesthetic philosophizing but for self-exploration. Brainard was gay, and he often placed the little girl star of Ernie Bushmiller’s graphically bare-bones comic strip Nancy, an embodiment of innocence nonpareil, in graphic heterosexual situations for never-specified motives that might have included dissipating the power of what he wasn’t attracted by. He also subverted high-art seriousness and cultural solemnity with Nancy by placing her smiling-bulb face on, say, all the nudes descending a staircase in Duchamp’s cubist icon,  or in Teddy Roosevelt’s niche on Mount Rushmore. He wrote Dadaist “stories” in which he and Nancy interacted, two of which appear with the 53 Nancy artworks in an album that also attests Brainard’s wit and humility. This is hilarious, not—however personal—self-referential, stuff. --Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Siglio
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 097995620X
• ISBN 13: 9780979956201
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144