Over the course of fifteen years, Joe Brainard made pencil drawings, gouache paintings, multimedia collages, and far-fetched stories starring Nancy, the spiky-haired perpetual girl usually seen with Sluggo. The Nancy Book documents his project, with 78 illustrations and essays by poets Ann Lauterbach and Ron Padgett. It was published this year by Siglio Press.
Nancy Is a de Kooning, Nancy Is Just an Old Kleenex, Nancy Is a Ball
In the "If Nancy Was..." series, Brainard unharnesses his imagination, submitting Nancy to a dazzling variety of transformations. Wherever the girl with black bumpy hair is and whomever she might have morphed into, the resulting existence is ridiculous and evocative. Brainard's ability to work in different media and styles makes his hypothetical game really work.
High Art and Dirty Comics
Many artists in New York circa early '60s shared a Pop attitude. Andy Warhol had even made a portrait of Nancy in 1961. This isn't the reason Brainard chose her; rather it's a parallel activity. Mixing mass culture and fine art imagery, the work in The Nancy Book incorporates cigarette wrappers, pages from dirty magazines, and Goya reproductions: a very Pop approach. Brainard references de Kooning, amateur porn, the New York skyline, and Cubism.
Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Nancy
In his essay on Brainard's relationship to Nancy, lifelong friend and fellow writer Padgett comments that Brainard chose her as a recurring theme in his work because he appreciated "[creator] Bushmiller's clean, bold line and... agreeably dopey sense of humor." Padgett downplays any identification Brainard, who was gay, may or may not have made with the character, qualifying this explanation as "complicated." The choice was thus aesthetic, and Brainard took the humorous elements to new, ironic levels.
Tulsa Poets in The New York School
Among the collaborative pieces in The Nancy Book, a few of them were by Padgett and Brainard, who both grew up in Oklahoma and moved to New York with friends in the early '60s. In one of their collages, dominated by yellows and oranges, a black-and-white Nancy trots above a building, announcing, "We're having my favorite meal, SHISH KEBAB." A bubble rising from a large Chinese ideogram reads, "I happen to know he's an orphan." It's a goofy, dreamlike moment.
More Collaborations with Ted Berrigan and Frank O'Hara
Poet, art critic, and MOMA curator Frank O'Hara and Brainard collaborated on a collage that's included in the book. It also feels Pop, with its multiple frames, a bingo card, an X, and Nancy holding a bone proclaiming, "Guess where I found this?!!" Poet Ted Berrigan, who came to New York via Tulsa, created the unsettling "Personal Nancy Love" comic with Brainard.
Joe Brainard the Writer
Anyone familiar with Brainard's influential memoir I Remember will recognize the strategy of making meaning through accretion, both in the visual and textual pieces. And the texts and the visual work function according to their own wild logic. In one piece, Brainard makes liberal use of quotation marks that insinuate:
Nancy wanted to be "that" kind of girl. I at "that" age didn't know what I wanted to be. But I certainly didn't want to be "that." Nancy did.
As with I Remember, Joe Brainard's genius, humor, and wild creativity all are expressed through accumulation and the interaction between the parts within a larger series. The seventy-plus illustrations and the texts in The Nancy Book are funny, thoughtful, sassy, and beautiful. Fans will love it; newcomers will be converted.
The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. Siglio Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-9799562-0-1
There's a bit more about Joe Brainard at the Art Books blog.
