Joe Brainard : Studio Visit
It’s early January, 1974. I am standing in front of a building on 6th Avenue in the 20s and push a button.
Let in, Joe Brainard greets me on the stairs as I am walking up to his second floor studio. Turns out he paints in what feels like a small apartment with furniture, though it is called a loft. Thin, breathy (sensitive as Marilyn Monroe in some curious way), I am aware that I am interrupting his work. I’ve called him out of the blue. We don’t know each other. I’m not planning to stay long. But I am leaving town the next day, grateful for the visit. Joe offers me a can of Dr. Pepper.
I’ve admired his drawings and writings in the few things of his I’d seen, and now it is a pleasure to be in his nervous but benign presence. Around the two small rooms, perched on sofa and arm chairs and leaning against a few walls, is an array of new paintings, all of which feature Kenward Elmslie’s dog Whippoorwill, a whippet. It feels as if the dog is actually in the room with us, there are so many ways to see his body and limbs, his narrow head curled up asleep, or looking out at the painter. I don’t know what I expected to see in Joe’s studio, but this use of a dog as sole subject for a series of paintings is probably the last thing anticipated.
The paintings aren’t big; they are sleek, beautiful, accurate. There may have been photos of Whippoorwill lying around but I don’t remember seeing any, if there were. Joe lights a cigarette and smokes as we talk about Vermont, the dog and the care with which he paints him. He doesn’t say anything about the difficulty of capturing Whippoorwill’s lively presence. The paintings are considered, elegant, sincere. They aren’t fast works, but they aren’t fussy, either.. Color, line and touch. Light and dark. Representation as noble triumph. In short, the pictures are alive. Joe will show them in his next exhibition.
Now it’s nearly twenty years later, mid-June 1993, and I’m standing on Greene St when Joe steps out of his building draped in an Armani sport-coat, the shoulders a little too wide for his thin frame. And before heading over to Kenward’s house, Joe hands me an envelope. Inside the envelope are twelve drawings, all letter size, all from a group of drawings used to illustrate Sung Sex, Kenward’s latest book. I have invited Joe to be in a group show at my gallery, and though I am under the impression he isn’t making much art anymore, the drawings are exactly what I want. Efficient, witty, playful: never less than smart. People will not only love them, they will buy them.
“What shall I charge for these, Joe”?
“$150 each,” he says.
“Easy as pie,” I say, thanking him.
And with a parting smile off he goes up Greene Street. His walk is loose, arms swinging at his sides. Joe is comfortable in his own skin. After twenty steps or so he turns around and waves goodbye. That’s the last time I ever see him.
RAUSCHENBERG: Last Laugh
Robert Rauschenberg and his crew of three or four guys will arrive at La Gare d’Austerlitz around ten pm on a fall night in 1973. I drive my little four-door Fiat to pick them up and take them to their hotel. Greeting them in the station, I can see that Bob is tired. Hungover, and tired. He says, “I’m ok, but I’ll be better tomorrow,” as if he always expects to be up, to put on a good show. They’ve just spent a short week in a small French town in Le Massif Central, experimenting with hand-made paper at the shop where it is made. They’ve pulled some prints, among other things.
But they are in Paris now because he is going to open a show at La Galerie Sonnabend in less than a week. I’ve already sent out the announcements. On Tuesday morning at eleven a.m. I slice through Paris on my mobylette, and park in front of the gallery in time to see Bob and his crew unloading a van. Out the backdoor of the van, onto the sidewalk, tumble many empty boxes of cardboard. These boxes once served to contain refrigerators, appliances, and furniture of all kinds, but have been thrown away. Picked up off the streets of Paris, this now broken-down, often flattened, refuse is about to become something else. This nothing material is about to begin reverberating in that infamous space between life and art.
I open the door and we bring the cardboard into the empty gallery.
Over the next few days, Rauschenberg and crew begin to select boxes they like. They hold this junk up against the wall, look at it, consider the presence of words, letter fragments, logos or tape, and save ones they like. The not quite randomly-generated geometric shapes of flaps and corners--flat or raised sections (the boxed parts)--will generate sculptural possibilities in low-relief. Many of their backsides, all but flat against the walls, are painted with day-glo colors, so that at their edges they give off an eerie glow.
Rauschenberg likes to sip Jack Daniels on the rocks while working. I remember being sent to buy bottles of it, though his assistants remained sober by day. Rauschenberg talks to any friendly visitor in the gallery, while one of his guys applies the day-glo paint, or strips tape from a box, or adjusts any number of little things. Collaboration is king. His helpers are artists, too.
Meanwhile, many a joke, a laugh, a happy guffaw can be heard as this cardboard is transformed from useless crap into art. Over the course of several days the gallery is turned into a show of new works by Robert Rauschenberg. And each evening at seven p.m. as the gallery is closing, Bob looks at Ileana Sonnabend and asks her for enough cash so he can take his crew out to dinner.
One afternoon they are laughing about the restaurant they’d eaten at the night before and Bob says, “It’s my favorite restaurant in Paris, and I have no idea what the food tastes like.”
Years later, when, upon occasion, I see one of his re-purposed cardboard works in low-relief at a gallery or museum, I am always surprised by how elegant they look. And I hear his bibulous laugh.
McQueen, Chamberlain, Monk
It was not what McQueen was wearing, it was how he talked.
Ticket in hand, I stood in line waiting to get in the Monterey Jazz Festival on a late afternoon in early September, 1964. Standing behind me was a woman with chestnut-colored hair, and behind her, with his date, looking exactly like himself, was TV & film star Steve McQueen. Seems that this fictional Josh Randall, of “Wanted Dead or Alive” fame, after 93 episodes on TV and a role in “The Magnificent Seven” in 1960, and his date, were surprised that they knew the woman standing in front of them. They began to exchange small-talk, starting with the surprise of being there at the same time. Then Steve asked her, “You got your admission, baby”? So effortlessly hip was his sound—the exemplar of cool, the avatar of anti-hero ease--that it should be spelled, “You gotcher ‘mission, babe?” The street bop of knowing was his sound. The woman he asked was the same height, same age, and same hair color as his date. The two women could have been sisters.
“Yes,” she said, lifting her left hand, showing him a ticket.
Aware of me looking at him and listening, Steve’s eyes, missing nothing, stayed focused on the two women.
Over a beige checked shirt he was wearing a light jacket. The cut of his fair hair, never long, never short, fitted his head perfectly.
Once inside the gate, I wandered forward, passing a grandstand on the right, filling with fans, and on the left a sea of chairs arrayed in the middle of a vast outdoor setting. At one end of the grandstand, standing not just tall but very tall, was Wilt Chamberlain. Did he like or dislike his nickname “The Stilt”? He looked out over the scene like a sentinel, clearly waiting for someone to join him.
And then, for a second, he looked down at me. And I looked up at him. I couldn’t help but smile. I was wearing pants cut off at the knees. And Wilt was wearing short pants too! Not the kind he wore on the basketball court, but not slacks, either. My cut-offs were cast-offs; Wilt’s were tailored to fit his extraordinary seven foot two inch tall body. With hair cut short, and quiet eyes, his arms seemed to hang from his broad shoulders as if from somewhere north of the Canadian border, only to appear, finally, half-way down the coast of California as beautiful hands, doing nothing but standing there at a Jazz Festival.
I thought of Wilt dunking with ease, of his scoring 100 points in one game, and of his many defensive battles with Celtic Bill Russell. Then I remembered Wilt missing free throws. And reading about the mirror on his bedroom ceiling, and of this bachelor’s legendary accumulation of lovers. Covering his legs, up to a point just below his knees, he sported expensive beige socks.
I wanted to get closer to the stage, so walked farther down an aisle, finally finding a seat in the middle. Next up on stage was none other than the Thelonious Monk Quartet. There were other groups that evening, no less on the bill than Monk, but I don’t remember them.
Thelonious hadn’t yet appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but would soon. I knew the songs, sometimes by name, but always by Monk’s legendary time and accents. At one point deep into his set, while Charlie Rouse was taking a long tenor solo, Monk got up and started dancing, spinning trance-like around the stage in perfect time to the rhythm and feel in Rouse’s solo. It was something Monk did for a while, this dancing on stage, until not long after Monterey, when the Time mag article appeared in print, making particular mention of the pianist’s free-spirited Terpsichorean thing. Only then did Monk stop doing it.
Rouse is winding down, playing the last measures of his solo, Monk’s still spinning like a dervish in the middle of the stage. Where is he? Will he come back? His arms are flying, his feet are free. Then just as Rouse plays his last note, Monk bolts toward the piano, and while still upright, hits a flat-fingered chord with both hands in the exact perfect groove, a split-second before his body slides onto the piano bench and the beat goes on.
“Timing” as a word ain’t nearly strong enough to account for the dramatic effect of that chord, of Monk’s body in space, of that slide on the bench, of the hat still on his head. Of the audible gasps and serious applause that followed.
