08/08/08
Text: Nik Mercer
Reappropriating popular icons and everyday characters has been around since "mass" was tacked onto "media," but unfortunately, the bulk of us are only familiar with such artists who work and live in the present, like KAWS.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, though, the under-appreciated Joe Brainard spent a great deal of time copping well-known cartoons and images for his own, socially-conscious—and absolutely hilarious—artwork, and he's finally being hailed for his cultural merits in The Nancy Book, out now on Siglio Press.
From 1963 to 1978, Brainard created "more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified by the incongruity of her presence"—and we suspect that's only the tip of the iceberg!
Pick up the 144-page volume right here and be enraptured by Nancy, re-appropriated. A couple sample captions: "If Nancy opened her mouth so wide she fell in"; "If Nancy was an acid freak"; "Picasso Nancy." You get the picture.
Edmund White once wrote that, "Joe Brainard took an unchanging icon of the American norm and inserted her into countless scandalous and fashionable contexts, subtly metamorphosing something that seemed eternal into absurdly contemporary forms. He is as funny as only a philosopher can be." Convinced yet?
