Matt Wolf

I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard
2012
HD video, b/w and color, sound
24:35 min

February 21 – May 4, 2025
(Schaufenster am Hofgarten & online)

Modesty, whimsy, and clarity of design grace the work of Joe Brainard (1941–1994), an American artist and writer whose evocations of memory and desire perhaps found their greatest expression in his 1970 memoir-poem I Remember. Composed of a sequence of brief recollections that jump between past and present, seemingly rising to the surface from Brainard’s subconscious, the poem’s standardized format admits a variety of images and feelings: “I remember how much, in high school, I wanted to be handsome and popular... I remember Greyhound buses at night… I remember leaning up against walls in queer bars...” These depictions of an American past are redeployed to bring a queer narrative at risk of being forgotten back into the slipstream of history. Brainard’s many drawings, collages, and paintings, as well as his short essays and verbal-visual collaborations were celebrated during his lifetime before he stopped making art in the mid-1980s and eventually died of AIDS at the age of 52.

Filmmaker Matt Wolf returns to the iconic poem in his film I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard, which is on view as part of the onsite and online series Schaufenster. His archival montage combines found vintage adolescent imagery, including from sex education films, with audio recordings of Brainard reading from his poem, as well as an interview with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the poet Ron Padgett. The film’s idiosyncratic edit is akin to the collaged quality of both Brainard’s poetry and paintings. The result is an inventive biography, of sorts, of Joe Brainard, and an elliptical dialog about friendship, nostalgia, and the strange wonders of memory.