Serial Realism: Poetic Narrative in Perspectives

Serial Realism

For late-modernist painters opposed (in critic Clement Greenberg’s terms) to “using art to conceal art,” perspective-based realism proved the apex of vulgarity (“Modernist” 68). Similarly, for prominent advocates of postwar poetic experiment, the adoption of a first-person “I” limits a poem’s scope to one of narcissistic confession and/or self-inflating insight. Yet this reductive preference for the abstract over the representational gets problematized with the advent of Pop—both in Pop painting, and in Pop poetics.¹ For just as the serial repetition of Warhol’s readymade icons produces as dramatic a dispersal of single-point perspective as any “flattening” of the picture-plane ever could, so Pop lyricism provides as provocative a critique of Confessionalist norms as does any overtly “opaque” text (Greenberg, Collected 29).²

Of course, Pop lyricism’s fusion of prepackaged data and perspectival multiplicity remains less renowned than does Pop painting’s.³ But by reconsidering the narrative complexities of Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop output, I aim to recast artist/poet Joe Brainard’s undervalued I Remember text (1970–75) as an astute consolidation of Pop poetics—of a polyvalent form with (potentially) broad appeal: as endearing, anecdote-based assemblage; as shrewd art/literary hybrid; and as pointed commentary upon prevailing poetic paradigms.

Crucial to Pop-art’s departure from static, single-point perspective—to its construction of a dynamic, multiplicitous perspectivism—is its reintroduction of narrative trope within the avowedly anti-narrative discourses of postwar painting and, later, poetry. Crucial to the establishment of a critical vocabulary with which to better analyze Pop poetics is an importation of the keenest conceptual-apparati concerning Pop painting. Since Brainard considered himself primarily a visual artist (an artist more comfortable, it is worth noting, with the readymade materials of the assemblagist than with the neo-classical-painter’s palette to which he aspired), Brainard can serve as propitious focal-point for further comparisons between these fields.⁴ In what follows, I thus want to suggest (using scholar Wendy Steiner’s study of the convoluted relationship between perspective-based realism and realist-narrative’s repeated subject as my model) that Brainard’s Pop-inflected, serial-realist “autobiography” fuses tendencies toward epiphanic insight, imagistic mimesis, disjunctive collage, and matte alloverness—all within the guise of accessible, first-person narrative.

Serial Perspective

Half a millennium before Warhol’s, Lichtenstein’s, and Brainard’s birth, Renaissance treatises concerning single-point perspective (here recounted by Steiner) proscribe narrative progress, even as they establish the proto-photographic template for all subsequent conventions regarding “realist” representation:

The logic of the Albertian model, in which a picture was to represent the view of a perceiver at a fixed distance from the scene viewed, demanded that the perception be atemporal, a single moment of vision.

(144)

Like the ecstatic lyric moment, the perspective-based image claims to offer a crystallization of acute perception—amid the eclipse of story.⁵ In Leonardo’s Annunciation, for instance, the painter constructs Gabriel’s angel-wings (according to popular legend) by copying from a live bird in flight, and thus conflates the sacred, hypersonic message with the artist’s singular “moment of vision.” In The School of Athens, Raphael convokes several centuries of philosophers amid a single, spectacular assembly, thereby suggesting that the most privileged pictorial-instant remains an “atemporal” one. Exemplars of Renaissance single-point perspective, Leonardo’s and Raphael’s paintings collapse complex narrative into dynamically constructed tableaux vivants.⁶ “Fixed,” focalized distance precludes the possibility for durational drift.

To restate this principle in terms borrowed from twentieth-century poetic scholarship: the detached instantaneity of Imagistic description (“Petals on a wet, black bough” [Pound 11]), the tortuous simultaneity of Confessionalist retrospection (“One dark night . . . I watched for love cars . . . . My mind’s not right” [Lowell 191]) can appear impossible to reconcile. And one way to evade this contradictory legacy (of “objective” immediacy, of “expressive” reminiscence) is to shun mimetic representation and/or psychological reflection altogether—as Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman call for in 1977’s “Politics of...