Editor’s Picks: Joe Brainard’s Letters Might Break Your Heart

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Joe Brainard, The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard (2024)

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the artist and poet’s death, at 52, after more than a decade in which he had largely retreated from the art world to focus on reading and writing. Like his poems and prose, including his most famous work, I Remember (1970), his letters are sweetly poetic, unassuming, funny and written in the personal style of his art, without much of the hrrmph of pretence. Reading the private notebooks and correspondence of an artist or writer can have an unintended disturbing effect: you often learn what the art was trying to cover up, often ruinous for a reputation – a menacing personality, an awfully cruel private life. But here, Brainard is as affectionate in his letters as he was in the poems he published in his lifetime. ‘Don’t you always feel as I do tho,’ he wrote to his friend Bill Berkson in 1971, ‘that our being together is never as full as it should be, or as it will (someday) be?’ I remember – as his most well-known line begins – that even other people’s letters can break your heart.

ExOrg, Café OTO

Next Saturday, three members of Extended Organ (now ExOrg) will perform at Café OTO in East London. Founded in 1995, the experimental group – which includes the artist Paul McCarthy – is part of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, an influential collective of artists and musicians which emerged in the 1970s. Their spooky, gurgling vocalizations and funky soundscapes (listen, immediately, to XOXO from 2000) pairs well with former band member Mike Kelley’s unmissable retrospective at the Tate Modern (up against the wall, you UK papers who maligned his genius!) and McCarthy’s forthcoming show at Hauser & Wirth in London. A haunting in Dalston: no better a night.

The Traitors, Season 3 (2025)

Only this Christmas did I finally discover the delights of the BBC’s reality competition show, The Traitors, hosted by Claudia Winkleman. Set in a castle in Scotland in the middle of summer, 22 contestants are plunged into an atmosphere of paranoia, recrimination and toxic groupthink after three of their number are secretly given the power to eliminate fellow contestants in the night. The only recourse the so-called ‘faithful’ are given to stop the onslaught is an evening roundtable, where they debate who among them is a supposed ‘traitor’ before voting off the accused. What if they’re wrong? Too bad! This running advertisement for the rule of law is wonderfully distressing and will leave you with the taste of blood in your mouth. As Winkleman warns the contestants who win a coveted evening of immunity from the traitors, ‘I can save you from murder, but not democracy.’ 

^{Main image: Joe Potts, Paul McCarthy, Alex Stevens, Rick Potts. Courtesy: © Fredrik Nilsen}