Braindeath
Artist
Ann Mikolowski
(American, 1940-1999)
Datec. 1981
MediumInk on paper
DimensionsImage Size: 8 1/2 × 11 1/4 in. (21.6 × 28.6 cm)
Frame Size: 16 × 19 in. (40.6 × 48.3 cm)
ClassificationsDrawing
Credit LineGift of Ken Mikolowski, 2009
Object numberUAC3931
DescriptionDrawing was printed with a poem by Warren Jay Hecht for the Alternative Press.To paraphrase Chekov, a gun introduced on page one of a poem should be fired on page two, and hard-bitten poet Warren Jay Hecht makes it happen in his short story Braindeath, published by Ken and Ann Mikolowski’s Alternative Press in 1981. The narrator and his friend Bud, both already drunk, have stopped at a bar on their way to the racetrack. Bud, we’re told, has a .357 Magnum in his glovebox (“stainless,” Hecht says, describing the handgun’s finish accurately, and its nature ironically). When a drunken patron lewdly gropes the friends’ favorite waitress, the Magnum appears in Bud’s hand — and we learn, in lurid terms, at least one reason for the poem’s title. (The narrator, who has grabbed the offender by the throat, is “left holding a necktie and a face.”) Ann Mikolowski, known for her meticulously stippled pen drawings as well as her finely detailed miniature portrait paintings, provided this illustration of Bud’s weapon. In print, the drawing wraps around the cover of the pamphlet in which Hecht’s poem is printed; the barrel of the gun rises from the lower left corner to the upper right, with the trigger guard resting against the bottom edge. The image is so blatantly phallic one wonders if Mikolowski might not be poking fun at this uber-macho poem.
Text by Sean Bieri
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Born in Detroit in 1940, one-time Wayne State art student Ann Mikolowski was acclaimed for her small but sensitively painted, nearly photorealistic portraits of her friends and fellow Cass Corridor artists, including those of Aris Koutroulis, Gordon Newton, and collector James Duffy, which now reside at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the ‘60s she and her husband Ken founded the Alternative Press, a letterpress publishing and mail art project that lasted for thirty years, and featured the work of countless local and nationally known artists, authors, and poets. She died after a prolonged battle with cancer in 1999.
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