Cellophane Bricks, A Life in Visual Arts delivers a long overdue refresh to art writing. “A book of short stories arrives in your hands as a box full of stuff,” writes Jonathan Lethem.
Lethem is celebrated as a genre-bending writer for his novels (Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude among them), novellas, short stories, essays, and a Marvel Comics series, but Cellophane Bricks is the first collection of his art writing, an ongoing exploration that spans over two decades. It is a treasure chest.
His personal entanglement with visual artists (his father, brother, classmates, friends) are at the source of the writing. In the introduction, Lethem looks back. “I truly never meant to write so many pieces like these. I didn’t believe I knew how, to begin with. When artists first asked me to make some words to accompany their artworks or exhibitions, I claimed to have a strict policy of meeting their request only with stories, with fictions,” he writes.
“I couldn’t do art writing, or perhaps I wanted to invent another version of what art writing would be. So. I wrote what I always wrote: scenes and situations and voices, characters and set pieces, sprung from my response to the art.”
For example, the piece on Brooklyn painter and collagist Fred Tomaselli takes the form of a letter to a friend about his warehouse studio visit and their burger lunch. The Homage to Perry Hoberman alternates dreamlike chase scenes, attempts to get through to Missing Persons, and three “visits” with the artist that involve his website, answering machine and robot. His experiences with Walt Disney and with Marvel's Steve Gerber coalesce around a proposal by a student, Lily Allan, to renaturalize Disneyland.
More than 40 tales, which Lethem now sees as “memory-pieces,” are gathered from works that first appeared in exhibition catalogs, materials or monographs; in magazines such as McSweeney’s, Bomb and Cabinet; or publications for Rizzolli, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Frick Collection and the Royal Academy of Art, London. Others appear here for the first time.
The opening and introductions to each of five sections (Fictions of Art, Graffiti and Comics, Book, Ecstasy and At Home) stitch the writings into a larger narrative, an autobiographical reveal from childhood to the present through the lens of artworks, most of them in Lethem’s personal collection.
Lethem exchanges writing for artwork. They are reproduced with each story on the same matte paper as the text, giving the lo-fi images newsprint pulpiness and muted colour. Their pairing with the texts reinforces the dance that moves through the book between the building partners of cellophane, language – by turns ephemeral and wrinkly- and bricks, art -persistently dense and material.
If you are in the Los Angeles, Calif. area before the end of June, take in the exhibition Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play, Contemporary Art and Art Writing, an offshoot of Cellophane Bricks that features art from or related to Lethem’s own collection, at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, where Lethem is a professor of creative writing and English. ■
OTHER ART BOOK REVIEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
- Bookmark: Worlds on Paper
- Bookmark: Textile Universes
- Bookmark: Memorable Murals
- Bookmark: Outsider Art of Canada
- Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné
- Bookmark: New Book about Bertram Brooker
- Bookmark: All the Beauty in the World
- The Role of Textiles in Relation to Art
- The Quest for the Meaning of Art
- Quick Pick - J.E.H. MacDonald: Up Close
- Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision
- The Role of Textiles in Relation to Art
- Surreal Spaces: The Art and Life of Leonora Carrington
- Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael
- Bianca Bosker: The Quest for the Meaning of Art
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