“I grew up in a house full of paintings and books,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in his introduction to Cellophane bricks: a life in visual culture (2024). “My father did the paintings and my mother tied the books to me.” From this artistic-literary context, Lethem has become a novelist, essayist and writer of news and, as the texts of this book show, an aficionado of day out of day.
The “Fictions of Art” section of the book, the first of the five, presents examples of Lethem which wrote in parallel, rather than directly, an artist's work. “I could not do art writing, or perhaps I wanted to invent another version of what artistic writing would be,” he explains, “therefore, I wrote what I have always written: scenes and situations and voices, characters and sets, spring from my response to art.”
The resulting text is not an ekphrastic writing, and it is not the kind of simple fiction of the genus Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, Richard Russo and Company wrote in response to The dark paintings of Maine of Linden Frederick. The play by Lethem on Fred Tomaselli, for example, takes the form of a letter to a friend describing a visit to the artist's studio in Brooklyn. During the relationship of their interactions, it offers critical reading. “His work is festive,” says Lethem, “and I find him explosively happy even when the drugs or some other images take a somewhat disturbing suron.” But the rest of the room is more entertaining than unconcisition, a report of their day in Williamsburg who includes lunch at Peter Luger.
The texts of Lethem are often wonderfully absurd, echoing his fiction, like his story as a surreal detective, Pistol, with occasional music (1994). In A tribute to Perry HobermanA new media artist who often incorporates machines into his facilities, he offers a series of funny thumbnails. Here is one: “You call missing people and get your own answering machine. You are waiting to leave a message, but the beep never comes. The beep never comes. The beep never comes. BIP.” This funny farce aligns with hoberman concentration on people and technology.
Part of the pleasure of this collection is the diversity of artistic practices of the covers of Lethem. In a section, he pays homage to graffiti, who, he writes, “fits like the blade of a knife between creation and destruction, between advertising and stealth, between the word and the image, the cartoon, the icon and the hieroglyph” – an eloquent way of describing this form of fleeting art. He also highlights his love of comics and cartoons, “objectified books” and the stonewriting in stone from the Italian verbo-visual artist Mirella Bentivoglio, among many other subjects.
The collection ends with two essays linked to the author's father. In the first, “my father started a painting” (which also serves as a preface to a New book by Richard Brown Lethem's poems, Roots, stones and luggage (2023)), he shares memories of the way in which the aforementioned childhood cleaning with his studio and his library shaped his vision of the world.
Lethem admits in advance to suffer from an artist's desire. “I am sure that I am not the first writer,” he thinks, “to aspire to the apparently more anchored and absolute situation of the painter or the sculptor, who lives what seems to be an enviable area of crafts, routine and expertise.” As a painter formerly Upon-a Time, by identifying with visual artists, Lethem “looking for a lost self”, as he says. With this collection of various tributes to painters, sculptors, etc., it is on the right way to find it.
Cellophane bricks: a life in visual culture (2024) by Jonathan Lethem, published by Booksis available for online purchase and bookstores.
