Jonathan Lethem Discusses His Abstract and Novelistic Book About Art

Jonathan Lethem’s Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture is not a conventional collection of writings about art. Lethem is most famous for writing novels such as Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, but he has also written prolifically on art, which he approaches art less as a critic and more as a fiction writer trying to imagine his way into works. In doing so, he offers keys to new worlds—or at least a world a good deal weirder and more abstract than our own.

Some of the essays in Cellophane Bricks are easy to follow, though just as many of the pieces read like impressionistic prose poems or refracted flights of fancy that connect to their subject matter in obscure ways. As Lethem writes in an introduction to the book, recalling his beginnings as a writer commissioned by artists to muse over their work for catalogs, gallery materials, and other contexts, “The situation, that of running my language up against the mystery of the artifacts—which didn’t require direct description, let alone explanation—kept revealing interesting new problems.” Among the artists engaged in Cellophane Bricks are Fred Tomaselli, Gregory Crewsdon, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Richard Brown Lethem (the author’s father), Rachel Harrison, Jim Shaw, and many more.

ARTnews recently spoke with Lethem about his approach to thinking about art, arranging bookshelves as installations, and growing up with art all around him. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

ARTnews: You have been writing about art in different ways for a while. What led to you to compile work in this mode now?

Jonathan Lethem: I grew up thinking I was going to be a visual artist but, after some art school, switched to writing. I always thought I was going to be a writer like I was a painter: I wanted to make imaginative things, not be a scholar or a nonfiction writer or a journalist. There was some critical writing I loved—Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis—but I didn’t picture myself ever writing about other people’s films or paintings or songs or anything.

But I loved hanging out with artists and was kind of a vicarious participant. My studio-visiting life was very meaningful to me, so when the invitation first came from a couple people for their catalogs or gallery materials, I was like, “No, I don’t have that muscle. On the other hand, if you want me to write you a story, I can try to do that.” I did it for the strangeness and amusement and comradeship—for the hanging-out of it. And I liked the results, because they were stories that weren’t like the stories I’d written before. They had a relationship to my thinking and talking about art.

Then I started to be more deliberate about it. Anytime an artist cruised me, I would say, “Well, I do this thing. It’s not like what you’re asking me to do, but…” I started to propagate it, and I accompanied it with a barter vow. I was like, “Let’s take money out of the equation. I’ll do it for a piece, even a tiny piece, a sketch or a scribble.” That could be seen as a very canny on my part, because the art is worth a lot more than the writing. [Laughs.]

Looking back over it as a body of work, does writing about or in tandem with art bring certain things out of you that you might not be otherwise inclined to do?

There have been constant surprises and revelatory moments, from the earliest examples to when I felt like there was a method to it. They’re very weirdly personal pieces. From the beginning, I kept trying to write about other artists, and somehow they were reaching into me. I would go to someone’s studio—sometimes an artist I knew well, sometimes a new encounter—and would think I could do the Vulcan mind-meld and speak in tongues about their practice. But the only mind I really know is my own, so I would end up making these weird amalgam creatures. The characters in the book are some sort of inter-subjective creatures made from my guesswork about another person and their practice, their worldview, what their studio life is like—and, of course, me. I’m trying to meditate my way into the brain of the artwork, but I keep bumping into myself.

How collaborative is the process? What kinds of conversation are involved?

It really ranges. The first people—Perry Hoberman and Fred Tomaselli and others at the start—were friends, and I was always talking to them about artistic concepts or resonating with their practice and their way of looking at the world. There was a lot of immersion before I set out to make something out of it on the page. Then, as I became bolder and the fact that I sometimes wrote for artists got around, I would be approached by someone who I didn’t have a relationship with. Sometimes there’d be a very scant or oblique encounter. Nan Goldin and I have still never met in person. She’s elusive in some ways, but I’d grown up with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book that I’d projected my fascination into. By one means or another, I have to find my way into a strong emotional relationship that feels exceptional to me to do a piece.

The Gregory Crewsdon piece is one of the most extensive, and it involves quotations from Italo Calvino, Robert Smithson, Lauren Berlant, Donald Barthelme, and others. How would you describe the process of writing that one?

The Crewsdon one was a real watershed, in the sense that I got professional about this thing that had been kind of a fugitive practice. It felt much bigger because it was for a Rizzoli coffee-table compendium of Gregory’s work and they wanted a big piece of writing. So I was like, “OK, I better believe in this method now, because I’m doing it not for some folding material that a gallery is going to hand out for free or a limited-print-run monograph or something. This is going to be in a canonical book.”

There was also something funny and hugely empowering about it, which is that Gregory and I knew each other as teenagers in Brooklyn. Even though I hadn’t been a studio visitor and we hadn’t seen each other a great deal as adults, I felt I had a superpower: I could relate to him the way I relate to my feral street-kid schoolmates and friends from the 1970s and ‘80s in Brooklyn. I was like, “I know where you’re from. Even if all these pictures are set in Western Massachusetts, I know it’s a city kid looking at New England.”

It also came around a time when I wrote “The Ecstasy of Influence,” an important essay for me where I tried to de-sublimate or un-disguise the element of pastiche, appropriation, and collage in my own writing practice. I felt like it was important to talk about that, and it involved overt borrowing and then giving citations and saying, “Look, this paragraph in my writing actually comes from somebody else’s writing.” It coincided with what I thought about Gregory’s photographs, which I felt also involved a lot of quotation from Hollywood film imagery. I wanted to think about sourcing and influence explicitly, and it became an appropriated piece, in part.

How about the Richard Prince stories? How did you wind up writing about a fantastical tale about traveling with Bob Dylan?

That piece stands slightly apart from the others in that it was written to introduce a book of Richard Prince’s writings [Richard Prince: Collected Writings, published in 2011]. By that time, I was looking for chances to play my game. Richard Prince got the got the joke, in a way, and I saw his work as having a provocative, sort of shameless, quality, so again I was doing an appropriation piece. A lot of the jokes in that just came from internet joke sites, and he never gave me a single piece of feedback or pushback. He just ran it exactly as I sent it to him. Prince’s work dares you to say: “You just pasted that in from somewhere else, right?”

You write about books in your surroundings being installations of a sort, and how rearranging them is something of a meditational practice. Has the nature of that changed for you over time? How actively do you tend that garden, so to speak?

It’s pretty active. I have residue from two parts of my life that I cherish and kind of mourn. One is that I was a sculptor as well as a painter, and the other is that I was a bookseller. I worked in used bookstores growing up. It’s really the only job I’ve ever had besides being an author and professor. I still feel like a bookseller. I like alphabetizing books and putting delicate dustjackets into plastic wrappers to protect them. I’m very into the materiality and physical quality of books. There’s some place where that intersects for me with collecting artworks, and my house shows the evidence of the way I nest them all together. It’s part of a curatorial impulse. Rooms of books, bookstores, libraries, and personal collections are beautiful things—an installation that models a person’s brain or sensibility. I’m not just a collector of books, of each of them alone, but I’m kind of collector of the plurality: rooms of books, different ways of storing them and exhibiting them and showing them, and the dynamic of them living together and talking to each other.

You write about living with some of your father’s work, like the painting Kansas City Star, and also a bronze piece by George Burk, about which you wrote “It’s a pretty strange artwork to take for granted, but I have to remember to find it strange.” Is there something in your experience of living with certain works for decades that you’re able to articulate or describe?

It’s sort of about embodiment, the intersection of our expressive selves, or these abstract impulses to make non-utilitarian gestures and present them to one another, to write a book or make a sculpture or make a painting. They also are, in a way, pieces of bodies or pieces of time. Kansas City Star being in my parents’ bedroom when I was growing up meant I studied it in the same mysterious way that you index: What is a parent? What is a bedroom? What are they doing in there when I’m not here? What is life? What is it to be an adult?

My father is still alive and painting, but when he’s gone, I’ll still have Kansas City Star as a piece of him that I’ve lived with on and off for more than half my years on Earth. You can’t always get something from a piece of artwork. You take it for granted, or it becomes almost invisible. But then there are other times when it stops you and opens you up again.

George Burk was a friend of my dad’s. There are pictures of this big, burly, bearded dude named George holding me as a baby. That one is also a mystery. Why did George make it? I didn’t ask that question as a kid, but I sure stared at that thing and tried to figure it out. Is George Egyptian? Is it meant to be scary? Is it meant to be sexy? It’s a very mysterious piece, but it was just also part of our kitchen. That’s where it hung when I was a kid, and now it’s in my academic office. My students might stare at and be like, “What does he mean by having that weird Egyptian lips thing in his office?” It’s a mystery and a piece of George that is moving through time and space, confounding interpretation everywhere it goes.