Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture

by Jonathan Lethem

Overview

A rapturous, ravenous celebration of visual art and storytelling from one of our most innovative writers and critical minds. 

Many know Jonathan Lethem as one of our most celebrated and eclectic writers, whose iconic novels—Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, among many others—play with genres and storytelling modes like a DJ mixing music. But Lethem grew up in his father’s studio, went to art school, and, in his own words, “made hundreds if not thousands of drawings, collages, paintings, hand-drawn comics, and even two animated shorts” before diverting, at nineteen, to prose fiction. The surreal and form-defying panoply of his stories, essays, and novels celebrates—and mourns—this forsaken world of the visual and plastic arts. That leap, between the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art, which operates as a sublimated wellspring for Lethem’s writing, is the subject of this book. 

Cellophane Bricks gathers a lifetime of Lethem’s art-writing, along with stunning, full-color images from the author’s own collection and elsewhere. Here we tour Lethem’s fictions in response to (and in exchange for) artworks by his friends; his meditations on comics and graffiti art; his collaborations with artists and interventions into visual culture, and his portrait of the museum that was and continues to be his home, untethered from geography. More than just a compilation, Cellophane Bricks comprises a kind of stealth memoir of Jonathan Lethem’s parallel life in visual culture—a ravishing assemblage that makes the perfect gift for story lovers of all kinds, and an essential, singular brick to add to your own collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798988670001
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	07/16/2024
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and twelve other novels. His stories and essays have been collected in five volumes, and his work translated into over thirty languages. He has been recipient of The National Book Critic’s Circle Award, The World Fantasy Award, The Berlin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He teaches creative writing and contemporary fiction at Pomona College.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

Left Bennington College after two years

Table of Contents

Table of Contents 

008     Introduction: CELLOPHANE, BRICKS, FOG & CINDER / A Life in Material Culture 

022     Fictions of Art 

143     Graffiti and Comics 196 Book 

262     Ecstasy 

326     At Home 

Fictions of Art 

024     INTRODUCTION 

028     THE SUBJECTIVE FOG / for Julian Hoeber 

038     THE COLLECTOR / Fred Tomaselli 

048     AN ALMOST PERFECT DAY / Letter to Bonn 

054     RECIPROCITY OF ARTIFACTS: A DOMESTIC / Rachel Harrison 

058     TRAVELER HOME / Martin & Munoz 

068     THE BILLBOARD MEN / Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel 

080     IMMACULATE KILLS / Alexis Rockman 

084     STATIONS OF THE RELOCATED WITNESS / Gregory Crewdson 

102     MISSING PERSONS: AN HOMAGE TO PERRY HOBERMAN 

108     X, CURATOR / David Maisel 

120     CELLOPHANE BRICKS: A FUGUE FOR MEMORY LOST / Nan Goldin 

130     JIM SHAW KILLS 

Graffiti and Comics 

142     INTRODUCTION 

148     ONE-TRACK MIND: ON PHIL COPPOLA 

150     COVER THE CITY: GRAFFITI GRAPHOMANIA, OR, THE FLÂNEUR WITH TOURETTE’S / KEO, PRAY & Katie Merz 

162     CRUNCH ROLLS / Introduction to Mascots & Mugs: The Characters and Cartoons of Subway Graffiti 

166     THE ORGY OF THE REAL / Todd James 

172     A FURTIVE EXCHANGE / Chester Brown 

178     BLACK KRYPTONITE / A Script for Pettibon 

188     20TH CENTURY VOMIT / Collaboration with Julia Jacquette 

Book 

196     INTRODUCTION 

206     OBJECTIFIED BOOKS / Alexander Munn, Cynthia Winings, Charles Child & Me 

222     THE RICHARD PRINCE STORIES 

230     FIVE RUN-INS WITH ROSALYN DREXLER 

246     GOD IN A SPRAY CAN / Robert Jimenez’s Ubik 

252     SYLVIE SELIG 

256     NOW IT CAN BE TOLD / For Tom Clark 

Ecstasy 

262     INTRODUCTION 

266     ANDY MIRRORBALL (WARHOL) 

272     TERMITE FOOTPRINTS / On Manny Farber’s Art Writing 

286     A VOYAGE AROUND MIRELLA BENTIVOGLIO’S STONE TYPEWRITER 

290     OVERHEARD AT THE INSTALLATION / For Charles Sheeler’s “Suspended Power” 

299     THE SLEEVE SHOULD BE ILLEGAL For Hans Holbein theYounger’s “SirThomas More” 

302     SEARCHING FOR UBLAND A Voyage to the Edges of My Disney Hyperartifact 

At Home 

326     INTRODUCTION 

330     VINYL CIRCLE, ON MY WALL / Chad Gerth 

334     FACES OF JEANNE AND TOM / On Living With a Forgotten Painter’s Masterpiece / Jeanne Redpath 

344     THE SKIN OF REALITY / A Studio Visit with Kari Gatzke 

350     JOYCEAN SLICES / Emily Joyce 

354     ALL MY CHALDRONS 

366     THE EASEL OF THE UNSEEN / Mark Johnson 

374     HAZEL 

378     COFFEEHEAD AND THE DECAYERS / Life in a Charles Long Sculpture Zone 

392     MY FATHER HAS STARTED A PAINTING 

402     ON A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER 

408     CREDITS

Editorial Reviews

Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A writer gifted at playing with genre forms and riffing on popular culture.” —USA Today

“The expected and welcome pleasures of reading Lethem: his intellect, dialogue and wry humor . . . so much of his work [is] inventive, entertaining and superbly written.” —New York Times Book Review

“He remains . . . a literary patron saint: the Brooklyn boy who did us proud by immortalizing our borough in contemporary fiction.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic

“Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist.” —Boston Globe

“I love and admire the way Lethem’s always pushing at the edges of the form. He’s so in command of the material, both of the subject and the language, that it sometimes feels as if he’s improvising on it, or even floating free of it completely, the way a jazz musician might. His wonderfully corrosive humor is underpinned by a strange, mixed sense of outrage and tenderness.” —Rupert Thomson, author of The Book of Revelation and Dartmouth Park

“A writer of abundant literary gifts who applies them with unapologetic enthusiasm.” —The Telegraph

“[Lethem is] as sharp a critic as he is a novelist. —Austin American-Statesman

“The quality of Lethem’s prose and the exuberance of his imagination are reasons enough to read [him] . . . When it comes to style, Lethem has few equals.” —Miami Herald

“Lethem writes knowingly and brilliantly about weird, off-the-grid, wayward America.” —Dana Spiotta

“One of his generation’s finest writers.” —The Maine Edge

From the Publisher

2024-03-09
An acclaimed author celebrates creativity.

Prolific fiction writer and essayist Lethem gathers his writings on art, most of which were published in catalogs, monographs, or exhibition materials, into a sometimes lyrical, sometimes surreal, always surprising volume, profusely illustrated with images of paintings (including a few of his own early works), sculpture, collages, movie stills, graffiti, book jackets, photographs, and comics. Many are from the author’s abundant collection. When artists asked him to write something to accompany their works or exhibitions—writing he saw as “language-cellophane” that “teases at being a transparent window”—he preferred payment in artworks. Lethem grew up in a world of paintings and books: “My father made the paintings and my mother handed me the books, and talked about them, and read them herself. I began wanting to make the paintings before I can remember….I began wanting to make the books too, soon enough.” With his father or on class trips, he was a frequent visitor to most of New York’s museums, going so often, he recalls, “that I couldn’t remember a time before I knew those rooms and some of the furniture inside them.” In high school, he would drop in at the Met’s Chinese Garden to take an afternoon nap. He pursued the dream of being a painter as a student at the High School of Music and Art, but once he went to college, he put away his “fantasies of becoming a painter, sculptor, cartoonist, or film director” and turned exclusively “to text, to narrative.” As this collection of stories, essays, dialogues, and reminiscences reveals, though, Lethem still feels a visceral connection to art: “By identifying with visual artists,” he writes, “I’m searching for a lost self” as well as “a continuation, not an interruption” of his father’s enduring influence.

Astute, often idiosyncratic responses to works of art.

Kirkus Reviews