Document Journal

Jonathan Lethem wants to do everything a writer can do at least once. His double-digit count of novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, have established him as a leading fiction author. But they form the core of a career that also includes countless short stories, two books of cultural criticism, as well as a host of rarer literary exploits, including completing Donald Carpenter’s final, unfinished novel Fridays at Enrico’s and editing The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a massive compilation of the late sci-fi author’s 8,000-page outpouring of frenzied, hand-written journal entries detailing his visionary experiences. Lethem himself identifies as a persistent dabbler. The Brooklyn-born, California-based author’s latest volume, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, published last month by ZE Books, offers a survey of another form among his far-ranging output: his writings on visual art from the past four decades.

Cellophane Bricks, a beautifully crafted hardback, celebrates the author’s appreciation for the world of images through its engaging spreads. The collection’s 38 texts span interrogations of the enduring tactile and totemic allure of books, to personal reflections on Lethem’s upbringing in 1970s New York City, to “essays” commissioned for exhibition catalogs, artist’s books, and monographs featuring works by Julian Hoeber, Nan Goldin, David Maisel, and Gregory Crewdson, among others. In these “word paintings” as he calls them, or fictions-as-exhibition texts, Lethem’s refusal to churn out conventional art writing, in favor of dreamy, headlong exercises in worldbuilding (many of them fully realized works of short fiction), is not his way of driving a hard bargain or dragging his heels, but a principled commitment to reward these artists with a small piece of the thing that he does best. To describe these fictions as “responses” to a body of artworks falls woefully short. Through them, Lethem enacts a glorious performance of the power of images to set the narrative imagination ablaze. (Lethem’s policy, whenever feasible, has been to accept art as compensation, resulting in a collection which he intends to display next year at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, where the author has taught creative writing since 2011).

For Document, Lethem talks about friendship, the privilege of an artistic upbringing, and what it means to be human in a world of machines.

“I think that this book—more than any other book I could ever imagine writing—is a document of social practice.”

Karim Kazemi: How did Cellophane Bricks come about?

Jonathan Lethem: For at least 20 years, maybe even longer, I had inklings that there might be something that would interest me in pushing together all of the places where I had written about artists’ work. I had already committed that gesture enough times, and the results seemed different from other things that I’d done. They weren’t cultural essays; they were usually fictions about the artists, and they felt very personal. Also, I love reproductions, and none of my books had ever included images — at all. I would fantasize, but it took a lot of time for this to coalesce. It really took the direct invitation of [ZE Books’ publisher] Michael Zilkha and seeing gorgeous books he was making for other people, like he had with Mary Gaitskill’s book The Devil’s Treasure. The publishing context helped me imagine that the book could exist.

Karim: I feel really strongly that artists should not have to be good writers. A lot of really great artists aren’t good writers, but they tend to have a lot of them in their orbits. Many of my closest friends are visual artists, and writing texts for their exhibitions is something I’ve done. It’s so different from writing criticism. At best, it can feel like you’re writing ad copy, ‘merchandising”’ their art. At worst, it can feel almost technical, like you’re merely annotating it, or generating metadata.

Jonathan: The commercial context for most of the writing about art can be very . . . uncomfortable.

I don’t really read about art. I don’t feel the drive, the need, to read critical art writing, so whenever I have fallen into this relationship with an artist where they ask me to add writing to their work, I always feel this double resistance. One is: ‘Why do artworks need writing?’ Because maybe it’s totally redundant. And also: ‘What vocabulary would I use if I tried?’ Because there isn’t a body of art criticism that I’m identified with.

Karim: A lot of it can be very heady, written in theoretical vocabulary that can approach total abstraction. There’s this sleight of hand, like, ‘If I say this in a certain way, nobody will notice that I’m not actually saying anything.’ The pieces collected in this book bear basically no relation to that kind of writing.

Jonathan: All I can really offer them are these really eccentric reframings. When they approach me, I say, ‘I can’t do it, but I can write a story,’ and what results is a story that arises not out of an identification with art writing, but an identification with their artworks and an attempt to write my way into them.

Karim: I’m completely certain that the artists are not accustomed to being written about the way that you do. How do they react?

Jonathan: In most cases, the writing wasn’t the very beginning of the encounter. It often occurs very deep into an encounter—[after] I’ve known this person for a long time, or we’ve been circling each other, flattering each other with a sense of mutual involvement, and this is a way of manifesting something—a kind of really deep, fun muddle—that we have already both leaned into.

By the time I was writing for artists I didn’t know—which came very late in the game, like with Jim Shaw or Nan Goldin—I could show them other examples and be like, ‘You’re not going to get regular art writing! You’re going to get one of these things!’

I think that this book—more than any other book I could ever imagine writing—is a document of social practice. I don’t mean, of course, on the level of organizing striking workers. It’s not necessarily noble social practice, but it’s like the practice of studio visits, the practice of hanging out with artists. The practice of…

Karim: …friendship?

Jonathan: Friendship! But also, because a preponderance of these texts were bartered for artworks, that ‘social practice’ amounts to wanting to connect to something vicariously by having a little piece of it in my house.

“When I compare notes with other writers, I realize they had to leap across a great gulf to get that artmaking is an everyday vocation. This is a kind of privilege I’m talking about.”

Karim: The very first sentence of Cellophane Bricks is, ‘I grew up in a house full of paintings and books.’ Your father is a painter. When I was a kid, I didn’t know that ‘artist’ was a real profession. Have you ever been to the Denver Art Museum?

Jonathan: I don’t think I ever have gone to the Denver Art Museum, no.

Karim: When I was maybe ten years old, they added a new wing to it—this very jagged, metallic, spaceship-looking building—and I remember that when it opened, there were people, like civilians, who were writing letters to the editor of The Denver Post about how walking around it made them nauseous, made them physically sick. I had only ever seen contemporary art in this environment, already enshrined in this penumbra of institutional legitimacy. It wasn’t until my early 20s, when I first stepped foot in a contemporary art gallery, that I really realized that before art objects ended up in the pantheon they had been displayed in these spaces that bear less resemblance to a museum than they do to a garage.

Jonathan: And that it’s truly all one thing, they’re just different windows into it.

You know, it’s taken me a long time to fully grasp how much it differentiates my life that my father was a painter. When I compare notes with other writers, I realize they had to leap across a great gulf to get that artmaking is an everyday vocation.

This is a kind of privilege I’m talking about. Inevitably, if someone grows up with insane privilege of some kind, they have to write about how this distinguishes them. It’s something I have to write about in the way a really rich person would have to write about that.

My dad, for that matter, is still painting. I’ve been making one particular studio visit for sixty years of my life.

Karim: Your first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was transformed into a sculpture by the artist Robert The, who carved a hardcover copy of the book into a facsimile of a handgun. In an essay titled ‘Objectified Books,’ which chronicles a number of pivotal moments in your books’ evolving visual identities, you write that The’s piece “was the only one of my books in which my children showed any interest.” Little children, of course, can’t be interested in big, difficult novels! Images and objects are more fascinating than words to children, I think, by default. Towards the end of the same essay, you write, ‘I fantasize about what I’ll do when I can’t write anymore or don’t want to. Some days I tell myself I’ll paint.’ I like this, the way it sort of indirectly presents the lifecourse as bookended by periods of illiteracy.

Jonathan: It’s really interesting, because it is like I’ve connected those two things without really noticing it. The plastic universe of making objects is, like you say, a more direct kind of play to make and manipulate the bricks than it is to manipulate the cellophane of language. But also it meets its middle in my pleasure in books as objects. If you’re lucky, they make hundreds of thousands of copies of your book. But what I still identify with is the idea of just wanting to make one, to just see my book on the shelf alongside the others. It’s like a really complicated sculptural desire.

I wouldn’t mind, by the way, being incorrect in that guess and dropping dead with a sentence half-finished. I might very well write to the bitter end.

“Wikipedia is, essentially, a collective of human beings trying to write authoritatively, to neutralize their individual voices. In other words, to become a machine. There are a lot of gray areas between the human and the machine, and so I wanted to make one of these gray area writings myself.”

Karim: I feel like many find their way to writing after wanting, and sometimes even trying, to do something else. Maybe this is a bit of selection bias, because I’m most interested in writers, and it’s writers’ lives that I know the most about. Maybe there are a lot of rock stars who wanted to be writers. I’m always puzzled by the way writers are portrayed by Hollywood, so romantically, when any writer will tell you that theirs is a very unglamorous, slovenly way to live. In a lot of these pieces, you seem to be very invested in conferring the title of ‘honorary writer’ on these artists in any way you can. In a piece about graffiti artists, you note that long before the act became known, in slang, as ‘tagging,’ it had been called ‘writing.’

Jonathan: What you’re describing as a sort of gift or amplification that I’m offering them, by letting them into my world, is a really generous interpretation of what I’m going to describe in a way that’s more like what you were saying about how writers are sort of unglamorous or creepy or grubby. I already used the word vicarious once in this conversation, and when you say that writers are more prone to play-act as rock stars or filmmakers or something other than what they are, I think that’s true. And, of course, the act of transmigrating yourself into some other being is basic to writing fiction. You’re constantly playing as someone other than yourself, so you’ve made a practice of it. It’s probably something that is emotionally important to you to enact, even if it can’t be satisfied or culminated. You don’t get to be someone else. The grubbiness, really, is that, there you are, dumb old you, at the end of the day.

Karim: I spend a lot of time talking to large language models. There’s been a lot of the fretting, a lot of pearl-clutching, from writers who feel threatened by artificial intelligence’s capacity to generate good, compositionally seamless, tightly argued prose, and I think that they are missing something major. What I love about Cellophane Bricks is its dearth of arguments about what makes a certain artwork ‘good,’ and how it is actually concerned with what makes an artwork intoxicating or worth coveting. In a piece called ‘The Collected,’ which you wrote for the artist Fred Tomaselli, there’s this fragment that goes, ‘Me and my brother spent a $5 bill that was autographed by Muhammad Ali. We basically just needed $5 that day.’

Jonathan: I actually employed AI in making one of the writings—the piece for Jim Shaw. I used both AI and Wikipedia, and I collaged chunks of what the AI wrote for me and chunks of a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is, essentially, a collective of human beings trying to write authoritatively, to neutralize their individual voices. In other words, to become a machine. There are a lot of gray areas between the human and the machine, and so I wanted to make one of these gray area writings myself.

Money, like best-selling books, is mass-produced printed matter. Like a novel, money is also a machine. Muhammed Ali turned that piece of the machine into an art object, briefly, and then my brother and I dragged it back. This “doubleness” is an area of enormous stimulation and dreaming for me, and it’s analogous to what you’re doing by conversing with the AI. You’re projecting a very typical future for a lot of people, which is that our irreducible, eccentric, peculiar selves are going to be among the machines. We already are among the machines; we’ve been that way for centuries, but we’re going to be among so many more intricate ones, and the only thing they won’t be is irreducible and stubbornly peculiar and irreplaceable the way we are, and it’s a very anxious thing to think that’s the only thing we have.