Cellophane Bricks
A Life in Visual Culture
-
- ¥6,400
-
- ¥6,400
発行者による作品情報
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel)shares an entrancing collection of stories and essays celebrating visual art. The author, who flirted with painting in college before "plung into the etheric realm of language," opens the volume with 12 short stories informed by artists and artworks, including a trippy meditation inspired by an abstract painting by Julian Hoeber, in which Lethem personifies a "Subjective Fog"—loosely, a liminal space "where one margin encounters another." Another story, which draws from the work of multimedia artist Fred Tomaselli, examines the frenetic impulse, and inherent impossibility, of collection ("A ‘real' collector tolerated the slippage, the loose and therefore implicitly temporary nature of his hoard... You glued shit to backgrounds like a maniac," says the unnamed narrator). Elsewhere, Lethem pays tribute to the graffiti of his 1970s and '80s New York City youth and sings the praises of comics artist Chester Brown. Combining mind-bending intellectual meditations with a visceral delight in his subject, Lethem's electric prose animates the proceedings (of artist Katie Merz, he notes that she paints on buildings, "though it might appear more as though she's peeled off their skin, to reveal networks of information agitating beneath"). The result is a transfixing look at what it means to make, and admire, art. Illus.
