Donald Barthelme and Museums

The February 23 issue of "The New Yorker" contained an article by Louis Menand called "Saved from Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered," which addresses the reputation of the short story writer and sometime novelist Donald Barthelme as a postmodernist and what, exactly, that means. For the purposes of this blog, the literary aspect was interesting, but what was more so was Menand's discussion of Barthelme's work as a museum director and how that relates, in some ways, to his writing. Menand writes,

In 1960, he joined the board of Houston's Contemporary Arts Association, and in 1961 became the director of its museum. Through these offices, he brought contemporary arts and letters to Houston: he arranged performances of Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Edward Albee's "Zoo Story"; poetry readings by Kenneth Koch, W. D. Snodgrass, and Robert Bly; and art exhibitions that included paintings by Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn. One of the luminaries he attracted was the art critic Harold Rosenberg, first to the pages of Forum and later to the museum, where he lectured before an audience of modest size. Rosenberg, along with his friend Thomas Hess, the editor of Art News, was launching Location, and he invited Barthelme to come to New York City to be the magazine's managing editor. Barthelme must have felt that his taste was too advanced for Houston, and he wasted no time making a decision. The move ended his marriage, but it established his career.

Menand then goes on to discuss Barthelme's avant-garde turn and its connection to the art of Robert Rauschenberg:

Having worked at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and then in New York for two art-world figures at a magazine covering the arts, Barthelme naturally looked to what was going on in painting for a way to get back to the spirit of Joyce and Beckett without merely copying Joyce and Beckett. The method he struck on was collage, and the easiest way to understand what he was doing with it is to compare his work with the work of another Texan in New York, Robert Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg was six years older than Barthelme, and his background was completely different. His father had no schooling beyond the third grade; he was an employee of the Gulf States Utilities, in Port Arthur, and his main interests were fishing and hunting. Rauschenberg's parents didn't pay much attention to him. Though he loved to draw as a child, he didn't realize that there was such a thing as "an artist" until he visited the Huntington Art Gallery, in San Marino, California, while he was on furlough from the Navy, and saw some portrait paintings. He recognized two of the images: he had seen them on the backs of playing cards. After his discharge, and with the help of the G.I. Bill, he pursued a peripatetic arts education, at the Kansas City Art Institute; the Académie Julian, in Paris; Black Mountain College, in North Carolina; and the Art Students League, in New York City.

He had his first show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery, in New York, in 1951. No pieces were sold (though Rauschenberg gave one to the composer John Cage, who was a friend). Interest did not build quickly. Even after he began his creative relationship with Jasper Johns, in 1954, Johns was the artist whose work-he was just beginning the American-flag paintings-people were excited about. But when Barthelme arrived Rauschenberg was at the center of the New York art world; he would win the Grand Prize in painting at the Venice Biennale in 1964.

Rauschenberg had a radical approach to materials: he made art out of anything. This was, in part, a consequence of his training at Black Mountain under Josef Albers, an ex-Bauhaus disciplinarian who apparently disliked Rauschenberg when Rauschenberg was his student and later claimed not to remember him. Albers sometimes made his students work with found objects, and Rauschenberg took that part of the lesson to heart. His promiscuity when it came to materials was also the consequence of sometimes having no money for paint or canvas. But he made do with whatever was around as a way of pushing the limits of painting. He would buy paint cans whose labels had come off, so that he wouldn't know the color before he used it, in order to let the materials dictate the product.

Rauschenberg's signature early works, the combines, were begun in 1954, before he started silk-screening images onto the canvas, a technique he learned from Warhol. The best-known is the stuffed goat with an automobile tire around its middle, "Monogram," which Rauschenberg started in 1955, after finding the goat at a secondhand office-furniture store, and finished in 1959, when he figured out what to do with the tire and painted a wooden "pasture" for the piece to stand on. "Coca Cola Plan" (1958) includes two cast-metal wings and three Coke bottles; "Bed" (1955) is made from an old quilt, a sheet, and a pillow; and so on.

Duchamp used found objects to make art-the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the snow shovel. But selection is an important feature of those works: there is a certain fastidiousness at the heart of the Duchampian aesthetic. The heart of the Rauschenberg aesthetic is messiness. Combining found materials in collages was not new with Rauschenberg, either. But traditional collage arranges fragments into a form, and Rauschenberg's collages are not organized in any ordinarily legible manner. "Rebus" (1955) is a little more than ten feet long; it includes part of an election poster, a photograph of two runners, a page of newspaper comic strips, a reproduction of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," a pinup shot, a self-portrait by Dürer, another photograph of the runners, and a child's drawing of a woman. The title is a joke: you cannot read the piece in any direction. Like most of Rauschenberg's work, it has no center. Form, in the conventional sense of a hierarchical order, is one of the things that he is trying to eliminate.

"The principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems also to me to be one of the central principles of literature," Barthelme said at a symposium on fiction in 1975. He loved the messy-"that wonderful category," he called it in a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Rauschenberg's work in Houston, in 1985-and he was fascinated by the artistic possibilities of the ugly. He once called his own stories "slumgullions," and he tried to create a certain amount of extraneous noise in them, on the theory that the distraction helped the reader. "The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude," he explained. "As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it's being poorly done." One of his favorite accomplishments as a museum director was a show called "New American Artifacts: The Ugly Show," which he mounted in 1960, and for which he collected, from junk shops and pawnshops, a baby-blue Styrofoam chrysanthemum, a hubcap, a jukebox, an unpainted paint-by-numbers picture of lambs, three bad reproductions of Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy," a copy of Ricky Nelson Magazine, and similar detritus.

In the production of found-material art, the painter has an obvious advantage, and Barthelme was aware of the problem.

Yes I know it's shatteringly ingenuous but I wanted to be a painter. They get away with murder in my view; Mr. X. on the Times agrees with me. You don't know how I envy them. They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of course, there's that), and lo! People crowd about and cry, "A real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that!" Fantastic metaphysical advantage. You hate them, if you're ambitious.-"See the Moon?" (1966)

The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we're trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That's the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.

It's an interesting connection to make, and Menand pursues it well.


He makes one more near the article's conclusion:

"The aim of literature," says a character in "Florence Green Is 81," one of Barthelme's first published stories, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart." Helen Moore Barthelme says that the line was inspired by an object he saw at a Contemporary Arts Museum exhibit; Daugherty assumes it was that classic work of surrealism Meret Oppenheim's "Object" (1936)-the fur-lined teacup. Barthelme once suggested that the main weakness of his writing was a lack of emotion, but in this he was plainly wrong. His stories were too wild to be emotional mousetraps, it's true, but he was a master of the ending. There is always a little tug, in all the mess, a melody we recognize. He could catch you unexpectedly.

For more on Robert Rauschenberg, visit this PBS site. Less exists online about Meret Oppenheim, but there's always Wikipedia.