DC's

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Laurie Simmons from Two Boys and the Love Doll (2015)
Her new work focuses on life-size objects, mail-order female sex dolls and male CPR dummies. The CAM exhibit consists of 20 photographs, several of which show a closed-eyed, open-mouthed figure in front of a laptop screen. These images raise important questions about isolation, especially given the figure’s original purpose. The doll itself is meant to be physically engaged with, to breathe life into a human that needs to be resuscitated.

 

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Shari Pierce 300 Sex Offenders from Within a 5 mile Radius (2011)

 

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Betty Tompkins various (1969 – 1974)
The large scale photorealistic paintings of heterosexual intercourse which Betty Tompkins made between 1969 and 1974 were practically unknown when they were exhibited together for the first time in New York in 2002. Knowledge of Tompkins’ paintings immediately broadened the repertoire of first generation feminist-identified imagery. More significantly, their materialization made manifest an unacknowledged precursor to contemporary involvement with explicit sexual and transgressive imagery. Shown at the Lyon Biennale in 2003 beside Steve Parrino’s equally wayward abstractions, Betty Tompkins’ work garnered extraordinary attention. The first painting in the series – there are only eight extant early Fuck Paintings – was acquired for the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou/CNAC in Paris. (A satisfying postscript given that the paintings were detained by customs officials and ultimately denied entrance to France in 1973; a situation that was repeated two years ago when Tompkin’s work was sent to a gallery in Japan.)

 

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Cheng Li Sensitive Times (2011)
Beijing-based performance artist Cheng Li, 57, was sentenced to one year of “re-education through labor” for “disturbing public order” on Friday by Tongzhou district branch of the Municipal Public Security Bureau, according to Cheng’s lawyer, Wang Zhenyu. Cheng’s detention is linked his work entitled Sensitive Times at the Songzhuang Art Zone in Tongzhou district on March 20, where he showed a couple simulating sexual intercourse in the basement of the Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art, which Cheng claimed an expression of how art had “sold out” and “anyone can do it.” The case brings to light “re-education through labor” sentences, a system of administrative detention handed down by the public security bureau rather than through the judicial system, a common practice which lawyers claim is not codified in the Chinese Constitution.

 

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Sarah Lucas from I SCREAM DADDIO (2015)

 

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John Miller, Richard Hoeck Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (2016)
Beyond the brutality of breaking humanoid figures, lies a soteriological opportunity, a hint of salvation. An empty promise, maybe. Now it’s over, some would claim, but an ending may be read as either a period or a colon. What comes next after a disaster or a happy ending? Three days after Flight 9525 crashed, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation to require that at least two people remain in the cockpit at all times whenever an aircraft is airborne.

 

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Darja Bajagić various (2014 – 2015)
Just 24 years old, the Montenegro-born, New York-based artist has been a nomad since childhood, living in cities including Cairo and Chicago. Her work, which incorporates pornographic imagery and serial killer “murderabilia,” seems to be the beginning of a career that will surely garner a lot of the attention from the art world and the Internet. Even before graduating, Bajagić was already whipping up controversy within the Yale MFA department, albeit unintentionally. The head of the department, art historian Robert Storr, had such a problem with her use of pornography that he called her crazy and suggested she go to therapy on Yale’s budget. Her interest in pornography, Bajagić says, is primarily cultural. She recalls her earlier works as being stylistically minimal, but she eventually sought to merge the conventions of painting and porn. By employing certain compositional strategies she wants to prod viewers into deconstructing her images, rather than simply seeing pornographic photos laden with gendered meaning, or focusing on why a female artist would be interested in pornography in the first place.

 

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João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira Loving as the Road Begins (2020)
‘Accessed via a staircase that leads to the first floor, upon entering the damp and dimly-lit structure visitors are faced with what looks like the washroom of a prison covered in grafitti. Sections of the space are partitioned off into cells juxtaposing antagonistic references. Alongside one of the walls is a bar, modelled on a popular gay club in lisbon and decorated with half-empty drinks, ashtrays and an old radio. Separated by a gridded metal ceiling, downstairs the walls are painted with images of naked men surrounding a large pool that evokes the interior of gay bathhouses.’

 

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Lutz Bacher Sex with Strangers (2014)
In Sex with Strangers, a key early work, the artist made photographic enlargements of illustrations and captions from a book that purports to be a cautionary sociology study about female psychology and deviant sexual behavior but is, in fact, pulp pornography.

 

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Martin Soto Climent Tight on Canvas (Bridget) (2010)

 

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Casja von Zeibel A Party Of Snow Elves (2014)
Strange white female figures, made out of three different materials combined, styrofoam, jesmonite, and plaster, seem to perform arcobatic sex – a kind of frozen Kama Sutra.

 

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Torbjørn Rødland various (2007 – 2016)
We’ve seen it before: the hazy glow, the casual perversity, the entire picture made punctum. But we hadn’t seen it before photographer TORBJØRN RØDLAND took up the lens more than twenty years ago, capturing scenes of allure, sex, style—and we’ve never seen it quite like this, in strange focus, unsettlingly backlit, infused with tactility and dread.

 

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Kang Yi Untitled (2013)
In an unusual exhibition of art last month, Chinese performance artist Kang Yi stood, nearly naked, on a raised podium in an auditorium in Guangzhou. With his arms outstretched and tied to a wooden plank across his shoulders, Kang remained completely still as a woman doled out hundreds of hickeys on his chest, abdomen and arms. The woman, a female art student, continued to bite and bruise Kang with her lips for an hour and a half before dousing him with basins of water at the end of the performance

 

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Charles Ray Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley (1992)
Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992) is a sculpture of eight lifelike Charles Rays engaged in mutual masturbation. Ray, however, seems to be in deep denial about why the piece might spark curiosity about what’s going on inside his head. “I used my genitalia — that’s not important,” he says. “People make a big deal out of that. But you know, should I ask my assistant if I can use his?” The piece, he insists, was born of a desire to fashion a compelling multifigure sculpture, and nothing of his true self was revealed. But if there is no connection to his own identity, why did he give each figure his face, and why on earth did he name the thing after himself? Now he’s stumped. “No, that’s true, you’re right. It was my face and my name.” He pauses. “Is that interesting?”

 

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Katarina Janeckova various (2010 – 2015)
Katarina Janeckova‘s paintings are overtly sexual and energetic, strange pictures of her and a bear in various positions, in public and private spaces; an art gallery, at the kitchen sink, in a bathroom, en plein air. Each image a potent mix of sex, domination, romance and mystery all wrapped up in a mythological landscape. A wish fulfilment dressed up as an X-rated folk story. Her use of pastel colours and bright breezy brush strokes give her pictures a sublime energy, as if we’re in the room, have stumbled across this bestial exhibitionist couple who love nothing better than getting it off infront of an audience. Unsettling in their psychological content they are nonetheless imbued with a sweetness and an innocence, the bear harmless, yet strong and dominant, a metaphor for the complications and emotional tensions that come with sexual awakening, with need and desire, yearning and horror. Perhaps her pictures are simply a play on the truth of life in a sexualized world. Of life in her native Slovakia.

 

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Millie Wilson various (1990 – 1995)

 

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Goshka Macuga Before the Beginning and After the End (detail, 2016)

 

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Sebastian Martorana various (2012 – 2016)

 

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Douglas Gordon and Tobias Rehberger After the After (2015)
After the After considers Ibiza’s status as an iconic place of hedonism, parties and decadence while examining the ‘after-point’ that occurs when this ultimately comes to an end, a time of emptiness and paranoia when one should not be left alone. The works in the exhibition range in media including film, painting, and sculpture and are situated both within the confines of the museum and displayed outside in the surrounding city environment. At the centre of After the After is a work comprising two parts based on the same section of film of two men engaging in sexual intercourse. Rehberger has constructed a large 5m x 5m ‘tile painting’(see above) depicting the upper half of the men, their faces and torsos, displayed on the terrace wall on the exterior of the museum. On viewing the tile painting close-up the image is totally abstract – totally pixelated from the individual tiles – only when viewed from a distance or through a smartphone screen does the image become distinct and concrete. This optical illusion forges a physical and ultimately emotional distance from the viewer to the intimate moment depicted. In his response, Gordon focuses on the lower half of the men via a film of their moving legs. The film is projected onto a wall inside the museum that can also be viewed from outside alongside Rehberger’s monumental tile painting.

 

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Vito Acconci Seedbed (1971)
In January 1971, Acconci performed Seedbed intermittently at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery. On days he performed, visitors entered to find the gallery empty except for a low wooden ramp. Below the ramp, out of sight, Acconci masturbated, basing his sexual fantasies on the movement of visitors above him. He narrated these fantasies aloud, his voice projected through speakers into the gallery.

 

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Sarah Anne Johnson Golden Boy (2013)

 

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Carolee Schneemann Meat Joy (1964)
Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the ‘sacred erotic.

 

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Thomas Ruff Nudes (2012)
Taken from porn sites, Thomas Ruff’s ongoing series Nudes thwarts the urge to see more and more – and by so doing brings us back to our senses. I mean that literally – to the blurry imprecision of the senses. Several contradictory things go on depending on which photographs you are looking at (or even while looking at the same picture). Porn takes the universal desire to have sex and delivers it and improves on it: perfect bodies, no disease or impotence (as suffered by the porn-addicted Michael Fassbender in Steve McQueen’s film Shame), no heartbreak, no regrets, no consequences. But by blurring these images Ruff improves them in the opposite direction. They acquire the uncertainty of memory, the imprecision of unenacted fantasy, the unfocusable swirl of the unconscious, of dreams. Or nightmares in which the idyll becomes either leeringly horrible or ludicrous and laughable. Though they are arranged with only one thing in mind, the original lighting is coaxed into gorgeous subtleties; colours become nuanced, delicate, or expressionistically garish. Acts and actors become more intimate than – and more remote from – the way they appeared on screen. The photographs impart a lyricism to the source material; or, particularly in the recent work, they lay bare the ghastliness and vulgarity of an industry that aims to service desire so thoroughly, so instantly.

 

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Bruce Nauman Seven Figures (1985)
An orgy lit out in playful neon. It is like a people puzzle. The work switches on and off in phases after each other. I was surprised at how strongly people still respond to the depiction of the scene itself (It was amusing to observe an old man and his teenage grandson pass by) To me the glow of the light and the movement elevates the image from a graphic to something quite enigmatic. Also the sound that comes with the switching of the neon adds to the rhythm of movement. It is the neon which has this lively energy.

 

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Amy Bennett various (2005 – 2007)
I am interested in the fragility of relationships and people’s awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another. To that end I create miniature 3D models to serve as evolving still lifes from which I paint detailed narrative paintings. Using cardboard, foam, wood, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures, I construct various fictional, scale models. Recent models have included a neighborhood, lake, theater, doctor’s office, church, and numerous domestic interiors. The models become a stage on which I develop narratives. They offer me complete control over lighting, composition, and vantage point to achieve a certain dramatic effect. — AB

 

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Nayland Blake Gorge (1998)
More recently, actually over the last 10 years or so, I have been involved in the BDSM community and I really consider what I and other people do there as performance art. It is an environment in which the audience and performers are co-extensive. It’s about people making meaning for each other, using skills and physical experience. It’s about exploring that relationship to power in a very particular way. I meet people in that environment who are experts in that. One of the things I have learned there is that power is only problematic when it’s fixed, when it is not mobile. All relationships have power dynamics, it is only a problem when power accrues to a particular location and is not allowed to move to any other place. Sometimes you want to be on the top, sometimes you want to be on the bottom and you see kids play with that dynamic all the time. I don’t think power is wrong in of itself; you cannot remove power from personal interactions. But you can examine power; is it fixed? Is it mobile? How does it move from one person or place to another? How does consent operate in any given dynamic. In a sense that is what democracy is – a power relationship based on consent as opposed to one based on force. And that is one of the things kinky people talk about a lot – what is consent? What does it mean? How do you confirm its existence? So that’s a place where these things are being talked about on a very deep level, certainly more deeply than the art world.

 

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Vartan Eytan (2014)
A young boy made out of plaster sits in an unnatural and vulnerable position, knees splayed and hands clutching his heels from behind. He is naked except for a loincloth and a blindfold. A section of his sculpted arm is missing. This is Eytan, a sculpture by Vartan, a queer former Orthodox Jew from Chechnya whose sculptures and paintings mostly explore demonic and sexual themes. “My work always shows a state of human spirit. Demons and angels, pain and uncontrollable desire, fear and loneliness. The naked body in sculpture represents a spiritual condition. I am not interested in ‘politically correct’ art because it’s boring. Shock, controversy, and honesty. These are the three principles of my art.”

 

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Maria Eichhorn Film Lexicon of Sexual Practices 1999/2005/2008/2014/2015 (1999 – 2015)
During the exhibition films were shot, depicting the first entries Eyes, Mouth, Breast Licking and Cunnilingus. In the course of each exhibition of the work in the years 2005, 2008, 2014 and 2015 new films were produced. The individual films are available in the exhibition situation in film cans labeled with the respective film title, to be played upon request, and are screened in a not darkened exhibition space. A text applied to the wall contains the list of all films and the information “The films will be screened upon request.” The scenes, shot mainly with a static camera against a neutral background, show close-ups of the practices identified in the titles, and are silent. 20 films (16 mm, color, silent, each approx. 2:40 minutes): Anal Coitus (2008), Anilingus (2008), Breast Licking (1999), Clitoris (2014), Cunnilingus (1999), Ear (2014), Ear Licking (2005), Eyes (1999), Feet (2014), Fellatio (2008), French Kissing (2005), Japanese Bondage (2015), Love Bite (2005), Masturbation (Man) (2008), Masturbation (Woman) (2014), Milk Bath (2014), Mouth (1999), Needle Play (2015), Vulva (2014), Wax Play (2015); film screening, wall text.

 

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The Kid Blessed is the Lamb Whose Blood Flows, Humanity is Overrated, Rise and Rise Again Until Lambs Become Lions (2013 – 2014)
The art that 22-year old artist The Kid creates spans genres. He describes his work as “forever caught between innocence and corruption,” and the well-executed pieces are compelling with their huge, detailed, Bic pen-drawn faces and hyper-realistic sculpted bodies. Photos of his sculptures, made from materials such as platinum silicon, glass fiber, oil paint, human hair, cotton, and mixed fabrics, force you to look, and look again, in order to believe that they are, in fact, inanimate objects.

 

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Voina Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear! (2008)
Actionist art collective Voina (“War” in Russian) hosted an orgy at the Timiryazev State Biological Museum in Moscow called Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear! (words plastered on a black flag that served as their backdrop). The slogan refers to Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister of Russia whose last name means “of the bears.” Said one member of the event: “This is a portrait of pre-election Russia: everybody fucks each other, and the puppy bear looks at that with an unconcealed scorn.”

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Jimmy De Sana various (1979 – 1986)
Jimmy De Sana (November 12, 1949 – July 27, 1990) was an American artist, and a key figure in the East Village punk art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. De Sana’s photography has been described as “anti-art” in its approach to capturing images of the human body, in a manner ranging from “savagely explicit to purely symbolic”. William S. Burroughs wrote the introduction to his collection of photographs Submission which was self-published in 1980.

 

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Hugh Auchincloss Steers Various (1987-1992)
‘Hugh Auchincloss Steers was an American painter whose work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum. He died of AIDS at the age of 32.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. So, I’m now on antibiotics, steroids, and a couple of other things, and I’m feeling somewhat better. Fingers crossed. ** jay, Hi, jay. Happy almost NYE. The book is: fascinating. I’m definitely hoping I’ll bounce back ultra soon. You good? What’s new? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. That ‘Poor Artists’ book sounds/looks most intriguing. The White Pube is a very curious moniker, obviously. Unless pube means something different over there. ** Carsten, Yeah, the doc prescribed me things, and I’ve started them, and the inklings thus far are good. I highly recommend the Costa. Seen in the most ideal visual situation you can because it’s visually ravishing. ** Minet, Hi! My holidays have been completely shit because I’ve been sick and, yes, very stuck in Paris. I don’t know the José César Monteiro, but I’ll look into it, thank you. And I’m happy you got to see ‘Room Temperature’ and liked it. Great! Thank you! Excellent news about your first English thing. I’ll subscribe, and I’ll pass the news onwards. Everyone, Here’s the mightily talented Minet, and please do as suggested: ‘I’m publishing my first official “thing” in English this January. It’s technically a zine, in collaboration with a visual artist, Geelherme, but considering it’s 50+ pages and a good chunk of it consists of my writing – pretty extensive, fragmented piece, felt really great to do it – I’m thinking it’s fair to call it a book. It’s titled Male Gaze. If you’re interested in reading/grabbing it you can subscribe here so you’ll get updates.’ Exciting! Sure, I’d love to see you here in April. Keep me up on when you’ll be here when the time is right. Love, me. ** Steve, Hey. Doc thinks it’s a bad lung infection, and has prescribed accordingly. If I’m not better in a week, I go see him again. I hope he’s right. Thanks for asking. ** Laura, Hi. There was fanfiction when I was a kid. It just wasn’t online. I’m sure there’s always been. It’s a natural inclination when you’re first testing out writing, no? I feel a little better. The symptoms are still there, but I can think and think about doing things more clearly. Thank you. And I hope/assume you saw Poecilia’s great response to you. ** Poecilia, Hi, thank you! It’s just lovely! Everyone, Poecilia made another PGL-inspired drawing for the fridge-door gallery before the end of 2025: It’s called “lightbulb moment”. ** Bill, Hi. I’m feeling a little better and hoping that means something. Welcome to your mostly home. ** Morgan M Page, Hi, Morgan. Yes, this sickness has been a total nightmare to be perfectly honest with you. Really hoping it’s almost over. No, I’ve never been a NYE person. I don’t like alcohol and I stopped doing drugs decades ago, so there’s nothing really there for me. I’ll just crash out as always. You? The only Mass I ever went to was in the afternoon, and even then it just never seemed to end. I think it was at least 5 hours long. I guessed it was supposed to make you high and trance-y or something? ** Steeqhen, Hopefully, thanks. Catching up on the classics, eh? I guess that’s a very Xmas-y thing to do. I could’ve found the bear poem on tumblr, I can’t remember. ** HaRpEr //, It is! A friend of mine is currently translating Jean-Jacques Schuhl’s never before translated, legendary first novel ‘Télex n° 1’ for Semiotext(e), and I’m very excited for that. Barthelme can be pretty great. Love from my fog to yours. Well, into yours. ** Uday, Thank you, pal. I am improving. Hopefully the improvement will keep improving. Bon day. ** Right. There’s a thing up there addressing that which is both attenuated and sexy or attempting to be. See you tomorrow.

 

‘When Donald Barthelme took popular characters (Batman and the Joker) and placed them in unusual, postmodern situations in his short story “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” (1967), he was doing something new: taking an old, familiar story and turning it inside out. He did something as daring when he reinvented the story of Snow White in his 1967 novel of the same name.

‘The importance of these literary experiments can be seen in the influence they have had on generations of writers. Now reinventions of popular stories (such as the inversion of the superhero comic in Alan Moore’s Watchmen) and retellings of fairy tales (like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked) are as common as a cold, but when my paperback edition of Snow White was reprinted in 1971, the experiment was unusual enough to warrant this statement on the back: “Donald Barthelme’s Snow White is not the fairy tale you remember. But it’s the one you will never forget.”

‘“She is a tall dark beauty,” the book begins, rather predictably, but then quickly veers off into strangeness, “containing a great many beauty spots: one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down:

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The hair is black as ebony, the skin white as snow”.

‘We recognize the dark hair and white skin, but what of these birth marks, represented in my edition, not by asterisks but by thick black dots with a white spot in the middle, all in a perfectly straight column that would have been impossible on the curvaceous heroin? This odd reliance on typographical symbols on the first page of a novel, draws our attention to the markings on the page, in much the same way that Laurence Sterne drew our attention to the ink, letters and symbols on the page in his novel Tristram Shandy, published two hundred and fifty years earlier.

‘Nothing else appears on the first page. This strange bit of text is only a fragment and we must turn the page to get the next, unexpected line: “Bill is tired of Snow White now. But he cannot tell her. No, that would not be the way. Bill can’t bear to be touched. That is new too. To have anyone touch him is unbearable. Not just Snow White but also Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem or Dan”. Bill and the other six men are obviously the dwarfs, although there is never any mention of short stature in the novel. In early versions of the Snow White tale, these dwarfs did not have names, but thanks to Disney, now they do, cute names like “Dopey” and “Sneezy.” Rather than these, Barthleme gives us common, everyday names, pulling the fairy tale out of the realm of unnamed myth and cute Disney characters into the mundane reality of the modern world.

‘Not only are the names plain, but we learn that “Bill is tired of Snow White.” How could anyone get tired of Snow White? What kind of fairy tale is this? Bill also has become adverse to any kind of human touch. This is a psychological problems, rather than a mythical conflict between good and evil. ”That is a peculiar aspect of Bill, the leader,” we read, “We speculate that he doesn’t want to be involved in human situations any more”. This “we” introduces another mystery of the novel. The narrator refers to the group as “we,” but he never uses the word “I” and refers to each character in the third person. The narrator cannot be pinned down to any single persona in the book. The narrator, then is both part of the story and apart from the story, a character in the story and an uninvolved spectator, troubling the role of the narrator in telling a story either from within or without the main events.

‘This unknown narrator even interrupts the story at one point to quiz the reader with questions like “Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( ).” He also tests the reader’s understanding of the story, asking, “Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince figure?” Such a question is less comprehension check, however, as it is help from the narrator in understanding the parallels between the fairy tale and this novel.

 

 

‘However, the narrator leaves the hardest work up to the reader: “Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( )” and then asks, “What is it (twenty-five words or less)?” This last question is one of the most metafictional elements in any piece of metafiction, as the narrator is directly asking the reader to participate in the writing of the novel. The reader is supposed to pencil in an answer and actually add to the text. Whether the reader actually does this (I didn’t) is irrelevant. The invitation to become a coauthor (which is what Roland Barthes called the Writerly Reader) is undeniable. The narrator is inviting the reader to participate in the production of meaning. As for what that meaning is, I wouldn’t presume to take over your responsibility! The rest I will leave up to you.

‘In short, the book is not so much a retelling of the story of Snow White, as it is an examination of relationships, especially the relationship between the writer, the text, and the reader. Nowadays retellings of fairy tales are as common as a Hollywood, but few have managed to do them with such intelligence, insight, and wit as the great Barthelme.’ — Metablog on Metafiction

 

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Further

Donald Barthelme’s barthelmismo
‘DONALD BARTHELME’S SYLLABUS’
‘The Beastly Beatitudes of Donald B.’
‘Preface to an Introduction to Donald Barthelme and “The School”’
‘Heteroglossia and collage: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White‘
‘Fatigue, Indolence And The There Is, Or, The Temporal Logic Of Collage In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White‘
‘Language and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White’
‘Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White’
‘BEYOND FRAGMENTATION: DONALD BARTHELME AND WRITING AS POLITICAL ACT’
‘The Pirate and Rogue in Donald Barthelme’s Anti-Fairy Tales’
Podcast: ‘Donald Barthelme, The Collective Shrug’
‘Interview by Donald Barthelme with Larry McCaffery’
The Donald Barthelme Archive
‘Saved from Drowning: Barthelme reconsidered’
‘Game’, by Donald Barthelme
‘Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art’
‘The Balloon’, by Donald Barthelme
‘The Indian Uprising’, by Donald Barthelme
‘DONALD BARTHELME NARRATES THE PROGRESS OF THE REINDEER’
Buy ‘Snow White’

 

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Extras

Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme’s ‘I Bought a Little City’

Donald Barthelme reading ‘I Bought a Little City’

Donald Barthelme reads ‘The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge’

Donald Barthelme and Narrative Appeal

Donald Barthelme & Stephen Banker, 1978 interview

Barthelme’s Snow White is Awesome

 

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Towards an Aesthetic of the Aesthetics of Trash: A Collaborative, Deconstructive Reading of Snow White
by Larry McCaffery

 

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Interview
from The Paris Review

 

You’re often linked with Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and others of that ilk. Does this seem to you inhuman bondage or is there reason in it?

BARTHELME: They’re all people I admire. I wouldn’t say we were alike as parking tickets. Some years ago the Times was fond of dividing writers into teams; there was an implication that the Times wanted to see gladiatorial combat, or at least a soccer game. I was always pleased with the team I was assigned to.

Who are the people with whom you have close personal links?

BARTHELME: Well, Grace Paley, who lives across the street, and Kirk and Faith Sale, who live in this building—we have a little block association. Roger Angell, who’s my editor at the New Yorker, Harrison Starr, who’s a film producer, and my family. In the last few years several close friends have died.

How do you feel about literary biography? Do you think your own biography would clarify the stories and novels?

BARTHELME: Not a great deal. There’s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there. The passage in the story “See the Moon?” where the narrator compares the advent of a new baby to somebody giving him a battleship to wash and care for was written the night before my daughter was born, a biographical fact that illuminates not very much. My grandmother and grandfather make an appearance in a piece I did not long ago. He was a lumber dealer in Galveston and also had a ranch on the Guadalupe River not too far from San Antonio, a wonderful place to ride and hunt, talk to the catfish and try to make the windmill run backward. There are a few minnows from the Guadalupe in that story, which mostly accompanies the title character through a rather depressing New York day. But when it appeared I immediately began getting calls from friends, some of whom I hadn’t heard from in some time and all of whom were offering Tylenol and bandages. The assumption was that identification of the author with the character was not only permissible but invited. This astonished me. One uses one’s depressions as one uses everything else, but what I was doing was writing a story. Merrily merrily merrily merrily.

Overall, very little autobiography, I think.

Was your childhood shaped in any particular way?

BARTHELME: I think it was colored to some extent by the fact that my father was an architect of a particular kind—we were enveloped in modernism. The house we lived in, which he’d designed, was modern and the furniture was modern and the pictures were modern and the books were modern. He gave me, when I was fourteen or fifteen, a copy of Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism, I think he’d come across it in the Wittenborn catalogue. The introduction is by Harold Rosenberg, whom I met and worked with sixteen or seventeen years later, when we did the magazine Location here in New York.

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

Music is one of the few areas of human activity that escapes distortion in your writing. An odd comparison: music is for you what animals were for Céline.

BARTHELME: There were a lot of classical records in the house. Outside, what the radio yielded when I was growing up was mostly Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys; I heard him so much that I failed to appreciate him, failed to appreciate country music in general. Now I’m very fond of it. I was interested in jazz and we used to go to black clubs to hear people like Erskine Hawkins who were touring—us poor little pale little white boys were offered a generous sufferance, tucked away in a small space behind the bandstand with an enormous black cop posted at the door. In other places you could hear people like the pianist Peck Kelley, a truly legendary figure, or Lionel Hampton or once in a great while Louis Armstrong or Woody Herman. I was sort of drenched in all this. After a time a sort of crazed scholarship overtakes you and you can recite band rosters for 1935 as others can list baseball teams for the same year.

What did you learn from this, if anything?

BARTHELME: Maybe something about making a statement, about placing emphases within a statement or introducing variations. You’d hear some of these guys take a tired old tune like “Who’s Sorry Now?” and do the most incredible things with it, make it beautiful, literally make it new. The interest and the drama were in the formal manipulation of the rather slight material. And they were heroic figures, you know, very romantic. Hokie Mokie in “The King of Jazz” comes out of all that.

Are there writers to whose work you look forward?

BARTHELME: Many. Gass, Hawkes, Barth, Ashbery, Calvino, Ann Beattie—too many to remember. I liked Walker Percy’s new book The Second Coming enormously. The weight of knowledge is extraordinary, ranging from things like how the shocks on a Mercedes are constituted to how a nineteenth-century wood-burning stove is put together. When the hero’s doctors diagnosed wahnsinnige sehnsucht or “inappropriate longings” as what was wrong with him I nearly fell off my chair. That’s too beautiful to be real but with Percy it might be. Let’s see . . . Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, Márquez.

Even Autumn of the Patriarch?

BARTHELME: After One Hundred Years of Solitude it was hard to imagine that he could do another book on that scale, but he did it. There were technical maneuvers in Autumn of the Patriarch—the business of the point of view changing within a given sentence, for instance—that I thought very effective, almost one hundred percent effective. It was his genius to stress the sorrows of the dictator, the angst of the monster. The challenge was his own previous book and I think he met it admirably.

It’s amazing the way previous work can animate new work, amazing and reassuring. Tom Hess used to say that the only adequate criticism of a work of art is another work of art. It may also be the case that any genuine work of art generates new work. I suspect that Márquez’s starting point was The Tin Drum, somehow, that Günter Grass gave him a point of departure . . . that the starting point for the essential Beckett was Bouvard and Pecuchet and that Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King is a fantasia on the theme of Hemingway in Africa. This is not the anxiety but the pleasure of influence.

You don’t, then, believe in entropy?

BARTHELME: Entropy belongs to Pynchon. I read recently that somebody had come forward with evidence that the process is not irreversible. There is abroad a distinct feeling that everything’s getting worse; Christopher Lasch speaks of it, and so do many other people. I don’t think we have the sociological index that would allow us to measure this in any meaningful way, but the feeling is there as a cultural fact. I feel entropy—Kraus on backache is a favorite text around here.

Do you see anything getting better—art, for instance?

BARTHELME: I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it’s a horizontal line, not a vertical one. Similarly the notion of an avant-garde is a bit off. The function of the advance guard in military terms is exactly that of the rear guard, to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo.

You can speak of political progress, social progress, of course—you may not see much of it, but it can be talked about.

Well, you’ve established yourself as an old fogey.

BARTHELME: So be it.

 

___
Book

Donald Barthelme Snow White
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster

‘An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life.

‘In Snow White, Donald Barthelme subjects the traditional fairy tale to postmodern aesthetics. In the novel, the seven dwarves are men who live communally with Snow White and earn a living by washing buildings and making Chinese baby food. Snow White quotes Mao and the dwarves grapple with low self-esteem in this raucous retelling of the classic tale.’ — Simon & Schuster

 

______
Excerpts

Baby Dim Sum

It is amazing how many mothers will spring for an attractively packaged jar of Baby Dim Sum, a tasty-looking potlet of Baby Jing Shar Shew Bow. Heigh-ho. The recipes came from our father. “Trying to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were. “Keep quiet,” he said. One tends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we noticed that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explicitly commented upon, in the text.

 

Dirty Great Poem

Now she’s written a dirty great poem four pages long, won’t let us read it, refuses absolutely, she is adamant. We discovered it by accident. We had trudged home early, lingered in the vestibule for a bit wondering if we should trudge inside. A strange prehension, a floating of some kind. Then we trudged inside. “Here’s the mail,” we said. She was writing something, we could see that. “Here’s the mail,” we said again. Usually she likes to paw over the mail, but she was preoccupied, didn’t look up, not a flicker. “What are you doing their,” we asked, “writing something?” Snow White looks up. “Yes,” she says. And looked down again, not a pinch of emotions coloring the jet black of her jet black eyes. “A letter?” we asked wondering if a letter then to whom and about what. “No,” she said. “A list?” we asked inspecting her white face for a hint of tendresse. But there was no tendresse. “No,” she said. We noticed then that she had switched the tulips from the green bowl to the blue bowl. “What then?” We repeated. We observed that she had hauled the Indian paintbrush all the way out into the kitchen. “Poem,” we had the mail in our paws still. “Poem?” we said. “Poem,” she said. There it was, the red meat on the rug. “Well,” we said, “can we have a peek?” “No,” she said. “How long as it?” We asked. “Four pages,” she said, “at present,” “four pages!” The thought of this immense work…

 

Royal Blood

At times, when I am ‘down,’ I am able to pump myself up again by thinking about my blood. It is blue, the bluest this fading world has known probably. At times I startle myself with a gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it comes from. It comes from my father, Paul XVII, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole accomplishment during his lack of reign was the de-deification of his own person.

 

Mr. Quistgaard

Although you do not know me my name is Jane. I have seized your name from the telephone book in an attempt to enmesh you in my concerns. We suffered today I believe from a lack of connection with each other. That is common knowledge, so common in fact, that it may not even be true. It may be that we are overconnected, for all I know. However I am acting on the first assumption, that we are underconnected, and thus have flung you these lines, which you may grasp or let fall as you will. But I feel that if you neglect them, you will suffer for it. That is merely my private opinion. No police power supports it. I have no means of punishing you, Mr. Quistgaard, for not listening, for having a closed heart.

 

Three-Pronged Assault

“I had in mind launching a three-pronged assault, but the prongs wandered off seduced by fires and clowns. It was hell there, in the furnace of my ambition. It was because, you said, I had read the wrong book. He reversed himself in his last years, you said, in the books no one would publish. But his students remember, you said.”

 

Bill

BILL has developed a shamble. The consequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to an idiosyncrasy. He has earned it by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise, his life.

 

MOTHER

“MOTHER can I go over to Hogo’s and play?” “No Jane Hogo is not the right type of young man for you to play with. He is thirty-give now and that is too old for innocent play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not innocent, and will want you to play it with him, and then you will agree in your ignorance, and then the fat will be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out anyhow. That is my reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand.” “Mother all this false humility does not become you any more than that mucky old poor little match-girl dress you are wearing.” “This dress I’ll have you know cost two hundred and forty dollars when it was new.” “When was it new?” “It was new in 1918, the year your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I’ll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.” “Mother I know Hogo is thirty-five and thoroughly bad through and through but still there is something drawing me to him. To his house. To the uninnocence I know awaits me there.” “Simmer down child. There is a method in my meanness. By refusing to allow you to go to Hogo’s house, I will draw Hogo here, to your house, where we can smother him in blueberry flan and other kindnesses, and generally work on him, and beat the life out of him, in one way or another.” “That’s shrewd mother.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. I’m still unwell, but I’m going to attempt to do the p.s. Due to the large number of comments I need to catch up with and my poor-ish brain power, I’m going to need to be brief and probably inattentive by default. I apologize. I’m starting antibiotics today, and I hope that will take me where I need to go. ** Tuesday ** Laura, Thanks, hoping, trying. ** Måns BT, Hi, Mans. Yes, high hopes for mid-March, and we owe it all to you, my friend. Fascinating journey you guys are on. Is it still unfolding? Do you think it’ll turn into something? I spent Xmas in bed mostly sleeping. Worst one ever. But Zac left a piece of the Xmas buche I missed outside my front door, and I eventually bit into that. The highlight. Xmas movie … I can’t think of any. New Years plans. My plan is to try to not be in bed. xo. ** nat, Hi, nat. Thanks. Glad for your good stuff. I look forward to being better so we can actually talk, or I mean so I can do my part. ** Steeqhen, Hi. Xmas: I slept and coughed and wished I was dead and staggered around once in a while all day. Nice, eh? ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben. ** Steve, Seeing another doctor today, we’ll see. ** Carsten, Off the top of what remains of my head … Bresson ‘Lancelot du Lac’, Hollis Frampton ‘Zorns Lemma’, Pedro Costa ‘Valentina Varela’, Welles ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’. Would be different on another day. ** Dr. Kosten Koper, Thank you, Kosten. It was great and honoring. ** Dev, Hi, Dev. I always go into illnesses believing my body can fix itself, and I gave my body every chance with this thing, but it can’t do the job, so I’m being doctored-up today and surely given the antibiotics that I obviously need, and we’ll see. I hope you’re fully well. ** Daniel Warner, Hi, Daniel. Sorry to be slow and hazy. Very long story short, the publisher of MLT promised the world and then just dumped the book with no support. Then they blamed the cover as being too controversial and put that very bland cover on the paperback instead promising to give it the support they hadn’t, and then of course they did nothing. That book was a bit cursed. Yes, we’re announcing the NYC screenings today, Thanks, Daniel. I hope to be more awake the next time we get to chat. ** Bill. Hi. Maybe: passenger. I think I caught it in NYC. A lot of sick people there, and I did start feeling weirdly exhausted before the flight. How are you? ** HaRpEr //, Hi. It’s been horrible, wow. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been this sick before in my entire life. ** Nicholas., Hi! Thanks for the list. I promise I’ll look at it when my eyesight isn’t gray and wobbly. HNY!! ** voskat, Hi. This year’s flu is truly evil! I’m barely living proof. Thank you. ** Morgan M Page, Hi. No, I was too sick to do anything or to want to do anything but sleep. But at least now I want to do things even if I can’t. That’s something. Was the Mass surprising? I’l look for your friends’ book when I get better. ** Montse Meneses Vilar, Thanks, Montse! Lots of love to you. ** horatio, Hi. Thanks. My goal is to be better for after the holidays. The holidays are fated to be toast. I’m drinking ginger tea? Seems to help a wee bit. Has your brother cracked ‘Castle Faggot’ yet? ** Thursday ** BLCKDGRD, Thank you. ** James Bennett, Hi, thanks. I don’t have the brain today to go find the bear poet, but I’ll try to remember to. ** Carsten, I’m seeing a doctor today who’ll hopefully give me what it will take to kill this thing. I don’t like resting/napping, but that’s all I’ve been doing. ** Jeff J, Thanks, Jeff. ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), Thank for the wishful words, my friend. ** l@rst, Hi. Thanks for the poem add. I’ll read when my brain can appreciate words again. ** Laura, Hi. Thank you. I got tested but I’m getting tested again today. I’m only traveling through my apartment, and the new doctor is across the street, thank goodness. ** HaRpEr //, No joke to put it very mildly. I never get sick, and this health wallop is a total shock, I must say. It’s really pissing me off. ‘Dusty Pink’! Yay! ** Steve, Thanks. It’s not much better, but hopefully it will be pronto. ** nat, Thanks, nat. I’ll take a spell very happily. Thanks to your pal. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. Where are you? Are you still across the world? ** morabelle, Hi. It’s very nice to meet you, thank you. Do come back when I’m fully functioning so we can have a proper conversation. If you want. ** Jack Skelley, I presume Disneyland was the insane blast. ** Justin D, Thank you, Justin. ** Dev, Thanks, Dev. ** Misanthrope, I sure hope you don’t catch this motherfucker I’ve got. Company taken over. Huh. Tell me more once I have my comprehension back. Stay healthy. ** sam, Thank you very much, sam. ** Steeqhen, Hi. I am counting on the ability of the doctor I’m seeing today to fix me or at least start. We’ll see. ** Wow, I made it. Think about Donald Barthelme’s wonderful novel today. See you tomorrow, I’m fairly sure.