Donald Barthelme

by Donald Barthelme

  The next day, pausing only to instruct my secretary, Rip, to throw our messenger business to Hubie the former cabdriver, who had given me his card, I flew back to Los Angeles to begin understanding the mystery of Helen.

  Letters to the Editore

  THE EDITOR of Shock Art has hardly to say that the amazing fecundity of the LeDuff–Galerie Z controversy during the past five numbers has enflamed both shores of the Atlantic, at intense length. We did not think anyone would care, but apparently, a harsh spot has been touched. It is a terrible trouble to publish an international art-journal in two languages simultaneously, and the opportunities for dissonance have not been missed. We will accept solely one more correspondence on this matter, addressed to our editorial offices, 6, Viale Berenson, 20144 Milano (Italy), and that is the end. Following is a poor selection of the recent reverberations.

  Nicolai PONT

  Editore

  SIRS:

  This is to approximate a reply to the reply of Doug LeDuff to our publicity of 29 December which appeared in your journal and raised such possibilities of anger. The fumings of Mr. LeDuff were not unanticipated by those who know. However nothing new has been proved by these vapourings, which leave our points untouched, for the most part, and limp off into casuistry and vague threats. We are not very intimidated! The matters of substantial interest in our original publicity are scatheless. Mr. LeDuff clearly has the opinion that the readers of Shock Art are dulls, which we do not. Our contention that the works of Mr. LeDuff the American are sheer copyings of the work of our artist Gianbello Bruno can be sustained by ruthless scholarship, of the type that Mr. LeDuff cannot, for obvious reasons, bear to produce. But the recipient of today’s art-scene is qualified enough to judge for himself. We need only point to the 1978 exposition at the Galerie Berger, Paris, in which the “asterisk” series of Bruno was first inserted, to see what is afoot. The Amercian makes the claim that he has been painting asterisks since 1975—we say, if so, where are these asterisks? In what collections? In what expositions? With what documentation? Whereas the accomplishment of the valuable Bruno is fully documented, by the facts and other printed materials, as was brought out in our original publicity. That LeDuff has infiltrated the collectors of four continents with his importunity proves nothing, so much so as to be dismissive and final.

  Of course the fully American attitude of the partisans of LeDuff, that there is nothing except America, is evident here in the apparently fair evaluation of the protagonists which is in fact deeply biased in the direction of their native land. The manifestation of Mr. Ringwood Paul in your most recent number, wherein he points out (correctly) that the asterisks of LeDuff are six-pointed versus the asterisks of Bruno which have uniformly five points, is not a “knockout blow.” In claiming severe plastic originality for LeDuff on this score, Mr. Paul only displays the thickness of entrenched opinion. It is easy, once one has “borrowed” a concept from another artist, to add a little small improvement, but it is not so easy to put it back again without anyone noticing! Finally, the assertion of the estimable critic (American again, we understand!) Paula Marx that the moiré effect achieved by both Bruno and LeDuff by the superimposition of many asterisks on many other asterisks is an advancement created by LeDuff alone and then adduced by Bruno, is flatly false. Must we use carbon-dating on these recent peintures to establish truth, as if we were archeologists faced with an exhausted culture? No, there are living persons among us who remember. To support this affair with references to the “idealism” of the œuvre of LeDuff is the equivalent of saying, “Yes, mostly his shirts are clean.” But the clean shirt of LeDuff conceals that which can only throw skepticism on this œuvre.

  Bernardo BROWN

  H. L. AKEFELDT

  Galerie Z

  Milan

  SIRS:

  The whole thing is to make me smile. What do these Americans want? They come over here and everyone installs them in the best hotels with lavish napery, but still, complaints of every kind. Profiting unduly from the attentions of rich bourgeois, they then emplane once again for America, richer and thoughtful of coming again to again despoil our bourgeois. Doug LeDuff is a pig and a child, but so are his enemies.

  Pino VITT

  Rome

  CARO NIKKI—

  May I point out the facility of the LeDuff–Galerie Z debate that you have allowed to discolor your pages for many months now? Whether or not you were admirable in your decision to accept for publication the Galerie Z advertisings defaming LeDuff (whom I personally feel to be a monger of dampish wallpaper) is not for me to state, although you were clearly incredible, good faith notwithstanding. I can only indicate, from the womb of history, that both LeDuff and Bruno have impersonated the accomplishments of the Magdeburg Handwerker (May 14, 1938).

  Hugo TIMME

  Düsseldorf

  SIRS:

  The members of the SURFACE Group (Basel) are unfalteringly supportive of the immense American master, Doug LeDuff.

  Gianni ARNAN

  Michel PIK

  Zin REGALE

  Erik ZORN

  Basel

  EDITORE (if any)

  Shock Art

  MILANO

  The most powerful international interests of the gallery-critic-collector cartel have only to gain by the obfuscations of the LeDuff–Galerie Z bickerings. How come you have ignored Elaine Grasso, whose work of now many years in the field of parentheses is entirely propos?

  Magda BAUM

  Rotterdam

  SIRS:

  Shock Art is being used unforeseeably in this affair. The asterisk has a long provenance and is neither the formulation of LeDuff nor of Bruno either, in any case. The asterisk (from the Greek asteriskos or small star) presents itself in classical mythology as the sign which Hera, enraged by yet another of Zeus’s manifold infidelities, placed on the god’s brow while he slept, to remind him when he gazed in the mirror in the morning that he should be somewhere else. I plead with you, Sig. Pont, to publish my letter, so that people will know.

  G. PHILIOS

  Athens

  CARO PONT,

  It was kind of you to ask me to comment on the good fight you are making in your magazine. A poor critic is not often required to consult on these things, even though he may have much better opinions than those who are standing in the middle, because of his long and careful training in ignoring the fatigues of passionate involvement—if he has it!

  Therefore, calmly and without prejudice toward either party, let us examine the issues with an unruffled eye. LeDuff’s argument (in Shock Art #37) that an image, once floated on the international art-sea, is a fish that anyone may grab with impunity, and make it his own, would not persuade an oyster. Questions of primacy are not to be scumbled in this way, which, had he been writing from a European perspective, he would understand, and be ashamed. The brutality of the American rape of the world’s exhibition spaces and organs of art-information has distanciated his senses. The historical aspects have been adequately trodden by others, but there is one category yet to be entertained—that of the psychological. The fact that LeDuff is replicated in every museum, in every journal, that one cannot turn one’s gaze without bumping into this raw plethora, LeDuff, LeDuff, LeDuff (whereas poor Bruno, the true progenitor, is eating the tops of bunches of carrots)—what has this done to LeDuff himself? It has turned him into a dead artist, but the corpse yet bounces in its grave, calling attentions toward itself in the most unseemly manner. But truth cannot be swallowed forever. When the real story of low optical stimulus is indited, Bruno will be rectified.

  Titus Toselli DOLLA

  Palermo

  January

  THE INTERVIEW took place, appropriately enough, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Thomas Brecker was renting a small villa, before which a bougainvillaea bloomed, on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie. Brecker was wea
ring an orange-red tie with a light blue cotton shirt and seemed very much at ease. He has a leg brace because of an early bout with polio but it does not seem to inhibit his movement, which is vigorous, athletic. At sixty-five, he has published seven books, from Christianity and Culture (1964) to, most recently, The Possibility of Belief, for which he won the Van Baaren Prize awarded annually by Holland’s Groningen Foundation. While we talked, on a sultry day in June 1986, a houseboy attended us, bringing cool drinks on a brown plastic tray of the sort found in cafeterias. From time to time we were interrupted by Brecker’s son Patrick, six, who seemed uncomfortable when out of sight of his father.

  INTERVIEWER

  You were a journalist when you began, I believe. Can you tell us something about those years?

  BRECKER

  I wasn’t much of a journalist, or I wasn’t a journalist for very long, two or three years. This was on a small paper in California, a middle-sized daily, a Knight-Ridder paper in San Jose. I started out doing all the routine things, courts, police, city hall, then they made me the religion writer. I did that for two years. It was not a choice assignment, it was very much looked down upon, one step above being an obituary writer, what we called the mort man. Also, in those days it was very difficult to print anything that might be construed as critical of any given religion, even when you were dealing with the problems a particular church might be having. So many things couldn’t be talked about: abortion, mental illness among the clergy, fratricidal behavior among churches of the same denomination. Now that’s all changed.

  INTERVIEWER

  And that got you interested in religion.

  BRECKER

  Yes. It was very good experience and I’m grateful for it. I began to think of religion in a much more practical sense than I’d ever thought about it before, what the church offered or could offer to people, what people got from the church in a day-to-day sense, and especially what it did to the clergy. I saw people wrestling with terrible dilemmas, gay priests, ministers who had to counsel people against abortion when abortion was obviously the only sane solution to, say, the problem of a pregnant thirteen-year-old, women who could only be nurses or teachers when they felt they had a very powerful vocation for the priesthood itself—I came to theoretical concerns by way of very practical ones.

  INTERVIEWER

  You did your undergraduate work at UCLA, I remember.

  BRECKER

  Yes. In chemistry, of all things. My undergraduate degree was in chemical engineering, but when I got out there were no jobs so I took the first thing that was offered, which was this fifty-dollar-a-week newspaper thing in San Jose. So after working on the paper, I went back to the university and studied first philosophical anthropology and then religion. I ended up at the Harvard Divinity School. That would be the late forties.

  INTERVIEWER

  You did your dissertation with Tillich.

  BRECKER

  No. I knew him and of course he was of enormous importance to all of us. He was at Harvard until ’62, I believe. He had an apartment on Chauncy Street in Cambridge, on the second floor, he used to have informal seminars at home, some of which I attended. But he wasn’t my dissertation director, a man named Howard Cadmus was.

  INTERVIEWER

  Your dissertation dealt with acedia.

  BRECKER

  In the forties that sort of topic was more or less in the air. And of course it’s interesting, that sort of sickness, torpor, one wonders how it arises and how it’s dealt with, and it’s real and it has a relation, albeit a negative one, to religion. The topic was maybe too fashionable but I still think the dissertation was respectable, a respectable piece of work if not brilliant.

  INTERVIEWER

  What was the burden of the argument?

  BRECKER

  The thesis was that acedia is a turning toward something rather than, as it’s commonly conceived of, a turning away from something. I argued that acedia is a positive reaction to extraordinary demand, for example, the demand that one embrace the good news and become one with the mystical body of Christ. The demand is extraordinary because it’s so staggering in terms of changing your life—out of the ordinary, out of the common run. Acedia is often conceived of as a kind of sullenness in the face of existence; I tried to locate its positive features. For example, it precludes certain kinds of madness, crowd mania, it precludes a certain kind of error. You’re not an enthusiast and therefore you don’t go out and join a lynch mob—rather you languish on a couch with your head in your hands. I was trying to stake out a position for the uncommitted which still, at the same time, had something to do with religion. I may have been right or wrong, it doesn’t much matter now, but that’s what I was trying to do.

  Acedia refuses certain kinds of relations with others. Of course there’s a concomitant loss—of being with others, intersubjectivity. In literature, someone like Huysmans exemplifies the type. You could argue that he was just a 19th Century dandy of a certain kind but that misses the point, which is that something brought him to this position. As ever, fear comes into it. I argued that acedia was a manifestation of fear and I think that’s true. Here it would be a fear of the need to submit, of joining the culture, of losing that much of the self to the culture.

  INTERVIEWER

  The phrase “the need to submit”—you’re consistently critical of that.

  BRECKER

  It has parts, just like anything else. There’s a relief in submission to authority and that’s a psychological good. At the same time, we consider submission a diminishment of the individual, a ceding of individual being, which we criticize. It’s a paradox which has to do with competing goods. For example, how much of your own autonomy do you cede to duly constituted authority, whether civil or churchly? And this is saying you’re not coerced. We pay taxes because there’s a fairly efficient system of coercion involved, but how much fealty do you give a government which is very often pursuing schemes which you, as an individual, using your best judgment, consider quite mad? And how much submission to a church, quite possibly the very wrongheaded temporary management of a church, whether it’s a local vestry with ten deacons of suspect intelligence or Rome itself? Christ tells us not to throw the first stone, and that’s beautiful, but at some point somebody has to stand up and say that such-and-such is nonsense—which is equivalent to throwing stones.

  On the other hand, how much value should be attached to individual being? I take a clue from the fact that we are individual beings, that we’re constructed that way, we’re unique beings. That’s also the root of many of our problems, of course.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’re well-known for critiques of contemporary religion, but also for what might be called an esthetic distaste for some aspects of modern religion.

  BRECKER

  If you’re talking about television evangelism and that sort of thing, it’s a waste of time to be critical. I begin speaking from the position that I’m a fool and an ignoramus, which is true enough and not just a rhetorical device, and having said that, I can also say that these performances give me very little to think about. There’s so little content that there’s almost nothing to talk about. A sociologist might profitably study the phenomenon but that’s about it. You note the sadness in the fact that so many people draw some kind of nourishment from what is really a very thin version of religion. On the other hand, people like Harvey Cox, who speaks about “people’s religion,” by which I take him to mean religion in nontraditional forms or mixed traditions or even what might be called bastard forms, have a point too—it can’t be disregarded, it has to be thought about. Not that Cox was talking about television specifically. He’s thinking, after Tillich, about the theology of culture as a whole. His generosity is what’s admirable, and I don’t mean that as a way of saying that his thought is not.

  INTERVIEWER

  Still, the whole t
hing, the millions of people watching and mailing in their money, is an example of what you characterize as the need to submit.

  BRECKER

  It’s that, certainly. But I’d rather talk about submission at the other end of the scale—say the Catholic bishops in regard to Rome, or St. Augustine, any of the classic saints, very strong figures, bending to what they think or feel to be the will of God. Here you have the most sophisticated people imaginable, people for whom religion has been a central concern all their lives, people who have in every sense earned the right to speak on this sort of question, and you find a joyous submission. The other end of the scale from what we were speaking of as the madness of crowds. That’s got to be respected but at the same time it can be examined, because the final effect is precisely submission. What is to be said of this kind of very informed, very sophisticated submission? That it reflects a proper, even admirable humility? It does. Or is it an abdication of responsibility? It’s that too, or can be.

  INTERVIEWER

  The question is one of degree, then. How much you give up.

  BRECKER

  The question is, rather, what is proper to man? The right way to proceed in regard to these matters can be argued in so many ways, and has been, that the individual can be forgiven for chucking the whole business, giving up religion entirely, and many people do. Still, the question remains. Is a particular position a reasoned position or is it rather a matter of personality, or even pride, the non serviam? If it is a reasoned position, how do you deal with the finitude of human reason? What should be trusted, reason or authority? Authority or the individual cast of mind?