27 - DeLillo and Land Art

Summary

Don DeLillo has always been deeply invested in visual culture. Americana, published in 1971, established what would be a lifelong concern with image-making, through the novel's engagement with Hollywood cinema and advertising. Since then, each novel has adapted and retooled those early concerns, exploring the ways that images are created and manufactured and the subsequent effects this has on human subjectivity, agency and consciousness. DeLillo's writing also incorporates specific works of visual art – as evidenced by several of the chapters in this collection – to depict aesthetic encounters that trouble the boundary between self and art object. From the Warhol screen prints in Mao II (1992) to the Morandi paintings in Falling Man (2007), artworks abound in the DeLillo oeuvre. Though DeLillo's relationship with art is intricate and complex, we can read his embedding of specific artworks within his writing as a means of problematising what it means to look at and be moved by art. Crucially, DeLillo seems increasingly concerned with the profound transformational possibility of looking at art, in which the ripples of its influence are felt far beyond the immediate moment of the encounter, into new reaches of the self.

Critics have noticed that DeLillo often uses his artworks to provide an echo of the central concerns of his novels; David Cowart suggests that ‘[o]ne can often – perhaps always – discern in such material a reflection or mise en abyme of the DeLillo work in which it appears’ (33), and Brian Chappell concurs, finding that ‘many of DeLillo's artist figures, such as Klara Sax and Lauren Hartke, produce works that become a mise-en-abyme for the text that contains them’ (11). Art then is communicative, providing a crucial structuring dimension, a way of offering additional conceptual architecture. DeLillo's muddy aesthetic encounters are amplified and given new dimensions in works that are made out of natural materials and are situated outside the home or gallery space, what I will call in this chapter land art, but can also be termed earthworks. The gallery space has particular import in DeLillo's work (see Herren, ‘Art Stalkers’; Phillips; and Coughlan's chapter in this volume), but, as I will argue, artworks that exist outside of the gallery have increasingly emerged in his post-2007 work, artworks particularly made of stone, and sometimes with architectural components.