28 - DeLillo and the Gallery

Summary

The gallery as represented in Don DeLillo's work will seem familiar to many. He captures the mundane details of the gallery experience: the crowded ‘museum lobby’ (Mao II 20); the ‘rambling white space set on several levels under ducts and sprinklers and track lights’; ‘edging sideways’ from wall to wall (Mao II 133); ‘the display of explanatory material’, the ‘bench in the middle of the gallery’, the ‘tour guide’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 108, 105, 109); the ‘museum guard’ (Point Omega 4); ‘the taped border’ around the art that one should not cross (Zero K 215); the bright or dimmed lights, the chill, the silence. And he captures the mundanity of the gallery experience itself; after all, people just ‘look at a painting, they just sit there or stand there’ (Great Jones Street 100). They look and stand, or they ‘[s]ee it and leave’ (Underworld 83). And yet this unremarkable act of looking at the walls of a gallery appears repeatedly in DeLillo's writing, receiving more pronounced attention in his later works. As Graley Herren observes, ‘DeLillo has remained persistently engaged with art, artists, and the creative processes through which various artworks are made’, but ‘his focus has increasingly shifted toward the other end of the artistic transaction, examining the reception processes through which artworks are perceived, assimilated, deconstructed, and reconstructed to suit the needs of individual viewers’ (139). DeLillo is concerned with the ways in which we receive, perceive, appreciate and are affected by works of art and with what it means to ‘love the paintings’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 109). He advises, ‘Just look. You have to look’ (‘Baader–Meinhof’ 107); ‘See what's here. Think about it clearly’ (Zero K 153). The gallery allows DeLillo not just to look at art but to look at the significance of looking at art. This chapter, therefore, asks, ‘What does DeLillo see when he looks at the gallery?’2 How can it be that you’re ‘alone in a room, looking’ (Falling Man 210), you’re ‘looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world’ (Cosmopolis 30)? What follows examines the part that the gallery plays in DeLillo's narrative and formal structures, and it shows how the gallery relates to DeLillo's insights into our mundane existence, ‘[b]eing human, being mortal’ (Falling Man 111).