Feature: Jennifer Bartlett’s Writing

Jennifer Bartlett was a writer as well as a painter, and her published works provide remarkable insights into her myriad ways of processing and visualizing ideas. The multiple forms of expression in Bartlett’s artwork and the rigorous conceptual systems that guide their production are echoed in her books, which combine essays, prose, poems and diagrams. On the occasion of the exhibition of Bartlett’s enamel plate paintings at Paula Cooper Gallery in Palm Beach, we are taking a closer look at the interrelations between the artist’s writing and painting.

Arriving in New York in 1967 after studying painting at Yale, Bartlett “took to the new bohemia like a duck to water.” While continuing to experiment with painting in new and instructive ways, Bartlett was inspired to develop her writing practice and to share the poetry she had been composing from a young age. Peter Schjeldahl, Ron Padgett, and other members of the community that gathered at St-Mark’s-in-the-Bowery encouraged Bartlett to join them in reading their work aloud, and she found an audience receptive to her work. Performances at Artists Space and Paula Cooper Gallery followed, precipitating the first exhibition of her paintings.

A poetry reading by Jennifer Bartlett on April 23, 1974, as part of “PersonA,” a performance and film series curated by Edit DeAk for Artists Space.

1967 was also the year that Sol LeWitt published his hugely influential Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, a text that Bartlett revered as “the best art thing that was written, and also probably one of the great poems of the late 20th century.” Bartlett conscientiously followed LeWitt’s “rules” for conceptual art, and her admiration for the exactitude of LeWitt’s method and his definitive use of form is manifest in her life-long devotion to geometric forms and programmatic strategies.

In an interview for the Archives of American Art in 1987 Bartlett recalls LeWitt visiting her studio and praising her systematic approach to her writing––without mentioning the works on the walls––describing it as something she could “go on endlessly doing while remaining of interest.”

In the late 1960s Bartlett developed her characteristic style and technique of painting, guided by a light grey grid silkscreened onto baked enamel plates. She was simultaneously at work on the manuscripts of what would become her two books: Cleopatra I-IV (1971) and History of the Universe (1987).

The relationship between writing and painting was productive in both directions. When planning the arrangement of the individual plates on the wall it was clear to Bartlett that they should read like lines on a written page, top to bottom and left to right. In the case of many of these works, in which dots are plotted according to mathematical patterns, the legibility is dependent on the viewer reading the work as Bartlett intended.

Installation view: “Jennifer Bartlett: Paintings,” Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, March 9 – March 30, 1974. Photo by Geoffrey Clements.

Bartlett published her first book, Cleopatra I-IV, in 1971 with The Poetry Project. Organized in four sections, aspects of Cleopatra’s life and character are examined in turn through essays, prose, and poetry. The book was produced in an edition of 300 copies, and is unpaginated and unbound.

In his 1974 Artforum review of Bartlett’s exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, critic Lawrence Alloway devoted much of the text to Cleopatra I-IV, praising how it “combines chronology, historical genre, sexual metaphors, aphoristic sentences and…an array of diagrammatic signs in systematic rows.” Alloway notes that this approach is amplified in Bartlett’s enamel plate paintings, as if the signs and symbols of Cleopatra had escaped the page for the gallery wall.

The diagrams in Cleopatra I-IV recall the systematic communication of an idea that guided the production of many of LeWitt’s books. Often published at the same time as an exhibition of a new series, the book would explain the system used to create the works. Gathered together in one place, the iterations of an idea appear as diagrams, clearly visualizing the process at play.

In 1987 Bartlett published History of the Universe, a free-form autobiography that intertwines personal anecdotes with cultural references while eschewing conventional concerns with chronology. The published book was a much-reduced version of the original manuscript, which Bartlett had been developing for almost twenty years. At a reading at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1972, Bartlett shared an extract from the text in which she imagines herself as a young athlete, accomplished at both ballet and baseball. The same extract was published in the Spring 1972 issue of Adventures in Poetry alongside work by other friends of The Poetry Project.

“I have a family and a great many friends. For my work I use Testor Pla paint enamel, #4 sable brushes, 16-gauge steel plates with a baked enamel surface, quarter-inch grid silkscreened on, and Xylol thinner. My rent is $195 per month, I pay a $73 loan payment. I teach for a living.”

Like Cleopatra, the book is divided into sections, and each is marked by one of Bartlett’s photographs. The images will be familiar to those who know the iconography of her paintings: a tree, a wooden house, and a shoreline each designate an aspect of the artist’s life. A view of a diving board hovering over a pool as seen from the position of a diver about to take the plunge is recognizable from Bartlett’s In The Garden series (1980-1983), which was also executed systematically and in a variety of media.

Described by an early reviewer in Avalanche magazine as a “kind of non-stop, precise inventory of personal events and habits,” History of the Universe also reveals the influence of LeWitt, who produced his own Autobiography (1980) by attempting to photograph, and catalogue, every object in his apartment.

–Daisy Charles

Sources:

‘Jennifer Bartlett’s History of the Universe’, in “Rumbles,” Avalanche, No. 7, Winter/Spring 1973, p. 3

Lawrence Alloway, “Jennifer Bartlett,” Artforum, May 1974, p. 64.

Oral history interview with Jennifer Bartlett by Avis Berman, June – September 1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

“Sol LeWitt by Saul Ostrow,” BOMB Magazine, October 1, 2003.

Allison Kemmerer, ed., Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work (Andover, Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy), 2006

Kirsten Swenson, “‘To the Abyss’: Process and Time,” Tate Research Publication, 2017.

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