186
PARTISAN REVIEW
all those
New Yorker
writers. And Hemingway as parodist, like in
The Torrents
oj
Spring.
McCaffery:
Somewhere along the line you got involved as a director of
an art museum. How did that come about?
Barthelme:
A peculiar happenstance. I was entrusted with a small
museum for a couple of years- the Contemporary Arts Museum
in Houston. They had just lost the director, didn't have a
prospect, and I'd been on the board. They asked me to fill in
temporarily, which I did for a while, and then they made me
director- probably more fun than anything I've done before or
since. For two years I mounted shows and developed programs in
music, theater, and film. In consequence, I met Harold
Rosenberg in 1962. At that time Harold had in mind starting a
new magazine, which he and Thomas B. Hess would edit. They
needed someone to be the managing editor- that is, someone to
put out the magazine-and they hired me.
McCaffery :
This was the now-legendary magazine,
Location?
Barthelme:
Yes. It was meant to be not just an art magazine , but an
art-and-literary magazine. We were able to publish some
wonderful material- some early Gass, some of John Ashbery's
work, Kenneth Koch's stuff. It was supposed to be a quarterly,
but in fact we published only two issues. Tom and Harold were
not worried about putting the magazine out on time and certainly
never put any pressure on me. We waited until we had enough
decent stuff for a good issue. That experience was a great pleasure
-listening to Tom and Harold talk. But getting back to the
museum, it was a very small place. My responsiblity was to put
some good shows together, mildly didactic, modestly informative.
So I had to study quite a lot very fast to be able to do this - to
make intelligent or useful shows. Luckily, I've always gotten along
well with painters and sculptors, mostly by virtue of not asking the
wrong questions of them .
McCaffery :
It's been my experience that asking a painter what his
work "means" is considered to be in bad taste. This seems to hold
true for writers as well.
Barthelme:
It's a separate study, "How to manifest intelligent sym–
pathy while not saying very much." The early sixties were, as you
know, an explosive period in American art, and I learned on the
job, nervously. Just being in the studio teaches you something. I'll
give you an example: when we were doing
Location
I went over to
Rauschenberg's studio on lower Broadway with Rudy Burkhardt ,
