Gallery spaces appear throughout Don DeLillo’s later work, including in “Baader-Meinhof” (2002), Falling Man (2007), and Point Omega (2010), exhibiting Gerhard Richter, Giorgio Morandi, and Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, respectively. These gallery spaces establish and structure relations between what is seen and who sees (the word “gallery” can refer to spectators as well) so that, as it is put in Point Omega, the gallery permits one “to see what’s here . . . and to know you’re looking” (6). This chapter is interested in the formal and even institutional aspects of the gallery—the frames, the walls, the guards—that mark and police the relations between art and viewer but also, it will be argued, between inside and outside; past, present, and future; trust, betrayal, and forgiveness; and life and death. The chapter shows how DeLillo’s galleries unsettle and reframe relations between previously stable positions, such as between the inside and outside of the painting, the room, or the text.
Interrogating the line between art and not-art and between gallery and not-gallery, DeLillo’s formal exhibition spaces ask us to revisit and reframe the spaces throughout his works, such as the desert, playing field, art centre, cinema, shooting gallery, and galleria or mall. This series takes in Americana (1971), for example, in which David Bell writes on the painted walls of his hotel room, and it culminates in Zero K (2016), in a cryopreservation installation that is also a form of art museum. And interrogating the line between life and afterlife, DeLillo’s gallery spaces are also religious spaces: they are the Rothko Chapel in Cosmopolis (2003), “a mortuary chapel” in “Baader-Meinhof” (105), a “hushed tomb” in Point Omega (12). In the gallery, therefore, the one “alone in a room, looking,” cannot consider the natura morta, the still life, without also considering how she herself is still living (Falling Man 210).