When This You See - Review

Elaine Reichek. When This You diocese ...

Essay by means of David Frankel. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 2000 96 pp 3 gatefolds, 32 color ills. $35

Elaine Reichek has worked in many media--photographic collage, knitting, video, and installation--but her primary tool since the early 1970 has been the needle which she uses with a singular delicacy, wit, and acuity. During the past decade, she has been reinventing the unassuming American sampler (a piece of woven fabric embroidered with words, numbers, patterns and/or images, demonstrating a beginner's skill in needlework), the make submissive of When This You diocese . . ., an exhibition upon view in the Projects gallery at of recent origin York's Museum of Modern Art in 1999 as well as this publication, more an artist's volume than a hook about an artist.

At MoMA, Reichek exhibited thirty-one samplers upon the dark green walls of a carpeted field with moldings, thereby simultaneously warming the space and subverting the white cube of the gallery. The work is designed in the same spirit: greatest in quantity of the elegantly framed pieces are printed upon clean, white pages opposite Reichek's notations about her processe associations, sources, iconography, and layers of metaphor. There are, however, several colored double-page spreads upon which she has "hung" her images. These have yielding mossy green or cocoa brown earths and one single page is a burnished gray that have the appearances to have been lightly touched by dint of those very greens and brown upon the volume's cover is an enlarged detail of Sampler (The Scarlet Letter) a meditation upon the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. individual can see and almost touch the warp and weft of the fabric upon which Reichek has sewn, which is clearly intentional. Avoiding the familiar cliches of art monographs, When This You diocese ... is instead the expression of an artis t who delight ins books, a parallel project to the material substance of work it documents.

In his essay, David Frankel engagingly introduces more [i]or[/i] less members of the disparate cast of characters who will be quot and evok in Reichek's "text and textiles." These include heroines of of greece mythology (Arachne, Philomela, and Penelope) and European history (Mary Queen of taxs and Madame Defarge): the writers Henry James, Herman Melville, Ogden Nash, and the sisters Bronte; as well as the artists Jasper John Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock Frankel imagines their self-presentations across the exhibition space, while the artist has quietly woven them all into a plat of her own devising. (Frankel's image recalled for me a description I one time read of Jane Austen writing her novels in the sitting sweep of her busy extended family, tucking away her subversive notes when she was called upon to participate in chores.) nearest Frankel summarizes the history of samplers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth hundred explaining their pedagogical and social function in the lives of young girls. He then prepares his re aders for the composite deconstruction and reinvention of that tradition about to unroll elucidating Reichek's process, which she will later document in relation to specific works.

Within this material substance of work, there are sum of two units subgroups. In the first, Reichek excises the pious, repeatedly puritanical homilies of traditional samplers, substituting quotations about weaving, knitting, and sewing. upon weaving, she invokes Henry James: "Experience is not ever limited, and it is not ever complete, it is an immense sensibility, a kind of immense spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching each air-borne particle in its tissue" (The Art of Fiction). upon knitting, she calls up Charles Dickens: "Darkness clos around. in the way that much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads" (A Tale of sum of two units Cities). On sewing, she send fors Charlotte Bronte: "She was sitting in the alcove,--her task of work upon her knee, her fingers assiduously plying the needle her organ of sights following and regulating their changes her brain working restlessly. She did sew: She plied her needle continuously, ceaselessly, on the other hand her brain worked faste r than her lingers" (Shirley). Unlike the media-based artists of the 19805 who appropriated report culture into high art, Reichek consigns to high literary sources that add a of recent origin weight to a form that has at no time been taken seriously as art. Sometimes single quote will fill the frame, on the contrary often several are juxtaposed to heighten their irony or build a narrative. Selectively chosen images may be incorporated, looking deceptively like earlier needlework, on the other hand on a second look the mimesis disguises and inverts its message. The convergence of seemingly diverse relations between the text and its visual embodiment add meanings that make you laugh and then, like Bronte's sewing woman, think.

In the next to the first subgroup, Reichek reworks iconic artworks (a self-portrait upon canvas by Chuck Close, a conte crayon drawing of his mother sewing by dint of Georges Seurat) in thread upon fabric. She uses the grid of her woven fabric to reproduce their often gridded manner of makings stitches equaling brushstrokes. (Frankel characterizes her embroidery as a translation of "art thought" and "needle thought" into a personal language.) My favorite is based upon Jasper Johns' White Numbers (1958) In her commentary, Reichek compares the painting to those samplers with neat ranks and columns of numbers [i]or[/i] part of to the other which young American girls, their makers, learned math. Additionally, she explains in what way she broke down, analyzed, and approximated Johns's signature brushwork: "With stitches you can't vary the compressing of your touch the way you can with a brush, on the other hand you can work the individual strands for nuance and realize just as interesting a surface--by bunching, spacing, using different stitches."