Interspecies Efforts at Close Reading

By Kameelah Janan Rasheed

MAY 2022 | Critics Page

In 2021, while being interviewed for a story in Art in America, the writer mentioned a paper by Jane Gallop entitled “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters” (2000). After the interview, I printed the essay from my home Xerox machine and set it aside. A few days later, while going through my weekly readings, I noticed a smashed bug! It seems that it crawled into my printer and became part of the text itself. A new composition emerged: a smashed bug whose expelled bits and wildly distributed printer toner obscure the original text. With this highly textured new text, we are reminded that a text is never finished. The substrate, the paper, can hold annotations, emendations, evolving textures, and glitches.

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by Rene Ricard, translated from the Spanish by Lauren Stroh

FEB 2022 | Poetry

Rene Ricard was a poet, artist, actor, and critic born in Boston in 1946. His books include 1979 – 1980, published by the DIA Art Foundation, God with Revolver published by Hanuman Books, Trusty Sarcophagus Company, published by Inanout Press, and Love Poems, published by CUZ Editions. His art reviews and essays were published by Art in America, Artforum, the Stedelijk Museum, the Whitney Museum of Art, Gagosian, and numerous other venues, and his paintings and drawings are represented by Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York and St Moritz. Ricard died in 2014 at the age of 67. His literary executor, Raymond Foye, is currently editing his Collected Writings.

Elaine Reichek: Material Girl

By Norman L Kleeblatt

APRIL 2022 | ArtSeen

Elaine Reichek scavenges among sources from literature, history, mythology, and art, fabricating images and texts she transforms into textiles. Trained as a painter by avant-garde, intellectually rigorous icons, notably Ad Reinhardt, her career has been defined by her strategic use of the textile medium—a feminist, postmodern strategy.