Oral history interview with Elaine Reichek, 2008 Feb. 12
Reichek, Elaine,
b. 1943
Conceptual artist, Fiber artist
New York, N.Y.
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Collection Summary: An interview of Elaine Reichek conducted 2008 Feb. 12, by Sarah G. Sharp, for the Archives of American Art, in Reichek's studio, in New York, N.Y.
Biographical/Historical Note: Elaine Reichek (1943-) is a conceptual artist from New York, N.Y. Sarah G. Sharp (1974-) is an artist from New York, N.Y.
This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.
Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service.
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Interview Transcript
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Elaine Reichek, 2008 Feb. 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview with Elaine Reichek
Conducted by Sarah G. Sharp
February 12, 2008
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Elaine Reichek on February 12, 2008. The interview was conducted by Sarah G. Sharp for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
SARAH G. SHARP: Okay. So my name is Sarah Sharp and I'm here with Elaine Reichek doing an oral history interview for the Archives of American Art for the Smithsonian Institute [Institution]. Today is February 12, 2008.
Elaine, you grew up in Brooklyn in New York, right?
ELAINE REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Can you can you just talk a little bit about what that was like, what your family was like?
MS. REICHEK: I grew up in a big Dutch Colonial house with middle class parents in a family of three. I'm the middle child.
MS. SHARP: Ah, middle child.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And what what part of Brooklyn were you?
MS. REICHEK: Flatbush.
MS. SHARP: In Flatbush. And did you go to were you in like public schools
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I went to public school, both primary, junior high school and high school.
MS. SHARP: You did. Okay. So what was I'm curious what high school was like for you.
MS. REICHEK: Well, I skipped a couple of grades and so I was way ahead of myself and I had an older sister. So the idea of passing and being like the other girls, very much interested in me and it was a large public high school which didn't pay too much attention to you.
MS. SHARP: So you just kind of moved through?
MS. REICHEK: We moved through, but you could also, which I did a lot, you could also easily maintain your grades and cut school.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.] Okay.
MS. REICHEK: So I spent an awful lot of time on the beach reading.
MS. SHARP: Oh, that's great.
MS. REICHEK: On my own, and as long as you showed up. I could pass myself off in my senior year as a freshman because in fact I was the same age and get on my bike, go to the beach.
MS. SHARP: So you kind of orchestrated your own education?
MS. REICHEK: In some ways, yeah. I had found high school like prison.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Just like prison. I remember watching the clock; it was insufferably dull.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And so did your parents know that you were
MS. REICHEK: No. I don't think so.
MS. SHARP: going off to no.
MS. REICHEK: I maintained the illusion of being a good student. I certainly didn't look, you know, like anyone who had a rebellious nature. I just managed to do as I pleased which is very difficult as a middle child.
MS. SHARP: So you you it sounds like you were really able to like cultivate your inner world at an early age.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I was masquerading a great deal of the time.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And I don't remember whether even my friends knew half the time what it was I was doing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, I started to take myself to Lower Manhattan at a very early age. I started to shop for my own clothes. I just went to the library on my bike. I took out records. I developed interests. I it was just another thing that I did.
MS. SHARP: And do you think that was important to your sort of ability to develop that alternate world, to like, live so close to Manhattan and have access to
MS. REICHEK: Yes, certainly.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: I was aware. I think I learned through reading that something else existed.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And I had enormous appetite for the something else and there's a story about being in the sixth grade and I was a snotty kid. I had a brand-new beautiful Schwinn bike, the pride of my it was two colors of green and a lot of chrome. It was very flashy and, of course, it was a vehicle for escape.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: You could get on your bike and in Brooklyn those days you could ride anywhere, to the beach, to the it just gave you an enormous amount of freedom. And I remember, I was still in the sixth grade, I was about 10, and I remember thinking and looking out at a field of concrete, oh, dreary, dreary, dreary. There must be something else.
MS. SHARP: Oh, you remember that feeling and thinking that?
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely.
MS. SHARP: Great. Where did you do your undergraduate?
MS. REICHEK: I went to Brooklyn College and I graduated a little early.
MS. SHARP: Right. So you're really
MS. REICHEK: And then I went to Yale [University, New Haven, CT].
MS. SHARP: And then you went to Yale?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: So did you go to Brooklyn College for four years?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Right after high school when you were young.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I went straight into it. My parents did not want to send me out of town.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: Because I was so young.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I think it was a control mechanism.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: My sister had gone out of town and I think I worked as a buffer between them.
MS. SHARP: Hmm.
MS. REICHEK: I think that actually was my role.
MS. SHARP: So you felt like they needed to keep you around
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: to keep a cushion?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I think that's really what was going on.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But they said I was simply too young, which made me very angry.
MS. SHARP: I bet. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Very, very angry.
MS. SHARP: So you lived at home the whole time?
MS. REICHEK: Yes, but it was a godsend because in those days Brooklyn College had the most remarkable faculty.
MS. SHARP: Oh. So who did you study with?
MS. REICHEK: I had Ad Reinhardt.
MS. SHARP: Oh, at Brooklyn College?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. I did not have him at Yale.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: I had better teachers at Brooklyn College
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: than I had at Yale. Harry Holtzman was there.
MS. SHARP: Oh, wow!
MS. REICHEK: Jimmy Ernst was there. Louise Bourgeois taught at night.
MS. SHARP: Oh, wow!
MS. REICHEK: I did not have a sense to take her.
MS. SHARP: You didn't know.
MS. REICHEK: But it was also a free tuition school.
MS. SHARP: Oh, great.
MS. REICHEK: So you could stay in school from morning to night.
MS. SHARP: Take as many classes.
MS. REICHEK: And never exactly, and never have to go home, and although studios filled up most of my time and in fact, I almost ran into a problem with graduation because I had so many credits for majors, I mean, I could have graduated with a minor in several different fields, I just went to school and the faculty was fabulous and it was everything that washed up after the [Second World] War.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And it was cultural. New York is based on refugee culture.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And there was people with Ph.D.s who came here with no resources, found paying jobs and good benefits.
MS. SHARP: And they ended up in places like Brooklyn College.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. They ended up in the city system and especially at Brooklyn College.
MS. SHARP: You you okay. When you were studying, you studied with Ad Reinhardt, and did you take what classes did you take with him? Did you
MS. REICHEK: Drawing and painting.
MS. SHARP: So the studio, basic studio?
MS. REICHEK: All the studio, exactly. I took all the studio courses. I took all the art history I could get. Whatever I could fit in. I took a lot, a lot of English lit. I took a lot of Russian and German 19th Century Classics, Economics. By Economics, I studied with Laskey,
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: which is my classic teacher. He was a Dutch refugee.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: He was simply wonderful.
MS. SHARP: So
MS. REICHEK: I went to school in the summer, too.
MS. SHARP: You did? It sounds like you did what you could to get out of your parents' house and be studying what you wanted to study.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I just did I mean, I found a life in school.
MS. SHARP: And did you when you were when you were studying there, did you realize that you wanted to continue studying art? Did you know it would be that or were you interested in literature?
MS. REICHEK: It was it was something that I did all my life. I mean, my uncle was an artist. My uncle Jesse [Reichek] was an artist. It was something that I always did, but I never was someone who joined the art club or was known as the artist. It was something I had myself and it was something I knew I did well.
When I got into school, I was somehow afraid to take studio classes because I thought all those kids come from music and art, but I did and once I took the first one, that was it. I never looked back.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I somehow the idea of being an artist, it was not what attracted me to it. I never wanted to be an artist. I just wanted to make stuff.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. It was the practice.
MS. REICHEK: It was the practice.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Because the idea of being an artist, I knew what it entailed. By the time I got out of college, I was choiceless.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But while I still had a choice my parents always wanted me to be a lawyer. If you had been in New York, you knew what the life of an artist is, and I actually remember going to Ad's studio on Broadway. I mean, I always thought he was a marvelous teacher until I had children of my own and realized he's really quite a terrible teacher because he just paid attention to the ones he liked. [They laugh.] I had a key to all the cases and put up my work. I went to Ad's. We had sherry. He showed me slides of things from India and I thought, and then I remembered somebody coming up in class, because we all painted in, you know, sort of a communal thing.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And the thing to do, of course, is to paint when nobody else was there which at night we had access to the studios,
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: and you're just I mean, it wasn't a big department, it was a tiny department on the 5th floor, and you were also the only ones that were allowed to wear trousers.
MS. SHARP: Oh. So the girls you were a girl wearing pants?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: That's great.
MS. REICHEK: And that was fabulous.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So we'd all be up there. We'd be up there all the time.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And it's funny because I didn't take any math courses. I don't know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. You just went to the studio. So there was a real little small community to be a part of.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. It was.
MS. SHARP: And so you it sounds like you were one of Ad's favorites. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Yes. I remember somebody coming up to him and showing him this sort of blue painting and him actually saying I think of how cruel it is now "too much blue." [They laugh.] I mean, it's horribly cruel.
MS. SHARP: That sounds that sounds like, you know, even people that studied, you know, even like some teachers I had when I was quite a bit younger, like some of the tradition of art education.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: He was interested in what he what and who he was interested in.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And he had been teaching awhile.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So he was yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's an artist who's teaching. What more can I say?
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [Laughs.]
Well, Elaine, you mentioned for a second your Uncle Jesse who was also an artist, and did you correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in your immediate family, no one else kind of studied the arts
MS. REICHEK: No.
MS. SHARP: in general.
MS. REICHEK: No.
MS. SHARP: Like no one else is a writer or a dancer or anything.
MS. REICHEK: I have cousins, the Shaws, Irwin Shaw, and whatever, David Shaw.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: They're writers, but no, I would not say, with the exception, big exception of a of a practicing artist,
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: as my father's younger brother, and that I came from my father and his brother weren't in a position
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: to one another.
MS. SHARP: Was he was your uncle let's just say so your Uncle Jessie Reichek was a painter?
MS. REICHEK: He's a painter, showed at Betty Parsons [Gallery, New York City], and my first opening, I went to my first opening at a very young age.
MS. SHARP: To one of his shows?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: That's great.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Recently, I found, when I was moving, a poster.
MS. SHARP: Oh, great!
MS. REICHEK: And then I framed it, I framed it.
MS. SHARP: Wonderful!
MS. REICHEK: It's dated 1970.
MS. SHARP: Oh, great.
MS. REICHEK: You know, but that was a late showing, but I still get to go to art openings and be aware of the fact that there was an art world.
MS. SHARP: That this
MS. REICHEK: That this world exists.
MS. REICHEK: Even subliminally.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I knew about it.
MS. SHARP: So you were, you know, even it sounds like even if your parents were in agreement with his
MS. SHARP: No.
MS. SHARP: The choices he made in his life
MS. REICHEK: Well, it basically is not I think it was the last act and there was a rivalry between Jessie and my father for their father's affection.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: They came from a very formal home and Jesse's relaxed relationship to his father was very different from my father's own relationship to his father which was formal.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So
MS. REICHEK: Very much first child, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Right. And maybe a little jealous or
MS. REICHEK: Totally.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Not as relaxed with the father.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: So but so that you were exposed in a personal way to
MS. REICHEK: It was a fantasy good father.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It was a fantasy I knew.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And I remember meeting him for the first time when I must have been about 12 and I had a distinct memory of him coming up. It was a Dutch Colonial house, so it was faced to the side with a stoop and so coming up the walkway to the entrance and I see my Aunt Laure, who's French, and extraordinarily glamorous, in a snood and a pony skin coat and high heels, and I look at her and I think wow! Wow! And I see Jesse is coming up and the boys had no fear and we had a large German Shepherd and the boys are fearless, my cousins, and Jesse's fearless and they're coming up the drive, and I think, yes!
MS. SHARP: That's great. So sort of this
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: fantasy of how life can be, huh?
MS. REICHEK: Well, it's escape.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I have a fantasy. I have some proof that something else exists outside of the kind of options and expectations that I and my family has for me.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. It's a model of another
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And you have it from reading and you have it
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: from New York.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Definitely. And Jesse was was he an abstract painter?
MS. REICHEK: Yes, he was a hard-edge painter. He went to Paris on the GI Bill, showed with [inaudible].
MS. SHARP: Wonderful.
MS. REICHEK: Christian Zervos. He knew [Alberto] Giacometti. He went to Chicago and was [Laszlo] Moholoy-Nagy's studio assistant.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: And then got a job at taught at the Art Institute, got a job at [University of California,] Berkeley but also Betty Parsons came to visit him in Paris where he was showing and asked him to join her gallery and he told me his first reaction to her was that she was a debutante with an alcohol problem [Sharp laughs] which, of course, was true, but
MS. SHARP: Perceptive guy.
MS. REICHEK: I don't know how perceptive he had to be. Anyhow, so but he did show with her and that was his main gallery until he left her. He really got disgusted with the art world.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. He did. So he
MS. REICHEK: And he dropped out.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. That's what it sounds like. I know that you were trying to organize some retrospectives.
MS. REICHEK: He did have a retrospective organized by his family in Petaluma after he died and the University of New Mexico was pleased to do a full-scale retrospective.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It really is.
MS. SHARP: They sort of they ended up in Northern California and kind of
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: got involved in the lifestyle and he wasn't interested in participating in that.
MS. REICHEK: He was not participating in the organized distribution of art.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: He felt that his what he needed to do to make that happen was not something he cared to do.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Well, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that's the family I come from. [They laugh.]
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah. Sounds like it.
MS. REICHEK: Well, it's a way of, you know, it's a particular kind of way of the world. Really quite at odds with
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: one's version of success and
MS. SHARP: Do you think that your your father and mother were like that? Was that part of your immediate family, too, in a different way? Maybe
MS. REICHEK: In some ways, they certainly cared about they respected knowledge.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But I don't think their definition of success was closer to American definition of success.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It didn't. I think they were slightly embarrassed by a display of wealth or
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Some people used to have a degree of self-consciousness about display.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But I don't think
MS. SHARP: It wasn't the kind of
MS. REICHEK: No.
MS. SHARP: rebellion or
MS. REICHEK: No, absolutely not, nor had they spent a great deal of time in Europe.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Jesse was primed for this, also, having a European wife and he was in Paris after the War.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That can make you, give you some idea of what European conception of artist's life is.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And the American, you know,
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: attitudes towards artists and to a certain extent although now if you look at the British its very different, but in other countries, you're always treated sort of better in Europe.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: At least they feed you well.
MS. SHARP: Right. And also, I guess, from like what happened with his generation and what the artists that were his peers and sort of heroes and all that stuff.
MS. REICHEK: So he was politicized. He had a major falling out with [Saul] Bellows about Vietnam.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Jesse led marches out of Berkeley.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: He was part of this ex-patriot group in Paris after the War.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know, Saul Steinberg, Hedda Sterne, [George] Bellows. I mean, this is a particular kind of milieu. It's where my cousins were born and
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: where he came into adulthood.
MS. SHARP: Right. So you, as we mentioned just really briefly a bit ago, you ended up in grad school at Yale and you must have been really young.
MS. REICHEK: I was.
MS. SHARP: You must have been kind of a traditional age to maybe be starting an undergrad degree by the time you went to Yale.
MS. REICHEK: I was close to 20.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Under 20.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So and so you moved away finally [laughs]
MS. REICHEK: Lordy, Lordy. However, I was ill-equipped.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I didn't know how to do my own wash, did know how to make my bed after years of summer camp. By the time I was five years old, equipped in me how to make a bed, but I didn't know how to do my own laundry.
MS. SHARP: That's a big learning curve.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. So I was very happy to be on my own.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And what was like what was the Yale were you in the painting department?
MS. REICHEK: Painting and sculpture. They would only me go to Yale if I lived in the woman's dorm.
MS. SHARP: Oh. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: So I had a double room for myself.
MS. SHARP: Oh, nice.
MS. REICHEK: Well, yes, but I didn't understand dorm life.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I didn't understand that you had to label the yogurt in the refrigerator. [Sharp laughs.] The six degrees of absurdity in the dining system. I didn't know what that was. I didn't quite understand, you know.
MS. SHARP: Like a strangely
MS. REICHEK: It was
MS. SHARP: constructed culture.
MS. REICHEK: I lived in this kind of constructed dorm culture which I know I didn't know what it was about.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: I had to shower with everybody else.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And I didn't know what's going on, and then I go to school and, I mean, I look around and I'm shocked because it's all boys.
MS. SHARP: In the art department?
MS. REICHEK: Right. In the art department in undergrad are all girls in my day. It's a women's department.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You get to grad school, it's all boys.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So that's the first shock and then I'm the same age as the undergraduates
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: and I come from New York and my boots have leather, you know, suede jacket, long hair, and I'm looking around and I go who are these people? [They laugh.] And of course, the likes of big Chuck Close and big Richard Serra
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: who are a couple of years ahead of me and, you know, I
MS. SHARP: So they were students there.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: They were like
MS. REICHEK: The last year.
MS. SHARP: They were in their last year the first year that you came.
MS. REICHEK: And mine was the first year in the Rudolph Building.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: So you have to get used to and we were all putting up boxes to isolate ourselves. It was the irradiated floor. I mean heat comes in so you're like a platypus in the studio. It was physically very uncomfortable and, you know, I had this idyllic notion of what graduate school would.
MS. SHARP: What did you think?
MS. REICHEK: Oh, I thought we would be sharing. We would have talks about our work. We would exchange ideas in a non-threatening setting.
MS. SHARP: So, maybe it sounds like an extension of what the open studio space was in Brooklyn College for you.
MS. REICHEK: No, that was all very nice.
MS. SHARP: But you were I mean what I mean, you were sort of fantasizing that it would be that and even better, right?
MS. REICHEK: Better because you'd be doing it full time because
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: when you're an art major in college, you have all those other courses to take too.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: By the time I was in my senior year, I was pretty much hanging out there all the time but, you know, you'd have art history, you know, classes which of course I did take, but you have you know, you could audit this, it would be an intellectual community of your peers
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: all wanting the same kind of interesting investigation of plastic moons.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, and it turned out if you didn't hide your paints they'd maraude at night and steal them.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs] Okay.
MS. REICHEK: And then we went to the library to prepare for an art history exam, you better hide the book because you can't get it.
MS. SHARP: You can't get it.
MS. REICHEK: People were hiding library books.
MS. SHARP: You're kidding?
MS. REICHEK: Oh, it was horrible.
MS. SHARP: How many how many students were in the graduate program when you were there?
MS. REICHEK: Well, in my class? Maybe there were 15, 12.
MS. SHARP: So maybe like so there were like 30 or so in the whole
MS. REICHEK: Not a lot.
MS. SHARP: Did you find any of that? Did you find any of the camaraderie that you were hoping for?
MS. REICHEK: Well, there were very few women, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I had boyfriends. [Sharp laughs.] In fact, I was it was horrible. It was the most self-conscious existence in the world.
MS. SHARP: Because there were men looking at you everywhere you went.
MS. REICHEK: Everywhere you went and I thought, oh, just let me be able to eat a tuna fish sandwich in peace.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Wow.
MS. REICHEK: It was horrible. It really was.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And then I took a job waiting on tables because my parents, although they got me a double room in the women's dorm, I think they were afraid I would fly the coop
MS. SHARP: Really?
MS. REICHEK: if they gave me enough allowance and paint was really expensive and I was living hand to mouth.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: In a double I mean, you know, it was an odd situation.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And their checks would come late.
MS. SHARP: Which you felt like was control from them a little bit.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, yeah. Totally ambivalent and control.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I thought I can't get fed I mean, you can see I don't require much food. [Sharp laughs.] This is absurd. So I took a job waiting tables in the law school and that is how I managed to get fed.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: So I could use all my money
MS. SHARP: For paints?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And that's how I worked around them.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Well, it sounds like, you know, you've always been industrious.
MS. REICHEK: I had to work you had to come up with a plan.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Well, I think even just going, you know, going to grad school at Yale and envisioning that you could do and just making the choice to do it, regardless of what that
MS. REICHEK: Well, they certainly I knew I needed to get into an Ivy League school in order for them to pay the tuition
MS. SHARP: Oh, I see.
MS. REICHEK: because that's really what they'd want.
MS. SHARP: Right, right, right.
MS. REICHEK: And also Reinhardt said to me just go to Yale and then
MS. SHARP: And did he help you with that?
MS. REICHEK: I'm sure he wrote a nice letter.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I'm sure he wrote a nice letter.
MS. SHARP: So who who did you study with at Yale or what do you remember? Like what was the how were
MS. REICHEK: I studied with Al Held who was horrible, awful, and Louie Finklestein. I had horrible people, except for my art history professors.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: They were good. I had Kurt Forrester, who ended up I think is an architectural art historian, and he was really smart. I loved my art history courses.
MS. SHARP: Well, it's interesting because, I mean, we'll get to it more later, but
MS. REICHEK: But I really loved them. That was really and the work around me, I found some people's interesting and some not.
MS. SHARP: How were you how were you treated? Did you feel like you were treated differently because you were
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: young and a woman and
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: sort of
MS. REICHEK: I did, and I was making large-scale abstract paintings.
MS. SHARP: You were?
MS. REICHEK: And I actually overheard
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: something devastating and it was, "It doesn't really matter what she does, she'll just get married anyhow."
MS. SHARP: Oh. Do you remember who was saying that or
MS. REICHEK: No, it was behind closed doors.
MS. SHARP: And you know it was about you?
MS. REICHEK: Of course.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: "Such a little girl, such big paintings and she makes them with her hands."
MS. SHARP: Oh. You mean what did that do to you? I mean, you were so
MS. REICHEK: I knew that stuff by now.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. But you also had such I just imagine like this really earnest desire coming to this place to have this exchange and
MS. REICHEK: Well, I I did, but I the whole experience at Yale, I mean, it can radicalize your politics without your even knowing it because what you realize is, you don't have any women instructors, it finally dawns on you,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: and after all the romance at the Cedar Bar finally dawns on you, where are the girls here, hello, it all begins to I mean the shock, the visual shock, you cannot ignore the visual shock, Yale was not co-ed at that point, of I mean, I sit in art history and there's two rows of boys, then there's me and two rows behind me.
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: And you were able to smoke in class and I remember taking out a cigarette and putting it to my mouth and a forest fire of Zippo lighters and my thinking, shit, they're going to set my hand on fire. [They laugh.]
MS. SHARP: Wow.
MS. REICHEK: Remember, these are the prep school boys and they're really uncomfortable
MS. SHARP: Right. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: with the presence of women in their classes.
MS. SHARP: And even like in a graduate program.
MS. REICHEK: But well, they took they were graduate you took art history in graduate and undergraduate classes. They were mixed. Okay?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So the undergraduate boys just assumed you were the same age. I didn't look at any older
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: than they were.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: And I wasn't any older than they were. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So but I did get to choose Giotto as the question on the I knew I was going to ace that exam.
MS. SHARP: Oh, that's great.
MS. REICHEK: Just by deference of my sex. Forrester said, "What would Elaine like to choose?"
MS. SHARP: Oh, that's great.
MS. REICHEK: And so I did not eschew the preference and I chose that. I take Giotto.
MS. SHARP: I know Giotto.
MS. REICHEK: I know Giotto. Let's have Giotto. I'll ace this.
MS. SHARP: That's great. Well, was that I mean that like kind of like prep school environment or like young
MS. REICHEK: It was
MS. SHARP: men it's really different from growing up in Brooklyn and going to Brooklyn College.
MS. REICHEK: My parents were you know, they had the pretensions to refinement. So it wasn't as if, you know, I wasn't dressed in pleated skirts, not like the other Brooklyn girls.
MS. SHARP: Right, right. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And it was they certainly had class aspirations.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I didn't look any different
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: than anybody else. So that it wasn't that. It was all that leather and ivy.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And those large upholstered chairs. I thought this is not upholstered for my behind. So it was in some ways, it was that I could and it was impossible to ignore the structure.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Right. And you must have had I guess it was really bad, both because you were one of the few women and because you came from a place where you had figured out the system and you could skip school and ride your bike to the beach and do what you wanted at Brooklyn College, where you sort of knew how to get by with your invisible cloak, so to speak,
MS. REICHEK: Right. Exactly.
MS. SHARP: and suddenly, I mean, you must have had that sort of double consciousness experience where everyone's looking back at you.
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely.
MS. SHARP: Not only are you
MS. REICHEK: And I'm different. Because I am Jewish.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Although in the cliché, "You don't look Jewish." I'm blond. I can pass.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It was not comfortable
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: to be the center of attention
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: all the time.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: When in fact the middle child is the invisible child.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It's the one, the left-out one,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: but in my family, it gave me access to a great deal of privilege that I wouldn't have
MS. SHARP: Because you were able to kind of move around without yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Negotiate, but also, in the words of my first analyst, the less attention they paid to you, the better off you were.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Very true.
Okay. So well, so when you were at Yale, Chuck Close and Richard Serra were in their last years and you came in doing abstract painting, I assume.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And then things started to kind of change and develop. So do you so maybe more than the people that the faculty that you studied with, what was the environment like? Like what were people working on? Was
MS. REICHEK: They were in fact Richard Sera was a painter.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: These ideas formulated slightly later than when we were in school. They were in the air,
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: but with the background of having studied with Reinhardt, it was laid down. I mean, if you studied with the black monk, there's very little past black painting that's left there.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: Having examined the support that you're not all of those formal ideas that were so important to that generation, what's behind the canvas, what is the lie of the object, the I mean, you reach in such a way a dead end.
MS. SHARP: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: And actually one of the early things that Richard Serra has been quoted as saying is "sculpture was open."
MS. SHARP: So there's still there's possibility.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. There was possibility.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But everyone felt that it was back to square one.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And so that it was the times more than what anyone was actually doing, since nobody really was that interested in Pop.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: The idea that American culture was dying and that Pop was the last in some way, there's a great deal of it's Ella Jank [?] movement in some way, if you look at it now, because it privileges the handmade and talks about mechanical reproduction and popular culture. It's American art.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But there's, you know, [Robert] Rauschenberg's in the attic.
MS. SHARP: Right. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Okay. There I mean think about Bruce Connor and all the people in San Francisco. They know, you know, that it's going.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And so we know that and so here comes the ‘60s.
MS. SHARP: And there's a sort of sense of like looking for other materials, possibilities.
MS. REICHEK: Possibilities inherent. You go back to square one. What can these it's reinvestigation, having reach the end point.
MS. SHARP: And so you when did you start using thread and cloth? I mean, some of your early works that I've seen that aren't painting look like they're still you're still kind of like working through like formal investigations that Minimalism set up or sort of like the end to
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: But
MS. REICHEK: I think
MS. SHARP: But this sort of exploration of like how can I find another material or
MS. REICHEK: I think what happened is I had that first show at Bertha Urdang [Gallery, New York City] and that's the one with the sewn canvases that you're talking about.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: The one in which a line instead of
MS. SHARP: You use you use a thread to make
MS. REICHEK: As a line.
MS. SHARP: And they're lying there. They look like line
MS. REICHEK: Paintings.
MS. SHARP: paintings, but they're actually a thread instead of instead of a taped, precise painted line.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: So
MS. REICHEK: So I'm sewing rather than drawing. What happens is I'm mixing drawing and sewing in these works that are kind of very much have to do with Agnes Martin, very much have to do with Minimalism, very much refer to Agnes Martin's dealing with line as part of a weaving support almost. I certainly didn't know that and only knew after that she shared [inaudible].
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And so her first work was talked about weaving.
MS. SHARP: Oh, I didn't know that either.
MS. REICHEK: And talked about the warp and the woof as the structure of the grid and that's something that I came to thinking on my own about the warp and woof, it being a grid structure, and so Minimalism and its reliance on the grid and the screen was very much in keeping with that the way a line would form that kind of support and because of Reinhardt's concern for anti-illusionism [sic] and I do remember coming in the studio with a hand sander taking out the lines between the abutted shapes.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And that I would work the other way.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And I could talk about the lie of illusion, by actually making the real thing.
MS. SHARP: By making the thing instead of
MS. REICHEK: The thing itself.
MS. SHARP: enacting a copy of the thing.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly, that it would be it.
MS. SHARP: And so
MS. REICHEK: Not the illusion of it but also the fact that it hooked to the back. We'd talk about that, too, and that has always been the thinking in my practice.
MS. SHARP: Piercing the surface.
MS. REICHEK: Piercing the surface. The illusionism and I knew it would have to be an illusion if it created an illusion
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: because it was in fact tied to the back.
MS. SHARP: And so were you when you were making those pieces in particular, were you thinking about Agnes Martin?
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I was thinking of a little riff on Minimalism.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And also grow with mathematics because a lot of them had number notations that don't mean anything.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Since everybody was always Fibonacci numbering and doing systems of whatever, I thought, oh.
MS. SHARP: So that that is really so in a way, I mean, I know it isn't like specific appropriation, but you're you're starting to think about
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I am very much
MS. SHARP: redoing
MS. REICHEK: thinking about redoing something in another way that talks about its meaning.
MS. SHARP: And sort of and and gendering it in a different way.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Or messing around with the gendering of it.
MS. REICHEK: Yep.
MS. SHARP: Okay. And then
MS. REICHEK: It's the typical stance for a middle child.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [Laughs.] And what about Funeral for the Grid [date?]?
MS. REICHEK: Oh, I just thought I'd lay it to rest. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: I mean that's that's what I think is really interesting about this work is that it looks you know, you are really earnestly investigating these formal concerns and material concerns, but then you're you're kind of you know, you're seriously turning it on its head but you're also kind of making you're kind of poking at it. You're making a little joke about it in a way.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I just it's I it's part of my nature. It isn't it's just part of who I am. I mean, there is a distance in which you I am perfectly sincere in my efforts, but you have to look at it from a larger perspective, too.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I think that I mean, we'll talk about this more, but I think that just shows up in a lot of your work, sort of like a clear, like, really like strong you're invested and you're earnest about it, but then there is a self-awareness or
MS. REICHEK: Without that
MS. SHARP: a standing outside of it.
MS. REICHEK: Without that, you just proselytize and you just you have unexamined yourself.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You simply have to put yourself in the equation and see I mean, there is something deeply ridiculous and so
MS. SHARP: Well, also, I think
MS. REICHEK: get a grip, you know. It's like, oh, get a grip.
MS. SHARP: This sort of the double meaning or double entendre. Sort of like not letting things just lie and be all figured out and decided and stuff.
Were you so what was we talked about it a little bit already, but the thread and fabric and sewing. Was that about like your immediate instinct for it. Did you go to that because it was an accessible thing? Were you familiar with it already or was it a conceptual choice? What was
MS. REICHEK: It was a conceptual choice because, I mean, I did have a grandmother that was a dressmaker, but come on, my mother played golf. I do not, as you know. The sewing machine was a foreign object, was until recently. New York City girls do not, you know, do home ec.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So I hardly, you know I don't know how to do I was never taught anything. I have a formal education. So none of this, you know, or weaving it was completely another language to me. So it came without a lot of associations, but I certainly had been to the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City] and seen tapestries.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Been in the Brooklyn Museum, brought up in the Brooklyn Museum. So but it seemed I liked it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I really I mean which was something I liked.
MS. SHARP: You actually liked doing it?
MS. REICHEK: I do. It's an activity. It puts you in a state of free associative edge of consciousness I simply the pleasure of it was very real.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And even at an early stage of
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I don't know. It was handwork and you know, that's an age where it also had to do with parroting studio. Now the studio, the large-scale studio, because sculpture was making big impact, big work in big lofts by big you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So, I mean, it bears the mark of a kind of real estate conceit which seemed, I don't
MS. SHARP: Ostentatious.
MS. REICHEK: It seemed self-important.
MS. SHARP: Self-important. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Enormously self-important.
MS. SHARP: So you I mean that's another level of like, look, I can make a giant
MS. REICHEK: You can make it by additive.
MS. SHARP: "I sewed it in my living room."
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's additive.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Okay.
MS. REICHEK: It's this and then that and then that.
MS. SHARP: So it is
MS. REICHEK: And it had to do with seriality and anti-masterpiece.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: And it very much had to do with the way in which you live time actually accrues inch by inch.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Row by row.
MS. SHARP: Right. Like Clothos [?]? And we'll get to that in a minute.
MS. REICHEK: Yes. It was just a kind of time thing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. That sort of that repetitive
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: So around this time, and so we're kind of up to the early ‘80s, you made this piece called Laura's Layette in 1979.
MS. REICHEK: Yes. You know that those pieces are actually a little earlier. What happens is somebody labeled my slides [laughs]
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: all at the same minute.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. They're all like everything.
MS. REICHEK: Everything is the same date.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: There's an entire like five years that's 1979.
MS. SHARP: Right. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: And for the life of me, I can't
MS. SHARP: There's an entire show at that time.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. For the life of me, I can't even figure out when they were made.
MS. SHARP: Well, I did actually Laura's Layette because we we can get to this in a second, but there's a connection to what Mary Kelly was doing at the time.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: But Laura's Layette was actually a few years before that.
MS. REICHEK: It is.
MS. SHARP: I saw some documentation of it that was a couple of years before that.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: But let's just describe what what it ended up being, Laura's Layette.
MS. REICHEK: Well,
MS. SHARP: Do you want to describe what it what the piece was?
MS. REICHEK: Okay.
MS. SHARP: Sorry.
MS. REICHEK: When Laura came home from the hospital,
MS. SHARP: This is your first child?
MS. REICHEK: My first child, my only daughter,
MS. SHARP: Your only daughter.
MS. REICHEK: I think you called her my first daughter.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: I think that was my only daughter. I have two children, a daughter. She had a layette made for her by someone, the mother of a friend. It was very elaborate, a little dress and sweater and booties and mittens and bonnet to take her home from the hospital in, and I kept that of course and it was I was very interested in the ritual of this, you know. It was sort of an interesting thing that one did. But at that particular time, there was a great deal of interest in pattern and decoration.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And so
MS. SHARP: When was when was Laura born? Seventy-four?
MS. REICHEK: Laura's ‘7- She's '78.
MS. SHARP: Okay. Sixty-eight, '68. Laura's 1968 and James is 1970.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: Okay. See, the piece was earlier. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: A great deal of talk about pattern and decoration, and I thought, well, we have these grown children. So I'm thinking about there was a long piece that was before Laura's Layette that was the Hand and Glove [date?] piece and that sort of traced the baby mitten to the mitten thumb-finger opposition and a full glove and that was the development of the way children used their hands and developed hand control,
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: distinguished themselves as primates first and
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Well, by the time I got to all the layette pieces, I mean that one involved Laura's mitten, I thought, pattern. Well, wait a minute, you know. This is a real pattern.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And not only that, it interested me because knitting is a pattern that reads left right right left. Left right right left. So it has another linguistic convention, but and if you turn the needles and mitten around, it's a whole other I was beginning to understand that the construction of what you say is in the medium itself, formal idea. In the exploration of painting, this could also be done in other structures, but the structure of language and the structure of what we're making have are given in a sense. They're encoded in the materials themselves and that if I had a knitted sweater, I had both a beginning object, the first object from the hospital,
MS. SHARP: Made by someone else as this sort of ritualistic giving.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. A pattern of behavior but also a pattern of ritual but also a knitting pattern which was a real pattern
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: which could be translated into other structures.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So I didn't know how to knit. So the first pieces I did, I went to a knitting shop and found a lady who could translate the knitting instructions from the garment.
MS. SHARP: So she didn't have a pattern. She took the actual
MS. REICHEK: Garment.
MS. SHARP: pieces of the layette and deconstructed it?
MS. REICHEK: And she wrote out for the first ones, the knitting instructions.
MS. SHARP: She translated them back into a set of instructions?
MS. REICHEK: Language, physical language. Then I took those knitting instructions and translated them into a visual mapping on a graph so that each box represented an operation of the hand, so that you could knit the object from the written instructions and graph instructions and the object itself.
There were three ways of transferring information and I showed all three. I showed the instructions in a book with the bonnet photographed on somebody else's baby at that time, a sweater somebody else I think it was my niece Maria in the sweater, I forget, but there was a picture of a baby in the sweater, and the instructions, and the object itself, and the mapping of the object.
What interests me about those pieces, they looked like computer pixels.
MS. SHARP: They look like computer graphs. Yeah. The map that you made. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Pixel stitch.
MS. SHARP: It's true. It's true.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: The grid keeps going. I you and that piece was the way you displayed it, you had the original sweater,
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: your map and
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: a sweater that was knitted from the translated instructions, is that right?
MS. REICHEK: No. It was the actual sweater. First I photographed the actual sweater on a baby. Then I wrote out by hand
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: the knitted instructions. Then I mapped it and then I put the actual sweater
MS. REICHEK: And you didn't have a you didn't have someone remake from the written instructions another piece or it was just
MS. REICHEK: Only in the original gloves.
MS. SHARP: In the glove one. Okay.
MS. REICHEK: In the glove ones, I had it done.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: Okay. And that one led to my learning how to knit.
MS. SHARP: I see.
MS. REICHEK: It was simply too much translation.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I thought, all right, when I started to knit objects on my own and got past the layette, that's when, but up until then, I was displaying in Laura's Layette, those not my knitting.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: I didn't know how to knit then.
MS. SHARP: So well, what's interesting about this piece is that, to me I mean, there are many things that are interesting about it, but one of the interesting things it that it seems to beyond the translation stuff, it seems to kind of deal with some ideas from conceptual art from the ‘60s about labor.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And some Fluxus ideas about kind of reenacting a script or creating the set of directions that creates a final thing, and then the way you displayed it, it like reminds me of maybe like Joseph Kosuth or something where they are three
MS. REICHEK: Broom, broom, broom.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Broom, broom, broom.
MS. REICHEK: Art and language.
MS. SHARP: Exactly.
MS. REICHEK: I was less aware of art and language at that point than I should have been.
MS. SHARP: But it was happening around that time.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, it was happening, but certainly Broom, Broom, Broom interested me. Saw it later but, you know, I thought but these ideas are in the air, whether you see them or not.
MS. SHARP: They're part of the yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You're reading and you're thinking.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And so as I mentioned earlier, Mary Kelly ended up creating this piece quite a bit later or at least showing the piece later called Postpartum Document [1974].
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Her children are younger than mine. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: Right. Were you did you did you know Mary Kelly or were you aware that piece was happening or did it just resonate later?
MS. REICHEK: Later.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Later. I you know, I'm acquainted with Mary Kelly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I say hello. We had partied together. And would greet each other warmly, but I knew her a little bit when she lived in New York, but know her less now because she lives in L.A.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Well, and it definitely is, you know, the idea of sort of mapping your experience with motherhood and taking it seriously
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: and putting that into your art work.
MS. REICHEK: Always when you're I mean, I found my children interesting. I found their linguistic development interesting. I found them interesting. I found them interesting and so the experience was interesting. I mean, the experience of sitting on a park bench with a lot of overeducated ladies
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [They laugh.]
MS. REICHEK: with graduate degrees that don't know what to do with their life was not uninteresting.
MS. SHARP: And you were involved in the A.I.R. Gallery [Artists In Residence Gallery, New York City]
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: and this was around the same time probably in the ‘70s.
MS. REICHEK: I joined after I'd had commercial exposure.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: I went from shows that my first shows were in commercial galleries.
MS. SHARP: Oh, really?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. And then I went to A.I.R.
MS. SHARP: Can you explain
MS. REICHEK: I developed some of the disgust with the commercial system. It's my natural
MS. SHARP: It's in your family, it's genetic.
MS. REICHEK: Right.
MS. SHARP: Can you explain just what A.I.R. was, just for, you know,
MS. REICHEK: Yes. It was the first women's cooperative and the prototype for many galleries afterwards. A group of women got together and made themselves a space and showed their work together.
MS. SHARP: And
MS. REICHEK: Now, also, you know that non-profit was in the air.
MS. SHARP: Right. There were a lot of artist-run spaces or
MS. REICHEK: Artists-run spaces in which artists are trying to wrest control of the marketplace. It is remember what's happening in in politics. It is the time for alternatives.
MS. SHARP: And what was the community of artists like? Were you were you with other women that were also sort of like exploring like Minimalism and conceptual ideas as well and were you
MS. REICHEK: Well, part of the group was Nancy Spero, Dotty Attie, Mary Grigoriadis, Mary Beth Edelson, Clover Vail. I am not in the first group. Okay. There are I mean, I joined an already formed group. I'm not an original member. I'm a very early member. I think Ana Mendieta joined after I joined. She's the next one after me.
For me, it was an eye-opening experience and I actually joined because functioning in a group was not an experience I had. I didn't really. I talked to you about your having been brought up and having very good or an interesting group experience.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that group dynamic is familiar to you.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That was something aside from summer camp and team sports in some ways.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I have less problems with competition because of, you know, being on a team playing athletics and summer camp [inaudible], but I didn't have a really group working experience other than summer camp.
And I thought since at this time, the women's movement was privileged, I mean they had experiences, I mean I was in analysis but I was never in group therapy and I certainly had never gone any of those things, but I thought it would be an interesting experience for me to work in this.
MS. SHARP: So this was only your first. It was like a conscious
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: foray into
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: the group experience.
MS. REICHEK: And also having had a [inaudible].
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I'm getting a lot of attention.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: This is good.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: My work had already fit. I mean, I was already doing it on my own when I came to them. So it was, you know, I was making feminist work. It seemed the perfect place to be. I mean, you know, put your money where your mouth is, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Join, join you know, publicly state rather than stay in the commercial system, you know. It seemed to be that that really wasn't where to be.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: For work like mine and for my politics.
MS. SHARP: So that was part of the conscious choice to like contextualize yourself with the feminists
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely.
MS. SHARP: in a as a in a professional context?
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely, absolutely. That's how I my work to be seen and so I joined and was happy to be part of the group, but the experience of working with a group, that was eye-opening. It was totally, totally educational. It was, I think, emotionally something I was unprepared for.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Very strong personalities, from very diverse places. I don't think I'd ever seen that much acting out in my life. [They laugh.] It was kind of shocking. You'd sit in those meetings and you'd think what am I listening to? [They laugh.] They must have thought the same thing when I spoke.
MS. SHARP: Like so you were you were kind of like figuring out where in a group you fit because there's a whole sort of
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And, I mean, that was the time. Everyone was working together and opening food cooperatives and art cooperatives and
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: there was a dream
MS. REICHEK: So you had to
MS. SHARP: of cooperation.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. It was a dream. I'd had that dream.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But in reality, it was very difficult and it was tough for me. [They laugh.]
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And so were most of the issues like large things about where the organization should go or
MS. REICHEK: No!
MS. SHARP: No. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: That's not what they were about. They were about who gets what and gets to show.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And how many spaces, you know, how many square feet in a group show.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: And my first group show experience was a total eye-opener. I think I got there 10 minutes late and three-quarters of the wall I was assigned to share was already hung.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs] So you have to be there early to claim your space.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: It was really and I was as ambitious as the next one. Who knows what I would have done if I got there early.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: But, you know, I guess I was brought up like a nice little girl that you have to wait for the roommate to come to decide which bunk to take.
[END MD 01 TR 01.]
MS. SHARP: Okay. I'm here with Elaine Reichek. This is the second disc in our recording and today is February 12, 2007.
MS. REICHEK: Sounds like an autopsy. [Sharp laughs.] A police interrogation.
MS. SHARP: The subject is five feet tall. [Laughs.] Okay. When we when we finished when we were last talking, we were talking about you being part of the A.I.R. Gallery.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: We were talking a little bit about the community of women and learning to be cooperative in a group.
MS. REICHEK: Well, what happened is in the end, Nancy and I paired off together.
MS. SHARP: You and Nancy Spero, yes.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And we ran the panel discussions.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: So that was great fun. We would think up something and then we'd ask a bunch of people and, you know, that turned out to be real fun.
MS. SHARP: So you guys chose your own committee work?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And so if you did that, everybody had to be on the committee and so if you Nancy and I were interested in that kind of thing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So that seemed just dandy to us.
MS. SHARP: Do you remember any of the panels you organized or
MS. REICHEK: Oh, yeah. I do. They were great. There was one where Hannah Wilkie performed, where this is really kind of an embarrassing story to tell. It was so crowded and such a fire hazard that Leon [Golub] had to get up on the desk and tell everybody they had to line up against the walls in case the fire marshal came and that they couldn't block the door. It was a riot.
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: It was actually a riot. Okay? We had to call upon the feminists had to call upon Leon to get up on the desk and shout over everybody. That was one. Then there was something called, oh, Old New Figuration.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, that was really we had to go find somebody else. I think we got the Noel people to give us, you know, some auditorium or some we found some space near Nancy's loft on Lafayette Street and on LaGuardia Place, sorry, and that was actually a really interesting panel about the New Figuration. Donald Kuspit was the moderator and it was people like Eric Fischl and, oh, God, I can't remember. April Gornick was in the audience, so she got up and said she wasn't a feminist.
MS. SHARP: Oh, wow!
MS. REICHEK: Leon was on that panel.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And I remember him just being hysterically funny about leaning back and saying I'm an old figurerator and I'm a new figurerator.
MS. SHARP: And who is Leon? Leon Golub?
MS. REICHEK: Leon Golub.
MS. SHARP: That's who you're talking about? That's really funny.
MS. REICHEK: So some of them were really good, and then I guess I can't even remember. I'm a little flighty from the cold medication. So I can't my my usually good recall is not operating.
MS. SHARP: Well, if you think of some later, we can talk about them.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. They were they were not all interesting, some of them were obscure topics where we didn't have much of an audience and some of them were packed houses.
MS. SHARP: Oh, really? Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Depending on what Nancy and I thought was particularly interesting, you know, or we were discussing.
MS. SHARP: Sounds pretty fun.
MS. REICHEK: It was just Nancy and I. We had fun thinking about stuff or we'd be having coffee or something or, you know, so it was a perfectly and then we had some pressure, I remember, to charge admission which we absolutely refused to do.
MS. SHARP: Oh, that's great.
MS. REICHEK: They forced us into passing the hat afterwards, but that's as far as we'd go. I think we did that for a couple of things and then we thought we just can't do this.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: We I mean, but you did at that particular point, grant and funding organizations began to tighten up and professionalize and they wanted you, because we had a non-profit corporation, to, you know, sing for your supper.
MS. SHARP: Was this like the late ‘70s, the early ‘80s?
MS. REICHEK: It was more in the ‘80s.
MS. SHARP: So
MS. REICHEK: The New Figuration. It had to be in the ‘80s.
MS. SHARP: Right, right. Yeah. The early ‘80s. Gearing up to the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] stuff.
MS. REICHEK: Everything started getting really tight.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And in some ways the paperwork
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: just and the professionalization of small spaces
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: just, you know, it was like just killed everybody.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Which is what really happened in the early ‘80s.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: The non-profits.
MS. REICHEK: It just I mean, they just went under from the sheer requirements
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: of accountability.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, they lost their spontaneity. They lost their we used to run something in which we had a lottery, a free lottery to spend a half hour with a critic.
MS. SHARP: Oh, wow!
MS. REICHEK: And we got a grant for that. Nancy and I wrote it up and you could get a half hour with you know, you submitted your name, and we really Mary Gregoriof's kid Vanessa chose out of a hat and we would call these people up and say you won a half hour. We got like big time people doing it.
MS. SHARP: And like who were who were some of the critics?
MS. REICHEK: Well, I mean Kuspit did it. I remember Brooks Adams did it. I remember Lisa Weedman did it.
MS. SHARP: Wow.
MS. REICHEK: Who else did it? Oh, really everybody. Carl Radcliff did it.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: I mean, people were really nice about this kind of thing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And we paid a lot, a decent amount,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: and it was a very good thing to do, but those things don't happen anymore.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah. But just the sheer sort of like they didn't have to just getting your name pulled out of a hat versus like a lengthy jury process is really sort of populist.
MS. REICHEK: I mean that's what we were thinking about, the turning around of the community.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And who didn't have access and wouldn't it be nice if people just, you know, got access
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: and wouldn't it be good to filter them through a non-profit space and just
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: by chance, you know, critics were willing to take it on. It was a different time.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Fewer issues probably.
MS. REICHEK: Not so many galleries. It was only a couple on Soho on 57th Street but that was it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Less of a well-oiled machine.
MS. REICHEK: Not so many grad students either.
MS. SHARP: Right. Yeah. I mean not so many people just getting fed into the system.
MS. REICHEK: Well, it's like a profession now.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. How long were you active with A.I.R.? Do you was it
MS. REICHEK: I can't remember. I had two shows. I had two shows with them. It was like one in the old space, which was on 12th Street [?], prints, and then one on Crosby Street.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: So I had two and I remember getting the space and I was there, certainly there for that, and it involved a great deal of negotiation. That, too, was done according to who could pay what. They got to pay what shares. Everybody didn't have to have the same amount of shares.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: Okay. You had a little bit more means, you bought more shares. You had a little less, you had less shares. Everybody had there was a minimum level.
MS. SHARP: You could have more in. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. It was just incumbent upon those, myself, Nancy, to buy a little bit more on anything, a little bit more to help women who were single with a child and didn't have anything.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: People like the artist [inaudible]. There were artists like that, too. She didn't have any money.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: She lived off making Sol LeWitt was very nice to her. She lived off she was one of the teams that drew for him.
MS. SHARP: Oh, for him.
MS. REICHEK: So it it was that was a fair way to do it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: In the end, that's what we decided to do and it worked. That's how we got our space.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I mean, I can't really it's amazing to me that it lasted for so long, you know. The end sort of, like, a dream of giving equal access, and all that was really like played out and actualized.
MS. REICHEK: It was still yeah. We were still in the beginning of the ‘80s.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Then the demands of money, professionalization, and the director
MS. SHARP: Creating the hierarchy, that was more like a corporate structure.
MS. REICHEK: It was more like a gallery.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And all of that in some ways it was a victim of its own success, too.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know, everybody moved on. There was a certain moment and then the moment wasn't.
MS. SHARP: It changed. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It was over. So we left it to others and it became a different place.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Because the actual impetus, which was collective and political and had to do with very strong feelings about in time and place, there were different sets in the whole way the art world operated.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So whether that will come back, I don't know.
MS. SHARP: Hopefully.
MS. REICHEK: I have no idea.
MS. SHARP: I don't know either.
MS. REICHEK: Things go out, they come in, they come out.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But
MS. SHARP: And it's also part of like a larger collective consciousness, like that wasn't happening, that was happening within galleries.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, we were connected to a larger field of a hope of change.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The white men generation has been so disappointed.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Hopeful. It's hopeful now.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And many of my colleagues are very bitter about what happened.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And how much hope there was.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Well, dialing back a little bit to the early ‘80s, in I think in 1979, I have here that you finished Laura's Layette, but I think maybe you showed it a lot during that time.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And that was also the year that you had an installation at P.S. 1 [Long Island City, NY] called "In the Artist's Bedroom."
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And this is where you really started to get into some direct appropriation and you made a bunch of they're kind of like little quilts. They were coverlets in the shape of different modernist paintings.
MS. REICHEK: They weren't quilts in the sense that they were quilted but they were coverlets.
MS. SHARP: They were coverlets like bed covers.
MS. REICHEK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. SHARP: But they were hung on the wall, right?
MS. REICHEK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. SHARP: And and it was in the janitor's closet?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Can you talk a little bit about that? Was that your first installation, and what was that like pulling that off?
MS. REICHEK: Well, it was an extremely interesting experience for me because, you know, I went to P.S. 1. You saw this it was extremely exciting. I mean, it was a renovated school and the space I really loved was this janitor's closet and the process, although people said it was complicated, for me, it really wasn't complicated. I saw the janitor's closet. I had this idea of what I wanted to do in it. I sent in a proposal and they wrote to me and told me I had it. That was it, you know. It was just one of those, you know, you apply, you get it
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: kind of things, and didn't know anybody, didn't talk to anybody, just had this idea, and working working the thing was insane. I had these toddlers that go to the school. I had these kids in school and so I had to go very early with my paint and my you know, and everything and get there and I think the guy who was sort of the superintendent surely had a substance abuse problem [Sharp laughs] because that I mean, he didn't go on until 2-3 in the afternoon.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: So I would get there at 10 o'clock, get in, and I just remember standing there on top of this 10 foot ladder, painting the room blue, and the memory of being frozen with the roller in my hand swaying back and forth, I still remember that.
MS. SHARP: So this whole it's this little room, like a little closet, and it's entirely painted blue, all the walls, a kind of royal blue?
MS. REICHEK: They're the kind of blue that signifies night.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So blue starry night blue and there's a small lamp hanging from the ceiling, like a ceiling fixture, with a single bulb, a kind of illusion to a [Vincent] van Gogh studio, a fixture that appears there, and the blue a darker blue starry night, that's for sure,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: and I shoved a single bed with a footboard painted blue in the closet and covered it with blue sheets and a blue coverlet and just set the stage and then hung single bed frames, reference to Rauschenberg on the walls, but the coverlets were all other artists and then the expression anxiety of influence comes much later but it was about those collective influences that are part of every artist's thought process.
MS. SHARP: So the frames were they were shaped like a single bed?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Framed like a headboard?
MS. REICHEK: They were wooden box-like frames in a stained brown wood with the beds recessed in them with a little pillow.
MS. SHARP: That's right. They had little pillows.
MS. REICHEK: They had pillows and they hung on the wall.
MS. SHARP: And what was what would be the coverlet on these little beds? For example, a [Piet] Mondrian?
MS. REICHEK: A Mondrian coverlet and a [Henri] Matisse. I had a Richard Tuttle coverlet. I had a Sol LeWitt coverlet. I'm trying to remember who else. A Rauschenberg one. Just anyone that I was thinking about at that time.
MS. SHARP: And what were there stars on the ceiling or something?
MS. REICHEK: No, no. Just it was a very high ceiling.
MS. SHARP: Yes, yes.
MS. REICHEK: So it was like I'm on a 10 foot ladder and I'm five foot four. So we're talking amazingly high ceilings. It's an old school.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So, you know, I'm standing there waiting. So it had to 16-18 foot ceilings.
MS. SHARP: And did people, when they entered, did they like climb on the beds and stuff?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: Really?
MS. REICHEK: The door was opened, but they did. They climbed into bed and you're supposed to lie there like you were going to sleep and seeing all the, how shall I say, the dream ancestors.
MS. SHARP: During the same year, you made a piece called The Life and Times of Art [date?] which doesn't have the bedroom motif, but there's a similar sort of you're using household items, like pencils, frames, window coverings, and fabric to again, on a small scale, so you're also making it diminutive, which is In the Artist's Bedroom, they're small, you remake famous paintings, also, or refer to them.
MS. REICHEK: That was more reference to framing.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: I used empty frames and then filled them in with references to ideas about framing and support and formal issues, like front, back and but I also included a lot of Pop iconography because, remember, the Pop artists were extending from the canvas.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: They were tacking real objects on to the frame, to the support, and dealing with a kind of sculpture painting integration. "Off the Wall" was one of the shows at the [Solomon R.] Guggenheim [Musuem, New York City] or, you know, putting on and so there was this dialogue about the difference between painting and sculpture and that kind of hybridity.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And so I just wanted to do the history, you know, of frame and window is you can trace the history of art through the frame and the window. So I was just sort of channeling that.
MS. SHARP: I found I I really liked seeing those pieces and you had described the Artist Bedroom to me but I hadn't until I saw an image, I didn't fully get it because I worked with you on recent work but I feel like this work, which kind of you did that work and then you moved into a whole other body of work for awhile, was foregrounded by this, though, like as far as scale and reproducing well-known, sort of, modern icons of painting with fabric or with sort of different kind of material.
I know there's other stuff going on in the later work, but I thought it was really interesting to see this.
MS. REICHEK: I think artists have ideas and then revisit and revisit them and they come back to them. I mean, every big departure for an artist is really has roots some place else. Even when you're making something that's described differently, the motivation's always somewhere intermixed.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You never just of its time completely.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So after so for the next three years, you you start doing these you're still doing appropriation but you start doing the work where you're appropriating photos of like non-western architecture. I think is what you start with. I'm thinking of pieces like Chichen Itza [date?] and the Temple of Heaven [date?], where you're using a format kind of similar to Laura's Layette because there is like a 2-D image paired with a sewn object. There's a sort of central geometry that's happening between them and there's multiples. I think you started with pairs and then you ended up doing some that were three.
So what I'm what kind of led you to these photographic images as in the first place as a source for this work?
MS. REICHEK: Well, the bonnets were really the source.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: They're bonnets.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Different kinds of hats.
MS. SHARP: I remember the pineapple.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. The pineapple. There's Chichen Itza. There's Temple of Heaven. You know, they're about hats and
MS. SHARP: So it started with those knitted objects because you're exploring them through the baby clothes
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: and the layette.
MS. REICHEK: But the mappings tend to look like architectural structures and that's how it feeds back into the architecture. It's the bonnet to the mapping to, oh, my goodness, this looks like a building.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So then, you know, the other structure is visual structure. It looks like, even if it's different, it looks like.
MS. SHARP: There is a language that is similar.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. It's visual association. So you're getting to a kind of associative structure which is another structure than linguistic instructions.
MS. SHARP: But you would
MS. REICHEK: So I would begin to expand the associative and the idea that a bonnet could equal a building because of the visual, you know, the accident of the visual translation was just too nutty for me to resist. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: So these pieces would be framed and they would be like a serial or there would be a maybe in one frame these three items. One was like a found bonnet sometimes and then maybe a the photo of like an archaeological photo of like a pyramid, for example, or another
MS. REICHEK: The bonnets were all knit by me.
MS. SHARP: And and did you
MS. REICHEK: By this time I can knit.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: So what happens is I can look I mean, I can look at a set of knitting instructions
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: and actually kind of know I mean, it's very interesting because you can kind of picture everything.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: If you've mapped them out visually, you know what these panels are going to look like.
MS. SHARP: They're sculptural.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly. So you get an idea that, well, my goodness, it looks like Chichen Itza. So you think, oh, yeah, so you go and get a photograph of Chichen Itza and you think, that's a bonnet, and so you work back from the photograph.
MS. SHARP: So you would show you would pair like a found bonnet with a photo
MS. REICHEK: No.
MS. REICHEK: and then you would make one, also?
MS. REICHEK: No, no found bonnets.
MS. SHARP: There was a set of instructions?
MS. REICHEK: No, there was the photograph.
MS. SHARP: But what you displayed in the piece was
MS. REICHEK: Was the photograph, the mapping of the knitting. I knit the photograph literally.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay. And then the the bonnet that came from
MS. REICHEK: From the
MS. SHARP: pattern?
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: I see. Okay.
MS. REICHEK: So what can happen
MS. SHARP: So it started with a photo and then you made
MS. REICHEK: That's right. The translation
MS. SHARP: I see. Okay.
MS. REICHEK: What happens is this translation works both ways. French-English, English-French.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: I could translate at this point from written, okay, into a knitted object and a graph, but the graph could then be translated into a photograph and you could work back from a photograph the other way.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: As in right left right left right, knitting instructions. Okay?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I could work it the other way.
MS. SHARP: So that's what you did. So you're starting with the photos. And where so were you like using a specific source to find these images or
MS. REICHEK: No, I don't know. I started with books in primary architecture and, you know, if
MS. SHARP: Things that you were attracted to and had nearby.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. Kind of like you know how these things happen.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Okay?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know, you get into bonnets. I mean, you get into hats. Even the Temple of Heaven, what happens is the Emperor receives information through his head, you know, and, you know, and the Temple of Heaven is where he receives the information.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So you make these nutty associative it was also some idea if you translate so carefully you, you know, miss the forest for the trees.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: You can get to a very nutty place just following one step after the other
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: without an overview and I suspect that would be the real root of the
MS. SHARP: So it becomes a little bit about setting up this set of instructions for yourself.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. It was by setting up this process for myself and then thinking, you know, this is you know, if you really follow this line of reasoning to the end,
MS. SHARP: Right. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: you know,
MS. SHARP: What do you end up with?
MS. REICHEK: it's like [Friedrich] Nietzsche; good ideas, bad conclusions.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: Anarchism, you know, good ideas, you get to the right place.
MS. SHARP: Well, and that work to me was a little bit like we were talking about broom, broom, broom or like
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Kosuth's One in Three Chairs [1965] and then
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: But there is that element of like a double side to it or a little bit of a joke or a little bit of a
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Yes, and one thing Kosuth this is not humorous.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: He has no humor about his rivals.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Get him to talk about Lawrence Weiner. But yeah, it was just you know.
MS. SHARP: And then but then it also was like Lawrence Weiner's Declaration of Intent [1968], you know. It could be made. It doesn't have to be made.
MS. REICHEK: Well, it's
MS. SHARP: So you're
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. It's instruction.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So after the series, you start to do the Tepee series, right? So you're using Tepees and
MS. REICHEK: Well, the Tepees started the original Tepee piece what happens is the photographs get interesting. Okay? I'm still looking at archival photographs and they get really interesting to me and you know, I lived so close to the Natural History Museum, it's also a childhood haunt, and, you know, I like a nice library, a picture file.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I used that stuff when I was a kid. I used to take out records from the Grand [Army] Plaza Library [Brooklyn Public Library]. You used to be able to take out records. They also had a picture file, as I began to be interested in picture files, and so I started to use them, I don't know, I just got interested in the photographs and the photographs led to more photographs. So I did a series of architectural structures that turned into bags and bonnets and went to the bonnets and went into architecture and then the architecture went into containers and if you're dealing with primary structures, you often deal with seeing them in a geometric form. It sounds like the title of a Jewish museum show.
But if you're dealing with early architecture, you're dealing with sort of simpler forms and then you start to think, well, where are these from and they're handmade. So it has a relationship to starting I mean, you make a grass hut out of a bunch of grass.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So it's very related to knitting or something like that. They're made at home, they're made out of what's available. They have a whole domestic idea behind them. So somehow I got into the domestic ethnographic and then I think about how picture files are so out of context and everything's so anonymous. We don't know where they're from and they have bad labels and I don't know anything about them and I think about the way I'm looking at them and I think about all the meaning that's been literally drained out of them and how they're collapsed and something about their there's a kind of silent quality about them.
There often aren't any people around; isolated thoughts and the photographs themselves as documents are very energetic and I wonder about that, too. And so the whole shift in the photography from public sphere which is very funny to pair with the baby bonnet
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: now comes instead of public architecture becomes kind of private.
MS. SHARP: Private architecture that's been documented in that
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly.
MS. SHARP: For specific purposes?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I kind of thing about little I mean, I think about the same thing you're thinking about when you're asking this question. Where are you getting these things from?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I'm getting them out of books. There's no Internet, remember.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: No Internet. It's just library pictures files. So somehow that shifts.
MS. SHARP: And there's a there's a scale shift that happens, too.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I think I get tired of working small and I come to the end of it.
MS. SHARP: And is there and so what ends up you end up making these big works, like 60 inches or more, sometimes.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I think I end with sweaters, you know, a sweater, Laura's bikini by that time she's wearing a bikini. A sweater that I knit for myself. It's like the only garment I ever attempted to make for myself but then, of course, I use it for my work and discard the sweater, but then I have like a tiny little scale model of it and something ironic that's it was the end.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So the part that interested me was the buildings.
MS. SHARP: The buildings.
MS. REICHEK: That's what that was the part to move along.
MS. SHARP: And your self-awareness of your interaction with these images and how they're edited and controlled or presented to you.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. What I'm getting from them, from picking up them stray. They're just reproduced. They have no you know, their context is lost. I think I'm talking about my own recontextualization of everything, that the whole idea of contextualizing and recontextualizing because at this point, I'm actually making installations.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Okay. So I begin to think about context and then the context just feeds into work and I become much more concerned with the installation and actually my first knitted show of large-scale knitted pieces is a complete installation.
MS. SHARP: So you I just want to I just want to describe one of these pieces really quickly to so so there's this large-scale reproduction of this ethnographic photograph
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: you found of, like say, a tepee, for example, and then paired with a knitted version and you call it like a bag or some kind of vessel.
MS. REICHEK: It's collapsed. It's a I knit the photograph.
MS. SHARP: And you collapse it, but it's like the same scale. So it's like this bag
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: thing.
MS. REICHEK: If you spread it out,
MS. SHARP: It's not framed.
MS. REICHEK: If you spread it out, if you spread it out, it would exactly equal the photograph.
MS. SHARP: The photograph.
MS. REICHEK: Not the tepee itself but the photograph.
MS. SHARP: So
MS. REICHEK: Okay?
MS. SHARP: And then it hangs in this kind of tent-like shape on the wall.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. It hangs upside down with the structure, the support, the tepee poles taken out of it, on a peg, so that they're made to be equal. But one, the collapsed one, the tactile one, the one that possesses qualities that the photograph leaves out is in the viewer's space, and takes on as much presence as the framed and distant one.
MS. SHARP: And then you paint on the photo.
MS. REICHEK: That's later.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: But becomes important in the sense that it points out the fact that it starts fairly early. You're right.
MS. SHARP: Some of
MS. REICHEK: The first ones I made for myself weren't painted, but I think by the time I you know, they got out in the world,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: they were painted.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I think what I'm talking about is the projection of color from the viewer. I mean, when you see a grass hut, you know, it's yellow.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: When you see a tepee and especially with tepee that has a language component, because that is not designed, that's a pictograph, and there are dream tepees and there are messages and pictograms easily legible to people who know the signs and symbols; that's another language, which, of course, an artist looks at as abstraction.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Circles, polka dots, stripes, you know. They just look like, oh, primary shapes, primary forms, primary decoration.
MS. SHARP: In a tepee that's sort of a triangle shape.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. So you're talking about an artist vocabulary because at this point in time, there's a degree of sensitivity to using ethnographic objects, although it's actually a little before this discourse,
MS. SHARP: Yeah. You were doing that pretty early.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: In such a you were doing really complicated and self-aware way that I think not many other artists were doing it and certainly not white artists really
MS. REICHEK: No. I I don't think but my hyperconsciousness of these kinds of things coming from a background I do,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: couldn't not be present because of my experiences.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And what I really like about the tepee and the and the the gesture of painting the dots on the dream tepee, which it looks like polka dots or whatever to someone who comes out of a Western modernist culture,
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: and you used primary colors to refer back
MS. REICHEK: Right. Red, yellow, and blue, always.
MS. SHARP: to that, and you're just you you kind of are revealing your own biases that you bring to something and and still kind of dealing with like thinking about like the issues of modernism or like formal concerns that are kind of removed from the reality of what this image was of.
MS. REICHEK: The reality is I'm in New York. I have access to everybody's to everything.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I'm privileged enough to know where to find it. There's nobody more provincial than a New Yorker. They think it all comes up the Hudson. But I and I live and in some ways have always been acquainted with ethnographic storehouses. I know what museums mean. So it would be hard being a woman and having gone to having had a kind of formal education, but having had graduate education experience at an all-male college, certainly I suspect being Jewish, would not make me aware of being politicized, not make me aware of civil rights issues which are easily translated into these kinds of issues.
MS. SHARP: And you at some point, you started also to what's what's one of the striking things about the architectural forms is that, as you I think you mentioned it a little bit earlier. There are no humans, and I in an article in an interview you did with Trace Lichtenstein, you talk about how, you know, where are these these are places that we know people live in, they cook in, they sleep in, they play outside, they do whatever, and some a photographer clearly came in and said everyone, over there.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: Framed this photo and made it isolated from its community of other buildings that may have been there and all of that.
MS. REICHEK: Tepees are always built in a circle.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: There is one final tepee piece that included people.
MS. SHARP: Oh, yeah. I
MS. REICHEK: The final tepee piece includes people and the final second-to-last one has two tepees.
MS. SHARP: Has two tepees.
MS. REICHEK: Two tepees. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: And and then you started using figures.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Humans. So what
MS. REICHEK: They're right in back of them.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: [They laugh.] They're in the same while you're searching
MS. SHARP: It's in the back of the tepees, the figures.
MS. REICHEK: Well, while you're in the file,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I did one on primary architecture of all nations. Okay?
MS. SHARP: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: I also was making collages at this time, too. Then the ones that, of course, are most meaningful for me are the Native Americans.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: The first dysfunctional family holiday is Thanksgiving. Even I know the Pilgrims haven't survived. [They laugh.] In the Northeast, we learn about Indians with tepees.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Native Americans have tepees.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And in California, you learn about the last [inaudible]. In the Southwest, you learn about something else, but we do less pueblos here.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: We do tepees and Plains Indians. I, of course, was brought up on grade B cowboy westerns.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: That was the fear of the first cinema.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So even any dope sitting there in the movies, you know, you can see that the Indians are sympathetic.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: You saw the unfair cowboy movies.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: We played Cowboys and Indians as a kid. We dressed up like cowboys. I read Last of the Mohicans [James Fenimore Cooper. Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I. Lea, 1826]. I mean, who could not be informed by the heartbreak of the Last of the Mohicans?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, people are not so stupid not to have known what happened.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: The fact that they didn't call it genocide till later, I don't think we knew about the systematic atrocities, but that always comes later.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Certainly people were hip to the fact that they were everybody was herded to the Trail of Tears. They didn't teach it, but it isn't that hard to find out about.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I just started to read, read and read and read and read, and I had the good luck to live near an ethnographic museum and I just started traveling. I went everywhere for that stuff.
MS. SHARP: Oh. So you were you traveled to get images for that?
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely. I began to go to ethnographic museums in for Tierra del Fuegians. I went to I went to London which has a very good Tierra del Fuegian because it was essentially [Charles] Darwin explored it. For the ethnography of Micronesia, Polynesia, for those installations, I went to France, I went to Museum [d'Histoire Naturelle] de Lyon. Everywhere I went, I went to Harvard [University, Cambridge, MA], I went to Yale, I went to the Peabody [Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, Harvard University], you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I never got to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum [Honolulu, HI]. That's still a dream, but yes, every ethnographical museum that I could, dozens.
MS. SHARP: And and what
MS. REICHEK: Just, you know, they're all coming back to me. My hands and knees dusty files.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: I loved it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I bet.
MS. REICHEK: It was great.
MS. SHARP: To dig through all the evidence.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Remember things are still not organized on the computer.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And it's just you get to actually look through it, except at the Heye Museum [The George Gustav Heye Center, New York City] before it became a National Museum of the American Indian [Smithsonian Institution], they were all on fiches.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: There was one tiny older lady who had to go into the cold room and put her sweater on and she was so exhausted after a trip through there and they were completely unlabeled.
MS. SHARP: Ahh.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, they were practically just thrown into a box and we had to stare into the fiche machine. That was really very difficult. They had great stuff, but it was just impossible to do research there. So we had to go every day and you could only keep her for two hours because you thought, my God, I do not wish to be responsible for she's going to get pneumonia or something, she was that frail.
MS. SHARP: Ahh.
MS. REICHEK: It was a great place.
MS. SHARP: It sounds kind of
MS. REICHEK: It was fabulous.
MS. SHARP: amazing. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, and the Museum at Tauverin [?].
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: Ahh. That was, you know, the African loot. Oh, my God. That was just amazing. Unreconstructed [Henry Morton] Stanley and [David] Livingston with their trunks.
MS. SHARP: Wow! Wow!
MS. REICHEK: I went to Holland, went to both went to Amsterdam. I went to Rotterdam.
MS. SHARP: Which had amazing cache, I'm sure, because the Dutch made it everywhere.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Everywhere.
MS. SHARP: Elaine, will you you went so you went from these like architectural figures and also and like before that hats and the layette and things that suggested a figure and never involved an actual figure and then the figures come.
What what what happens at like I mean, in my was it just those photos were so amazing?
MS. REICHEK: Death.
MS. SHARP: Death.
MS. REICHEK: Death. Some of this is not only for me but the body had always been referred to in the layette.
MS. SHARP: Yes, referred to.
MS. REICHEK: And I, too, posed in a bikini, but this is the ‘80s and not only does my own husband die, he dies of cancer very suddenly, but I lose my friends, too. The whole community is devastated. I spent the ‘80s, like so many of my friends, being a primary caretaker. Not only was I widowed from a truly happy marriage
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: and totally unexpectedly but the whole downtown community is completely devastated. We found our source of social gathering to be funerals, going to the hospital and going to funerals.
MS. SHARP: So George died in the ‘80s and
MS. REICHEK: George died in '86.
MS. SHARP: the AIDS crisis was hitting New York. Oh, wow. So you
MS. REICHEK: George died. Nicholas [last name] died. I mean, I can just
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And I don't know whether I mean, these figures I mean, I can't say exactly whether they precede or I've seen the pictures or it's I actually, it's a little confusing for me, too, but I think the first show in which I include figures are [inaudible] and the Tierra del Fuegians.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: The tepees lead later to the Native Americans, but before that, they come back but they're an extension of the Tierra del Fuegians and what happens is one of the pieces that I'm doing on architecture, when you hit on a tepee, so I seguedinto the Native American stuff, but they were part of a larger group and one of my structures was the Tierra del Fuegians structure and then I started to look at these remarkable pictures of Tierra del Fuegians as part of this same cache of photographs and something about that parallel ethnographic history, something visited.
They had a horrible visitation and it was never the same. Maybe something as simple as that story.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And
MS. REICHEK: The boat appeared in the harbor.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And they're gone. They all
MS. REICHEK: Pure blood Tierra del Fuegians, there are no more.
MS. SHARP: All right. And so and then you
MS. REICHEK: I could also that was stuff I read as a kid, too.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It wasn't as if I wasn't that stuff, I it was stuff archaeology was something that interested me as a kid.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah. So there's still
MS. REICHEK: It was yeah. There it was it wasn't like I wasn't I mean, I was a heavy history person.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know, I came into college being a history and government major. I mean, I liked those stories.
MS. SHARP: You were attracted to those kind of artifacts.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, yeah.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: No, not just the artifacts, the histories.
MS. SHARP: The entire history.
MS. REICHEK: Ethnographic. I mean all of that was really stuff I liked.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: History was a subject as well as English literature that I I literature in general that although I must say my my I you know, I acquired a taste for other history in college.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. The Tierra del Fuegian pieces, you so it's a similar similar tactic as the structures, large-scale photograph, you hand-paint sometimes markings that were on the bodies?
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: And then you knitted same scale versions of just the figure that hung on the wall
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: without the background and without being framed, usually next to it?
MS. REICHEK: That's right. Nailed to the wall.
MS. SHARP: Nailed to the wall.
MS. REICHEK: And they have armature. They had a wire in them.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: They do have a wire for support but the wire does not make space.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's just the knitting.
MS. SHARP: The
MS. REICHEK: It's just to hold the shape.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's actually the knitting itself but the guts I mean, they're eviscerated.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And
MS. REICHEK: It's just the skin, like the photo is a skin.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. The flattened like a
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Flattened 2-D. I've knitted the photograph, not the man.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: I've knitted the shadows into the body represented. The markings are interesting because, of course, they, too, have meanings. The Fuegians, they look like Chiller [?]. I mean, they look like fabulous dancing figures. They're quite wonderful, but the object was to disembody the figure.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So that they could be spiritual. They come, they beat the women into the huts. [They laugh.] They controled the rituals, the men, and this body painting was very much part of of it's not something that they did once a year.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It's this thing that they did, you know, much more often than that.
MS. SHARP: So regular.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. Regular, regular stuff.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And so that's interesting because in a way, like you're because you're some of this stuff happens, like you are saying, I see these markings as these other things, I see it as pattern. It allows me to maybe like to humanize these people and you sort of are still talking about like the frame, the photographer framing and making choices about what you see and decontextualizing these
MS. REICHEK: Well, at this point, the discourse of photography is, you know, you know the people still have trouble with this, that documentary photography if you read anything about the history of photography, you know, you're combining photographs to make, you know, Carlton Weston's doing it in early photographs of America.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: So if you've looked at any photographs, you know that from the very beginning, there's no such thing as a documentary photograph. In fact, it's been even with the WPA [Works Progress Administration], the most sanctified body of work, which I work on later, you know those hairbrushes are arranged on the table.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know they pushed those accessories around. I mean, in the Civil War Matthew Brady people are moving bodies around for a better shot.
MS. SHARP: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: And this, of course, interests me enormously.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Public lie, private truth.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: You know, untold story, alternative version, alternative material, some way of keying the viewer into this is I'm telling another story.
MS. SHARP: And and this is like the mid/late ‘80s and the early 1990s. So there is like this sort of I think just larger cultural interest in like identity and
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: sort of dealing with how people are seen. I'm trying to think of another good example.
MS. REICHEK: Well, how things are framed, how information is framed. If you do a language piece on Broom, Broom, Broom, you're talking about translation.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That is something that is always interesting, too. Translation from one media to another structure.
MS. SHARP: Which is the knitting process.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Translation. So that translation has really a kind of steady thread throughout everything.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Your connection to like the to New York in the ‘80s and how the you know, all of these artists are dying of AIDS and there's this caretaking going on, so the connection to sort of like the gay art world and and the thinking about like [Robert] Mapplethorp's photographs and the same sort of discourse about the lust that's engendered for like these beautiful bodies and and what happens with ethnographic photographs.
MS. REICHEK: I think there is something about a healthy body.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: There's something about the whole body that
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But there's also the thing about diseases of visitation and that it is no more.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And it's something about something coming from nowhere and changing everything.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And nobody invited these people in.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Okay? The Fuegians were I mean, who expected the boat to appear in the harbor.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I really I haven't seen these works in person, but I finally saw a really good installation shot of these works and I understood I didn't really understand the scale in relationship to the viewer.
MS. REICHEK: They're full body scale.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And when I saw that installation shot, I realized that you made this room of you're still you're still using you're still having this discourse about photography and modernism and formalism, but they're like these yeah. They're these shadow figures.
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: There's this sort of sadness actually to that just room of these full-scale and you've used like this heavy wool, it looks like, to knit them so they look really physical.
MS. REICHEK: They have enormous presence.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Because they're in your space, they're tactile.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The photograph's distanced behind the bodies.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So all the warmth and armor of the body, the skin, is present.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And you think, well, that was the person and that person's dead, you know. I think photography in itself is totally death-affected.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So, I mean, there you have it. Death, death, death.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And these structures are no more. So there's something deeply energetic about ethnographic and all kinds of photography. Even in a photographic album, even when a child looks at a photograph and they say, who's that? That person doesn't live anymore. So it's very the photograph is a record oftentimes of times that have gone by. It's a document of the past, but it's a selective document.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's just a moment.
MS. SHARP: And then the
MS. REICHEK: It's out of time quality in and of itself. It's a framed moment, literally framed moment of time and so the framing literally and what framing means and what something in your space means that to us.
MS. SHARP: There's something about the I imagine seeing these in person but the attentiveness that's required to knit an object, the physicality of that must just kind of, you know, bring you back to, you know, an understanding that you are looking at a document of a person, of a moment, versus how we automatically interact with those images.
MS. REICHEK: Well, there's certainly an investment of time and labor and making
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: something from nothing. So it has I hoped my translating it into a labor-intensive figure, that there would at least be acknowledged I would acknowledge myself that although I'm complicit, I at least I know I'm complicit because I know that my literally painting on them, I'm marking them and I'm showing I'm marking on them and I'm showing you that I'm reading them wrong, but that I do it with some degree of respect and time invested.
MS. SHARP: Were you in any way did you feel like you were re-enacting , because I read that reading of it that you're saying, this is how I see it, I'm showing you that, but in a way those marks also could be a sort of re-enactment that like, you know, a human hand actually made these circles or whatever the pattern was? Was that part of your thinking at all or
MS. REICHEK: I don't think it was.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean that's a very good point, but I don't really think I was aware of that when I was doing it.
MS. SHARP: Because it really does it humanizes the you know, and brings into the tactile world the thing that was handmade.
MS. REICHEK: It's a good point. I can't claim it as my own. [They laugh.]
[END MD 02 TR 01.]
MS. SHARP: Okay. So I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about I guess like the idea and I know in an interview you did awhile ago with Therese Lichtenstein, you talked about this, too. But and I think this was very strongly held in the early ‘90s when identity politics as a I mean, I don't want to actually simplify in that way, but a person's identity was in the art world a big part of content and people were really dealing with like
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: rewriting and redirecting histories and reinserting forgotten
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: histories into the sort of larger accepted mainstream
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: set of histories, and I feel I think there is a kind of strongly-held opinion, and I think it probably is true in some ways today, too, that one should only discuss their own personal history
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: and not
MS. REICHEK: That's correct.
MS. SHARP: invoke any other
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: history.
MS. REICHEK: Was I poaching on Native American culture? Okay. This was in fact something that did come up. I got tagged a little less than most, although I did get tagged.
It's interesting because I'm not an anthropologist and my work certainly Lothar [Baumgarten] and I do very different kinds of work. I think there was some article for Artforum that Charles Miller wrote discusses that. That's neither here nor there.
This is a long discussion that I had with Jimmie Durham about did he feel and of course, he's written in support of my work. I hope that the work that I was making would all have enough things in it and was stated always that I was talking about white people. They were photographs taken by white people. They were white persons' history and that really what needed to be examined was white people. Native Americans knew perfectly well what they thought, but the person who needs to examine themselves in terms of these preconceived notions and and ideas about cultures are white people and that that's where the looking needed to be done and so I thought, well, that's what I'm doing and that's what I need to do. So that's what I did and it was always from the very beginning
it it certainly was a land it certainly was territory I knew was fraught. It was not a surprise to me.
I hoped that from the very beginning, I built this into the record that in using materials, like handmade materials and alternative methods of presentations, that it would be the cue that I was talking about perhaps a different way of viewing architecture, even though it was a very long time. I wasn't a driving a car. I think I was sitting in the back of the car. I was being driven or something like that.
MS. SHARP: Oh, yeah. You sat right.
MS. REICHEK: Something like that.
MS. SHARP: You were a passenger and you
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And I have to account for that, but I also thought that if I refused to do this and actually retreated from what interested me, it was a form of self-censorship that was not healthy for me personally and not healthy for the discourse itself, that it wasn't about I mean, it just leaves it's just not healthy.
MS. SHARP: And for you, were did you see other artists doing that? I mean, I I I read this work as the content actually is about like your positioning as a consumer of
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: these ethnographies.
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely.
MS. SHARP: And and you're sort of indicting the larger culture as
MS. REICHEK: I didn't visit reservations.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It I'm talking everything was received by someone in New York.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: If I'm looking at picture files, they're already a mediated source.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And they're ethnographic photographs, so they've been taken awhile ago and they're identified, if they're identified at all, as white photographers, okay, and in some ways, they're just totally anonymous. Most of them are totally anonymous, but there is almost no documentation by Native Americans and the pity of it all as Native Americans often received their history the same way.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And now have to live up to some ethnography that's been perpetrated.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So it's a complicated history in terms of ethnography for Native Americans and that's what I chose to deal with because it is the American ethnography.
MS. SHARP: Right. Were you were who were the were there other artists that were dealing with identity in, if not a similar way, maybe dealing with identities that weren't their own in the way that work was read at least or
MS. REICHEK: I think Lothar is the other person.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: He's trained as an anthropologist.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But he actually did anthropological work.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: That's a very different kind of thing.
MS. SHARP: Very different. Yes.
MS. REICHEK: But I I'm trying to think now if there was anybody else doing this, but I don't think so.
MS. SHARP: I didn't find a lot of evidence of anyone else doing this.
MS. REICHEK: I can't remember, but I don't think so.
MS. SHARP: And you ended up it seemed like you ended up in a lot of group shows where it was like maybe Jimmie Durham or some of your other
MS. REICHEK: And me.
MS. SHARP: And you, yes.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And me.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, even in an all-women show, I always wanted a man, too. Do you know what I mean?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I never I mean, I'm not I'm not an essentialist.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, everybody should have their space for discourse and whatever, but we all live in a larger world.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, you know, I'm for much more a kind of [inaudible]. Nobody, you know, doesn't eat Chinese food. Nobody do you know what I mean?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, and to condemn people, sort of the interesting ethnicities to only make work about their ethnicity is the other pressure point.
MS. SHARP: Right. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, and that has been going on.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Or as Jimmie would say, he who wears the biggest headdress gets the most attention.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that is truly, truly and then you see how it plays out. So that white people can make anything they want,
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: but people of interesting ethnic or skin color or
MS. SHARP: Right. Any different
MS. REICHEK: exotic places
MS. SHARP: Right, right. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: have to make, you know, work about that to get anywhere, to fit into the expanded quotas.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Probably much of this is necessary now. We're in a transition. We're not totally post-Colonial.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: We certainly with the candidate of a fully qualified, soon to be, I hope, our president,
MS. SHARP: Talking about Barack Obama.
MS. REICHEK: Let us hope that maybe some progress has been made.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I think that I mean, this is another discussion , but I think that in the art world, at least, that is starting to loosen up a little bit. I don't think they're tied to their identity, but I I I I wondered during I mean, the you know, right around the sort of ‘80s, ‘90s, like the early ‘90s, it was really a time when it was like staking there was like claiming the
MS. REICHEK: That whole that's yes, an absolutely
MS. SHARP: drawing lines and clinging
MS. REICHEK: Circling the wagons.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, it was ferocious and whatever.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, people stopped making public sculpture because, you know, they made something with a [inaudible] and stood it in front of everybody was, you know, knee-deep in this stuff.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: There wasn't anybody working politically. Mine was the ethnographic thing, but anybody who was working in a downtown community, anything, public sculpture was, you know, just completely
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It was very difficult. I know several people who had their commissions destroyed and it's a stage you need to pass through.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And these things need to happen.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And so if I mean, they're part of just what happens and having been through the feminist debate, I certainly knew that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Having heard the rhetoric in and around early feminism, I certainly was prepared because it was the it's always the same rhetoric.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's exactly the same rhetoric. It's just
MS. SHARP: The group dynamics.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. Just group dynamics. It's, you know, a small pie, me, too.
MS. SHARP: So when you
MS. REICHEK: Why is she got whoo.
MS. SHARP: Who got the bigger piece of the pie?
MS. REICHEK: Who got the bigger piece of the pie? And, you know, it's totally understandable, but I'm not poaching,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: you know, anybody's anything. Nobody owns the picture of a tepee taken by a white person. Pictures of, you know, and if you come from a pueblo culture, it's not your house anyhow.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean people keep thinking all Native Americans are the same.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's a confederation of people who, you know, when I was doing research at I did a lot of research at the National Library of Congress, looked through lots of pictures there, great pictures there. I was sitting in the Native American Study Room and, yeah, I was the only white person there, but after awhile, they'd rather ask me does this guy in this picture look like this guy, I mean, because, believe me, the Cherokee are not talking to, oh, I don't know, the Sioux.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, as Jimmie says, I look skinny and tall and blue eyed and shifty and he's heavy and brown-skinned and we don't have a lot to say to one another. [They laugh.] So and the old wars between them, you know, feminist wars are exactly the same thing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Who's married, who's sick, who's gay, who's who's independent, who's got money, who this, who that.
MS. SHARP: Who owns property, who
MS. REICHEK: Let's exactly.
MS. SHARP: That's power. So that we're kind of talking about we talked about it earlier, too, this you had this show at the Grey Art Gallery [New York University, New York City] and was that in '92, "Native Intelligence?"
MS. REICHEK: The beats me.
MS. SHARP: It was before it was in '94 then in '94, you did the "War Room" at Carlo Lamagne [Gallery].
MS. REICHEK: Oh, yes. So it has to be early ‘90s.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I think it was '92. So and in that show, you had some of the tepee pieces, but there were other was that the show with the 10 little Indians?
MS. REICHEK: That was the big yeah. That was the big Native American show.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That was that's a show that took me five years to make.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And it had a bunch of different like you just
MS. REICHEK: There were photo collages. There were tepee pieces, a room of photo collages, a room of of the configuration of the Grey Gallery was completely different. I mean, it was a completely different gallery. It was a big space. I had figures. I had tepees. I had photo collages.
MS. SHARP: What was the I'm sorry, go ahead.
MS. REICHEK: The 10 Little Indians was like the was a room of pieces that had to do with childhood, movies that, you know, all about cowboys and Indians really.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And there were language pieces in these things, lots of photo works. It was a nice show to put up.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. It sounds like you were kind of it's like all of the different sort of tactics you'd been using to go at your content.
MS. REICHEK: It took five years to work through this body of work because there was that much research involved and I was only interested in a large-scale installation.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That's what I wanted.
MS. SHARP: And and then, of course, around this time because this was 1982, we're starting the first Gulf War.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: And
MS. REICHEK: Nineteen ninety-two.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So, right, it was we were sending troops into Iraq for the first time and you made you had a show at Carlo Lamagne Gallery called the "War Room."
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And there's a lot of photo collage in that.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. I wanted to talk about the photographic lie, just straight up, about war photography.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But, you know, I just I had finished the Native American series. I was still still adding to it in some ways since it you know, there wasn't you know, when you show sometimes you're not quite although it was a big show and a lot of work and traveled around forever. You know, I was still doing Native American work, you know, sort of hadn't quite finished the last of the last of it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I was still making work, I had some dress pieces I hadn't made yet, that I hadn't got to make which I ended up really liking, Gray Owl stuff. That came afterwards, was shown in Europe, but I simply needed to I think the "War Room" actually may come before that.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: I do. I think the War Room because by that time, by the time the Grey show I'm with Michael Klein. So the "War Room" has to come before that. The War Room has to come somewhere in the Tierra del Fuegians somewhere or other.
MS. SHARP: Okay. Well, I probably I mean, it might have some I'll look this up and doublecheck it, but I had that it was in 1994, but you probably since it was the First Gulf War, you probably were making that work in '92 and '93, I would guess.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: While the "Native Intelligence" show was up.
MS. REICHEK: Something I think it's before that.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: I actually think there's so that's a glitch. I think that "War Room" work is much earlier than that.
MS. SHARP: Well, because in 1994 is when "Post Colonial Kinderhood" [The Jewish Museum, New York City] happened.
MS. REICHEK: Well, then these are much earlier than that. That's way earlier.
MS. SHARP: So then okay.
MS. REICHEK: Way, way, way.
MS. SHARP: Okay. So that's actually a good place to move into now because then you it actually was in the "Native Intelligence" show was was that the first time you started using samplers?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: So you picked up the language of like the sampler.
MS. REICHEK: The sampler language had to do with early sampler culture in America. The fact, the first arriving hmm. Our forefathers or whatever. The text image quality because I was already doing text and image, you know. I was already, you know, printing text on photographs.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Noble Savage, Savage Noble, things like that. And already using text on the bottom of the photographs and text and image was just a very natural extension because that's exactly what samplers are.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And I thought if I could make a group of samplers where I could at least get Native Americans to speak for themselves through quotation and apply them to American samplers, that I would have some hopeful something or some way of representing Native American culture within the body of the show.
MS. SHARP: And you're using this form that's that was like girls and learned the sampler and as a way to sort of engrain the message that was in the sampler into so it was about proper behavior sort of
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: and cultural mores and so you're turning that on its head a little bit
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: by having like various famous Native Americans speak through the sampler.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly. What if.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. What if.
MS. REICHEK: What if.
MS. SHARP: And so so that's in 1994, "Post Colonial Kinderhood" goes up and this is I mean, it's not a big shift because it's clear that all of your work does come from a personal experience, but it's the first time you're you start really directly talking about your your family and your childhood. It's about your childhood and you even have like quotes from family members,
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: their voices in it. So do you want to talk a little bit about that? The sampler the sampler
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: stuff starts taking off as a form that you're interested in.
MS. REICHEK: Yes. What happens is I'm I mean, I did personal ethnography rather than looking at ethnographic photographs. I applied my methods to my own family and began to just have a look at how that operated in the context of my own life.
MS. SHARP: And there's a story that did someone from the Jewish Museum or someone ask you, why don't you do this about your own family?
MS. REICHEK: Yes. Susan Goodman came in and asked for the first of the the Jewish Museum was being renovated and said literally, she came in and she said should I keep coming to school here for my kids? I said yeah. And she said got anything Jewish? [They laugh.] And I didn't. But it worried me.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: At that time, I was preparing work for the Irish Museum [of Modern Art, Dublin].
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: And talking about the relationship between AIM and the Native American American Indian Movement and the Irish and English conflict.
MS. SHARP: And you were doing that that work had some similar like you were knitting figures and
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: using, pairing with photos so there's like a similar formal language.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. I'm mixing the double history which is really quite interesting because A.J. Mooney [sp], who's the best Native American ethnographer, is Irish and so early ethnographic photographs here are extremely interesting because at the same time that this stuff is going on, I mean, it's the parallels between the language and, of course, the Virginia Colonies, the the actual plan is Sir Walter Raleigh's plan executed in Ireland, for the invasion of Ireland, at the same time that the Virginia Colonies first actually the community for the first one. This is exactly the same thing.
MS. SHARP: That's really interesting hidden history.
MS. REICHEK: So it had all these hidden connections to tobacco and to the tobacco trade and to which is like, you know, sort of like the coke of you know, and and to the consortium of, you know, the English shipping companies, East India Company and places like that. It's world trade beginning in the kind of it's a nasty business.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's tobacco, slaves, sugar, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So this Irish-English connection between colonization of the Irish, settling of the Irish and bringing them into line with the English Crown, it happens. I mean, we were talking about similar kinds of things and similar kinds of descriptions and if you read what's said about the Irish and what's said about Native Americans and what's
MS. SHARP: Similar kinds of language and structures.
MS. REICHEK: Completely, completely.
MS. SHARP: Interesting. So so you took the challenge. Were you surprised? Did you what did you think at that point about making personal work? Was that, you know, really directly personal work? Was that something you considered before or
MS. REICHEK: I'm not a confessional type. I don't mind talking about what happened, if you ask me, I'll talk about it, but, I mean, it's kind of interesting now because I'm going to do a talk on Louise Bourgeois for Dia [Art Foundation, New York City] and Louise always frames her work in terms of personal iconography. It's not my habit of mine to do that. I don't mind asking questions. There's a degree of transparency. It's perfectly okay with me. I'm quite direct. If you ask me something, I'll tell you, answer as best as I can, but I'm far less concerned with all the autobiography then maybe other people are.
So yeah. It was kind of awkward, but because I already had all these practices in place, it seemed like, you know, how come? And the how come was the motivator.
MS. SHARP: The challenge. You rose to the challenge.
MS. REICHEK: The how come. I thought I kept thinking about, well, how come. Okay? Now why haven't you done that?
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And as I tell them, I'm a product of long years of analysis.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So, of course, that's where I went.
MS. SHARP: And it was you ended so you did this big installation.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: It started at the Jewish Museum in New York and it traveled around.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: And you recreated your childhood bedroom, even down to I thought it was great that you even like looked up and found the same exact furniture that you had and you there's, of course, a lot of text samplers. You bring in the voice of your family kind of by using the samplers in a really interesting way.
So can you talk a little bit about the furniture and the sort of
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. My parents I was brought up in a big Dutch Colonial house in Brooklyn and with, you know, sort of bastardized Dutch Colonial antiques which were very much of the fashion. Subsequently, I would tell you that the site of corn on the door makes me run. A dysfunctional household masquerading, such a cliché, masquerading as the American family. Three beautiful children, a German Shepherd dog, a large Dutch Colonial house, a nutty asylum.
Anyhow, so it was something about my parents' desire to pass, to have a history. They it's an immigration history. It's the same one that which is why it interested me. It's the same one what does Americanization mean?
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Certainly brought up in the Native American work in the sense that Native Americans' ambivalence towards integration, about losing tribal ways, about reclaiming their culture. You know, what are they going to do with 3,000 pairs of moccasins? You know, it's all speaking for yourself, what do you give up, what do you maintain, you know, must we all and I think for Jews, this is always you have always been an interesting question.
I mean, there's a lot been done with Hollywood now, but, hell, there wasn't to that point. I think that I mean that show was still made in the heat of the ethnographic not identity wars.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Right in the middle of it.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. Right in the middle and so I think it was a surprising and extremely provocative, more provocative than the Native American work in the sense that it was very difficult for people who knew the work to take on a kind of essentialist stance. If they knew the work, it was very difficult for them to make the point.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Okay? If the idea of the work was mainly do you know what I mean? The idea of the work, it was never the work itself.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: That was the question, you know. Could a white person talk about Native Americans?
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: In this particular show, it was not a positive identity show. One of the things that the show was about is self-censorship.
MS. SHARP: Actually, it was a little bit controversial. You had some letters to the editors.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, I loved my letters. I got a great one from a nun that said, "You should be ashamed. Jesus was a Jew." [Sharp laughs.] I gave that to Norman Kleeblatt. He wanted it. And this, of course, predates "Too Jewish" [Jewish Museum, 1996] and predates all of that. Most of the ethnographic most of the identity shows most of the identity shows had to do with forming identity in public, refuting stereotypes, all of those kinds of things, and mine were about much more about my own experience and about the desire to pass that my parents we were taken to Best in Company for our haircuts. We were told not to dress like the other girls, resulted in a very bunch of very unattractive brown Oxfords [they laugh] and blue pleated skirts and we all had Easter hats.
MS. SHARP: Oh, wow! Really? Where did you wear the Easter hats?
MS. REICHEK: I think the high holidays. Not around Easter but let me tell you, they were Best in Company's finest.
So there was very ambivalence about being Jewish. You know, it was okay to be Jewish, but, you know, other people weren't supposed to guess you were Jewish. The fact that I was blond and athletic, my parents were delighted. It was the only part of me that delighted them. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: So it's sort of like assimilation narrative and like
MS. REICHEK: So many people.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. So many immigrant families.
MS. REICHEK: It's the same story. I don't think there's any immigrant group that doesn't have this story.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You can talk to any Italian girl, talk to any it's prevalent now, too.
MS. SHARP: There was a great quote by your daughter in one of the samplers.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, Laura.
MS. SHARP: Do you remember what that quote was?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. "All the mothers of Jewish boys love me. I'm the closest thing to a Shiksa without being one." [They laugh.] And that truly was what it was.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It wasn't that you wished, it was that you didn't want anybody else to guess.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And it seemed like I mean, I know I remember you got a letter to the editor, a woman said something like you should you know, basically wanting you to like reframe your childhood as a happy one involving dradle playing and
MS. REICHEK: There was no dradle playing.
MS. SHARP: just sort of chastising you for just being honest about your own experience.
MS. REICHEK: People were horrified.
MS. SHARP: Like you'd exposed your private to the public.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. The docents were all so dismayed and they all wanted to know, they wanted to know to be a back to the faith narrative.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: They kept asking me was I practicing. I could tell them really.
MS. SHARP: And it was at the Jewish Museum and during the time like where
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: people probably were starting to
MS. REICHEK: Oh, it was really I mean lots of letters to the editor, lots of you know, people found you in the phone book. [They laugh.] You got exactly.
MS. SHARP: There was some these monogrammed towels.
MS. REICHEK: Do you know that I I must confess I'm often overprepared for a flurry of this or that, but this did quite take me
MS. SHARP: It rattled you a little.
MS. REICHEK: It didn't rattle me. I was surprised.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Less rattling than, I mean, less rattling I thought, gee,
MS. SHARP: I mean, it seems like you got a much stronger response from that than from all of your other work and all of the other potential
MS. REICHEK: Well, I mean, the criticism in and around the Native American thing was nothing. I mean everybody always has I mean, during that time, there was nobody's body of work that went up that didn't have some political fault.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: There was nothing you could do
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: if you wanted to say anything that didn't bring comment. I mean, you know, so everybody was used to being attacked, under attack. I mean that's just the way it was. If your work had anything to do with other cultures, I mean, it was just part of what happened.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And for those of us lucky enough to have been through feminist battleground, we were probably better prepared than other people were.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But no, this one was major.
MS. SHARP: And so I want to talk about a couple other things in the show. You had these monogrammed towels.
MS. REICHEK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. SHARP: What I mean, was that it was surprising to me to see that for some reason.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, the J-E-W on them?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, well, one of the things you always had was it's like the thing of F-H-B, Family-Hold-Back. In my family, nobody used the guest towels, only the guests used the guest towels. You weren't allowed to touch them.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: So they're like, you know, not for our hands, you know. They're for the guests.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: But they also have to do with purification and there was Ivory Soap in there and
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: there were pictures of my mother-in-law and my mother in camp uniforms which actually looked like Mechin in Uniform, those bloomers and ties, and, you know, we were all kind of out there doing, I mean, Americanizing sports.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: All of that healthy, you know, outdoor play, wholesome activities.
MS. SHARP: And there was a bed that was a major kind of like a centerpiece.
MS. REICHEK: It was a four-poster bed, but it was I mean, I exposed structure, didn't put a canopy over it because I wanted the bare bones of the structure to show, and all that furniture was cut down to like a 10-year-old girl's size, slightly more diminutive, and everything was made to make you feel like it was shadowy, really. I was lucky enough to get a professional lighting consultant because that was the most important thing. It needed to be lit in a kind of gloomy darkness; five o'clock in the afternoon on a winter day and it cast shadows on the bed, almost made a skeleton on the floor, and had a headboard and a footboard with text on it about coming to America. One from Richard Nixon and one from George Washington. Upper crustian bed for a Jewish girl.
MS. SHARP: So they were the headboard was carved and then
MS. REICHEK: They were samplers. They were embroideries and framed into you know, into ovals in the headboard and the footboards.
MS. SHARP: And then there was the coverlet on it?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Did it have
MS. REICHEK: It had text on it, too.
MS. SHARP: It had text on it, too.
MS. REICHEK: Which was in Yiddish. I don't know Yiddish but I managed to find this and it's like a Yiddish phrase that means what do you want for my life?
MS. SHARP: Bookended by Richard Nixon and George Washington.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, exactly.
MS. SHARP: Really, really great. I would love to see that piece in person when I saw the photos of it.
MS. REICHEK: The Jewish Museum was nice enough to buy the whole installation.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: So they own it.
MS. SHARP: And it it traveled around to San Francisco and Ohio, too. Yes?
MS. REICHEK: At the Wexner [Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, OH], it was installed.
MS. SHARP: That's great. And you they videotaped you at the Wexner.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Talking about your "Post Colonial Kinderhood."
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I'm sure I ran my mouth forever.
MS. SHARP: So you you were still dealing with the exchange between two cultures,
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: and that was a point in the other work you did
MS. REICHEK: It was between two cultures meeting each other.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That, for me, is almost like now between image and text.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's in the space that goes out between two things.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The middle, as in middle child.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The middle of the polarities of either end. That's where meaning can be ascertained.
MS. SHARP: And these these happened to be two cultures that you were part of, that you lived between.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly. But whose line of collide were part of my experience that I experienced. I had experienced early. I finally got to leave home. I had experienced it in my life. I had experience at Yale, my experience in my life. I had experienced it from being able physically to pass.
MS. SHARP: Okay. Great. So
MS. REICHEK: Those experiences.
MS. SHARP: That reminds me of the E.B. Du Bois talks about the double consciousness or the sort of like living it yet being aware of it.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: I feel like that's part of the work that you were doing that we just talked about, the Native Intelligence and the Tierra del Feugians and it comes into the
MS. REICHEK: It has to be or it has to be for the 21st Century
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: the state of consciousness. It is unusual for anyone to still be in the place that they were born.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I still am in New York. I mean so that's very strange. Most people are on their second or third cultures.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that awareness has to be part of our consciousness, at least now.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: No one could be that isolated and provincial. Let us hope that American politics proceeds on that.
MS. SHARP: Well, there is also the culture can just change around you, too.
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely.
MS. SHARP: Because of all the transitory
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Because it's a city in which you can't possibly make those kinds of assumptions. Just get on a train.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That's why I love cities with subways.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I'm a big fan of the subways.
MS. SHARP: Go through the yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You bet.
[END MD 02 TR 02.]
MS. SHARP: Okay. So we were talking about "Post Colonial Kinderhood." And then I was going to just sort of start I wanted to talk about how you kind of after that show, it seems like you reach back into the nineteenth century. I guess I'm thinking about like well, you start making work, I guess, for the show in 1999 at the MoMA "When This You See..." [1996-99].
MS. REICHEK: Ah. That actually has to do with real circumstances, much more so than whatever. I've already at that time done yes, one, two, three bodies of samplers, full bodies of samplers. And at this point, the thing that interests me most is the sampler. I'm showing with Michael Klein. And Michael closes his gallery. And I have a choice what to do. I can pick up another gallery, hopefully. But the other thing I can do, since I've had a lot of exposure and I'm feeling fine, is to virtually at this point go home and give myself something really nice.
I'm also tired. I've been traveling and showing and traveling and showing. You know, it's a very good time for me. And investigate the samplers in the time it's going to take. And I know that I have put down my interests or put aside my interest in actually investigating and that I will have to do a lot. And of course, I'm familiar with a lot from the Native American shows. So I know that I actually like doing that and that it's something that pleases me. And I know it's what I want to do and if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it.
MS. SHARP: So you just want to go you're just looking forward to going into like a big production mode.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And I'm really interested in I feel equipped to do it. And I feel happy at the prospect of doing it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I just decide, okay. I've just had a show. I've just had this, I've just had that. Now's the time. But mostly, it's the idea, if you don't do it now you'll never do it.
So I go home. And I start to involve myself in embroidery, the history of samplers, what they mean, the history of embroidery, what that means, references in books. And I think, well, if I'm going to make samplers and I'm going to take this as my medium, and I've already defined myself as working in alternative materials, this is really what I want to do, I will trace so that I will know the history of women's work.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: And of course, I know that it has a history to rival painting and sculpture and that it's a historical medium.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.] Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: And so this is it's not that I went back to the nineteenth century, it's that in the same way that I traced histories, I went back to trace the history in all kinds of written texts because now I'm working with text image. I start to work in this I mean, if it's text photography, it's in the layer in between it.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So I begin to do a devilish amount of reading. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.] You look so happy when you say that.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, right, yes. I get to stay home and read. And so I begin to. And at this time, I'm proficient. You know, I'm in control of the medium.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS REICHEK: I've taught myself well enough to but still don't know enough. I mean, it's a huge alternative history, the history of embroidery, the history of samplers in themselves. It's huge.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And I mean, I still have not done samplers around the world or embroidery, which is an extremely interesting question in terms of ethnography and national identity. It's something I haven't gotten to. I don't know when I'm going to or souvenirs and embroidery. I don't know when I'm going to get to these bodies of work, but I'm still it's funny because I didn't develop Ariadne fully. I did everybody else. But she was such a big, big one that I could not even get to her. I didn't even touch her in the MoMA show. I never even there was no sampler about Ariadne.
MS. SHARP: Oh, in the MoMA show.
MS. REICHEK: No. Ariadne, Philomena, you know, all of these. I mean, they appeared. I mean, you know
MS. SHARP: So you kind of peeked to the edge of Ariadne and realized it was this vast thing that you're saving up for?
MS. REICHEK: I felt that I could not say what I needed to say. There was many points I could go back to in that show. But this is the one that held on.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Sometimes, you just don't know what it is that's going to out of these my first survey, which was the MoMA show.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It was a survey.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: People had used in the art world, used the medium of embroidery at this point. But they had never done what I felt needed to be done.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And also, those who were proficient with embroidery didn't seem to concern themselves with that. The fact that it was feminist interested some people, but the medium itself didn't interest them. Other people did it for them. I thought, well, you know, I'm somebody who now knows how to make and has something to say. So this was being, you know, my job, my enterprise.
MS. SHARP: So it became important at that time for that work for you to make it.
MS. REICHEK: Very important.
MS. SHARP: And you made it yourself.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, absolutely. I make all my work myself. I am a studio artist. I have very little entrepreneurial zeal.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: If I have assistants, I love them. You know, they're wonderful. But it is my I make my things.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. You don't farm out your embroideries.
MS. REICHEK: No. No. If I have you come, lay out a piece, and work with a sewing machine, great, but you know, it's part of a larger enterprise.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Yeah. So well, let's talk a little bit about "When This You See " then "When This You See " was the name of the title, not When This You See then.
MS. REICHEK: Yes. It's "When This You See "
MS. SHARP: It's become a tongue tie-er.
MS. REICHEK: It's a sampler phrase.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: When This You See, Remember Me.
MS. SHARP: So for the title, you left off the "Remember Me," and you left three dots so that it's hanging.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, exactly, to "When This You See " what are you going to see?
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.] Yeah. Let me know.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah, let me know. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: So this was in the project room at the MoMA?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And then you also had a show at the same time at Nicole Klagsburn.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And as we were talking about, for several years you took some time off. So you or not off, you've been in production mode instead of showing mode.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. It took five years to make that body of work. It simply took that long. Between the reading and the sewing, I mean, it just took that long.
MS. SHARP: And it ended up in you know, you have two shows. It was a huge body of work.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: So and it was, as we've already discussed, mostly samplers. So besides like art as an overarching factor, or you were talking about the sort of alternative history of the sampler, was there another were there any other like organizing factors or themes to the text and images that you appropriated for that show?
MS. REICHEK: Well, each one stood for a certain kind of knowledge or a certain kind of something I wanted to say. You have to make sure you don't repeat you know, it's not just expanding on one idea.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Each one had a specific idea that I wish to express in the best way possible, the best text, the best image, the best everything, the best scale for it.
MS. SHARP: So it stood for one of your ideas about all the investigation.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, about some part of this investigation.
MS. SHARP: Okay. And then there also in your the way like using embroidery and your earlier interest in sort of like redoing modern and abstract paintings and then we touched on for a second the grid, and the pixel and the stitch shows up later.
MS. REICHEK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. SHARP: There's sort of like an institutional critique happening.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Here you are at the MoMA and you're showing samples.
MS. REICHEK: Well, there's also part of that that appears in the Chuck Close. You know, there's appropriation in that show, too. There's a Jackson Pollock appropriated by [Andy] Warhol appropriated by me. So that's in there also.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Nothing much got lost in that because I have everything represents something. But there is institutional critique. But you know, talking about ethnography, and you're talking about religion, and you're talking about identity, in some way it's critique, too.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, it's all heard that. So in the piece Sampler, and then in parentheses "Starting Over" [Sampler (Starting Over), 1996], that has this piece has that Ad Reinhardt quote, "Made, unmade, remade." And then three of his paintings and that's matched up with a quote from Penelope from The Odyssey [Homer] about her nightly process of undoing the weaving she'd done during the day to hold off the suitors, right, until Hercules returns.
And then the image is the Three Fates measuring, spinning, and cutting the cloth of life. So
MS. REICHEK: What? No, no.
MS. SHARP: Isn't it? Clothos?
MS. REICHEK: No, it's three women. They're working on no, it's not that. It is working it's the women working a warp-weighted loom, the kind of loom that Penelope would have woven her text on.
MS. SHARP: Okay. So, but actually
MS. REICHEK: Penelope may I haven't done with the Fates yet, okay?
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: Fates are weaving. Fates are weaving. They appear slightly I mean, their reference is always there, and maybe I refer to them in one of them. But I haven't really done the whole Fates thing yet. But this is a picture of a warp-weighted loom, the kind of loom that Penelope would have used.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: And it's not a personal loom. It's a loom that would have taken other people to use. I mean, they're big.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And that would be the appropriate loom that she used. And there is a lot of controversy as to controversy? Discussion about what it was, aside from a shroud for the Laertes, father-in-law, that she was weaving. But it may have been a story cloth that told the deeds of so what is she texturally winding and unwinding? Is she unraveling the language? Is she the first process artist?
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: So it was important to show this kind of you know, what it was she was I mean, if it wasn't this and the hand.
MS. SHARP: Right. It was this physical.
MS. REICHEK: She's unraveling this thing.
MS. SHARP: Okay. Yeah. Well, it's there's like that sort of duality we talked about before, or the little bit of like pun involved, where you're connecting, you know, Ad Reinhardt's statement with this sort of grand Western myth. But you're also saying he wasn't the first one to come out with it. [Laughs.] You're sort of you're calling it sort of universal, but you're also saying, you know
MS. REICHEK: The idea a process, okay.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Okay. I mean, Ad talked a great deal about, you get up in the morning and you do it. And then you do it again the next day. Okay? I mean, you know, and that doing, redoing I mean, he's making a lot of black paintings at that point, those black paintings. And what he's doing is, he's doing all the variations on this cross-like form. I mean, it's, how far can you go?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, it's a you know, [Robert] Ryman does it in white, takes that idea and makes a life's work out of it.
MS. SHARP: Was that an idea that he actually gave you personally? Did you absorb that from him from your personal interactions with him as well in any way?
MS. REICHEK: I believe that what I absorbed from him is being accountable.
MS. SHARP: Ah.
MS. REICHEK: That there's nothing in there that shouldn't be in there.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: That there's nothing just for gesture. That everything that you put out there has to be there for a reason.
MS. SHARP: Every choice is a conscious choice.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Conscious, or if it's unconscious, does it further the meaning? Do you see that later?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But it's that idea.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: You can work from the unconscious, but then it has to be vetted. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: Yes. [Laughs.] Are you really when you're sort of pairing these things together so you may have just answered this question, actually. But how much is like a conscious choice? And I feel like I've witnessed in your process that you do leave this sort of room for unconscious or unchosen connection that can reveal itself a little bit later, that you part of you it seems to me that your process is very, you know, studied and astute and conscious. But there is a moment of sort of play or intuition that allows these other connections to come.
MS. REICHEK: More than I'd like to admit.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: You stuff just, I mean, brings itself together.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You don't consciously you know, how you lay out a body of work is, I've got this idea and I've got this idea. And what goes with this? And what goes with that? And then something else pops up. And then you go find this, and then you think, "Well, that's not right. That's not what goes with this. This goes with this."
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that's probably the better way to do it. And Jesus, this idea and that? It's like that. It's not I mean, if I knew everything I was going to make, I'd be bored to death.
MS. SHARP: It would be painful.
MS. REICHEK: I do like to keep myself amused. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.] And that does sound a little bit like, you know, what Ad Reinhardt was doing with his black paintings. It is sort of like following, you know, searching down every alley until you find
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. This weighs more. And that's actually luminously nourishing, that nothing is exhausted. Nothing is ever just done.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. There's always new combinations.
MS. REICHEK: You know, there is always a new way to look at it. There's always somebody else's point of view. There's always you know, one of the most gratifying things is installing a body of work you've already installed.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, to see it again.
MS. REICHEK: Because all of a sudden, what you thought was oh, well, that wasn't such a good idea. Or this is obviously better with that.
MS. SHARP: So that kind of leads into like you must learn a lot about the pieces that you choose to appropriate, you know. I mean, that's a great thing to hear coming from someone who really recently has used a lot of appropriation. You know, you're appropriating modern art and
MS. REICHEK: Oh, I'm almost never used an image that I haven't seen. I'm a real stickler for at least I know the work. If I haven't seen an exact image, I know and probably, I've seen them all.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I never use stuff that I'm not informed with. I don't think you can appropriate stuff like that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I don't think you know what you're appropriating.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, definitely.
MS. REICHEK: And in fact, part of the work's content is what's I can't comment on it. And my appropriation is always about chatting about it without knowing what it is. I mean, how can you say something I don't know just legitimate? Unless your point is misreading.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Deliberate misreading, which is perfectly fine. The artist misreading something always leads to something else, creative misreading. I'm sure that's part of my work, too. But I don't think I'm not afraid of information. I mean, really.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I believe that you need a degree of I mean, it just wouldn't suit my nature to take something without knowing what it was.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of one of the great things about talking to you about some of your because there are all these things evident in the work, and then there are these other back stories and connections that made them come together that really like illuminate.
MS. REICHEK: The connection is not real.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, it can be an emotional connection that might have a reality somewhere, not only for you, but in the broader culture [inaudible].
MS. SHARP: Yeah, directed. Well, the piece we were just talking about, with the Ad Reinhardt quote and Penelope weaving called Sampler (Starting Over), in your installation at the MoMA, it was hung above you mentioned this for a second. You did a reproduction of Andy Warhol's Yarn Painting. Can you and this is
MS. REICHEK: Yes. His yarn it's print, okay? And it's multiple, and he does it a million different ways. But Warhol is sending up Jackson Pollock.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And one of the I think Hal Foster said this. "Oh, Kirk Varnadoe, he had more words for ‘scheme' than the Eskimos had for ‘snow.'"
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Okay? So I mean, by that time, I mean, it all looks like thread.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And so Warhol is doing this. And then I'm just making it into thread.
MS. SHARP: And then you actually sew it.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: And the thing about the Warhol print is that it's like this really kind of funny joke about like heroic Abstract Expressionism and popular culture.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: But then in a way, it is kind of like this it holds together as an abstract piece, even though it's using and so it's kind of and I think like there's that quality in your work, too.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, Warhol I love Warhol. I'm a huge Warhol fan. I mean, Warhol just takes everything he can, and reprocesses it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, he's I'm about to use him again in Ariadne because he the thing he thinks that's great about your [Giorgio] de Chirico is de Chiricho keeps making his own work again, you know, again and again and again. And although other people are chastising of him for it, Warhol thinks it's great. He sees it very differently.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, in that you can keep remaking. So I read this review by Bill Arnie [phonetic] where he says that in this show you were kind of making the case that the whole of western culture is linked to the history of sewing. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: And why not? [Laugh.s]
MS. SHARP: He was convinced
MS. REICHEK: He was convinced.
MS. SHARP: in his review.
MS. REICHEK: That may have to do with bonnets and buildings.
MS. SHARP: Yes, actually. So it's interesting, though, because this show is kind of this crux, and then you start to I guess in the same way, you're linking sewing to western culture. But you kind of start to look forward. And you say that you start thinking about the pixel being connected to the
MS. REICHEK: The computer comes into my life.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, the computer shows up.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: And you start thinking about the pixel and the stitch as the same unit.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: And the computer of course, early and early computer images are totally based on this grid and there's this idea of pixilation and squares going together, which
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Remember, I'm grid conscious. I'm grid conscious. I've already come out of you know, it's not as if I this is an un how shall I say? This is something I would see immediately. So the way in which I've been sewing, by now, and know how stitches make a pattern, so when I get my first computer, which is very slow, and the images start pixilating out, I think, "Oh my goodness, what is this?" And so that's what happens. It's from the direct experience of my first computer.
MS. SHARP: So you actually see this pixilated image, and you realize it looks like a cross stitch image.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. That it comes it patterns it forms itself in isolated units, okay? The same way that a cross stitch isolated unit, the grid makes itself. And so that kind of fragmentation is something I've dealt with and recognize it and find it of interest. And then look down and I'm working on the World Wide Web, and it's like, oh. Yes.
MS. SHARP: A web.
MS. REICHEK: A web.
MS. SHARP: One of your early pieces that were starting to deal with this was Sampler (World Wide Web) [1998]. And you used images from your it was a Mac computer screen with phrases about sewing?
MS. REICHEK: Yes. This was my first I loved my first Apple, I had an Apple.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: It had a beautiful plastic bubble.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: So nice. I loved that computer. And it lasted for a long time.
MS. SHARP: One of the early iMacs?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: What color was it?
MS. REICHEK: It was blue.
MS. SHARP: The blueberry.
MS. REICHEK: It was the blueberry.
MS. SHARP: Wonderful.
MS. REICHEK: Okay, it was the blueberry. I regretted not buying the orange. I bought the blueberry; I think it was cheaper.
But anyhow, that's what it came right out of. And so I just copied it. And as long as I was talking about language and image and the history, I got into the Web. So I had gone to the [Sigmund] Freud Museum [London].
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And I've never worked on this either. Anna Freud had a loom in her studio. And she knit also to end her sessions. And she was chastised by her father because her thinking was nonlinear. It was web thinking, associative thinking, okay?
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: So I really had this kind of odd you know, reading about Anna Freud and the fact that she had this loom. And they were now sort of remaking what she did. And all the Freud women did handicrafts and [inaudible] penis and lack and stuff like that. So I sort of investigated that in the MoMA show, you know, talking about so I'd had this experience in the Freud Museum, also, and reading a little bit about Anna Freud.
MS. SHARP: And then you're starting to get into like using the Internet a lot, and you're starting to think about associative thinking and how it's structured and how to navigate it.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Yes. Exactly. And of course, it's the same thing as the picture files.
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: It's the same kind of associative thinking that goes between bonnet and building and whatever.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So it's just organized for me.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And it's the same when you're going through index cards, which are no more you have the same thing of flipping and associating. But also in the stacks. [Car alarm sounds in background.] One of the great things about the stacks is, you kind of get ideas looking at these titles cheek by jowl.
MS. SHARP: You go to look something up and you find things near it that are close.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. That is totally Google.
The old car alarm. I'm just looking at this to see if I should change the disc. I think we're fine right now.
MS. REICHEK: Should we have some tea?
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Maybe we should stop. I'll change the disk. The car alarm will
[END MD 02 TR 03.]
MS. SHARP: Okay. So on the last disc, we were you started talking about your connection between the pixel and the stitch, and we talked a little bit about the screensaver pieces that you made, and so at the show you were having at Nicole Klagsburn during this time, you also had some video. Was this the first time you were using video? You had the videos where you appropriated and edited images of men sewing in Hollywood movies.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, no. I had done a film earlier called When You See [1996-1999] that went with the MoMA show which were clips of movies with women knitting, sewing, or weaving, and so I had already shown that at Nicole's and I just thought it would be funny to put that outside.
MS. SHARP: To do the men sewing.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: And some of them were like Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were from Hollywood movies.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. They were from Hollywood that showed men doing sewing and knitting.
MS. SHARP: And the one with with women sewing had text, like sort of intercut with words like "obsession."
MS. REICHEK: Yes, right.
MS. SHARP: So and were you drawing a connection also between the process of sewing and editing? Was that
MS. REICHEK: Yes, I've often referred to film and film and suture and film theory and sewing and things like that as something that does interest me. Early cinema, early cameras, early sewing machines. It's all the rapid repeat, early rifle. Okay.
MS. SHARP: All the similar technology.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, exactly. That particular technology, and if you're interested in sewing at all, you're interested in if you're interested in history stuff, you're interested in the history of technology.
MS. SHARP: And so then kind of getting more into well, technology and translation and maybe like commodity or something as part of it, you did a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
MS. REICHEK: That was really that was the first video that I worked on. It was the first interactive piece that I worked on where I actually used the computer as part of my work. So I made this video before but it was edited on an Avid. It wasn't edited on a computer. We didn't have it. So it was edited on an Avid. But this is the first time that I used the computer, but it was also in some ways a technological show because it used in order to shoot at the Gardner, you had to depend on an additional camera because of lighting prohibitions, they never let you photograph there. There was no way that I could do something like a virtual exhibition and have a record of it before the digital camera.
MS. SHARP: So you so for this show, you actually made samplers.
MS. REICHEK: I actually made for Shoshan Wayne [Gallery, Santa Monica, CA]. They were shown first at Shoshana's.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: It was because the time worked out that way. I was working I was working on both I knew I was going to have both things and part of the plan was to have East and West.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: That the they were on samplers, the Adam and Eve sampler and the East is where they arrived, but then the Western migration just paralleled history of America. So but in this particular case, the time worked out so that I started the Gardner show but it was a body of work that I was working on for Shoshanna. So they were actually physically shown at Shoshana's first and then came back east and were installed at the Gardner, but both plans were at the same time.
MS. SHARP: You were thinking about the Gardner show
MS. REICHEK: Yes, exactly. I had already been to the Gardner. Do you know what I mean?
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: I already knew in some ways and it seemed perfect material for both.
MS. SHARP: So do you do so you went you did your residency at the Gardner where you just you were there, you did research, you were in the museum.
MS. REICHEK: Three years, dear.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: On and off for three years.
MS. SHARP: Spread out. Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: It was the longest it was the thing that went on forever. [Sharp laughs.] I thought is this thing ever going to get done?
MS. SHARP: So
MS. REICHEK: Many times Shoshana was shipping work just took forever. What came and then the first part was for me to situate it on Mondays when the museum was closed and have photographs taken, exhibition photos.
MS. SHARP: So you would go into the Gardner Museum and put your own work, your own samplers, kind of like
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: integrate them or hide them within the displays that were already there?
MS. REICHEK: Yes, they offered me the gallery. It's not very nice and I wanted to be into the big museums. That seemed to be the thing to do. So I circumvented Mrs. Gardner by having a virtual exhibition because the Gardner prohibition is that nothing be moved, nothing be sold; remain just as she left it. But given the stealth nature of the video camera and the fact that the museum was closed, I developed this plan with the curator for a virtual exhibition that would be conducted in the Gardner Museum and I got the chance to have my work integrated into the collection and one of the things that was very nice for me was because I had been there so much, I actually had an installer that was cooperative, and people in other departments were cooperative.
MS. SHARP: Oh, that's great.
MS. REICHEK: Which is not usually contemporary art is not something, how shall I say, that used to be privileged.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: These whole intervention things are often very vexed situations because you come parachute in and you leave and this was not what happened. By the time I installed, I knew this collection, I knew it well because I'd spent so much time there and so much time thinking about this and it was an appropriate body of work to do because the samplers Adam and Eve Mrs. Gardner was interested in all kinds of images. She was interested in textiles. She was interested in sculpture. She was interested in artifacts. She was interested in china. She was interested she had lots of interests and so the work was very appropriate there.
MS. SHARP: What were some of the choices that you made or how did you go about sort of planning where your work was going to go? Did it have to do with the objects that were there and the content of the text in the samplers or was there sort of a visual
MS. REICHEK: Everything.
MS. SHARP: thing? All of it?
MS. REICHEK: All of it. You know, it's, you know, what does it speak to? What where is it appropriate? What is the room to put this in?
MS. SHARP: And then you ended up so as you said, you took these digital pictures and then you created a virtual exhibit. So you ended up with an interactive CD-ROM and I think the Gardner Museum has it as part of their website, also.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, exactly.
MS. SHARP: So and did it did it show in the gallery, too, at all or did it
MS. REICHEK: Yes, at one point, they did. They did have a gallery. They had a little station for it.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: Which is very nice and some people saw it there and some people saw it online and then some people saw it later when I showed it in New York.
MS. SHARP: Oh, and where did you show it
MS. REICHEK: At Nicole's.
MS. SHARP: At Nicole's?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I projected it which was really fun.
MS. SHARP: That's great.
MS. REICHEK: I projected also when
MS. SHARP: Oh, that video was projected.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I got to project and the difference between projecting a CD-ROM and it was just a tactile difference, but I got to project it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. That's great.
MS. REICHEK: Worked it with a mouse from the table.
MS. SHARP: How so you you developed a project with a curator there that
MS. REICHEK: Yes, Pieranna Cavalchini, who was a curator I knew because I had already worked with her on Spoleto [Festival, Spoletto, Italy]. I'd done an installation in in a 9th century hospital in
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: Spoleto.
MS. SHARP: When was that?
MS. REICHEK: I came from the show came from the show in Oxford. The installation for Bookworks in Oxford and came to Italy right after that.
MS. SHARP: Wow.
MS. REICHEK: That was a wonderful experience. It was like a Henry James experience. You go from the British and it was freezing in Oxford. I mean they hadn't caulked those windows.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: It was really cold. It was wonderful. It was wonderful working there in the Ruskin College of Art, but I went from there to Spoleto and so the weather was beautiful.
MS. SHARP: What was the installation in the
MS. REICHEK: I dug out a 9th century room.
MS. SHARP: Oh, wow!
MS. REICHEK: Because I didn't like the places that she assigned me to. So I just dug out this room and I did a show about tourism called "Camera Con Vista," "Room With A View," a play on many things.
MS. SHARP: You didn't really talk about that actually. You did a couple of installations, I think back closer to the time of like the "Native Intelligence" show, that was about tourism.
MS. REICHEK: Oh, yeah. That, I did one at Bill Stelling's and then across the street at Barbara Braathen's [Barbara Braathen Gallery]. The one at 56 Bleeker Street, what was it called [56 Bleeker Street Gallery]? You'll have to look this up.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: But, of course, it had to do with tourism. I mean that one came out of it was called Revenge of the Coconuts [: A Curiosity Room, 1988].
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And there's a funny story about you used these green coconuts.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: They wiggled or something.
MS. REICHEK: They were water coconuts that were unpeeled.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: And so they rattled in their shell as they were kind of dropping and drying. So the floor was littered with coconuts.
MS. SHARP: And that
MS. REICHEK: It was a big palm tree.
MS. SHARP: A big palm tree in the middle, yeah, and then
MS. REICHEK: It was a very early I mean, I really these installations came before I think there was a word for it, like environments. Is that what they were called then?
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: I don't know what they were called then.
MS. SHARP: I think they might have I think environments might have been a way to describe them.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: And you like the walls were painted really dark and
MS. REICHEK: It was actually tin on the walls.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: Rotted tin.
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: It was fabulous.
MS. SHARP: And there were these
MS. REICHEK: There was a skylight.
MS. SHARP: And did you make these you made like columns or something?
MS. REICHEK: I made I made paddle shields from Cook's Exploration and I hung photo collages.
MS. SHARP: There were a lot of photo collages you were doing.
MS. REICHEK: There were photo collages. They were about tourism. I mean I forgot all about that tourism there was all tourism things in between
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: in between I guess I was working that at the same time that I was working the first bonnet. Do you know I was working the ethnographic photographs that went with these photo collages?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And so there was these pictures of sight and commentary on tourism. That was a huge body of work.
MS. SHARP: And it kind of went along with some of your other
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: I think it went on in between you were still doing
MS. REICHEK: It went on in the Grey Gallery, the same kind of thing going on there.
MS. SHARP: Like around the "War Room" time.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: You still had photo montage collections.
MS. REICHEK: Working with found photographs.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And hand painting them.
MS. SHARP: And then in the line that we were talking about with the Revenge of the Coconuts, you also had like a bunch of old cameras piled
MS. REICHEK: No, that's across the street.
MS. SHARP: Oh, that's
MS. REICHEK: In Desert Song [1988].
MS. SHARP: Desert Song, right.
MS. REICHEK: We did the wet, we did the dry.
MS. SHARP: Right. And you used all these images of like Islamic architecture
MS. REICHEK: Desert clichés.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Clichés about the Middle East.
MS. SHARP: Right. I remember looking at that because I just saw that, I guess, several months ago in your archives and thinking how incredibly I don't know the idea of the desert cliché and and I think did you have movie images from movies?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. Lots of movie stills and then there was a black sand, you had to sort of walk through black sand, very dark and painted like a kind of Islamic columns they actually had the column
MS. SHARP: Right, right.
MS. REICHEK: and they had a round arch to enter. So you came into this really pitch black room with a backlit kind of photograph of desert storm and camels and things like that and then there were these photo collages, all they weren't they were they were photographic pieces and they were all in arched black mats. So you read them along the walls and then in the corners, there were all cameras piled up.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. That that piece was so I thought this also when I was looking at the War Room, you documentation of the "War Room" show, how much those images resonate now and what a strange sort of like cultural repetition we're going through. I mean, obviously they resonate in various ways for long periods of time, but, yeah,
MS. REICHEK: It's just it was the same kind of movie things that worked with the Native Americans.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I'd done it in the presentation. I watched those kinds of things in photo collages, like the early island movies, like Taboo
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: and Flaherty and all those ethnographic documentations.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And for the desert, I just watched everything from Morocco to I mean, you know, I watched them all and, I mean, there there are every cliché in the book is there. National Geographic, many of the photos
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: were in National Geographic and ethnic repertoire representations, all of that went into both of those shows.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Both of them had music compilations to them.
MS. SHARP: They were both of them seemed sort of cinematic, actually, because they had sound. The lighting was sort of dark and directed towards the images or
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: like a light box.
MS. REICHEK: Very much cinematic.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And they both had sound. They all had compilation. Discs that were played on a boom box, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. It was kind of like a movie, movie music sound.
MS. REICHEK: Movie music, ethnographic movies, silly music, the Sheik of Arabic.
MS. SHARP: Clichés. Yeah. I mean, in a way, that's sort of like non-movie movie music.
MS. REICHEK: In the same way that working with ethnographic material and using cliché, that was really not I mean, that became a huge issue for Carol Walker.
MS. SHARP: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: It was so long before that that I did this that it was really understood as I mean, in some ways my Native American work that fell right during the culture wars. In Desert Song, Revenge of the Coconuts, we were so pan-unspecific, we could hardly take offense. There were no Moroccans in Morocco. There was the French Foreign Legion and Marlena Dietrich in high heels in the desert. [They laugh.] There was no way to take offense.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Well, in thinking about our talking about the Gardner Museum, the project titled, by the way, Madam I'm Adam [2002],
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: forwards and backwards,
MS. REICHEK: A palindrome.
MS. SHARP: A palindrome. Why why was it important to make a CD-ROM which is, you know, it mimics like sort of associative ways to move forward backwards and all around versus like a series of photos of your interventions or a single video or
MS. REICHEK: It seemed that since I was using digital form to make the installation, that that was the appropriate vehicle for it, and anything else would have been in the mode of documentation that wasn't appropriate to how I was doing this and how I circumvented it. So it just seemed
MS. SHARP: So it just made sense.
MS. REICHEK: It was just the mode that made sense. That was the technical mode that I was capitalizing on.
MS. SHARP: Right. But that it wouldn't have existed without that technology.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And the whole virtual idea seemed appropriate for making the CD-ROM.
MS. SHARP: And because, like you said, you had to use the digital camera, you couldn't have used
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: it would have been a really long exposure.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And that the way in which the work interacted with the work already there, you know, made its presence felt and disappeared very much like an experience on the Internet.
MS. SHARP: Right. And then the sort of if you're a person looking at this, you can't see them all at once.
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: You go into these rooms.
MS. REICHEK: It's time effective the way you would actually look at art. So it mimics that experience of actually seeing it while being fleeting by. So it was in some ways trying to make the appropriate vehicle for the content.
MS. SHARP: And I guess a little bit after that CD-ROM was finished is when you were talking I think this was where you projected it at After Babel Alpha Beta [2004] is that the show at Nicole's?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And this show is really like this is in 2004 and you're really like digging into language and translation
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: in this show and coming back like the samplers appear, of course, but this show really has to do with like translating back and forth, it seems like.
MS. REICHEK: It's also about scale
MS. SHARP: I'm sorry?
MS. REICHEK: It's also about scale and appropriation. It seemed to me that the language thing which has always been important to me, and I really wanted to talk about that, and since I'd gotten I'd read so much Bible stuff for the Adam and Eve stuff from Madam I'm Adam, you know, I was up to my ears in that stuff, I could be a little forward and you get to other stuff, too, and there was all that universal library which is a perfect subject for me, you know, for many people, you know, translation, all of these things seemed to reach back to the translation pieces, the early translation pieces and so I wanted to take my interests, my reading interests. These are the kind of things I had explored at the very beginning and just do it in a different way.
MS. SHARP: One of the pieces in that show was a Settee [sp, date?], which is such a great piece. You embroidered this sort of it's a pretty large piece, actually.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. The scale is the scale in this is I mean is big scale.
MS. SHARP: Big scale.
MS. REICHEK: Big scale. And that is I mean, I just finished the samplers.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Do you know what I mean by that?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That was it, finished, done.
MS. SHARP: Put down the samplers.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Get into, you know.
MS. SHARP: And so well, the Settee piece is you embroidered these pictographs that were that represented that were supposed to be like universal representations of certain ideas and they were sent to space. Were they were on the Golden the record that Carl
MS. REICHEK: This is after.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay.
MS. REICHEK: This is after. That's the first one.
MS. SHARP: So what was the what was the Settee piece?
MS. REICHEK: That's exactly it's the same thing, but it's it's a later computer code.
MS. SHARP: And were these so they were like
MS. REICHEK: They were radio waves blasted into space.
MS. SHARP: Okay. And they were like what were the pictographs? Like what
MS. REICHEK: The pictographs, when they got stuck, they formed pictographs, okay, with signs
MS. SHARP: So something caught the wave, it would form these
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. And and
MS. SHARP: They were like drawing shapes.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. When I got to describing the body, they had an Adam and Eve with, you know, the most clichéd kind of she's posed like a babe and he's saying hi. [They laugh.] It was just they just resorted to, I don't know what kind of figuration here, but they they got to that.
MS. SHARP: It's funny that like that would be like what might be the universal symbol for [they laugh]
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. I mean perhaps they have two heads. I mean what do I know? But that's you know.
[END MD 03 TR 01.]
MS. SHARP: Yeah. And what were some of the other like pictographs or
MS. REICHEK: There they looked like computer code.
MS. SHARP: Right. They looked like
MS. REICHEK: Or they looked like hieroglyphs. But, you know, they were lingua franca. A code they developed to describe it's a simple number system, but untranslatable without the proper I mean with a core computer, you could do it, if you had that that information programmed, you could translate it, but I certainly don't have it.
MS. SHARP: Right. But the point of and the point of this whole project was to create this universal language that like an alien might find and learn the history of the U.S.
MS. REICHEK: Well, it was an encyclopedia. It was a universal library that they would find out basic information about the earth.
MS. SHARP: And, of course, it was actually totally subjective.
MS. REICHEK: Not only that, it asked for a reply. [They laugh.] They were fully conscious that, you know, nothing was ever understood, but they wanted to hear back.
MS. SHARP: Just in case.
MS. REICHEK: Just in case. I mean, this is funded by the government, also, and
MS. SHARP: Wonderful.
MS. REICHEK: it was just and you could download it from the Internet.
MS. SHARP: And then so, well, in the same show you have these curtains with Morse Code on them.
MS. REICHEK: And what I'm talking about is basically, you know, pictographs, language, representation of language of code, translation from, you know, the verbal to the visual. That's why there's sign language piece there, early technology versus, say, the Morse Code, which is obsolete now, versus a kind of a new computer code, sophisticated way of encoding information, using technology, sending it to outer space.
MS. SHARP: But all sort of composed of similar units, like
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Small units.
MS. SHARP: ones and zeroes, dots, dashes.
MS. REICHEK: That's right.
MS. SHARP: Can you so the Morse code piece, you have these like sheer purple curtains.
MS. REICHEK: They weren't purple.
MS. SHARP: Oh, was that a different one.
MS. REICHEK: No, no, no, no purple.
MS. SHARP: Purple's the wrong word.
MS. REICHEK: No, you use purple, I don't use purple. That's not of course I use purple. I know you're interested in purple. In their first when I showed them at Nicole's, they were the sheerest hint, hint of blue.
MS. SHARP: Oh, okay. So they were actually the first ones were blue.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. But the palest blue-grey and they were a translation and they were embroidered and this I actually brought to a place in Long Island City because they had an early machine, one that would have been close, within 20 years, of [Samuel F. B.] Morse's invention of Morse code. A Singer sewing machine became available and the first kinds of stitches made were loop stitches. My sewing machine won't make those.
So I brought it to a place in Long Island City where this wonderful person at Penn & Fletcher has a real interest in early sewing machines and he has rebuilt this early machine out of sheer love and they could do it for me.
MS. SHARP: Wow.
MS. REICHEK: So I got the original transcription of Morse's Morse code message which he wrote out himself in his own handwriting and the system which is the first Morse code is only dashes, they changed it later from the Library of Congress. You can get it on your computer.
MS. SHARP: So this is the first message that was ever sent?
MS. REICHEK: The first Morse message sent from Baltimore to Washington. Okay? And I had that sewn over some the final version was 60 feet. I guess this one was maybe 40, 40 feet scrim-like curtain from floor to ceiling, just wafting, the message in Morse's handwriting, plus the Morse code underneath, plus a translation of what the Morse code meant, and the first message sent was "What Hath God Wrought?" Which was an anxiety about technology. So it seemed really nice in a show that I was talking about translation and information, the dream of the universal library and whether the computer would make that possible or not, the fact that as soon as you record it, your computer programs become obsolete, that the Morse code was obsolete, and the fact that Morse was a painter and made the first telegraph on his stretcher boards in his studio, all of this seemed like a nice marriage of the verbal and the visual of the pictograph and the sign.
MS. SHARP: And it was the the machine, sewing machine that you were talking about which was the contemporary of
MS. REICHEK: Yes, it's 20 years after. The technology that interests me is it goes Jacquard loom, analytic engine, prototype for the computer, then Morse code, Singer sewing machine, and then Perkins commercial dye comes last.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: So that's the parallel history in the 19th very much like the period we're in with the same kind of anxiety about machines and
MS. SHARP: Why why did you choose curtains to put them on? What was the
MS. REICHEK: The whole show had a kind of it was about the way in which information flew.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: But I wanted the perfume of this show to be first of all, the scale was big, so I wanted a classic painting show and because they were large they weren't so much this to this to this. The way the associations were made, it was better achieved by walking some distance to the next piece. So it also had to do with mood and the air of untethered information, virtual factoids.
MS. SHARP: And did they did they actually like cover the windows in the gallery?
MS. REICHEK: Completely. That's what they were made for and I also it was also a plot. The gallery then it was before they built this wall. I mean, you walked in and almost fell out the windows. So I wanted to contain my space and so it was just about creating an installation in which everything was contained in my space.
MS. SHARP: I like the image of the air kind of moving them
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. They
MS. SHARP: and the ephemeral quality of something
MS. REICHEK: The whole tone of the show is very different from the dense tone that I'd used either at MoMA or other installations I'd made before with the coconuts on the floor, dark rooms, the theatrical 19th century museum at MoMA, just very different kind of thing. I wanted a different kind of I didn't paint the walls. I just wanted a straight show of air between it.
MS. SHARP: Then like the pieces like I'm thinking of the Settee piece and it is kind of it really all the images kind of sit on one plane and there is a sort of air in between each little pictogram.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: And it it kind of and it definitely refers to because of its flatness, like modern painting in the grid and all the things that embroidery can refer back to.
And then so in coming up into 2006, you just you recently, that's two years ago, but now it's almost like a couple months ago, probably, you had this show at Shoshana Wayne called "Glossed in Translation."
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: And then just this fall, working from similar bodies of work, the Pattern and Recognition Show. I'm sorry. "Pattern Recognition" [2007] at Nicole Klagsbrun.
MS. REICHEK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. SHARP: And does the sort of centerpieces of of this show were these a series of small embroidered versions of famous art icons, famous modern paintings for the most part and some contemporary work and they were out really small, almost like a patch or something you could sew on your shoulder.
MS. REICHEK: I would like to go back to Shoshana's show.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: Which was really a continuation in many ways of Nicole's show.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: "Glossed in Translation" was it furthered this discussion
MS. SHARP: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: of translation and then somewhere in there for the Shoshana show, I began working with my own digital machinery.
MS. SHARP: Hmm.
MS. REICHEK: Okay. But I was already and that learning curve was interesting. So the piece of So Well Written [date?] which was made on a digital machine in the Lawrence Weiner, those are digitized pieces in the in a hand-sewn show which is how that was the first time I've used digital embroidery, was in Shoshana's show.
MS. SHARP: So this you have this machine that you can you can make a digital file on a computer. You can scan things or create it yourself
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: and then it has some software that translates it into a set of instructions for the computer and then you I'm sorry for the sewing machine and it has a little card that then goes into the sewing machine and the sewing machine will then automatically sew based on the pattern that you've designed, right?
MS. REICHEK: Yes. Now I've used the computer, of course, before for the handmade pieces because they laid out something to make by hand in the form of instructions, but
MS. SHARP: You lay out
MS. REICHEK: never
MS. SHARP: and print your patterns
MS. REICHEK: Print my patterns. I sew from the pattern by hand. So it's digital to hand and I like that because my hands it looks like it's completely digitized. So it refers the thing about the digital machine, which is nice in combining it with the hand made stuff, is that it has a different surface. It's as smooth as a painting surface and it doesn't refer to it which is completely computerized.
MS. SHARP: Right. There's no sort of pixel revealed in it.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. So it in there, there's a very nice the two together and that's actually when I first began doing that at Shoshana's show, showing both handmade work and digital work at Shoshana's and then at Nicole's, the same thing because I had room that was a handmade room and it was and I reversed the scale because in the hand weave the homage to Matisse and textiles, I thought, oh, I'm going to get into textiles and swatches because embroidery also comes with embroidery, like thread cards and things that you and when you look at fabric, you have swatches of the fabric.
So swatches, you're looking at them and they're part of your practice, and if I had known that Matisse had always had a textile collection and of the importance of textiles for Matisse and I I had much of this information before Matisse and his textiles were shown at the Met, but I was so delighted with that show. So I thought, okay, I will talk about the relationship of flat painting to textiles. That would be something to talk about and pattern and also at this point, I'm picking up images from the web. I'm scanning books, downloading images, jpegs, jpegs, jpegs, and I thought I would talk a little bit about harvesting images.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: The way in which I had been doing this. So I began to think about something about Matisse and I thought I would talk about this.
MS. SHARP: So these little pieces that were made with the computerized sewing machine, you were sort of you were harvesting images, as you said, you would grab things
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: from the Internet and from books and scan them, and basically what happened was you had a lot of them and you you did you remade work by artists like Elizabeth Murray, Carol Walker, Chris Ophelia, modern masters like Matisse and Ellsworth Kelly, a bunch of others, and would make multiples. You would redo their paintings and you would choose like the thread color and it and it was a really when you walked into the room, I think the first thing I was overwhelmed by was how all of these works that I was familiar with in some way had been kind of reduced to the same scale as each other and and and sort of made into these little icons, you know. It really changed
MS. REICHEK: Well, in the Matisse Room, there was a small swatch of a Matisse painting handmade blown-up.
MS. SHARP: Ahh.
MS. REICHEK: So in the big room, I had small work and in the little room, I had big work.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: Matisse got his own small swatch blown up big, 50 by 60. In this, what do you see? I mean, I had seen a lot of this work myself. So someone my age looks at the computer differently. It's I mean, when I started art history you were looking basically at black and white pictures in a cardboard box and then there were slides and I've still got slides, but it was a different way of looking at images.
When you look at images on the Web, they're all homogenized, scale, texture, everything, more so than in photographs. When they're reduced in photographs, the scale, by virtue of your screen, is never very big. So everybody, the famous and the not-so-famous, floats around on the Internet. You know, you want to see [Gerhard] Richter's clouds, you type in clouds, Richter. You want to see they all pop up for consumption.
Also, I live in New York. So in New York, the way in which fashion and design moves so quickly in and out of high-low, but probably the issue for the 21st century, you know, began certainly in the 19th but it's still a thing that, you know, has been working itself out in terms of craft and making and what's acceptable and all of that discourse.
It all just I mean, no sooner does it get at this point shown on the runway that it gets into the galleries or in the galleries, it gets shown on the runway and the line between décor and what is shown in art galleries is completely obliterated. I mean, Gagosian [Gallery] is showing furniture and there's no more line and, you know, it's fine with me, but it's not that I'm objecting to it. I'm simply talking about it. How quickly we consume and and digest and reconfigure and that's a universal practice now.
MS. SHARP: One of the things in that show was a table with a sample book on it where you did a series in blocks of color, so you had several in blue and then you could see how they might look in pink.
MS. REICHEK: It was magenta, cyan and yellow.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Because the machine that I use, or the two machines that I use now, they are capable of production and reproduction. They're programmed. So they are essentially a kind of print-making tool. They're all supposed to be the same. Of course, they're not, but, you know, glitches and everything like that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But, you know, they're a means of production. It's not handmade. It's you slot a card or the, you know, tab in it and it it sews.
MS. SHARP: The interesting thing about that because I worked with you on those for me is that, like you said, they were a little bit different.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Sometimes they'd be tighter thread in one part and looser in the other, depending on how the machine was feeling.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And that each one, though it was machine made and definitely had that appearance at the show, required a lot of personal interaction. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: It did, indeed. It did, indeed.
MS. SHARP: Each one had a lot of special attention.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, and each one was very different.
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: I always said my idea of making multiples was to make five of the same thing by hand.
MS. SHARP: Right. [They laugh.]
MS. REICHEK: I just yes, it's but you see, it's the first time that a machine this sophisticated has come on the market.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's simply home sewing. The way the DYI, do it yourself, D
MS. SHARP: DIY.
MS. REICHEK: DIY.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: DIY. Sorry. Has everybody's an artist.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean everybody edits their photographs. Everybody is encouraged to make this craft. There's just
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The way the do it yourself has produced this, you know, whole generation of people making stuff at home is extraordinary of the magazines that are out. I mean, it's a whole world. Did we ever go to
MS. SHARP: We oh, right.
MS. REICHEK: parties and sew together? Hello?
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's amazing.
MS. SHARP: The machine that the sewing machine that you use is marketed towards like a sort of consumer, like
MS. REICHEK: Oh, all the programs.
MS. SHARP: maybe someone who has six children and likes to put butterflies on their lapels or something. They're very
MS. REICHEK: It was never meant all the the reason the technology is difficult to use for someone who wants to make something is all the technology is not meant for you and it has to be gotten around.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It has to be overridden, used to plot, you know, the big embroideries. It's I mean, if you use it the way it's supposed to work, you will get beige embroideries
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: that are incomprehensible. Okay? I mean, you know, you just I mean, I'm hoping there's better software out.
MS. SHARP: But they might match those couches really well. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: I don't know what they do, but they I can always tell if somebody's used the program and not done an enormous amount of correcting.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Now, I have old software, too. So maybe the new ones are better.
MS. SHARP: Well, there is something about consumer and this is the same for like something like an iMovie or other editing tools.
MS. REICHEK: Absolutely.
MS. SHARP: The home thing there's so much you aren't able to customize very much. They sort of preplan there's an assumption about who you want to be or what you want to make when you get these machines.
MS. REICHEK: Yep.
MS. SHARP: So I think that makes that work even more interesting because you had to kind of work around, you know, what the company assumed you wanted to make.
MS. REICHEK: It with both.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: With both, I mean, if the company had any idea and in fact, I actually tried to get a free machine and had a great proposal from a curator where was she? Kentucky or some place like that. Had a whole show plan and everything and got up to the top and they turned us down. We were not commercial enough.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. They don't care about artists. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: They don't care. They don't care. So we never got our freebie machine. So I didn't do the show. We had to buy one. Honestly, I did try, but just these things don't befall me.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, it was not for lack of trying.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So we just had to, you know, find Harvey [last name?] and then the machine is programmed for home source.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So that the kind of this step to that step is not a very logical way of because you have not I mean, the whole vocabulary of the sewing machine, the whole
I mean, it's a wonder world of products that you are particularly unacquainted with.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Things for this and things for that, but basically it's a machine that is made for home for a sewer that wants to make monogrammed towels and also might want to embroider on a quilt of do
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: curtains or the ambitious might want to make a vest.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs] They had some nice vests.
MS. REICHEK: Vests.
MS. SHARP: Well, it's interesting because you I mean that's but that's the kind of thing like you took even the technology of embroidering or cross stitching a sampler or another piece of like home décor and you make your own you know, you even if you do it without using a computer, I don't know, like in the "Native Intelligence" show, you still
MS. REICHEK: I could do this it's easier.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Frankly, it's easier to do it by hand. It's only because I want to talk about that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: For me, to sit down and copy something. I mean, I just made two hand line drawings with a snap.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It was just copying.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I can do that. Everybody who's taken drawing can do that. It's the map of it.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So, I mean, that's easy work. Everything I got to sew for Madam I'm Adam or I mean, the MoMA show was by all hand no computer or anything like that. I don't think I got to using even the program until the larger-scale embroideries. Before that they were just handmade.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. It just allowed me to and probably still could be made that way, but I do want to talk about this other thing and because that stuff is available. I want to talk about that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: This is not about I mean, I use embroidery as a new deal, but with paint, many things can be made.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, nobody defines a sculptor by the material they use. No, you know. You're a lead thrower or you're a Cor-ten steel person or you're a you know.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It's just silly.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So for me, embroidery is my medium, but I use it to talk about things it's a cue for the viewer and it's not a privileged material.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It comes with its history, but that history is part of what I'm talking about, but I'm not talking about embroidery in later bodies of work. I mean, it's only partially about what I'm saying is informed by my medium.
MS. SHARP: And it is
MS. REICHEK: And that probably comes out of Reinhardt.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I mean, well, and the sort of contemporary angle of using the computer sewing machine and like
MS. REICHEK: The oldest technology. Oldest technology
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: newest technology. The thread of connection.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The Internet throws up history. It throws up history in a non-linear way. It throws up things you would never think of type in the wrong, you know, search word and and, you know, amazing amount of stuff you're not looking for pops up.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And so that particular way in which that works is very much, you know, a practice I'm interested in. What does the machine think, you know? Also systems of, you know, the ethnographic files, what they put together?
MS. SHARP: Right. How things become related
MS. REICHEK: Right. Exactly.
MS. SHARP: and who's choosing that.
Well, I I was going to like try and finish up by talking about what you're doing next which originally I thought was going to be you're going to take some time. You've had a lot of you've had two big shows recently and
MS. REICHEK: People who know me laughed. They laughed.
MS. SHARP: You said I'm going to take some time and do some research, but it turns out
MS. REICHEK: I did take, for me, some time. I mean, what's "some time?"
MS. SHARP: I know. It was like a month.
MS. REICHEK: I think the time I needed was to say that I had finished with the swatch work.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That the only thing I would be interested in terms of swatches and this I would have to be given the space or be given a museum is I could go around to the museums and look at the patterns and maybe do a swatch work out of the museum collection and that would parallel a kind of Gardner intervention but I'd make the work out of and that would probably be the only way in which I mean, you can go on making them forever.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But I've kind of exhausted my interest in them and actually what I wanted to do was just, you know, that there was something else I was interested in that I hadn't done, and that was Ariadne [date?]. And that I wanted to talk about production and reproduction and the Internet and that quality. I mean, so that was foremost in my mind and how I got my material, but once that was kind of set, I thought, well, you know, I'd like to talk about this more.
MS. SHARP: Were there things when we were doing when we were working on the sampler work, it seemed like you had some unfinished I think the Ariadne was one of them.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Things that you really wanted to work out, but the sampler format just totally wasn't right.
MS. REICHEK: No, I can't do it in a sampler format there's too much. It's too big a topic.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You can kind of play with Arcachne and Philomena, but I've worked with the web structure and I've worked with worldwide web and all of that. So I kind of fiddled around with Arachne and Philomena could certainly, you know, the poor, singing, sad nightingale, she could certainly fly around a little bit more, but the one that interests me is Ariadne because that is a very complicated myth and everybody's weighed in on it, everybody's had something to say. [Gilles] Deleuze, [Friedrich] Nietzsche, [Martin] Heidegger, [Giorgio] de Chirico, [Guillaume] Apollinaire. The original mythology appears in you know, it's wonderful [Pablo] Picasso. It's a rich and interesting it could also be an occasion of tracing back, maybe moving. I'm sure moving had something to do with it.
MS. SHARP: You recently moved from a home that you'd lived in for many, many years.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, and so the experience of moving and always when an experience that maybe you thought you didn't want to do or you do and it turns out great, that's kind of like a silly comparison but Ariadne just was grief struck and then she got better. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So always those. Everybody likes those kinds of that's a silly point, but there is something about the labyrinth in which you journey to a point and then trace your way back and in some ways maybe that is a process in the way you kind of go down and dig and then come back. Which is, in every body of work there's a way in which you enter and a way in which you leave and you don't quite know how you can get out of it.
MS. SHARP: But you do?
MS. REICHEK: Because as you develop the body of work, you don't think about where it ends; you just think, you know, and then you say what you have to say.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: But you don't actually know how or where it's going to go and where you're going to come out and so it probably just mirrors in some very creative process.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You go down and you come up.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And during that point, you're kind of feeling your way around.
MS. SHARP: I you said earlier that I'm not sure if this is on the recording or not, but, you know, you've dealt with all the major myths kind of except for Ariadne or that you're holding off.
MS. REICHEK: I certainly haven't dealt with all the major myths, but Ariadne is a logical one for me to deal with.
MS. SHARP: But you've been holding off kind of.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I didn't know what to do with her because it's where to stop. I still don't know.
MS. SHARP: Uh-huh. [Affirmative.]
MS. REICHEK: Myths taken out of context are always strange anyhow because they all depend on what came before and what comes after.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It's all connected and who did what to whom, you know. So do you begin in Ariadne with Daedalus and there's good material there. Architect, artist, diva, Daedalus, James Joyce, good, good, good. Or do you begin with Ariadne? So I just decided, okay, I'll begin with Ariadne and this thread, which is my basic material, I thought, let me go back to that thread, you know, the thread thing which started, okay, which was my first show, which had to do with thread and line.
MS. SHARP: And you just did these line drawings with thread, right?
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. I just thought I'll go, you know, and it could be because I'm people are starting to interview me and I'm starting to have my I mean, somebody's writing a dissertation and I'm starting to archive my material.
MS. SHARP: I was going to say that you lived
MS. REICHEK: I started listening. So I suspect that the process of moving, which is a trauma, not moving yourself and clothes and furniture, it's moving the studio
MS. SHARP: The stuff, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's the studio.
MS. SHARP: And the archives.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. So this is all
MS. SHARP: That wasn't easy for you to actually recently, really complete your archives and kind of complete them.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, and they're not finished yet.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: We're still in the I mean, we're still in the middle, but it the dissertation thing and the interviews for that and somebody's in your file drawers and then you move your studio and you have to put everything I mean, I have a storage everything's out of the house now. It's in storage.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So you have to wrap it and pack it, get storage space and
MS. SHARP: You're being you're forced to
MS. REICHEK: You're being forced
MS. SHARP: look back
MS. REICHEK: to look back
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: in a way and also when you move after 30 years, you've got a lot of sorting to do and you know what a nut I am it's absurd, tagging, I mean, children in Bushwick get the colored pencils. I just gave away bunches of stuff.
MS. SHARP: In an incredibly thoughtful manner you purposefully gave away.
MS. REICHEK: Well, I'm kind of a control freak. I mean, it's just nuts but I do this my way and so when I moved, we had lunch at noon and I got to feed the movers. They thought they had gotten the day off, which they did because I was so incredibly organized, having done, you know, everything before. So, I mean, the move it was nothing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I prepared and when I got up here, it was like, oh, call a locksmith, I'm in here.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Don't look back.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But it was the process that probably made me recall how I got started and usually I just like go from one body of work to the next, what interests me next, but this time, I needed to take off. It was time I needed to take off. It was really about realizing I was finished with that body of work and that was this really one-shot deal.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that's what I wanted to make and that was it and only in another situation would I be interested in doing more of it. I had said everything I could say.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. As a form it will only retain interest in a certain way.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. For me.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Just, you know, yes, for me, I could have done different things. I mean, you know, there's always wait a minute, it won't work.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But basically the subject matter, I had talked about harvesting and appropriation. So what did I need to talk about, you know, what interests me that I hadn't explored which was the first impetus of the work, and I think that's why I steered clear of it in the MoMA show, because I knew I was going to get threats.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: The fates are somebody else, okay, and they get certainly it's pretty clear from all the translations I've read that the Fates did not give Ariadne the clue which is that's what it's called, the clue, of thread.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: That it was Daedalus that gave it to her. But there are some myths that say the Fates gave it to her. When you read a myth, you have to isolate the myth, you have to find the translation and the translation you like and what feels right to you. I'm somebody who loves Ovid. So Ovid's translations are I like an earlier [Herman] Melville that was my translation, but there's many more. I mean, that was mine I grew up on.
MS. SHARP: So in this process, are you reading multiple translations to try and stitch together
MS. REICHEK: Always. You have to. You have to always, but I'll end up with Ovid. Because in the way it's Ovid is a poet, and it's so beautiful, the translations I like best, I mean the myths are told by different people, let's begin it that way, and then they're translated. They have different authors, too, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Different people write out the myths.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So we're first talking about versions of the myth
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: and then we're talking about translations of the versions of it as translated by several people, and there's many good [Allen] Mandelbaum, somebody named [Tony] Kline. You just use the one you like, but for this show, I seem to be headed towards the Melville, the old one. I've used Mandelbaum; in MoMA I used Mandelbaum for some things. He's very good for that. I looked at a couple of translations to see what the language is.
MS. SHARP: And so what about technology in the work, besides plotting some of your embroidery patterns on the computer and stuff? Do you have plans for that in this series?
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Yeah?
MS. REICHEK: Ariadne is also mathematical people math book love it. It's basically the labyrinth is puzzle solving. There's Suduko is based on the Ariadne algorithm.
MS. SHARP: Oh.
MS. REICHEK: It's not trial and error. Okay? It's more like the possibilities and then you go from here to there. It explains it in text why it's not exactly the same. But that's the basis of Suduko. So I'm certainly going to do some Suduko work and it should be really fun.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. That will be really fun.
MS. REICHEK: And also I'm going to work with the labyrinth structure and what that means but also there are programs for called Ariadne programs. There are two of them I know of. One is you it's for robots, finding the shortest distance between two points in the least amount of time. That's one. The other one helps you lay out plots of writing in different ways and organize the material
MS. SHARP: Wow!
MS. REICHEK: and that, too, is an Ariadne kind of algorithm.
MS. SHARP: Interesting. You might use that for text.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly, exactly. It I remember seeing an example which is plotting the movie of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergmann's [Casablanca, 1942] most famous movie in the world, not the Maltese Falcon [1941], the other one; "You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss." Oh, come on, Sarah. [Laughs.]
MS. SHARP: I'm not I don't know.
MS. REICHEK: It's absurd. Anyhow, doing that very well known plot and doing it in different ways and different organizing principles
MS. SHARP: Oh, wonderful.
MS. REICHEK: So that's like a screenwriter's and a plot-making writer's tool.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: So that will be interesting and I have to research that further. I know that there's at least three kinds of things exist.
MS. SHARP: That's great. So there is this kind of
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: And that they are called Ariadne.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Elaine, as we're talking, I've I feel like I have a good handle on like historically what artists you like and or what excites you and what's interesting. I'm curious. Who are some of your contemporaries that you feel like aligned with, you know, conceptually or
MS. REICHEK: It's hard to say who you feel aligned with. Actually, that's not how I choose who I admire. I you know, I do what I do, they do what they do.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: I who I love whose work I love,
MS. SHARP: Yes.
MS. REICHEK: I think what you're asking me
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Who do you love, Elaine? Tell me. [They laugh.]
MS. REICHEK: Who do I love?
MS. SHARP: Who do you love?
MS. REICHEK: Well, I love Isaac Julien's work. I love Jimmy Durk's [sp] work. I love I only mention this because they're extremely well known. Okay. They happen to be boys. I'll get to the girls. Okay? And I love James Caldwell's work. He's our total fan. I love Gene Silverpool's work. I am a deep admirer of Carol Walker. I there are many women whose work I admire. I admire I'm tongue tied now.
MS. SHARP: Probably the medicine. I put you on the spot. I'm sorry.
MS. REICHEK: I think it's cold medicine actually because there are so many. Louise Bourgeois. These people's sensibilities are completely different from mine.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Totally different.
MS. REICHEK: Agnes Martin. [Inaudible.] I have plenty of them.
MS. SHARP: I'm sure
MS. REICHEK: Jenny Holzer. Barbara Kruger. I have young artist friends whose work I love.
MS. SHARP: You you called yourself, I think maybe in two different interviews, a librarian with a thread with a needle, and, I mean, I think that could account for you too, like you have a really you have this ability to appreciate a really broad range of whatever things, you know, work, literature, music, whatever it is.
MS. REICHEK: Well, it's work that seems authentic to me. Work that I know when I see it, I know it comes from some place which is, you know, deeply moving to me because it represents a real belief system, represents someone who is deeply engaged in their work, and no one else could make that work, the kind of [inaudible]. Her love of travel, it's all in her work. My friend Jeff Perrott, who hasn't shown much, his incredible talent lies both in the verbal and the visual, someone who has never gotten into it, who is a brilliant, mature artist. Not everyone gets what they deserve or what I think they deserve.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And young artists coming up, I'm trying to think, certainly interested in Paul Kennedy's work and Lisa Towne's work. I'm certainly interested in your work and Kristin's [last name?] work and I'm certainly engaged in that generation. I know that I've actually been told that [inaudible] who have something to say.
MS. SHARP: And you kind of use like a sort of internal compass of it, meaning to
MS. REICHEK: It just feels
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Honest.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, the three famous boys I mentioned in the beginning because in fact in private you asked me about that
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I knew them when they weren't famous. I mean way, way, way, way Jimmy didn't have a commercial gallery. Isaac [last name?] did. [Inaudible.] Repetition. In Italy first and then a little bit in Ireland I was introduced to his work in Ireland and it's really interesting. I've always liked Rebecca Horn's work.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Somebody whose work I really she put on a perfect show at the Guggenheim.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Yvonne Rainer.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So I think I was thinking of the boys because
MS. SHARP: We were talking about them first. Yeah. No, of course. I mean, I kind of put you on the spot. I just was
MS. REICHEK: No.
MS. SHARP: thinking about, you know, there are the things you look at that are for your work and that feed your work and then there are the things that you just look at, and love to look at and might not come in
MS. REICHEK: Exactly.
MS. SHARP: directly.
MS. REICHEK: It's stuff that just you get a feeling that even if I'm not even that interested in the project, I'm interested I like Richard Pettibone also.
MS. SHARP: Oh, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I like Pettibone a lot.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Really, I like that work.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that's true for Bourgeois. I actually remember some of that work, early too.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know, you just go into a shell and think, oh, this is this is good.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: It's quite subjective.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. The whole thing is very well, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about or no?
MS. REICHEK: No.
MS. SHARP: I think we've covered it
MS. REICHEK: We've been at this all day.
MS. SHARP: from birth to today.
MS. REICHEK: Yes, exactly. I think we've been at it. If there's something else, we did skip over a lot of the ethnographic period probably,
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: No, we tied it up at the end.
MS. SHARP: Okay.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, calling found photographs as a form of appropriation. We talked about that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. I think we we talked about that.
MS. REICHEK: We've talked about the authorial voice.
MS. SHARP: The authorial voice.
MS. REICHEK: How the voice comes from combination rather than from the traditional source.
MS. SHARP: It comes from
MS. REICHEK: Combinations of things.
MS. SHARP: Oh, the voice that you create in your works?
MS. REICHEK: Yes. Exactly. My voice is about putting things together.
MS. SHARP: Right. Actually, that was that's some I know it definitely happened in Post Colonial Kinderhood, and I don't know if it happened before that, but your your you started your initials started to show up, where if you did an embroidery, you would put the person that you were appropriating and your own name.
MS. REICHEK: Yes.
MS. SHARP: Like your name started to become part of
MS. REICHEK: Yeah.
MS. SHARP: the work.
MS. REICHEK: But it's always it's always about this combining of things.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And early, because that kind of authorship and the death of the author had not been proclaimed yet, it had more to do with a feminist consciousness about the uber voice.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Okay?
MS. SHARP: And how did that did your ideas about that relate at all to like people like Sherry Levine or
MS. REICHEK: The appropriation was this is starting to sound like Bill Anasazi or something. My use of appropriation predates that.
MS. SHARP: Oh, right.
MS. REICHEK: And so it wasn't so much about market ideas and name on it. It
MS. SHARP: So you were when the pictures
MS. REICHEK: the use of appropriation has to do with a lot of ideas floating at Metro [Pictures Gallery, New York City] at that particular point about the modification of art.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And certainly Laurie Simmons was invested in and many people were interested in that. I mean, as the art world began to expand, it was certainly pretty intimate.
MS. SHARP: Right. Do you want to get it?
MS. REICHEK: No, because oh, let me just pick it up.
[END MD 03 TR 02.]
MS. REICHEK: Mine comes much it doesn't become so much about appropriation because it didn't have a name then.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It becomes
[END MD 03 TR 03.]
MS. REICHEK: Really comes from ideas about the authorial voice, not as appropriation.
MS. SHARP: So you're saying that you're reusing of images and stuff like that is really about like authorship and the authorial voice and shifting that.
MS. REICHEK: Yeah. Yeah. And lot part -- in a lot of ways, that's certainly informed my early use, the anxiety of influence, stuff like that.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: Before Sherrie [Levine] in the appropriation and made that her subject.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: That is not my subject.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It is her subject.
MS. SHARP: Right. There is a little bit of it because maybe the pictures, people were dealing with authorship a little bit. But it's a whole it's a very different.
MS. REICHEK: Yes. It's a different comes from a different place.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Were you engaged with them at all when that was happening, or just --
MS. REICHEK: I know Barbara [Kruger]. And because I've met Sherrie and been to but they are I mean, Barbara, actually, yeah.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But Sherrie is somebody who's been at the dinner table that I've been at. But that was not my that's not what I really was interested in. The way in which it touched into the work, I found supportive.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: I was glad.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: You know, welcomed it with open arms, as I welcomed, you know, news of Mary Kelly's piece.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: But it isn't that. I mean, it was never just this one I've had a lot of ideas that I don't just want to you know, keep working on.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: And that is something people do today in very many ways. They do this, they do that. They're all over, you know, this and that and that. But remember, this is not the way it used to be.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: It used to be that you had a although I'm confident that my work doesn't look like anybody else's, it used to be that you had to be known as someone who did this.
MS. SHARP: Right.
MS. REICHEK: And if I got to be the embroidery lady, I mean, I don't know how that happened, except that I use embroidery.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So but the embroidery lady was always talking about something else, too.
MS. SHARP: Right, yeah.
MS. REICHEK: So now, you know, I've been referred to as the doyenne of embroidery.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: Just because I used it as a medium.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: But shows about medium they serve, I guess a purpose, but they are not about what your work is about. I don't think anybody just has a painting show or a sculpture show, but then again, those are dominant art historical mediums.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: Although now, there is beginning to be these specific medium shows. I mean, you know.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, there have been white shows and black shows and red shows and things like that. I mean, they are just defined by that.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Ceramics shows, like that.
MS. REICHEK: Exactly. Maybe they're necessary. I mean, I always think, Who cares what we use? I mean, do we have to do that? But I think we actually do because I was actually shocked. I mean, I have to tell you, I was shocked I think they were, too at the Museum of Art and Design. I was shocked. This embroidered show? I keep getting doyenne-d for.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: I mean, the degree of attention it's just amazing.
MS. SHARP: Yeah.
MS. REICHEK: I mean, everybody in the art world is, you know, it's like a crafts fair these days.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: I mean, you know, Barbara Gladstone has got pots, you know. It's been going on for you know, the last five years it's been sort of the most interesting, from Jorge Pardo, you know, redoing of Dia, to -- I mean, it's like knock, knock. I mean oh, maybe, you know, we're all such ostriches; all we know about is our own.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: I've never found nothing more boring than a group of artists. It's like dentists talking about amalgams or something.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.]
MS. REICHEK: You know, we're terribly, terribly only interested it gets to the point you can't hang out with civilians. It's impossible. I can't believe how dull we all are, myself included.
MS. SHARP: [Laughs.] Well, it all depends on who you're asking, I guess.
MS. REICHEK: Well, I hope I haven't bored the bejesus out of my listeners.
MS. SHARP: No. This has been great.
MS. REICHEK: Thank you, Sarah.
MS. SHARP: Yeah, thank you.
MS. REICHEK: Thank you for asking me thoughtful questions.
MS. SHARP: You're well, I tried. And thank you for answering them there so thoroughly.
MS. REICHEK: And doing research and putting your time and energy into talking to me.
MS. SHARP: Of course. It's well worth it. It was a great experience.
MS. REICHEK: I'm certainly appreciative of it.
MS. SHARP: Thank you.
MS. REICHEK: And I look forward to seeing, you know, what comes out of it.
MS. SHARP: Yeah. Hopefully it's good. Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW.]
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Elaine Reichek, 2008 Feb. 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
