Reena Spaulings is a collective project in the medium of a novel, an artist persona, and an institutional art-gallery active from 2005 to the present in New York City. The Gallery's Co-founders and Co-Directors include Carissa Rodriguez, John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad. The Reena Spaulings novel and persona remains an anonymous collective organization. The Spaulings initiative speaks to ideas of collectivity, anonymity, and artistic categorization through literature and artistic production.
Reena Spaulings is a branch of the Bernadette Corporation, also based in New York City.
Contents
Novel
Process
The novel of Reena Spaulings begins as a branch of the Bernadette Corporation under John Kelsey, under the publishing company Semiotext(e) in New York in 2004. To dismantle categorization around the artist's name, the Bernadette Corporation brought together novelists, artists, and anonymous contributors to write a collective novel under the pseudonym of Reena Spaulings. The contributors would write in a collective workshop, each writing one's own section of the novel, which some shared with peers and others keeping the section private. The collective wrote on one's own time, sometimes never showing their work to the rest of the collective. The purpose of the production of a general, collective novel is to challenge notions of labelling, making the product relatable to all members of society. Reena Spaulings is a pseudonym, which artists can challenge the creator's hand, to keep the work a collective production.[2] Reena Spaulings, as a novel, inserts itself into the art historical canon and questions the notions of the artist as a celebrity and as an individual.
Summary
Preface and Chapter 1
The novel's preface describes the novel's creation by 150 artists, novelists, and unnamed contributors. The narrator likens the creative process to questioning the experience of language and categorization. Reena Spaulings, the protagonist, is introduced through a series of oxymorons for her physical identity, including “young and ugly and beautiful”.
Spaulings enters a museum, watching and observing a series of guards. Spaulings in turn is observed by three characters: Bernadette (a guard watching through a webcam), Rain and Jenny. After Spaulings leaves the museum, Rain criticizes their “homeless” ensemble and Jenny fantasizes about them kissing on a ski lift, calling Spaulings the “most cool girl in the world”.
Chapter 2
Reena leaves the museum and walks through the streets of New York. She describes the atmosphere of the streets she crosses: 79th Street, 66th Street, and so on. She also meditates on magazines and on how our lives resemble those in magazines.
Chapter 3
Reena goes to a party and observes the partiers from a distance. Spaulings mentions that the party goers are raving but are not “black out” drunk yet. As the party progresses, Reena encounters a series of parties and pays close attention to their mouths, as it interests her. Reena starts dancing with a "god" like man, a model in which she describes as beautiful but extremely intoxicated. Spaulings dances with the man and party goer Maris burns Reena with her cigarette for no reason. Maris cools down Reena's burn with an ice cube from her drink, apologizing for her erratic behavior. However, Maris oddly continues to poke fun at Reena's appearance. Reena goes to the bathroom and reconnects with Maris at the bar, in which they do a line of coke together.
Chapter 4
The next day, Reena works at the gallery and provides an overview of the paintings she's guarding, including Manet's Young Lady in 1866. Reena recalls the night before, stitching together the memories she still has interwoven with the descriptions of paintings and the symbolisms around her. Maris visits Reena at work and gives her a business card, proposing to Reena that she be a model is her upcoming photo shoot. Reena ponders, and accepts the invitation.
Artist Persona
Artists
Many artists have adapted the Reena Spaulings name as a personal pseudonym. Artists who have actively identified with the alter-ego are Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey, two of the founders of the Reena Spaulings Art Gallery in New York. The alter ego allows for artists to adapt the name, therefore allowing to participate in a larger collective force which aims to dismantle the artists hand and association of one's person to the work. Reena Spaulings as an alter-ego also acts as an avatar, allowing for an expulsion of singular identity within the institutionalized art world, creating an anonymous guise for artistic production. The Spaulings pseudonym has been compared to the persona of Gossip Girl, as the character goes through multiple authors and artistic transformations.
Artist Works
The One and Only (2004) is Reena Spaulings’ first solo exhibition, installed in the Chelsea Gallery in New York. The work depicts a flag occupying a gallery wall, acting as a Territorial marker for the artist. Spaulings installs the flags on a series of steel bars, which are decorated with tar, paint, mirror shards, and embroideries. The One and Only, within the context of the gallery, challenges Colonialist ideologies, speaking to ownership as Spaulings work is installed in another art gallery despite having an existing gallery space for the collective.
Stephen Willat, under the pseudonym of Reena Spaulings, produces The Strange Attractor in 2010 in New York. Willat, based on his observations of individuals and events in New York City, creates a series of videos, diagrams, and maps which display his findings. The process of the work speaks to mathematics, using lines to break larger categories, sometimes defined by pictures or colour blocks, into smaller subsections. The Strange Attractor represents Spaulings’ image of the city as a series of experiences.
The title of The Strange Attractor is derived from a chaotically-formed pattern, inspired by the mathematical and scientific conclusions from Willat's findings.
Controversy
In 2009 under London's Tate Modern show Pop Life, artists Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey incorporated artist Merlin Carpenter’s quotes without their permission. While the quotes could be found in the gift store and in the Tate’s cafe, the artists nevertheless licensed the quotes for use. The artists, within the institutional corporate boundaries of the Tate, incorporate Carpenter’s quotes under the guise of “Reena Spaulings”. Spaulings, being an alter-ego, is faced with a disruption of artistic integrity due to appropriation. Merlin Carpenter viewed the appropriation as an attack against their work, thus, proving the ego to be a flexible and sometimes controversial guise of artistic integrity regarding commercial institution. Merlin Carpenter, in turn, installed a café within the gallery of the Tate to comment on incorporating their work within the Tate's corporate spaces. Quotes could be read in the café, including "You put my work in the Tate's café, so I'll put the Tate café in your art gallery."
Gallery
Reena Spaulings Fine Arts, named after the novel and pseudonym, was founded by John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad in 2004. The gallery is located at 165 East Broadway in New York City, United States.