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Elaine Reichek: pixels, bytes, and stitches.

Article Excerpt
Since the early 1970s feminist artists have been using embroidery as a vehicle to reclaim female agency in contemporary artistic practice and to question the validity of a hierarchy of genres in the history of art. Roszika Parker's Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and Making of the Feminine, published in 1984, was the first text to research and evaluate the history of this art form and its important role, as a form of cultural production, in validating women's contributions to global history. (1) For the last four decades, the New York--based artist Elaine Reichek has been making work that unravels the tradition of the embroidered sampler--as an educational exercise designed to "frame truisms and life lessons for girls and young women within decorative patterns"--retooling this domestic format to critique the patriarchal and modernist assumptions of our culture. (2) In her most recent bodies of work Reichek uses the medium of embroidery to interrogate the complicated relationships among art history, representation, and technology. (3) By juxtaposing hand-made cross-stitches with those produced by a computer-programmed sewing machine in samplers that simulate famous works of art, Reichek offers an incisive commentary on the many forms of translation and remediation that are integral to the history of mark-making and illusionism in Western visual culture. For those interested in cyber-based art practices, her longtime engagement as a classically trained painter-become-needlewoman with the history of technology and mechanical and digital production offers an interesting point of departure.

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The new-media scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as "the representation of one medium in another," or the attempt "to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of meditation." (4) In the world of digital visual culture, this process can be executed in a number of different ways, from the simple scanning and digitizing of printed text or reproductions of works of art, to the more aggressive juxtaposition of different media in digital art, to "the nearly total absorption of one medium by another in the webcam site." (5) In Reichek's case, the embroidered work she has produced over the past decade cleverly responds to the histories of both art and technology; for her, remediation questions the notions of authenticity, originality, and the canon by staging a powerful collision between different types of mark-making.

Reichek's interest in the relationship between art and technology was readily apparent in her 1999 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Projects 67: Elaine Reichek; When This You See ..., a collection of thirty-one pieces that critique traditional definitions of "high art" through musings on the female-dominated arts of embroidery, weaving, and knitting. (6) One of the final works in this series, entitled Sampler (World Wide Web) (1998), serves as an important bridge to understanding her most recent exploration of the relationship between digital technology and the seemingly traditional practice of "women's needlework." In this hand stitched sampler on linen, the viewer is confronted with the familiar image of an early Macintosh computer screen with a random assortment of scrolling text on the theme of weaving and fiber arts ("Spin spin-off spin a yarn spin a web web of deceit/net wove weave a spell ... embroider the truth embroider a fantasy."). Reichek notes of this piece how the language of weaving and cloth "suffuses our consciousness as a deeply embedded metaphor":

We even talk about the fabric of life. And this metaphor runs right up through the most up-to-date technology. In fact, there are links between the history of weaving and the computer. The jacquard loom, invented in the eighteenth century, is often considered an early example of a programmable machine--the prototype for that kind of thinking. Also, although the computer is considered a boy toy, in the early nineteenth century it was a woman, Ada Lovelace--the daughter of the poet Byron--who developed the mathematics and worked to refine a calculating machine, the Analytic Engine, devised by Charles Babbage. He provided the idea, she provided the system, the logic .The pixel and the byte are like stitches--tiny indissoluble elements that in combination with thousands of other indissoluble elements make up a picture. Are there bugs in your computer? Maybe they're spiders. (7)

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With references to Arachne and the gendered traditions of the textile arts, Reichek leaves her audience pondering the history of cross-stitching as "tradition unbound," an age-old form of conceptual mark-making with direct implications for technological progress up to the present day. (8) Her MoMA exhibition in fact offered a metahistory of the relationship between needle arts and technology, and the exploration of this story has since infused her practice. The jacquard loom, widely adapted in France in the early 1800s for its accomplishment of automated weaving through the use of cards that programmed the loom, is a powerful point of reference. Reichek notes the masculinist associations of the history of technology and attempts to give agency to women and their unrecognized role within that history. (9)

The integral relationship between the pixel and the stitch--both free from gendered attributes or stereotypes--lies at the heart of Reichek's most recent work. (10) The pixel is the primary digital module from which the face of our electronic visual culture is constructed. Reichek's embroidered computer screens address how the computer brings with it new ways of thinking about images and patterns, and also conventions of visual representation that are nonetheless rooted in...