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51


The museum’s statement misses the polemical background of the renderings: Reich’s attack on neorealism.
This was about as clearly intellectualizing as Reich ever got in his career.
His mantra: “The world is real enough.”


It’s me alright, 1971

52


The image taken from a Jim Nutt drawing of a cartoon character sticking its long nose between bare buttocks looks comic-pornographic, but Reich’s point is that the buttocks are not buttocks but knuckles, copied from some magazine picture. Nor are they knuckles, nor a photograph of knuckles, but a drawn copy of a printed reproduction of a photograph of knuckles.
He puts one over on the porno-minded viewer.
His angry irony was missed by some. Thomas Albright, in a San Francisco Chronicle review headlined, “Humor on the Art Scene,” called Reich’s humor “barbed -- and in some ways as noxious -- as a scorpion’s tail.”
Albright compares the effect to “Bosch’s ‘Garden of Worldly Delights’ as it might be translated by Hans Belmer -- which is to say, vulgar but at least not dull.”
True, Reich responded strongly to the Bosch paintings he lingered over in Madrid, at the Prado and Galdiano. But Velasquez and Goya held his attention, too.

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