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55


Interview

Dalkey interviewed the artist, and reported that Reich had a “quirky sense of humor and a richly metaphoric mind.”
“He describes the frozen food section of a supermarket as a repository of ‘intimate photos of produce.’
“He equates advertising images with pornography and regards the photos of food he collects as his employees.
“‘I’ve had a job for a certain piece of pineapple for years,’” he confides.
He told Dalkey, “I copy what I’ve cut out faithfully, and then give it a different chore.” She said that in these works, “Ak-Mak crackers become the limbs of a figure, or the leaf of a rubber plant becomes a feather in Mona Lisa’s cap.”
Reich went on:
“’What I do is the next thing to anthropomorphizing food, similar to making images out of vegetables as Arcimboldo did.
“When I started doing them (the drawings), I realized that this was what I’d been waiting to do….waiting all my life, my conscious artistic life, for something so cohesive. The message may be raw, but it’s meaty.”

56


Besides the Crocker show, the renderings were exhibited in private galleries and a large group was circulated throughout the Southwest by the Arizona Commission of the Arts and Humanities.
In my review of that show for Art in America I said, “ He likens his labor to a crop-duster making repeated passes over a field. Likewise, the viewer makes mental and visual passes at the pictures, making a series of discoveries and wrong guesses trying to recognize where the bits and pieces come from, gradually entering into Reich’s stream of consciousness. We move into the thought stream directly, through the eye and the mind, without the intermediary of the ear, of words. Surrealism without the verbiage.
“Like the Surrealists, Reich intends to disrupt conventional ideas by turning them back on themselves. In particular, his target is all those attitudes that derive from the imagery of printed and televised advertising, which he deplores. By scrambling fragments of these images, he seeks to exorcize their power. His greatest delight is to have a viewer jump to conclusions -- to identify a smeared mouth as a vagina when in fact it is a dab of chocolate pudding.

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