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59  The other Candy Store artists were seen as friendly collectivists, but Reich’s work was edgier, hungrier, not cute like theirs.
Reich and others built the gallery with little support beyond the shaky tolerance of its quirky owner whose seeming openness to new art attracted them. They liked Adeliza McHugh because she was not part of the art world of either Sacramento or San Francisco,
was slightly contemptuous of those worlds, and, living in the gallery‘s back room, lived with the art all the time, as they did.
But like these artists, even the most cartoonistic ones, Reich didn’t stray far from the seen world. His always-on imagination and his facility with drawing -- in pencil, brushstroke or pastel -- seemed to demand figuration at times. See the appendix.
Contra Realism But the new, non-funky realism seen in New York riled him. Reich’s answer to fawning verismo was a slogan he used all through life: “It’s all made up.”
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60 He was convinced of the inevitability of art, everywhere and at all times.
Because the images in his renderings were just craftily copied pieces of paper, they could be arranged, juxtaposed or combined in the most surprising, comical, sexual or commercial panoplies. He was applying his earlier mastery of collage, inverting and subverting it to affirm his animus toward neo-realism.
So-called realism is as made-up as surrealism or abstraction. It’s all made up.
He intentionally compromised the eye-flattering imagery of commercial art by exposing its artifice.
I wrote: “Reich saw immediately that images from printed publications were loaded with meaning that could be compromised by unexpected juxtapositions,
By exploiting these juxtapositions, he tapped into a basic source of humor -- jolting and tickling the mind by colliding incongruous concepts. After mastering collage, Reich felt he had the right to make fun of it. Laughter is an appropriate reaction to some of Reich’s pieces. Shock, surprise and taking offense are others.”
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