Reena Spaulings is an art dealer (with an eponymous gallery on Grand Street), the title character of a Pynchonesque novel, and now an artist currently showing at the newish Haswellediger & Co. She is also, of course, a fictional persona dreamed up by the members of the collective Bernadette Corporation. The show provides an opportunity to investigate the various projects orbiting this elusive character. One can check out the novel and a CD, titled White Light/White Heat, with tracks by the usual downtown suspects (Lizzi Bougatsos, Seth Price, Rita Ackermann, et al). But the main attraction is an assortment of flags, standing at attention or crossed like the crests of an oddly regal family of anarcho-bohemian LES scenesters. The flags—fabric remnants and tablecloths—are smeared with thick black paint or stained with (presumably cheap) red wine. They are adorned with plastic figures and utensils, fake flora, skull-and-bones appliqués, and various heavy metal detritus—“hardcore art” is, after all, what Reena claims to produce in the confessional letter that serves as the show’s press release. Animated by the artist-marketers behind her, Reena is similar to Annlee, but, unlike Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s mail-order manga character, Reena is never represented visually. She’s “pre-aesthetic,” absent and therefore ever-present—the hostess who left her party before it began. To quote our novelists: “How is she? Young and ugly and beautiful. All in one vehicle. A sponge, a vacuum.”
