Reena Spaulings

Reena Spaulings is a collective project in the medium of a novel, artist persona, and institutional art gallery active from 2005 to Present in New York City. The Gallery’s Co-founders and Co-Directors include John Kelsey and Emily Sunblad, the Reena Spaulings novel and persona remains an anonymous collective organization.. The Spaulings initiative speaks to ideas of Collectivity, Anonymity, and Artistic Categorization through literature and artistic production. Reena Spaulings is a branch of the Bernadette Corporation, also based in New York City.

The novel of Reena Spaulings begins as a branch of the Bernadette Corporation under John Kelsey, under the publishing company Semiotext(e) in New York in 2004. To dismantle categorization around the artist’s name, the Bernadette Corporation brought together novelists, artists, and anonymous contributors to write a collective novel under the pseudonym of Reena Spaulings. The contributors would write in a collective workshop, each writing one’s own section of the novel, which some shared with peers and others keeping the section private. The collective wrote on one’s own time, sometimes never showing their work to the rest of the collective. The purpose of the production of a general, collective novel is to challenge notions of labelling, making the product relatable to all members of society.Reena Spaulings is a pseudonym, which artists can challenge the creator’s hand, to keep the work a collective production.[2] Reena Spaulings, as a novel, inserts itself into the art historical canon and questions the notions of the artist as a celebrity and as an individual.

Preface and Chapter 1

The novel’s preface begins with the creative force addressing the reader, describing the process in which the novel was created. 150 artists, novelists, and unnamed contributor created Reena Spaulings. The author(s) question the notions of experience anddescribes the city as “informed, imagined, by many people at a time”, likening the creative process to questioning the experience of language and categorization. Spaulings, the protagonist, is introduced through a series of oxymorons for her physical identity, including “young and ugly and beautiful”.  The narrator ends the commentary in the preface and tells the story of Reena beginning in Chapter 1.

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