HEATHER BAUSE RUBINSTEIN

Plaids + Poems is a collaborative project with my husband, poet and art critic, Raphael Rubinstein where he has written typewriter poems of the same size to match a plaid watercolor painting I have made. They are exhibited and sold in pairs. A website and book are forthcoming.

Under Erasure is an exhibition we curated together at Pierogi Gallery in New York (November 28, 2018 – February 2019). Taking its title from Jacques Derrida’s concept of “under erasure,” the exhibition will include both visual artists and contemporary writers whose work features different varieties of erasure. For Derrida (as for Heidegger before him) to put a word under erasure (sous rature) is to signal the inadequacy of inherited language while also recognizing its inevitability. Since Derrida introduced the concept of under erasure in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, this emphatically visual act of intervention has become an indispensable technique in diverse disciplines.

The Miraculous in Houston, a public art installation at the University of Houston, used the texts from Raphael's The Miraculous (first published in book form by Paper Monument in 2014)— a book  largely focused on conceptual and performance art—as the basis for the installation.

The Miraculous recounts feats of endurance, acts of absurdist wit, projects that confront political repression and racist attitudes, and celebrations of the natural world. Many of the artists included perform their work in the streets, parks and squares of big cities, unleashing the creative potential of public spaces. Several texts highlight the loss of historical memory or the contradictions between the spiritual ambition of art and its status as a market commodity. A number of episodes describe moments of revelation, often seeming to occur by sheer accident, when artists discover their true creative path, the work they were meant to do.

By displacing these micro-narratives about the lives and works of contemporary artists from the world of museums, galleries and art criticism into the public realm, we attempted to share with the university community, and the larger Houston public, some of the wondrous human activities that, for lack of a better term, we call "contemporary art."

 

prev / next zoom fullscreen show thumbnails

POEM PAINTINGS

COLLAB-PAINTINGS // ON PAGES FROM THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

SOUS RATURE | UNDER ERASURE

Exhibition at Pierogi Gallery, New York November 2018—2019 // Digital Archive
Taking its title from Jacques Derrida’s concept of “under erasure,” the exhibition curated by Heather and Raphael Rubinstein includes both visual artists and contemporary writers whose work features different varieties of erasure. For Derrida (as for Heidegger before him) to put a word under erasure (sous rature) is to signal the inadequacy of inherited language while also recognizing its inevitability. Since Derrida introduced the concept of under erasure in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, this emphatically visual act of intervention has become an indispensable technique in diverse disciplines.

THE MIRACULOUS: HOUSTON
Part of CounterCurrent17, in coordination with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Foundation for the Arts, a public art installation across The University of Houston

The Miraculous: Houston is concerned with, among other things, the effects of displacement. At the heart of the project are two simultaneous displacements or migrations: 1. the movement of a book from private individual reading to public reading, and 2. the movement of contemporary art from spaces dedicated to its exhibition to public spaces in which there is no expectation of encountering an artwork nor even of referring to the subject of art. Designed to be highly noticeable against the subdued palette of the university’s buildings, with colors and fonts that refer to the original Paper Monument edition, this project departs from most previous architecture-text experiments in that it involves transposing the entire contents of an existing book and dispersing them across a wide area; it can be thought of as an “exploded book.”

 

x