Literary excavations: The text-based art of Brigitte Radecki

Brigitte Radecki (1940- ) is a German-born Montreal artist whose installations explore the interface between text and visual art by juxtaposing abstract paintings with citations from classic, but largely forgotten, twentieth-century literature. As an artist and a feminist, Radecki takes an archeological approach to exploring the human condition---excavating the past and incorporating references to mythology, literature, painting and historical events that have shaped today's culture. I study Radecki's oeuvre through an analysis of two installations: Miss Lonelyhearts (1998) based on the eponymous 1933 ironic novel by American writer Nathanael West (1903-1940), and The Black Notebooks based on By Grand Central I Sat Down and Wept (1945), Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart's (1913-1986) lightly-veiled autobiographical novel.;Methodologically, Radecki's discourse combines difficult-to-interpret literary citations and iconography. Her philosophy is to create synergies redolent of myriad subtleties questioning human interconnectedness and complexity---to study the past in order to understand the present.;Stylistically Radecki is an abstractionist. She has a personal affinity for abstract expressionism; however she labels herself a postmodernist, and seeks to rupture the insularity of abstract expressionism and open it up to context and wider social concerns---the most important of which, to Radecki, is the status of women in contemporary society.