The Miraculous

Reviews / Votes

"Once an artist becomes a name, the very fact of his or her fame can obscure a clear-sighted view of actual works, past or present. This isn t necessarily a problem, since an acclaimed artist s renown itself contributes to the context in which an emerging body of work will be seen and considered. And, of course, it is often productive to assess an artist's new efforts in light of previous accomplishments. But the fantasy of the innocent eye is compelling because, in our information-glut age, becoming over-informed is always just a few clicks away.

In The Miraculous, published by Paper Monument, poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein describes 50 artworks realized in the last few decades. The texts in this beautiful little book range from a sentence or two to a couple of pages. Many of the works in question which are often conceptual and/or performative in nature were in some way creative watersheds: they located the artist s voice, pointed the way forward, raised the stakes of the ongoing imaginative investigation or (in one case) brought it to an end. And with each description, the name of the artist is nowhere to be found.

In its entirety, one of the shorter entries runs:

A successful German painter who enjoys provoking outrage buys an out-of-the-way service station in Brazil and renames it in honor of a notorious Nazi long rumored to have escaped to South America. Soon, photographs begin to circulate of a forlorn building on the facade of which have been emblazoned the words Tankstelle Martin Bormann; (Martin Bormann Gas Station).

An index reveals all the artists identities; some of their stories are quite familiar, others not so much. But withholding names in this manner drives home the point: our perception of a work is distorted when we know who made it, whether that person is celebrated or obscure. Uninformed of authorship, the reader of The Miraculous confronts (through Rubinstein s pellucid prose) the works themselves in all their wondrous weirdness, far from both the blinding glare of acclaim and the shadows of the market and its machinations."-Stephen Maine, artcritical.com