‘Russian Constructivism’ first appeared in the middle of Don Quixote, published in 1986. It was then reprinted with slight alterations in Brian Wallis's edited volume Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists in 1989, alongside writings on the visual arts by Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince, among others. Subsequently, it formed part of Acker's collection of essays on the city in Bodies of Work (1997). That Acker continued to circulate ‘Russian Constructivism’ in different places, shifting its status from a fictional piece to an art-text and to an essay, is only one reason to consider it an important segment in her literary oeuvre. Yet while Don Quixote has received considerable critical discussion, strikingly little of that discussion focuses on what is arguably its most remarkable component. Unsurprisingly, given its explicit borrowings from the visual art of Sherrie Levine, critics have tended to relate ‘Russian Constructivism’ to the procedure of appropriation, whereby its meaning becomes inseparable from postmodernist concepts and canonical texts. The copying and manipulating of texts by others has come to be seen as an evacuation of a fixed meaning, a critique of the traditional notions of originality and authorship and, when Acker and Levine borrow material made by men, a feminist subversion of the male-centred canon.

Acker commented that she wanted to do with words what Levine did with her artistic and photographic copies. Considered the culmination of Acker's appropriation technique, Don Quixote's middle section, comprising ‘Russian Constructivism’ and three other texts, was written, Acker notes, ‘out of a Sherrie Levine-type impulse’. Levine made obvious reprises in variable sizes, numbers, mediums and colours of works by Courbet, Mondrian, Malevich, Schiele, Duchamp and others, sometimes with minimal discernible difference from the originals. Her methods became so fused with the aloof postmodern rhetoric that when she displayed her series of rephotographs After Walker Evans in 1981, as one critic recalls, ‘few people even bothered to look inside the frames to consider what she was rephotographing. […] [I]t did seem embarrassing to be caught looking at them too closely. As initiates had concluded, the meaning of Levine's curiously covert art had to lie elsewhere, beyond the frames of these pictures.’