'Awareness' is tied to the art world's slightly belated acknowledgement of the rise of cultural studies that swept through university humanities departments in the late 1970s and 80s. As increasing numbers of non-Western voices were accorded legitimacy, uniform History became multifaceted 'histories'. By the mid-1990s, when this near-seismic shift hit the art world, its cosmopolitan centres — New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin — began looking farther afield for artistic talent, resulting in major exhibitions of young artists from China, Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. By 1999 the all-inclusive 'Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s- 1980s' toured major museums across the United States. Some observers, wary of exoticism for its own sake, interpret this interest in 'the periphery' as, at best, a condescending token gesture, and, at worst, a kind of cultural neo-colonialism. But regardless of one's opinion of the phenomena, the trend continues: witness 'Inverted Utopias' on view last summer at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the inclusion of some of that show's Latin-American artists in the inaugural collection display at the recently reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York. This geographic expansion of the art world roughly coincided with an upsurge in the art market, an ascension from the 'crash' of the early 1990s, that has yet to abate; it now more-or-less ingests omnivorously — i.e. supports — all formal and conceptual strategies. Peter Schjeldahl, writing recently in The New Yorker, sketched the outline of a similar trajectory, describing the current art world as a 'sluggish mishmash'. (1)
The qualifying word in Schjedahl's phrase is a point for debate, but 'mishmash' is a succinct description of what one sees these days on any trip to New York's Chelsea neighborhood, London's East End or Los Angeles's Chinatown. Every artist seems to have a narrow specialty: in an afternoon spent visiting galleries, one might find performance artists who foreground identity politics, painters who stick to a haughty, cool formalism and photographers with a knack for illustrating the complexities of contemporary life. Yet somehow, in this 'anything goes' environment, no one knew quite what to make of Rachel Harrison, who in the mid-1990s pinpointed the essence of this promiscuity by taking the wide view. Given the critical response to some of her recent exhibitions, it can be said that some people still don't know.
In reality, it couldn't have been simpler: she placed the two greatest legacies of early 1960s art — the moment when the first rumbles of a cracking in the modernist telos were heard — into a dialectical relationship simply by sticking one onto the other. Pop art's incorporation of photography into other mediums (mostly painting) and the reductive forms of Minimalist sculpture were, and still are, deep veins of gold for artists mining recent art history for inspiration. That she successfully combines the two, and refuses to reduce avenues of interpretation by presenting the resultant combinations didactically, hints at the breadth of Harrison's inquiry and ambition. To her credit, her forced pairs — Minimalism and Pop Art, sculpture and photography, sculpture and 'display', volumetric space and representational space, the handmade and the readymade, form and meaning — coexist without canceling each other out. Neither do they add up to something greater, though her works are often great. They simply are.
There are intellectual rewards to be gleaned from engaging with her sculptures and installations, but the onus for finding them is placed squarely on the viewer; Harrison shows rather than tells. This refusal to identify her strategies can be described as a blank affect, and it subsequently leads to difficulty in untangling the meaning of particular elements in her works. But it is not the same as being uncaring. Her rough-hewn forms made of cast-off wood, pieces of drywall, styrofoam or plaster, often painted over, give off an improvised air that is misleading; each formal gesture is intentional. Likewise, the seeming indiscriminate inclusion of found photographs (often of celebrities) — photographs the artist has taken — kitsch figurines or consumer objects is a false front, as these decisions are equally carefully wrought. Every element in Harrison's work signifies something, but repeated gestures — affixing photographs to her sculptures, treating the sculpture as a pedestal or display stand — rarely communicate the same thing twice. Her stance is akin to a conversation partner who mostly stays quiet, leaving us to fill the void with babble. Because a viewer must devise meaning from scratch as she approaches each work, looking becomes a constitutive act, and we often end up seeing what we want to see.
Bustle in Your Hedgerow, made and exhibited in 1999 and later included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, is a five-and-a-half-foot-tall coarse-grained take on Robert Morris's Untitled (L-beams) (1965). The structure, painted dark green, sports two similar, unflattering tabloid pictures — one on each side — of a hefty Elizabeth Taylor seen through hedges wearing a pink housedress. Having made a sculpture that approximates the stolidity of its Minimalist forebears, the inclusion of the photographs turns the solid, wall-like object into both a support for the pictures and a representation of the hedge that was meant to guard Taylor from our peering eyes. As Saul Anton was quick to point out in an Artforum article, Taylor has a certain solid, wall-like quality herself in the photo, leading to 'a structure and an image that refer to each other and their capacity for representation . . . in a sort of loop'. (2) The object becomes an image and the image becomes an object in a riff on Richard Artschwager's 1960s conflation of material and representation, as in Table with a Pink Tablecloth (1964). Technically Table could be used as a table; likewise Bustle's sixty-six-inch height allows most viewers to peer over it (possessively and voyeuristically) as if it were a hedgerow. There is a distinct difference between Bustle's height and the seventy-two inches of Tony Smith's iconic Die (1962), another forebear that sets up a much different physical relationship with the viewer. But lest we get caught up in formal comparisons, Harrison suggests yet another reading of Bustle that scrambles a Minimalist treasure hunt: 'The . . . inclusion of Liz and her pop identity confuses (bustles) any historical reading (the hedgerow).' (3) And this says nothing of the fact that the title is lifted from Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven'. Taylor, the cult icon, and Led Zeppelin's classic song carry as much cultural weight as the history behind the sculpture, albeit of a very different sort.
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