The photographs in Bustle were deployed for a specific task: they disrupt intellectual grappling with the (art) history behind the sculpture's form. Stopping thought in its tracks, or at least deflecting it as soon as it gathers momentum, is what Harrison does best. Call it intellectual phenomenology: the photographs in Bustle induce a self-consciousness about our own process of interpretation in a manner similar to how Minimalist sculptures, Bustle included, often make us aware of our physical presence in a given space. This 'simple' sculpture enacts a double de-centering of the viewer. Other works achieve this in different ways. We search for meaning by peering closely at the pictures affixed to this or that sculpture. Sometimes we discover that they are profoundly moving, as in the casual snapshots of a young girl with Down's Syndrome — the Polaroids were found on the street — used in Untitled (1991), which give the work a distinct pathos. Sometimes the pictures evoke a specific moment in time. The repeated images of Johnny Carson and Archie Bunker, embedded into the yellow orb of 2 a.m. 2nd Ave. (1996), call to mind the late 1970s moment when both were in the public eye. Less obviously: because they were purchased from the type of nighttime homeless sidewalk vendor then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani worked tirelessly to eradicate, the pictures also call to mind that transitional moment in New York City's recent history. In yet other instances, Harrison chooses a picture because it contains the same colour as the sculpture to which it is affixed, a purely formal decision.
This shape-shifting relationship with images allows Harrison to make unexpected equivalences and connections between them, or between them and the objects that make up her sculptures. This can lead one to believe she is simply a funnel for a vast river of pictures — a fact that begins to make her seem like another artist who worked with images of Liz. Indeed, this aspect of Harrison's art can be seen as an extension and open-minded critique of the image attachment that could be called Warhol's life project. Warhol's enthrallment led to doublings and repetitions that inevitably changed the meaning of the images he selected; Harrison's cooler stance often foregrounds the picture's status as a thing above its ability to represent something external to the sculpture into which it is incorporated. Harrison says as much herself in a recent Artforum article: 'A photograph of a celebrity is a thing, not a picture. It's a mundane cultural artifact.' (4) In her work, pictures — of Liz, Johnny and Archie, Bo Derek, or anonymous people and things — often seem relevant only to each other and to the other constituent parts of her sculptures.
Warhol, perhaps more than any other artist, is the yardstick by which more artists working today are measured. His artistic practice, which sailed so brazenly into uncharted waters, now acts as a buoy for critics to discuss others working in comparably liminal territory. Beyond Harrison's continuation of Warhol's inquiries into the efficacy of images, and beyond her appropriation of the subjects of his paintings and sculptures (celebrities like Marilyn and consumer products like a box of Campbell's Barbecue Beans, itself a funny conflation of two of his most iconic works, the soup can and the Brillo box), Harrison takes an interest in his films. She writes: 'Warhol abused the idea of a moving image by making it a moving still.' (5) In a neat inversion, the addition of photographs and videos to her works abuses the idea of sculpture as a static object. The gesture gives them a sense of duration that places the viewer amid multiple temporalities: that of seeing and apprehending the sculpture's contents; that of the temporal distance between when the photograph was taken and when it is viewed; and, in the case of works incorporating video, the time necessary to view them from beginning to end.
Indigenous Parts, an installation that, to date, Harrison has presented in three variations at three different venues, illustrates these points concisely. For the first version, exhibited in New York in 1995, Harrison collected drywall scraps from the exhibition site and surrounding environs and piled them up around and against a column: a scavenger aesthetic is one of two threads that unites all three versions of this work. On top of this whirlwind of debris she hung found photographs; in 1996, when she created Indigenous Parts for a second time, a little-seen painting from the host institution's collection was brought out of storage and displayed as part of her work. The use of these works implicitly refers to the creative process — the time — that went into their production. The other element connecting the three installations — the most recent one was exhibited in the 2003 Venice Biennale — is the inclusion of a video screen playing a NOVA television documentary outlining how ants build a colony. It functions like the legend on a map, and is a pithy illustration of the time Harrison spent scavenging for parts and installing the work, perhaps making the installation, in some sense, the closest approximation of a self-portrait she has made.
Harrison gave viewers another peek at things from her vantage point in her 2001 New York solo show: each modestly-scaled sculpture tucked into her labyrinthine cardboard installation contained a built-in viewer in the form of a kitsch figurine, a doll, or the representation of a person on a commercial product label or in a photograph. A ceramic bearded Chinese scholar wearing traditional dress stands on the black Formica pedestal of Untitled (Scholar's Rock) (2001) and stares inquisitively at a lumpy abstract purple form slightly larger than him; puppies look longingly at a bent cardboard envelope; a woman pictured on the label of a can of salsa eyes a postcard reproduction of David Teniers's The Archduke Leopold's Gallery (1651). In the exhibition, the sculptures were juxtaposed with a series of untitled photographs depicting visitors making a pilgrimage to the second-floor New Jersey window in which an apparition of the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared. One can draw an analogy between these twin searches: that of aesthetic contemplation for the 'meaning' of a work of art, and that of the religious seeker looking for communion with a Spiritual presence. Indeed, photographs are an indexical trace of the presence of people, objects, whatever is in the picture, in the same way an apparition is the indexical trace of the presence of the Spirit. But, once again, something is slightly awry: Harrison never closes in on her subjects, preferring to shoot from across the street with a telephoto lens. In many of the pictures a black cable can be seen slicing across the bottom of the frame, interrupting the primacy of the spiritual/photographic experience. Harrison once again plays the role of cool observer. She emphasises the looking in 'looking for meaning'.
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