Published in Afterall issue 11.

The forward thrust of modernist ambition, which despite many counter- and cross-currents, birthed a more-or-less linear progression of artistic movements during much of the twentieth century — Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism, Conceptual art, Post-Minimalism, to name a few — finally began to give way in the 1990s. (The simultaneity of Pop and Minimalism may have been the first chink in the armour, so to speak.) It may be too soon to analyse fully the pressures that caused these fissures, but at least two will figure in any detailed analysis. For lack of better terms, let’s call them awareness and omnivorousness.

‘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.

Rachel Harrison, Bustle in Your Hedgerow, 1999

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.

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.

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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’.

* * *

Rachel Harrison, Cindy, 2004

Beholding Harrison’s recent work dredges up a mixture of ‘How’d she do that?’ incredulity, bewilderment and roll-your-eyes laughter, a combination of feelings rarely experienced in a gallery setting. Her works alternately charm, mystify, provoke, embarrass and entice. What’s not in doubt is their ability to set up complex relationships to those who view them, a fact enhanced by Harrison’s use of scale: many of her works are roughly the same size as bodies, and encourage us to treat them as such. Take Cindy (2004), a multi-level assemblage of wooden beams and horizontal surfaces caked in polystyrene and cement, painted fluorescent green, and topped with a store-bought blonde wig. It’s appropriate that instead of a title this work has a name, because sassy Cindy, perched behind a wall of sheetrock so that all we see upon walking into the gallery is a swish of hair, recasts our phenomenological relationship to sculpture as a coy game of hide-and-seek. Is this sculpture flirting with me? As Elizabeth Thomas writes of Harrison: ‘She is a teaser . . . setting up multipart compositions that flirt with theatricality through staging, framing and mounting.’ (6) Many of Harrison’s sculptures have a ‘front’ and a ‘back’: Buddha with Wall (2004), presented in the same show as Cindy, also has a life-size character ‘hiding’ behind an impassive façade. The front of Sphinx (2002), which presents a photograph of Sister Wendy hung on a seamless piece of drywall, contrasts even more sharply with the seemingly ‘unfinished’ back in which wooden struts, haphazardly joined together, support a bloody-meat-coloured blob. The dissonance between the two serves to further frustrate gestalt moments.

Harrison’s works — perhaps unwittingly — call to mind a disparate array of artists, engaging each in a dialogue with rich repercussions. Her lumpy monochromatic surfaces evoke Franz West’s informe abstract sculptures, and engage a history of anti-aesthetic art. (West’s couches, benches and seats also come to mind when thinking of Harrison’s interest in turning sculpture into a functional object, however complicated their commodity status may be given their ungainliness.) Her sophisticated and dryly witty use of images implies an understanding of John Baldessari’s conceptual projects (which Harrison has cited as an inspiration); her presentation of them as three-dimensional objects, as things (instead of solely as referents), recalls Cady Noland’s more caustic rendering of a different set of pictures snatched from the world. Harrison’s mix of found objects and cheaply constructed handmade elements is kin to Thomas Hirschhorn’s work, which likewise questions the status of sculpture as ‘display’. But while Hirschhorn’s use of the term is due to a hesitancy to grant his constructions the autonomy afforded works of art, Harrison tramples unconcerned across similar terrain, her sculpture-shelves and sculpture-bases more effectively kick-starting dialogue about these issues in the process. Yet Harrison’s sculptures carry this art-historical weight lightly. Silent Account (2004) humorously allegorises the effort involved in her aesthetic heavy-lifting: a collection of muscle magazines prop up a wooden platform that simultaneously seems to be a short staircase and the ‘base’ for an abstract form painted pearlescent green. It looks like an unbalanced table under which a waiter has stuck a book of matches until you bend down, read the magazine spines and deduce the intentionality of the gesture. If we gave voice to this work in the same way we ascribe personality to Cindy, it would probably ask, with a hint of playfulness, ‘Are you with me?’

Press 55 (2005), Harrison’s most recent work at the time of this writing, uses the ‘Are you with me?’ language of an Acoustiguide audio selection, as reported in The New York Times, as its launching pad. Standing in front of Cézanne’s The Bather (c.1885) at the newly reopened MoMA, the reporter presses ’55′ and the audio guide tells her:

It’s dominated by the figure of a young man. He’s wearing only a pair of white briefs and is standing alone in a bare landscape. The ground is pinkish and flat and suggests a sandy beach. It is tinged in some areas with green. In places, there appear to be shallow, bluish pools — left behind by the tide perhaps. The figure’s naked body is painted in pale pinkish flesh tones, but shadowed by the same greens, blues and violets as the sky and watery ground. [. . .] This practical, detailed assessment of colour and space had a startling effect. (7)

Harrison highlighted this text, photographed it and hung the photograph on the wall. Nearby stands her ‘bather’: it is one of her characteristic lumpy assemblages, awkward and abstract. It is also a spot-on visual translation of the Acoustiguide text. Mostly blue and green, with touches of purple and tan and blushes of pink, it even has a package of white Calvin Klein briefs resting on a ledge that juts out from the form at about waist height. One’s first reaction is to swivel back and forth between the work’s two parts, checking for inaccuracies. They are everywhere and nowhere: the sculpture is a hilarious take on gaps in translation — here, painting to text to sculpture — as well as a portrayal of where the ‘modern disturbances’ Cézanne initiated (as the MoMA website says of the painting) have ended up. The Times reporter goes on to announce: ‘with its concentration on detail, this tour allowed me to really see what was before my eyes’. If we’re willing to look closely, one could easily say the same thing about Harrison.

FOOTNOTES

1 Peter Schjehldahl, ‘That Eighties Show’, The New Yorker, 24 January 2005.
2 Saul Anton, ‘Shelf Life’, Artforum, November 2002, p.164.
3 Harrison quoted in Bill Arning, ‘The Harrison Effect’, Trans, No.7, 2000, p.168.
4 Rachel Harrison, ‘Empire State’, Artforum, October 2004, p.146.
5 Elizabeth Thomas, ‘Rachel Harrison’, 54th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2004.
6 Harrison, op. cit., p.146.
7 Julie Salamon, ‘MoMA Helps Visitors To Use Ears To See’, The New York Times, 11 January 2005, p.E1.