May 28, 2004
Article on Harrell Fletcher
Here is the text of a short article on Portland-based artist Harrell Fletcher that will be published in the July-September issue of Flash Art.
Harrell Fletcher is quick to point out that he is not a collaborator. His recent projects, which have involved senior citizens’ groups, other artists, new mothers and their babies, friends, church choirs, and meditation classes, are less the result of an intentional reaching out to specific partners than a byproduct of the artist’s everyday engagement with the outside world. Everyone is a potential accomplice when you go looking for what you find beautiful. When you find it, it’s natural that you’ll want to share.
The predilection for sharing has a recent art world pedigree, and Fletcher’s artworks sail in the wake of Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture; Ben Kinmont’s variation on Beuys, which he calls “third sculpture”; and the recent ascendance of those engaged with what Nicolas Bourriaud calls relational aesthetics. These latter-day feel-good conceptualists have their differences, of course, and Fletcher’s comes from reversing the course of his 1990s predecessors: whereas they seek to push their activity out of the gallery and into the world, Fletcher literally brings the outside in. (One of Fletcher’s graduate school critiques involved the local postman offering comments on his art.) Witness The Sound We Make Together, 2003, in which DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, played host to seven different groups from the surrounding community during the course of Fletcher’s exhibition. Documented by an unmoving video camera, the gallery became a kaleidoscope in which all manner of people—black, white, young, old—came into the space, made use of it to do what they normally do together, then shuffled back out. Another hard-not-to-smile video uses a similar formal structure, presenting a cascade of tightly cropped five-second shots of babies in strollers that the artist encountered on the street.
Fletcher’s projects for the 2004 Whitney Biennial evince two aspects of his sensibility. He worked with the artist Miranda July on a new “assignment” for their collaborative website, LearningToLoveYouMore.com, in which anyone who made, recorded, and electronically submitted an audio recording of themselves making a joyful noise would be included in a playback of the combined files in the museum. This Container Isn’t Big Enough employed myriad student volunteers in the service of organizing ten mini exhibitions in nontraditional spaces around New York City and the publication of a free catalogue-slash-guidebook available at the Biennial. A tone of gentle encouragement—to participate in the artwork, to get out and explore your surroundings, to appreciate the little things life offers us all—unites the two projects and, combined with sincerity and a sense of wonderment, threads through the rest of Fletcher’s art.