Frankfurt am Main
Portikus
28/11/09 -
17/01/10
Rachel Harrison is one of today’s most important sculptors. With a characteristic mixture of pop art and minimalism, she has brought sculpture back to the object, from which the art discourse and the popularity of installations had made it farther and farther removed. It is not that Harrison’s art is simple to define or its concept clear, but it is unmistakably ‘things’.
The first horror film I ever saw was a 1980’s remake of The Blob. The Blob, as fans of the genre perhaps know, is a pink, sticky mass that slithers forward like an amoeba, devouring everyone in its path, so that it continues to grow and ultimately becomes a rather exciting ‘thing’. Perhaps what is most disturbing about the bloodthirsty jelly is that it lacks all possible external references to the archetypical monsters of the horror genre. It is a monstrous thing, but no monster. The Blob is formless, faceless, has neither a front nor a back and is moreover pink (!) in colour. It has no teeth and no claws, let alone a chainsaw in hand, and consequently in no way whatsoever satisfies the expectations of what should keep us on the edges of our moviegoer seats. In any other circumstances, a blob would be no more (and no less!) than an overgrown Jell-o pudding, but as soon as it moves into the frame of the horror picture it becomes a terrifying thing, vacant and expressionless, substance for its own sake. The blob, in other words, is abstract, a phenomenon that still brings on moments of incomprehension, and indeed, sometimes terrible fear.
Some 15 years later, I stand eyeball to eyeball (if it had one) with a blob. This time, the blob is more modest in format and immortalized in polystyrene by artist Rachel Harrison (b. 1966), who lives and works in New York. This pink-painted, unidentifiable monstrous mass is part of her 2002 installation, Sphinx, which from various perspectives evokes the bewilderment and doubt that we can expect to experience on seeing Harrison’s work. (It was not without cause that critic Robert Nickas put her work in a category that he had invented exclusively for her: what-the-hell-is-that Sculpture.)
At first sight, Sphinx is comprised of a plaster wall with a picture of Sister Wendy on it. In the 1990s, Sister Wendy became internationally known as the art-loving nun who presented a BBC television programme on art history. In the photograph that Harrison used in her installation, Sister Wendy, filled with joy and expectation, looks at a bust of a Pharaoh as if she were expecting the Virgin Mary to enter the sculpture while on the verge of shedding tears. The wall panel on which the photo hangs is placed in the centre of the space, and immediately behind it lurks the threat of that apparently meaningless pink thing, which stands atop a shabbily constructed framework of wood, complete with dolly for transport. It is, as Harrison says, her interpretation of an Egyptian Sphinx. At the same time, it is also a sculpture that tries to be abstract, but that cannot permit itself to be so in the company of the nun. This is not to say that it ‘means something’. The thing accumulates substance and content by way of negating every surrounding attempt at meaning, to wipe away meaning, just as the movie blob feeds itself on warm-blooded creatures and consequently expands in volume. Harrison’s thing needs all the elements that surround it in the installation in order to ultimately refer back to itself, and therefore fails to be an autonomous work of sculpture. At most, it is a sculpture that makes use of the power of reduction. The object is so minimalist that you could actually wheel it away, and then look at ‘nothing’. We have here still said very little about what the thing actually is, and Sister Wendy, for all appearances aware of no evil, stands with her back against the proverbial wall. She knows that she can offer no help to those experiencing this odd-shaped form, and instead throws herself wholly onto the clearly friendlier-looking Egyptian stone beauty.
From her retrospective exhibition Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, which was recently presented at New York’s Bard College Centre for Curatorial Studies and will be at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in the spring of 2010, we can deduce that a comparably humorous form of putting oneself in perspective is typical of Harrison’s sculptures and installations. She borrowed the title for the exhibition from an article by author David Foster Wallace, published in the American Gourmet Magazine. ‘For practical purposes’, Wallace wrote, ‘everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about. It’s all a matter of what your interests are.’ This is also true for Harrison's sculptures, which are primarily constructed from combinations of wood, polystyrene, paint, photographs and ready-mades or found objects, varying from rubbish and IKEA furniture to everyday objects from pop culture. Harrison’s work generally has a clearly distinguishable front and back, and in some cases also an inside, so viewers are inclined to start thinking in circles, walking around the work until they bite themselves in the tail. This has already befallen many a critic, and I am certain I will not be the last.
In Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, Harrison focuses on the spatial or objective experience of the object or sculpture, and mostly a combination thereof. It sounds as if this could plausibly apply to any sculptural work, but that is not always self-evident in an art world in which the discourse is overwhelming, capable of degrading the object into mere ‘meaning’ or interpretation. Harrison employs visual and sculptural strategies that test the expectations of her viewers and corrupt the forms they use to attach or assess meaning. (Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a blob!) Her sculptures and installations evidence a consciousness of different genres in art, such as minimalism and pop art, of the history of the ready-made and the art of taking over art-historical elements, to which Harrison undeniably responds in her work. At the same time, Harrison's objects expose the powerlessness of that same art history, which offers no concrete answer to the encounters with her extravagances of formlessness, deformity and humorous spin.
In her 2006 installation Marilyn with Wall, for example, is a photograph of the now iconic picture of Marilyn Monroe. Harrison photographed the ‘original’ used by Andy Warhol for his series of portraits (now at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh). In Harrison’s photograph, Marilyn is still partly concealed by her protective layer of transparent archival paper, so that the generic image of the American sex symbol and pop icon is rehabilitated into a mystification, an image that is moreover treated like an object, if not quite like a relic. In contrast, the photograph hangs on a wall made of apparently accidentally stacked, broken remnants of a white museum wall, and consequently, even Marilyn’s fifteen minutes of fame are irrevocably numbered. Marilyn with Wall takes on all the potential expectations of the viewer and defuses the strength of the historic references that the artist has employed. As a result, the references sooner form a strategy than a visual statement. The work questions the viewer, who keeps trying to cope with ‘previous knowledge’ of given artistic contexts (such as the devoted Sister Wendy) as they stand face to face (!?) with a Marilyn or a blob.
With Harrison's work, looking is a sensory form of thinking. It is also a form of thinking that has to take place in three-dimensional space. It is not enough to look at a photographic reproduction of her work, because you inevitably miss the apparently nonchalant board attached to the back of the sculpture or, to give an example, the paparazzo photograph of Liz Taylor in a red bathrobe that adorns (or defaces) the back of a minimalist-looking, green, L-shaped plaster wall (Bustle in Your Hedgerow, 1999).
This way of looking at things, which must unfold in both time and space, is also manifest in Perth Amboy, an installation from 2001. Here, Harrison saw herself as a kindred spirit of sculptor Richard Serra, whose powerful steel structures reverberate in the maze of cardboard that she installed in the space for Perth Amboy. In the labyrinth (anything but macho, it is sooner fragile, thanks to its easy-to-handle and easily dismissed material) lurk several observers who take on Harrison’s ready-mades and ‘hand-mades’: a porcelain statue of a Chinese sage looking at a rock fashioned by Harrison; an Indian observing a miniature painting of a sunset; Becky, the wheel-chair-bound friend of Barbie, staring at a photograph of a film set with a green screen for the special effects that are added at the post-production stage. When we look through Becky’s eyes, that green projection screen seems to transform itself into a monochrome field. Who’s afraid of green? Becky is in any case not afraid of abstraction.
Distributed about the labyrinth is a series of photographs of a house in a suburb of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The house became an object of pilgrimage when people learned that the resident had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in the window. Harrison photographed the pilgrims, all of whom touched the window in hopes of catching a glimpse of the vision in the transparent windowpane. Ultimately, all those greasy hands and fingers smudged the window, so the pilgrims had created a visible trace of their desires. The photographs that Harrison took in Perth Amboy summarize her fascination with the dimensions of looking, as well as with the origins of representation out of abstraction. What do you discover when you stare into a pane of glass and see a miracle, as a result of your own visions and expectations? What emerges when you stare at a pink pudding and descry in it a terrifying monster? What does the art pilgrim see in his or her own desire to see?
To experience the work of Rachel Harrison and appreciate the art of her blobs, it is probably enough – entirely in keeping with Harrison’s own humorous tactics – to tell a silly joke that reveals the mystery of representation and abstraction. At the annual comedians’ convention, members are so familiar with one another’s jokes that they have given them numbers. One after the other, they tell a joke by calling out numbers, setting off a reaction of loud cheering, catcalls and thunderous laughter. A new person in the group sees this and tries to do the same. He calls out a random number, but no one laughs. ‘Oh well,’ concluded one of the ultimately disappointed jokesters. ‘Some people just don’t know how to tell a joke.’
Moosje Goosen is a writer based in Rotterdam and New York.
Rachel Harrison’s work can be seen from 28 November 2009 through 17 January 2010 at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, and from 27 April through 22 June at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Translation: Mari Shields
Columns: Urgent
