Rachel Harrison

Rachel Harrison

Regen Projects II

Show closed July 10, 2010

(Reposted from ArtSlant.com)

Rachel Harrison is phoning it in as of late.

For an artist that for many (not me) represented a wonky, handmade burst of fresh air in the mid-90s, her proceedings, it is easy to argue, now have a certain rote feel to them. She’s been, for instance, trotting out her photographs from an ongoing series of photographs called Voyage of the Beagle and placing them next to a sparse population of sculptures since 2007. That’s only 3 years, and perhaps unfair to say, but it stands to reason that an artist, so often praised for funny singular moments of sculpture, would have more dynamism when it comes to a gallery space. She’s capable of such dynamism, but at the moment is either too busy (probable), taking on too many shows because of market need (definitely) or just lazy (hard to know).

Before I go on to discuss affirmatively many of the individual sculptures in Harrison’s current exhibition, ASDFJKL; at Regen Projects, I need to clear the air on the Voyage of the Beagle photographs and say exactly why the entire series for me is entirely inadequate. In the series, Harrison photographs and presents various sculptural moments from around the world, most of the time straight ahead views of busts, mannequins, taxidermy animals, ancient statues and votives, and even toilet seats. They are remarkable in their diversity and in the oddity of the juxtapositions, but there are a couple of problems here.

First, photographic work of this nature and exactly for Harrison’s purpose, has existed for artists ever since the camera was able to be employed as a quick recorder of visual experience. In historical shows, we take delight in the photographic contexts for artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and even older artists like Fernand Knopff, taking in how their photographs seem to be found instances where moments in their art become apparent photographically perhaps because the photos were an inspiration. These working studio documents point, as an archive, to ongoing aesthetic inquires that may elude the casual observer of their major work. They are helpful and illuminating. Every artist I know has a body of photographs like this, and it is baffling that Harrison gets credit for hers as, in the words of Alison Gingeras (from an essay on Harrison in Parkett No. 82), “readymade versions of her own work” or work that “sets off for uncharted formal and conceptual territories.” The photos should stay in her studio where they belong and where they can inform her often quite witty sculptural work.

Second, that these photographs, as interesting and fun as some of them may be are taken seriously as works of art leads me to again be concerned over the influence of the sloppy thinking behind so much archive work. It is not bad for meaning to remain pliable and be negotiated into shape by a viewer, but the fact remains that such an investment in a gallery space is a far fetched proposition. Worse, it’s an invitation for an artist to simply not to take the time to think through the concerns they are interested in when it comes to their archives. I had this problem with Sam Durant’s use of display material from a closed American Heritage museum a few years back at Blum and Poe. In that show, we were given clumsy sculptures and a pile of books to read, and such is the case with Harrison’s Voyage of the Beagle. The archive in front of you is just an unformed mass of material from which an artist should do something.

Fortunately if the Voyage of the Beagle was left in Harrison’s studio, one can still have a good time with many of her works in this show. Certainly, the exhibition has its moments. The basic logic of the works uses gnarly or grizzled masses of lumpen material to create plinths, elaborate bases, or environments for little collaged moments on the surface of the sculpture where other real world objects come into play. Say what you will about many of the infantile moments in Harrison’s work, she knows how to nest a collaged object in a sculptural surrounding quite well, embedding something as random as a Chinese food take out menu into a new material situation and have it make a certain amount of zany sense.

There is a narrative order to many of Harrison’s works and often the pay-off is like a well-placed punch-line at the end of a joke. My favorite moment was a particular white, gooey plinth called Around the Water Cooler, 2010 that initially reminded me, in a bad way, of something Urs Fisher or Terrance Koh might do. However walking around the piece reveals an actual water cooler positioned in a groove in the side of the piece. The sculpture ceases instantly to be an art object and becomes an actual water cooler. It is not that the transition is interesting (it happens all the time), it is that it is deadpan and funny. I cannot buy David Pagel’s review of the work in the Los Angeles Times that finds Harrison employed in a removed, academic enterprise. The work is often too humorous for that.

Pagel is right, however, that Harrison does have many erudite and annoying academic writers pushing her work, layering it with piles of overworked rubbish that is unfortunate (see Gingeras above though admittedly, she is curator and not an academic), and he is also right that Harrison may believe her morbidly overwrought Freudian PR. But in many ways, it should be noted, the overly familiar feeling of her current show at Regen is a product of her own influence on a younger generation of artists.

So many sculptures feel like Rachel Harrisons (if I see another leaning wall piece, I might just hang up my hat and move on) and perhaps this familiarity leads writers like George Baker (also writing in Parkett) to place Harrison as a part of a generalized sculptural moment where thoughts on formal relationships relies on what Baker calls “promiscuous relation” or “polymorphous perversity”—“a sculpture holding up other objects, other forms, a sculpture of attachment, of juxtaposition, of connection.” You might place artists (repressing for just a moment their individual projects and just going formal) like Thomas Hirshhorn, Urs Fisher, Sterling Ruby, Amanda Ross-Hoss, Nate Lowman, Manfred Pernice and countless others in this category, in the sculpture as “subjective construction” moment where, since the self is split, fractured, and riven with so many contradictions, the subjective constructions look like that as well—accumulations of objects, messy apartments, and connections that are wild and hodgepodge.

It may be the case that this is what we are at the moment and this is our sculpture, but for me the verdict is still out. I haven’t given up on elegance and reason just yet.