Seeing the picture in my timeline from Nayland Blake’s Matthew Marks opening last night of Equipment for a Shameful Epic, 1993, sent me back to the first time I’d seen it, alongside their great 2008 conversation with Rachel Harrison published by Bomb Magazine. Which is ironic, because they start that conversation by exploring the differences between seeing a work of art in person—experiencing it—and seeing a picture of it online.
Actually, they start by lamenting the lack of issues or consensus of “ideas the community of artists was grappling with,” and then they go deep into what turns out to have been one of those big ideas: image vs. object, and the specific physical, psychological, and emotional experience an artwork can elicit. Which, it turns out, it intrinsic to how both artists work:
Blake: The best works of art teach you to read at a greater depth because they provide you with a quality of experience that is so vastly different from our normal buzz-around, get-through-the-day thing. If we don’t argue for the value of that kind of experience, then, to me, there’s a kind of capitulation. My engagement with the object is about a quality of attention and a way to reveal my inner life to myself by externalizing it, by making it physical, or enacting it in some way.
Harrison: A person can get better at reading the object, definitely, but what about feeling? Can you teach someone to put feeling into their work? I won’t call myself an expressionist and say that my work is all about feeling, but it is often about directing my thought process externally, because in my head the thoughts are going so fast. At what point can I see them? At what point can I have a conversation with forms and myself and the objects that I make that is without language?
Harrison describes reproducing something essential of the experience of coming across a can of Arnold Palmer AriZona iced tea:
I was at a gas station deli and I saw a can of iced green tea; at first glance, the guy whose picture was on it looked like Bush. What was also interesting about the can was that it had some writing in Chinese characters. This seemed incongruent with the picture—it was actually Arnold Palmer, the golf pro. So I made the sculpture Tiger Woods. I wanted to have the same initial level of involvement with the can, but since it was no longer at the gas station, this was not possible. My art is not representational, so I had to create an entirely different experience for the can to be present in the world.
An entirely different experience, yet somehow similar. The press release for Harrison’s Greene Naftali 2007 show, If I Did It, has a quote about Woods being expected to provide us—the 21st century golf-consuming public—with the same experience Palmer did decades before. It’s that irresistible gap between art and life again.
Speaking of which, it turns out the online experience [sic] can also involve an entirely different context for an artwork. The Google Image search for [no-quotes] Rachel Harrison Tiger Woods returned the work and the show, but also the gossip column travails of Woods’ former mistress, also named Rachel, whose red carpet photos bracket an uncannily similar drawing by Harrison—of Amy Winehouse.
And yet I was still surprised when I got to the end of the absolutely bonkers home tour video just now, and then the third of three Sotheby’s auctions of Pauline Karpidas’ chock-a-block collection of surrealist artworks and Lalanne fantasia, to find multiple works by Harrison amidst the Magrittes and Ernsts. I wouldn’t call Harrison a surrealist, but I think anyone who’s scrolled this far can see that her work is indeed often about the translation of inner thought into physical form. And then literally as I’m about to post this, deciding whether to go with the single image or the screenshot grid, I clicked on Lot 338, a 2012 drawing of Winehouse, and see this pullquote from Harrison:
I want people to be real with art, to be conscious and present with the object in order to experience it. Sometimes when I am looking at a painting I might space out and start thinking about something entirely unrelated. When the painting wakes me back up I see more of what’s there before me, and it puts me back into the present. This kind of experience is becoming increasingly important to me.
From the 2008 Bomb conversation I’d just written a whole-ass thing about. That sentence quoted by Sotheby’s goes on, though; it’s a …, not a .:
This kind of experience is becoming increasingly important to me as these other aspects of virtualization, marketing, and branding explode. Maybe I’m starting to think that artworks need to unfold slowly over time in real space to contest the instantaneous distribution and circulation of images with which we’ve become so familiar.
Anyway, I guess what I actually wrote is a whole-ass thing about what the experience of looking at art online was like for me this morning.