Because it was acquired by an esteemed American collector in 2010, right in between her shows at Greene Naftali, the first public view of Rachel Harrison’s 2008 work Mustard and Ketchup only came in October 2019, when Interview Magazine published a detail alongside Harrison’s conversation with actor, director, and visual artist Matt Dillon. It included a printout of a photo, taken December 6, 2007 at the Musée d’Orsay, of French president Nicolas Sarkozy making a gesture to German chancellor Angela Merkel as she looks at Gustave Courbet’s self-portrait, Le Désespéré (1843-45), painter’s taped to a sheet of pink insulation board.
The painting, then owned by a BNP Paribas art investment fund, was on loan to a Courbet retrospective that later traveled to the Met and Montpellier. The painting was last on public view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 2010-11.
The photo, by Maya Vidon for the European Pressphoto Agency, was published in the New York Times on December 7, 2007, to illustrate a news story about Merkel and Sarkozy pressuring Iran while the US pursued sanctions over the country’s nuclear program.
Harrison also appended the Vidon photo to a smallish, Rothko-esque painting which she showed in Vienna in 2008-09. It was perhaps the least leisurely of group of photos of world leaders at leisure, which appeared in works throughout the atypically thematically unified show. The photo and the show are mentioned in the catalogue for Harrison’s Whitney retrospective.
In October 2025, Le Désespéré went back on view at Musée d’Orsay for five years, and it was revealed that BNP Paribas had at some point sold the painting to Qatar Museums. Several days later Nicolas Sarkozy reported to la Santé prison in Montparnasse to serve a 5-year prison sentence for soliciting funds for his 2007 election campagin from Muammar Gaddafi. He was in solitary confinement for 20 days before being released pending appeal.
While in prison Sarkozy wrote Journal d’un prisonnier, a 216-page book, which was published in December: « En prison, il n’y a rien à voir, rien à faire. J’oublie le silence qui n’existe pas à la Santé où il y a beaucoup à entendre. Le bruit y est hélas constant. À l’image du désert, la vie intérieure se fortifie en prison. » [en]
This month the entirety of Mustard and Ketchup was revealed to the public for the first time, at Sotheby’s, where it will be sold today, as I type this, in fact. It turns out to be a delicate thing. The condiment bottles that give the work its name also give it an alternate scale. The photo is at (standing) eye level atop a dowel mounted into a square pedestal, surrounded by drill shavings. In one moment it looks like a teleprompter or information sign. Or a self-portrait on a go-go dancing platform. Then the eye falls, and suddenly the Burger Toppings of Calais are shuffling on their own mini-plinth at the base of the largest truckstop billboard America has to offer.
As Rachel Harrison said to Matt Dillon, “How does anyone know? It’s a crap shoot. And with art, it’s about the long run.”
[DAY AFTER UPDATE]
A kind reader sent a link to Le Consortium in Dijon, where Harrison’s 2008 exhibition Lay of the Land includes the same detail image as appeared nine years later in Interview. And though it does not appear in the museum’s installation shots, I’ve been assured Mustard and Ketchup was on view in Dijon. The world has now been neatly divided into those who saw Harrison’s show in Dijon, and those who did not. And the revelatory experience described in this post no longer holds for the former group. Hopefully amusement at the phrase, the Burger Toppings of Calais will be enough to keep us all together.
[MORNING AFTER UPDATE]
The good people of Greene Naftali have shared a photo of Mustard and Ketchup installed at Le Consortium in Dijon. Thus through jpg technology we can begin to narrow the divide between those who saw the show and the rest of us who now at least know a bit what it looked like. And it looks great, especially with its spindly formal rhyming with the mic stand in American Idol in the background. [American Idol was published in Bomb alongside the great conversation between Harrison and Nayland Blake—about the difference between seeing something in person and seeing it online. which I wrote a bit about last fall during Blake’s shows at Matthew Marks. The title of that post echoes the title of this one: Artworks Unfolding Slowly Over Time, In Cyberspace.
More than many of Harrison’s shows, the prevalence of rectangular columnar forms in the Dijon show made me think of Anne Truitt, an artist I know Harrison had been interested in for a long time. And American Idol, combined with the literal [Courbet] self-portrait posted at head height in Mustard and Ketchup, left me seeing figural references in Harrison’s work.
And that led me to think back about similar references in Truitt’s sculptures, too. Which is ironic, since I was really kind of a bitch to Blake Gopnik when he anthropomorphized Truitt’s columns of color in his Washington Post review of her 2009 Hirshhorn retrospective. Art is about the long run, indeed, and maybe in the long run, I’ll get it right.