Tag: rachel harrison

Fans of Rachel Harrison and Scarface who prefer their sculptures incorporate readymade framed scans of gifted Central Park tourist souvenir portraits of Al Pacino as Tony Montana without a bullet hole are in luck.

Whatever it means for an artist to have a recognizable style or practice, this is the first time I’ve noticed Harrison using a readymade object in at least two of her sculptures. But then, this particular object—a framed, print of a scan of the original drawing given to Harrison by a friend—is explicitly a copy, so why shouldn’t there be more than one? Does it have Deep Meaning that in addition to the 2012 sculpture, Valid Like Salad [whose later history of violence and conservation was discussed previously], Harrison used this movie star sketch in a 2011 work titled, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? You tell me.

Because now that I’ve seen Harrison reuse a specific object at least twice, I can’t stop looking for other repetitions and patterns in her work. Portrait was exhibited in 2011 in estrella distante, a Roberto Bolaño-themed group show at kurimanzutto, organized in collaboration with Harrison’s LA gallery, Regen Projects. Though it would have been obvious because it was facing a doorway, the installation views of Portrait omit the Tony Montana picture—should we assume it was there?—and center the typewriter perched on top of the painted concrete block, which sits in turn upon the typewriter’s case.

Which is itself a repeat of a move Harrison used in Structural Design (2010), a sculpture she showed at Regen Projects in 2010. Arguably, that work, or the keyboard of the Royal Safari portable typewriter it incorporates, gave the show its title, Asdfjkl;. The artist also makes an appearance in the press release, where the reference to typing hand position is described as “mentally tactile, as it speaks to the moment when one is just about to touch an object, or when one’s fingers have just had that physical encounter. The rapidly changing relationship to writing produced by the aid of machines is central to this title (the artist grew up without texting and is still not that good at it). Structural Design is a sculpture whose components are a Royal typewriter and painted forms balancing on the edge of the typewriter’s case, teetering in a moment between gravity and expression.”

Now these forms, both the boxes and the sheets, and the teetering, come into focus as elements of Harrison’s vocabulary. So does this strategy of separating two elements—a typewriter and its case—with sculptural forms. And hanging a framed photo on them. Or putting them on bases or plinths. And on and on. Seen in volume, and over time, a syntax appears, and a portrait of the artist does emerge in the work, or at least a portrait of the artist working.

Speaking of Rachel Harrison, for the last post I was going back through the catalogue for Life Hack—an exhibition in a book if ever there was one, and with a sweet artist-designed cover I had a computer read aloud to me. And there was a big, beautiful spread of the eighth incarnation of Marilyn with Wall that felt like an even more direct nod to Louise Lawler than all the rest.

I kept getting caught off guard by an aggro undercurrent in Maggie Nelson’s essay about Rachel Harrison in The Paris Review. [From 2020, in response to Harrison’s show, Life Hack at the Whitney, it was first published in the show’s catalogue in 2019. It’s been a long pandemic, and the stack of open tabs mocks me from the corner.] But I can’t let this one go by unnoted:

This current of nihilism or violence has been present in Harrison’s work for some time, via its excavation of America and Americana; in 2015, it became literalized, when actual bullets were fired into her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, by an ex–security guard who spray-painted and shot several pieces of art in the After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists exhibit before taking his own life. After defacing the art—including sending a bullet into the forehead of a framed drawing of Al Pacino in Harrison’s 2012 sculpture Valid Like Salad (a new, tragic echo of Davidson’s mop in the head)—the ex-guard, Dean Sturgis, sat in a folding chair and shot himself in the head (a new, tragic link to Circle Jerk).

Whatever urge toward defacement, whatever hostility toward art qua art, whatever exploration, however lighthearted, of American breeds of masculinity, celebrity, and sociopathy may have been at play in Harrison’s work (in 2007, she titled a show “If I Did It,” after O. J. Simpson’s much-maligned memoir)—all must now sit uneasily with the legacy of Sturgis, whose bullet holes serve to remind us that our everyday includes mortal threat and terror as much as it does remote controls and air fresheners.

Nelson makes it sound like this association with the Wexner Center shooting was foisted on Harrison’s work, that it’s been tragically linked, passive voice. But that elides the artist’s own agency, and her own decisions, and risks diminishing her own insights about her work, both before and after it was shot.

I bought this Rachel Harrison print from Between Bridges’ 2020 Solidarity cultural organizations fundraiser project this summer because I wanted to help the worthy non-profit I ordered it from. But mostly I hoped that seeing it bigger and in person, I’d be able to figure out what is going on in this image. So far, I’m still stumped.

It is a digital collage of a screenshot, with a crop&drag of one of Harrison’s works. The date and the avi feel like a Photos app interface? I have tried and failed to identify the red menu UI of what looks like a museum, or a gallery guide website: (“Exhibitions”? “Visits”? “Thots”? OK, probably not that last one.)

The drawing, titled, The Classics, is one I recognized right away from Harrison’s show this spring at Greene Naftali. Not that I saw it in person, of course. (Did anybody?) But it’s not just a drawing, but a drawing in pencil, ink, and crayon on an inkjet print–of what looks to be a cropped image of a drawing. That got chopped and overworked again. I think the pink line drawing of a male figure was on the original sketchbook page, and the elaborate female figure was drawn on the print. As Anne Doran notes in the conversation-with-the-artist-slash-press-release, “[T]hese are drawings on photographs of drawings of photographs of sculpture.”

“In the nineteenth century a series of major excavations of Greek and Roman statues were documented by French and British photographers. The relationship of the camera to sculpture goes back to its [photography’s, presumably. -ed.] invention,” Harrison replied.

It [the drawing] was a remediated object from a show that got locked down, re-remediated into an image that was sent out to propagate around the world. As another kind of object.

Anyway, I guess now I’m throwing it [the image of the print] out there, if anyone has any insights, lmk?

2020Solidarity [betweenbridges.net]
Rachel Harrison Drawings, 6 March – 31 July 2020 [greene naftali]