Introduction
“Rachel Harrison Life Hack” is a chronological mid career survey (artist born in New York, 1966) from 1991 to the present. Harrison graduated from Wesleyan in 1989 and moved to Brooklyn in the early 90s, before it became the art hub it is today. With little money she utilized cheap materials at hand and showed work in alternative spaces and pop up galleries around the city instead of in more traditional galleries. “Life Hack” in this sense refers to her seemingly improvised work, making do with materials immediately at hand rather than materials carefully laid out or gathered beforehand with a plan in mind. These are not the usual materials found in a museum, they seem to be pulled from the aisles of a Home Depot and a Costco, crashing the gates of high culture and presenting themselves as both puzzling and accessible at the same time. Harrison references pop culture as well as art history using everyday, inexpensive materials not normally associated with fine art, with a very “Do It Yourself” aesthetic. The use of such materials undermines the gap between everyday life and art and dismisses the association between art and precious or rare materials. Like Marcel Duchamp and the Dada school a century ago, she also combines a sense of wry humor with her mundane materials, and leaves the meaning of her seemingly absurd works open to interpretation by viewers. There doesn’t seem to be a wrong answer when looking for meaning in her work. For instance, in the murals at the start of the show there is a photograph of a burned bagel called “Are You Sure It’s the Right Baby?” This was a question posed by her mother’s doctor when Rachel was born. There is such a multitude of references in Harrison’s work that it is unlikely that anyone other than Harrison herself can decipher them completely, but the works can still be appreciated without knowing any of these references or even taking the time to learn them.
The first thing to note about this show is the doorway leading into it from the elevator. Rachel Harrison draped some streamers across the door to bar the entrance, an entrance that seems the most convenient as you step off the elevator. The streamers don’t look like an actual barrier, so to make sure no one steps over the streamers the Whitney has put up more traditional stanchions. Harrison is very interested in museums and the way art is displayed in these institutions.
Voyage of the Beagle, 2007
This installation consists of 57 photographs and refers to Darwin’s account of his journey on HMS Beagle published in 1839, which lead to his theory of evolution published in On the Origin of Species in 1859. These photographs record Harrison’s search for the origin of sculpture. She began her voyage in Corsica where she photographed prehistoric menhirs (standing stone) daring from 1500 BC. She continued on around Europe and the United States photographing images of high art and low popular culture and has arranged the photos in a way that shows the relations between the two: another example of the democratization of high art and high culture. She’s also exploring the difficulty of documenting sculpture with photographs: with her own sculpture, she insists on the necessity of walking around it, of seeing it in the round.
Teaching Bo to Count Backwards, 1996-97
This gallery contains Harrison’s work from the nineties when she was starting her career. In the Bo Derek piece there are cans of olives stacked on an inverted gutter with photographs of Bo Derek and her husband John. As you look at the cans from left to right you will notice that the number of olives depicted on the labels gradually decreases while Bo’s expression transforms at the same time. Her husband John’s expression seems aloof while Bo becomes increasingly assertive. Bo Derek is probably most associated with the movie 10 which was her rating as a beauty and also references the manner of counting via the canned olives in an absurd way. Harrison is usually referencing art history in some way, and in this case we can see a relationship to Warhol’s soup cans as well as the Minimalist focus on systems, especially systems of counting or recording and seriality in repetition.
Untitled (Poles for a Dangerous Art World), 1992
There is a piece on the opposite side of the gallery called Dinner which consists of ten Mason jars which comes from her first Manhattan group show in a restaurant in the East Village. Harrison ordered dinner from the restaurant and put the leftovers in Ziplock bags which she arranged on the wall in a grid, referencing conceptual and minimalist art in a similar vein as the Bo Derek work. After two days there were so many flies around the bags that the owner of the restaurant complained so Harrison put the bags in Mason jars. Looking at them, you can sense allusions to the bodily functions of ingestion, digestion, and excretion. She further explored this idea of storage and accumulation with Poles for a Dangerous Art World. We are tempted to read the labels on the bags to make sense of the piece, but are warded off by the poles on which they hang: broomstick, paint roller extension pole, pool cue, billy club, ski pole, etc., some of which are sharpened like spears. Obviously, storing art in a Ziplock bag is not something that a museum conservator would recommend, and we get back to this idea of the high and low, art and the reality of the day to day. The bags contain the types of things stowed away in a basement and quickly forgotten: potting compound, hair extensions, denim, bread, tuna can, vacuum lint, foam, tape, wire, etc.
Main Street Gallery
This gallery includes work that Harrison began showing at Greene Nafali from 2004-2007. Looking at her work in the show, you notice that there are no barriers to protect the work, no tape marking off where to stand or stanchions keeping viewers back: the only lines on the floor are in this gallery, which form a map of a town. She wanted to arrange the sculptures in the format of an American town with generic street names like Main Street. As you walk around and look at the works they are like homes and their owners in a small town, odd and sometimes unsettling in a way that undermines the generic sameness of small towns and the people who live in them. Sphinx is a sculpture that you run into as you enter the gallery. You first see a photo of Sister Wendy (a British nun who hosted a BBC art history program in the 1990s) mounted on dry wall, and need to walk around the dry wall to see the sculpture on the other side: appreciating sculpture requires movement. Sister Wendy gave a mass audience access to art history, the ability to appreciate art without the pretentious trappings of the art historical elite. There are photographs on the adjoining wall, titled Perth Amboy, which show an image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe which miraculously appeared in a second story window in a home in Perth Amboy in 2001, attracting pilgrims who waited for hours to see it. Harrison found this touching, and saw it not only as religious devotion but also as devotion to the ideal of the American Dream. While a painting of the Virgin and Child by an artist like Leonardo or Raphael is of great value in the traditional art world, this image of condensation on a window which looks like the Virgin to believers in an immigrant community is of equal or even greater value to them as a direct communication from the Virgin herself. There is a sculpture called Cindy, which features a blond wig and is a reference to Cindy Sherman. Alexander the Great features a mannequin with two faces, with an Abraham Lincoln mask on the back of the mannequin’s head wearing sunglasses. She did a series of works incorporating mannequins she found, along with found materials like FedEx boxes which she coats with a cement like medium. All of these pieces she creates herself, with her own hands, without assistants: real life hacking art.
Huffy Howler, 2004
This work is a mock equestrian statue, the cliche of the heroic man on horseback. There are sheepskins hung from the back of the bike with an image of Mel Gibson from the movie Braveheart and the front of the bike is weighted down with purses full of stones and brick, perhaps a reference to the love conquests of the leading man which actually weigh him down more than they lighten his load. This is the hero of make believe, of a kid daydreaming that they are riding a charging steed as they peddle across their neighborhood, of actors playing medieval warriors while living a pampered life of privilege once the camera stops rolling and they retire to their catered meals and trailers. The hero riding the bike would not get far since the front tire is flat and the bike itself is impaled on a lavender wall-like form. Gibson was once pulled over for a suspected DUI in Malibu, where he berated the police with an anti-Semitic rant and yelled “Don’t you know who I am? I own this town.” This also introduces the idea of ownership, of conquering, even if it is just a sense of privilege and kingship from conquering the world of entertainment.
Sunset Series, 2000
Harrison has joked that with this series of photographs she explored travel photography without leaving her studio. She used a found photo of a sunset and challenged herself to create as many photographs as she could using this single photograph as the template. She rephotographed it 31 times, using different kinds of lenses, different amounts of lighting, changing the aperture of the camera, cropping the photo, bending the photo, taking a photo of the photo from an oblique angle, shining light off of the surface, wrapping the photo in plastic wrap, etc. She did all of this without utilizing a dark room, she simply took 35 mm photos. The subject matter is purposely banal, which was part of the challenge: every photograph of a sunset looks basically the same as every other one even though every one of them seeks to capture a “special moment.” “Let’s capture this magic moment in Cancun forever with a photo of the sun going down over a featureless ocean surface which could be any body of water anywhere in the world.” How can you manipulate it to make it different using low tech techniques and not sophisticated Photoshop like software?
Springs, 2017
This series of photographs were taken at the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, New York. These are photographs of the paint cans that were in Pollock’s studio after his fatal car crash in 1956. The brushes are stuck in cans of hardened paint, the fluidity that made his work flow now gone. By shooting them from above, they resemble the holes of a grave.
Hoarders, 2012
This piece requires you to see it in the round to appreciate it: sculpture requires movement. What looks like a boulder from one side is seen propped up by a metal bucket on the other, while a video plays on a flat screen where a taxi driver she filmed talks about the way the one percent in this country hoard their wealth. The driver mentions the A&E show “Hoarders,” and compares the hoarders on the show with the hoarding of the wealthy. This echoes the hoarding of food in Mason jars and ziplock bags in the previous gallery, the idea of accretion evident in her sculptures, the gathering of stones and bricks in handbags, etc. The piece looks heavy, but the boulder is made of wood, polystyrene, chicken wire, with cement glue and acrylic: it is hollow and actually quite light.
Drawings of Amy Winehouse, 2011-12
Harrison began this series of drawings the year Amy Winehouse died in 2011. There are fifty drawings in all where Winehouse is placed alongside artists who have been long canonized, like Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Willem de Kooning, Alice Neel and Martin Kippenberg. Is this equating Winehouse’s genius with those of other geniuses, or is it a parody, lumping everyone together in the cult of fame and celebrity, leveling, once again, the idea of high and low art and culture. The drawings depict Winehouse as a caricature, it’s uncertain if they are drawn in sympathy or in mockery. The drawings were done from videos Harrison pulled up online, combing through the endless feed of YouTube. The series also speaks to art school, when the beginning artist learns to draw by looking at images in books and magazines, where things are 2 dimensional and already framed, before commencing with drawings of live models and sculpture. Note that in the drawing featured here the eyes are skewed the same way: Winehouse’s drunken visage is like that of a Picasso.
Installation encircled with chairs
The main feature in this gallery is the platform of sculptures surrounded by a circle of chairs. The idea of an assembly of figures, of monuments in a civic space, a forum, a space for democracy and democratic debates, as the diverse sculptures each clamor for recognition, to be heard. Of course the irony is that when a visitor sits in one of the chairs, they have their back to the work, to the assembly, the points being expressed. This is if visitors feel free to sit in the chairs, to transgress the “don’t touch” ethic of the art museum. Harrison is actually bothered by benches in museums, which are now just spots for people to look at their phones instead of the art so here if you want to sit and look at your emails you will not be able to look at the art at the same time: you need to make a choice. I’m with Stupid depicts a child mannequin, which is buried in junk, and wearing a death mask. There’s a sculpture on the opposite side with a syringe in it and a sculpture across from I’m with Stupid with a photograph of Santa Claus being arrested, perhaps during SantaCon (which makes it justified in my opinion). It is better to not see each work in isolation, but to see it as a whole, as an assembly, to run your eye over all of it and take it in in its totality. Again, the idea of accumulation, of hoarding: the sculptures could have been spread out through the large gallery room, there is plenty of space, but they are all crammed together on the platform. Harrison is also commenting on museum culture where you see a cone on the floor, a cone that art handlers put on the floor while they are working. The sculpture near the cone is on the floor, not on the platform behind it, as if the handlers had not finished the installation when the show opened.
Full HD, 2019
Harrison made a sculpture entitled “Every Sculpture Needs a Trap Door” that incorporated a print out of an Andrea Fraser essay titled “Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?” Presumably Harrison included this essay as a reference to Sandback’s work, which created an illusion of demarcated space using taunt lines of yarn. Full HD seems to reference Sandback in this sense. The minimal nature of this work can be contrasted to the materiality of the works in the previous gallery: it is a stark transition. If you think of the previous gallery as being full of bombast, this is a quiet rejoinder, a self-deprecatingly spare way to close the exhibition.
Perhaps the title is an ironic commentary on the low tech nature of the sculpture, including the old video camera that is presumably not filming in HD. In any event, the camera is pointed at the wall of the gallery so any HD filming will be of a blank wall. The title might also be a reference to the fact that what we see with our own eyes, like this sculpture, is full HD without the use of technology. The phrase “Full HD” suggests that we are about to see something amazing that is worthy of the technology, like a school of fish on a coral reef or a drone flyover of the Grand Canyon or Manhattan. Instead, we get a full HD view of a broom, a rug, a branch, and some cords.The broom echoes the mop at the start of the exhibition: these two mundane cleaning objects bring us full circle. Like other sculptures, there are no caution strips, there is no barrier to getting too close to the work. Given how fragile the work is, leaving it exposed in this way is especially risky.