More Recent Old Review: Rachael Harrison

Review of Rachael Harrison’s “If I Did It” at Greene-Naftali

Rachael Harrison is one the best contemporary sculptors around and this outing at Greene-Naftali, titled, “If I Did It” after O.J. Simpson’s title for his unreleased book, shows her at the top of her game. The sculptures here, each titled for a famous man, hewed closely to her typical formats – generally lumpy, stucco-ed, brightly painted, misshapen quasi-formalist sculpture adorned with kitschy knick-knacks, as well as a long rebus of photographs of sculptures depicting faces. The results here were nonetheless surprising in new ways.

Typically, these pieces all present a number of contradictory ideas about space and how radically different sculptural motifs, using a free-associative approach to meaning, can be juxtaposed. Each element seems to mock our tendencies to read them in familiar ways. Does it matter how beautiful, formal, well-crafted, or whatever, an abstract element is if there’s a can of “Arnold Palmer’s Lite Half & Half Ice Tea/Lemonade” nestled into one of its crannies (or that this can makes its appearance in a sculpture titled “Tiger Woods” – get it, “half & half”?)? It does, but only because the efficacy of a punch-line is mostly determined by its set-up. Part of the can’s jolting incongruity is that it suddenly becomes a formal element, as well, forcing you to think about what this ridiculous thing looks like i.e. utterly bizarre.

Elsewhere these tricks achieved mixed results. A tall roughly rectangular monolithic sculpture with a thermostat mounted on its side was titled “Al Gore”. Painted in both warm and cool tones, it initially seemed like a joke about color “temperature”, but the title reduced it to a one-liner. Likewise, a piece titled “Fats Domino” with a can of Slim-fast set on top is sculpturally impressive but the “Fat/slim” pun is a little grating. Another, titled “Johnny Depp”, painted in metallic gold paint and violet which included a large hoop ear dangling off it was more subtle and convincing. The clashing shades of fake gold were stunning, vulgar, off, and mesmerizing all at once.

A ring-bound book of Harrison’s source material and inspiration here also provided insight into her practice and offered unusual clues to her sculptures’ significance. A quotation from the enlightenment philosopher John Locke for example, describes how “complex” ideas derive from simpler ones: how the simple ideas of “red” and “sweet” together might form the complex idea of a “sweet, red apple”. Aside from offering an analogue for Harrison’s practice (where complex elements would seem to combine in mounting complexity) it also provides an alternative explanation for the funny Styrofoam apples appearing elsewhere on a couple of her sculptures (and, therefore, a concomitant comment on her tendency to deflate complex meanings back to the comical incidentals of particular forms – as if John Locke was a guy who wrote about apples). Whatever else apples might signify, a Styrofoam apple (with an apparently real bite taken out of it) is nonetheless, like Ms. Harrison’s sculptures as a whole, an ineffable, marvelous oddity unto itself.