Rachel Harrison--the ironic Jungian

Rachel Harrison gave a lecture at Cooper Union today as part of an an ongoing lecture series in the school's wacky hi-tech new building on 3rd Ave and 7th Street--the opening ceremony for the disorienting educational edifice happened the same afternoon. I am told there were sandwiches.

As cynical as she claims to be about art, the lecture was an inspiring kick in the pants to a way of thinking about the world and objects through a lens of relational narrative and shifting context that activates history and theory and presentness or objecthood in the best way possible. I used to go to Chelsea and be just as impressed (if not moreso) by street trash and passerby convo-snippets afterwards as i was by the art. I hadn't been switched 'on' like that in a while. Few sculptors really challenge you by actively engaging your attention deficit disorder.

Has the internet has destroyed this kind of mentality? There's just way too much out there, you can't take it all in. Web surfing is not an art experience, but in a way it has killed the sort of art experience I'm talking about. All this clicking around, all these juxtaposed tabs and infinite opportunities to follow your next blip of distracted thought--it takes the thrill out of the webby-ness of real life. And then there's Ryan Trecartin. His YouTube channel is pretty amazing. I think I only like his work on YouTube.

Having seen the show at Bard, "Consider the Lobster" earlier in the summer, I wasn't sure what to expect from the talk. Her work viewed en mass comes off as formulaic--maybe too reliably irreverent. You can always count on something being turned on its head; eventually, you wonder if the diatribe is against art itself. The lecture confirmed this. Yes, Rachel Harrison hates art. She said so.

Her process and persona are full of contradictions, and she knows it, and that's part of it. She isn't trying to own a masternarrative, she's trying to explore as many dimensions as she can (or as many as she feels like it), and inevitabley the currents will contradict each other. Is that how whirlpools happen? There are things one loves and things one hates, and things one doesn't understand, and Rachel Harrison believes in following these impulses--she's probably a Jungian or something. An ironic Jungian. She claims to be against research--which i understand as an effort to follow the symbolic connections that happen naturally in ones personal exposure to the world--to avoid didacticness. didactitude? Whatever. Hierarchy is the enemy.

Despite her frequent references to pop culture, Rachel Harrison does not make art for 'the people', as entertainment or enlightenment for the common folk. just for herself, her friends and for people who get the joke. This sounds pretty elitist, no? Well, on the question of the "friendliness" of her work, her Socratic response was "if you are watching the cricket and you don't know the rules of the game, does that make cricket 'unfriendly'?"

She hates museum efforts to lure in the public through non-art related events, like Yoga at the MoMa and PS1 Warmups. Turning the museum into a venue makes people think that art should deliver the goods in a user friendly way and contributes to its widespread undermining by our entertainment-crazed consumer-retard culture. Other things that undermine art: art fairs, biennials, crappy artists, crappy galleries, and hyper-inflated auction prices for relatively mediocre works.

I wish i could remember the line of thought that followed a discussion of her sculptures as still lives versus as blogs. My mind was a bit blown by the personal applicability of these topics, as a painter of still-lives and an aspiring blogger. Some people think of sculptures as still lives... What is a still life? A group of objects composed in such a way so as to create an allegory. A blog is a webpage with reverse-chronological entries, hyperlinks, opinions. If one thinks as the objects in a still life as hyperlinks to a use/history, then there is common ground. Although a still life will always be more vague in its objective meaning than someone's ranted opinions and links. Allthough not really, when you think of the 'form' of blog, the overall meaning could be totally self-contradictory and vague.

Her answer as to the difference between the two: anyone can have a blog, but you have to be really good to paint a still-life. Aware of the holes in the argument (a bad still-life is still a still life, a good blog is better than a bad one), she sticks to it anyway. This was at the end of the 2 hour lecture, and she was hungry.

New Paintings

Just finished this today. It will be included in BOFFO's "Objective Affection, "opening Saturday Sept 18 from 6-8 pm at 2 Joralemon S


Still life with Flight Pillow, Rocks, Etc
Oil on Canvas,
44" x 28"



This painting was in Best Rapper Alive (W.W.W.D?) Curated by Audrey Berman and Pete Deevakul at Bushwick Starr.
http://bushwickbk.com/2009/08/25/contemporary-art-lilwayne-magic/

Wayne with Earring
Oil on Canvas
12" x 16"