Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Rachel Harrison
American; 21st-century
New York, NY: Greene Naftali (Exhibition: Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations)
74%
The Excavator. 2023. Wood, polystyrene, cardboard, cement, acrylic, enamel, shovel
The problems can also be the solutions when it comes to combining conceptual techniques (readymades, texts) with traditional formats (sculpture, painting). Problem: it can be tough for an intermedia artwork to convey to its audience whether it ought to be approached primarily as, say, sculpture, language-game, appropriation, or photograph, etc. Every artistic format contains a different set of experiential possibilities and limitations; the quality of an intermedia artwork substantially depends on how successfully it channels experience through one (or several) of these conceptual medium-categories versus another. This artwork, for instance, could be taken in as either a sculpture with a found-object appendage, or as a readymade enframed by a sculptural object. Which brings us to a solution: rather than try to stem the infinite regress of should-I-be-experiencing-this-thing-this-way-or-that-way type questions, an artwork can instead wield this confusion and, through it, erect experiential ambiguity as the crux of experience. This is what The Excavator has done, and done with a fair degree of success. It's successful, at first, because of how significantly sculptural it is, and how impressive it is as a sculpture: the stepwise upward progression and transformation of its rectangular theme, culminating with that mangled cube, offers up a lot of visual intrigue in the round; the object's rough, foggily colored surface makes it feel at once earthy and ethereal. But when you try to incorporate that shovel into your experience, you can't fully do so — it comes from an altogether different world than the sculpture it's leaning on, which undermines its status and achievement as a sculpture. What becomes noteworthy, then, is not the artwork's physiognomy, but the fragility of our sense of that physiognomy could have significance on its own terms. (2025)
New York, NY: Greene Naftali (Exhibition: Rachel Harrison: The Friedmann Equations)
49%
Scepter. 2025. Wood, polystyrene, cardboard, chicken wire, burlap, cement, enamel, acrylic, Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers, Uline dolly, Panasonic KX-TG5431 telephone with answering machine
Scepter hails from a series of large surface-y chromatic sculptures with attendant found-item components. For each of these works, success tends to be a matter of whether all of the disparate objects that comprise the piece manage to harmonize conceptually without congealing into some kind of formal whole. That is, does the work convince you that it had to have been a chimerical not-quite-sculpture thing, rather than just a good sculpture? Scepter does not. That's partly because its readymade elements (shoes, phone, dolly) feel almost willfully unconnected, partly because its marquee sculptural element — that big purple skin-tagged thing — is too dense, too unified, as a sculpture. The sculptural portion comes to look like a found object among found objects while all the appropriated stuff begs to be read on sculptural terms. The result is that the total artwork seems to equal exactly the sum of all the parts. (2025)