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Rachel Harrison: Museum With Walls
Text by Tom Eccles, Iwona Blazwick, Jack Bankowsky, David Joselit, Paul Chan, John Kelsey, Allan McCollum, Lucy Raven, Amy Sillman, Steven Stern.
Rachel Harrison (born 1966) is one of the most exciting artists making sculptures today. Her assemblages of found and constructed objects carry a provisional quality, a wry sense of humor and an all-embracing intelligence. Playing with materials ranging from plinth, pedestal and corrugated cardboard to plastic ketchup bottles, insulated travel mugs and Barbie's wheelchair-bound friend, Harrison creates colorful, canny, thought-provoking constructions that are worthy peers of Rauschenberg's Combines. This volume, the most comprehensive monograph of Harrison's sculpture, video and painting to date, provides documentation of the past 15 years of her work and includes essays by Tom Eccles, David Joselit, Iwona Blazwick and Jack Bankowsky, plus contributions from Paul Chan, John Kelsey, Allan McCollum, Lucy Raven, Amy Sillman and Steven Stern.
"1. Color plays a forceful character in Rachel Harrison's farcical situations. Absurdity genarally prevails over gravitas: yellow trumps green and lady-shape mugs man-form. A phallic green sculpture is goofed up by a blonde wig. A bunch of dumb, dark-green trash bags hunker down lugubriously on the floor, concealing something ominous, but their weight is cheerfully rigged up to a pulley system made of canary yellow ropes. And the only words you could really use to describe the shape loitering over in the Sheetrock corner would be hot orange or boobs."
Amy Sillman excerpted from A Few Remarks on Rachel Harrion's Use of Color in Rachel Harrison: Museum With Walls. Featured image is a detail of Two Lemons, 2005, also from Rachel Harrison: Museum With Walls.
"It's funny to look back on: I-am-Spartacus walls that laughed off art, blocking a view of the walls behind them that held the room's structure together, or that held any art upon them. It's clear when looking now at the first image of this installation (more than it was in person) that the view from the room's entryway was the vanishing point of the work.
I guess that's called hindsight. A room about looking in order to believe, whose objects get revealed as you pass through it. In each tableau, seeing trumps the functions or desires of the lower body. The amputated busts of Marilyn Monroe and Le Senora have been rolled into places they can stare from easily; Wheelchair Becky, camera around her neck, is likewise positioned, but her vision, like that of the others, is unconvincing. The photos around the room's perimeter exhibit faith, instead, through touch. How do you grasp an icon, or feel vision? To deprivilege the eyes, the horizon could be cropped out, or obscured."
This past weekend art lovers, book lovers and publishers from all over the world flocked to New York to celebrate the book as made object, from photocopied zine to sleek monograph. The ARTBOOK booth, a walk-in rendering of our Collage & Photomontage Curated Library, was designed by artist Michael Assiff. (For more on Michael Assiff, please continue to end of post.) continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 12.25 in. / 272 pgs / 245 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $75 ISBN: 9781936192038 PUBLISHER: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College/Whitechapel Gallery/Portikus AVAILABLE: 8/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College/Whitechapel Gallery/Portikus. Text by Tom Eccles, Iwona Blazwick, Jack Bankowsky, David Joselit, Paul Chan, John Kelsey, Allan McCollum, Lucy Raven, Amy Sillman, Steven Stern.
Rachel Harrison (born 1966) is one of the most exciting artists making sculptures today. Her assemblages of found and constructed objects carry a provisional quality, a wry sense of humor and an all-embracing intelligence. Playing with materials ranging from plinth, pedestal and corrugated cardboard to plastic ketchup bottles, insulated travel mugs and Barbie's wheelchair-bound friend, Harrison creates colorful, canny, thought-provoking constructions that are worthy peers of Rauschenberg's Combines. This volume, the most comprehensive monograph of Harrison's sculpture, video and painting to date, provides documentation of the past 15 years of her work and includes essays by Tom Eccles, David Joselit, Iwona Blazwick and Jack Bankowsky, plus contributions from Paul Chan, John Kelsey, Allan McCollum, Lucy Raven, Amy Sillman and Steven Stern.
