CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/1/2014

The Human Factor

What does the most challenging figurative sculpture look like today? The Hayward Gallery's Southbank Centre attempts to answer this question with The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, featuring work by 25 international artists, including Rachel Harrison, whose Jack Lemmon (2011) is reproduced here. Debra Lennard writes, "The work's main element is a painted concretion, but in this case it forms a garish bulwark, a ruined safeguard for the small body that cavorts beside it. The figure itself is two-faced, a Janus-like kidult he/she. Depending on which way you approach it, you are met with either the calm, bespectacled face of shop-window-mannequin womanhood, or the smirking mask of Dick Cheney, 46th Vice President of the United States, perpetrator of what many consider to be the biggest foreign policy blunder of modern times, and codenamed 'Angler' by the US Secret Service. In Harrison's assemblages, the title is as much part of the work as any of its other elements. As she herself has said, 'a title is an object; it is another place where I can add a "thing."' In Jack Lemmon, the riffs on lemon as a color and as slang for a defective person are as significant as the reference to the great comic actor, who dressed in drag to escape the mob in Some Like it Hot (1959), and was known as 'Dickhead' in one of his later roles."