Sculpture.

In May 2012, Rachel Harrison opened her show The Help  at Greene Naftali gallery, New York. A long, purple carpet (like one down which Willy Wonka might walk, stretching to the gates of his chocolate factory) cuts through the middle of the room. An astroid of multicolored mush anchors one end of the rug as it sits stubbornly where it seems to have landed, half-atop a tin garbage can and a television looping a point-of-view film of a nighttime cab ride. The boulder does not look particularly comfortable, though immovable. The other end of the rug is held by a patchy green-and-pinky box like a cabinet-shaped paperweight. Behind its back it hides a carpet sweeper. Doing the rounds it seems, or paused. This must be the help. Working hard? Or hardly working? None respond, it does not turn, yet there hangs an eery sense of order in the air, as though each has done/does/is doing their duty, everything in its right place, all quiet and well. This in contrast to the gnarled silhoue...

On entering Jack Whitten's Odyssey  show at the Met Breuer I'm confronted with a blank wall bearing said title, emblazoned in blue, and a great white coffee table of a pedestal rising from the slate floor in the center of this initial space. Atop it like a fishbowl of orchids is a horned stump of bright wood, the base warm and warted with something like pearly fungus and the horn peaking into a a crooked point, a polished thorn stained like deep cabernet, rising from a whitewashed cinderblock. I approach and find the "fungus" to be really detris, bits of plastic, technological trash, seashells, teeth. A stripe of white paint, I realize, skirts the base of the stump, and I feel as though it were floating or really sprouting from the thing like a seed. A gnarly lima bean. And from the crusted stump sprouts the thorn, polished and crooked and sticking out a knotty arm as if to stabilize itself or grab at a nearby tree, more sure than itself. At the thorn's gentle cr...

Entering the 2018 Constantin Brancusi exhibition at MoMA, I am met at the portal by Maiastra  (1910-12), the youngest work in the show. A totem pole of limestone, a carving of two rough-hewn figures stood atop a block of limestone, leaning into one another, and one of their faces so concealed as they hold a block of limestone equal to that underfoot upon their heads. And crowning the tower of rock is the maiastra, a reference to a creature of Romanian myth. A smooth, futurist bud of marble. With a swollen chest like a tulip, neck like its stem snipped at the end. A little carved beak with little round eyes. This was Brancusi's first bird-form sculpture, a motif used by art history to define the artist's career. And a fitting doorman, gatekeeper. Standing tall and phallic like a monolith, hewn by hand and made of stone like a monolith, and bearing a simple iconography immediately identifying itself with the religious, or at least mythic (that is an image of man and/or woman ...

https://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/rachel-harrisons-asdfjkl-at-regen-projects-la/ In the early summer of 2010, Rachel Harrison exhibited six sculptures at her show "Asdfjkl;", including these four imaged above. Brutal, lumbering forms of bubbling stucco who assault their viewer with naked, shameless color. Super-absurdist nightmares leaning in every direction at once. Yet each bears a readymade badge grounding it firmly in, or at least parallel to our pop-cultural reality. For  Signature Roll , the monolithic eeyore whose towering torso seems to really undulate and convulse, it's a dangling sushi menu. For the tall cubist figure with the coked-out-Miami-Mexican-restaurant skin Pablo Escobar , it's a cluster of decorative glossy ceramic chili peppers hanging from his shoulder. Along with Siren Serenade , the dainty black fellow in the corner of the first image, they stand around the stout Around the Water Cooler , "an opalescent white block with an une...