Escobar by Harrison.
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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 uneven, whipped cement surface ensconcing a Whirlpool Energy Star water cooler in a central cavernous niche, locat[ing] the group in space like a hub" (Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Art Agenda, same link as images).
So Harrison creates living characters with tangible personalities, living in relation to one another, and creating spaces around them, both individually and as a cluster, to really physically affect the viewer. Thinking of Walter Benjamin, I'd like to call Harrison a master of the craft of objects of uniqueness. That is the craft of 'aura'. The aura of originality radiates from all objects of art (ideally), coming from its place of absolute particularity in the world, though for some the aura is stronger than in others. The aura being the difference between viewing an image of a painting, and viewing the thing itself hanging on the wall. And so with screens pervading every corner of our lives, the idea of aura becomes even more significant as terrifying dystopian realities begin to come to pass, coming to life and crawling facelessly out at us like the girl in The Ring. The aura being the driving force of the high art market. It might be said that a work's monetary 'value' is a representation of the object's aura, it's power to affect a consciousness.
Thus are monuments physically enormous, for as a physical mass, it has physical agency over the world, it's atoms vibrate as anything else—it's very being is effective—so is the Statue of Liberty so impressive. So impressive that one not even need actually be standing in front of it in order to feel its significance and comprehend its grandeur. We know the Statue of Liberty simply because she is so huge and singular, and made of copper and gold. Thus has monumental art always been so political. A monument exerts actual physical force over a people as it invades their space, at the same time that it radiates ideology and reinforcements of power structures and status quos. The issue of Confederate monuments in the southern United States feels worth noting here.
And so do the members of Harrison's motley crew stand, grand, singular, figural, familiar, powerful, monumental. And yet Pablo Escobar is composed of no more than wood, cement, polystyrene, and a piece of craft shop decor, barcoded sticker still attached. All just one trip to the hardware store away.
After sculpting a complexly composed form of her humble materials, Harrison covers it in a crazy camouflage that almost hurts to look at, hangs a bit of kitsch on it, and names it after the one drug lord known by name in nearly every American home.
It recalls tacky commercial recreations of 'ethnic atmosphere', and following from that such sites of appropriation as Cinco de Mayo. And more faintly I recall the cacophony of corporate American Christmas with its blaring red and green patchwork like the rhythmic squeals of Alvin and the Chipmunks echoing through the grocery store, the chilis resembling colored string lights, the body like some strange yard totem to accompany inflatable Rudolph. A psychedelic North Pole. Harrison's characters are the monuments of our unbridled dreams, the ones from the sleeps so deep we don't recall.
And so her characters are more like anti-monuments. For they walk like monuments, and talk like them, and definitely we feel them to be monumental. Feel it vibrating all through us. And yet they are hollow. One imagines, perhaps, literally, for they do not look hard to push over, like props from an amateur film set, but also figuratively. For what is it that they stand for?
Like anyone else, they simply stand.
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