In Terms Of

Tag: Martin Kippenberger

  • Say It Together, Unmonumentally

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Say You, Say Me: Art Is a Song in Your Head—Rachel Harrison in Conversation with Greil Marcus
    Thursday, October 29, 2015
    Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York

    Rachel Harrison, Cindy (Green), 2004, mixed media, 72 x 37 x 31 in. (artwork © Rachel Harrison; photograph provided by Greene Naftali, New York)

    “Language is forced on art,” quipped the artist Rachel Harrison to an audience member during the Q&A session of this event. “We’re just throwing words at art all the time. Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy? It might. It employs a lot of people.” Such is Harrison’s self-consciously funny and cynicism-free outlook for giving titles to her works. That outlook is also a good way to understand her art practice over the last twenty years. I lost track of how many times I chuckled to myself during this hour-long talk.

    Harrison attached funny stories to a few of her works. A gallery goer stole a Baby Phat handbag fastened to one sculpture, and friends told her that someone had ruffled the blonde wig topping another. “What is that desire, not to mess with hair but to mess with artworks?” Harrison asked during her lecture. “Because I get that sometimes.” The way Harrison recounted taking the photograph she uses for Marilyn with Wall (2004–ongoing) characterized an Andy Warhol museum archivist as a sketchy street drug dealer.1 Yet irony plays no role in her practice: “I work too hard to be ironic,” she told another attendee.

    Harrison’s art practice is varied: mostly sculpture and installation but also photography, drawing, and writing. (Artforum has published a few great articles by her, on Andy Warhol’s Empire, Jeff Koons’s Bob Hope, and a parade organized by Paul McCarthy.) She isn’t yet known for a singular masterpiece, for which she could be inextricably linked, but her style is recognizable a mile away. A typical work is larger-than-life-sized, built from construction materials or polystyrene and slathered with cement and paint, with an extra prop or two—a bottle of Mr. Clean, a plastic figurine, or a framed photograph of a celebrity—fastened to it. Sometimes a sculpture rests on a plinth, a pair of milk crates, or a shipping dolly.

    Rachel Harrison, Zombie Rothko, 2011, wood, polystyrene, acrylic, and plastic doll, 70 x 23 x 31 in. (artwork © Rachel Harrison)

    Tonight’s event paired Harrison with the music critic Greil Marcus, best known for writing the books Mystery Train (1975) and Lipstick Traces (1989). Marcus was funny, too, in his own way, as he read aloud a short introductory essay peppered with off-the-cuff observations. While in Paris, he visited an art exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a Frank Gehry–designed building in Paris that “from the outside looks like a spaceship just about to take off.” Marcus circled Harrison’s Zombie Rothko (2011) round and round, taking in the bright orange hair of a plastic doll torso placed on the top of a craggy, painted blocky form. “What first might bring a laugh might turn disturbing,” he surmised. “What first might just throw you and not seem to hit is going to end up being the governing principle of the work.” And considering the ways she infuses pop culture—in particular a series of twenty colored-pencil drawings of the British singer Amy Winehouse carousing with characters from paintings by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Martin Kippenberger—he argued, “Not enough has been made of the way that Rachel’s work engages with the world that people actually live in…. That when you see it you’re seeing a distorted, funnier, more gripping version of the life that you actually lead.”

    I am embarrassingly late to the Rachel Harrison party. My longstanding impression of her work was that the criticality vibe overpowers all other interpretations, including humor, which I certainly noticed but didn’t take seriously. After all, Greene Naftali, her gallery of eighteen years, shows Very Serious Art by Paul Chan, Michael Krebber, Bernadette Corporation, and others. Over the years I have dutifully seen Harrison’s head-scratching exhibitions—at Greene Naftali, in the Whitney Biennial, at the New Museum—but never considered it in depth, despite my editing an exhibition review of her work in 2005. For years I recognized the work’s shock value—you could never call it beautiful—but never acknowledged its smart value and its terrific sense of humor. To get a better sense of what her work is all about—this is the primary reason why I attended tonight’s event.

    Rachel Harrison introduced the front side of Buddha with Wall (2004) as “Buddha Descending a Staircase” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In a chronological artist’s talk, Harrison presented two principle themes in her work—walls and frames—and how her thinking has has shifted from the former to the latter. Indeed, since the early 1990s she has made use of Sheetrock and metal studs brought into the gallery or taken down existing gallery walls (but never removing them from the exhibition space). The title of Harrison’s first solo exhibition—Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?—came from a New York Times article on building codes after Hurricane Andrew; the show took place in an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

    Developing this interest in modular and provisional work, the artist filled a gallery with a maze constructed with rectangular sheets of cardboard (Perth Amboy, 2001). “People call this a labyrinth, but you’re not going to get lost,” she joked. For Marilyn with Wall, Harrison took down nonstructural gallery walls and set them aside. “You make more space by cutting up a wall, and you make more space for a body,” she explained, sort of. “And by having more bodies you can have more spaces.” She metaphorically attributes physical space to mental space and to thinking. Harrison notices how people walk through rooms and on the subway—she may be watching you.

    Installation view of Perth Amboy (2001) at Bard College in 2009 (artwork © Rachel Harrison)

    After discussing a handful of museum and gallery exhibitions across Europe, Harrison tackled Three Young Framers, a solo outing at Regen Projects in Los Angeles this past summer. With wall studs leftover from shows by Glenn Ligon and Raymond Pettibon, which the gallery saved for her, she demarcated rooms within the hangerlike building, not unlike Michael Asher’s 2008 show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Although her initial idea came from drawing outlines of the gallery’s floor plan on paper, using a ruler, Harrison confessed that she wanted to see the Asher exhibition again, and this was a way to do it. She finds sophisticated humor in his work, from the George Washington statue to the Santa Monica show.

    During the conversation, Marcus saw “a scary, lifeless, maximum-security prison” in Three Young Framers, not a reference to Asher (who he may not know). No reviews of the show mentioned the prison angle, which Harrison chalked up to the herd mentality of art criticism. If the press release had mentioned jail, she noted, everyone would have zeroed in on that instead of Asher. There is no single meaning in your work, Marcus continued, adding something about how taking selfies imprisons actually imprisons the vain photographers. “Where they are,” he said, “is much less important than the fact that they are there.” Or maybe people just like documenting their life in photographs, like they’ve done for decades.

    Harrison’s 2012 exhibition The Help comprised a handful of sculptures and the Amy Winehouse drawings, which Marcus found to be upsetting and nihilistic, distorted and angry, bitter and self-destructive. Seeing the pictures changed the way he perceives the British singer, who died of drug and alcohol–related causes in 2011. Harrison appreciates her music but did not previously follow her career. The subject of the drawings was chosen randomly, she said, from a magazine cover spotted in a supermarket checkout line—though celebrities certainly play an important role in her work. Harrison admires the way Winehouse turned herself into sculpture, into a pop icon, purely through invention: her hair, singing soul music, and having working-class origins. What if someone looking at the drawings knows very little about Winehouse? If one puts the singer in the wrong place, Harrison and Marcus concluded, we can rethink her career and how she got there instead of repeating platitudes.

    Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2012, colored pencil on paper, 22⅜ x 27⅞ (artwork © Rachel Harrison; photograph provided by Greene Naftali, New York)

    Marcus saw the “scrapbook” exhibition Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, which he did not find terribly interesting. Three artists (Harrison, Jennie Ottinger, and Jason Jägel) had work at the same museum in a separate exhibition, called You Know I’m No Good. That presentation, which included Harrison’s Winehouse drawings, was overwrought, disturbing, violent, and mutilated, according to Marcus, not unlike the disturbing images in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. There is agency in creative acts, Harrison avowed. Marcus agreed, arguing that pain is an expressive force.

    Another audience member—it was the art historian Hal Foster—stated that most people understand Harrison’s work as collage and assemblage. He articulated a different perspective: “You don’t collage things; you collage views, viewpoints. It’s about putting subjects together, not objects together.” Although the same could be said for many artists, his observation is spot on. Harrison seemed pleased with it. She mentioned another description about her work, made by Foster, that she likes: “You take a bad thing and make it worse.”

    In Terms Of count: 13.

    1 Rachel Harrison said: “They’ll let you make an appointment, and you can go to Andy Warhol’s archives. And you just wear gloves, and they’ll let you touch everything. And there’s a can of hairspray, chewing gum, all the things you know about—fabulous things. And then I was about to leave and the guy was like, ‘Well, don’t you want to see it?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said ‘Everyone wants to see it.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Don’t you want to see the source material for Marilyn?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’” She ending up taking a 35mm photograph of the publicity still, partially veiled by a glassine sleeve. The image is a key part of a sculpture called Marilyn with Wall, which she has created several times since 2004.

  • Much Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting

    The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness
    Thursday, June 4, 2015
    Jewish Museum,     Scheuer Auditorium, New York

    Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.

    Step One

    Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.

    Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 x 49 7/16 in. (artwork © Estate of Sigmar Polke)

    One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.

    Step Two

    Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2

    Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)

    Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.

    Step Three

    Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.

    Step Four

    Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?

    Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Step Five

    Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she  repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.

    Step Six

    The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?

    Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm (artwork © Martin Kippenberger)

    Step Seven

    A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.

    After Steps

    The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”

    2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.

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