SHOW REVIEWED: CONSIDER THE LOBSTER

Consider the Lobster

The show I choose for review this month is a survey of Rachel Harrison‘s work from over the last 15 or so years entitled “Consider the Lobster”. The exhibition is on view at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, also there was “And Other Essays”, a collection of mini-exhibitions put together by Harrison and six other artists using work out of the Hessel’s permanent collection. “And other Essays” was interesting but this is the last time I’m going to bother to mention it. “Consider the Lobster” plus “And Other Essays” was reviewed back in July by Holland Cotter for The New York Times. You can catch his review here.

Then and Now

I first encountered the work of Rachel Harrison through reproduction. The piece I saw was a yellow glob of polystyrene plopped atop a stool-like structure which was also yellow.  The legs of the stool-thing were long and skinny, the blob seemed to take on the characteristics of a fat cartoon. Attached to the yellow blob was a photograph. The photograph was framed. Back then it hardly mattered what the photograph on the yellow blob in the reproduction was of because I immediately connected to what I considered the vital meaning of the piece; photographs were objects cut out of three-dimensional space. Photographs recorded time and documented moments and they were liars because it is impossible to record time and things will be forgotten. There was also something in the yellow blob about sculpture, something about how a photograph sort of was a sculpture, something about how silly minimalism seemed just then and something about chaos and destruction and messes and bright colors. Back then, in art school, in Ohio, eating instant noodles and staring at a reproduction, I connected to and understood a thousand things about the work of Rachel Harrison, she was pretty much saying all the things I wanted to say.

That was over seven years ago, and half of what I first saw in Harrison’s work I have forgotten or pushed aside. Visiting the Hessel was bittersweet–being given the chance to reconnect with Harrison’s work, though the artist is fourteen years my senior–I can’t help thinking that while she flew off to never-never land I stayed behind and grew up. It is never pleasant to feel old and it is even more unpleasant to wonder if you have been going about things the wrong way. I’m still grappling with it but it is possible that this exhibition will turn out to be a life-changing experience.

It is funny to imagine that a life-changing experience could come out of viewing a pile of plastic peas in their pods atop a mound of pastel metallic glop. So it goes.

Religion in art, and art as religion

Rachel Harrison’s work has the kind of wisdom and assuredness that comes from looking at and living art too much. The Hessel Museum, built on the Utopian landscape of post-modern buildings in the beautiful wilderness of up-state New York is the perfect location for this kind of art-introspection. There is no one around who will rain on our aesthetic parade or make us question that what we are doing might be silly.

There is a bit of a drugged-out sensibility involved with really liking Harrison’s work–you know that feeling you can get naturally but most likely you’ve experienced it while high–that feeling where everything in the world is beautiful, and I mean everything–the trash has been placed just so you can appreciate it aesthetically and the world has conspired to turn itself into a gallery installation. Everything is on view for you, everything is absurd and meaningless and beautiful, everything is so good that you want to document and record it all.

It’s easy to dismiss this happy sensibility as false and decadent (and perhaps it is–my jury is still out)–maybe we should be out saving the planet instead of crying over the beauty and bizarrely profound footage of thousands of sneakers running the New York Marathon. (“Foot Stays in the Picture“–a video piece that involves three TVs propped up to knee height by three IKEA-looking stools. The TVs are inside pedestals that appear to have had a chainsaw and a painterly brush taken to them.) Certainly there might be better ways to use our time.

But it is hard to not be thankful that Ms. Harrison has produced her art while walking through such masterpieces as “Perth Amboy” (or, as I am unsure that it is one work and is probably several works–the correct way to say this might be; the gallery room that houses “Perth Amboy”) –a labyrinth of cardboard that conceals and then reveals various wonders (a mound of colorful plastic drinking straws, a dollar-store  ceramic figurine of an ancient Chinese scholar dressed in blue “staring” at a blue polystyrene blob, pictures documenting pilgrims to a house in Perth Amboy where a sighting of the Virgin was reported. . .). While you are inside the cardboard you can hear the sounds of other videos in other parts of the exhibition, giving you the feeling that you are backstage at a concert or exploring a basement you should not be exploring. The cardboard is also warm, muffling, insulating. (It smells like cardboard, which is for myself an oddly comforting smell.) While you view documentation of pilgrims to a house in Perth Amboy you are invited to have a similar religious experience while contemplating Barbies’ wheel-chaired friend “contemplating” a photograph (the doll also has a plastic camera around her neck).

Art stuff

I have read over two articles who have tied Harrison to Warhol, and while almost everyone after Warhol could be said to be in dialogue with him, just as all of us are pretty much on the death-phone with Duchamp chatting our own lives away. I don’t think this is entirely accurate, or at least it doesn’t really matter. Sure pop-culture is there and so is Marilyn Monroe but the work is abstract-expressionist-painterly, color and form takes precedent over subject matter in many cases. Harrison seems more in line with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and she’s a definite contemporary of Jessica Stockholder (7 years Harrison’s senior).

In Harrison’s work pictures, video, and content are handled in the same way a painter might use the color red. Sponge Bob looks good next to the picture of Mel Gibson which looks great near the video of an estate auction, and over here we can add some phenomenology. When it’s all done I might as well be looking at one of Arshile Gorky‘s later works. What meaning there may be slips in and out of our heads like the remembrances of a dream.

Much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality

The name of the Hessel’s Rachel Harrison survey refers to the title of an article by David Foster Wallace that was originally published in Gourmet Magazine, and later became part of a collection of essays entitled “Consider the Lobster And Other Essays”. The article is worth a read if you are unfamiliar with it (download the pdf off a link on this wikipedia article). The essay is basically a discussion on the ethics of boiling lobsters alive, and our reluctance to think of this ethical question while preparing and eating lobster, masquerading as a review of the Maine Lobster Festival. The questions brought to play in the article seem very relevant to the viewing of art in today’s art gallery.

Just as it might be impossible to review a lobster festival without thinking about the vast amount of lobsters being boiled alive for $12 (as it was for David Foster Wallace), so it might be impossible to visit an art gallery without contemplating a justifiable framework for just why all the time and effort had to be put into the creation of an exhibition of art. Or, at the very least it is impossible for me not to wonder if it is necessary to create and then destroy walls, use vast amounts of polystyrene (which cannot be good for the environment), create aesthetically pleasing messes and manipulate popular movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean. There is money and resources involved in all of this that could have been used for other things. People with stunning intellects have put their heads to this art instead of other things. The product (art–or a lobster) is enjoyable and has a value, and to answer that it isn’t worth it means to stop a large amount of business and puts many people out of work. I hope I am not far off-base in thinking that Ms. Harrison pointed out this article on purpose and that I am not jumping to the extreme in believing that we are meant to question if the experience is worth the vehicle of production. It seems really brave to raise this question about your own art, but I suppose the question is about art in general.

A good place to end this appears to be by adopting the ending of “Consider the Lobster”;

“These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.”