Contemporary Sculpture and the Critique of Display Cultures

Tainted Goods

Dan Adler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351049160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

In this book, Dan Adler addresses recent tendencies in contemporary art toward assemblage sculpture and how these works incorporate tainted materials – often things left on the side of the road, according to the logic and progress of the capitalist machine – and combine them in ways that allow each element to retain a degree of empirical specificity. Adler develops a range of aesthetic models through which these practices can be understood to function critically. Each chapter focuses on a single exhibition: Isa Genzken's "OIL" (German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007), Geoffrey Farmer's midcareer survey (Musée d'art contemporain, Montréal, 2008), Rachel Harrison's "Consider the Lobster" (CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2009), and Liz Magor's "The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities" (Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, 2008).

1Rachel Harrison

“Consider the Lobster”

Entering Rachel Harrison’s exhibition “Consider the Lobster,” I am greeted by a gridded bulletin board, hanging on an otherwise bare beige wall.¹ It is, in fact, a chart, containing dozens of little labels, printed with names and job titles. People are grouped according to categories: the boroughs of New York City, “Home Attendant,” “Continuing Treatment,” and “Supportive Employment.” It may have been a psychiatric hospital’s means of organizing duty assignments, a bureaucratic instrument identified with the mental health services of a specific city.² I speculate on its symbolic scope—as a cross-section of a massive metropolitan milieu, a facilitating means of designating people who treat (or process) those who are marginalized, those who are habitually labeled as different, abnormal, or as not leading productive and useful lives, those who are obsolete (or at risk of becoming so) and therefore considered a burden on the rest of society. Obviously referencing pre-digital technologies, this object is infused with a sense of obsolescence. The tiny cards register as actual documentation of individuals while, in a more metaphorical sense, represent a spectrum of vocations: social workers, nurses, records analysts, rehab techs, psychiatrists, counselors, porters, financial managers, clerks. Taken from its original context (a hospital’s offices), it now forms part of Harrison’s installation Snake in the Grass (1997/2009). It inspires speculation partly because it is not anchored by any established traditions of iconography—either in terms of art or popular culture—such as romanticizing treatments of the mentally ill or the exploitive spectacles of degraded, down-and-out humanity.

Figure 1.1Rachel Harrison, Snake in the Grass, 1997/2009

Installation view, “Consider the Lobster,” curated by Tom Eccles, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 27 – December 20, 2009

Polystyrene, acrylic, aluminum studs, Sheetrock, rope, garbage bags, La Gloria Cubana cigar, baking tray, olive pits, shovel, snakeskin, Rock Box cooler, foam art-handling blocks, FEGS hospital chart, wood, picture lamp, exit sign, bottled water, ten chromogenic prints, and one pigmented inkjet print

138 × 288 × 498 inches (350.5 × 731.5 × 1264.9 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella

I am struck by the starkness of this chart, so prominently placed in the show, as an artifact signifying mental health problems permeating a population. It offers an unusual invitation to consider how and why so many of us struggle to cope with pressures and insecurities. Webster’s defines a “snake in the grass” as a thing or person that is seemingly harmless and helpful—or one posing as a positive influence—but that is secretly faithless, capable of treachery and much harm. The snake in the grass notion may be situated within cultures of consumerism, saturating our spaces of work and play. Increasingly, these cultures are expressed as “packaged” experiences, promising fulfillment but failing to deliver the goods. Partly in response to such failure, we may develop neurotic and depressive behaviors, particularly when what is commonly categorized as “fun” does little to alleviate the malaise. The cultural critic David Foster Wallace certainly suffered from such symptoms. In the article “Consider the Lobster”—also the title of Harrison’s exhibition—he muses about forms of tourist entertainment in America that commercialize authentic local flavor, such as a lobster festival in New England:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way that you can never admit … It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect or a dead thing.³

Harrison does choose a tourist destination as a subject in Snake in the Grass: the site of the JFK assassination in Dallas. Moving beyond the introductory chart on the beige wall, I find a photo offering a partial view of a famous image—shot moments after the fatal shot(s) were taken—of a policeman sprinting across a grassy patch of ground, passing picnicking people, toward the Grassy Knoll. Harrison provides a photograph of this legendary picture, perhaps purchased in Dallas: her work includes a $20 yellow price tag, as well as a fragment of text that mentions a key witness to the assassination, Beverly Oliver. Another photo shows a grinning and aproned man, holding a souvenir photo depicting a bird’s-eye view of Kennedy’s motorcade route; the top of this picture’s frame serves as a resting place for a Mi Cubano cigar—a punning gesture that may reflect a Cuba-related, conspiracy-laden conversation with the depicted man. However, in the gallery there are other photographs of individuals who are just hanging around. Not composed with care, these latter images were presumably taken around the Grassy Knoll area—souvenirs from trips taken to the tragic site: one depicts two men on the grass; their faces are not revealed, and they stand awkwardly, with arms at their sides, perhaps struggling to come up with meanings that satisfy or fulfill. Another shows a man in profile, with a blank expression. Considered independently, these images fail to deliver discernible events that could function as evidence of being anywhere; they are not even suitable for posting on Facebook or Instagram.

Figure 1.2Rachel Harrison, Snake in the Grass, 1997/2009

Installation view, “Consider the Lobster,” curated by Tom Eccles, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 27 – December 20, 2009

Polystyrene, acrylic, aluminum studs, Sheetrock, rope, garbage bags, La Gloria Cubana cigar, baking tray, olive pits, shovel, snakeskin, Rock Box cooler, foam art-handling blocks, FEGS hospital chart, wood, picture lamp, exit sign, bottled water, ten chromogenic prints, and one pigmented inkjet print

138 × 288 × 498 inches (350.5 × 731.5 × 1264.9 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella

Normally “JFK” is a character cast in terms of tragically unfulfilled promises: of social reform, of progressive government, of glamor and intrigue (Marilyn and mob ties). Harrison may be implying that the Kennedy Camelot is a fantasy that many of us just prefer to rub up against, in a nostalgia-infused daze, as one literally lingers on a patch of grass—rather than face the realities of present-day politics. Indeed, on a shelf fastened to one wall, Harrison has lined up six close-up photographs of grass—according to Harrison, they were taken on the Grassy Knoll—rendered in different shades of green; the images might reflect the repetitive, and perhaps neurotic, investigative intent of looking for traces of evidence, or they may indicate a mere testing of different printing processes. But they are also, quite simply, pictures of grass, on display here as consumer (non-)options or (anti-)products, relatives of Warhol’s series of Campbell’s Soup Cans (offered in 1962 as multiple flavors on shelves, like those in in grocery-store aisles).

And, quite crucially, all of Harrison’s images have been placed upon pseudo walls, either hanging from the ceiling or held in place precariously with the aid of bright yellow ropes and forest-green garbage bags filled with unknown (presumably heavy) material. While it is intriguing to think of refuse as the supportive substance for Harrison’s exhibition design, the bags and ropes help to facilitate a speculative, sculptural stage for viewing. I wander and wonder about what, who, and where the worthy content is. But one thing is certain: that I have strayed from a seamlessly packaged, nostalgia-soaked, tourist experience about the death of a president. The yellow lines of rope occur at assertively diagonal angles across the space; they must be acknowledged, along with those precarious “walls,” as display surfaces here divorced from the notion of load-bearing, monumental architecture. Any centered sense of self-awareness, of a clear-cut narrative, is further complicated by considering the material realities of twine, drywall, and green plastic—along with the activities of suspending, hoisting, spanning, and extending—as subjects in themselves. Sheetrock and aluminum studs are exposed, along with an array of miscellaneous things that help the installation resist being cast as a conventionally museological, tourist experience: water bottles for offices (perhaps belonging to Bard or a hospital?); a bundle of wooden slats; a brand-new “Rock Box” cooler placed upon its cardboard container (suitable for a luncheon on a Grassy Knoll?); along with shipping paraphernalia that may speak to the processing, installation, and transport of (art) goods. On the floor lies a baking tray; instead of cookies, Harrison has scattered olive pits resembling animal droppings. Nearby is a snow shovel, with a green scoop serving as a tray of sorts, offering up a decaying, neatly rolled-up snakeskin: another snake in the grass.

Combining an incoherent range of references to JFK, the Dealey Plaza area, and a lot more, Harrison’s display does not serve up sentimentalizing entertainment. There are no heroes to empathize with, no nostalgic flavors to enjoy. The tour guide is replaced by hangers-on, stumbling around. The meandering installation expresses the divide between our selves and history, and operates in tension with narratives designed for spoon-fed consumption, about villains and heroic protagonists (e.g., Jim Garrison, as portrayed in Oliver Stone’s film JFK). And yet her work strikes deeply ambivalent notes, wavering between an indiscriminately curious pursuit of experience (i.e., just hanging out at the Grassy Knoll, staring with your camera at the grass), morbid fantasy (about sensational, violent death), and conspiracy lore (organized crime, anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, and Texas oilmen). Harrison’s approach depends on the role that photographic experience plays in facilitating such fictions and fantasies, allowing them to stray from official accounts. The American brand of cultural enlightenment is so often based on the re-living or re-creation of tragic events. An assassination site becomes the object of fascination, a destination for history buffs or run-of-the-mill tourists, and a pilgrimage site for the purpose of reflection, for those wishing to “share” in the collective mourning of a nation. Grief for a head of state may mellow like a fine wine over the decades, perhaps to be savored by those wishing to detect alternating hints of irony and sincerity. But in the end all that remains are trash bags, photos of grass, and olive pits. As with Wallace, Harrison’s approach to the tourist experience is satirical and ironic in tone: suspicious of moralizing conclusions—which shut down speculation and questioning—and those who tend to pronounce them, including museums.⁴ One such institution is the Sixth Floor Museum—housed in the Texas School Book Depository building—which employs hundreds of photographs, films, artifacts, and other hard evidence to educate tour groups about the assassination and its aftermath. In contrast, Harrison’s satirical treatment is made possible in part through acts of indirect borrowing and mediation—as in the case of photos of parts of photos—reflecting a perspective that feels decentered and arbitrary.⁵

Worth recalling in this regard are Cady Noland’s assemblages, which similarly satirized American mythologies, including those based on moments when a disastrous event became a spectacle, or when people are transformed into media icons. As in the case of her series of Trashed Mailbox and Misc. Spill works from the 1980s and early 1990s, Noland’s practice did indeed develop in the wake of specific American events—the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the brutal treatment of protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and Watergate—phenomena that threatened the country’s image as a united, just, and invincible society. Like Harrison, Noland offered haphazard arrangements that combine iconic images (flags, celebrity photos, references to tabloids) with found objects that may initially seem unrelated, including those from the consumer world (grocery basket, shopping cart, beer cans), along with elements expressing the notions of repression, impairment, and debilitation (walkers, handcuffs, metal barricades). Crucially, only some of these components may be definitively identified with American contexts, and so the works manage to resonate in more dispersed and far-reaching ways. Unlike Harrison, however, Noland’s works are often devoted in relatively focused ways to antiheroes with a cult status, like Oswald and Patty Hearst. Hearst’s multiple personae, which ranged from fairy-tale princess to terrorist, were subject to media exploitation; transferring silkscreen enlargements of media imagery onto brushed aluminum supports, Noland portrayed her in these various guises in a manner that runs closer to the specificity of portraiture.

In Snake in the Grass the subject—the “main event”— may only be accessed indirectly, within a fragmented and disjointed formal frame, populated by “characters” and “artifacts” that seem utterly inadequate as informational sources or institutionally prescribed stories about what happened in Dallas, why it matters, and how we should remember it. The work reads best as a satirical statement, meant in part to provoke unexpected contemplation about the cultural motivations for delivering “JFK” as a packaged product, chock-full of national and sentimental pride. Indeed this may be a far more revealing and challenging “snake in the grass” to consider. As with much of “Consider the Lobster,” I read Harrison’s work as a conglomeration of fragments caught up in the process of losing currency, offering a display with tentative and tenuous authority, as infotainment or anything else.⁶ It is crucial to consider the abstract and material qualities acquired by things when they lose their transmissibility and comprehensibility—the fraying edges of labels and hanging walls, the sheen of green trash bags, staring at the shoes of a couple of guys hanging around on the Grassy Knoll, only partly posing in the camera’s sights—striking alternating notes of absurdity and alienation. It provokes reflection on our predicament, on our diminished capacity to make links between old and new, with confidence or assurance.⁷ This lack is rooted in a culture of incessant accumulation, of products and experiences, which promise “currency” and fulfillment but never really deliver the goods.

Another of Harrison’s installations, Perth Amboy (originally shown ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rachel Harrison: “Consider the Lobster”
• 2 Isa Genzken: “OIL”
• 3 Geoffrey Farmer: “Me into Many”
• 4 Liz Magor: “The Mouth and Other Storage Facilities”
• Conclusion
• Index