Rachel Harrison at Greene Naftali

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Always thought the Harrison crust blobs were symbolic shorthand for "sculpture." Their lumps confused authentic and a stand-in for it, like a movie prop modernism. And collected detritus like a provisional gum. They were too stupid to be real, too caveman to be serious. But eventually the movie prop becomes real, or tries to, and we're left considering it. Which may be the eventual resurgence of interest in Harrison, when we stand to think all the fake art we are being forced to consider. 

see too: The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense

Rachel Harrison at Galerie Meyer Kainer

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An information processing app asked to process our world. The premise reasonable. The results are deeply midcareer. Literal. Instead of a Terminator HUD, we get a generalized mess, abstraction. Harrison has a struggle, recompressing the diamonds after the explosion of her star, the mall, our world. But every group show looks like you blew up a mall today. Harrison's influence is prevalent. CAWD has written more about her mostly through other artists. Her work explains a lot of other artists. Our exploded semio-wasteland. We're all just garbage pickers now in Harrison's ruin, even Harrison. A trash become good god. 

Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

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The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse and short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding.

Condensing the mall into the diamonds of its peak 2006-08 moment we have to admit it was a pretty neat trick, the things just felt like collapse within singular objects.

The fallout of [this] semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

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"so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance between viewer and object is always already filled up and occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of appearances." -Kelsey on Harrison

Whereas Harrison's objects had once incorporated the conditions governing the mall-like sign-systems overtaking public space, the all but destroyed semio-coherence of advertising illogic into art's poetic fissures structuring a grand palace on non-sequitur, have mutated, over-inflating into a cartoon version of a Harrison object itself, a big throbbing tumescence of a lumpen art object.

See too: David Lieske at MUMOK, “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.