Rachel Harrison

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  print January 2023

  CLAES OLDENBURG (1929–2022)

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2022
  
  Woke up and ate a Ray Gun. Dreamt COMING TO AMERICA was on my T-shirt, actually a wife-beater, people stopped to ask me why. I could stand in the middle of the street with this T-shirt, I say over and over again. Downtown a snow-covered pawnshop, curves and grooves in the artificial light beaming soft pillow icicles carved with a lasso. Landed at Dan’s to eat vegan meatballs with Sousee, Brod, and Nony. We all had more than some wine. Still hungry walking home stopped for french fries.

  FRIDAY
  
  Rodin exhibition: dull premise, loved the drawings. Giant walking legs Combine—separate

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  passages September 23, 2022

  Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022)

  TUESDAY AUGUST 23, 2022

  Woke up and ate a Ray Gun. Dreamt Coming to America was on my T-shirt, actually a wife-beater, people stopped to ask me why. I could stand in the middle of the street with this T-shirt, I say over and over again. Downtown a snow-covered pawn shop, curves and grooves in the artificial light beaming soft pillow icicles carved with a lasso. Landed at Dan’s to eat vegan meatballs with Sousee, Brod, and Nony. We all had more than some wine. Still hungry walking home stopped for French fries.

  Friday, August 26

  Rodin exhibition: dull premise, loved the drawings. Giant walking legs

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  print September 2014

  Rachel Harrison

  THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES

  I DON’T LIKE BOB HOPE but I might like Bob Hope, or at least I did when I saw him at the Whitney’s Koons retrospective. His head is so big, like a bobblehead, but fixed in a creepy stainless-steel grin. He has a lot of presence for a little guy, and I wondered about the tabletop scale in the oeuvre of an artist where size really does matter. Maybe he’s meant to mimic the real Oscar that Bob joked about never getting. Although I knew he entertained our troops, Bob Hope wasn’t quite on my radar, so I thought I’d look into it, see what he’s really an icon of. In 1986 (the

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  print September 2010

  Paul Thek

  “PAUL THEK: DIVER, A RETROSPECTIVE”
  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
  October 21, 2010–January 9, 2011
  Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky
  

  SOMEHOW IT’S FITTING that one of the largest holdings of Paul Thek’s art is in the collection of the archbishop of Cologne. After all, most of the artist’s work has a pretty heavy religious component, and touches, one way or another, on the issue of faith. No wonder Thek left New York in 1967, spending nearly all of the next decade in Europe––it’s not like these topics were weighing on the minds of most art-world insiders at the time. Or

  
  
  

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  print December 2006

  THEIR FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS OF THE YEAR

  To take stock of the past year, Artforum contacted an international group of artists to find out which exhibitions were, in their eyes, the very best of 2006.

  AMY SILLMAN

  “Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul” (Museum of Modern Art, New York) In a rather cynical mode, I trudged uptown one day last spring to see the Munch show at MoMA for what I thought would be a cliché-ridden overview of Nordic gloom-goth. What I got instead was a hard punch to the gut: powerful color, radical ideas about the depiction of memory as space, paintings with emotional vanishing points rather than rational optical

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  print September 2005

  Rachel Harrison on Paul McCarthy

  I HATE A PARADE. I hate the twined feelings of exclusion and obligation––like I don’t belong or that “belonging” involves accepting the passive role of watcher as the scripted procession rolls by. I don’t care to stand on the sidelines beholding a spectacle in regimented time slots, corny framed narratives, forced good spirits, and propagandizing themes. Parades are crowd control under the guise of celebration: You have to believe in “control” to participate at all. So why did I make a last-minute decision to attend a Sunday-morning parade celebrating Paul McCarthy’s “LaLa Land Parody Paradise”

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  print October 2004

  Rachel Harrison

  EIGHT HOURS AND FIVE MINUTES IS A LONG TIME TO SPEND watching a movie. That’s how long Empire is. I made it through six hours once on my birthday. I knew Warhol didn’t really expect this of me, but I wanted to see what it was like, to treat his film like regular cinema and get lost in the movie. Looking can be meditation, internalized and Zen, and it can also be an escape that takes you away from the real world for a while. Since I had read about Warhol films before I actually saw them, I thought of them as actions, not as objects. The idea was paramount, not the product. But when I finally saw

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  print September 2004

  ELECTORAL COLLAGE: A PORTFOLIO

  FOLLOWING THE RELEASE OF THE INDELIBLE Abu Ghraib photographs this past spring, Richard Serra produced Stop Bush, a print that he has distributed widely both in art venues and in mainstream publications, as well as on the Internet. Serra insists that the piece is not an artwork but rather a “way to just get the message out,” a tack that inspired Artforum to invite other artists to take up the cause. Our brief was simple and open-ended: We asked fourteen artists to make an original contribution to these pages on the occasion of the American presidential election. A few, like Tom Sachs (whose