- RACHEL HARRISON
CAR
STEREO
PARKWAY
- Installation View Transmission Gallery, Scotland April 16
to May 14, 2005
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Review by Mick Peter
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The
space was decorated with garlands of gaudy foil bunting, the kind
you expect to find demarcating the boundaries of a used car
dealership. The routes through this garish noise were determined by
boxes of various shapes and sizes. Fonts emblazoned on these jumbled
cardboard building blocks invited the piecing together of a
sculptural poison pen letter. Any possible narrative connections
were hopelessly fleeting. Reframed by the act of collecting these
materials in the locality of the gallery the texts of lowly crisp
packaging became exotic and ‘foreign’. Here Rachel Harrison's Car
Stereo Parkway (2005) Orchestrated the improvised grafting of
objects to other objects, a tactic of shifting connections similar
to the brutality of a ‘cut and shut job’ (the practice of welding
together written-off automobiles to make a new and illegal whole.
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A wall
of these boxes greeted the viewer, and from underneath this edifice
a pair of glam platform boots emerged. The crocodile skin surface
partially transformed these disembodied appendages into an urban
version of a snake in a woodpile. Only on navigating your way round
this obstacle did the boots’ position seem to be the result of an
accident or possibly a hugely wayward stage dive. Like the
unfortunate carriers of extravagantly large panes of glass in TV car
chases, the boxes appeared to be designed to absorb an immanent
impact. Their stacking and arrangement in the space seemed to be
all about latent energy, and the objects lurking behind and around
the wall offered some confirmation of this theory. As if a toxic
tanker had slewed across the road and spewed its radioactive load of
coloured gloop over the innocent bystanders, a barely recognisable
figure, wearing a blobby red mantle, occupied the corner of the
gallery. Sprouting from what I surmised was the head end was a
fantastic, tumescent, prosthetic nose, replete with elastic
retaining strap. This schnozzle was reminiscent of Willie Murphy’s
Tricky Dick drawings from the late sixties, sagging male
genitalia as Richard Nixon’s droopy jowls and bulbous nose.
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The
Watergate era informed much of the show. The perception of the
public personas of slightly ludicrous individuals, constructed
or otherwise, was a repeated motif. Pompous rock band Kiss were
entrusted with carrying a substantial part of this dimension of
the work. Harrison’s approach was once again esoteric in
approaching the familiar heavy metal genre. The slightly
hermetic tactic of her transubstantiation of the received
meaning about the band was both disorientating and thrilling.
Although most people are familiar with the slightly ludicrous
spectacle of Gene Simmons and co. Harrison’s more tangential
reframing showed a Kiss most people would barely recognise in a
video projection from atop an upturned box plinth, . Heavily
edited footage juxtaposed interview sequences of abject hilarity
with Harrison’s ‘adverts’, images of cleaning materials shown,
like the boxes, as part of her dreamlike anti-logic. The result
was one of the most bewildering reassignments of domesticity
since Queen’s I Want To Break Free video (1983), in
which high camp spilled over into a cross dressing stadium rock
band doing domestic chores. Harrison’s video sequences seemed to
be selected on the basis of maximum graininess making a kitsch
music phenomenon seem like a bootleg that could be of great
importance to the discerning collector.
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Bonus tracks, so to speak, were provided by the
show’s expansion into the basement of the gallery, where one encountered a stage
maquette and an unlikely audience for the whole extravaganza. Potatoes,
sprouting away merrily in the gloom, stood in for a muddy and adulant festival
crowd slowly going to seed with their heavily made-up hard-rocking heroes.
Harrison’s process of excessive repetitiveness reminded me of revelations about
Stanley Kubrick’s estate after the director’s death, and of one anecdote in
particular. Journalist Jon Ronson, on entering Kubrick’s library, was amazed by
the number of books. Only when he took a closer look did he realise, ”Bloody
hell. Every book in this room is about Napoleon”. If Napoleon were substituted
for Kiss, a model of Harrison’s joined-up thinking could be constructed. The
mass of materials and the repetition of families of objects in her show were a
device reflecting not a compulsive act, but rather a kind of Brechtian
alienation effect, the startling feeling of having the everyday represented
while revealing all the mechanisms behind its enactment.
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