EthicalDative

Installation view of “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” a mid-career survey of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Credit…Charlie Rubin for The New York Times.

In her “Life Hack” exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Rachel Harrison corrals artifacts inside a circle of chairs facing away. Like eat my dust. Irony? Wit? Truculence? Genius? Contempt? Here’s how Holland Carter talks about it:

… I’ve learned that “life hack” is internetese for myriad improvised tricks or techniques devised to make the practical crises of daily existence — how to remove ketchup stains from a shirt, how to relax with strangers — more manageable. No doubt some of these interventions work better than others, but the fact that they’re a popular phenomenon, a thing, suggests that a lot of us are looking around and seeing chaos, and trying, with whatever panache we can muster, to make it productive. Ms. Harrison’s art is really good at that.

(Holland Carter, “Peas, Socks and Sidewalk-Trash Sculptures: Just Keep Looking,” NYTimes, 11-14-19)

I’m drawn to Harrison’s “Brownie,” which scans as a queasy skeleton gagging itself.

“Brownie,” from 2005, is a Giacomettian column embedded with life-size skulls. Credit…Charlie Rubin for The New York Times.

(c) 2019 JMN

Edith Gregor Halpert, the pioneering art dealer, wearing a brooch and ring designed for her by Charles Sheeler, in a photograph for Life magazine in 1952. She is joined by artists she was promoting that year: Charles Oscar, Robert Knipschild, Jonah Kinigstein, Wallace Reiss, Carroll Cloar and Herbert Katzman. Credit…Estate of Louis Faurer; Time-Life Archive/Getty Images; via The Jewish Museum.

… Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), was a formidable, feisty and sometimes manipulative self-starter with an ecumenical eye, a passion for art and an inborn instinct for sales and promotion. Halpert was central to establishing the market for between-the-wars American art and thought that everyone should own art. She liked to keep prices low, would sell on the installment plan and staged annual holiday sales. She also thought that anyone could make art, an idea that was crucial to the folk art revival of the 1930s. For her time, she was unusually open to artists of color and, to some extent, women.

(Roberta Smith, “A Forgotten Pioneer’s Art World Is Resurrected at the Jewish Museum,” NYTimes, 11-7-19)

Halpert’s low-balling of price, and her notion that “everyone should own art,” mark her as a visionary for her time and a relic for ours.

(c) 2029 JMN