DEPTH JUMP TO SECOND BOX: RACHEL HARRISON

Depth Jump to Second Box   Designed to facilitate a variety of business interactions, the basic conference room is by nature a space of latent potential. Though still in use today, these blank, dry-erase infrastructures contain an aspect of outdated futurism. Their promised flexibility seems to lag behind a world of commerce that happens virtually and without discussion. Nonetheless, these table-centric spaces persist, raising the question: How might these seemingly arcane architectures be repurposed? A ping-pong tournament? After-hours Karaoke parties?  Rachel Harrison uses a range of “materials,” from store-bought objects to social mores, as fodder for formal humor and cultural commentary. Her latest exhibitions have included upright sculptures donning selfie sticks, parachute chords anchored to gallery walls that act as framing devices, and drawings that pair Amy Winehouse and art-historical figures. Abstract and painted forms, posed with readymade accoutrements, recur throughout her work, which ranges from sculpture to photography, drawing to video. Harrison has recently enlisted cardboard boxes, commonly used for postal delivery, to change shape in the service of art. Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler is situated on the 4th floor of an office block building at Berlin Alexanderplatz. For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Harrison will make new work for the gallery space and an adjacent, fully equipped conference room used by other businesses in the building.     Exhibition

Text:   Rachel Harrison. Express your Fitness in Everyday Life 

We cannot step beyond the everyday. The marvelous can only continue to exist in fiction and the illusions that people share.  It is assumed that the work must “speak for itself,” as if the divine dogma of modernism were able to deliver a clear and universal message to a uniform “family of man.” I’ve cracked cases like this with nothing to go on, just by getting out and walking around at random. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve picked out long ago. All these fragments of perception that lend themselves to pictures release something because they strike a chord, and that chord is the artist’s life, which, like ours, keeps changing. Two things are happening at once. That’s all. It is an equivalence that is entirely ordinary. This atmosphere ends up making you better as an individual, everybody knows your name, everybody loves you, and you’re part of something bigger than just getting a workout. There is no escape. And yet we wish to have the illusion of escape as near to hand as possible. So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. In affluent regions of the globe, this has occurred amid the dissolving of most of the borders between private and professional time, between work and consumption. It is a fact that night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. In order to stimulate competition, a powerful injection of aggressive energy is necessary, a sort of permanent electrocution. It’s emotional, it’s raw, it’s intense, it’s incredible, it’s awesome, the reward for doing well is the ability to express your fitness in everyday life.

The acceleration of novelty production is a disabling of collective memory. What finally occupies attention is the management of the technical conditions: all the expanding determinations of delivery, display, format, storage, upgrades, and accessories. The interference of all silence. The sound of a machine, a scratch, dirt or its image. People walk through the door and say ‘hey, where are all the machines?’ We’re the machines.i Kirsty Bell _ iLefebvre, Henri; Gonzalez-Torres, Felix; Burroughs, William S.; Perec, Georges; Taussig, Michael; White, Ian; CrossFit®; Crary, Jonathan; Eddie, Crazy, consumer electronics NY; Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’.