On my way to Rachel Harrison's Brooklyn studio, I had one thing that I was going to bug her about: clowns.

Two groups of clowns in particular: the hedonistic clowns of '70s hard-rock, KISS, and the Gacy-inspired abject n-metallers, Slipknot. Having both made appearances in Harrison's work as often as some 20th-century artists like Andy Warhol and Frank Stellaartists who appear in name only or in Lawler-esque photographic fragmentsI figured it might be a way to explore the cultural references that circulate on the other side of the gallery's walls. One of Harrison's most important contributions to the cultural dialogue surrounding contemporary art in the roughly 20 years that she has exhibited is her non-hierachical use of cultural idioms. These idioms, one side of the coin, inform art's existence as a gallery-based, museological experience but, on the other cheaperside of the same coin, idioms that inform the aesthetic experiences attached to America's far more psychologically dominant commercial culture. Yet as these aesthetic opposites are presented with neither one above the other, Harrison lays bare the inapparent correspondence that communes between these estranged cultural forms one is just as likely to find a clown in a museum as you might a masterpiece in a carnival, so to speak. After talking with Harrison at length about America's clown industryboth KISS and Slipknot have mobilized armies of consumers to purchase their floods of merchandise, it becomes clear that many of the initial influences lumped onto her work, who unfailingly range from Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol to Franz West and Martin Kippenberger, don't quite provide a complete map for navigating the complex emotional responses embedded throughout Harrison's materially and semiotically intricate referential networks. Which is not to say there is no rapport between Harrison and these canonical artists, as there remains a considerable one. Limiting Harrison's practice to an exclusively museological interpretation often obscures the cross-cultural and anthropological examinations core to Harrison's novel approach. While her work's irreverent appearance easily fits into the global(-ized) dialogue governing sculpture's current "unmonumentality," that her work also acts as a communicative relay to the cringe-worthy mass aesthetics whose refined exclusion stipulates contemporary art is not to be ignored. This is, no doubt, the reason why when I queried Harrison for her primary influences, none of the previously mentioned artists immediately entered the discussion. Rather it was an unexpected collection of conceptual, performance and video artists: Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, to name a few. And after talking clowns for an hour, it was only a matter of time before Bruce Nauman's video installation Clown Torture (1987) entered the discussion. With its documentation of 6 "entertainers" enduring not only a torturous gauntlet of repeated tasks outlined by Nauman but also the scrutiny of the viewer's mediated gaze, one must wonder if they have found an art historical shortcut to accessing the complicated network of references, puns and associations of Harrison's artistic aggregates. The parallels between Nauman's violently interrogated clowns and the oft-idealized museological art object scrutinized by Harrison are undeniable: they are both are here for our enjoyment, whether they like it or not. Another entertainer scrutinized by their viewing public surprisingly mentioned by Harrison during our conversation was Karen Carpenter. More specifically, the Barbie doll who "played" Karen Carpenter in Todd Haynes' controversial first film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)a film that garnered both acclaim and infamy for depicting the tragic life of this squeaky-clean pop singer entirely with the popular plastic figurines in place of human actors. When discussing her favorite aspects of Superstar, Harrison emphasized that in order to give the doll a greater likeness to the anorexic star,

Haynes reportedly had to sand down the Barbie's arms and legslimbs whose skinniness most people presume to be readymade. Even when watching the film, the visual gag of substituting a doll for a human actor, especially in a highly dramatic context fraught with tragedy, first elicits giggles given such a conceit's ironic wit. However, the "dollness" of Haynes' actors quickly fades as the pop narrative's tragedy mounts so that, by the film's finale, Karen's tragedy is doubly amplified by the haunting absence of a living performer. That a slight maimed consumer good is as adept at triggering an audience's sympathy certainly reveals much about the profound psychological interaction at work between objects that scream "kitsch" and the subjects who consume them. I, for one, never thought of Haynes' film when considering Harrison's Barbie-centric work, Untitled (Becky Friend of Barbie) (2001). Well, not a Barbie, rather Barbie's handicapped "friend," "Becky." Untitled (Becky Friend of Barbie), a component of Harrison's immersive installation Perth Amboy (2001), rests within a labyrinth of upright cardboard sheets and a photographic series of a suburban New Jersey window where the Virgin Mary was believed to have been sighted. Included among three other worksall riffing on the consecrated museological use of pedestalsBecky is one of four different figurines who contemplate a different aesthetic object: a Confucian monk scrutinizes a "Scholar's Rock" (in this case, one of Harrison's signature sculptural masses humorously painted the same color as the scholar's robe); a family of dalmatians consider a mangled business envelope as a towering abstract sculpture; an Indian chief studies a humorously small easel painting, is he pondering the easel's status within our post-Greenbergian contemporary context? As for the wheelchair-bound Becky, she is grinning into a photograph that Harrison had taken of a film studio's vastly unpopulated green screen. With Superstar's canny object-subject substitutions now in mind, Harrison's Untitled (Becky Friend of Barbie) appears as an update of Caspar David Friedrich's romantic masterpiece, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), for a world whose claims of handicap-accessibility and political correctness seem increasingly titular, a fantasy projected on to the worlds' manifold surfaces. However, where Friedrich's famous painting depicted a scenario suffused with the romantic ideal of sublimity, that ambiguous sensation of terror cloaked in exhilaration, Harrison's 21st-century remake/remodel swaps out the sublime for the sublimated, where trauma cloaks contentment, comedy masks tragedy. Or in Becky's specific case, the de-sublimated, as this smiling doll appears in gleeful thrall to the digital age's most prominent aesthetic void, this abstract media surface stripped bare of its projected fantasies. Harrison's non-hierachicial use of kitsch within the highly governed contexts of contemporary art finds one of its unlikeliest creative precedents in one of her former Wesleyan college professors: the renowned experimental composer and musician Alvin Lucier. Taking John Cage's non-traditional use of everyday objects as his starting point, Lucier has employed non-musicaland potentially kitschyobjects to realize a number of his innovative compositions. Sometimes alone and in other instances accompanying traditional instrumentation, Lucier's repertoire of non-musical instrumentation has included ping pong balls, carbon dioxide-filled balloons, an electronic bird, a cooking pan or a teapot, to name a fewobjects that certainly wouldn't be out of place nestled in one of Harrison's sculptural aggregates. Perhaps Lucier's most notable contribution to the historical dialogue initiated by Cage's use of silence as a compositional tool is the way Lucier transforms these customary objects into devices that sonically articulate the very silence that surrounds thema phenomenon experienced in the pioneering Bird and Person Dyning (1975), for example. Lucier literally amplifies the inapparent sensory bondsvia normally inaudible resonant frequenciesthat are always present, yet rarely

experienced, between the object's performative silence and the corresponding world in which it exists. Yet the sound of this sensory correspondence is not one of lyrical sonority, of an etherial harmony akin to the supposed music of celestial spheres. Rather Lucier's spatially-articulating sonic interrelations are a highly choreographed version of the musical scenario familiar to anyone who has ever been to a rock concert: a musician either accidentally or intentionallyturns their instrument (the input signal) toward their amplifier (the output) and unleashes a banshee-like wail of ear-splitting noise, a shrill dissonance better known as feedback. And thanks to the fetished imagery associated with commercial music, the formal omission of this silence's ever-present space from commercial music's aural reality takes on a highly allegorical tone, pointing very much so to the highly repressed bond between one cultural signal and another. One of Harrison's new sculptures, Siren Serenade (2010), deals with both music and the signals through which it finds its aesthetic formyet in an aesthetic space most often construed as "sculpture." Named for the Gene Krupa record nestled in its side, Harrison's eerily black new work most noticeably includes a They Live-esque satellite dish cropping out from its top. What are the transmissions the work receives? Is it the very siren's serenade stuck into the other side of the work? Or is it perhaps a signal beyond the work's immediate sculptural space, where the sculpture isn't an autonomous creation but rather a by-product of this mediated correspondence; that the sculpture didn't sprout the readymade objects adorning it but rather the readymade objects sprouted the sculpture between them. There is a great similarity between the mythological serenade invoked by the work's titlethat is the seductive song of the sirens repressed by Odysseus and his crew so as not to veer fatally off courseto the same inapparent aural space that can warp a pop song into something physically unsettling; the repressed aural space that, when amplified, can veer a commercial ditty off its course, crashing it into the listener's ears. Much can also be said of Harrison's dissonant interrelation of readymade kitsch with the readymade forms of museological art. It is as if Harrison's input signal of silent curios swoops in front of the white-walled gallery output signal, loudly magnifying the inapparent correspondence between these two seemingly irreconcilable cultural forms. Given the formal similarity between Lucier's and Cage's musical silence and the visual silence of the green cinematic surface-turned-void that en-trances Becky, Harrison's soundless readymades and found objects are certainly deceiving appearance wise. As, within Harrison's critical oeuvre, the museological distinctions like "sculpture," "readymade" and "kitsch" that are piled onto the interpretive surfaces of Harrison's sculptural and non-sculptural objects are exposed as noisy special effects fundamental to the market appeal of the big-budget blockbuster better known as contemporary art. Sam Pulitzer is a writer and an artist living in New York. Rachel Harrison was born in 1966 in New York where she lives and works. Selected solo shows: 2010: Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Whitechapel Gallery, London. 2009: Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum, Bard College; Portikus, Frankfurt (DE). 2008: Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Le Consortium, Dijon. 2007: Migros Museum, Zurich; Greene Naftali, New York. 2006: Christian Nagel, Cologne (with Michael Krebber); The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (with Scot Lyall); LACE, Los Angeles. 2005: Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. 2004: SFMOMA, San Francisco; Camden Art Centre, London; Arndt & Partner, Berlin; Greene Naftali, New York. 2003:

Bergen Kunsthall (NO). 2002: Milwaukee Art Museum (US); Arndt & Partner, Berlin. 2001: Greene Naftali, New York. 1999: Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. 1997: Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. 1996: Arena Gallery, Brooklyn. Selected group shows: 2010: The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, MoMA, New York. 2009: Venice Biennale; Tate Triennial. 2008: Front Room: Dieter Roth and Rachel Harrison, Baltimore Museum of Art; Whitney Biennial, New York. 2007: Paul Thek in the Context of Todays Contemporary Art, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Unmonumental, New Museum, New York; The Hamsterwheel, Arsenale di Venezia, Venice / Festival de Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse (FR); CASM, Barcelona / Malm Konsthall, Sweden. 2006: The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Berlin Biennale. 2005: Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; When Humor Becomes Painful, Migros Museum, Zurich. 2004: Speaking with Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection, Guggenheim Museum, New York. 2003: Venice Biennale. 2002: Whitney Biennial, New York; Stories, Haus der Kunst, Munich. 2001: Off the Wall, Gallery 400 University of Illinois, Chicago. 2000: Walker Evans & Company, MoMA, New York / J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Greater New York, P.S.1, New York. 1999: DOPE. An XXX-Mas Show, American Fine Arts, Co., New York; Still Life, State University of New York College at Old Westbury. 1998: New Photography 14, curated by Darsie Alexander, MoMA, New York. 1997: Current Undercurrent: Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art. 1995: Looky Loo, Sculpture Center, New York.