The conquest of order

Michael Paraskos

There is a sense of uncertainty in visiting Rachel Harrison』s exhibition at the Whitechapel. The glass doors to the main gallery are covered with sheets of newspaper, so the initial assumption is they have been blacked out for an exhibition changeover. Perhaps this is also an oblique reference by Harrison to the astonishing environments created in the early twentieth century by the German artist Kurt Schwitters, his Mertzbilden, in which whole rooms would be transformed into alternative worlds through the hanging of newspapers. But perhaps it is not.

Having established from the warder that the Harrison exhibition is still on, you enter the gallery and are immediately confronted by a piece made from a crocheted shawl, fluorescent safety jacket, roughly painted plinth and hay bales. There is nothing wrong with using such materials, as art can genuinely be formed from anything. But it has to be formed. In this piece, called Haycation, Harrison does not seem to understand that the primary purpose of art is to form order in the face of chaos. Looking at Haycation what we see instead is an assemblage that is unresolved and incoherent. It fails to establish its own pocket of space, a unique world that is distinct and distinctive from the chaos of the actual world. As such it simply adds to the chaos of the world, and fails to function as art.

This problem is also illustrated by a neighbouring piece, called Green Beans. This work is arbitrary, as shown by the addition of a pile of broad beans to the top of the rough-hewn plaster block, which seem to serve no other purpose than to give us an odd title. The block itself is dappled with splodges of metallic spray paint, which have the visual effect of breaking up the surface and therefore dissolving the form. Again, instead of forming order in the face of chaos, we are given yet more chaos. And this seems to be the general principle running through the entire show.

It would be charitable to suggest this fundamental misunderstanding of art can be blamed on Harrison』s tutors at art school. Harrison clearly has a love of materials, as shown by the diverse range of them used in this exhibition, and that love should have been nurtured. It is the first step to a genuine understanding of the aesthetic nature of art. But it is only a first step, and Harrison still needs to learn a simple lesson in controlling the materials she uses by imposing order on them.

Of course a cleverer art critic than I might argue that Harrison is making us confront chaos, and as such she is undermining our certainty about the world. The problem is I do not really need people like Harrison to tell me the world is chaotic or to undermine my certainty. The morning before I visited this show I watched the Al Jazeera television news and was able to see endless examples of real chaos and real uncertainty. From art I expect something else. Not necessarily comfort, but certainly not more meaningless chaos.

Until June 20th