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Women, of Coarse
John Haberin New York City
Rachel Feinstein and Rachel Harrison
Rachel Feinstein opened at the Jewish Museum the morning after Halloween, with decorations still visible in the windows of the magnificent town houses up the street. Everything inside might well belong to the same Upper East Side luxuriance, with its echoes of art deco and Baroque excess. Everything, too, might be just as filmy, as ghostly, and as cheap. How else can an artist or a woman today become a goddess—or a witch?
It takes a lot to get Rachel Harrison to leave her studio, maybe even more than a miracle. She heard tell in 2000 that residents of Perth Amboy, just across the river in New Jersey, had seen the Virgin Mary in streaks on their windows. Harrison, too, has treasured dirt and grease long enough to count them a miracle. Still, I could not swear that she made it to the scene for her photos of a woman at her window. They blend right in with sunsets as seen from her studio that year, in photos so coarse that they could pass for Polaroids. But then coarseness is at the core for her of American culture—and at the core of her art at the Whitney. 
Halloween: the morning after
Actually, Rachel Feinstein considers herself a triple goddess or witch—as, in the show's title, "Maiden, Mother, Crone." She considers it the plight of a woman in pretty much any era. If New York now is a bit more "neopagan" along with her, she can only aspire to keep up with its diversity. She worked as a model while finding her way to a career in art, and she is still only thinly disguised. The alter egos in her sculpture include a Madonna, Eve, Alice in Wonderland, a flower girl, satyrs, and a page out of a lingerie catalog for Victoria's Secrets. If they range from the New and Old Testaments to fairy tales and consumer culture, her artistic references range just as widely.
The male guardians at the entrance pick up Michael, the archangel, in a painting by Guido Reni and Stephen, the first Christian martyr, in any number of versions. A crucifixion blows up a small sculpture from around 1500. By the time the show is over she will have riffed on eighteenth-century porcelain and portraiture. She can work in clashing wood planes like Ursula von Rydingsvard, with whom she studied at Columbia University, or in white polymer and plaster, the better to undermine its purity. Her spattered colors resemble sculpture for Harrison at the Whitney, as does her fondness for pop culture. Still, if popular culture is going to take her down, it is going to take Western art along with it.
It will do so, though, with pleasure. Feinstein also studied with Kiki Smith, who believes in naked bodies and rough edges, but she has no patience for female essentialism. For her, each stage in a woman's life is another role assignment and another disguise, and she has been growing into them. She had her breakthrough in performance in 1994, sleeping right through the exhibition. Her performance alludes as well to the origins of the tale, in which Sleeping Beauty's supposed rescuer was her rapist. On video as Spring and Winter, spring withholds its promise, but the work's clumsy camera angles and blurred focus find a recompense in speckled lights like winter snow.
Besides, if she seems to spend an awful lot of time with children's books, she is a mother now, and so are the majority of her sculptures. One of Mister Time began as a drawing by her son. (She brought the same improvised black line to her 2014 summer sculpture in Madison Square Park.) She is also less accepting of tragic endings than ever. A broken-down black carriage may never get Cinderella back from the ball, and the dress of a shepherdess still has a bleeding edge. Yet her more colorful women are looking more and more proudly like nuts and sluts.
The exhibition catalog stresses Feinstein's eclecticism through conversations with others. It counts Sarah Sze, Lisa Yuskavage, and Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer, as mutual influences along with von Rydingsvard. Sze must have taught her to bring the mess of her studio into the gallery and Yuskavage to treat mature women without embarrassment. In borrowing from Victoria's Secrets, she has shed the model's extreme slimness. She must like, though, that the model served as a "snow angel," like Feinstein's own sleeping beauty. She has also painted on mirrors and incorporated mirrors into a shattered tower, because a model like that would have spent a lot of time in front of one.
As curator, Kelly Taxter treats a midcareer retrospective as less a progression than a theater, with the exhibition design by Annabelle Selldorf her stage set. After the guardians and the tower come a room to either side for sculpture mostly on pedestals. The street wall becomes a wooden panorama of Miami, where Feinstein grew up, art deco touches intact. The far wall of the other room becomes a painted panorama of Rome, no more in ruins than her women. Between the two rooms comes an alcove for a few more sculptures and the early video, plus shelves for sculptural models. The whole goes by quickly, too, because the artist has only limited means to slow a visitor down, but taken as a whole it becomes a woman's real and fictive lives.
More than a miracle?
Rachel Harrison has her visions, as do most artists as part of their job, if not often in such studied bad taste. She has had plenty of help at that. She can find her heroes and heroines in tabloid fodder, like Bo Derek and her husband, with canned vegetables for her Mount of Olives. She can render Alexander the Great as a female mannequin with a Halloween mask. If it depicts Abraham Lincoln and the mannequin wears it on the back of her head, the mass culture that the artist values has its own way of flaunting its status while leaving Western culture behind. If it also resembles the art of museums in clinging to the past, she is a hoarder as well.
Not to be confused with Rochelle Feinstein, a painter of many late modern guises, she treats everything as an act of preservation, if not necessarily art. She leans a photograph of Sister Wendy, the TV guide to art history, on another plinth and lays a dull gray blanket on garish yellow stairs as her ancient Greek statuary, or Kouros. Marcel Duchamp and Nude Descending a Staircase beware. Still, she sees art as dirty and dangerous, like her Poles for a Dangerous Art World back in 1992. At the end of each pole hangs a Ziplock bag, to preserve a can of tuna, a Bible, and (to trust her label) "bioharzardous materials." She had been sticking meals uneaten in such bags from the very start of her career, as East Village art the year before.
From there, it was a short step to her monuments, with or without mannequins. She might add just about anything to blotchy acrylic in rough white cement, building on her earlier socks in gesso. 
As sculpture goes, they give new meaning to the word base. A tribute to Al Gore may lack much in the way of resemblance, but it does have a thermostat for Mister Global Warming. Other works have a camcorder, a satellite dish, a snow shovel, and a lawn mower, for Marat/Sod. If I have to explain the reference (to a play about assassination and insanity by Peter Weiss), I can hear her saying, your loss.
In all this, Harrison is claiming the debris of civilization for a woman—if only at times a female mannequin. Men come off unevenly, to put it mildly. Her version of an equestrian monument amounts to a bike rising from its rear wheels to a photo of Mel Gibson on a sheepskin, as if flayed alive. It takes a woman's black purse to suspend it in flight. Hans Haacke and Henri Matisse put in cameos, but you know that she messes around with politics and bright color. Women dominate her photographic survey of actual monuments as well.
In all this, too, she is exploring the barriers that people put between themselves, each other, and art. Gore and others occupy a circle of chairs, turned outward and toward you. Early work embeds key images in imitation paneling, and photos of more barriers line a wall across from the elevator. It has three openings, but one is cordoned off and the other labeled "Wrong Way." At first I took that for the title of her midcareer retrospective, with "Life Hack." I would not rely on Harrison to help you hack your way through.
The barriers can grow frankly off-putting compared to Perth Amboy at MoMA in 2016 or her biker in Chelsea—and I had more to say about both at the links. (She has appeared, too, in Unmonumental" at the New Museum and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) As with her drawings of Amy Winehouse in colored pencil, I tire quickly of icons of bad taste. Still, she erects barriers, she says, and takes them apart only because museums do far too much to protect viewers from art. Of course, curators like Elisabeth Sussman and Sondra Gilman, with CUNY's David Joselit, are more interested in protecting art from viewers. Just how serious is Harrison anyway when she calls art dangerous?
Rachel Feinstein ran at the Jewish Museum through January 3, 2021, Rachel Harrison at The Whitney Museum of American Art through January 12, 2020. Related reviews follow Rachel Harrison to MoMA and to Chelsea.