Mark Harris at Trans Hudson - New York - Brief Article

A large-scale mural (9 by 28 feet) titled Sixty-eight, Sixty-nine (1999) set the tone for Mark Harris's exhibition "Hippy," which included seven works in as many different mediums. Consisting of rainbow-colored, drip-shaped paper cutouts on similarly colored modulating backgrounds, Sixty-eight, Sixty-nine was the most obvious representative of hippiedom. Many of the cutouts featured vintage Ungaro fashions arranged according to the fabrics used: synthetics at left, woolens at center, leather and vinyl at right. But while this large hit of loppy eye candy fit the exhibition theme, and was in some sense its flowery poster child, the conceptual trip it provided was less intense than those of Harris's more restrained works.

Playing off the color vocabulary and visual intensity of Sixty-eight, Sixty-nine was the show's title work, Hippy, a 103-inch-high, 68-inch-wide wall hanging that is an assemblage of painted-over paper cutouts, reminiscent of Pollock's dense webs but with a japoniste feel. What seems a random pattern of painstakingly rendered cuts in the paper is in fact a nine-times repeating pattern made from a rubber matrix print containing the Pollock-like marks.

Marijuana in the U.K. (1999) is a two-screen, synchronized video in which the British artist, seated alone in what appears to be a cannabis herbarium, reads on one monitor from Baudelaire's 1858 essay "Poem of Hashish" and on the other from Walter Benjamin's 1928 text "Hashish in Marseilles." The camera ranges over plants, me artist's profile, his moving lips and the words on the page, as the simultaneous readings in Harris's lulling baritone voice create a discombobulating cacophony. The waves of words are interspersed with cadenced pauses, reminiscent perhaps of the delirium of sensory experience the texts describe.

Another work, an artist's book titled In Sight of Chaos by Mark Harris (1999), collects the first and last pages of 100 prophetic books related to the subject of chaos. Where else could one find in a single volume the work of Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, Malevich, Susan Sontag and Doris Lessing (to name but five of the 100 authors), with a title copped from Herman Hesse? Despite the radical disjuncture of prose styles, typography and Weltanschauungen, the book is an original compendium. With beautiful efficiency, it achieves a dizzying information deluge that would appear to be central to Harris's goals.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group