Valid Like Salad
Comprised of things both found and made, Valid Like Salad is anchored by a bulky, lumbering form made precarious through asymmetry and disequilibrium. Attached to this pillar, which Harrison sculpted out of wood, polystyrene and cement and later embellished with a Picasso-esque harlequin pattern, are a dog collar and a scanned print of a drawing of Al Pacino from the 1983 film Scarface. Valid Like Salad exemplifies Harrison’s long-standing fascination with male celebrities, on whose exaggerated machismo she casts a critical, feminist eye. Indeed, Harrison’s anthropomorphic monolith is partly an ironic re-interpretation of historical statues of so-called great men. An act of violence resulted in Valid Like Salad being damaged in 2015. Because Harrison decided to forgo conservation, the damage is now conceptually and structurally part of the work. To erase evidence of it would be to repress the very dysfunction Harrison seeks to lay bare in her sculpture.
Artwork Details
- Title: Valid Like Salad
- Artist: Rachel Harrison (American, born 1966)
- Date: 2012
- Medium: Wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, framed digital print, plexiglas, and dog collar
- Dimensions: 82 × 46 × 48 in. (208.3 × 116.8 × 121.9 cm)
- Classification: Sculpture
- Credit Line: Kathryn E. Hurd Fund, 2016
- Object Number: 2016.461a–c
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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