Art Institute of Chicago, Rachel Harrison, label

We were in Chicago last weekend and spent a day at the Art Institute. Wandering through the permanent collection, we came upon this sculpture by Rachel Harrison.

As always, wondering what it was about, we looked at the label. I was interested to learn that the work is one from a series of works named after prominent men; this one is titled Pablo Escobar, and the label reminded me that he was a famous drug lord.

As I wandered away, Tom started snorting at the label, and, of course, I read it again. As Tom said, the sculpture hardly seems a "biting critique of cultural representations and stereotypes," although its bright colors and souvenir ceramic ristra (a string of peppers) certainly are stereotypical Latin American tropes. Perhaps the label writer was suggesting that the sculpture calls attention to the stereotype of Latin Americans as liking bright colors and cheap souvenirs, and being drug dealers? It has taken me 5 days to come up with that explanation and that was only possible because I photographed the object and the label in response to Tom's disdain. Given the small number of words allowed for museum labels in some institutions, I wondered why the writer did not give a clearer explanation of Harrison's purpose rather than refer to the other  people depicted in the series. On one side of the sculpture is a shelf, where one would imagine the artist had placed something, but it is empty. The sculpture of Al Gore is a bright colored mass with a thermostat attached and that of Tiger Woods is a bright colored blob with a can of golf balls on a decorated pedestal. So those seem more playful than biting and not particularly stereotypical.
 I was amused that the ristra still has its sales tag. Oh, and by the way, the label says the figure "holds a bouquet," but I think the ristra is just attached to him. No hands.

Of course, having copied the label, I'm now wondering about another sentence: "Stubbornly physical yet highly conceptual, Harrison's sculptures evoke ancient memorials and reflect the influence of today's celebrity-centric culture." It's a nice-sounding sentence, but I wonder why her works are stubbornly physical, as opposed to just plain physical and why the writer seems to think that physical things aren't usually also conceptual. I don't see the evocation of ancient memorials beyond that naming a work after a person who is dead makes it a memorial, and I have no idea how  they "reflect the influence of today's celebrity-centric culture" except that the work is named after a person who is well-known (but not well-known enough that I could remember who he was).

I was struck by the size of the sculpture and like the way it evokes a human being without being very specific: the top suggests a tilted head, there are shoulders, a narrowed part that could be a waist, the shelf suggests buttocks, and the lower part could be slightly bent legs. The painted colors copy the colors of the peppers in the ceramic ristra, an object that can be found in shops carrying Mexican tchotchkes.

Here's the label: