Harland Miller, Marianne Boesky
15 January – 12 February 2005
Harland Miller’s new work is clever and self-aware enough to arouse suspicion: should irony really be so appealing? With titles like Plan B – My Story and Too Cool to Die, Miller may be knowing to a fault, but his large paintings of imaginary Penguin Books dust-jackets are also handsome, wry and surprisingly deft.
Miller’s first solo New York exhibition is entitled Dear Son, This is one of the last of my few remaining pre-marital possessions – look after it won’t you, Love Dad. It’s not exactly pithy, but it’s a fair calling card for an artist and writer who clearly appreciates a sardonic mix of devotion and detachment. The phrase, an inscription he found in one of the books, also hints at Miller’s interest in the language of ownership and in how language and ideas are shared, borrowed and outright stolen.
In International Lonely Guy (2004), the word surface from a washed out grey background less like the title of a scholarly biography than a melancholy sigh of resignation. This is where it’s fucking at – at least it used to be – Harland Miller (2004) is not likely to show up on the bestseller list, but could be a depressed stoner’s mantra; and Miller gamely nominates himself for the part.
Successful appropriation on this scale demands a strong personality, and Miller is undaunted: imposing his own sensibility onto well-established formal templates, Miller successfully bends familiar material to his own devices and still get his jokes in. 61 With A Bullet – Ernest Hemingway (2004) displays a fascination with a certain white-bearded, boxing lover who shot himself when he was, as Miller reminds us, 61 years old.
The paintings’ inherent graphic punch makes it easy to overlook their discreet surfaces, studiously indiscriminate drips and smartly rendered letters. The books’ patinas are faded and worn, even nostalgic. They resemble nothing so much as colour-field paintings, complete with gentle clouds of pigment straight out of Mark Rothko (another epic suicide, incidentally).
Less successful are what appear to be author photos on the back of crime novels, but are in fact depictions of old mug-shots of women. While writers’ photographs are typically about as spontaneous as the Queen’s Christmas message, it’s not the most fertile ground for Miller’s talents, particularly considering black-and-white portraits such as these are very much the realm where Gerhard Richter is, as Hemingway might say, the undisputed heavyweight champ.
Miller is doing just fine in his own weight class, however. Despite a heavy dose of formal borrowing, he creates his own world where language conveys sarcasm and wit, but supplies no satisfying answers to his unspoken anxieties.
David Coggins, Modern Painters Review, March 2005, p.99
