Matthew Angelo Harrison: Detroit Affinities Interview

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Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appearance (1951), was of great importance to the Detroit-based artist Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1989), who in his late teens took a deep interest in philosophy through Goodman's writings and in particular his work on art. Harrison was inspired to delve into contemporary art and eventually to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Harrison is interested in the construction of systems and the possible relativity of the world around us. He does not think in closed and resolved terms but embraces open-endedness in a way that is perhaps typical for artists of his generation; his outlook combines a strong sense of community, both local and global, with the systems of the digital world. He is interested in aspects of manufacturing, in particular its often-hidden performative aspect. The artist closely studies the aesthetics of prototypes and carries over into his own practice the anticipatory feeling of the unfinished object.

Three-dimensional printing, also known as additive manufacturing, has been around for almost four decades, but only in the last ten years has it become practical and affordable for individuals outside industry. The printers use a series of coordinated stepper motors to distribute material in specific places so as to build objects in many layers, in a time-consuming and often-monotonous process. It has in many ways revolutionized thinking around the production of art (if not yet the making of art); very interesting in the context of Detroit, the birthplace of assembly line, is the idea that 3D printing might signal the beginning of a third industrial revolution succeeding the Fordist production process introduced in that city at the outset of the twentieth century.

Harrison's 3D printers are not the sophisticated high-tech equipment typically found in industrial production facilities. All of his devices are homemade constructions, DIY gadgets with low-tech parts put together by the artist himself, suggesting more kinship with abstract sculpture than with anything state-of-the-art. They combine minimalist aesthetics with the industrial look of open-source hardware. And not only are the machines homemade, but so is most of their software. Harrison's printers use clay rather than the more common plastics. This gives the artist the ability to build large volumes rapidly and to change at any moment the form of a sculpture being produced.

Harrison's 3D printers on view at MOCAD use computer aided design (CAD) files, created via a 3D scanner, to print replicas of traditional African masks. Harrison is less interested in the masks as ceremonial or aesthetic objects and more into drastically changing our perception of something by replicating it in unlikely materials. A historical African mask is re-created by using a FaceGen process in which CAD files are specifically used to sculpt human faces, connecting the tribal and seemingly exotic world of Africa with the DYI sphere of the digital age.

Forcing the organic and the nonorganic to work together creates a tension of not only materials but also sense and experience. When a bone breaks, it produces a visceral response because of the bone's direct relationship to the body. When clear acrylic breaks, the response is purely visual, pictorial: the only thing ruined is a perfect image. The bone of a dead animal speaks as well of lifelessness and possibility; it is essential material that can be reused for completely different purposes (such as an elephant bone as part of a sculptural installation). The exotic animal bones are part of a visual vocabulary, an iconography, that Harrison is slowly developing. It is a landscape of visual tropes, some familiar and some unfamiliar, some exotic and others common, and all mysterious yet literal and quotidian at the same time. Integrating the bones within acrylic boxes and benches prevents the production of a likeness of nature and points instead to architectural boundaries: cages, walls, fences.