The view my window crops from the wider world features most of ‘The Andaz,’ a stucco and glass hotel tower, one end of which is entirely given over to a billboard announcing a new season of Glee, the most beloved comedy of the year (Wed., 9 p.m., Fox 1); a sliver of the rusticated, ‘Wild West’ theme eatery Saddle Ranch Chop House; and a tangle of impossibly pink bougainvillea punctuated by a Dr. Seuss palm tree tipsy in the breeze. I can’t decide if this landscape—a fairly typical stretch of Tinsel Town’s fabled artery, the Sunset strip—is ugly or beautiful, but it reminds me of a Rachel Harrison, of the way this artist’s sculptures and, for lack of a better word, installations bunch and parse disparate textures and references (‘From Marfa to the National Enquirer,’ as she has put it), one upping the real world’s inspired way with the improbable. —Jack Bankowsky, Editor-at-Large, Artforum 1

In the fall of 2007, the New Museum of Contemporary Art opened a new building on the Bowery in lower Manhattan. This was a major moment for the institution—which had been founded in 1977 and housed in a limited space on 583 Broadway since 1983—but also for contemporary art in New York City.

The new New Museum was the first ever art museum to be built in the historically neglected Bowery neighborhood. It was also the first museum to be constructed from the ground up “downtown”—that is, what’s commonly defined as below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. The museum also had a history of presenting groundbreaking exhibitions that filled the gaps within (and questioned the programming of) the big three modern art institutions of New York: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Not surprisingly, close attention was paid to what the museum chose as its opening exhibition.

In a fitting move, to mark such a monumental occasion, the New Museum opened with a show titled Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. Unmonumental presented what the institution’s curators—and three of them worked on the show together—considered to be one of the most common and interesting trends in contemporary sculpture. In general, this trend was the creation of sculptural assemblages, made up of found objects or fragments—that were sometimes ephemeral or fragile and close to what one might consider trash. These works were either built, sewn, glued, or tied together, or some combination of all of these techniques, and their formal approach ranged from figurative to abstract to various mashed-up places in between. These objects were generally human-scaled and often looked like the result of a dare: to make the most unexpected combinations and juxtapositions of objects and materials possible.

Unmonumental featured established artists like Isa Genzken and Sarah Lucas alongside younger or more “emerging” artists. Among the works greeting visitors were Genzken’s Elefant (2006). Constructed out of vertical blinds, artificial flowers, foil, plastic tubing, as well as toy soldiers and Indians, the piece looked like a cross between a bouquet of garbage and a disheveled figure bearing all of its belongings on its back. Carol Bove’s Utopia or Oblivion (2002) seemed to express an opposite aesthetic approach. The work was a minimalist and meticulous arrangement of Knoll tables, books, and a small string-and-stick sculpture. Urs Fischer’s life-size candle of a female figure (Untitled [Kerze] from 2001) pushed the boundaries of ephemerality once it was lighted to melt down over the course of the show.

According to the curators, the aesthetic of Unmonumental reflected contemporary society’s “excess of choice,” and they saw the role of contemporary sculptors to be one of filtering or selecting the materials, objects, or ideas of society, akin to how a DJ might create a piece of music or a search engine operates in relation to the Internet’s vast trove of information. The show’s compositions were described as nonhierarchical, expressing a “nonemphatic fluidity” or lacking “extravagant gestures.” The curators also saw unmonumentality as reflective of the way Western culture now seamlessly and minute-by-minute moved from the banal (i.e., the latest gossip about Britney Spears) to the tragic or politically important (i.e., America’s war in Iraq), while also mirroring an overall absence of significant monuments, symbols, and ideas. In this vein, one of the curators, Massimiliano Gioni, referred to the twenty-first century as our “headless” century.2

According to the New York Times, Unmonumental was a great success, “a gauntlet thrown down to other New York museums regarding contemporary art.” It was celebrated primarily for saying at least something—putting theories and arguments forth about what today’s art was, rather than avoiding the topic. The show said, “Get your nerve on. Take a stand. Start an argument by being focused or maybe even one-sided instead of just by being confused or simply too big or small.”3

One of the centerpieces of Unmonumental—apart from the works of Genzken, Fischer, or Bove—was a sculpture titled Huffy Howler . It dated from 2004 and was by a New York–based artist named Rachel Harrison (b. 1966).

At first glance, Huffy Howler looked like the site of a bike accident. Its central feature was a bright yellow Howler mountain bike manufactured by the historic American bike company Huffy. Its pedals, crank, and lower portion of the front part of its frame (technically called its “down tube”) were stuck (or placed, depending on how you saw it) in a strange 2 to 3-foot haphazard structure, consisting of wood and polystyrene squares and rectangles covered with cement which were then painted with acrylic. The structure looked like a cross between a David Smith Cubi sculpture and a birthday cake experiment gone wrong.

Hung from the Howler’s left handlebar (which loomed over a flattened front tire, turned to the right) was a group of six cheap black purses. One of them was filled with a brick and the others with different types of rocks, stones, and gravel. On the opposite side of the bike, a long metal pole (a telescoping extension handle made by the company Mr. LongArm) had been stuck directly onto the frame just in front of the back tire. The pole pointed out diagonally from the back of the bike toward the sky. Draped from the pole’s top end was a long piece of sheepskin reaching almost to the floor. A publicity photo of Mel Gibson’s face, from the 1995 movie Braveheart (in which he portrayed William Wallace in his failed fight against the British in Scotland) was clipped to the sheepskin toward the top and faced away from the bike frame.

What was the viewer to make of such a work? There were various ways to approach it.

First of all, like many of the works in Unmonumental, Huffy Howler upset one’s expectations regarding the materials that could make up a sculpture. To review, the media applied in this work included: wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, Huffy Howler bicycle, handbags, rocks, stones, brick, sheepskin, metal pole, wire, pigmented inkjet ink, and binder clips. Most of these components were either very close to being garbage, or very cheap, and the juxtapositions of media seemed unusual to say the least. Was there any precedent in art history for a work combining a bike, sheepskin, and handbags? This seemed to be part of the point.

At the same time, beyond the audacity of the media combination, was the composition of the work. While similar artists—both in the show and not—brought together unusual materials, Harrison was able to bring them together into a unique kind of cohesiveness so that her final work brilliantly teetered between coherence and absurdity, order and disorder. In this respect, critics likened Harrison’s compositions to the way garbage is organized in a junkyard or how detritus can be artfully arranged on the streets of New York City.4 Others saw her compositional contradictions in bigger terms. They viewed her work as “actualizing the quick changes, instant attention shifts, and nomadism of contemporary life as a whole.”5 Most interestingly, on the basis of her compositional strategies, her sculptures have been labeled “complexes.” This label is meant to function in contrast to Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic 1950s and 1960s “combines,” which featured found objects, and were an integration of painting and sculpture into one, combining the two together. Harrison’s works, in contrast, test the boundaries of such combinations; she puts together objects that never entirely seem to combine. She also creates a viewing experience that changes as you walk around the piece, heightening the sense that her objects work both together and separately.6

Comparison to the history of equestrian sculptures offered another way to look at...