Harper’s Weird Magnificence – Artwork Jewellery Discussion board
Arnoldsche revealed Weird Magnificence, a e-book about William Harper, final yr. AJF timed the discharge of this overview of it to coincide with and have fun an unrelated exhibition, Treasured Grotesqueries: The Jewels of William Harper. That present will run October 23–December 12, 2025, at Les Enluminures.[1]
Glenn Adamson and Martha J. Fleischman (eds.), Weird Magnificence: The Artwork of William Harper. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2024.
William Harper is a provocateur. His jewellery, objects, and work command consideration and confront us with surprising magnificence and beguiling assemblages. He’s good at this, and the e-book Weird Magnificence: The Artwork of William Harper presents many examples of the methods during which Harper exploits his methods, from emotive coloration work in enamels, “jewels,” and gems, to suggestive titles like The Brothel’s Favourite, with its erect shaft of aquamarine. His use of appropriation, recontextualizing pure objects like tooth and claws, feathers and fur, bugs, shells, and even a small penis bone, performs with archetypes and elicits our visceral response. We’re drawn in by items like Pagan Child #10, with its striped beetle carapace suspended between pure pearls, serving as a scarab “jewel,” a pendant dangling from a wonderful gold and cloisonné enamel fibula brooch.
Harper is an icon of artwork jewellery and the studio craft actions. His profession spans seven a long time and his work is held within the collections of museums all through the world, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, from the Cleveland Museum of Artwork to the Vatican Museum in Rome. A tremendously prolific artist whose work has been broadly revealed, exhibited, and picked up, Harper has been an influential and essential determine for generations of jewelers, artists, and collectors.
Weird Magnificence, edited by Glenn Adamson and Martha J. Fleischman, achieves in full what solely the very best artist books do. Revealed by Arnoldsche, this beautiful monograph is crammed with hanging pictures of weird magnificence—gold and bones, hair and nails, all juxtaposed with extraordinary vitreous enamels. However Adamson and Fleischman have created a lot greater than a e-book of pictures. This e-book is sort of particular due to the essential textual contributions that supply insights into the artist and the artwork, serving to us perceive and recognize a complete lifetime of concepts, influences, and artwork works.
Ten authors contribute to this e-book and provide histories, anecdotes, and appreciation of Harper and his life’s work. Weird Magnificence is a wonderful artist e-book, and an essential one. It captures Harper’s life and work. As such, this e-book is a cultural artifact with an essential function that exceeds an historic doc to encourage and inform artists, readers, and researchers of the longer term. Weird Magnificence features a narrative biography by Glenn Adamson, texts by Arthur C. Danto, Mary E. Davis, Toni Greenbaum, Cynthia Hahn, John Perreault, and William Harper, a dialog with Ugochukwu-Easy Nzewi, a preface by Martha J. Fleischman, and a foreword by Abraham Thomas.
Adamson’s “Form Shifter: The Lives of William Harper” is the central textual content, a poetic invitation written by a curator and historian who skillfully arranges occasions and influences like objects in an exhibition. Adamson contextualizes our bodies of labor inside experiences from Harper’s life, beginning together with his childhood productions of puppetry and marionettes and carrying by way of to his studio in New York. It’s fairly a narrative—a self-described “unusual little child” who favored classical music and opera, attended Western Reserve College, found enamel and jewellery considerably by probability, and spent a lifetime changing into a “pagan aesthete” who conjures up saints and martyrs, barbarians, and serpents within the type of jewellery.
In his textual content, Adamson permits himself the roles of biographer and narrator, talking on to us and sharing anecdotes and observations, whereas making a shared expertise with the reader. “This can be level to intervene within the narrative—simply as Harper himself typically has” leads us right into a story of titles used to outline works in sequence. “Again to the story now…” carries us into the historical past of reveals at Kennedy Gallery in New York. “As talked about briefly, above…” we study that Harper started visiting Penland College of Craft within the late 60s, and shortly after participated in an interdisciplinary workshop for instructors modeled after Black Mountain School. It led to new our bodies of labor, and life-long appreciation and interpretation of ethnographic objects and cultural artifacts.
Weird Magnificence presents context for Harper’s work with out looking for to “clarify.” Inner and exterior forces each play their components, and context is offered in essentially the most complementary methods, suggesting the origins of works as a part of the bigger story of the artist’s life. The story wends its manner from a secluded and rural life in small-town Bucyrus, OH, US, to Cleveland, then Florida State College, and finally New York Metropolis. The biography and intensive chronology assist us perceive essential influences: artwork, theater, music, museums, and galleries. Harper shares that he makes use of his data of the humanities and tradition to have an effect on his intuitive strategy to conceiving and creating his work. In a single anecdote we study that he “endured” a five-hour revival of “Einstein on the Seashore,” by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, to which he credit his summary idea of “interludes,” a method he makes use of for creating “connective tissue” between longer sequence of labor.
The ten contributors’ texts deal with our bodies of labor with out concern of taboo, the profane, or forbidden fruit. Like Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Harper’s work reminds us of the ever-changing nature of magnificence, “the flowers of evil,” and our morbid curiosity with the macabre. He pays homage to different artists and exalts anomalies in nature: Scheherazade, an unique gold and cloisonné enamel brooch with amethyst and tourmaline, is impressed by the ballet that he has recognized and beloved since childhood; Albino I, a gold and cloisonné enamel fibula brooch with pearls, reveres the pale in a palette impressed by the early works of Cy Twombly, which he had seen on the Met, and titled for the genetic situation.
The story additionally consists of the evolution and trajectory of the artist’s apply. Harper’s work is about making objects that categorical our humanity, transcend time, and serve our elementary want for artwork. Early in his profession, his notion of “craft” and the work of his contemporaries performed an essential half in his effort to diverge and differentiate from what was taking place in American craft. Harper recounts how, traditionally, the clear and minimal aesthetics of Scandinavian Trendy gave approach to new aesthetic values derived from analysis and experimentation with new supplies and strategies. He took a unique path, nevertheless, looking for to imbue his works with the highly effective emotional triggers he typically skilled when works from different cultures. He took dangers, and he challenged extra standard approaches to working with discovered objects. Adamson notes: “Many jewelers have vigorously contested that bigotry of low expectations, however only a few with Harper’s daring, nuance, and mental depth whereas working solely independently of what jewellery usually appears like or ‘ought to’ be.”
House and studio are additionally an essential a part of William Harper’s story. As Churchill asserted in 1943, “We form our buildings; thereafter they form us.” Artwork-making is way the identical. Artists form their studios and houses, which in flip form them. Within the biography we study that Harper’s studio has all the time been at residence, and has been the place the place he has made all of his work. A photograph supplies a glimpse of his bench. Adamson describes his most up-to-date go to to Harper’s studio: “Treasured stones glowing with inside gentle sat in close to orbit, as in the event that they’d been pulled into his area by gravitational attraction.” Within the picture of Harper’s workspace and bench, items of detritus share area with gems, jewels, and quite a lot of gold parts.
Within the photograph portrait of Harper and William Benjamin Harper (his husband), he’s surrounded by his assortment of ethnographic objects, together with a West African Senufo fertility doll, a present from his first partner in 1967, “a portent of issues to come back.” His residence and studio present the area that continues to form what he attracts, paints, and makes, the place he thrives. To go to his residence and studio through this e-book is an inspiring expertise.
What about inspiration? The place does the work come from and the way does the artwork develop? Just like the items themselves, some solutions are summary: intuition, allusion, mythology, and faith, amongst others, all play an element. The artworks and the writing additionally provide strategies concerning the impact of experiences in Harper’s life and his huge data of the humanities as inspiration. Two of the texts by Harper provide extra particulars. He opens the essay “Saints, Martyrs, and Savages” with “These items are about faith. They don’t seem to be meant to be non secular jewellery, nor are they anti-religious.” The e-book presents some intimate particulars, and leaves room for interpretation, similar to the artwork itself.
The artist’s intent is arguably the core matter within the considerations of artwork discourse. What’s the work about? “Intent” is thoughtfully revealed explicitly and generally implicitly all through Weird Magnificence. Glenn’s biography and the opposite essays assist to handle a few of Harper’s intentions for the viewers, whereas revealing his methods to attain them. The place historic references in titles and captions could also be obscure or esoteric, a visceral response to the visible parts within the work is assured from the reader.
Weird Magnificence presents a deep and implausible engagement with the artwork of William Harper. It’s one man’s expression of holism: aesthetic, mental, psychological, social, and metaphysical, all components of a gorgeous complete, developed and revealed throughout a long time of artwork and experiences. With nice intelligence, this e-book sustains enigma, understanding full nicely the attraction of the ambiguous and the unknown.
[1] 23 East 73rd Avenue, New York, NY.
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