Harper’s Weird Magnificence – Artwork Jewellery Discussion board
Arnoldsche printed Weird Magnificence, a ebook about William Harper, final 12 months. 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 ebook Weird Magnificence: The Artwork of William Harper provides many examples of the methods by 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 tremendous 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 extensively printed, exhibited, and picked up, Harper has been an influential and vital determine for generations of jewelers, artists, and collectors.
Weird Magnificence, edited by Glenn Adamson and Martha J. Fleischman, achieves in full what solely the perfect artist books do. Revealed by Arnoldsche, this beautiful monograph is crammed with placing 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 ebook of pictures. This ebook is sort of particular due to the vital textual contributions that provide insights into the artist and the artwork, serving to us perceive and respect a whole lifetime of concepts, influences, and artwork works.
Ten authors contribute to this ebook and supply histories, anecdotes, and appreciation of Harper and his life’s work. Weird Magnificence is a superb artist ebook, and an vital one. It captures Harper’s life and work. As such, this ebook is a cultural artifact with an vital 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 along with his childhood productions of puppetry and marionettes and carrying by 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 likelihood, and spent a lifetime turning 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 an excellent level to intervene within the narrative—simply as Harper himself usually has” leads us right into a story of titles used to outline works in collection. “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 be taught that Harper started visiting Penland Faculty of Craft within the late 60s, and shortly after participated in an interdisciplinary workshop for instructors modeled after Black Mountain Faculty. It led to new our bodies of labor, and life-long appreciation and interpretation of ethnographic objects and cultural artifacts.
Weird Magnificence provides context for Harper’s work with out looking for to “clarify.” Inside and exterior forces each play their elements, and context is offered in probably 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 approach 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 vital influences: artwork, theater, music, museums, and galleries. Harper shares that he makes use of his information of the humanities and tradition to have an effect on his intuitive strategy to conceiving and creating his work. In a single anecdote we be taught 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 technique he makes use of for creating “connective tissue” between longer collection of labor.
The ten contributors’ texts handle our bodies of labor with out worry 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 identified 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 observe. 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 vital 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 strategy 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 usually skilled when works from different cultures. He took dangers, and he challenged extra typical 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 completely independently of what jewellery usually seems to be like or ‘ought to’ be.”
House and studio are additionally an vital 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 be taught that Harper’s studio has all the time been at house, and has been the place the place he has made all of his work. A photograph offers a glimpse of his bench. Adamson describes his most up-to-date go to to Harper’s studio: “Treasured stones glowing with interior 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 components.
Within the picture 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 return.” His house and studio present the area that continues to form what he attracts, paints, and makes, the place he thrives. To go to his house and studio by way of this ebook 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 a component. The artworks and the writing additionally supply recommendations in regards to the impact of experiences in Harper’s life and his huge information of the humanities as inspiration. Two of the texts by Harper supply extra particulars. He opens the essay “Saints, Martyrs, and Savages” with “These items are about faith. They don’t seem to be supposed to be spiritual jewellery, nor are they anti-religious.” The ebook provides some intimate particulars, and leaves room for interpretation, similar to the artwork itself.
The artist’s intent is arguably the core matter within the issues 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 realize them. The place historic references in titles and captions could also be obscure or esoteric, a visceral response to the visible components within the work is assured from the reader.
Weird Magnificence provides a deep and unbelievable engagement with the artwork of William Harper. It’s one man’s expression of holism: aesthetic, mental, psychological, social, and metaphysical, all elements of an exquisite complete, developed and revealed throughout a long time of artwork and experiences. With nice intelligence, this ebook sustains enigma, figuring out full properly the attraction of the ambiguous and the unknown.
[1] 23 East 73rd Road, New York, NY.
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