News from Atlantis: William Harper’s Expanded Oeuvre

 Although his elaborate pins are informed by sub-Saharan tribal art, of which he is a serious collector, they do not look specifically African, but the use of found materials, the embrace of accumulation as a composition technique, and the suggestion of fetishistic content signal more than homage.

When does a brooch become a badge or a medal? When, as in the case of Harper’s art, it takes both bravery and taste to pin it to your dress. In a world of diamonds, an outsized Harper pin is, to say the least, attention-getting. Women once jokingly referred to their make-up as war paint; I can imagine women referring to their Harper pins as shields, weapons, magnets. Harper’s use of cloisonné is revelatory; he eschews the traditional shiny surface, the better to reveal the layers of melted glass applied over reflective metal and to allow richer, more original colors. Not only has he written the book on cloisonné, he has accomplished the impossible: he has “de-Fabergéd” the technique. Furthermore his cloisonné “line” of demarcation between glass colors often moves out and carves the air. These spirals and other forms, along with various appendages, edge the brooch away from self-contained form toward assemblage, but assemblage that can be pinned to a lapel or a dress.

The news here, however, is that Harper’s art has become even more complex. Many of the brooches (and so far two of the necklaces) now come with reliquary-like storage and display boxes, each heavily encrusted with materials: lead, nails, an insect or two, and sometimes jewels. They also come with and grow out of a narrative context.

Under the influence of 9/11—our artist saw the smoke clouds from his East Village roof and saw the uptown march of the dust-covered World Trade Center escapees—Harper began to create a “backstory” for his art that, if not an alternative world, is certainly an alternative ancient history. This “ancient history” explains the brooches and necklaces and the reliquaries Harper now uses to store and display his most recent brooches and necklaces. Stashing Harper jewelry in a drawer was always a waste. Now they can be displayed and protected when not being worn.

Here’s the story: Harper transformed the WTC disaster and his own personal upheavals into the Atlantean apocalypse. Within this fiction, his jewelry (past, present, and future) is in the process of being “recovered” from around the world where it had been dispersed. The prequel has become the sequel.

Far be it for me to try to summarize the artist’s dense narrative, written out here and there on collage works and in an actual book of drawings and texts. Until some lucky apprentice deciphers and types out all the details, we’ll have to rely on the artist’s more conversational version. Suffice to say, Harper’s Atlantis existed around 20,000 BC and was ruled by a married pair of twins whom he calls Proteus and Psyche. From what I can understand (or project), their marriage may be a symbol of psychic wholeness, not unrelated to the Rosicrucian alchemical wedding or, let us say, the Masonic imagery in Mozart’s The Magic Flute

Then, as in Plato’s Atlantis, something goes wrong and all hell breaks loose. The once powerful island culture is dispersed, explaining the similarities of art forms across the globe. It’s the flood. It’s the Big Bang theory of global culture.

Harper’s brooches and necklaces and their boxes—and his non-wearable sculpture too—are meant to be examples of recovered Atlantean art. Influenced by cultures around the globe (including Appalachian folk forms in the US), Harper turns the influences inside out, making his jewelry the now newly acknowledged source of previously unexplained congruencies. The message or the hope, on one level, is that art can survive apocalypse. It did once before.

In the past, artists (and poets and composers) used culturally agreed-upon myths to inspire their work: personages in the form of gods and goddesses and narratives that embodied truths and revelations could be depicted and act as armatures for more personal emotions. We have no gods and goddesses now—at least outside of Hollywood. We have no Zeus, no Mercury, no Pluto; no stories of transformations and redemption. So it is not surprising that in a period of crisis and upheaval, some artists are beginning to make up their own myths.

Harper, of course, remains the master of enameling. But I would also say he may be the new master of the box. We have not seen anything as original as Harper’s brooch and necklace reliquaries since the boxes of Joseph Cornell, and, best of all, they do not look like anything by that master (nor like the boxes of Lucas Samaras). By creating a world of his own, Harper is in a class of his own. Unlike other box art, Harper’s reliquaries are beautiful and scary.

The jewelry, in any case, requires no justification. Harper’s brooches which indeed have always looked spooky, transcultural, multicultural, and, most importantly, were made and continue to be made by a process of improvisation rather than by pre-set design, now come encased in ornate storage and display boxes.

The lavish use of gold in the jewelry signifies elegance but also sets up connections to cultic and ritualistic uses of gold in cultures from Egypt to Peru to Mexico and all the way to Byzantium and then on down to Rodeo Drive. The odd non-precious materials, however, link the works to folk magic: chicken legs from Appalachia, hair, teeth. The brooches are signs of power that, although gratifyingly elegant, sometimes look as if they might have been constructed by a hermit crab. The use of lead and iron on the outside of the reliquaries anchors the work in the real. Harper’s art embodies the interstitial, a zone that allows the unification of painting and sculpture, sculpture and jewelry; male and female; gold and lead; the skillfully made and the found; abstract form and narrative.
 

About the author

John Perreault. 1937–2015, critic, poet, artist, and curator, was one of the most influential figures in the art world of the past half century. He first established himself as a critic with the Village Voice, between 1966 and 1974, and then went on to a multifaceted career including curatorial and leadership positions at the Everson Museum of Art, the American Craft Museum, New York (now the Museum of Arts and Design), and UrbanGlass, New York. In the 1970s, Perreault was among the chief critical supporters of the Pattern and Decoration Movement, taking a leading role in reframing the relationship between craft and fine art, ornament and abstraction.

The essay on William Harper included in this volume was written in 2004 at the artist’s request, but previously unpublished.

Portrait of the author: John Perreault reviewing a de Kooning show for The Village Voice.
Credit: Fred W. McDarrah/The Village Voice.