David R. Harper: A Mouth-Shaped Room

DAV I D R . H A R P E R

A Mouth-Shaped Room

DAV I D R . H A R P E R

A Mouth-Shaped Room Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum | Milwaukee, Wisconsin

2220 North Terrace Avenue | Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202 USA www.villaterrace.org David R. Harper: A Mouth-Shaped Room was curated by Shana McCaw, Senior Curator with assistance from Jenille Junco, Assistant Curator and Collections Manager.

The exhibition was supported, in part, by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

June 27 to September 15, 2019

Executive Director: John Sterr Board Chair: Stephen DeLeers Curatorial Advisory Committee: Melissa Dorn, Nirmal Raja, Rafael Salas Installation support: Thomas Szolwinski, Madeline Tautges Š2019 by the Charles Allis & Villa Terrace Museums, Inc.

Design: Corkey Sinks Copy Editing: Chris Sharrow, Sally Shoemaker, and Dr. Deborah Johnson, Professor of Art History at Providence College Photography: Rich Maciejewski Printing: The Fox Company

C O V E R A N D I N S I D E C O V E R : Details BACK COVER

of She Drank the Water that was Meant for the Orchids (3 Parts)

Detail of She Had; She Would

From David R. Harper Along with the above contributors, I would like to thank the writers who contributed truly thoughtful and caring words to accompany my work - Rhiannon Vogl, Joel Parsons, Jamilee Lacy, and Shana McCaw. I would also like to acknowledge the friends and family who aided me through the making of this exhibition, Jesse Butcher, Anna Caldwell, Heather Carlucci, Alex Gartlemann, Laura Bickford, Patrick Tinker, Steve Higgins, and Jan Peacock amongst many others. I would also like to thank all those who lent support with a helpful hand, Emily Bianchi, Cate Tinker, Laura Bickford, Faythe Levine, and Brittany Pogue. I would like to give special acknowledgment to Karen Patterson who, time and time again, pushes me toward the things that I fear and need the most.Â

CO NTENTS

Acknowledgments

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A Mouth-Shaped Room S h a n a Mc C aw

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In the Skin of an Artist Rh i a n n o n Vo gl

23 This Is... A Tour of Time Itself Ja mi l e e L a cy

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Standing in Front of David Harper’s Laocoon Jo e l Pa r so n s

50 Contributor Biographies

A MO UTH-SHA PED R OOM Shana McCaw Senior Curator, Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum

The title A Mouth-Shaped Room equates a space in a house to the power of speaking and language. The conversations of visitors to Villa Terrace are the current audible voices in the rooms, but it hardly needs to be said that houses have voices of their own. The Villa Terrace’s voice is a fervent one: its architectural detail and ornament, combined with marks of age and weathering, tell a story of idealism, transformation, and transition as the house moved from family home to museum. Though the house’s voice is felt rather than heard, it speaks most strongly when an especially aware listener – in this case, artist David R. Harper – offers a new interpretation of the house and its lost histories, creating a portal into another kind of experience.

The Villa Terrace began as a home. It is said that Agnes Smith, together with her husband Lloyd and architect David Adler, wanted to build a unique house that reflected her love of architecture and design, and was also a convivial place where children could be playful and their imaginations nurtured. Some years after returning from a family trip to Italy, Agnes settled on the idea of creating a house in the style of an Italian Renaissance villa, which was completed in 1924. Given its lakefront location and Italian inspiration, the house came to be called Sopra Mare (“above the sea” in Italian). By all accounts, Sopra Mare was indeed a warm and welcoming center for the Smith family and friends. Stories of fabulous parties and bountiful Thanksgiving and

FA R L E F T

Attritio installed in the Mercury Courtyard at Villa Terrace

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Christmas celebrations were well known around the city. The Smith’s spirit of hospitality is still present at the Villa today since it is a coveted site for festivities of all kinds. Eventually, the house was given to the Milwaukee Art Museum to be used as its decorative arts wing, and later, as an independent museum still operating on behalf of Milwaukee County.

One of our primary interests in working with artists like David Harper is to offer a new perspective of the Villa Terrace by reinterpreting its story from a contemporary vantage point. The house remains a place of idiosyncrasy, and an homage to the spirit of fantasy that originally inspired Agnes Smith and David Adler. Together with Lloyd Smith’s work as an innovator and leader of a company devoted to cutting-edge engineering, these intentions form a foundation of creativity that melds seamlessly with the spirit in which artists work. With A MouthShaped Room, Harper transforms the Villa Terrace into an illusory world of historic fiction by activating the entire house with sculpture, transformed Attritio , 2019

objects, and installations. He references the mu-

Dehydrated milk, calcium carbonate, gum arabic, plaster,

seum’s post-domestic history as a decorative arts

marble, wood, steel, glass

museum by using images and objects influenced by various eras such as Greco-Roman figures, plant and animal studies from the 19 th century, handmade wood vitrines, and stained glass. Suggesting that traditional ways of categorizing art genres and movements are permeable and changing, Harper composes his installations in ingenious ways that combine contemporary sensibilities with a reverence for the past.

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One such sculpture, specifically designed for the

civilization we forfeited long ago, perhaps at the

Villa Terrace, is Attritio (Cat. 1). A bust of Diana,

cost of an intact cultural narrative.

Roman goddess of wild animals and hunting, stands atop a plinth fitted with a glass carboy to catch the

Art in symbiosis and at odds is a theme in much

residue of her slowly erod-

of

ing figure. Referencing the

competing impulses of a

gradual degradation of so

handmade vitrine distanc-

many classical sculptures

ing us from objects that

still standing in their orig-

tempt

inal

animal

outdoor

locations,

Harper’s

us

work.

with

forms

The

tactility, assuming

Harper created a casting

lifelike postures while im-

compound that would has-

mobilized on a plinth, or

ten this process just enough

representations of eras so

for visitors to witness the

disparate we are reminded

slight erosion of the sculpture over our three-month exhibition run.

Courtyard at Villa Terrace, ca. 1925

that only a contemporary

Smith children pictured are (left to right):

artist – living in today’s

June Ellen, Suzanne, Robert Lewis,

globalized world – could

Lloyd Bruce “Ted”

put all this together and make

In direct conversation with

it

seem

familiar,

Diana, a nearby sculpture of Mercury – the focal

composed, and relevant, even if that means elicit-

point of the courtyard – stands proudly displaying

ing fears of dislocation and loss. Though Harper’s

a film of moss and lichen especially concentrated

combinations seem to provoke opposition, they

on his torso, which is the oldest part of the figure,

also contain symbols of protection and nurture.

originating in the 2 nd century. Like Diana, Mercury

One feels that the artist is shaking things up only

is an interloper, brought to the courtyard in 1967

to resettle them with utmost care. The journey this

to replace a kylix originally serving as the cen-

provides to visitors and stewards of the Villa Terrace

tral feature of the courtyard. Both figures embody

is a path to the future. It reflects a challenge to our

metaphors of fragmentation, displacement, and

contemporary situation as people overwhelmed by

temporality that not only reflect the biography of

information, and offers a model for how we might

the Villa Terrace, but are also relevant to the phe-

better interact with the past, as a layered, simulta-

nomenon of contemporary nomadism, a practice

neous experience.

that finds us moving from place to place, repurposing buildings and spaces built for a version of

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IN THE SK IN O F A N A RTIST Rhiannon Vogl

Moles, cuts, scrapes, welts, blisters – a multitude of markings, contusions and imperfections mar the skin’s surface – tracking life experiences like written histories on the body. Some lingering more ephemerally like a stain; some developing over time like a polaroid photograph, and others being slashed violently into permanence across the supple flesh, blood drawn, slicing deep, stitches required. Bruises are unique in the way that they both add colour to the skin, but do not actually alter the surface of the skin; instead breaking up through the deeper layers of the body, rising up as abstracted plumes of purple, iron red, jaundice yellow, indigo, and sickly green, they tell us more about what is going on inside than out, inner trauma, internal distress, deep damage.

Resulting from flukes, falls, failures, forgetfulness, in time they will fade away, our foolishness no longer on display, but we all know how they feel, know the tenderness, the embarrassment, the ache that they can store long after their rainbow recedes, and we appear as though we are healed.

The way we know ourselves through the skin, know the world around us and know each other is the subject of Heidi Kellett’s article, “Skin Portraiture: Relational Embodiment and Contemporary Art.” In it, she identifies a recent sub-genre of contemporary art, which she calls “skin portraiture.” Kellett observes that this visual language prioritizes the representation of the skin, and, through strategies of fragmentation, magnification and anatomization,

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Mère, Fils, Pierre, 2019 installed in the Master Bedroom Gallery

Detail of Mère, Fils, Pierre

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abstracts the “skinscape” of the human body, so as to render the subject anonymous and therefore “allow our attention to move from the subject’s identity to the experiences of embodiment of many bodies, including the viewer’s.” 1 For Kellett, skin portraiture creates a specific type of empathy or relationality between the audience and the work of art – an experience of “haptic visuality” 2 where a sensorial, sympathetic connection is established, despite the absence of actual physical contact. Kellett posits that this form of relationality allows for the boundaries between the Self (viewer) and Other (subject) to become more porous, more penetrable, a dynamic relationship that results from “a dialogic exchange between skins, which can be physical and social. To relate to someone is to understand them based on the revelation of shared experiences and/ or memories,” 3 which she argues, skin portraiture is able to do through its focus on the near-universal commonality all bodies have with the skin.

Kellett partitions the genre of skin portraiture furMère, Fils, Pierre, 2019

ther into three-dimensional works that make use

Ceramic, industrial felt, cotton, plaster, rubber coating,

of techniques from the domestic sphere – sewing,

calf skeleton, Czech seed beads, glass, steel, wood,

quilting, embroidering, knitting – and works that

35mm slide, stereoscope slide, linen, cotton embroidery floss

also take skin as their primary material. While numerous contemporary artists have employed these “traditional” modes of handwork to complicate conventional, often gendered experiences of the division between the public and private spheres of work, Kellett identifies two new terms - “Haut Craftwork” and “Haut Couture” – as useful ways to talk about “the impulse to make domestic and clothing objects with human skin in the 21st century.” 4

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Mère, Fils, Pierre, 2019 Ceramic, industrial felt, cotton, plaster, rubber coating, calf skeleton, Czech seed beads, glass, steel, wood, 35mm slide, stereoscope slide, linen, cotton embroidery floss

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For Kellett, Haut Craftwork defines “the use of skin in the production of one-of-a-kind domestic objects made from crafting techniques often associated with the metaphor of home,” while Haut Couture refers to “garments made from the representation of skin associated with the clothing metaphor.” 5 Kellett’s play on words – the use of ‘haut’ – German for skin – to replace ‘haute’ – the French for unique, meticulously constructed clothing – reflects how this genre of art making invites us to consider what it is to live in, be in, and live through, the skin.

In David Harper’s sculptures and installations, the possibility of this haptic relationship is not confined solely to one between human bodies. Skin, scales, flesh, and fur all form part of the same somatic sphere - each as porous, each as vulnerable, as fragile as the other; permeable, adaptable, essential. His chimeric creations make use of the skin as a memory device, a record of the body, one in a state of multiple fragments. It is tempting to read them each as individual figures, fauna, and felines that each have a story to tell.

Details in the window Mère, Fils, Pierre

And certainly, they do.

Ceramic, plaster, rubber coating, 35mm slide, stereoscope slide,

But what if we are to read Harper’s whole oeuvre here, the entirety of A Mouth-Shaped Room as just that – one single entity, one body in multiple iterations, one skin in the state of many becomings. Harper’s work is often discussed in regard to his ornamentary impulses. As examples of Haut Craftwork, his trailings of delicate beadwork, trimmings of feathers and pearls, and finely stitched

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threads are the result of delicate, tedious, absorp-

Didier Anzieu calls the skin a protective enve-

tive activities, those that, at one time, would have

lope, its physicality a manifestation of its parallel

been learned domestically and used to keep idle

psychological functions such as containment, pro-

hands busy, or to still the mind.

tection, and inscription.7

For him, it holds deep

psychic resonances – memories, fantasies and There is a more subtle way that one can think about

emotions that have affected, impacted, and influ-

the pieces in A Mouth-Shaped Room – beyond being

enced our development, or that will play these roles

exemplary of Kellett’s definition of Haut Craftwork,

in our future. The stories told through the skin(s) in

they can also be considered nuanced forms of skin

A Mouth-Shaped Room are evidence of this, expres-

(self ) portraiture. Harper often casts hollowed

sive yet elusive, like a bruise that has been deeply

slips, fragile shells of ivory plaster from his own

felt, yet faded over time. They belong to the artist,

body, and in so doing, takes an imprint of all that

having both contained him and been contained by

has been stored within his own skin and transfers

him, making him who he is, but also the products of

it onto a creature that now lives outside of himself.

his own making. Here, clad in their new protective

His markings become the camouflage of anoth-

envelopes - glass, metal, enamel, and rubber – they

er, his scars the basis for something else’s stripes.

exist preter-verbally; phantasms of an-Other’s

As such, his presence manifests two-fold in these

physicality, specimens from and of the skin, they

works - the artist’s hand/work is just as much a

echo from the past, and are hints guarded for the

part of the final piece as the physical presence of

hereafter.

his skin in their end product. In such a way, the skin is a limen or threshold that both contains the Self (artist), and also, as Kellett suggests, creates the conditions for the experience of “haptic visuality” where the sensation of ‘knowing’ one’s own Self is conjured physically through the act of looking at these artworks. “In the context of skin portraiture, the connection between Self and Other is … about the ways in which we all connect through the sensual and tactile nature of our skins.” 6 Recognizing the presence of the skin of an-Other, we comprehend it in a way that is beyond the ocular, from a place that is deeply felt on, and within, the body.

E ND NOT ES 1 Kellett, Heidi. “Skin Portraiture: Relational Embodiment and Contemporary Art.” Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone, ed. Caroline Rosenthal and Dirk Vanderbeke, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 244.

2

Kellett, 248.

3

Kellett, 249.

4

Kellett, 249-250.

5

Kellett, 250.

6

Kellett, 248.

7 Anzieu, Didier. The Skin Ego, (Le Moi-peau [1985]). Translated by Chris Turner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

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Leo, 2018 Porcelain, synthetic hair Installed in the Playroom Gallery

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Slowly and Quietly, 2015 Lamb hide, polyurethane, glass, steel, wood, aqua resin, hand-woven cottolin, paint Installed in the Playroom Gallery

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THIS IS A SCRIP T FO R A FILM FRO M SEVERAL B OOKS CO NCERNING AN EXH IB ITION WITH MO RE TH A N A RTWOR KS or A TO UR O F TIM E ITSEL F IN AN ITALI AN R EN A ISSA N C E R EV IVA L IS T VILLA STARRING TH E A RTIS T WITH K ANT, B R ON TË, B EN JA M IN , DU R AS , RO B B E-GRILLE T, CA LV IN O, BA L DW IN , A N D GARCÍA MÁRQU EZ Jamilee Lacy

PREVIOUS SPREAD LEFT

She Drank the Water that was Meant for the Orchids (3 Parts) installed in Zuber Gallery

Detail of She Drank the Water...

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Detail of She Drank the Water that was Meant for the Orchids (3 Parts)

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(Notes to set a certain tone: Criminally obfuscating but too refined to stir scandal, this script for a film from several books concerning an exhibition with more than artworks oscillates like clock hands between quasi-historical parody and loving meta-discourse. Mining the depths of the audience’s gleeful, spiteful, whimsical and bottomless reverence for Revivalist architecture and design, as well as the studio backers’ own knowledge of 17 th, 18 th, and 19th-century visual culture, the playwright suggests the director guide the actors’ interpretation of an object, a space, an edifice. This way the audience—by way of the director and an art curator—can closely read the references with which the artist creates painstakingly detailed renderings, sculptures, and installations that hold a very stylish, if slightly acerbic, mirror up to the culture’s distorted, but exquisitely elegant, historical revisionism.)

It begins.

Opening with a romantic, passionate, violent burst of music, the kind used at the end of films with powerfully emotional climaxes (a large orchestra of strings, woodwinds, brasses, etc.), the credits are of a classical type: the names in fairly simple letters, black against a gray background… the names or groups of names are framed with simple lines. These frames follow each other at normal, even rather slow, rhythm.

The artist’s name is listed; the artist plays every character, every object, every devilish detail.

Then the frames are gradually transformed, grow broader, embellished with various curlicues which finally constitute a kind of picture frame, at first flat, then painted in trompe-l’oeil so as to appear to be three dimensional.

Finally, in the last credits, the frames are real, complex and covered with ornaments. At the same time, the margin around them has widened slightly, revealing where these pictures [hang], the wall itself decorated with gilded moldings and carved woodwork. The camera passes across [this] section of wall to reveal a Lady with a Greyhound, The Protective Grandmother, a Siesta, some Children with [a] Kitten, and a Munich Tavern. The camera moves slowly, barely pausing to see these faces and places, then continues its movement through the ballroom grandeur of an empty great hall into a charming courtyard garden, where Diana, sweet and fiercely fragile, guards Mercury’s greed as much as she mourns their mutual demise.

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The sun sets. The courtyard dims. The stars faintly twinkle.

(Notes to set a certain context: The relationships between the sky and earth, historical architecture and interior design, art object and time are infinitely looped. At the villa, situated in the industrial urban midst of a stunning Mediterranean vista, the starring artist summons a fictional territory that initiates trans-historical flow, opens up wormholes and leaps of imagination, and speaks to questions about how to inventively inhabit the constrictions of the site, the epoch and the image.)

Just as the camera turns, it begins to spin. Slowly at first and then with ever-increasing ferocity, while stringed instruments hum their way to a scream.

Finally, it stops, and the music crashes into an abrupt silence upon view of a new location—the villa’s great hall again. But its ballroom floor is empty no more. The lights fade and a flash of bright glares off the black lion’s mane. Leo wasn’t there before. He is now.

A rich, buttery voice begins speaking continuously, but although the music has stopped completely, it takes us some time to understand the words. It’s not Leo, but nothing is immediately discernable. Eventually, we hear a feminine bass voice, wispy yet beautiful, deep and clear: Once again— 1 I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure—of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hall—where corridors succeed endless corridors—silent deserted corridors overloaded with ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings—sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries— transverse corridors that open in turn on empty salons, rooms overloaded with ornamentations from another century, silent halls…

A masculine soprano voice, overly bold but no less beautiful, responds: Yes, but what does it mean to orient oneself in decoration and cosmology? [I]f all the constellations… were one day by a miracle to be reversed in their direction… even the astrologer—if he pays attention only to what he feels and not at the same time to what he sees—would inevitably become disoriented. After all, I advanced, 1

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The dash represents a slight pause, more emphatic than the meaning of the text suggests.

She Drank the Water that was Meant for the Orchids (3 Parts), 2019 Wood, steel, rubber, cast dehydrated milk, industrial felt, polyurethane, leather, taxidermy bird, muslin, copper, rubber coating, glass, palm fronds, feathers, atomizers, cast acrylic, fire-polished chatons, enamel, latex

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She Drank the Water that was Meant for the Orchids (3 Parts), 2019 Wood, steel, rubber, cast dehydrated milk, industrial felt, polyurethane, leather, taxidermy bird, muslin, copper, rubber coating, glass, palm fronds, feathers, atomizers, cast acrylic, fire-polished chatons, enamel, latex

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as though to meet you—between those walls covered with woodwork, stucco, moldings, framed paintings, among which I was walking—among which I was already waiting for you, very far away from this setting where I now stand, in front of you.

The bass voice: [T]hese eyes [were] made to feel you, they must turn away from you—toward these walls covered with ornaments from another century, black woodwork, gilding, cut-glass mirrors, old portraits—stucco garlands with interlacing baroque ribbons—trompe-l’oeil capitals, false doors, false columns, painted perspectives…

The camera view expands, and two figures stand framing Leo. With a floating gait, the figures—shadowy but solid—move into the library. They murmur— almost inaudibly—greetings to the Brothers, who are confoundedly split in their deference.

After a silence, a third voice, that of a child, somewhere off-screen asks: Are you coming?

The soprano voice sharply: We must still wait—a few minutes—more—no more than a few minutes, a few seconds…

(A silence.)

That beautiful, deep bass voice, now quite restrained: A few seconds more, as if you yourself were still hesitating before separating [him]—from yourself—as if his silence, though already gray, already paler, still threatened to reappear—in this same place where you had imagined it with too much force—too much fear, or hope, in your fear of suddenly losing this faithful link with…

The voice gradually slows, suspended until it becomes a series of tones. Again, the camera spins, dizzily, and stops on a new setting. This time, it seems, the viewer has been transported from reality, to a storybook scene in French 31

tropicália. A fragrant breeze blows. Birds chirp and tweet. Bees buzz. The camera zooms out and pans—the place is no illustration; it’s a colorfully wallpapered chamber with ornately carved trim.

As the figures recede into the corners, farther than floral lamps’ light will reach, a tableau materializes from the central glow, as if grown from the wallpaper flower beds. Diana—that mercenary, mistress of all trades, bountiful mother, stoic monumental woman—bleeds color and something like life back into the Décor Chinois chamber.

Sing-songs the child out of view: We are forever—in a past of soft marble, like [this statue].

The soprano voice babbles: Hadn’t you ever noticed all this?

The bass voice weeps out: [T]his garden rendered for a grand palace, a museum of permeable time, with its halls deserted now, only temporarily, its walls motionless, mute servants long since dead no doubt, who, like Diana, still stand guard at the edge of a moment, at the corners of the corridors, along the galleries, in the empty salons, through which I walked to meet you, at the thresholds of the doors thrown wide that I walked through one after the other to meet you, as if watchful, indifferent, while I was already waiting for you, forever, and while I am still waiting for you as you still hesitate perhaps, still staring at the door into and out of this garden… and into the hell of paradise.

It ends.

The closing credits of a classical type list the artist’s name in perpetuity.

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RIGHT

Detail of She Drank the Water...

FOLLOWING SPREAD

Detail of She Drank the Water...

, 2019 Wood, glass, dried flowers, porcelain, glaze, snake shed, industrial felt, rubber, steel, limestone Installed in the South Gallery

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Details of She Had; She Would

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT

Being Plotted Together, It Cleaves Fast, Healthy is the Antidotes Bitterness, Who is Against Us?, and Hic Houd (I Hold It), 2016 Wool felt, nickel, resin-bonded charcoal, polyurethane, wood, cast acrylic, enamel, linen, cotton embroidery floss, pyrite glass, iron pyrite (fools gold), magpie wing Installed in the South Gallery

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Reliquaries I-V, 2019 Glass, plaster, lead, found photograph

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STAND ING IN F R ON T O F DAVID HARPER ’ S L AOCOON Joel Parsons

We see a warm box in a dark room. Inside we find a chunk of the work’s namesake: an ancient Hellenistic sculpture that Harper has partially remade, a fragment. In the original sculpture, our hero Laocoon is wrapped in a tangle of snakes, every slab of muscle straining to its limit, face contorted into a shape so extreme that it telegraphs not only agony, but release. Depending on who you ask, either Poseidon, Athena, Minerva, or Apollo summoned the deadly knot of serpents, probably to punish Laocoon for having sex on sacred ground. Desire manifested in the wrong place has always had grave consequences.

In Harper’s fragment, which isolates the head and trunk, we can see that the desire for which Laocoon was damned still ripples through his thick torso. In the original sculpture we can see that it also animates his massive hand as it grips a smooth marble shaft - a serpent - whose mouth, in turn, seeks out the precise place where Laocoon’s well-defined abdominal muscle meets hip bone. The meeting of muscle and bone carves a deep furrow running southward from waist to groin. In another bout of divine confusion, this particular bit of anatomy is alternately called Apollo’s belt, Aphrodite’s saddle, or Hercules’ girdle, depending on whose erotic imagination we’re accessing, or which search terms we’re shamefully but feverishly typing into the white bar at the top of the computer screen in the dark of our teenage bedroom, tumbling into one of those fraught adolescent moments when vague erotic ache discovers concrete

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D This Quiet Moment, 2019 and Holding Apart, 2016 (Wood, aluminum, resin-bonded charcoal, rubber coating, silk, hand-hooked rug) installed in the West Gallery LEFT

Detail of This Quiet Moment

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form. And now, having followed this path back in time and inward, and southward, we find ourselves a bit out of line, out of sorts, temperature rising, feeling flushed in this gallery while eroticizing the glowing pink box in front of us, projecting desire onto this damned Trojan. Returning to his contorted face we see the big mythological death, yes, but also the little French one: release. We nervously scan the darkened room to make sure we’re alone.

Snakes begin to curl at our feet. Desire manifested in the wrong place.

A quick redirect to cool off: Harper’s fragment is cast from the dust that was created in the process of making the rest of the work in this exhibition, mixed with milk. Leftovers and milk. Milk and leftovers. Leftovers and milk. If the exhibition had a digestive belly, this would be it, churning death into life like milk into butter. Our eyes slosh about until we notice, suspended above Laocoon’s head, This Quiet Moment, 2019 Wood, glass, lead, sawdust, dehydrated milk powder, resin, acrylic tile, industrial felt, atomizer bulb, plaster, steel

the perfume bottle lashed to the pink pearl wall: a bladder within a stomach, another body in this seductive coffin.

It is appropriate that Harper emphasizes fragrance here. Smells and death are as inextricable as smells and sex, particularly in the way they provoke memory. Think of the potent oils used to anoint Laocoon’s limp, heavy body so that mourners could approach him without retching. Smell our high school lover’s t-shirt, preserved in the bottom drawer of our dresser. Think of Laocoon’s sacrilegious dalliance. Think of our lover. Smell Laocoon. Scent returns bodies taken from us by death or distance, makes memory 44

palpable, reanimates dust into form. Though the

the sweetest perfume, distilled from the most deli-

chemical compounds that create scent sensation in

cate flowers and the gentlest spring breezes, is also

the brain are volatile and ephemeral, the mythology

a momento mori, intentional or not. Sprayed on the

they conjure is as durable as marble.

pulse points of the body where our flesh is warmest, perfume transmits lust with

Sober-minded chemists have

every heartbeat, then decays,

isolated and named these com-

vanishing into memory.

pounds: cadaverine, skatole, dimethyl trisulfideputrescine,

In Harper’s perfume bottle

butyric acid. (The last one

we might imagine a snakey

is the smell of rancid but-

tangle of the rich resins, oud,

ter

leftovers.)

and spices that have scented

chemists

bodies for millenia. We might

(perfumers) mix these com-

add a swirl of butyric acid and

pounds

semi-stable

a healthy dose of indoles, com-

potions that hold death and

plex scent compounds that are

desire in temporary stasis, to

present in many white flowers,

be strategically, incrementally

such as lilies. Indoles are also

atomized and absorbed so that

said to conjure rotting flesh

-

milk

and

Amorous-minded

into

we might control the leakage of memories or regu-

and some types of sex, particularly those types

late the currents of our appetites. Perfume is trigger,

which may be considered wrong-placed. Our pro-

narrative, camouflage, weakness, indulgence.

fane hero, we imagine, might bathe in this perfume.

(Wilde would drink it.)

Some perfumes address the heady mix of death and desire head-on. De Profundis, by Serge Lutens,

Death wraps itself sinuously around Harper’s

smells like a mossy, wet cemetery full of chrysan-

Laocoon. Longing perfumes it. Desire, manifested.

themums, dahlias, and disturbed dirt. (De Profundis is also the title of the text that Oscar Wilde wrote from prison after his desire manifested in the wrong place, namely Lord Alfred Douglas). A funeral mix of roses, incense, and myrrh, Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Thanatos takes its name from Greek mythology’s personification of death, its intoxicating sultriness only enhanced by its darkness. But even 45

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PREVIOUS SPREAD, LEFT

Prone, 2017 Wood, steel, ceramic, glaze, gum rubber, wool felt, cast acrylic, flocking, plaster, latex, rubber coating, auto body resin, taxidermy bird, silk, cottolin, glass Installed in Dake Gallery ABOVE

Details of Prone

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ABOVE FROM LEFT

Brothers and Crutches/Holders (5 parts) installed in the Dressing Room Crutches/Holders (5 parts), 2016 Wood, linen, cotton embroidery floss RIGHT

Brothers, 2015 Lamb hide, linen, cotton embroidery floss, polyurethane, wood, hand-woven cottolin, paint, glass

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Envelopper, 2014 Cowhide, polyurethane, linen, cotton embroidery floss Installed in the Library

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CO NTRIB UTO R B IOG R A PH IES

Shana McCaw is a Milwaukee-based artist-curator who has worked as a researcher, teacher, and consultant for the past 19 years. She and her husband Brent Budsberg maintain an internationally recognized art practice that explores history as subject and medium, an interest that parallels her curatorial work at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. Their studio is located in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.

Rhiannon Vogl is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto, where she researches postmodern art writing. From 2008-2018, she was a curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Rhiannon runs marathons, lives for avocados, coffee, and has written for Phaidon; Blackflash; Border Crossings and Canadian Art.

Jamilee Lacy is Director and Chief Curator at Providence College Galleries in Rhode Island, where she organizes exhibitions, publications and experimental presentations of contemporary art. She holds two undergraduate degrees in studio art and art history from the School of the Art Institute and a master’s degree in comparative literature from Northwestern University.

Joel Parsons is an artist, curator, and teacher based in Memphis, Tennessee.

He is the director of Clough-Hanson Gallery and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Rhodes College.

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The Bruise (Yonge) (I, II), 2019 Porcelain, glaze, china paint, wood, glass, enamel, steel Installed in the Hallway

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