Lovely Bones

Slought unearths the fruits of a deadly obsession.

by Shaun Brady

Slought Foundation/Richard Harris Collection Coillur (litti-cusci), by Javier Siva Meinel, gelatin silver print, 1993.

[ visual art ]

"Collectors have an appetite that doesn't seem to have an end to it," explains Chicago-area art collector Richard Harris without a trace of irony. But the thousand-plus pieces that make up Harris' personal collection have an end built right into them — from nearly every canvas, print, sculpture, carving and Grateful Dead T-shirt stares the hollow eyes of a skull.

The inevitability inherent in Harris' collection, a small portion of which makes up Slought Foundation's exhibit "Strictly Death: Selected Works from the Richard Harris Collection," is captured by James Ensor's etching My Portrait in 1960, an image of the artist as a reclining collection of bones. "I hadn't thought of it much while I was collecting, but in a sense it's my way of dealing with mortality," admits the 72-year-old Harris.

Earlier in life, after giving up his pre-med studies at Queens College, he had assembled a large collection of rare books largely focused on natural history — "living things," he says, "birds and flowers and animals and so forth. When you look back you see things you hadn't been aware of when you were in those stages of your life, but my collections move from the living to the dead. There's a line there that I hadn't been aware of."

The collection began in 2001, upon Harris' retirement after 35 years spent trading in antique botanical and herbal prints. Deciding to sell his personal collection of prints by Rembrandt, Matisse and Picasso, he was casting about for a new direction when he came upon a display of memento mori at the art fair in Maastricht, Netherlands.

"I thought that was fascinating," Harris says, "and realized that this idea of skeletons and skulls might be fertile ground to investigate."

The fruits of that investigation cover a staggeringly wide range of time and practices — from a 4,000-year-old Chinese stone carving to a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, from a full first edition of Goya's 1863 The Disasters of War to the Chapman brothers' "rectified" 1999 versions.

"We love this obsessive focus on a topic that can never be completed because the project is encyclopedic by definition," says Aaron Levy, executive director of Slought Foundation. "To collect is not just to compile or to buy, it's to be consumed by this passion which one is almost addicted to, in a beautiful as well as a problematic way. What's so interesting here is that he's collecting something that at the end of the day evades our comprehension and understanding, so with each work he at once gets closer to and farther from the actualization of his aspirations."

Slought's exhibition of about 40 pieces from Harris' collection marks the first time any of it has been placed on display. Even with such a small fraction of the whole, it offers a far-reaching sample: Jasper Johns, Kiki Smith, Irving Penn, Sally Mann, Durer, Rembrandt. Unlike most Slought shows, "Strictly Death" is not arranged to place the work in service of an over-arching theoretical position, but simply offers a diversity of representations.

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"We've always been interested in the limit of what one can do with art but also the limit of what a society accepts from its cultural representations," Levy says. "When you look at the heterogeneity of artists from the Baroque through the present, the one thing that's persistent is this topic. A Rembrandt and a Kiki Smith are two different phenomena, but at their heart is a shared concern, a shared fixation on death. So in the end, it's less a question of why we're doing the show and more a question of, how can there not be more shows on this topic?"

"That's the beauty of it," says Harris, who insists that the vast nature of the subject is precisely what appeals to him, evoking a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities (though at his wife's insistence, the collection intrudes only minimally on their living space).

"The skull and the skeleton are anonymous, yet cultures from Asia, from Europe, from South America, from all over the world have come to those images and related them to their own religious, social and political beliefs," he says. "The universality of it is extraordinary, and the images are still the basic skull and the basic skeleton. It doesn't change from prehistory to today or from any part of the world. The thread continues. It goes on."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

"Strictly Death" opening reception, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Sat., Jan. 23; through March 8, free, Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., 215-701-4627, slought.org. View more images at citypaper.net/arts.