“My notion is if it isn’t everything, it’s nothing.” Harris Diamant
The artist, Harris Diamant, might still be at City College if they hadn’t “pushed him out.” An undergraduate for six years, with a major in every department, he felt it was “so much better a place than the world outside.” In another era, he might’ve been a gentleman scholar, the kind of modest landed gentry who went on expeditions, wrote treatises, and conducted private experiments. Under the radar. He had not a clue what to do with his life…in terms of profession.
Twenty years later, a dealer in antiques and folk art, Harris found himself delivering a life-sized carved wood cow he’d sold (the sign for a dairy,) to the upstate home of well known collector and gallery owner, Allan Stone. “It weighed thousands of pounds… We picked it up in Pennsylvania. And the deal was, we were supposed to sneak it into his house because his wife was getting really upset.” Stone was “an accumulator.” By all description, a purchase that size actually could have been lost in the fifty-five room house. Harris was a purveyor. The pleasure of finding the piece and then someone who would value and enjoy it was his bailiwick. It would be years more before he began to create art himself.
Al Heim’s father owned a second hand store in Harlem. Heim was Harris’s best friend. The two sixteen year olds would regularly pick through antique shops and junk heaps unearthing intriguing or aesthetically appealing objects. Harris attributes the beginning of his affinities to this scavenging. Each boy, in his own way, collected. “It was all inexpensive…and brought me to a place I like to be at. I don’t have real longings to own stuff, certainly not for long periods of time. I do love making the judgment of whether an object is worthy of owning.”
Married right out of college (it was expected), Harris had to earn a living. He lasted six months as an investigator for the welfare department, but didn’t like being “the man.” The expression elicits a wince even today. Nor did he “have much aptitude” for teaching, something he did in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn for six years.
Around 1961, the first organized flea market set up in Manhattan on Sundays at Sixth Avenue and 26th Street. It cost a dollar to get in. There was excitement in discovering décor , clothing, and collectibles for very little money. Harris took a space. A neighborhood drugstore in Bed-Sty near the school in which he taught went out of business. Items being sold included 19th century bottles with reverse-painted labels and pill rolling machines. “Real antiques. The real deal.” These he added to original and faux Tiffany lamps, silver antique jewelry (“you could buy almost anything for $8”) carnival glass, crockery. “In the early sixties there wasn’t really a defined market. The worth was being established as I sold it.” Soon, the weekend income allowed him to reduce school time to substituting.
Harris, his then wife Gladys, and Al established a tiny 6’ x 20’ shop on West 72nd Street called Eris, after the goddess of discord. “I’d open the shop when I came home from school around four and stay open till about eight.” Two years later, Al was too focused on his film career to devote much time to Eris. An Englishman came in and offered to buy the entire inventory. They split the proceeds. Participation in antiques shows all over the city followed.
In 1966, Harris quit the school system to open Eris Antiques on 53rd and Second Avenue. His specialty was bronze sculpture, especially Western American, antique toys, model steam engines, antique scientific instruments and Art Nouveau jewelry. Then a dealer introduced him to American Folk Art, which “…comes from simple folk who made it to please themselves and their families. It made everything else seem nasty to me.” Harris added this to his mix, especially in the third incarnation of Eris. One of the first appreciators of and dealers in the genre, he helped define anonymous folk art. Again, Eris’s entire stock was bought out just before closing. His last bricks and mortar venture, The Diamant Gallery, on West 72nd Street, was devoted to American Folk Art. It closed in 1987.
Curiously, it was the modern, minimalist sculptor, David Smith who inspired Harris to finally create his own work. A Hirshhorn Museum exhibition featuring 27 small pieces by Smith “left me with the powerful message that I could make art. I knew it wouldn’t look anything like Smith’s, but I would myself start creating. I went home, claimed what had once been a maid’s room for mine, and made a little sculpture.” Equally intriguing from a man whose knowledge was bound up in the mediums of earlier centuries, was his choice of steel.
The first piece was about 5” x 10” and substantially heavy. “I was always fixing stuff, so I knew how to solder.” Harris brought the sculpture to art dealer Allan Stone who excitedly offered him a show in October, 1987. Almost all the art was of a scale that could be “picked up.” A few were sold. Allan bought several. Harris was forty-two. He never looked back.
From abstract steel constructions, he moved on to figurative wood. And started carving heads. “I don’t consider myself an especially three dimensional person. I had to discover where stuff is in space.” He taught himself lathe turning, welding, and carving, exploring the process in “a very dedicated and focused way” for five years. A 30” laminated head stands on the table in his studio. It’s archetypal in appearance. Harris is drawn to Egyptian and Greek antiquities signifying “access to eternity.”
Soon, some of the heads were “upholstered” in sheet lead. (The term, offered by Harris’ designer wife, Neville Bean, admirably describes a fascinating technique of covering the wood with malleable sheets of lead.) “Lead has a memory. Wherever you put it, it stays.” Seams are soldered and the excess is cut off. Brazing, welding, and gold and silver leafing are additional methods currently used with a wide variety of metals, plastics, and paints. ‘Quite a learning curve and undoubtedly part of Harris’s being able to maintain interest in the process.
Moving away solidity and opacity, Harris’s pieces are now constructed like three dimensional elevations—all planes, angles, and surfaces. The viewer’s eye is allowed every possible point of view inside and out. Light travels and reflects. Selected pieces are mounted on turntables to further accessibility. Some house a central mirrored element which offers the illusion that a viewer is inside looking out. The artist has “an affinity for symbols, objects and accessories related to vision.” Optometric apparatuses, eyeglasses, goggles, and corrective lenses all appear in recent work. “These references call attention to sight-and-insight in more than just a literal sense.” The All-Seeing Eye of secret societies like the Masons is a natural metaphor.
The precision with which Harris executes his vision is extraordinary. Every facet is measured, every seam met tightly and held invisibly. (He sometimes works with binocular magnifiers). Burnished surfaces gleam. Materials are solid and strong, meant to last. “I’m always afraid to stop because I’m not confident of restarting.” Complete focus is apparent. He even backed off trout fishing.
Once a work is finished, he photographs it from every angle. “I can show how an object looks in the mind’s eye, perfecting it, taking it away from distraction, otherwise the mind follows the eye elsewhere.” Creating in an instinctive/fugue state Harris protests he doesn’t consciously deal with content at all. “I do the same thing over and over in an attempt to reveal what’s inside me. Paying attention only to where the work takes me.” Each piece represents a state of mind and is, in fact, a kind of evolving portrait. Through the lens and then printed, a sculpture reveals additional perspective. It’s Harris’s way of understanding what he’s done, “stepping back and really seeing it, almost like taking a small vacation.”
Harris Diamant’s work hails back to a robotic future envisioned as early as the 1927 German Expressionist film, Metropolis, an attribution to which he doesn’t object. It exhibits an inadvertent relationship to Steampunk (a hybrid of anachronistic 19th century technology and futuristic innovation). Yet, despite the medium, there’s also something iconic and mythical about these heads. Were they archeologically unearthed a century from now, they might be taken for gods. Omniscience has no shelf life.
Harris still deals the occasional piece of folk art or unusual find he comes upon at a show or on Ebay while looking for components. (See stories of The Electric Pencil and read “From Trashcan to Museum“on Woman Around Town). They pass through his hands. The hands of a sculptor.
Second photo from top, 1962, from left to right: Harris, friend and film editor, Al Heim, and Harris’s wife, Gladys Roth.
All unattributed quotes are Harris Diamant
For more information go to Diamant’s website
Obsolete represents Diamant on the West Coast
