letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
emily
harvey: a life in fluxus
Henry
Flynt: Emily Harvey from Photos of Women (1989/1991)
In
one of the last conversations I had with Emily Harvey she talked about salt.
"I'm
still fighting the salt, but I'm winning," she said on the phone from New
York when she began chemotherapy treatments. It was May 2003, and Emily was referring
to the renovation of the apartments in Venice that would form the basis of her
Foundation. Emily was battling back the briny waters around Venice as they attacked
her artist studios, and battling to stay alive for long enough to take me on a
promised "special tour" of Venice, such as Angelo, her third husband,
had given her to show her the effect of salt on the friezes he had studied as
an art student and followed as they decayed.
I
never got to take the tour with Emily, but our conversations about both her foundation
and her fight with pancreatic cancer found their way into The New York Times in
July, 2003, something she thanked me for. She wanted to tell the world. Simply
and directly. And again, I learned what a true character Emily Harvey was. I imagine
I wasn't alone.
There
were the Venetian roof carpenters - "they use cork chips and cement"
- whom she educated about the re-roofing of the Cloisters. There were the Venetian
mattress replacement experts who patiently emptied her mattress of its wool, combed
it and refilled it as Emily studied them. She giggled in delight once the bed
was reset back on the frame. "It was a beautiful, comfortable mattress again!
For fifty bucks!" The local specialists, who restored the 300-year old terrazzo
floor by scraping up the existing mixture of ox's blood, red brick dust and wax,
must have certainly enjoyed this perky American art dealer. Totally hip Emily
(in her signature pigtails) let them know everything there was to know about it.
"It feels velvety to walk on...barefoot…so luxurious," she cooed.
"The floor was so gorgeous."
In
early Spring 2003, when I first heard that Emily was sick, I called her in New
York. I was nervous and didn't know what to expect. She said, calmly, "The
doctors gave me three months to live --11 months with chemo." She told me
about the foundation she was putting together and urged me to get in contact with
her husband Davidson, and a dozen other close friends and artists who would fill
me in on the project, and the history of her gallery.
I
first met Emily Harvey in the late 1980s, visiting her gallery at 537 Broadway,
interested, as both artist and writer, in the Fluxus phenomenon as it manifested
years after its birth and a decade after its reported demise. She routinely exhibited
what most in the art would termed "marginal," but I was continually
intrigued by whatever she would put on her walls, or floors, and most by the people
who regularly showed up there. I discovered books split in half by Buzz Spector.
There were video installations by Nam June Paik. I wandered through the ephemera,
hanging in mid-air, of A.M. Fine: drawings of spoons, and obsessive typewritten
notes on nickel postcards. I saw the "Brown Paintings" by Dick Higgins,
witnessed a lecture and video of a plastic surgery "intervention" by
French artist Orlan, and a discussion of globalization by Ben Vautier. It was
the most lively, engaging gallery I'd found in New York. It was less a showroom
for expensive objects, than a kind of art house, with cats and cups of coffee,
and a cast of characters that helped define - for me - art in the latter the 20th
century. And, from Emily, I gleaned what was really important in making and looking
at art: experiencing it. I wrote an essay on Fluxus in America for the Lund Art
Journal, and another piece, focusing mainly on Emily's gallery and her role in
George Maciunas's irreverent and often conceptual art movement for Connoisseur
in the early 1990s.
It
was apparent that Fluxus suited her. She was irreverent, fun and extremely social.
In every contact with Emily and the gallery over the years, I was aware of her
generosity, her down to earth presence, and her energy. Casually dressed in a
denim frock, Emily was more den mother than art dealer. She told me to call Ay-O
to take a tour in the dark labyrinth in the basement of 537 Broadway. "You
must do this!" she told me. Ay-O took me through the darkened, winding corridors
of the building -"Watch your head!"- to his biggest "finger box"
installation. It was a literally a hidden jewel, using the building as a "box."
"Wasn't it great?," she enthused when I'd surfaced an hour later.
Most
people who came to the gallery were surprised, I think. Carolee Schneemann told
me Emily once abruptly left a conversation in mid-sentence with an art collector
to fetch a band-aid for someone who caught a splinter in his finger. Another collector
she left standing in the gallery to have a rather engaging chat with the UPS man
who'd just arrived. She was often wielding a hammer, or making spaghetti.
Emily's
gallery was a home to probably hundreds of artists and friends, who undoubtedly
felt they'd come to the right place at the right time. She gave to her visitors
and acquaintances and friends what the high-tone galleries on West Broadway and
Uptown could never offer: herself. And she gave an unmatched enthusiasm for her
artists, whom she treated as family. They in turn, adored her.
"Her
gallery was the only one in New York not connected with money but with the idea
of having people express themselves," said Christian Xatrec, her second husband.
"Emily showed artists like Dick Higgins," he said. "Nobody else
would show him." Christian came to my house in Paris and told me how Emily
maxed out her credit cards to acquire the estate of AM Fine from the artist's
mother, and used her corporate art sales job as a source of ready cash for edgy
Fluxus exhibitions.
Christian
cross-referenced stories of many artists I knew of, and some I had met, with stories
told to me by Emily. These were the people - Ray Johnson, John Cage, Daniel Spoerri,
Francesco Conz, Henry Flynt, Jean Dupuy, Allison Knowles, Charlotte Moorman, Ben
Patterson, Jackson MacLow, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks (Cloudsmith), Eric
Andersen, Ben Vautier, George Brecht, Olga Adorno, Robert Filliou, Ken Friedman,
Christer Hennix, Joe Jones, Takako Saito, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Williams, La Monte
Young, Marian Zazeela, Lance Fung and Yoko Ono among others - who added in their
wonderfully unique way to the vaulting spirit of the former loft of George Maciunas.
They were the life injected into the spaces Emily inhabited and opened to the
world.
I asked
Christian about her many husbands and he laughed. "Emily inspires in both
artists and husbands a deep loyalty and love."
And
that, deep loyalty and love, was - or better, is - true. It is the essence
of her gift.
Matthew
Rose, PIU (For Emily), 2002. PHOTO: Davidson Gigliotti
When
I was last in Venice in late May, 2003, I visited Emily's apartments on Calle
dei Cinque, and the gallery, Archivio Harvey. Emily was not able to meet me. She
was in New York, still undergoing treatments at Sloan Kettering. Henry Martin,
Berty Skuber and Ewa Gorniak gave me the grand tour, taking me up to the roof,
showing me the terrazzo floors and introducing me to Emily's cats. We walked late
into the Venetian night, and talked about what Emily had done over the past 10
years in Venice - and was still doing - when all odds seemed against her. When
most people would lay down and just die. She was hurrying to set up the Foundation.
She wanted others to benefit from the enormous inheritance of love and fortune
she'd been blessed with. And in that spirit, I wanted to leave her something.
It was a little painted text work on wood in acid green and psychedelic fuschia.
The word was "PIU." In Italian, it means "more." I wanted
(and I think we all wanted) "more" Emily.
I
was happy to know Emily Harvey. I am changed because of her, and every time I
set foot on a terrazzo floor or remember the message Dick Higgins once left on
my answering machine concerning the nature of Fluxus - "It comes in waves…"
- I think of her.
RIP
November 8, 2004
Matthew
Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. E: mistahrose@yahoo.com
The Emily Harvey
Foundation: 537 Broadway, NYC, NY 10012
The
Emily Harvey Foundation: S. Polo 322, I-30125 Venice, Italy Tel: +39-041-522-6727
affiliates
