Souls in Aspic

By ROBERT HUGHES

"The world presents itself to me in a many-faceted, elusive vision--I am no longer interested in the now of today. There exists a peripheralness, a border to which the unconscious mind must be let free and unburdened." So says Harold Paris, the bearded, exuberantly loquacious son of an immigrant Yiddish-theater actor, who is having his first major American show at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif. At 46, Paris has been by turns wigmaker, illustrator (for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes), fisherman, painter, environment maker and sculptor. Though he has exhibited frequently in Europe, he is still virtually unknown in the U.S., for, as Berkeley Museum Director Peter Selz puts it, "he has never been part of any movement in American art. I think that is why he was never successful in New York, where art goes in movements and trends. When most art in America is cool and removed and interested in problems of form, here is a man who is constantly retaining the emotional concept."

Paris' emotions are much possessed by death. From his early Buchenwald illustrations to his latest environments, Paris remains a poet of ritual and mortality: he has even been known to bury an invisible sculpture sealed in a black coffin as part of a happening, and one large environmental piece at Berkeley, Pantomima Illuma (1966), is a kind of tomb, a black chamber with soft walls and eerie pencils of light on ambiguous, fleshy bits of sculpture. Paris' work is that of a rich and disordered temperament, which manages to be both heavily serious and slightly glib.

He is a virtuoso in every medium from clay to rubber, from stainless steel to Plexiglas, and his involvement with craft sometimes gives his images a cer tain preciousness. His newest works, The Souls, are slabs of aspic-like silicon gel, none of them bigger than a sheet of typing paper, in which objects are set and, as it were, embalmed. The gel has the disconcerting resiliency of flesh--it feels vulnerable and intimate--while its contents, which may be any thing from a cut-out decal of a rain bow trout to a diminutive plastic air plane, exhale a delicate poetry of sur realist juxtaposition; their like has not been seen in America since Joseph Cornell's boxes. Memory and touch, a poignant archaeology of the self: at its best, Paris' work is pure magic.

"You know," he says, "kids love The Souls. I ask them if they understand what they are and they say yes, they are fairy tales; in The Souls I deal with fantasy, and they are quite romantic and mystical too. You look at a petal falling to the ground and it means some thing different from all the other petals you've seen. And you file that away in your mind. As an artist, I can come to grips with these images."

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