The Brooklyn Rail

Jim Harithas was fearless, and that fearlessness made him the only gallery director in America willing to take the risk of showing Gittoes. His Witness to War was in 2011 and twelve years on, that is still the only time my paintings, installations and drawings have been seen in the US.

This year, I was on my way back to Ukraine when David Ross informed me of the sad news that Jim had died. I was willing to divert my flight to be there for him, but David suggested Jim would appreciate me raising a vodka to him, as missiles rained down on Kyiv, more than another face at the funeral.

Back in 2010, David showed Jim my film Miscreants of Taliwood and to my total surprise Jim agreed to do a show in Houston at his Station Museum of Art without ever seeing the paintings. This good news came as I was making a new documentary,  Love City, Jalalabad in Jalalabad Afghanistan. I found myself shuffling between Houston and Jalalabad for much of the next year as Jim built the show, mainly from works stored in Berlin by my friend Mayen Beckmann, Max’s granddaughter. They included my toughest paintings of the slaughter of innocents with machetes, at Kibeho Refugee camp in Rwanda, that had been exhibited at Kassel and my “Descendance” series from Iraq. Jim was willing to pay the huge cost of transporting these very large paintings, sight unseen, to the US as well as from my home country of Australia. 

Jim knew what it was like to live between war zones having smuggled much needed medicines and other necessities into Nicaragua during the Ronald Reagan devised Contra War against the Sandinistas. We had a common friend in Ernesto Cardenal, the radical Jesuit priest who invented Externalist Poetry and upgraded the recognition of peasant art to Museum status. In 1986 I had made the Documentary ‘Bullets of the Poets’ in Nicaragua and Jim was delighted to screen it continuously in the Gallery Cinema. 

He titled my show Witness to War and designed the placement of every work with the precision of a Bauhaus Architect. 

Jim discovered art through his mother but his first love for Great Art came in Germany where his father was stationed as a WW2 Veteran officer, assisting with the post fascist transition to democracy. Jim fell for the works of the German Expressionists who made him want to become a painter. Finding Beckmann, Dix, Kollwitz, Kirchner and Gros had the same effect on me. The American art world has always had an aversion towards German Expressionism and makes no connection between it and home-grown abstract expressionism. Unlike Jim, they are particularly averse to figurative expression when it has political content. 

I think that Jim gave me the show because I shared his political beliefs and not due to my abilities as a painter. This was confirmed one day when I took my oils out to finish a large canvas depicting body parts spinning around in an atmosphere of blood, guts and fire; my attempt to capture the moment of death for the occupants, when a Vehicle runs over an IED in Iraq or Afghanistan, something I have witnessed multiple times.  Jim stood behind me as I applied the paint using the palm of my hand and fingers. In a surprised tone he said “So, you can also paint.” I treasure this complement like few others. 

The big controversy in Houston at the time was the refusal by the local authorities to allow any Mosques to be built in the city precinct, post 9/11.  Jim bravely acted on my desire to create a mosque in the Gallery and employed Mexican carpenters to build it, enabling me to design a detailed and mystically decorative interior which members of the Muslim community soon came to pray in. We offered the Mosque to the Menil collection but they refused and sadly it had to be dismantled and destroyed. In honour of Jim’s memory, I am about to recreate this mosque at our Yellow House in Jalalabad and hope to prove as Jim always said, “art can win where war fails.” 

My film Miscreants of Taliwood is about the violent suppression of the Pashtun film industry by bombing video stores and killing film crews. Jim had his carpenters build a replica of a Peshawar Video store with a counter and my collection of CDs and DVDs including posters and Pashto language dramas made at our Yellow House. The store was a celebration of the heroic efforts of film artists in Pakistan and Afghanistan to resist the repressive Wahhabist-inspired fundamentalism of the Taliban.

When I returned from Afghanistan for the opening of  Witness to War  I was in deep trouble with a notorious gangster and warlord named Maula. Under the American occupation corruption was rife and monsters, like Maula, had become rich beyond their wildest dreams. I got a tip off that Maula had paid a hit man and his team to kidnap and kill me as I got off the plane. They had bribed my normally trustworthy driver by paying for him to take a sex holiday in Baluchistan if he agreed to collect me and deliver me for execution. Jim saw the emails from my informant but did not tell me to return or try to convince me that I would be mad to do so. He expected me to have a strategy and that was what was most unique about Jim, he never held anyone back no matter what. I had a close connection with some private military contractors protecting the Australian Embassy who sent an armoured vehicle to the plane, allowing me to wave to my potential assassins through bullet proof glass, as we passed them, waiting outside the airport gates.

When recommending Jim to me, David Ross said “What you can learn from Jim, who is a truly great curator, will give you insights into yourself and your art which will be priceless. But what is most important, his example will strengthen your resolve to stay true to what you believe, because that is what he has always done , followed his passion no matter what the cost.” 

In the introduction to the Witness to War catalogue Jim wrote “Gittoes creates his artwork almost exclusively in war zones, where he experiences the deprivation, disorientation, and the challenge of living dangerously in a dysfunctional world of suffering and death. He epitomizes a morality that we try to ignore even though we are not entirely ignorant of the devastating effects of our American wars on the lives of innocent human beings.”