The Brooklyn Rail

Growing up in the outskirts of Houston, Texas, you didn’t meet people like Jim Harithas. I knew monsters, functionaries, and also-rans. All of them venal. I was venal too. I had returned home in need of a job, and, for the first time in my life, I was beginning to wonder if there were any people who stood for anything. That’s when I met Harithas.

Sure, Jim Harithas was a titanic figure, an earthmover, but nobody had told me. Even Jim never mentioned his past accomplishments unless it was connected to an anecdote praising an artist or person he had known. His mind was always on what he was doing, what he was reading, what he was thinking about in the present.

I met him after I cold-called him after dropping by his strange, dimly lit Art Car Museum. At our first interview, Jim didn’t mention anything about a job. Instead, he waxed eloquent about Fidel Castro, the lasting tolls of the civilian bombings in Kosovo, and Henry Miller’s fictionalized run at the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. The next morning Jim offered me a position—duties unclear and wages low. But I was at a crossroads, for later that same afternoon I was offered a position as a copywriter with an ad firm with good pay and benefits.

I followed Jim Harithas around the world for the next six years. He was my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. He gave me a conceptual map of the world, even a Houston I hadn’t known, one seething with artists, broken dreams, and the clash of ideas. He was a contrarian. I remember this injunction of his, used to eviscerate any art he considered mannered or polite: “Taste?! Taste is nothing. Ideas are everything.” Five minutes later he was likely to demand we uninstall every work in an exhibition to rehang each picture three inches higher.

Knowing him was a revelatory experience, and Jim never shied from revelations, however grueling. When we walked through Gaza City streets still bloody with the evidence of IDF incursions, the threat to his safety didn’t matter to him. He was fearless. One evening we were watching a concert in one of the slums in the hills surrounding Caracas, when Jim realized he was still wearing his Rolex, an affectation he would have spurned were it not a gift from his wife Ann. Even though we were in one of the most economically desperate parts of a city riven with wealth inequity, his only response was to nonchalantly rotate the watch face inward. He didn’t even roll down his sleeve.

He could be the kindest, most generous, most patient person one moment, and the most infuriating and mercurial the next. He believed that everyone was an artist, but not necessarily a great, or even good one. Through it all, however, his sympathy always remained with the underdog, the dispossessed, the victims and martyrs of history. Maybe people got the Harithas they deserved. I got the Harithas I needed. I loved him even when I was cursing him.

He transformed the way I saw the world. He worked in broad strokes and people listened. He said that artists should speak the truth, so I ran my mouth a lot. He said artists should take risks, so I quit him because the only time I ever felt safe was at his side. Long after I quit working for him, I have followed him in my mind. Even now, after his death, he’s there now, chiding me. I’m not a spiritual person, but I hope that in some way he’s with Norman Bluhm and Sal Scarpitta, telling stories and ducking and weaving like a boxer.