Jim Garmhausen will present “How to Enjoy The End Of Time On Ten Dollars A Day” at the Tompkins County Public Library at 6:00pm Tuesday, July 20, and the exhibit will be on view through July.
JIM GARMHAUSEN HAS had three shows in the last calendar year. He began with a bang over at the bar formerly known as Korova, with a comic art show entitled “Follow Me if You Want to Live.” He followed that with a piece called “They’re My Friends…I Made Them,” an installation in the Night & Day space on the Commons that is still hanging. His latest, on view now at the Tompkins County Public Library, is entitled “How to Enjoy The End Of Time On Ten Dollars A Day.” Garmhausen will present an artist’s talk tonight, Tuesday, July 20, at 6:00pm, and the show will hang at least until the end of July.
“I use, in my exhibit, rusted, aged pieces of metals and antique toys, combining these objects with sculptures and paintings, to create a world where product/junk and people have synthesized into one,” Garmhausen wrote by email. “My fascination with metals, and their slow deterioration; and antique toys, with their store of sentimental energy, finds a place here, along with my art, which has been described as children’s art with adult voices (often unsettling and dark).”
The show includes a few different media: “I made a lot of small clay sculptural heads, and I think I wound up in the neighborhood of twelve to fifteen of those. Then I did paintings on wood; plastering the wood, painting on it, and then gluing pieces of metal on the surface.”
Garmhausen explains that “How to Enjoy The End Of Time On Ten Dollars A Day” is an interpretation of my reading of Philip Dick’s science fiction story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” “In reading the book, I was struck by the idea of what the book calls ‘kipple,’ and defines as ‘the collection of useless bits of trash we wallow in; all the paper and junk that is not recycled.’” Garmhausen wrote. “Kipple accumulates even without the intercession of people; an abandoned apartment will be reentered, months or years later, and found to contain more junk. Somehow it has multiplied, and spread. The inference is not an organic splitting, or recreation, but somehow a breakdown, an erosion, that results in more instead of less.”
Garmhausen continues: “A central theme of the book is the creation of androids, both animal and human. Animals are created to be bought by the average citizen; they give a sense of well-being, importance, and depending on the animal, status. People, or ‘replicants,’ are created to be workers, or slaves. They are supposed to be without free will, or the desire to be free. This goes wrong, ultimately.
“This commodification of humanity, the creation of human-like machines, calls into question the motives of the creators, and of the buyers as well. The book resonates, I think, because of its insistence on a world driven by the creation and selling of products. The end result of producing materials is, finally, the accumulation of junk. My personal stance is that our world is driven by a maniacal desire for self-definition by the accumulation of stuff, of products, of items that we choose to identify ourselves by. In a sense, we become products, like androids, and are disposable. We are constantly shedding layers of products like discarded skins, and we are increasingly surrounded by, and hemmed in by, the junk of rejected, outgrown items.”
Though “They’re My Friends…I Made Them” got its name from a quote from “Blade Runner,” Garmhausen doesn’t see himself particularly drawn to speculative fiction. “It’s not a genre that I seek out, but often resonates with the dark work I create. Though it is true that ‘Star Wars’ was filled with all of this junk, and that fascinated me. I grew up watching “Battlestar Gallactica” and “E.T.” but it was never obsessive about it.”
Garmhausen will present “How to Enjoy The End Of Time On Ten Dollars A Day” at the Tompkins County Public Library at 6:00pm Tuesday, July 20, and the exhibit will be on view through July.