February 10, 2005
The many roles of Jim Rittimann
Moving from professional bull riding into the creative life of art and exhibition design is not an often-trod path, but it’s the one taken by artist Jim Rittimann, exhibition designer at the UW’s Henry Art Gallery. Oh, and he shows dogs, too.
As head preparator and exhibit designer for the gallery, Rittimann, 53, gets the Henry gallery space ready for its visiting installations and consults with the artists and curators to make sure each exhibit is correctly installed and shown to its best advantage.
“I talk to them, and design ways to … make sure their ideas come out as clearly as possible,” he said. Rittimann has been at the UW since 1986, and earned his master’s degree in sculpture while working at the gallery.
It helps that he, too, is an artist; he knows how to communicate with the exhibiting artists and generally forms friendships with them as he helps their art take on three-dimensional reality at the Henry. And whether he agrees with every artist on every nuance is not the point; “I know what they want and how to achieve it,” he said.
His colleagues at the Henry appreciate his talents, too. “He really gets it,” enthused Elizabeth Brown, chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections at the gallery. “He has the larger picture as well as an ability to focus in on the details. I depend on his eye, and his mind.”
Rittimann has a selectivity of words and a no-frills, Texas kind of attitude that hint of stories untold, and indeed, he has led an interesting life. His current job is worlds away from the environment that occupied him in his youth. From his late teens until he was 29, Rittimann was a rodeo bull rider, competing nationwide in the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association.
He could as easily measure his bull riding career in injuries as in years. This becomes clear when Rittimann gets to listing his rodeo-related calamities. “All the ribs on my left hand side (have been broken) different times. I broke my collar bone several times. My knee … and I have lost my spleen and been kicked in the head four times and knocked out…I’ve punctured a lung…”
But then, that’s the profession, he said: “If you’re in rodeo and you ride bulls, it’s not ‘if’ you’re going to get hurt, it’s ‘when.’”
Still, it wasn’t the injuries outright that made him decide to leave the sport. “At times I’d start thinking, ‘Is this what I want for the rest of my life?’” He chose his words carefully: “It became — it just wasn’t interesting anymore. And when you start thinking like that is when you get hurt, when you’re not putting 100 percent into it.”
Does he still miss bull-riding? A bit, maybe. “There’s a lot of freedom. You’re like a free spirit — you work for yourself.” But then, time would have ended his career anyhow. “It’s pushing the envelope to do it into your 40s,” he said.
A love for animals, however, continues in Rittimann’s life. He and his wife, Christie, have eight dogs — four Boston Terriers, a border collie, two shelties and an old Doberman pinscher — most of which compete in dog agility shows across the country. They have no children. “Our dogs are our kids,” Rittimann said.
The dogs win points in each show that then lead to further honors. “We have boxes full of ribbons,” Rittimann said. “And all of our dogs have won some, except our Doberman, who doesn’t run at all.” He said presenting the dogs in a show environment is a bit like his former work with bulls (except for the pain and injuries), in that human and animal are always working and thinking in tandem.
Rittimann’s artistic life is busy, too. He creates eye-catching, intriguing sculptures that blend fact and fiction abstractly. He likes art that provokes a response, he said.
Take the lanky, skeletal creatures among those labeled “Mixed Bones and Insect Parts” pictured in notes for a 1996 exhibit titled Related Species: they seem to defy several natural laws one by one, starting with gravity itself.
Frozen in an imagined leap or gesturing with long, sticklike limbs — their outlines almost languid despite the brittleness of bone — these would-be insects seem proud, even preening. Many stare outward with black goggle eyes. Such formings of bone and wing never really existed in the living world, of course — only in Rittimann’s imagination.
Brown, the Henry’s chief curator, has high praise for Rittimann’s art. “I think he has an original vision, and a very beautiful technique that’s surprising,” she said. “He makes things that are totally convincing but completely impossible. But there’s a subtlety to it, a beauty.”
It’s Rittimann’s style to present his creatures without presuming to give the viewer a detailed explanation. That way, observers may conjure their own stories — of how the imaginary animals might have moved, or what sort of lives they might have led. That makes the art take place in the viewer’s mind. It’s not for him, he feels, to make these oddities move. That’s for the beholder. “I like that a lot,” Rittimann said. “If they moved around like in a movie, I wouldn’t like them. The fact that they don’t move allows you to think.”
Rittimann said, “I always like making works that play on both sides of your brain, that play on the rational side of how you look at things, and on the irrational side, not describable with words. It stirs the emotions and the imagination — so when those two things come together, I find that really exciting.”
And though Rittimann works regularly with artists to help facilitate their own creations, he doesn’t care for insularity or aloofness in the art world. His art is for regular people, he says, not for other artists. “The best people who view art are the people who are not afraid to say what’s on their mind.” And if a viewer calls his art “junk,” well, at least it’s an honest response, he said.
“I make art solely for me, and if the world gets something out of it, that’s great. I am not trying to teach you something — I am only opening doors. If I knew the answer to something, why would I want to do it?”
