MARTIN PURYEAR by Roberta Smith & Charlie Finch

November 2, 2007

HUMANITY'S ASCENT, IN THREE DIMENSIONS

By Roberta Smith

On Sunday, when the Museum of Modern Art's
30-year retrospective of the sculptor Martin
Puryear opens, the New York art world will find
itself in what may be an unprecedented situation.
For the first time in recent memory - maybe ever
- two of the city's most prominent museums will
be presenting large, well-done exhibitions of
living African-American artists. The Whitney
Museum's 15-year survey of Kara Walker's work has
been searing hearts, minds and eyes since it
opened early last month. Now it is Mr. Puryear's
turn to weave his finely nuanced yet insistent
spell.

Perhaps in the future welcome and overdue
coincidences like this will no longer merit
mention. In the meantime this one has the added
bonus of representing radically different ways of
being an artist, black or otherwise. Ms. Walker
comes out of Conceptual and appropriation art and
makes the bitter legacy of race relations in this
country the engine of her cut-paper
installations, animated films and language pieces.

Mr. Puryear, who was born in 1941 and grew up in
Washington, D.C., is a former painter who emerged
from the Minimalist and Postminimalist vortex
making hand-worked, mostly wood sculptures. These
soothe more than seethe, balancing between the
geometric and the organic with Zen aplomb.

Mr. Puryear is a formalist in a time when that is
something of a dirty word, although his
formalism, like most of the 1970s variety, is
messed with, irreverent and personal. His
formalism taps into a legacy even larger than
race: the history of objects, both utilitarian
and not, and their making. From this all else
follows, namely human history, race included,
along with issues of craft, ritual, approaches to
nature and all kinds of ethnic traditions and
identities.

These references seep out of his highly allusive,
often poetic forms in waves, evoking the earlier
Modernism of Brancusi, Arp, Noguchi and Duchamp,
but also carpentry, basket weaving, African
sculpture and the building of shelter and ships.
His work slows you down and makes you consider
its every detail as physical fact, artistic
choice and purveyor of meaning.

The MoMA show, which has been organized by John
Elderfield, the museum's chief curator of
painting and sculpture, is quite beautiful and
conveys Mr. Puryear's achievement persuasively.
With 40 works on the sixth floor and 5 more on
the second-floor atrium level, it displays a lack
of repetition unusual in these product-oriented
times. Of the five in the atrium, two are
attenuated sculptures that reach upward several
stories, making new use of that tall, awkward
space. "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" from
1996 is a wobbly ladder whose drastic
foreshortening makes it seem to stretch to
infinity.

It suggests that the climb to success is
deceptively long - and perhaps longer for blacks
than whites. But its limitless vista also has a
comedic joy worthy of Miró.

Mr. Puryear once said of Minimalism, "I looked at
it, I tasted it, and I spat it out." But he has
taken a lot from it, and used it better and more
variously than many of his contemporaries.

While rejecting Minimalism's ideal of being
completely nonreferential, he said yes to its
wholeness, stasis and hollowness, to sculpture as
an optical, imagistic presence that nonetheless
can't be known completely without walking around
it. Above all he applied the Minimalist embrace
of new materials in a retroactive manner: using
wood in so many different ways that it feels like
a new material, both physically and poetically.

Mr. Puryear's treatments of wood verge on the
encyclopedic and give the material an almost
animal diversity, creating a kind of rainbow
coalition of contrasting skin tones and textures,
bone structures, muscle densities and
personalities. Surfaces are light or dark, matte
or gleaming, smooth or bristling, richly stained
or au naturel. Woods are thick, thin and very
thin; opaque or transparent; solid or skeletal.

Each piece is to some extent a new start, with
its own integrity and references. Topped by a
layer of dried mud, the squat bulletlike block of
weathered wood that is "For Beckwourth" (1980)
conjures up an Indian lodge, a Baule sculpture
coated with dried sacrificial material, an early
Greek tomb and a nondenominational church dome.
(These associations can arise before a label
informs us that James Beckwourth, the son of a
black mother and a white father, was born into
slavery and was eventually made a chief of the
Crow Indian nation.)

The elegant 1975-78 wall piece "Some Tales" is a
series of lines so spare they might almost be
drawn, but are in fact long, thin pieces of wood,
abstract yet glowing, with intimations of human
use, and somehow sinister too. They bring to mind
drumsticks, an oxen yoke, saws, bullwhips, tree
branches. One long loop is both a giant hairpin
and a rope ready for coiling into who knows what.
"Bask" (1976) is a low-lying floor piece in
black-stained pine, tapered at both ends, but
with a gently swelling center. It suggests a
sleeping seal, but also a rolling wave of oil
that might kill a seal.

A mysterious seductive blackness, one of Mr.
Puryear's touchstones, dominates in a large
rounded monolith from 1978 whose polished,
headlike form is tellingly, even ominously titled
"Self" - the dark inescapable thing within us
all. But this looming form also tilts oddly, a
little like the Rock of Gibraltar or a whale's
breaching snout..

The monolith of "Self" is also a Puryear staple.
Later on it is streamlined and open like a rib
cage in the lustrous "Bower," and a kind of crazy
scribble in "Thicket" - or as close to a scribble
as raw two-by-fours can get. In "Old Mole" it
culminates in a beak and its densely
crisscrossing lath suggests a creature both blind
and bandaged. In "Confessional" the monolith
expands into a habitable hut made of a
semi-transparent patchwork of wire lightly
clotted with tar. One side is truncated by a
large plane of wood that might be a door or even
a face, at which point the hut mutates into a
cowled head, that of a priest or perhaps of Death.

The face of "Confessional" becomes explicit in
"C.F.A.O." (completed this year), whose initials
stand for Compagnie Française de l'Afrique
Occidentale, the French trading company that
sailed between Marseille and West Africa
beginning in the 19th century. Its most striking
form is an enlarged negative impression of a
white Fang tribal mask that is embedded in an
impenetrable scaffolding of wood dowels. This in
turn rests on a worn-out wheelbarrow: European
and African forms enmeshed in an intractable
post-colonial chaos.

Mr. Puryear's work is humorous but not ironic. It
has a complex worldview devoid of trendy
critique. It offers more integrity than
innovation and proves repeatedly that accessible
doesn't rule out subtle. Like Elizabeth Murray,
who was also the subject of a recent MoMA
retrospective, Mr. Puryear has pursued what might
be called an old-fashioned approach to the new.
But really, both have done nothing more, or less,
than ground formalism in the rich world of their
own experience and identity. And that is new
enough.

Slide Show @
<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/01/arts/1102-PURY_index.html>

The Martin Puryear show opens Sunday and
continues through Jan. 14 at the Museum of Modern
Art, (212) 708-9400.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

>>>

A LOST OPPORTUNITY

by Charlie Finch

I guess I've been spoiled watching Martin
Puryear's sculpture unfold in the intimacy of
McKee Gallery all these years. His black tar on
mesh homunculae, which first emerged from the
cocoon of the late 1980s, were particularly
endearing when experienced one on one in a
gallery setting. The romance of Puryear involved
imagining his encounter with his materials, wood
soaked in water, streched mesh and cooling tar,
the comfort of their finished morphism.

Now, in Puryear's deserved retrospective,
everything scatters like so many duckpins on the
sixth floor mall of the Museum of Modern Art, a
disappointingly sterile place to be with
sculpture. Here, the weak esthetic associations
of Puryear's forms, the elements of scrimshaw and
those painted saws you buy in Vermont, are
highlighted, through no fault of the artist, but
through the random uselessness of curator John
Elderfield. Better to have distributed Puryear's
work through the museum's forbidding hallways
where shadows and light could have enveloped the
pieces. Instead, we have art as LL Bean
catalogue, an equivalence of objects on sale.

So cover one eye and zone in on a piece or two.
Dumb Luck and Maroon are the finest of the tar on
mesh creations. A white table of lumpy objects
titled Self, Believer and Reliquary show Puryear
as geologist, random forms waiting to be rolled
and kicked, and even borrowed by David Hammons.
MoMA's walls are oppressed with signs for this
show warning people not to touch the art or bring
"children under 12" within its vicinity. Well, if
you deny Puryear tactility there's nothing left.
These same signs proclaim the "fragility" of
these pieces, not a word any sane person would
brand on Puryear.

Particularly egregious is Elderfield's stuffed
atrium of roped-off wagon wheels, a ladder and
scurvy poles which appear from below like giant
cheese sticks. A bolder curator would have put
this stuff outside in the Sculpture Garden,
subject to the elements, allowing viewers to
enjoy changing patinas and sense of decay
floating through Puryear's imagination. Let the
trustees drop a million or two on the artist for
the privilege. Instead we are locked in a barn of
wooden doodads. Greed's Trophy, an exaggerated
hockey goalie's mask, mocks Elderfield's effort
from the atrium walls.

Affinities between Puryear and other artists are
sparse and singular: Philip Guston, Lee Bontecou
and the Robert Morris of the '60s. But, the
aforementioned David Hammons is the closest, form
as irony making wrinkles in the mind. Any other
space would have served Puryear's sculpture
better than MoMA. For the true lover of art and
what MoMA once was, the museum and its leadership
remain a disgrace.

Pics @
<http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/finch11-1-07_detail.asp?picnum=
1>

"Martin Puryear," Nov. 4, 2007-Jan. 14, 2008, at
the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street,
New York, N.Y. 10019

CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks:
Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).

©2007 artnet