RSS Feed
Martin Puryear
Four Decades of Crafting Sculpture
BY JONATHAN BINZEN
The first thing you saw as you climbed the stairs leading to the cool-hued, high-ceilinged first gallery of the Martin Puryear retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art this winter was a tapered sapling sixty feet long pointing nearly straight up. It took your heart up with it. An auspicious opening to an outstanding show.
When you reached the top step you saw that the sapling was the attenuated shaft of a two-wheeled cart, and that some blocky piece of way-too-heavy cargo had tipped the cart backward and rendered it useless.
Like so many of Puryear's sculptures, this one, “Ad Astra,” exploits the vast vocal range of wood. In the shaft, stripped of branchlets but otherwise seemingly little altered from its natural state, the wood speaks in the timbre of the tree—tender in its wavering line but striving upward, a beautiful signal of nature against the flat blank walls and square-chopped windows of the gallery. In the wheels, it is wood bent to man's uses: its native accent erased, it speaks in the universally understood language of pure human utility. And then there is the cargo, where wood has become something abstract, talking in an unknown tongue and taking on an ambiguous form somewhere between a faceted, bleached boulder and an unknowable object wrapped in a tarp.
In overall impact, the piece conveyed to me a sense of man's being thwarted by his own outsized ambition. But any too-literal reading of a Puryear piece is bound to be diminishing, as his great strength is in conjuring shapes and images that stir the emotions and delight the eye while operating on a level below the literal.
Much of Puryear's sculpture draws power and meaning from the vernacular of crafts and artifacts: baskets, ladders, wheels, tools; human use and human industry. The first gallery of Puryear's show held several other magnificent pieces fueled by these same themes.
If the found wheels of the cart are hard and literal and make you feel the joltings of the rutted road they've traveled, the wheel in “Desire” is metaphoric, a lyrical expression of the idea of a wheel. Puryear made the wheel metaphorical by enlarging it—it is 16 feet in diameter—and thinning down its parts. Nearly delicate in its proportions, it conjures thoughts of flywheels, watchworks, spinning wheels and antique bicycles. The wheel is connected by a long axle to a cone-shaped element made from thin slats. The slats, woven in a spiral that tightens at the top, convey a sense of torque—of the wheel rotating around the cone and driving something like a mill or a screw pump.
From a certain angle the wheel's slender bending spokes, bounded by a thin rim, bring to mind the paths of planets in an old-fashioned wire model of the solar system. Seen this way, the woven cone becomes the sun or some other centerpoint planets orbit around. All the parts of the sculpture are lovingly rendered, and whether it evokes devices human or heavenly, the piece is a revelation of the beauty of physics.
“Ladder for Booker T. Washington” is another prime example of the voltage Puryear can create by pairing worked wood with wood left closer to its natural state. It was made from a twisty ash sapling 36 feet long that was split down the middle and fitted with turned maple rungs. The ladder, which tapers from almost two feet wide at the bottom to less than two inches wide at the top, is an artful exercise in vanishing perspective. It might have felt like an academic exercise if performed with straight-milled wood, but with the ladder bending and buckling as it rises, the piece becomes an engaging allegory of aspiration.
By naming the sculpture for Booker T. Washington, presumably in sardonic reference to his theories of racial accommodation, Puryear has opened one intriguing avenue of thought for the viewer but closed off many others.
Across the way, six long, lateral wooden sculptures were arrayed on a wall. Five of them had the weight and vigor of quick lines drawn in a sketch book. The sixth was a 20-foot long, sawtoothed piece of pine, dark, thick, worn-toothed. In another context the other five pieces might have taken on far different allusions; but displayed with the sawtoothed piece, they had me thinking of tools and implements. These were tools transformed, however, stripped of their specificity as if by centuries of abrasion and forgetting. The smallest one, to the left, was like the soul of a two-man pull saw—just a smooth blonde piece of wood with upturned ends like handles and a wave in the shaft at one end that seemed to imply the motion of the sawyer or the whip of the saw blade.
Together these pieces brought to mind the wall displays of old tools one sees (and creates), which never feel quite right. Yes, the old tools are beautiful and meaningful, but pinned on the wall and deprived of utility they are drained of something essential and seem empty. Puryear's wall pieces, by contrast, seemed to express the inside of the object, the essence of its action or function.
Baskets are a potent source of inspiration and expression for Puryear. His sculpture “Brunhilde,” made of criss-crossing, half-lapped cedar slats, is essentially an open-weave pack basket enlarged ten times and turned upside down.
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK
“Ad Astra” (2007); ash, Sitka spruce, hickory, pine, found wagon wheels; 63′ × 74″ × 104″. Also shown: “Desire,” “Ladder…” and “Some Tales.”
Puryear, an African-American born in 1941 in Washington, D.C., spent two years in Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps in the mid-60s after graduating from college. While there, he explored all sorts of indigenous crafts and met many of the makers. It's clear from his sculpture that then and later African and Asian basketry had an enormous impact.
In a piece like “Brunhilde” the power of the basket form is plain. It allows Puryear to create a piece in which structure and ornament are the same thing, and enables him to define a volume without obscuring it. He has said that “interior space [is] a world of enormous conceptual potential, an important aspect of sculpture.” And the interiors of his sculptures, whether revealed, suggested, or deliberately obscured, are often as important as the exteriors.
In a traditional monolithic sculpture, carved out of stone or wood, the inside is invisible—and irrelevant; it is simply more of the material you are seeing on the outside. In “Brunhilde” the interior is every bit as visible as the exterior.
Puryear's “Old Mole” is a slat-wrapped piece in which the interior is obscured and yet suggested by the very method of construction. You can see deep into the many overlaid layers of slats, and it makes you consider the inside—is it an armature, or simply an opening?
1. “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” (1996); ash, maple; 36′ × 22¾″ × 3″.
“Desire” (1981); pine, red cedar, poplar, Sitka spruce; 16′ × 32′.
2. “Some Tales” (1975-1978); yellow pine, ash, hickory; 13′1½″ × 32′9¾″.
In some of his sculpture Puryear displays an ability to conjure abstract solid forms that have a raw, riveting presence and the kind of elemental beauty you might associate with Brancusi. His sculpture “Self,” illustrates Puryear's capacity to create abstract shapes with a looming life within.
After his time in the Peace Corps, Puryear spent two years in Sweden, where he studied printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts and also sought out a range of Swedish craftsmen. One of the most influential meetings for him was with James Krenov. Krenov was then working in the basement of his house in Stockholm and had not yet published his first book.
 |
 |
3. “Brunhilde” (1998-2000); cedar, rattan; 8′ × 9′4¼″ × 6′2″.
4. “Old Mole” (1985); red cedar; 61″ × 61″ × 34″.
5. “Self” (1978); stained and painted red cedar, mahogany; 69″ × 48″ × 25″.
Although it is hard to pinpoint a Krenovian note in Puryear's work, there is everywhere in it a manifest love of wood and woodworking tools and techniques. “Lever#3” evinces a love of the trade in the faceting that travels from the main block all the way along the tapering neck of the piece. To me the sculpture also suggests some fanciful rabbet plane producing a long, curled shaving. To another viewer the faceted neck might just as easily suggest a tendril or a black dinosaur, but the facets are expressive of the spokeshave or plane that created them. Here and throughout Puryear's oeuvre you also see his embrace of the craftsmanship of risk; it is implied everywhere in his sculptures by lines and planes that waver the way a drawn line does and by deliberately imperfect surfaces.
The woodworking in Puryear's pieces is good but not overly fastidious. A furnituremaker might quibble with the fitting of some of the joints or with evidence of staples used for gluing and then removed, their holes left unfilled. But the level of care seems appropriate—he isn't making these pieces out of ebony and hornbeam; the materials and joinery are consistent with the utilitarian objects from which the sculptures derive some of their imagery and power.
1. “Lever #3” (1989); carved and painted Ponderosa pine; 7′½″ × 13′6″ × 13″.
2. “Alien Huddle” (1993-1995); red cedar, pine; 53″ × 64″ × 53″.
“Alien Huddle” is evidence of the finer craftsmanship of which Puryear is capable when the occasion arises. With its sheer surfaces and pure geometry, it is unlike almost anything else in the show. There are other elemental pieces, but they are typically more fragmentary than this, with a flat plane on the floor as if only part of the piece is visible above ground. Puryear also plays here an unaccustomed note with the wood, which is featureless, smoothed and nearly devoid of grain and texture.
Although the piece lay apart from most of his other sculptures, it shared with them the capacity to engage the viewer effortlessly in a colloquy about its meaning. It brought to the surface thoughts about planets, about atoms, and about the nuclear family—husband, wife, child. As ever, Puryear's work seems to invite contemplation but never seems to present itself as a puzzle with a specific solution.
Puryear's sculptures most often display the sort of fine detail found in something made at a workbench or—in the case of carving and basketry—with the work in one's lap. “Thicket” is a step in the other direction, toward the larger-scale and coarser craftsmanship of timberframe building.
Puryear uses the scaled-up materials here without enlarging the scale of the piece, and the result is a sculpture with a barricaded, overbuilt aspect; it seems like a hasty fortification against—what? I saw the overall form as faintly head-shaped and read the piece as a picture of mental frustration, of a futile attempt to protect or understand oneself.
In “Bower” Puryear seems in a lighter mood, employing curved rods and radiating slats to create a transparent piece that conjures thoughts of sun bursts and streaming water, wind over a plane's wing or a rudder slicing through lakewater.
Many of Puryear's sculptures combine beautiful forms with shapes and textures that induce a more complex emotional response. But in “Confessional” Puryear dispenses with the beautiful and dives right into the emotional. Using patched and tarred wire mesh he has created an overall shape that might be a head or a confessional chamber or both; the wooden end suggests either a face or an entrance—or both. Together, the dark mesh with its odd bulging shape and the coarse wooden wall, discolored and pocked with odd cavities, insertions and protruding posts, creates a piece with a feeling of dark foreboding and potentially dangerous mystery.
 |
 |
3. “Thicket” (1990); basswood, cypress; 67″ × 62″ × 17″.
4. “Bower” (1980); Sitka spruce, pine; 64″ × 7′10¾″ × 26⅝″.
5. “Confessional” (1996-2000); wire mesh, tar, various woods; 6′5⅞″ × 8′1¼″ × 45″.
The sculptures in this rich retrospective, brought together from across four decades of work, reveal a maker of enormous power. There's not a stale piece in the exhibition and not a fallow period in evidence—the work has evolved over the years but the strength and freshness of expression were there from the first and have never dimmed. Puryear's work is an inspiring example for anyone who works wood, demonstrating depths and distances the material has never traveled before.
Jonathan Binzen is a freelance writer and photographer living in New Milford, Connecticut.