Martin Puryear
"Martin Puryear" by John Kissick, Summer 2008, p. 89
A somewhat pathetic confession: every time I see the formally elegant and meticulously crafted work of the American sculptor Martin Puryear (and it is pretty hard not to run into one of his pieces in just about every major American museum), I get this thoroughly neurotic and completely unexplainable free-association flashback to a guy from high school. He was smart and good-looking, oozed sincerity and had an annoying habit of making everything he did look completely effortless. He was also thoroughly charming, and thus I loathed him. His elegance and naturalness drove me crazy; he seemed so comfortable and authentic in his own skin, while the rest of us were left to define our individuality by the rock-band patches on our jean jackets. For my crowd, it was only with the viral onset of irony as a substitute for conviction that we were miraculously transformed from pathetic to somewhat fashionable. He, on the other hand, just kept being sincere and exceptional and all but oblivious to change...the poor soul.
This retrospective of Martin Puryear’s work, which originated at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is possibly the most handsome installation I have seen in years. Mind you, with all its nodding to human touch, sensitivity to materials and near-seamless integration of tradition with formal rigour—all performed with technical aplomb and virtually no overt display of irony—it is hard, perhaps almost impossible, not to be enamoured.
For those who missed the 1980s and 1990s, a little art history is perhaps in order. Puryear burst onto the American art scene in the late 1970s with a body of work that eloquently had its (critical) cake and ate it (material sensuality) too, referencing both the minimalism of the 1960s and the emerging racial and craft concerns of the 1970s. His work, typically made of wood and fabricated using hand tools and time-honoured techniques originating in Africa and Europe, was about locating some vestige of the personal within an established canon of formal coolness. The work looked minimal, but displayed an undeniable human investment in materials and making, and Puryear has for the most part remained consistent to this vision for more than 30 years.
Initially, the critics gushed. Today, however, commentators at venues like artforum.com, possessed of our age’s requisite cynicism regarding art’s potential to speak to the human condition and equipped with a well-cultivated sense of boredom about technical skill, are quick to label Puryear’s work a museum-safe anachronism and his sensibility to materials little more than quaint. They insist that work that speaks so eloquently and specifically to craftsmanship and tradition may be seductive, but it sure as hell ain’t about the pixel politics and DIY of today. Skill, effort and a commitment to craft? Whatever. There are other naysayers (oddly prominent at academic conferences) who are quick to dismiss Puryear’s generous aesthetic as safe (which is of course the kiss of death in certain circles, because it implies that there is actually a broad audience for the work...God forbid!). They point to Puryear’s ability to imply an African-American sensibility through the gentle rhetoric of materials and to his easy integration of identity (both personal and racial) into the formal structure of high-end modernism as indications of the work’s essential timidity in addressing what could and should be messy and nasty.
I, on the other hand, would argue that anyone who can seriously hold on to such tired critical positions in the face of what is arguably one of the most quietly compelling bodies of work of the last couple of decades either has an anger problem or has had their heart removed. Puryear’s work has a quality of timelessness that is rare today. Its forms forcefully and unapologetically conjure a language that is today scary for most of us to use in polite conversation...quishy words like evocative, archetypal, elegant, organic and labour. (Note to self: strenuously deny that you actually use these words as opposed to simply quoting other, less informed souls.) They stick in your consciousness like the memory of an old friend—familiar, reassuring and complete, in and of itself. Puryear’s singular emphasis on human industry, made manifest in the extraordinary variety of surfaces, joins and laminations that are employed in the crafting of each piece, speaks profoundly to the enduring predicament of the artist: navigating between the supposed polarities of thinking and making and finding the truth in the middle. That’s not such a bad place to visit from time to time. It even makes me feel forgiving of that perfect dude from high school.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
