ART REVIEW : Puryear: A Paean to Craftsmen

Martin Puryear makes sculptures that want to be masterpieces. Initially that aim might sound vulgar. In reality, vulgarity is about the last word that comes to mind in the presence of his almost excruciatingly refined art.

As made plain by the touring retrospective of Puryear’s work, lately opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, this is not sculpture that aggressively asserts an ego-driven bravado or puffs up with self-aggrandizement. Indeed, it’s remarkably self-effacing.

Poised, clear-witted, formally inventive, non-representational but decidedly referential in its polyglot allusions to plants, animals, shelters and tools, Puryear’s best sculptures are serenely powerful objects in which every nuance feels thought through and deliberate. A resulting tendency toward aloofness is tempered by the reliance on natural materials (almost always wood), by the quietly coiled energy implied in a frequent emphasis on wood’s tensile strength (he sometimes ties the stuff in knots), and by the sensual and romantic appeal of hand-crafting that is central to his aesthetic.

The retrospective chiefly spans the last 15 years, following the rapid development of Puryear’s art after a disastrous fire in his Brooklyn studio, which destroyed almost all his youthful work. Now 51, Puryear is among the most accomplished sculptors of his generation. Yet, a perplexing anomaly emerges from the exhibition: You can admire this art enormously without, curiously enough, feeling much passion for it.

The earliest sculpture in the show is a 1980 reconstruction of a 1974 “Rawhide Cone” that was destroyed in the studio fire. Simplicity itself, the sculpture announces a variety of concerns Puryear would soon explore. A large, irregularly shaped piece of rawhide was used to line the interior of a conical form and then, apparently, moistened to allow it to adopt the conical shape when the rawhide dried and hardened. Removed from its mold, the four-foot rawhide cone stands upright on the floor, vaguely suggesting a small tepee or hut.

“Rawhide Cone” brings to sculpture concepts today more commonly associated with an ethnographic arena of crafts. Natural material is seamlessly wedded to a clearly man-made form. The piece precariously balances between mundane functional allusions and its obvious existence as an object made solely for contemplation. The hand of the artist, by no means autobiographical or self-expressively employed, is nonetheless everywhere in evidence.

This appeal to hand-craft is odd because, as a graduate student at Yale University from 1969-1971, Puryear witnessed in close proximity sculpture’s Minimal and Post-Minimal juggernaut. In its wake, industrial manufacture had been elevated to a high plateau. While clearly intrigued by these developments, Puryear nonetheless held fast to commitments established earlier: In the Peace Corps from 1964-66, he had worked with local carpenters and craftsmen in Sierra Leone, while subsequently he had studied modern Scandinavian furniture design during a two-year stint at Stockholm’s Swedish Royal Academy of Art.

As aptly put by Neal Benezra, former curator of the Chicago Art Institute and able organizer of the retrospective, the result for Puryear has been “sculpture informed by the methods of craft . . . the process of the joiner, the wheelwright, the cooper and the patternmaker.” Craftsmanship is put on a platform in Puryear’s art, whether it’s the careful sanding and burnishing of ponderosa pine, cypress and ash in the unfurling, probative forms of “Lever No. 2” (1988-89), the intricately pegged joinery of dense beams in “Thicket” (1990) or the expert equilibrium of “To Transcend” (1987), in which a thin, curved, disk-topped pole climbs high up on a wall from a bean-shaped block of mahogany, balanced with precision on the floor.

If present at all, traditional sculptural methods of carving, casting and modeling are also inevitably put at the service of building--specifically, building by hand. Even when the principal support is steel mesh, as in the big, swelling, tar-slathered and surprisingly buoyant form of “Maroon” (1987-88), the sculpture abjures any allegiance to industrial manufacture. Puryear’s masterpiece aesthetic is perhaps best described as deriving from a “master-apprentice” tradition, which is common to craftsmen.

The artist also puts sculptural structure in the foreground, which further emphasizes the process of its making. The linked intersection of two cones in “The Spell” (1985) plays transparency against density in order to complicate the structural interplay. One cone is composed of thin, wire rods, creating an expansive, diagrammatic “drawing in space” that rises up off the floor; the other cone is narrow, tightly wrapped and ground-hugging, a basket-like form composed of thin, layered sheets of pliant cedar. The two are united at their circular ends, which spin out from one another.

“The Spell” is a sophisticated elaboration of ideas nascent in the early “Rawhide Cone” and one of the most adroit and impressive works in the show. It demonstrates how far Puryear’s art had come in a decade’s time. Cosmopolitan sources in African, European and American culture are seamlessly merged, and disparate traditions from design, furniture and sculpture are harmoniously brought together.

In the same way, contradictory formal qualities peacefully coexist. Most important, this cultural synthesis doesn’t subsume any one source within the conventional demands of any other. The surprising gathering of disparate parts is instead endowed with animated life.

One drawback of the show at MOCA is its less-than-hospitable installation, which makes it difficult to follow Puryear’s development. The chronological arrangement from 1974-1990 is extremely loose and, when a jump in time is made, the resulting juxtapositions too often seem arbitrary. Neither do the overcrowded galleries provide the breathing space this sort of sculpture demands. The refinement of Puryear’s sculpture is undermined.

In fact, the installation’s slightly chaotic edge says something about a principal weakness of Puryear’s art. A perfect chaos, which always seems the normal state of things at the volatile intersection between nature and culture, is the one element Puryear’s sculpture hasn’t yet mastered. He elegantly extends and complicates an idealized artistic tradition whose principal exemplar is Brancusi. But, the retrospective has arrived at a moment when principles of chaos and disorder are being absorbed into, not resisted by, the work of what’s turning out to be a remarkably interesting generation of younger artists. The accidental result for this generous show of Puryear’s sculpture is a faintly moralizing tone, which otherwise it would not have.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 621-2766, through Oct. 4. Closed Mondays.