The Handyman : Martin Puryear stays in touch with his sculptures, bending, splitting, molding and joining his materials with a craftsman’s skills

“I’m very much aware that I have an anachronistic way of thinking about art and making it,” sculptor Martin Puryear says. “Anybody important doesn’t put his hands on his work.”

With a traveling retrospective of his sculpture at the Museum of Contemporary Art (to Oct. 4) and a resume that includes winning a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and the Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Biennial, both in 1989, Puryear surely ranks as an “important” artist, but he has a point about his hands-on approach.

In an age when artists often function as executives who direct the production of their work but scarcely touch it themselves, the 51-year-old sculptor calls himself “a builder” or “a maker.” Indeed, a tour of the 40 works in his exhibition reveals that Puryear bends saplings, splits timbers, molds rawhide, joins beams with wood pegs and makes steel-mesh patchwork. He uses all these methods to create a body of artwork that has been widely praised for its elegance, rigor, honesty and, yes, craftsmanship.

“The irony is that my work is often thought to be flawlessly crafted, but it isn’t,” Puryear says. “Art shouldn’t wear its craft. The work should transcend its virtuosity. Craft is what is necessary to get the work realized.

“My methods are related to trades in the vernacular realm. I use ordinary ways of making things,” he says. “I learn what is needed to do the work. I’m driven by very pragmatic needs.”

To make the smooth black volumes of “Bask” (1976) and “Self” (1978), for example, he employed laborers’ methods. “I’m interested in trades like boat building and sheet-metal work that locate compound planes in space and build them in space,” he says.

Puryear’s motivation is quite different from that of most tradesmen, however. In “Bask,” a sleek 12-foot-long sculpture that lies on the floor and gradually rises to a height of 12 inches in the center, he set out to create a form that is “both planar and swollen.” From one side, the piece appears to be a crisp silhouette; from the other, it seems to roll and disappear into the floor. “It’s a finely honed knife blade, but it’s also biomorphic, with an ambiguous sense of volume,” the artist says.

Whereas he dreamed up “Bask” and built it to match his mental conception, some other works are “process driven,” he says. “Some Tales” (1975-77), a 30-foot-wide installation of ash and yellow pine, began when Puryear found some old lumber, split the timbers and cut notches in one beam, gradually changing the angles so that the points flow from one side to the other. Eventually he saw a relationship between that timber and some bent saplings that he was working on separately. The result is a seven-part work that can be seen from afar as a lyrical assembly of horizontal lines or, up close, as a series of visual incidents created by nature and the hand of the artist.

Among other “process driven” works are several large wood rings. These circles were made by bending green branches, but they became “vehicles for color, almost like paintings without centers,” he says. Some of the rings are painted in stripes, while others have dappled patterns that might be mistaken for natural surfaces.

Critics have noted that Puryear’s works vaguely resemble functional objects--cones, funnels, primitive dwellings, wire baskets--but the association is not intentional, he says. As to where the ideas originate, “it’s an amalgam” of objects, feelings, experiences, stories, materials, processes, the human body and specific people.

For example, James Beckwourth, the son of a white man and a mixed-race slave mother, who became a Crow Indian chief and served as a guide for U.S. troops in the Cheyenne War, inspired two works in the show. One, “Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth” (1978), consists of seven long strips of twisted rawhide; the other, “For Beckwourth” (1980), is a crusty, mound-like structure of earth, pitch pine and oak.

More often than not, Puryear names his works. “Big and Little Same,” “Dream of Pairing,” “Old Mole” and “Empire’s Lurch” are provocative, while “Sharp and Flat,” “Lever” and “Rawhide Cone” are relatively blunt identifiers. But Puryear confesses a certain ambivalence about titles.

“Art is something that should be discovered. There’s a confrontation with the work that becomes a kind of self-confrontation. I don’t like titles to eclipse the experience of the work,” he says. “People tend to look for clues and hang on to them like a life raft. My titles aren’t airtight. They are just devices to identify the work, not an absolute key. I like the work to describe itself to viewers who are relatively open to spending a little time with it.”

Attentive viewers may notice that Puryear’s work reflects the interests of a well-educated artist who has traveled widely.

He was born and raised in Washington, where he studied biology and art at Catholic University. After graduating in 1963, he served for two years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. Along with teaching art, biology, English and French on his tour of duty, he learned woodworking techniques from local craftsmen.

Puryear journeyed on to Stockholm to study printmaking at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art, then returned to the United States in 1969 and did graduate work in sculpture at Yale University. His reputation as an artist took shape while he was teaching--at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois--and exhibiting his work across the country.

Puryear, who lives in Upstate New York, was based in Chicago during the ‘80s, so it isn’t surprising that his retrospective exhibition originated at the Art Institute of Chicago. The show traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington (where exhibition curator Neal Benezra is now employed) before coming to Los Angeles. The final stop is the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Nov. 8-Jan. 3).

The sculptures are installed in roughly chronological order at MOCA, but Puryear’s work doesn’t lend itself to a step-by-step view of the artist’s development. Throughout the 2 1/2 decades represented, he has worked with line and volume, which he calls “the polarities of sculpture.” His inclination to simplify form while enriching meaning has been consistent as well. “What has changed is that my process of thinking has become more complicated. It’s like a basket that you put more and more things in,” he says.

“I’ve always had a kind of reductivist way of approaching the work, to achieve formal clarity. But it’s not Minimalism, which had an incredibly puritanical sense of reductivism and reduced evocation to zero. I think my work courts evocation unashamedly. You can see the artist who made the work, how it’s made, the involvement of the maker,” Puryear says.

“What is interesting is to see how my work evolves over a 25-year span and what has happened in the realm of sculpture in that 25 years. When I started, this work was very curious because Minimalism had such a strong hold on the (art world’s) consciousness. I think my work is more related to the reductivism of Modernism. Minimalism will be a blip on the screen, but it had an amazing hold on artists. That was the last time there was an attitude that firm. As much as I rejected it, Minimalism was a committed point of view. Now the situation is like a rocking sea.”

Turbulent as the waters of contemporary art may be, the notion that artists must follow the mainstream has gone out with the tide. And if Puryear’s approach to art is anachronistic, it is no longer unique.

“I felt very isolated when I first started to work, but I’m not isolated anymore. My way of thinking is common property now,” he says. “Now my task is to individualize my work, to make sure it remains mine.”