Ladder for Booker T. Washington (detail) 1996, ash
Martin Puryear is a sculptor who brings to his art extraordinary skills in craft. In his current traveling exhibit of recent work, the materials are mostly woods and wire mesh, often accented with tar. As displayed at the Berkeley Art Museum, this group of ten large constructions is arrayed in the central atrium creating an ensemble of unusual elegance and precise refinement.
While Puryear titles all but two of the pieces (and the titles even suggest "content"), these are abstracted images rather than realistic ones; they are deliberately ambiguous, encouraging individual interpretation, not so much of a literal sort, but, rather, a subjective, visceral response.
Perhaps most literally defined is "Ladder for Booker T. Washington," a 36 foot (four stories high!) ladder, hewn from one ash sapling. Its curves and undulations, which some have suggested represent impediments to the climb, were in the wood naturally, not created–but surely embraced–by the artist. The stronger element of the design is the narrowing of the ladder as it rises, from two feet wide at the base to a mere inch wide at the top. The effect can easily be interpreted literally–the narrowing of opportunity at the higher reaches–but the more interesting visual effect is the resulting play on perspective: seen from below, the narrowing produces a sense of even greater distance, the peak unattainably remote.
The title "Brunhilda" is far less literally applied to this piece constructed of laminated strips of red cedar which have been glued, stapled, and clamped as in the painstaking manufacture of fine furniture (which Puryear studied at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art). It is large, about eight by nine feet and over six feet high. But the open airiness of the latticework creates a contradictory lightness–the piece almost seems to float. Its understated curves and the gentle pinches at either end near the top create an exceedingly complex interplay of the crisscrossed lines of the structure. Where those lines meet at the ends, Puryear has created an artful meshing of their varied paths. It is one thing to create such a piece in woven basketry; accomplishing a similar result with these less yielding materials is an audacious challenge to the artist, superbly met in this work.
"Lever #4" is also of red cedar, this time painted in a metallic gray. It’s an L-shaped solid, with a gentle tilt forward, the heavy looking rear vertical element raised up off the floor, the weight resting on the forward base of the L. Squint and it looks like a boomerang. Whether a tool or a toy, it achieves a weightlessness through its delicate balance that plays against the sheer size and bulk of the piece.
Puryear’s fascination with containers (about which he speaks articulately and with a scholar’s encyclopedic knowledge) is expressed not only in the wood of Brunhilda, but also in several pieces constructed of wire mesh and tar. An untitled 1997 work takes the shape of a somewhat irregular four-holed donut. Once again a tension is created between massive size and airy material: the wire mesh seen from several steps back suggests a similar effect to old-fashioned netting on a woman’s hat. Walking around the piece differing patterns in light and line emerge, especially in the play of the far side mesh against the forefront mesh.
"Horsefly," another wire mesh work, is snail-shaped with the added element of window/eye-like glass insets, for which Puryear used textured craft glass set into oval shaped frames. It’s a continuing play on massive volume against openness and transparency, a suggestion within this solid/open structure of vulnerability.
Puryear has been linked with minimalism and the aesthetic connection is surely there. He is quoted: "Minimalism legitimized in my mind something I have always focused on—the power of the simple, single thing as opposed to a full-blown complex array of things." But Puryear adds important enhancements to that fundamental simplicity — a richness of ambiguous suggestion, a complexity of balances, weights, light, and textures, and a master’s skill with exacting craft processes in a variety of materials. All of those elements come together in a unique and profoundly satisfying classical harmony.
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