martin puryear and richard serra

Post-Modernism is dead and I am "calling it," as they say on Grey's Anatomy and E.R. The movement had been on life-support this Fall 2007, evidenced in the Richard Prince exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum and the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney Museum. These were two very important shows which recontextualized images in order to signify that human behavior can be shamefully violent and repulsively nasty. Richard Prince brings us pornographic nurses and tabloid rape victims (as well as silly old jokes and advertising mythology); Kara Walker seduces us with elegant black silhouettes of female slave degradation in the Ol' South (producing voyeurism to atrocity). Today, as the political wind changes direction, the art of recycling to enlighten the audience seems tired and suspiciously self-serving, as if pandering to the auction houses while sanctimoniously beefing up the museum's reputation.

Thankfully, two recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art—Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (June 7 to September 17, 2007) and Martin Puryear (November 4, 2007 to January 14, 2008)—have blown fresh air into the art-mosphere. Both sexagenarians, Serra (b. 1939) and Puryear (b. 1941) reaffirm that Modernism brings out the best in us, because it asks us to engage in the moment of our absolute being—the here and now—regardless of our ethnic, political or gender differences. Known as Post-Minimalist Modernism, Serra's and Puryear's sculptures induce an exhilarating awareness of sheer physicality in art and one's own physical presence in relation to the work of art. This visceral confrontation recharges our commitment to immediacy as the art experience, eschewing for a moment our personal baggage, culpable pasts and divisive identities that take us out of the gallery and into ego-enhancing navel-gazing. In front of Serra's and Puryear's sculptures we dive deep into the absoluteness of our being—our sentience—to consider, if only for that moment in the museum, the essence of living in time and space. That said, these two exhibitions are very different: Serra creates forms that make us aware of space, while Puryear invents forms that challenge our preconceived notions of space.

Most of Richard Serra's sculptures, such as Band, Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence (all completed in 2006), require walking into the piece. Situated one after another in a vast open gallery on the second floor, these three enormous architectural settings induced a state of dizziness and visions of Theseus entering the mythical Labyrinth on Crete to find the Minotaur (if only we had taken that ball of yarn from Ariadne ...). Serra expects the visitor to experience disorientation as he or she meanders through the works. This disorientation also brings on confusion, as the visitor may leave one work to enter another without realizing the transition.
Nevertheless, being self-aware in relation to the work of art is Serra's mission. Therefore, you walk (or ride) slowly through the works, registering all along the way the sensation of existing in this overwhelmingly humungous construction, similar to a prehistoric cave or natural canyon. The sensation is majestic: here is grandeur, vastness and geometric complexity—torque, for example, is the curvature of a surface vertically and horizontally (like the wheel of a car). This torque provokes a weird sense of instability among these giant walls.

Other Serra installations, such as Delineator (1974), define space. Here two 26 by 10 foot steel plates, one on the floor and the other suspended from the ceiling, form a separated cross "delineating" (Serra explains) the volume of the room which becomes part of the work itself. The heavy rectangular metal plate hovering above also imparts a sense of danger, as it introduces possibilities that are a bit disconcerting. The work harks back to Kasimir Malevich's Black Cross (1923), which Serra thought about while he lay in bed recovering from a herniated disc.

The anxiety of wondering if a huge metal sheet might smash your body to smithereens or flop down on your toe occasions other compositions, particularly in the 1969-1972 retrospective works Equal (Corner Prop Piece), Floor Pole Prop, Circuit and One Ton Prop (House of Cards), made up of steel plates and lead pipes pushing against each other, and held together only through the laws of gravity and force. Earlier works, such as Belts (1966-67), To Lift (1967) and Slant Step Folded (1967) also experimented with gravity and play.

Martin Puryear's Modernist sculpture also incorporates serious observation with free play, but in a more sensual way than Serra's. Several times I leaned in to smell the wood as I read off the suggestive names: pine, hickory, maple, Sitka spruce and ash. There was little fragrance to inhale, but the potential to indulge this olfactory sense augmented the desire to linger among these elegant visual expressions of interiority and exteriority. Self (1978), for example, carries this idea. It is a biomorphic form, composed through a composite method of compound curves, rather than made of one solid block carved to become a curved shape. Self looks like a whale emerging from the water, sighted from a distance. Stained and painted black on red cedar and mahogany, its smooth, polished wood surfaces bent into a curvilinear form shapes its exterior appearance. But the work is hollow—a secret interior has been hidden, a metaphor of the self and its duplicate identities: appearance and essence. "I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them," Puryear explains in a ubiquitous wall text. "But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence." Exterior surface versus interior space often creates this "tense coexistence" in Puryear's art.

Puryear achieves the tension of exterior and interior space by fashioning arcs, circles, slats, basket weaves and other rounded forms out of wood that are both well-wrought and astonishingly subversive. Most notably, Puryear's spare circular works (often untitled) seem to defy wood's natural characteristics. Cerebral and mystical in clarity and roundness—or, as the essay by chief curator John Elderfield suggests: controlled risk—Puryear's works are not about the banality of craft. They are about the presentation of opposites. Brutally course materials vie with smooth amorphous components, as in Maroon (1987-88), made of wire mesh, pine, yellow poplar and tar. The black wire mesh, flattened on one side with a raw surface of wood, encompasses a bulbous form with its porous skin, permitting us to peer into its interior or stand back to behold a strange biomorphic exterior. Open to close examination, Puryear's work remains mysteriously ambiguous and unresolved, a metaphor of life itself.