anya gallacio

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.

martin puryear

Martin Puryear. Bower. 1980. Sitka spruce and pine. 64" x 7' 10 3/4" x 26 5/8" (162.6 x 240.7 x 67.6 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
There is so little mystery in many of today's most famous painters whose lives are readily available for public consumption. But interestingly, Martin Puryear's work, which is also on view shares a certain quiet reflectiveness , a stand-aloneness that shouts out:Puryear came from segregated Washington DC and so access to the National Gallery was special and magical; then in Chicago, the science and natural history museums added to his fascination with exotic objects. He enlisted in the Peace Corps and lived in West Africa among indigenous peoples; here, he began the move towards abstraction and to using local materials. But he has never joined an art movement and cannot imagine being held to one or another political or social idea. He began as a figurative painter but his experiences overseas changed him dramatically, and unlike many artists, he doesn't mind if his work is beautiful--and indeed it is. But in a Seurat-ian echo, he finds the most interesting art has a "flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence." As Seurat sees the sculpture in the human body, Puryear sees the biomorphic forms in sculpture. Puryear's work has one other subtext which stands out: it feels like he has been thinking about the evanescence of the natural environment--and that in a pinch, we could crawl into one of his bentwood structures and be protected, somehow from the ravages of man, if not nature.

fred sandback -more space and volume

Sandback’s sculptures outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular body of work that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity.The exhibitions will examine the broad scope of formal invention that the artist achieved within a defined idiom. The works on view will range from smaller-scale, metal and cord works from the late 1960s to constructions from the 1980s and 1990s that encompass entire rooms, thus demonstrating the artist’s signature vocabulary of forms in varied combinations and at different scales.

richard deacon

On a cold, wintry afternoon, the strip of 20 buildings huddled along a railway track hardly fizzes with creative energy. The only immediate sign of life is a grim-faced man in a bobble hat scuttling out of one unit and into another, identical but for the words "plastic handrails" emblazoned on its façade.
Yet here, on this dreary industrial estate in south-east London, one of Britain's foremost sculptors has his studio.
"I first came here in 1991," says Richard Deacon, leading me upstairs past bookshelves and a bicycle to an airy pigsty of a room in Unit 18. "It had no history and no atmosphere, but, after renting a space for years in an old meat-pie factory in Brixton, I wanted to buy somewhere, and these units were on the market for less than their building costs."
So it was that the Turner Prize-winning Deacon, whose work is housed in many of the finest art collections in the world, ended up with a studio sandwiched between an organic food company and a dairy. "It was quite an upmarket dairy," he says defensively. "The milkman used to pop in to comment on the sculptures."
Fifteen years on, the original neighbours are long gone. "What started as maybe 25 companies is down to only around five," he says, a hint of nostalgia in his slow, booming voice. "And me. I'm still here."
As if to reassure himself of this fact, the artist has packed the upstairs room of his studio - "a sort of drawing, conceiving kind of space" - with material evidence of his existence. Every available surface is buried beneath a blanket of sketches, clay models, photographs, objects and books.
Perhaps the most striking feature in the studio, and certainly the most organised, is a set of shelves filled with a dizzying array of plastic creatures, rocks, fossils, and junk, neatly arranged according to some indiscernible code. It looks like something one might find in a schoolboy's bedroom.
"They're my collections," says the 56-year-old artist, brushing a giant hand across the bald crown of his head. "Found objects, toys, little bits of nature, souvenirs, whimsy and all the rest of it. They're here to keep me company, I suppose. There is a sense in which the studio accumulates bits, some intentionally and some not."
Bits, and ways of putting them together, have been central to Deacon's work for the best part of three decades, from his early laminated wood-and-vinyl constructions to his more recent steamed-plank sculptures.
The last of these, Restless, was the highlight of the artist's one-man show in Tate St Ives last year, and today hangs in the studio's "less congenial" downstairs room, writhing in the half-light like a mythical sea creature. "I haven't touched a piece of wood since finishing this," he says, patting its distorted surface affectionately. "This was a culmination of sorts."
These days, as his current exhibition at the Lisson Gallery demonstrates, Deacon's preferred material is clay. The tightly structured show centres on a set of ceramics: hollowed-out, angular blocks that look like the frameworks for unconventional tents.
After years of wrestling wooden planks into impossible curves, the move to clay has brought about a fundamental change in Deacon's approach. "I was interested in generating something without building it," he says. "Because these sculptures start as a lump, you don't have to worry about where the top piece will connect to the bottom piece."
The act of carving also takes Deacon back to his earliest artistic memories. "My very first sculptural experience was in Sri Lanka, when I was seven," he recalls. "I remember looking at rock-carved sculptures of the reclining Buddha, and being very aware that the cliff face had been removed. It was like an experience of negative space: something had been taken away and the figure was there."
Two years later, the young Deacon made his first tentative steps as a sculptor, taking his father's best saw and using it to cut a brick in half. "I couldn't see why he was upset," he smiles. "I was just really interested in the fact that it was possible."
Even now - despite the monumental scale of much of his work - Deacon remains more fascinated by the process of sculpture than by the result. Although he has hardly hung on to a single finished piece, he has "never got rid of any drawing, any models, any notes".
"I've never said this to anyone before," he says, "but thinking about how to leave things in the world, I am more likely to leave behind an archive than a permanent series of sculptures - a germ for other ideas to come out of, rather than a bunch of final statements." He sighs, one heavy hand returning to his head. "But how you present something like that without being a boring old fart, I don't know."

richard deacon

richard deacon