14 January 2008

winter interior

I’m afraid I’m getting further and further out of touch with the Art World. I can’t seem to look at the work around me with anything but the most subjective and self-centered eye. Perhaps, unable to find my place in the current culture, I seek refuge in the rooms of familiar experience and favorite objects. It’s winter, anyway. Time to haunt the Museums.

I made it to MOMA today just before they closed the Puryear show, thank god, but spent half the time just daydreaming. It’s as good a show as I’d heard (from friends, mostly; I never bothered reading a review anywhere…), although I think I prefer to see his sculptures one at a time. These objects can be so commanding of space in their mute solidity – I mean, even the basket- and cage-forms look like it’d be rude to move them. The back of the 6th-floor gallery had just a few too many beautifully solitary forms crowded into that space. They looked like a mob of possibly unstable strangers stuck in a slow elevator, each one desperate for a just a little bit more space, but holding it in, holding it in… Mostly, I loved the group of smaller early pieces nearby, and the huge ones installed downstairs, especially the Ladder for Booker T. Washington and – oh lordy – that giant wheel Desire (some images here .) They had space to breathe there, for sure.

Upstairs I surreptitiously skimmed surfaces with my hand (sorry, Martin!), and cooed over the joinery, inhaling wildly as I passed for any whiff of tar or sanded pine. No luck. I wandered in my own reverie, completely disconnected from my usual Way of Seeing. I thought constantly of my good friend from Grad School, Kevin Kennedy, whom I watched struggle out of his old Photography shell and into a bentwood nest of Sculpture, guided (spiritually, anyway) by Puryear all the way. I thought of his wife, Arden Greer, who fed us tomato pie and told teaching stories in her impeccably soft Southern accent. Somehow, with them, I got more Art Thinking done without ever having to say a damn thing about it.

I did some small woodworking of my own in those couple of years, some with the help of my then-girlfriend Luisa, and some in the woodshop at Penland when I probably should have been in the darkroom. Luisa taught me a little MIG welding and the comfort of Power Tools, and even she was in love with Puryear in her way. I still have a tiny ladder that she made back then…

I did my best with what little I knew of Sculpture, discovering that I really was a Photographer at heart, despite my love of the Object. Well before my Silver Nitrate addiction, I was already blackening my hands with ink and tar, staining frames and other misshapen objects. Most of what I made was crap, with the exception of some tiny bass wood baby feet, now waxed and covered with Brooklyn Street dust. They don’t smell like much either, now, but the memories are just as strong.