The Final Part of Puryear

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Maroon/Martin Puryear, 1987-1988 Photo: Milwaukee Art Museum

Before we get back to things in London, let’s wrap up that interview with Martin Puryear, whose retrospective opens this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art.

LACAYO: You’ve spoken about how the most impressive things you saw while in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone were the many well made objects for daily life. In Africa you obviously began to appreciate how making things and the processes that go into that — joinery, carpentry, cooperage, basketry — could be useful in a work of art without turning the work simply into a work of craftsmanship.

PURYEAR: My interest in making things long preceded my going to Africa. Ever since I was a kid, I was always drawn to understanding how things get put together. Then I had to figure a way to put that together with my training as an artist. My background was all about traditional ways of making art, oil paints or egg tempera, carving wood, carving stone. Constructing was something I had practiced in a more functional way. But then it became interesting to me to make artwork by constructing it.

And what also interested me was that in working that way you’re using a methodology that doesn’t come out of the history of art. It comes out of the history of ordinary workmen, tradesmen practicing their trade, whether it’s wagon builders or roof thatchers or basket makers. This isn’t a new idea, David Smith was a master welder and Julio Gonzalez was a jewelry maker. So this is nothing I’ve invented. But it’s part of the lineage I belong to.

I think of crafts as simply a means of making something. Every artist wants his work to be made as well as it can be made, whether he makes it himself or he pays someone else to do it. In our time the artist is considered to be the one with the brain and the imagination. To get your hands dirty actually building something? You can buy that nowadays. So a lot of artists buy a very high level of craft from somebody else. They don’t put themselves in the place of the maker and I persist in that practice. It’s a rich place to be. And also — I’m a very controlling person. (He laughs.)

LACAYO: In an artworld where beauty is still a suspect notion, do you worry about making work that’s beautiful? Even too beautiful?

PURYEAR: In the last century our notions of beauty became so expanded. What we can call beautiful isn’t just the simple pleasure of well resolved color, shapes, forms. There’s a whole sense that the brain itself can be a sense organ. This is what Conceptual art opened up. It’s similar to what a scientist means what he talks about a beautiful theory, that there’s a certain beauty or harmony or resolution in it even though it isn’t about sensual pleasure.

LACAYO: No, what I mean is that some of your work is so plainly beautiful. The beauty in your work is usually hard won, but it’s there. Do you worry sometimes when you look at something you’re doing and think, “God, this is just too pretty.”? Your piece Maroon , which is very powerful, is also plainly gorgeous.

PURYEAR: I don’t think I worry about it. I have such a suspicion of easy beauty, because I know how complex notions of beauty are. It’s interesting that you would talk about Maroon because that’s a very ugly piece to me. The piece works for me but I don’t think of it as elegant in any way.

LACAYO: Let’s talk about one of your newest pieces, C.F.A.O. When I first saw it I said to myself, “Oh, I think this is some kind of autobiographical piece. It contains a mask, and the artist wears a mask, like we all do at some times in life. It’s a barrow filled with wood, and the artist carries around the burden of his entire life with him, like we all do.” Is that a fair reading? And whether it is or not, are there pieces of yours that you feel are more autobiographical than others?

PURYEAR: I don’t think personal autobiography is part of what I’m doing, although I think there is a way you can say that everything an artist makes has an element of self-portraiture in it. That C.F.A.O. piece is not autobiographical in a personal sense, but it certainly has elements of my experience tied up in it that I was trying to untangle — or maybe knot together is a better way to put it.

C.F.A.O. is the abbreviation for the name of a French trading company in West Africa. There was a C.F.A.O. building in my village in Sierra Leone, which had been abandoned for many years when I arrived there but it was still being used as a warehouse. And it struck me that here’s this huge company doing business in a country that wasn’t even a part of the French empire. It was just the whole notion of contact between cultures, of what gets taken and what gets given.

LACAYO: I’ve just come from the Kara Walker show at the Whitney. What she does — those cut paper silhouettes of surreal scenes from the Old South — that’s one way of being an artist who’s black, making that experience central to your work. Most of your work doesn’t speak directly to the experience of being black or to African-American identity. And then some of it does, though usually more obliquely.

PURYEAR: First the work should have an existence independent of ethnic issues or history, so that it really works as an object, as something for a person to confront as an art experience. Certainly in this day and age you can load up work with a huge amount of issues of social reality or history or strife, and not just racial or ethnic issues. Look at Louise Bourgeois, somebody who has made a whole career out of personal pain and a sense of betrayal. The judgment that’s she’s leveled her entire life has been a huge source of ideas for incredibly powerful work.

With Kara, her work is much more focused on a particular racial dynamic which our society is finally able to look at. I remember when I was younger, maybe thirty years ago, the art world couldn’t deal with this. But at the same time I feel that the ethnic component of my own identity, while that’s part of who I am, it doesn’t subsume everything else about who I am. I’m a person who can also look at things from nature, from history, appreciate beauty in a way that anybody could, no matter what their ethnicity is. So for me the expression of a particularly black aesthetic is a tiny part of my overall thinking.