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Pure Puryear
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20241 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
1,756 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
The Martin Puryear retrospective, which is currently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C, and travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in July, could not have come at a more propitious moment. Organized by Neal Benezra, formerly of the Art Institute of Chicago and newly installed as the Hirshhorn's chief curator, it presents elegantly crafted objects that are striking presences and that are possessed of broadly allusive meanings, despite being thoroughly abstract,
The show's virtue, besides the fact that it gives us manifold visual pleasures, lies in its affirmative power: It reminds us of the validity of Modernism and its signature invention, abstraction, as well as the viability of individual vision and the forming hand in the making of art. Both the exhibition and Puryear's career underscore the absurdity of the mainstream 1980s dictum about the irrelevance of Modernism and the higher truth of the Post-Modern media culture. Not since the Christopher Wilmarth retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art three years ago have we been given such a forceful idea of what it can mean to be a sculptor in the twentieth century.
Nonetheless, the 1980s remain vestigially present in this exhibition, hovering over it like a shade. For it is impossible to go through the Puryear retrospective without being reminded of one of the paradigms of 1980s cant, Jenny Holzer. Holzer is famous for what she calls her "truisms," politically charged sayings such as "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise" etched into slabs of stone and intended as a commentary on contemporary society. (Art critic Robert Hughes has observed that only in the art world could Holzer hope to find an audience for her morsels of "wisdom." They are so bad, says Hughes, that they couldn't even get published as poetry.)
What connection could there possibly be between these two, who in terms of artistic talent are at opposite poles? Four years ago, when a committee of judges was selecting the American representative to the Venice Biennale, Jenny Holzer was chosen, and Puryear was selected to represent the United States at the considerably less prestigious Sao Paolo Bienal. The reason? The committee wanted to send to Venice someone who made "socially conscious" art. In other words, politics, rather than artistic quality, was the standard used.
It was the kind of travesty that says far more about the mentality of the art world today than about the artists concerned. The show now at the Hirshhorn confirms what one already knew, that Puryear
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