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John McQueen: Woods and Words
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10472 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
1,239 Words |
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Patricia Malarcher
Patricia Malarcher writes on the arts from Englewood, New
Jersey. |
John McQueen calls himself a basket maker, yet casts aside all traditional notions of the ancient craft of basketry. In his distinctively original works, one finds a combination of an engineer's attention to the details of assembly and a shaman's attunement to nature. Although he uses materials gathered from the woods, his forms have been inspired not only by the curves of vines and branches but also by common objects such as cardboard cartons. Ever since McQueen emerged as an exhibiting artist in the mid-1970s, the trees around his home in Upstate New York have played a role in his work. At first, they served simply as his source of materials; more recently, they have provided the subject matter as well as the physical substance of his work.
McQueen's basketry evolved from his earlier sculpture, in which he planted sod and made it grow downward toward a grow light rather than up toward the sun. "From these pieces I moved to ideas surrounding the way man uses trees as metaphors for himself in nature," says Mc Queen in the catalog that accompanies John McQueen: The Language of Containment, a mid career retrospective survey of the artist's work from 1975 through 1992. Organized by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, it was shown there from March 20 through July 25, 1992.
The exhibition's four sections--"Container," "Spirals," "Language," and "Trees"--chart different paths of McQueen's explorations. While establishing a rough chronology, they also show that certain forms recur throughout the work. Early on, McQueen seemed primarily concerned with inventing forms to enclose inner space. Yet, there always is a twist to make a viewer think. For example, a piece made of morning glory vines and day lily leaves has a soft, pliable appearance reminiscent of a historic Native American basket. The sense of antiquity is reinforced by the basket's construction of patches that were woven and then pieced together, as if reassembled. That sort of reconstruction is typical of pottery, not baskets, which are not only perishable but have been minimally valued.
Another container is a plaited imitation of a packing box held shut by overlapping flaps. Why would an artist choose to interpret such an ordinary object in basswood? Pondering the question, one might recall that the carton that inspired it also was made from a tree. As Vicki Halper of the Seattle Art Museum, who curated the show, observed in the catalog: "Basketry for [McQueen] is a chosen language, not a set of inherited shapes."
In both science and art, the
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