I came across an early assemblage by Mark di Suvero. So here's another of his works to add to the list.
Oh my. The room seemed barely wide enough for this piece, I couldn't back up far enough to get the whole thing in the picture. It's a baby sculpture compared to his later works, but still big—a conglomerate of tree trunk, phone pole, 2x4, and tire. The space certainly couldn't contain the energetics of this unwieldy, yet strangely balanced almost anthropomorphic work. It needs far more space around it and nothing—no Sam Francis nor Diebenkorn—on the walls. And yet, despite the cramped quarters, or maybe even because of them, the parts seemed especially heavy and the the magic of the work even more mysterious. How does it hold up? I mean the tree trunk is massive.
One of the parts I loved best was the 2x4 joined to the telephone pole with steel plate and rivets.
About those rivets...
What is so stark about the piece is that there is all of the work that happened with riveting—that was a special way of joining steel before welding was invented. People built beautiful things then that mostly ended up in the scrap pile. Riveting was a way of handling the hot iron, the rivets themselves, and I find the pieces beautiful because of that. Those forms are part of an industrial landscape that had been dismissed.
He's talking about another work, Yes! For Lady Day, which is all steel, but the rivets are the same.
Di Suvero elsewhere talks about wood joints.
...I started using the wood that they tore out of these hundred-year-old buildings and they made giant fires out of them down on Water Street. I could see the skyscrapers dancing through the fire. I used the wood because I knew how to join it together. All of those structures in the first show I did in less than six months, and then my back got broken because I was doing a job that paid the rent. The real part of the work is the joinery, which is invisible, and a lot of that hasn’t survived because they’ve been taken apart and put together too often, and they weren’t made for that. Since then I’ve developed a more complicated kind of joinery, which allows for many parts coming together and yet looks very simple. But part of the beauty of learning and loving the technique is that you make something very difficult look easy, like Bach. (Laughs).
Well, this work does not look simple to me. How the parts balance is very strange—like a hidden power is streaming in the steel—an animal power, brute strength. I think of the Hulk. I'm waiting for the parts to be flung through the air.
What I love about di Suvero is his engagement with the materials and tools—the craftsmanship of working with iron, steel, wood. And he is hands-on, especially with his early works like this one at the de Young. You can imagine him constructing the base and then hoisting the wood, cranking it up by hand even.
You know, if you stop being explorative, you may as well stop making art altogether. I had to change from working in wood, where you need your body to work through, to steel where there is equipment. By moving into that, the constructive part of my work became much more dominate. I ended up learning how to run a crane, and buying one with a grant that the National Humanities for the Arts gave me. Manuel [Neri] bought a church, I bought a dead crane, and learned how to fix cranes. But then you change, you change once you have a different set of tools, and the tools really determine how far you can go.
How far, how big, how grand. Yes.
Another unexpected sighting at the de Young was a sculpture by Bruce Conner which I wrote about in my remembrance of him in July. Encased in a pristine vitrine is Snore, his homage to the dump truck made of wood boards and cloth remnants wrapped in nylons and hung with testicular bags of cotton stuffing. It was great to see it in the flesh, as it were. It is fleshy. Fleshy and soft, and how like all things fleshy and soft (except for art encased in museum glass cases) eventually ending up on the dump heap. Not melancholic, nor morbid, I think Connor was truly honoring the ending-up of things. So there it is, the end-up, an icon in the church of art. How right. Just so.
And then, after all, there were the etchings by Martin Puryear.
I look at Puryear's sculptural forms—dark shapes or these see-through vessels—and I think of Richard Serra's massive slab prints. I'm not sure why, but sculptural ideas seem to translate more readily into prints than painting or drawing. Perhaps it is the machine intermediary. These prints are sculptures on paper.
These two, Untitled, State I, State II are 35 x 28 inches large. Not only do they resemble alchemical vessels, but the act of producing them is alchemical. Besides the chemicals and tar, there are the calculated steps to the procedure leading to stages of transformation, states of being. Spare and mysterious, they are forms which point to something else unnamed, hermetic yet resonant. Really beautiful.
First quote from interview with Jan Garden Castro inSculpture Magazine.
Other quotes from interview with John Yau of the Brooklyn Rail.
Puryear pics courtesy of Barbara Krakow Gallery.
