At the de Young

Dropping in at the de Young to see prints by Martin Puryear...

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.

Cast Off

When I went to see Bruce Conner's film, Easter Morning at the San Francisco Film Festival in early May, I didn't know he was ill. It was his producer who let on after the screening. This news gave further resonance to the film which is a reconstruction of an earlier effort—a resuscitation, like the title says, Easter Morning: new day, new life, resurrection. Shot in 1966, rediscovered, re-imagined, revived in 2008, it is a beautiful collage with light flickerings and shadows. Conner died July 7th.



This isn't the first time he's died. In 1959, only two years since arriving in San Francisco, he held a show by "the late Bruce Conner." The "stuffed lumps of cloth, the nylon and wax" (how he described his sculptures) were inert and dead to him. He needed to move on.

He also hated to be pinned down. So when he received yet another request for biographical information from Who's Who in America he wrote back that Bruce Conner had died, and sure enough, for the 1973 edition of the book, the editors added deceased to his entry.

Easter Morning was his 27th film. He was known best for his films, but he never claimed to be a filmmaker. But there is something about his films, because they opened doors for him, gave him a name.

I got a Ford Foundation grant for filmmaking. I got an application blank which I tore up and threw away because I decided it was a waste of time. That was '63. I talked to somebody else later who said, "Why don't you do it. I work at the Ford Foundation. Why don't you fill the thing out because it's sort of like a game." I decided I would play it as a game. I would play it like a dialogue between me and an invisible audience. I'm exposing myself telling them all of my history. My vaccinations. Explaining my whole theory of art and life and what I intend to do in the future. How I'm to use whatever alms they will give me. I started drawing parallels of this kind of activity with religious rituals. Confessionals, and ringing of bells, and doing penance in the streets. Fantasies of movies that I would make. It offered me a chance to fantasize. It was my opportunity to write in an entirely different context. I've never been able to write in the context of publication. I knew all the crap that you have to go through. You write it. You type it out. You make a bunch of copies. You send them out to all the magazines. Over the next two years you'll get the copies back. It's most disastrous. I've never been able to do that. This was a way for me to have an audience. I would write letters. Well they loved it. Somebody loved it. They gave me a film grant and all I had made was sixteen minutes of movies. And I didn't expect to get it because there were a lot of other filmmakers who were more qualified and should have gotten it. Like Stan Brakhage was the man who had most to do with me getting into filmmaking, and he didn't get one. He really should have.

With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

Nonetheless, he was an artist and what he was doing with film was what he did with anything: he rescued, recycled, reused, remade whatever he found. He collaged with images, collaged with film, collaged with stuff, detris, cast offs.

In San Francisco the trash was picked up by an organization called the Scavengers Protective Association. They went around the city with big trucks, gathering the trash by emptying the trash cans onto big flat burlap sheets. They would gather it up on their backs and dump it into the truck. Or, when the truck was full, they would hang them on the sides like big lumpy testicles. So they were using all the remnants, refuse, and outcasts of our society. The people themselves who were doing this were considered the lowest people employed in society... I decided, we'll have the RAT-BASTARD PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION: people who were making things with the detritus of society, who themselves were ostracized or alienated from full involvement with society.

Christ Casting Out the Legions of Devils, 1989.

This was in the 50s, early 60s when men still wore ties and women wore gloves. Conner was what you'd call unconventional.

Artists were using oil paint which I felt was a pretty limited medium for spontaneity; for using what was around for you. We figured you could use anything you wanted to. The main thing was to make it, to make the image. To make the thing that you were trying to do, and whether it fell apart or not was of secondary importance. In fact, for me it became of primary importance. It became a dialog of how you relate to objects. You have a choice of how you want to relate. If you want to, you can take assemblage or collage and seal it in a solid block of plastic. Or you don't. Time is working on it. Manuel Neri would make his sculptures of plaster on cardboard, corrugated cardboard. The first time they were shown at the San Francisco Museum a couple or three years later, they had to sweep up the floor underneath every day because the plaster would keep popping off.

Metronome (1961, reworked 1995) wrapped in nylons.

Nylons figure a lot in his assemblages. And the atomic bomb in his films...


A Movie, 1958, found footage.

... until he became known for these elements in his works. When he was identified with nylon stockings, assemblage, short films with historic footage... he'd quit. He stopped making assemblages in 1964, and film—he came back to film when he could come at it another way.

"How you relate to objects," is the nugget behind his work. I understand this. It is how I operate—responding, engaging, being in conversation with the things I come across. Like this—this trio of frames from Mea Culpa, one of the films he did in the 80s with David Byrne and Brian Eno. Here, these spot shots are recast in a different role.





Mea Culpa from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1981. There's also America is Waiting online.

You know there's more. This is just a taste. Luckily there are some films online and books now, retrospectives having been done. But this is the end frame. All good things must come to an end. Or do they? That's just a line. Conner knew that. All things can be reborn.





Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Interview with Bruce Conner by Paul Cummings in NYC 4/16/7.

Sculptures and collage at Paule Anglim Gallery, SF.