In recent years the issue of ”public” versus ”personal” art has received a great deal of attention.
Much of it was caused by the controversy over Richard Serra`s ”Tilted Arc,” a sculpture so aggressive in form and placement that people working at the government plaza where it is sited–Foley Square in New York City–want the piece taken down.
Both sides presented their objections in open hearings nearly two years ago. Nothing is yet resolved. The case continues to raise questions about the tenuous relationship between artist and public.
Next Saturday the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center will open an exhibition that illustrates how one of the city`s most prominent sculptors, Martin Puryear, has dealt with this relationship. The show presents both his public and personal work, from 1978 to date.
Puryear says very little about his sculpture, but this is clearly a matter of preference, not inability. He feels that words tend to replace a visual experience and may seem to bind an artist to a particular approach or style.
The more specific the discussion, the greater the hazard. On any given issue he would rather stay free to examine both sides.
His manner is soft-spoken, but he knows what he is about and expresses it with the naturalness of fact. What he says contains no idle pleasantries. His work does not occasion humor or smiles.
Others may live more easily in the spotlight. That is not his affair. He reveals personality only through his approaches to the two aspects of his art. ”I think there is a difference between the nature of the result when you work on things for a true public sector and when you work in the studio in a more insular way,” Puryear said. ”The source of all my pieces is the studio, and when I work on something that will be shown in a gallery or museum, there is the sense that people will know about what they are going to see. In that instance, I think about perception, general perception, not intelligibility. But when I think about work in the public arena I think about intelligibility a lot. I run everything past that issue. I don`t know that it has made a difference, but it`s like an article of belief. I feel it`s something that still has to be thought about.
”It is very tricky. You don`t want to give people pap. You don`t want to give them palliatives or reinforce notions that don`t do justice to their intelligence and its ability to stretch. On the other hand, you don`t want to put a very private meditation into a public context either. So it`s a question of what`s possible between those extremes. That`s the question that interests me, even though, as I said, I don`t know that I`ve found an answer.”
One piece that Puryear feels is successful in defining itself to the public is ”Bodark Arc” (1982), at Governor`s State University in Park Forest South. Several artists have works there, and the roster was pretty much completed by the time Puryear received his commission, so he chose the most distant spot and proceeded to subvert viewer expectations by presenting not an object but a redirection of attention toward the landscape itself.
This is achieved by means of two paths, an arc and a line that bisects it, both of which lead to a small cast-bronze chair. But spectators are not aware of the geometry until they move through it, reach the chair and view their passage whole. Thus, no matter what one calls the piece–sculpture or landscape architecture–it still speaks in experiential terms.
”That piece is really a kind of garden setting,” Puryear said, ”like a wild garden. And one reason that gardens are so interesting to me is that they are retreats. To go there is to put yourself in a state of mind where you are open to, in a sense, escape. I`m not interested in using words to prime the world`s eyes to look at my work, but without getting too literal I think that all my work has an element of escape. Call it what you want: fantasy, escape, imagination, retreat. It is an idea of otherness.
”I think about this a lot because my work is generally involved with nature, growth and grown things. The materials tend to be natural; I don`t have a lot of feeling for materials that are highly processed and
industrialized. But I am a city person, and perhaps because I am, an urge for the country comes out. I wouldn`t want to make a big metaphor of it, but my work is like what comes through holes in a dam, forced out by the pressure of living in an urban environment.”
Ideally, Puryear would like to see all his work sited in nature; in this he is like Henry Moore. But even beyond the personal preference, he feels that an automatic allotment of sculpture for public buildings–”like a lapel carnation on every suit”–fails to do justice to the integrity of art. Sometimes a better solution is to create what are called ”amenities,”
artist-designed pieces that may serve a function and, hence, be readily understood.
The key work here is the proposal Puryear made in 1980 for Duncan Plaza, an unattractive and underused area in New Orleans. His redesign was about accommodation. He wanted the plaza to become a magnet, attracting people by really accommodating human use.
Among its attractions were an amphitheater, a colonnade, several eating areas and a screen from traffic provided by a parklike verge. Everything was meant to reverberate with the history of New Orleans as it was popularly perceived. Among other things, Puryear would have made the patterns for the cast-iron fence, designed the seating and taken care of a lot of the details himself. Unfortunately, his proposal was not chosen, and for reasons the city never explained, the project (which would have been done by artist Robert Irwin) was dropped.
”On commissions I often hear it said that sculptural objects are not wanted,” Puryear said. ”That`s what one hears from people who have a budget for art but know that there`s not really a place for it. And I`m happy doing that, as I have a very pragmatic side. But, really, I`m a sculptor, and sculpture is not, per se, furniture. So I have an interest in these things but do not confuse them with my primary activity. I feel they stretch my identity into another area that by its nature is more graspable by ordinary people. It also occasionally is good to turn a free-rein activity into a reined-in province where there are functions and requirements to be met.
”I think such limits are really good sources of invention and, hence, ideas. So I do feel that I take requirements of use pretty seriously. In other words, a chair I design has to accommodate a sitter; it is not just an idea of a chair. If I make a chair, it has to be a chair. And it also has to be my chair. So those kinds of things I do take as challenges, but I couldn`t make my whole life around them because I`m not a designer or an architect by nature.”
As an artist, Puryear constantly tries to subvert the kind of skill that gets developed through repeating a process. As one does something over and over again, work becomes automatic and the level of randomness and risk goes down. This is what he struggles against, for art, he believes, is not mastery but confrontation.
The added confrontation of public art comes from knowing that odds are against the possibility of creating a piece that will give something to everyone. For example, ”River Road Ring” (1985), at the River Road transit station in Chicago, was a result of a great many studies of how a suspended incomplete circle would behave in relation to moving people. Yet after this was determined and the piece was in place, Puryear still came up against an overwhelming problem: Subway stations, after all, are not places of contemplation.
Puryear knows whether each piece is a successful formal realization or not; if it is a piece intended for museum exhibition, that is all he needs to know. But with a public work, satisfaction depends on the artist`s knowledge being confirmed by others, many others. And that he may never know. That is the open-ended part.
”If I felt I couldn`t do anything positive in the public arena,”
Puryear said, ”it might mean that I would have to stop. That would be a kind of despair. To make a piece that would be in critical terms a masterpiece but in public terms a nuisance, well, I`m not the kind of artist who could be comfortable with that.
”Still, I do think you can realize something about the human condition and create work with an emphasis on intelligibility that shows you care about people. If you have the best intentions, giving your absolute best–and, again, I am not always certain how–in some way those intentions should come out.”
Organized by the Chicago Office of Fine Arts, ”Martin Puryear: Public and Personal” opens next Saturday at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., and continues through April 4.
