Haptic: The First 101 Days of President Obama. Day Six. January 25, 2009.
This afternoon I went to a poets’ panel at the San Francisco Museum of Art (Joinery: Poems on the occasion of Martin Puryear) . Subject: Martin Puryear, an African-American sculptor who works primarily in wood. (Go to the SFMOMA website, among others to see photographic samples of the work). The poets included:David Levi-Strauss (moderator & poet & critic), and poets, Norma Cole, Aaron Shurin, Susan Thackery, and Michael Palmer. All of whom spoke well about the work, some from the point of view of the ways in Puryear’s practice of ‘joinery’ mirrored various aspects of the ways in which their own poetry - in terms of collage, and/or the translation process of working or joining English to another language. Others spoke directly to the psychological experience of responding and incorporating the work in the process of both looking.
For myself, the real subject and/or focus was on the issue of ‘meaning’ - what, or what do or do not Puryear’s sculptures provide in terms of meaning. Do they reduce in the way you can say looking at the Eiffel Tower means it is “the Eiffel Tower.” Puryear’s works offer no such assurance. They are what they are and they are ‘not’ what they are. Each piece yokes together spatial and material elements and concepts that have no history of being together(different kinds of woods), while at the same time, the objects are so well-made they give the momentary illusion that what is conjoined is natural and is meant to be a utilitarian object of mostly some impossible sort. (It is impossible to reach or climb the ladder, or push what may be a wheelbarrow. etc.) Some panel members suggested that this utilitarian, yet lack of ‘utilitarianism’ was similar to the role of poetry, or those of who “join” language (words) together, sometimes beautifully, but without any utilitarian intention, though an illusion of intention or usefulness may appear to be possible. The well-made erotic poem is such, but not such, etc.
Actually, I believe Puryear, for all of the beauty of his works and the implication of a meaning, is not at all about making conclusive meanings. (None of the poets were arguing from that position either.) Not at all. On some level the work is about thinking, about process, about coping with oppositional materials. The individual works are also an imaginative demonstration of pragmatism (or pragmatic thought). That is, they are about working with the materials at hand. The process and the object might mean one thing one week, then totally elude us, and/or configure another meaning the next week.
The disparate materials, the disparate solutions, the humility of process in the making are what I take away as meaning..
To make a leap to the present subject (the making of the new President), this pragmatism, the constant yoking together, disparate, sometime violently opposed kinds of materials (nations, classes, weather, energy, finances, infrastructure, etc.), I suspect, is quite akin to the demonstration and example of the work(s) of Martin Puryear.
Obama’s practice perforce must be - particularly after the disasters of these last 8 years - is to learn the counter-theology of living practically, ‘with a practice’. Instead of the craft of working with wood, it is Statecraft. , the craft of making a working State.
In this case a State that we currently witness and respond to daily as Citizens shaping or being shaped, the dialog of constructing what is (or what remains!) possible.
(By the way, David Levi-Strauss, the moderator of today’s discussion, has a good interview with Martin Puryear in the Brooklyn Rail. I do not have the link handy. Go there and ’search’ either name.
