Installation views at New York's MOMA

Martin Puryear's exhibition has crossed the country, hopping from one august institution to another. During this migration it has settled itself into the baroquely tinged confines of the National Gallery's West Wing, as well as the cavernously spare quarters of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For such a studiously formal show it has adapted surprisingly well to each new home. In its San Francisco iteration at SF MOMA, the show has again elegantly inhabited its vessel.

The space is methodically filled with a generous and sensitive offering of work. Pieces have enough space to breath and exist on their own, but remain close enough to each other to allow threads of influence to emerge. Their measured proximity allows the energy of each piece to carry over into the experience of the next work, building successively into a wave.

Some works are notably absent. Understandably space is an issue, particularly for large works like Puryear's 1981 Desire. And, though I missed them, works like Cask Cascade, and Dead Eye, are arguably somewhat redundant to Old Mole, and In Sheep's Clothing, both of which are thankfully present. However, works such as Her, Lever #4, and Shrine are sadly missing, and less successful pieces like A Distant Place and Le Prix clunk around dissipating the energy built up by stronger work.

Old Mole 1985 / Untitled 1981-82 / Lever #1 1988-89

Despite a few curatorial hiccups, the majority of the work in the show is powerful and well orchestrated. I particularly like the way the installation counteracts the serial nature of the six or so circular wall works by sensitively interspersing them throughout the exhibition. I also appreciate the scalar recession that the show employs moving from the enormous Some Tales, through an open center space, to an intimately scaled back room. This cozy rear sanctuary wonderfully terminates not in a wall, but rather, a glowing frosted glass expanse. The soft aura emanating from the glass partly lights the subtly introspective work in the space and spiritually recharges us for our return to the main space of the exhibition.

The work in the rear sanctuary is smaller in scale than elsewhere in the exhibition, and more somber. The wry material humor woven into many of Puryear's other works is absent. The funerary tone of works like Reliquary, Bask, Bower, and For Beckworth, is tempered by the brightness of Believer and the mousey roly-polyness of Mus. However, in these times of terror, both of these works read alternately as munitions--Believer a lumpy cartoon-like bomb and Mus a conical wooden warhead.

If violent and bodily death haunts this cluster of free standing works, the wall pieces in the room extend the emptiness of death into a philosophical meditation on absence. The four works are from Puryear's series of circular wall works. Unlike the two ring works elsewhere in the exhibit, which embrace a particularly organic wooden materiality, these pieces are less about their own material than the charged absences they enclose. These energized absences are reminiscent of the voids within Morris Louis' Unfurled paintings. While Louis' Unfurleds open vast existential spaces between their conditioning ribbons of magna color, Puryear's rings bring contained versions of such space into tangible existence within the gallery.

Self 1978 / Brunhilde 1998-2000 / Dumb Luck 1990

The charged emptiness critical in the rings is also an essential element of the strongest works in the show. Unlike the circular wall works, many of these are monolithic. While they possesses both the unity and solidity of a monolith, they also exhibit a degree of permeability and interiority that activates their otherwise cohesive surfaces and forms.

At the most enclosed and elusive end of this spectrum is a work like Self. Composed of stained and painted red cedar and mahogany Self forms a black silhouette-like mass equal parts shadow and whale. While visually impenetrable, it suggests through its capped construction an open interior cloaked within the darkened wood. This mysterious empty core charges the rest of the form with a presence full of memory and longing.

If Self is the shadowy dense end of this type of work, Brunhilde made of cedar and rattan occupies a lighter and airier side. Bulging and pillow-like this immense woven and laminated cage is surprisingly cheerful and inviting. Circling the piece, the surface and volume of the work become inextricably intertwined. The infinitely shifting visual overlap of lattice is frozen physically within each "end's" "seam," where overlapping weaving solidifies into a contiguous mass. The befuddling compression of logics expressed in this construction provides an artless and enjoyable riddle to unravel. The multiplicity of the work aptly embodies a reflexive interplay of interior and exterior, surface and volume, material and technique.

In Sheep's Clothing 1989 / Charm of Subsistence 1989 / Thicket 1990

Like both Brunhilde and Self, much of Puryear's free standing work invites attentive circling; each circuit offering a new understanding as the experience of the work accumulates. This mantra-like action echoes the concentric growth of the wood most of these works employ and the accumulated construction that their forms reflect. It is clearly sensed that each piece, though crafted with skill, developed through a dynamic evolution rather than a predetermined plan--structures emerging from a negotiated interaction of material and process. This emergence is part of what lends the work its feeling of inevitability. It is also what gives the works their distinct identities. Sometimes bordering on the anthropomorphic, each piece is assertively its own being. Rather than determining them, Puryear seems to have guided them into being.

Within the unity of Puryear's works is a fluttering multiplicity. Meanings emerge and recede. References suggest themselves but never resolve or become definitive. These fleeting impressions, rather than producing a cacophony of meanings, accumulate into a unitary if amorphous understanding that is felt rather than cognated--beneath and beyond the threshold of language. Each part of this field flits away from direct examination, but the sum produces a resolved aura. This palpable but illusive presence spans the facets, forms, and surfaces of the work as well as the residual marks of its making. Puryear's work wears the traces of its construction, not as a justifying cloak of craftsmanship, but rather as the honestly naked evidence of its path into being.

This iteration of Puryear's retrospective is not without flaws. Both Puryear's tapering Ladder for Booker T. Washington and the towering Ad Astra fill SFMOMA's soaring atrium. Yet, missing the piece Desire that accompanied them in New York, they feel a bit appended. In this pared-down presentation, one piece would work better than both. My pick would be Ad Astra, because something about the overtly literal metaphor of Ladder for Booker T. has never sung for me, and my dislike is only heightened by its suspended installation. Problematic as these atrial outliers are, they successfully function as teasers and intriguingly puncture the otherwise tightly contained show.

Sharp and Flat 1987 / Greed's Trophy 1984 / Bower 1980

Also, in some of his more recent work Puryear has stepped away from singular unity to explore metaphoric amalgams in works such as C.F.A.O and A Distant Place. Referential works such as Ladder for Booker T. Washington and Le Prix are part of this newer direction, as is Ad Astra with its clearly appropriated wagon wheels. To my mind, this departure is weaker than Puyear's other work, relying too heavily on easily legible tropes and romantically distressed found objects. This new terrain for Puryear is treacherous and crowded, populated by the work of Ed Kienholz, H. C. Westermann, and even some of David Ireland's more cliché pieces.

To be fair, Puryear is in the early stages of carving out this new trajectory. He has thankfully steered clear of more didactic collagist techniques, and judging from his other work, it is likely that he will take what he is now doing in unexpectedly resonant directions. Also, my criticism is contextual: the newer works are in the toughest of crowds, struggling to keep up with some of the most powerful and significant work of the last century.

Martin Puryear will be on view at SF MOMA through January 25th, 2009.

Special thanks to SF MOMA for the use of their press images, and to the denizens of the internet for such a wealth of picture posts.