Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Martin Puryear
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art
83%
Alien Huddle. 1993-1995. Red cedar and pine
The value of Puryear's art often lies in his ability to turn technical feats of making and construction into artistic accomplishments. He aestheticizes craftwork by letting its processes run free and loose, which intensifies the contradictions latent within them. In Alien Huddle, there's the inclusion of that small bulb of a different wood-type on the side of the smaller cedar orb; there's the quiet symphony of line that results from the wood pieces forming such a variety of joints; there's the blemishes of the object's surface, which conflict with the perfection of its form; there's the slight asymmetry to the two wings coming off the sides of the the smaller sphere. It's not that all of this is of sufficient visual interest to elevate the craftsmanly nature of Puryear's object to some aesthetic plane higher than where woodwork lies. It's that all of these visual oddities are simple results of this form having been executed at all: Puryear's method lays bare the nonidentity between a form and the way it instantiates as a real object. You can see this in the little gaps between some of the pieces of wood. (TFS, 2025)