Some Shorter Lines for MARTIN PURYEAR
Word count: 395
Paragraphs: 10
A few months ago, Martin Puryear asked me to write an essay for a catalogue to accompany an exhibition of his new work at McKee Gallery (May 3 - June 29, 2012). When I went to Martin’s studio to see the sculptures that would appear in the show, the wheels immediately began to turn, and I knew that I could write the essay. In the essay, titled “Looking Back to Move Forward,” there were certain things I felt I needed to do, and some things I could not do. The sculptures continued to work on me, and the wheels kept turning. So here are four further attempts at “language in the vicinity of what it’s talking about,” as Bill Berkson (quoting Carter Ratcliff paraphrasing Robert Smithson) defined criticism. The titles are Martin’s.
The Rest
The rest might ask
What’s at stake
In rolling stock
From a stuck era?
Move on, they’ll say,
But their memories
Will not necessarily
Be loaded with bodies.
Here, the load
Is carefully concealed
In medium and scale,
But vivid, in the making.
The cart rocks back
To lift its tongue
In praise, insubordination,
And hope.
The Rest is history.
Black Cart
A shadow swells
On a scumbled ground,
Civil distortion,
Coming round and around.
A constellation cart
In a darkening sky,
Like a Big Dipper asterism
To the naked eye.
What’s rising
In this form,
In the back of a child’s head,
Heading into a storm?
Scrolling
Light on its feet,
Like a sign.
Only line,
With a little depth,
Suspended in mind,
Over the possibility
Of flight.
The Load
Carrus in a cortege,
Carrying the Angel of History
Forward, looking back,
Unblinking—
A perfectly public sphere
Concealing a concave mirror
In which we see ourselves
Reflected, Etant donnés,
Back into our own
Implicated eyes.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.