Martin Puryear, Vessel, 1997–2002, pitch pine, wire mesh and tar. © Martin Puryear, courtesy McKee Gallery, New York.
Martin Puryear, Deadeye, 2002, pine. © Martin Puryear, courtesy McKee Gallery, New York.
schizophrenia in regards to artistic value makes one wonder why these distinctions are so important in the first place. Instead of sidestepping class values, I am attempting to call the whole high and low history into question.13 Taylor thus relies on marquetry to not only achieve an interesting tension between surface and subject matter, but also a more objective approach to subjects that could be more theatrical and sentimental in character. Another artist who navigates issues of art and design crossover is sculptor Courtney Smith. Over the past few years Smith has cut and hinged existing furniture pieces (some with historical veneers, literally and figuratively), alluding to anthropomorphic and structural anomalies.14 Another body of work features areas of elaborate curlicue, floral designs that Smith makes to be carved onto ordinary plan furniture pieces, thus revealing the artifice of decoration by creating a visual contrast or ‘collision’ with the natural grain of the wood. In all this, the original furniture pieces often retain a modicum of their original functions. More recently, however Smith has been creating new works with
intricate forms that are meant to be integrated into the owner’s space and actually used. Smith’s approach to wooden furniture then involves an intricate mélange of craft approaches, design decisions and, not incidentally, recycling and reuse, an issue that has increasingly come to prick the sensibility of all woodworkers in light of a new awareness of the finite resources that would be available without some conscientious harvesting and reuse of the materials. As these few examples demonstrate, Working Wood: Art, Craft and Design will cut across a broad spectrum of art and object making. It will demonstrate that all artists working in this medium do so in the context of specific philosophical and conceptual beliefs or traditions. In the final analysis, the exhibition will pay homage to this material, which is one of the oldest and most venerable in object making worldwide, while also being the most relevant today. Lowery Stokes Sims is Curator, Museum of Arts and Design, New York City.
Notes 1. Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Berg Publishers, Oxford, England, 2007. 2. This work is currently been editioned by A/D Gallery New York City. See http://www. adeditions.com/objects.html. 3. For example, Serra’s 1969 installation, Sawing, at the Pasadena Art Museum. 4. For example Morris’s installation, Untitled, Timbers, in the 1970 survey of his work organised by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City. 5. Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Hard hats and art strikes: Robert Morris in 1970’, Art Bulletin, vol. 89, no. 2, June 2007, p. 334. The meagre female contingent in Minimalism included Tina Spiro and Ann Truitt, who also worked primarily in wood. 6. Writing in 2001, critic Robert Hughes suggested a ‘craft ancestry’ for Puryear’s work: the ‘antique technologies’ of industrialism, ‘folk technologies’ including ‘basketry and cooperage’. See Robert Hughes, ‘Martin Puryear’, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,1000284,00.html?iid=chix-sphere. 7. See Robert Storr and Neal Benezra, Martin Puryear, exhibition catalogue, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2001. 8. Martin Puryear in conversation with John Elderfield, Tuesday 13 November 2007, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Notes taken by the author. 9. ibid. 10. Robert Hughes, ‘Martin Puryear’. 11. This information on Taylor’s work is based on the author’s conversation with the artist in her studio on 8 December 2008. 12. Alison Elizabeth Taylor, e-mail correspondence with the author, 16 January 2009. 13. ibid. 14. This information on Smith’s work is based on the author’s conversation with the artist in her studio on 3 December 2008.
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