no contest
by Douglas Messerli
Noah Purifoy Noah
Purifoy: Junk Dada, curated by Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz, the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art / I saw the show on Wednesday, June 3, 2015
She had
obviously been on a visit to his remarkable on-site desert exhibitions of his
work near Joshua Tree National Memorial, where he had created a distinctive
series of “room-like” sculptures, which people describe as being something
close to a “city of art.” I had never seen the work, but looked forward to
viewing selections from it which I saw the other day at LACMA, presenting a
wide range of his art and six works from his desert installations.
Trained in
art at the Los Angeles Chouinard Art Institute (which was later to become CalArts),
Purifoy was attracted to art-making through the works of artists like Kurt
Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and the outsider creator Simon Rodia, and first
gained attention for his work when, after the devastating Watts riots of 1965,
he and a group of artists (Deborah Brewer, Judson Powell, Ruth Saturensky, and
Arthur Secunda) scoured through the burned debris of destroyed neighborhoods
for the bits and pieces of material that would make up the artworks which were
shown as 66 Signs of Neon across the
country between 1966 and 1969. The work, filled with pieces of stunning beauty
and wonderment, is shown in the new Purifoy exhibition for the first time since
that decade. Given the cleverness and originality of some of this work, it is
worth quoting Purifoy’s explanation of how that art came to be:
We
watched aghast the rioting, looting, and burning during the
August happening. While
the debris was still smoldering,
we ventured into the rubble like other junkers of the
community,
digging and searching, but unlike others, obsessed without quite
knowing
why. By September…we had collected three tons of
charred wood and fire-molded
debris…We gave much through
to the oddity of our found things. Often the
smell of the debris…
turned our thoughts to what were and were not tragic times in
Watts and to what to do with the junk we had collected, which
had begun to haunt
our dreams.
The works he created immediately
after that watershed moment in his art career continue to reveal the artist’s
ability to wittily reuse materials, including the several fabric-based works
such as Rags and Old Iron II (After Nina
Simone) of 1989 and Earl Fatha Hines of
1990, and the stunning constructions and assemblages such as Zulu (1989), Black, Brown and Beige (After Duke Ellington) (1989), For Lady Bird (1987-89), The Door (1988), and The Last Supper (1988). In these works,
Purifoy continued to explore through collage and assemblage ways in which to
celebrate some of the Black and White figures who had represented significant
bridges between the cultural and racial divides of American life, while yet
retaining a great sense of humor and gracefulness. While certainly connecting
himself, through his work, with the concepts of “art brut,” Purifoy’s
particular manifestation of various constructions of his oeuvre represent a sense of delicacy and elegance that one does
expect to find. It is in the positioning of his combines, the balance and
detail between the macro and mirco that matter. If upon seeing his works we are
immediately taken aback by their power, we are still drawn into them, forced to
inspect them further for their substantial intimate messages. If one is
momentarily awed by Black, Brown and
Beige (After Duke Ellington), for example, we are asked to come forward and
explore the work’s various surfaces: the intricate lattices and ladder-like
structures that connect the body of this multifaceted (symbolized in Purifoy’s
work by many hands) composer, pianist, and conductor.
And here too
we sense a kind of comical absurdity. There is indeed “no contest” for the two
rusted bicycles (one locked into an upside-down position), angled atop what
appears to be a clapboard shack.
Yet, there is also a sense of bemused
bravura about Purifoy’s title, as if he is suggesting that in the very creation
of this ridiculous situation the artist has already won, hands down, whatever
race in which he might have been expected to participate. And there is no question,
at least to this viewer, that Purifoy is right. He was won us over to his
ingenious vision of the world before even leaving the starting line. Working
basically in quietude and isolation, and with materials that most of us could
not even imagine to be reused to create such objects of beauty, Noah Purifoy has
indeed created a world that represents only his gifted imagination.
Los Angeles, June
5, 2015
Reprinted
from Art Là-bas (June 2015).