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
When poet-novelist Fanny Howe was last in Los Angeles—as we dined with
our mutual friend Diana Saves in late 2014 at The Roof restaurant on top of the
Wilshire Hotel, a block away from my office—she suddenly asked, in the midst of
conversation, “So who is this Noah Purifoy?” I shook my head, momentarily
confusing her question with another “Noah” with whom we were both acquainted,
before answering, “I don’t know his work, but LACMA (the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art) is dong a big show of him in the next couple of months.
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.
The show at LACMA nearly made
me ask this same question, although the accompanying material in the catalogue,
wall didactic material, and press release information made it quite clear just who Noah Purifoy was as individual. But
I was startled about the fact that I’d never before encountered this brilliant artist’s
creations, as if somehow somebody had been keeping a big secret from the art world.
For Purifoy is not just a local phenomenon—which he most certainly was when one
considers his many years as an administrator of the Watts Towers Arts Center in
the 1960s and Director of Community Services at Central City Mental Health
facility in the early 1970s, and his later involvement with the California Arts
Council—but is clearly a significant sculptor working in an international
tradition of assemblage and so-called “junk” art that can be directly traced
back at least to the Dadaist groups of the early 20th century.
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.
In works such as Drum Song,Untitled (Watts Remains), both from 1966 and Untitled of 1967, it is almost as if
Purifoy defies the meaninglessness of so much destruction by pulling together
items from the ashes with such great ingenuity and a sophisticated sense of
color and balance that we cannot truly imagine these as emanating from the
anger and hate between races. If there was ever an example of art as a healing
force—a concept reiterated by Purifoy again and again through his work as a social
worker and psychologist—the pieces of 66
Signs of Neon demonstrate it.
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.
At the age of 72, an age when
most artists are pulling back from their creative efforts, Purifoy, with the
help of friends, purchased land in the California desert near Joshua Tree, and set
out, over the next 15 years, to create a virtual city of assemblage. His large
desert junk creations sprawling over a ten-acre parcel, consists of more than
120 large-scale sculptures, made completely out of junk, The Purifoy park in
the Mojave has become a favorite of art connoisseurs who travel to Joshua Tree
to observe how these large pieces, subject to intense heat, wind, and the local
lizards, birds, and snakes, are altered through time. Yet for most viewers, the
six pieces represented in this show will have to serve as testimony to Purifoy’s
grand desert creations. 
Almost all of these works, in
particular, No Contest (bicycles) of
1991, From the Point of View of the
Little People of 1994, and Ode to
Frank Gehry (1999)—the last of particular significance given LAMA’s
upcoming Frank Gehry show—are grand testaments to just what I’ve described
above, being works that brilliantly combine wit, grace, and a vastness of
vision to shift our initial awe and shock to a sense of fascination and
childlike wonderment.
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).
