Martin Puryear (b. 1941 USA) --- Greed's Trophy 1984
The wire and the cagelike form of Puryear's sculpture may suggest a hunter's trap or a fisherman's basket; another allusion could be to sport, and the lacrosse stick. These different echoes resonate with the title Greed's Trophy, but the work has no single model among human artifacts, and its traces of them fuse with hints of the human body: the dark eye, and the lolling tongue at the bottom, evoke a head, while the shape—dwindling at the foot, expanding at the "chest," and swelling slightly into a circle at the top of the armature on the wall—is subtly figural. Meanwhile, as Greed's Trophy is taking us in these various interpretive directions, it remains conspicuously empty and open, its tense curves a sculptural essay in shape without physical substance.
"I was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure objects," Puryear has said, and his work is deliberately associative. Minimalism has informed his involvement with materials, but whereas the classic Minimalist object is industrially fabricated and impersonal in shape and surface, Puryear's art is steeped in cultural and historical reference, and he is enormously adept at carpentry and other manual skills. In fact Greed's Trophy, in evoking the tools of the American outdoorsman, claims a place for the history of craft in our understanding of the country's art.
Martin Puryear (b. 1941 USA) --- Greed's Trophy 1984
The wire and the cagelike form of Puryear's sculpture may suggest a hunter's trap or a fisherman's basket; another allusion could be to sport, and the lacrosse stick. These different echoes resonate with the title Greed's Trophy, but the work has no single model among human artifacts, and its traces of them fuse with hints of the human body: the dark eye, and the lolling tongue at the bottom, evoke a head, while the shape—dwindling at the foot, expanding at the "chest," and swelling slightly into a circle at the top of the armature on the wall—is subtly figural. Meanwhile, as Greed's Trophy is taking us in these various interpretive directions, it remains conspicuously empty and open, its tense curves a sculptural essay in shape without physical substance.
"I was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure objects," Puryear has said, and his work is deliberately associative. Minimalism has informed his involvement with materials, but whereas the classic Minimalist object is industrially fabricated and impersonal in shape and surface, Puryear's art is steeped in cultural and historical reference, and he is enormously adept at carpentry and other manual skills. In fact Greed's Trophy, in evoking the tools of the American outdoorsman, claims a place for the history of craft in our understanding of the country's art.