The Synesthesiac The Art Agenda Meandering in the Metropolis and at Middlebury

Author: Ashley Gamell

One afternoon over Thanksgiving break, I was elbowing my way through the MoMa's collection of charcoal drawings by Georges Seurat, the French master of pointillist color and light (open through January 7). A swell of people edged along the gallery perimeter, squinting at the small mounted sketches with their arms crossed. The drawings are brooding and intense, their shadowy contents recalling the oppressive sensuality of the Paris underworld in the days of Toulouse-Lautrec. The subjects, mostly men and women, emerge out of a web of black strokes, like objects in a vacuum. The museum visitors inspected the walls in a tense silence, tracing the discipline of an artist searching desperately for a new form of representation. I took a long gander at a refreshing pastel study for "Sunday afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," then moved on into the open air of MoMa's other major installation, a retrospective on the contemporary African-American sculptor Martin Puryear (open through January 14). In this gallery, things were different - people paced, circled, and chatted enthusiastically around Puryear's huge wood and mesh sculptures. Children's voices and footsteps rang out in the maze. The rooms were warm, full of the scents of pine and cedar and the crisp, elegant lines of fine craftsmanship. The clutter of luminous, geometric objects seemed to radiate energy and conversation.

Puryear skirts around definition as an artist - he is alternately witty, confrontational and abstract. The spare tidbits of text in the exhibit tell the visitor that he is concerned with colonialism, has lived and sculpted in Africa with the Peace Corps, as well as in Asia and Europe and gathers inspiration from various disciplines, such as technology and natural history. Otherwise, he remains in obscurity. A gelatinous mound of painted black wood entitled "Self" looms off to the side of one gallery room, its shape undulating under the light. As you draw nearer to it, the life-size form shifts mischievously and yet appears opaque, withholding. This is the sensation that pervades all of Puryear's works. They refuse to ascribe to a single interpretation but ooze with possibilities for each onlooker. These limitless layers of meaning create what the artist calls "a flickering quality"- it's what makes these massive, imaginative sculptures as spellbinding for the scholars as they are for the toddlers.

The captions around the gallery give the impression that there are specific historical and cultural issues behind each piece, but most of the time, Purvear's not telling. "It gives me great pleasure to feel there's a level that doesn't require [this] knowledge," he remarked in 1978. However, if you're looking, some of the works can be quite political: "C.F.A.O.," named after the acronym for The French Company of West Africa, a 19th century colonial trading company, consists of an indigenous African masked ensconced in a towering wooden matrix, being carted away on a wheelbarrow. Other sculptures feature chain links or "levers" raised magically into the air, as though being held up by an invisible workforce, a laboring nation unseen by museum-goers. A gorgeously wrought ladder rising thirty-six feet into the air, winding and narrowing so that it seems to disappear into the heavens, is called "Ladder for Booker T. Washington."

And yet, many pieces remain staunchly untitled, taunting the viewer who looks to the little white plaque for a clue with which to narrow and identify the work. Puryear is creating objects that look useful - great wheels and combs, painstakingly hewn and polished - but the magic comes precisely from the fact that they cannot be put to a specific use. His works affirm Dickinson's claim, "success in circuit lies"- they circle ideas without ever falling into an agenda.

Puryear's balancing act between art and politics reminded me of a recent exhibit at Middlebury's Johnson Memorial Building: May Mantell's "Animals (a requiem)." Environmentalism, like colonialism, is a priori issue at Middlebury: we all agree that living creatures are intrinsically valuable, just as we all agree that the West has been naughty. That makes it an interesting place for an exhibit that advocates a vegetarian approach. Mantell's twenty black-and-white photographs are mainly of dead animals - a pile of wolves after a hunting derby or a glassy-eyed roadside deer. The accompanying quotes, like the sad, majestic images, convince us to adopt "a boundless ethic that will include the animals also." The problem here is that we were already convinced.

Mantell is best when she does not harp on her message but instead focuses on the visuals merits of her subjects, their geometries and patterns. "Pigeon," photographed here in Middlebury, is more homage than tearjerker. Wings tucked in symmetrically, eyes closed peacefully as though in sleep, the bird attests to the grace of natural forms, prevailing even against death. In "Deer Remains," the still-elegant legs of a long-gone deer resurface out of a heap of straw, striking an eerie visual harmony with their burial place. "Animals" demonstrates that a political message is often best served by artworks that depict things just as they are. Like the dark masses of thighs and hats in Seurat's drawings, the curve of a wing or a speckled underbelly in Mantell's more objective images speak for themselves. These photos don't dictate a predetermined response - they stun with a peculiar physical beauty, giving rise to emotions that hover in a grey area somewhere near reverence. Both Mantell and Puryear's works navigate the border between art for art's sake and art for the world's sake. I would argue that they succeed when they are foremost works of art: precision can be a more powerful form of political protest than protest itself. In the richness of an ambiguous image and the tension of a mysterious object, an artist can reveal something new in the universe, something more subtle than West and East, living and dead, good and evil. This is the same end Seurat was struggling towards in his hundreds of small dark drawings - a moment of enlightenment that changes the world.