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Visiting
Artist
Sculptures in the Wild Noah Purifoy's large-scale scupltures create a whole brave new world in Joshua Tree and establish him as an international leader in his genre of assemblage art. text by Kathy Bryant photography Courtesy of Noah Purifoy |
 Above: Noah Purifoy in Joshua Tree.
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| The desert has enticed visitors for centuries. Who wouldn't be intrigued by monzogranite rock outcrops more than 100 million years old, and plants so fantastic that even George Lucas couldn't have dreamt them up for a "Star Wars" scene? Named Joshua Tree by early settlers because the stark vegetation resembled Joshua raising his arms to heaven, this area encompasses both the high Mojave Desert and the low Colorado Desert. |
Shipwrecked, 1995, is made of nautical rigging, redwood and found objects. |
It was into this fierce landscape
full of nature's assemblages that 82-year old artist Noah Purifoy came
in 1989 to create large-scale, outdoor assemblage sculptures of his own,
"It’s either hot as blazes or cold as ice here," he said in his soft Southern
accent. “But its a wonderful place to work." And it's his “brown scenery,"
as he calls it, that has inspired some of his best assemblages, using cast-off
junk, like tires, car parts, bowling balls, foam rubber, iron, shoes, and
old clothes bleached in the sun, as well as construction materials like
steel, aluminum, weathered wood, glass bricks, Astroturf, chicken wire,
old windows, adobe and aluminum.
Purifoy makes a variety of works. Some are see-through structures for viewing the world; some are homeless people's camps. One piece, Gas Station, 1989, is a wooden construction partially covered with rags in which three cylinders rise from a platform, a reference to lone gas stations found in the middle of the desert in the 1950s. Kirby Express, 1995, is a 100-foot-long circular track filled with "train cars" made of vacuum cleaners. And some of his pieces are holes in the around. |
| These and other works seem in their element in Joshua Tree. His latest, called A Weird Place in Wonderland, is a 60square-foot earth piece. "It's my biggest project so far," he says. "It's something I could only do in the desert." The 15foot-deep piece is under construction, both physically and intellectually. Besides this one, he's also working on several pieces in his studio to keep from getting bored, he says. |
| Purifoy forms a basic Structure and overlays it with found objects. He also has an interest in nature's participation in the creative process, especially the effects of sun and rain. "Changes are an integral part of life itself," he says. |
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| Purifoy knows change. In the 1960s, he lived in Los Angeles and was founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center. He was teaching there when the Watts Riots started, and when they ended, he picked up pieces of rubble and debris from the streets and incorporated them into works of art. His most famous work, the huge 66 Signs of Neon, constructed out of charred wood, broken furniture, burned file cabinets and melted neon signs, came from this time. This work represented what the Watts community had been, what it was, and what it hoped to become. It represented both a dirge and a rising phoenix. The 66 Signs of Neon traveled to nine California universities where it was exhibited in student centers, not university galleries. "It wasn't considered art," Purifoy says. "Assemblage and black political art weren't considered art." |
| Using art as a tool for social change, Purifoy was ahead of his time. Since the early 1960s, he felt art education could solve inner city problems and stimulate other community cultural activities. And so from 1965 to 1976, he helped redefine black consciousness in art, especially through his unique approach to assemblage sculpture. He also influenced other black artists like Bettye Saar and David Hammons. |
| "I was searching for my own idea," he recalls, "and had been studying the Dada movement and how it had reversed the whole concept of art. The debris from the riot is what finally launched me on my own course." |
| Purifoy was inspired by the Dadaists, particularly Marchel Duchamp, who produced the first "ready-mades." Purifoy has a deep reverence for these already-made found objects and respects used and discarded things with histories. In this way, each of his artworks subverts hierarchy and removes the... |
