MARTIN PURYEAR: I’m real interested in vernacular cultures
where people lived a little closer to the source of materials
and the making of objects for use.
I’m real interested in trades, in ways that people make things
which are not necessarily artistic.
I mean, they’re artistic in the sense that they can have formal beauty,
but they’re not, they’re not done with an artistic motive.
They’re done often with a utilitarian motive.
As a woodworker I use tools all the time.
And there’s a certain art history to the evolution of woodworking tools in itself.
These are the carving tools…
I mean, you look at the forms that various utilitarian things have taken
throughout history and there’s a whole sort of shifting sense of beauty.
It is a ladder. It's made like a ladder.
It's made like country ladders you see in places,
whether they would, people would cut a tree trunk in half
and put rungs between the two halves.
And Ladder at Fort that’s a, that's a ladder.
The title came after the work was finished.
I didn't set up to, set out to make a work about Booker T. Washington.
The work was really about using the sapling, using the tree.
And making a work that had a kind of artificial perspective, a forced perspective,
that made it appear to recede into space faster than it, in fact, does.
That really was what the work was about for me,
is this kind of artificial perspective.
It's an idea that requires a certain actual length;
it's a piece that couldn't have been done small.
As it was, it was thirty-six feet long.
And the idea of Booker T. Washington, the resonance with his life,
and his struggle, and the whole notion that his idea of progress for the race,
was a long slow progression of, as he said,
putting your buckets down where you are, and working with what you've got.
And so, it really is a question of like, the view from where you,
where you start, and the end, the goal.
And, I really, it's, this is something I don't really want to elaborate on too much
because I think, I think it's, it's in the work.
I came from a generation where the work was itself the information.
So, there remains this belief that the work itself can have an identity
that can hopefully speak whether it's through beauty,
or through ugliness or whatever quality you put into the work,
that is what the work can be about.
The work doesn't have to be a transparent vehicle for you
to say things about life today or what you,
what you see people doing to each other or things like that.
I'm making a case for my own vision.
It can actually move in a direction that has got some representational tendencies.
Or some, at least some elusive tendencies.
Or some kind of tendencies that are, very suggestive.
—OLIVER: Has it been eight years…
ave you been back since…
—PURYEAR: I haven’t been back.
This is my first visit since it was finished.
I wanted to do something which was like a folly,
like an architectural folly, which I think it ended up being.
It was just an attempt to make a work that had,
literally had two sides that there’s a grotto-like half of this experience,
that you can look into, you can peer into,
but never really enter. It’s mysterious, hopefully mysterious.
—OLIVER: You have to get down real low and
there has to be a lot of ambient light…
And then there’s the other side of it that’s very much a projection into space,
a kind of more aggressive, if you will, masculine side.
And the two are divided by a wall.
And I was very interested in working with stone.
The idea of real permanence was important to me.
And the idea of making shapes out of that material using stone shapes
in space that aren’t about straight walls and ninety degree corners.
OLIVER: I know the stonemasons loved the idea.
When they were here working they said this was their favorite part.
When they got here and they got to the window,
to do things other than a traditional stone wall…
—OLIVER: So there’s that false arch that’s over here and…
—Puryear: Do you have those maquettes?
—Oliver: Oh yeah, all was saved…
PURYEAR: Steven always gets extremely involved in these projects as a troubleshooter.
And, it almost seems that the more complicated the project,
the more fascinating it becomes for Steven and it doesn’t seem to at all put him off,
and it just sort of makes him dig deeper and deeper into it,
and just use all of his contractor’s instincts.
Most of the visitors like to take the pictures…
In the sense they get this...
Stone doesn’t want to go out over space.
And this piece cantilevers out to about five feet.
And so it took some serious engineering to allow that to happen safely.
And, through Steven’s work he knew of a very very good stone worker–
Eugene Domenically.
And he was a crucial part of this whole process.
—Puryear: I think he did the whole dome himself…
It was a funny thing about how we could get this shape right.
He wanted to look at the model and just eyeball it, remember that?
And I said, “Eugene I think we should have some kind of a, a gauge,”
and I suggested that and he – “No, we don’t need that! I can copy it.”
I mean, there’s a lot of know-how out there that’s really nice to collaborate with, and use.
That’s what I have learned is how to give up
some of the control that I felt I had to have over every single aspect of it,
because there’s sometimes the other people’s input can actually open up your thinking,
to possibilities that you weren’t even aware of.
I think of it as a monolith, although it is made from eighteen stones.
But it’s really carved in a way so that it becomes a contoured single object.
It certainly suggests a head, a colossal head.
And, I’ve done various pieces in the past that have been based on
that finished piece same idea of a an enormous head.
And, I’ve been wanting to do something in stone, in this,
using this kind of form for a long time.
I have spent most of my working life ah,
making work that may seem to be carved
but which it in fact is constructed, made from parts and put together.
And although this was made from eighteen blocks assembled,
essentially the process of shaping the blocks was one of
carving from solid material. And I’ve never carved stone.
I haven’t carved stone since I left, left college really.
And when I got notified that there was an interest
in having a commission of mine in Japan,
the choice of material was in some ways suggested by the fact that it was Japan,
because they have such a tradition of working with stone there.
One of the major challenges which is the, the sheer scale of it,
the sheer size of working with blocks that large, finding blocks that large.
They have to be located in a very remote part of China
and brought to Xiamen on the coast where they were worked,
a city that has a very, very large stone industry
And a piece of this scale the carving requires diamond tools
and water to do it efficiently.
So I had to find a way to really transmit my ideas to artisans,
which required making the model at one-tenth scale
The model could be disassembled
and the tracings made of each block
and those tracings could be enlarged ten times
and that’s the basis that they used for making the final piece.
In China it was a little complicated because I had to translate in two stages.
— Puryear: You see how here it goes in. Together it may not be…
I had a person with me who spoke Japanese and English.
—It will be correct here and be correct here but maybe this…
And the person in the stone yard spoke fluent Japanese,
and he was Chinese.
So, it had to go from my person from Japan into Chinese.
The piece was, in fact, carved much more than I had anticipated in China.
The actual contour of the outside, was thought to be done in Japan.
It turns out that that was, that work was largely done in China.
That’s why I had to go to China, to, to see the work in progress.
—Puryear: This can’t be a straight line..
The work was delivered to the site in Japan.
I was introduced to, this man, Mr. Okasaki, who had worked with sculptors a lot.
Done a lot of carving, for, for various sculptors, Japanese sculptors.
And very very proud person, in terms of his workmanship
and the respect that he had for his work and just his abilities.
And, once the pieces were assembled, the shaping continued.
There was a week’s worth of carving on site.
Mr. Okasaki and his son did most of the carving with hand chisels, and diamond saws.
But the shaping was mostly done with hand chisels,
because of the surface I wanted.
I didn’t want a surface that was in any way ground or polished.
It had to have, it had to have marks of the chisel.
It doesn’t look natural.
It’s a very man-made surface.
It has, it has pockmarks from the, from the blows of these sharp chisel,
but the contours are quite smooth and quite continuous.
But, run your hand over it, and it feels like you’re running it over a very rough rock.
I think I do deal in forms, that people often see something organic
and derive from nature and I’m certainly interested in nature—
I’m real fascinated by natural forms and natural processes.
But I’m probably more interested in the way culture,
cultural forms evolve, the making process itself, and the history of making process—
it’s always been a big generator of ideas.