Pressure-sensitive (Here’s what’s Watts.)

"I do not wish to be an artist. I only wish that art enables me to be,"  

Purifoy, 1963

Pressure, made of the wreckage from of the Watts riots of ’65 (1), is not just evidence from a crime scene or verification for an insurance claim form.  It is also a portrait.   This once functional vessel, pounded down and burnt black, represents the very people who made it - by destroying it and anything white-owned in their neighborhood.  With an eye for seeing beauty in what other’s discard, Artist Noah Purifoy ‘found’ it.   He framed and titled it as a way to ‘interpret the August event’ for 66 Signs of Neon, a group show made from the same stock.   

There is no doubt who it represents.   In a Los Angeles Times review of Junk Dada, a retrospective exhibit currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), reporter Christopher Knight calls it among other things, the ‘crumpled carcass’ of a cyclops (2).  And in a blog post (3) about Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, a 2014 group show at the Hood Museum of Art, where it was also shown; Polish-born, Vermont-based art teacher Viktor Witkowski compares it to “burned, decomposed or mutilated bodies.”

For twenty years following the rebellion, Purifoy dedicated himself to the found object, and to using art as a tool for social change (4).  Isolated and viewed close-up, the violence that re-formed the central figure is evident.  50 years have passed, but segregation has not.  It may not be as blatant as it was in 1965, but whether it’s the amount of pigment in our skin or money in the bank, our fear of the other continues to separate us.   It would have crushed Purifoy, the California Arts Council member who helped bring Art to state institutions like the prisons, to see things as I did at his Art exhibit at this state institution, LACMA.  

Photographs from the New York World-Telegram

During a time when Malcolm X further separated white and black Americas with his harsh indictments, Purifoy smoldering work of art generated empathy by making palpable the frustrations of being black in 60's era America. It is so effective that it shifted my focus from the anthropomorphic objects on the white walls to the white people in attendance, and from then to now. I was surprised to see only 4 Africa-Americans in attendance. It seemed as though  LITTLE HAD CHANGED  when I realized 3 of them were working.

From my sketchbook:

Study for: Purifoy's Pieta                                                     the gesture: Down but not Out

Down but not Out

In a similar pose, Mossadegh
(and Democracy) just after being
overthrown by CIA, Iran, 1953

Pressure may be small in size, but it is deep with meaning.   It is simple, yet profound.   It serves as an icon of the exhibit, and of the rioters who inadvertently created it.  Man, represented as a container, is deflated and no longer useful.  He is broken in form and spirit.  This gesture is universal (5) across culture and time, for it conveys the common experience of enduring hardship AND the defiance required to survive it. Don’t count him out.  He is only on one knee, not both, and could at any moment rise. 

Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression (5)
Attitude of the Legs; Kneeling and on the side

I’ve been back to the exhibit at LACMA three times since our field trip. It has been scaled down from occupying the entire floor to just a couple rooms as LACMA prepares for the next installation. On closer inspection, I was surprised to learn that most of the remaining work, which looks like it’s from the ’65 riots, was actually made in the 90’s.   Was Purifoy milking a 30 yr old Tragedy?  No. Purifoy had repeated himself because history had.  These paintings were not about the Watts Riot of 1965; they were about the 1992 Rodney King Riots (6).  LITTLE HAS CHANGED.

In Death as in Life

Is it poetic or pathetic that Purifoy, famous for making art from burnt remains, died (7) in a fire?!  In any case, it is pitiful.

Purifoy's Pietà 

Pietà (the Pity) by Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1499 

Facts/References

1. Wikipedia, Watts Riot 3 tons cleared by Mr. Purifoy and other assemblagists, like John T. Riddle Jr.

There was over $40 million in property damage.

casualties: 34 deaths, 1032 injured, 3438 arrested

2. Los Angeles Times, Review by Christopher Knight, June 8, 2015

“Pressure" is a small, black and blue rectangle of what appears to be checkerboard linoleum held in a chipped white picture frame. A conundrum is attached at the center.
Some sort of gun-metal gray canister has been squashed and made useless, its flattened valve staring out like a Cyclopean eye. Uncannily poised, Purifoy's composition has the look of a medieval icon. …Reconfiguring a crumpled carcass as an object of cultural veneration — a work of art — gives a mighty push-back to the physical force (or pressure) that has been leveled against it.

3. Same Old Art blog by Viktor Witkowski, October 27, 2014

Laid on top a black-blue grid a flattened and charred metal container forms the focal point of this composition. Reminiscent of DADA objects or the Rauschenberg multiples, Purifoy’s arrangement points to something more violent in nature. Whatever has happened to the central object, its metal or aluminum body has been folded to the extent that it can no longer be identified or reconstructed. The impossibility of identification, not unlike that of burned, decomposed or mutilated bodies, assigns a new role and meaning to this once functional piece. It has become a reminder, but also an artistic opportunity. Embedded within a new context and outlook, it demonstrates that violence does not always have to result in more violence.

4. Noah Purifoy Foundation website; About the Artist

As a founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, Purifoy knew the community intimately. His 66 Signs of Neon, in line with the postwar period’s fascination with the street and its objects, constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts. This strategy profoundly impacted artists then emerging in Los Angeles and beyond, such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge, and Senga Nengudi, who all worked with him. For the twenty years that followed the rebellion, Purifoy dedicated himself to the found object, and to using art as a tool for social change. In the late 1980’s after eleven years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where he initiated programs such as ‘Artists in Social Institutions,’ which brought art to the state prison system

5. Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression; Attitude of the Legs; Kneeling and on the side

Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression, Genevieve Stebbins, 1886Gestures and Attitudes: Exposition of the Delsarte Philosophy of Expression, Practical and Theoretical by Edward B. Warman, 1892The Delsarte System of Physical Culture by Eleanor Georgen, 1893Delsarte System of Oratory by Abbe Delaumosne, Angelique Arnaud, 2016

6. Wikipedia, Rodney King Riots

$Billion+ in Property Damage

Casualties: 53 deaths, 2000+ Injured, 11,000+ Arrested

7. Los Angeles Times, Obituaries, Noah Purifoy, 86; Assemblage Artist by Scott Timberg, Mar 09, 2004

Noah Purifoy, the renowned assemblage artist and Watts Towers Arts Center co-founder, died Friday in a fire at his home in Joshua Tree. He was 86. Purifoy was found on the floor next to his wheelchair Friday morning by his caretaker, who called San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies and firefighters to the home. A coroner's office spokesman said that the artist may have fallen asleep while smoking. An autopsy will be conducted later this week to determine the cause of death. Purifoy was best known for "66 Signs of Neon," a traveling exhibition of sculptures made from 3 tons of rubble from the 1965 Watts riots. His works have been part of the collections of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum in New York and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

There is no mention of the cause of his death on the Noah Purifoy Foundation website, or on LACMA’s web page for the exhibit. In printed material at LACMA, it says he died from a studio fire.