Intensifications of Nature

By ROBERT HUGHES

Flora and fauna animate the works of two American sculptors

The exhibition of recent sculpture by the American artist Nancy Graves, on view at the Knoedler gallery in New York City through March 29, is her best yet--the work of an artist who, in midcareer, is only now getting into full and impressive stride. To say that Graves, 43, in the cliche of artspeak, is "involved with organic imagery" does no justice to the depth of her entry into the natural world as subject. When so much in current art tends to be either narcissistic reflection on the self, or ironic broodings on cultural dilemmas, she remains one of the very few good nature poets in American art today.

Her images of the life that lies beyond our own bodies have acquired a swarming, teetering richness, a lyricism of impulse and a sharp oddity of tone that look and feel like no one else's. America is not short of banal nature art with worthy moral lessons: Save the whales, admire the mallard, reflect on the moral transformation of the seagull. The boots one sees protruding from this tumulus of Orvis-catalogue kitsch are poor dead Thoreau's. But to bring a whole mode of invention to bear on some aspect of the natural world, to reinvent its emblems within a living tradition of art history--even for a moment, or in a fragmentary way--is rather more difficult, and that is what Nancy Graves has done with these sculptures.

One's first impression, in a roomful of them, is of wandering in an aquarium. Coral is everywhere: fans, rigid laces, spreading antlers, all speckled and inscribed with rainbow color. Growths push upward from the floor and terminate in mad displays of hair, Medusa-like tentacles and other scribbles. Though some sculptures seem to belong to the sea bottom, there are others that suggest the land--tropical nature, in its fleshy leafings and embowerings. The plants, or colonies, or whatever they are, ramify from narrow stems; sometimes they reverse the "normal" look of sculpture--well planted, firmly accommodating itself to its own weight--and seem to flourish in a zone of reduced gravity, where things float and spread. Always they are airy, open. In formal terms, their ancestry is constructivism, and they are part of the extended family whose American patriarch was David Smith, a fact that Graves acknowledges in giving some of her works names like Zaga, in homage to a suite of sculptures Smith titled Zig.

But if their basic format is constructivist, "drawing in space," their internal imagery is very much not. Her works like Zaga, 1983, or Cantileve, 1983, when one gets down to the detail, begin with a profusion of animal and botanical spare parts that Graves has cast directly in bronze. The things in her delirious lexicon of shapes include the fiddleheads of giant ferns, fragments of woven rattan, dried anchovies, pig intestines from the Chinese market below Canal Street in New York City, leaves of the Monstera deliciosa (another bow of homage, this time to Matisse, in whose late works that indoor plant is a constant character), broccoli stems, bamboo fans, the seed pods and roots of lotus, gourds, warty cucumbers, the breastbone of a turkey: a list without apparent limit. Some of the things Graves brought in could only be used once or twice: a crayfish she brought home in a doggy bag from a Louisiana restaurant, for instance, became so offensive that the founders would not use it again, and there may be troubles with the dried squid she recently found in a lower Manhattan shop.

Once cast, they are patinated in a striking range of mat colors--never quite the colors of nature, always with the volume knob turned high--and then assembled. Since the patinated color may break down under strong sunlight outdoors, Graves also uses fired-enamel colors on some pieces. Accident contributes its share here: because the thickness of the bronze casting varies in an unpredictable way, and hence the heat of the metal and the rate of fusion of the enamel vary as well, the enamel colors run and waver into one another like wet watercolor, somewhat blurring the identity of the object they cover. This makes the enamel pieces slightly more abstract, fractionally less decipherable, than the patinated ones. Graves, whose SoHo studio contains one of the most formidable collections of Triffid-like indoor plants in Manhattan, recalls that the idea for doing sculpture in this way came to her a few years ago because "I had a cat that peed on a plant and killed it. I liked the plant too much to let it go, so I took it up to the foundry and asked them to try to cast it." Direct casting from such forms was done in the 19th century as a tour de force, proof of a foundry's technical prowess, and Ludwig of Bavaria once commissioned a bronze cast of a whole basketful of flowers, much admired by Graves. But the idea of making modern sculpture by these means had not been tried on a full scale before, although, like nearly everything else in the past 50 years, it was foreshadowed by Picasso.

The result, in her better works, is very far from mere curiosity. Graves has an acute sense of spatial construction and knows exactly when to rein in the intrinsic oddity of her metal flora. So one does not get distracted wondering what this or that thing was: what counts is what it now is, its role in a larger system of metaphors that circles back on nature. One would need to be a bronze gourd oneself not to be delighted by this artist's ebullience and delicacy of feeling.

James Surls' sculptures, at the Delahunty galleries in SoHo and TriBeCa (through April 14) may not be as complex and many-layered as Graves', but they have their own peculiar intensity about the stuff of the natural world -- in his case, wood. Surls, 40, a muscular farm dweller from Splendora, Texas, who is sometimes mistaken for Willie Nelson, works with whole branches and roots, artfully pegged and jointed together so that their knotty, straight-from-the-ground appearance is kept even as they turn into parodies of the human figure. It is like the folksy sensibility that pops two eyes on an odd-shaped root and turns it into a doll on the road side stand -- only the mix of Surls 'n' burls is done under better auspices than mere quaintness.

It is infused, at the start, with a real sense of fright: the noonday demon, as it were, lurking in the woodpile. Surls' huge wraiths posture and writhe on point with a sort of evilly humorous grace; they summon up nursery horrors, tree demons, swamp critters. They have some of the charged, crude intensity of New Mexican santos. Surls is a good craftsman who does not make a parade of technique. He lacks laconic effects -- nothing too beautiful: storytelling rather than elocution. His preferred tools are the chain saw, the ax and the blowtorch, with which he "paints" areas of sooty shadow into the wood. This scorching makes his pieces look even more like visitors from Down Below. You can laugh at the devil, but not too hard or long.

"I want art to look back at me," Surls told an interviewer a few years ago. "If it doesn't you might as well bury it in your backyard." There is a lot of autobiography in Surls' work, but some anguish, too, mingled with self-mockery. Of course, Surls' sense of the demonic (or the angel ic, which makes a less convincing bow in one or two pieces) is filtered through quite a lot of art history, from Mini to the ornery, meticulously crafted constructions of the late H.C. Westermann. His main weakness is a penchant for cockeyed whimsy, which seems to be an inexpert deduction from Miro. But this hardly matters beside the strength of Surls' best work. Notably Working in the Garden, 1981, the massive root system of an oak dug from the ground, seasoned, and then equipped with a demented spiral wooden "cloud" on top -- a whirling dust-devil of some sort, studded with eyes and bristling with wooden facsimiles of double-bitted axes. It is an altogether marvelous apparition, one that manages to be funny, menacing, otherworldly and stridently physical all at the same time: a master piece of the special American genre of buckeye surrealism, as lovingly made as tall stories are lovingly recited and polished in the telling. Clearly, Surls is turning into a fabulist of the most engaging kind.

--By Robert Hughes