Sheryl Sutton & Martin Puryear: Sculpture as Performance and Performance as Monument to the Still

It’s 1977, and we’re in The Kitchen’s loft space on Wooster Street in SoHo, which is shrouded in darkness save for a timid bit of real estate illuminated at the center of the room. While swollen shadows frame as proscenium arch, a spotlight denotes the stage where our eyes are to settle. Artist and performer Sheryl Sutton ambles forth from the background towards the glow and pauses into a statuesque still. Her long, slender arms extend convexly around her frame. Exceptionally slowly, near imperceptible, she unfurls them and begins to sway. At her base she shifts her weight not from foot to foot but across each metatarsal, a contrapposto of rooted precision. Draped in moonlight, Sutton is a lone blade of grass at the mercy of a gentle wind it appears only she has been graced to receive. In this methodical state of sway, seconds swell into eons as she dictates new metrics of the temporal. She appears to be listening to the whisper of unseen currents trickling through the atmosphere. We are bearing witness to a controlled undoing. Her arms extend out further from her frame, forming right angles, which then collapse softly into sinuous spires. There is an abrupt change in her demeanor and she begins to pace back and forth across the room. Back and forth, back and forth, Sutton lulls us with these repetitive movements, deeper into a theater of the everyday. By demanding we endure the altered velocity of an action familiar to the audience, she is also inviting us to wade into contemplations of radical slowness. In this performance, entitled Paces (1977), no matter the speed at which Sutton operates, every moment feels splayed towards eternity like the infinite possibility of unravel in a Maren Hassinger wire rope sculpture. She compels us towards slower measures of being.

Time is already fractured already here; on a hilltop in New Windsor, New York, decades away from Sutton’s presentation, sits another lesson in patience—a sculpture similarly invested in eternity, Lookout (2023) by Martin Puryear. When Storm King Art Center originally approached Puryear years ago about the commission, the offer was for a temporary installation, and he declined. He wanted to create something permanent.

Birthed from this desire of permanence is a completely new sculptural endeavor, which is unique to Puryear’s practice as it is his first use of brick as a material. Stepping through a gaping, vaulted archway, you find yourself in a twenty-foot-tall earthen dome that slopes upwards at an angle away from you. Apparent in the brickwork is a labored and repetitive movement of stone – a migratory shift from vertical orientation to horizontal as the sculpture builds towards its zenith. This technique, known as Nubian vault-building, is predominately found across the African continent and revered for its use of earth without the need for a wooden structure. Fundamental to the singularity of Lookout are ninety oculi, which geometrically pierce the shell of its masonry at varied angles. Each small aperture is calculated to allow in light and frame the landscape; they align at one central viewing point in the sculpture, which enables you to see out of all of them at once. Puryear chose this point of convergence to be at the eye level of the average person. Therefore, to visit the work is also to be implicated in its making. “This piece at Storm King is waiting for you; it’s anticipating you,” the critic and scholar Robert Storr shares.(2) It is in this prerequisite for engagement where sculpture exists symbiotically with performance. Lookout yearns for a body to walk in and fulfill it. It is a waiting that does not demand immediacy or haste but is an everlasting promise that when you are ready to arrive you will be held. It is a monument to patience. In solitude the sculpture endures, not devoid of meaning, but eager for a viewer to engage in a matrimony of being. The conceptual stroke of this panoptic central point means that to stand inside the sculpture is to be made while simultaneously you make. Under the converging oculi acting as observatory, the work poses a question back to the viewer: “What have you brought here with you today?” Puryear’s sculpture works to define you as you define it, an ontological affirmation of your everyday.

The abstract frameworks of both Paces and Lookout, explicitly carve a place for the external figure. The audience becomes an integral element in the fulfillment of the work—the viewer’s own performance. Sutton’s protracted, repetitive, familiar movements demand we recognize and acknowledge them in ourselves. Standing inside of Lookout, at the highest point of Storm King Art Center, under its gaze we are transformed into its nucleus. In each of these works, the audience is flipped from viewer to object in a self-imposed observatory. Once that participatory step across the threshold has been taken, into the sculpted structures of Paces and Lookout, one through gesture and the other through brick, we too are now accomplices, conjoined in the construction of meaning.

This is sculpture as performance and performance as a monument to stillness. Both works offer a poetic exhortation for a life better examined, foregrounded in patience, waiting, and a radical slowness. In the final chapter of The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie examines the use of poetic language, or artistic means of expression, around “capacities of waiting,” writing, “One might even say that [poetic language] is a language that tries to approximate sensation rather than ideology. It can be definitive or dramatic, this language, but it is reflective of the interior and so its sureness is fleeting or at least multiple.”(3) It is that approach towards the poetics and expression of sensation in the performance and sculpture that works to texture our capacities of waiting. Puryear and Sutton each harness methods of eternity through the somatic, akin to the way an ocean repeatedly washes itself back up to the shore to inform the toes of someone standing at the water’s edge.