Word: westermann
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...horses, made from sticks, chicken wire and mud by the California artist Deborah Butterfield. There is also a hilarious piece of funkiness by a Texas sculptor, James Surls, representing a tornado chewing through the roof of a church; Surls' debt to that master of buckeye surrealism, H.C. Westermann, is ob vious enough, but the image has a wobbly comic-strip blatancy about it that carries conviction...
...basis of Westermann's art, which provides both the curt humor and the haunted pessimism with a formal matrix, is craftsmanship. After quitting the Marines in 1952, Westermann eked out his G.I. Bill income by working as a handyman and carpenter-precariously, since his standards of joinery and finish soon became too high for him to be employable in the quick-profit building trade. His sculptures have always been exquisitely made, the rare-wood inlays done with a skill almost vanished from modern American joinery, every miter and dovetail fitted to perfect tolerances. This pitch of care gives...
...also gives Westermann's pieces a typically hermetic and defensive look: protected by their glass enclosures and crates, armed with hooks, hasps, locks and hinges, they take their stand as small fortresses of care and responsibility against an inimical world of non-art-ratty execution, sloppy thought. This point is neatly made by A Close Call, 1965. Inside the box, a wooden doll with an ermine's head reels backward to avoid a dagger that has penetrated the glass ceiling...
...outside world is breaking in. It is a very funny and slightly poisonous image of paranoia. But it also has a lot to say about how frail privacy is (can the creature be, in fact, an artist: Westermann himself?) and how vulnerable are the fictions that art erects...
...value of this retrospective is that it lets us see how the desire for an unimperiled wholeness in the face of a world perceived as menacing can supply an artist of Westermann's gifts with an apparently endless range of subjects and motifs. Inventiveness, we are reminded, is one of the strategies of survival itself...