Martin Puryear Sculpture, with Race Extrapolations

Woke is everywhere, often wearing out its welcome fast. Consider the arts. Just last month, a big Philip Guston retrospective was put on hold because his legendary paintings ridiculing Klansmen weren't, um, weren't, ah, something enough. Supposedly the show needed more anti-racist input on how these paintings, which anyone interested at all in painting has been looking at nonstop for decades, might lead to misunderstandings among viewers. It seems that the presence on the exhibition's consulting team of some of America's greatest African American artists wasn't good enough. Maybe because those artists have been too busy creating art to read Ibram X. Kendi. I don't know.

The idea is that all art has to be explicitly anti-racist, otherwise it is propping up the all-pervasive white supremacist culture. Loud echoes of the Soviet regime where all art had to depict the heroism of the working people, otherwise it was decadent. The corollary here, today, is that the Black artist who deals mostly in abstract art is said to be shirking his or her responsibility to educate people about the Black experience, especially those parts dealing with injustice, proposing, as the abstract artist does, that the inner life, impacted by surface identity but not limited by it, is unimaginably rich, and the source of images that resonate for all people on emotional, psychological, sensual, and, yes, aesthetic levels, to name just a few. Isn't the best art art that can't be nailed down, or to a cross, for that matter?

Which is why the primarily abstract work and philosophy of the great African-American sculptor Martin Puryear is so refreshing. Even when his work is less abstract or is possessing of social overtones, they are poetic, with meanings that are suggestive or implicit, not explicit in the manner preferred by the woke. I mean, think about it. Shouldn't the whole point be that an artist of color should be able to do whatever the hell they want? Isn't such autonomy and agency the ultimate goal, considering that these are precisely the things that are suppressed in an oppressive system? Isn't it exactly the racist attitude to deny the rich inner life, with all the pain and joy and complexity that entails, of the oppressed other? Look, if someone wants to devote themselves to political art, more power to them, though I suspect such art may have a limited shelf life, unless exceedingly well done. Hey, it might even do some good. But I freely admit I'm a partisan here, which is why I mentally cheer Hear! Hear! when I consider Puryear's thoughts on the matter: "I've never joined any kind of movement myself, and I can't imagine requiring my art to serve an exclusively social or political role."