TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100190/1001400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 132 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 100

Sculpture of the Absurd


Joel Shapiro brings uncanny expressiveness to human form

By ROBERT HUGHES


    The small but choice show -- only 26 pieces -- of the
sculpture of the New York City artist Joel Shapiro, 48, now at
the Baltimore Museum of Art, reminds one of what odd twists can
come out of supposedly settled styles. Shapiro has always been
vaguely connected in peoples' minds with early-1970s New York
minimalism. And yet, although his work in some ways coincides
with that movement, it has little to do with it. It is
idiosyncratic, emotionally concentrated and mostly quite small
in scale: everything minimalism was not.

    Shapiro first earned attention in the '70s with pieces that
reversed the cult of Big Size in American sculpture -- a bronze
house 9 in. high, for example, or a lilliputian metal chair
sitting on the floor. Seen in the huge white-wall and oak-floor
gallery spaces of early SoHo, these looked totally out of sync
with their surroundings. Yet the contrast between the object
and the space around it was part of Shapiro's project. The
smallness seemed to gather and focus the room, stretching the
distance between your eye and the sculpture, while giving the
dumb-looking thing an irksome, gnatlike insistence.

    Clearly, Shapiro had learned a lot from the way Giacometti's
tiny figures could control the distances around them. Equally,
part of his point was to challenge the idea that there was a
"right" distance from which to see a sculpture. Should you get
down on the floor with it and look for detail? But there was
no detail, or not much. The sculptures were sitting in your
space. So might you stand back and take in the general effect?
But there was no general effect: the pieces were too small to
produce one. Shapiro's little sculptures conspired to make you
feel you were looking down the wrong end of a telescope at
something right next to you, seeing it very sharply, very
densely and puzzlingly far away.

    Then Shapiro began to move toward the human figure. This
note is struck in the very first object in the Baltimore show,
made in 1974, which from across the room (or in reproduction)
looks like one of the abstract scatter pieces done by
minimalist sculptors in the '70s -- Serra or Barry Le Va -- but
is in fact an image of human dismemberment. Look closer, and
the bits of wood turn out to be an artist's mannequin that
Shapiro broke up in a fit of anger -- "I pulled it apart and
just threw it around the room," he says to curator Deborah
Leveton in the catalog interview. "It's a pretty aggressive
piece." Indeed it is, almost childishly so, although its
distant ancestor is a surrealist classic by Giacometti, Woman
with Her Throat Cut, 1932.

    But the work underscores the central oddity, and the source
of originality, in Shapiro's art: his desire to use a style
derived from "radical" modernism to make credible images of the
body. Minimalism didn't want the figure. It hated the idea of
the totem. It despised any kind of liveliness. It wanted to be
its chilled, nonreferential self: a box, a row of bricks on the
floor.

    Whereas liveliness, if not lifelikeness, is exactly what
Shapiro's sculptures are about. They are assembled from simple
elements, generally balks of timber, run through a big planer
to true up their sides, or (for the larger pieces) wooden
boxes. Mitered together, these become blockish dolls -- sexless
signs for the human figure. Sometimes the wood is left as it
is; sometimes it is partly painted; and since the late '70s,
Shapiro has taken to casting it in bronze.

    He has a fine, brusque sense of sculptural form -- art that
hides art. One might think it easy to put six or seven blocks
and rods together and make a figure: child's play, literally.
So it is, but not with the results he gets. Every alignment,
every chamfer and plane speaks of aesthetic decision. This
sense of deliberation is increased by his craftsmanly regard
for surfaces, which -- particularly in the bronze pieces from
the '80s -- is almost fanatical. The bronze preserves some of
the texture of the wood from which it is cast. This skin,
quoted (so to speak) by the metal, mediates the smooth
blockishness of shape, filling it with discreet incident, as
does Shapiro's way of polishing some minor planes to take the
light, leaving larger ones dark.

    But whatever the subtleties of finish, these homunculi take
on an uncanny degree of expressive life. His block figures
sprawl on the floor or hunch in submission. They balance
precariously on one leg, flailing their arms like whirligigs;
they strut sassily along like Robert Crumb's cartoon figures
or lean forward half-collapsed, as though their joints had
given out. Sometimes, as in the big bronze Untitled (JS 866),
1989, which consists of nothing more than two legs with a block
for a torso, they can be read in two ways, as a figure either
reeling backward under shock or leaning forward into its own
run, and off-balance either way.

    This sense of disturbed balance, in particular, is a key to
Shapiro's work. Although he wants you to think the sculptures
stand naturally in their postures of frozen movement, this is
by no means the case. To make sure, for instance, that the long
legs of a "fallen" figure stay off the ground instead of
tipping the body back up, he will sneak an invisible
counterweight into the torso.

    The works are frank about their artifice -- Why not? -- and
hospitable to memories of older art. Their instability
distantly reminds a viewer of some of Degas's bronzes; their
theatricality, of Carpeaux's. Sometimes they invoke older
sculptures quite openly. There is a dense little untitled
figure from 1979-82, cast in bronze from seven small chunks of
wood roughly joined with wax, that seems to have been done in
homage to Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta -- the slumped
vertical body in a posture of exhaustion. A strong pathos
underlies the movement of Shapiro's figures: they are signs for
men, but absurd signs, and their Dionysiac freedom looks
anxious and vulnerable for all its laconic shamelessness of
gesture.