‘A Window to the Word’

Joel Shapiro’s art always seems to be asking questions. Is this large bronze figure collapsing or being uplifted? Does it say “Yes” or “No”? Or “Oh no”? And is it in fact a human figure? Why are those bright blue, pink, and yellow boards and beams floating in the exhibition space like motes or musical notes, or punctuation marks drifting away from their sentences? What about that one-inch-wide basswood ladder barely reaching a gallery-goer’s shin: does it imply fragility or futility? A model of how it is, or a tiny monument to what might have been, or still might be?  

I’ve been looking at Shapiro’s sculptures and works on paper for some four decades now. A certain quickening of affective attention takes hold in me whenever I encounter his off-kilter figures—in a book at a friend’s kitchen table late at night, turning a corner in a museum, against a landscape seen from a passing car. Or in “Out of the Blue,” at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan where, in a recent show, three invigorating large new wood sculptures were juxtaposed with twelve smaller pieces in bronze (which often looks like wood) and wood (that sometimes looks like bronze). In several of the draft-like studies, Calderesque or doodle-ish wires tether components of a sculpture that have wafted off as if in a micro-gravity field. These small works—ranging from one to three feet tall—affirm laws of gravity as they defy them. The balletic bronzes are gentle knockouts: so much gets done with their choreographic rhetoric and at that modest scale. The wooden casting forms and their grain, along with nail holes and even the outline of tape strips, are imprinted on the bronze: delicate and durable are brought into alloyed tension.

Shapiro’s pieces are fixed in space, but they seem to be moving, or about to move: and in their way they do, drawing us into walking around them, beneath or toward them, as their asking opens through us and we find ourselves physically and emotionally shifted, changed—moved. Especially from the early 1980s onwards, Shapiro’s singular and visceral iconography, or vocabulary, pitches the viewer into a quietly sublime and kinesthetic experience of unanticipated relation. “The slow and steady development of his sculptural language—from poetic elements to full-throated poetry, from alphabet to ode—is,” as Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1993, “one of the most satisfying stories in art of the last quarter-century.”1 More than thirty years on, that story has only deepened.

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Born in 1941, in Queens, Shapiro has lived in New York City for most of his life. After graduating from NYU on a pre-med track, he spent two years in rural South India as a Peace Corps volunteer. The experience gave him, he has said, “a sense of… the possibility of being an artist.” The integration of art with daily life and its ability to activate space struck him in lasting fashion. Temples and household shrines exposed him to Indian sculpture’s magnetic combination of stasis and ornate motion—a physicality evoking states of mind—just as the patterns and products of traditional craftsmanship modeled for him the artisan’s “acute sensitivity to material.”²

Shapiro returned to the States in 1967 and soon enrolled in NYU’s MA program in art. He studied under the sculptor and architect James Wines and the art historian Irving Sandler (best-known for his his book on Abstract Expressionism), took in the New York art scene, and worked as an exhibition technician at the Jewish Museum. By 1969, at twenty-seven, he was contributing to group shows at the Whitney and the new Paula Cooper Gallery, which hosted his first solo exhibition the following year. 

The young Shapiro was all pent-upness. His first aggressively passive works aimed at making a mark, or marks, asserting a presence on a landscape dominated by the conspicuous minimalists and conceptualists of the day: Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, and Carl Andre. Shapiro went through “an idea a week,” as he put it, producing a series of distinctive if relatively distant installations that took root in a concept but bluntly engaged with materiality—textures and densities, weight, scale, and central conceit. A three-inch high iron chair on a gallery floor. A fifty-five-square-foot rag-paper record of some 10,000-plus ink-prints from a fingertip (his), in stacked but hardly static rows and columns. Seventy-seven clumps of fired clay formed by a single hand. A piece called “75 Lbs.,” consisting of a six-foot-long beam of magnesium set beside a ten-inch chunk of lead—each part weighing in at seventy-five pounds. 

Looking back on some of those earlier installations, Shapiro reflected: “I simply felt my vocabulary had been perhaps unnecessarily limited and why not allow figuration?—it would allow more expression. Had I been as generous as I could be?”³ Little by little his conceptual emphases began to give way to something more resonant and directly emotional. An important transitional piece was a small 1976–77 bronze sculpture that looks something like a stick figure gone wrong in the making and lying on its back, wounded perhaps, or like a struggling bug, maybe a praying mantis—though in fact it was meant to suggest a half-dead tree.⁴  (In interviews Shapiro explained that it was a response to his sister’s suicide.) 

Whatever the aim, or trigger, it provided the opening through which his mature work would unfold. The quantum leap forward occurred a few years later, with Untitled (1980), a freestanding, nearly life-size figure made of four plain four-by-fours of unequal lengths as extremities (with a tattoo-like lumberyard stamp on one arm), and boxy rectangles that might be a torso and head. Here too the work questions our perception and construction of meaning, as the Lego-like figure conjures something between a rudimentary dance-step channeling grace under pressure and the midpoint of a serious fall. “A declaration of intent,” in Hendel Teicher’s words. It’s as though figuration were a means of trapping an abstraction within or just beyond it—call that metaphysical dimension psyche, or (as Shapiro often does) thought. Remarkable release through form soon followed. 

Uncanninness now takes hold where the canny had been. Recombinant possibilities multiply, for maker and viewer alike. The results are marvels of evocative abstraction, from the endlessly inventive and dancerly incarnations of that 1980 Untitled to the monumental 1993 Loss and Regeneration, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., where a massive figure, possibly stumbling in flight, confronts visitors outside an entrance and a much smaller-scale house is upended further into the open plaza; from tone-conducting woodblock prints testing balance and pitch and spatial relation to the buoyant, elegant, and—as Richard Shiff has it—“unruly” output of the past four decades-plus.⁵ Like almost all of Shapiro’s work, these pieces seem to be surprised mid-gesture, before the network of connections they embody evaporates.   

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ARK, the central piece in the Pace show, hovered at the heart of a large, high-ceilinged, and almost temple-like space with skylights and a floor-to-ceiling window looking onto the street. My initial associations with this roughly twelve- by eighteen-foot geometric jumble—the largest of Shapiro’s wooden constructions to date—summoned a kind of space station, with wings and panels unfurled. The colors were playful, tuned a quarter-tone higher or lower than primary. Within the pure expanse of the hall, they almost mocked the expectation of import, of weightiness, even as they pulled us in toward them for a closer look. But not too close; the complexity of the piece suggested that a certain distance was called for, at least initially, and movement. 

When it came to absorbing the whole, no single perspective would do. As we slowly circled the work, its parts came into focus in serial and compound fashion. A deep red caught the eye, making us step closer and notice the wood grain showing through the wash of paint, and now we saw that this plane was part of a lopsided rhomboid box, which suddenly seemed like a coffin being borne. (Coffin-like shapes surfaced early in Shapiro’s sculptures.) There, beside it, was a dark indigo panel, wholly exposed, as two long beams—one yellow, the other a softer blue—extended above it, reaching well beyond the “chassis,” as if to pick up signals or absorb power from a far-off source. 

And so we moved on, noting the proliferating effects of light and shadow—the different grains of the wood and shapes, the thickness of hue and tone—shifting with our position along the arc we’re describing. Indigo met a more upbeat blue and what seemed like teal; the coffin’s red gave way to an orangish inch-thick board, the bottom of which—seen up close—turned out to be coated with the blue from above, which had dripped in the process of application. All sorts of handsomeness had entered in. Then something threw that feeling off and we found ourselves laughing, almost aloud, with pleasure and amazement at what this artist had done once more with the alphabet blocks of his elemental vocabulary, the very basic shapes and palette, and the sly generosity of his vision.  

Some grand transmission was taking place—a deflection or relay of experience, a translation of vital information. Yet the process as a whole was disarming. The longer we lingered with the work, the more it seemed like a vessel, a carrier, a container for conveyance of what matters, even through catastrophe. Maybe that ARK of the title (about which I’d forgotten). Remembering that Shapiro thinks of his art as “the memory of experience…an attempt to locate experience in form,” it’s hard for me not to recall that the biblical Hebrew term for “ark”—as in Noah’s—is teivah, which in the later rabbinic idiom means both the wooden cabinet where scriptural scrolls are kept and “word.” More than one eighteenth-century Hasidic commentary understands Genesis 6:16, “You shall make a window to the ark,” to mean “you shall make a window to the word.” And with that we’re back to the language of Shapiro’s art, which has come to him out of the blue, or blues, of his life and work and the sky that the street was still showing, and which his ARK now somehow bears. “All that abstraction,” he once mused, “it’s so—human.”