Several years ago, while visiting a friend in New Haven, we went to the Yale Art Gallery, and on one of the upper floors was a Joel Shapiro exhibit. It comprised some of his smaller works, many made of wood, some plaster (in fact, the exhibit was called Plaster, Paper, Wood, and Wire, though I did not recall this before I looked it up again). They reclined on the floor and clung to the wall, and were mostly monochromatic, painted in white or a single primary color. All in all, I remember being underwhelmed by them. In fact, my friend and I spent the next leg of our walk trying to put words to exactly what it was we didn't like about the work.
And yet it is now three years later, and those Shapiro sculptures, more than anything else we saw that day – more than the Voulkos plate, the Rauschenberg 'Interior', the Nevelson suspended sculpture, the Basquiat, even the Twombly – have stayed with me and floated back to the surface again and again. In particular was a simple inclined plane, built of plaster (according to the image sheet, though I remember it as plywood, painted opaque white). It sat on the floor, inviting you to come down to its level, to roll a ball down its surface or peer through channel cut in its base, while also calling to mind everything from early Egyptian architecture to Judd's wooden boxes to homemade access ramps.
In an interview with Shapiro a year before the Yale exhibit, when asked to look back over some of his early, small-scale works and trace a throughline to his newer work, Shapiro expresses a view of his own work that echoes what I felt upon first viewing it, though perhaps in reverse: "There are moments when the work looks good, and other times when you think, what am I doing?" When I first saw the work, I thought, What is he doing? My initial answer was, Not much, or perhaps, Not enough. And yet, as I have sat with it, I find myself agreeing with Shapiro: The work looks good. And not only does it look good, but it works on the viewer in some quiet, slow way.
From that same interview comes a great quote from Shapiro that perhaps helps to explain his work’s hold on me. When asked about his sculptures, he says, “They are playful and engaging. They interest me a great deal. At the end, as an artist, you are synthesising the stuff around you in a way that engages you. You don’t quite know what you’re doing. You only figure it out when you make the work.”
Below are images of Shapiro's small works in wood, beginning with some early pieces, from the late 1970s, and then moving through some works from the Yale show and the mid-2010s.
