2.8.10 — Not in Kansas Anymore
For thirty years now, Joel Shapiro has felt as familiar as one’s very own childhood. Sure, even now, so long after Jeff Koons, Minimalism is the official language of public sculpture and public memorials. And sure, for a while Minimalism banished sculpture’s not-so-secret weapon from Michelangelo to Giacometti, the human form. Yet Shapiro brought them together. Who now could tear them apart? 
He starts with thick beams of metal and wood. They hold together with solder, bolts, chains, and little else, especially not gravity. Their tottering geometries are already part of a city’s industrial history, especially when they land in sculpture gardens and summer parks. They also look like stick figures, but as an awkward grownup might imagine them. Dancing or falling, they hang in there all the same. They could be someone you know or yourself—only, like David after all, slightly larger than life.
For all that, the native New Yorker started small. At Paula Cooper (the annex across the street) through February 13, Shapiro’s early sculpture is tiny and devoid of life but as personal as the past. A cast-iron chair from 1977 rises all of three inches off the floor, which might as well extend forever. Bronze houses or barns run not much larger. Their stiff edges, hard materials, closed shapes, and scale keep them at a distance. They seem to reside not in a gallery, but in memory. For many critics these days, they belong to anything but Minimalism.
Perhaps, and perhaps the show begins as a rebuke to Minimalism. From 1969 to 1971, Shapiro works in wood rather than industrial materials. A wooden coffin or the carved-out shell of a boat sure looks representational. A tiny mannequin, the kind from an art-supply store, has broken into bits. Where Carl Andre uses regularity and repetition, they fall where they may. If, as Michael Fried complained long ago, Minimalism turns the gallery into a theater, these remain objects, only somewhere apart.
Of course, memory is a tricky thing. Critics like to think that they have put late Modernism behind them by now. Yet with his turn to cast metal, Shapiro also embraced Minimalism. At the very least, he made it his own. Already in wood, the randomness and shattered elements got along just fine with entropy, a favorite idea of Robert Smithson. And then for Shapiro factory and sculptural materials took over the joint.
They have abstraction’s regular geometries, including a trapezoidal prism—or indeed the very first hint of a stick figure on so small a scale. A house on a short pedestal connects to the iron plane below it. Another house sticks out from the wall at eye level, with a door and windows, and one wall piece consists of merely a plane and a square hole, leading to hollow metal sticking down. Their dialogue of open and closed, empty and full, explores the formal vocabulary of sculpture, and art this small makes one aware of oneself and the room quite as much as Andre or Carl Flavin does. Work so rigorous and haunting can never fully belong to Minimalism, any more than to the childhood on a farm Shapiro or I never had. After Soho and Chelsea, art is not in Kansas anymore.



