Summertime means sculpture time, and what better place to start than with the sculpture of Joel Shapiro. With each passing year, and with each successful show, this artist edges towards greatness. The last time I saw Shapiro it was his colorful stick-figure bronzes dancing in the summer sun on the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum. That was 2001. Now inside the (glorious) exhibition space at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea, Shapiro’s latest work looks more confident, at ease, and—simply put—better than ever.[1]

Shapiro is one of those rare artists on the contemporary scene: he can navigate the current art market and find both formal and professional success. For a sculptor who emerged during the doldrums of the 1970s, Shapiro wisely borrowed the spartan “primary structures” of minimalism and the Earth-First aesthetic of post-minimalism (his medium is wood, or bronze castings of wood). He maintains the sensibility of his times, including an acute awareness of scale. Yet he wrestles sculpture away from the obstreperousness and soullessness of minimalism to create work with spirit, joy, and internal animation. Once more, sculpture gives as much as it receives.

Of the five major pieces at PaceWildenstein, size can vary from thirteen inches to a massive twenty feet. Each piece works on its own devices and yet complements the next. The largest sculpture, Untitled (they’re all called Untitled), knocks into the wooden roofbeams of the gallery ceiling as though communing with a long-lost friend. Mill-cut eight-by-eights, cast in bronze and finished down to a woody hue, extend up like the arms of a swing. Shapiro often tests our reading of shape by positioning his sculpture somewhere between biomorphism and pure abstraction, and nowhere is this done better than here. This sculpture radiates human excitement without, necessarily, resembling recognizable form. Scale is a factor, but unlike the works of minimalism, it is not the only factor.

The achievement of this large work is only bettered, in my opinion, by a couple of mid-size pieces in smoothly finished raw wood. Here are the show’s biggest surprises: squared-off shapes tumble out in a wave over the gallery floor and stretch up to the skylights, supported in parts by brass fittings and slender armatures. The hollowness of each individual object communicates—is it possible?—an almost musical quality, a timpanic “rhythm of the cubes,” as it were. Plink punk plunk. The sculptures of Joel Shapiro are a full-sensory experience. What a pleasure it is to find an artist working with form that expresses, rather than depresses, the experience of living.

It speaks to the order of the universe that as certain art stars rise, others make their slow descent. In the world of sculpture, this may be truest for Frank Stella.

We barely need reminding that in 1959, at the age of twenty-three (and fresh from Princeton! and best friends with Michael Fried! and he would marry Barbara Rose! and his father was a gynecologist!), Frank Stella made big with his “Black Paintings,” the “what you see is what you see” chalk-striped canvases that ushered art into the minimalist and—more significantly—conceptualist era.

If this was the undoing of painting, Stella more recently has labored at the undoing of Stella. In the 1980s, much like Norman Mailer, Stella believed he found inspiration in urban graffiti “art.” His subsequent sculptures became the “Black Paintings” in reverse. No one could have accused Stella’s early work of appearing belletristic had not there been this later sculpture: cumulonimbi of exhaust manifolds, goopy paint, and booksmart titles with all the sexiness of an aging comp-lit grad student at mixer night. The result left people underwhelmed and longing for the earlier material. Naturally, Stella has kept up this manner of artistic production for what’s going on two decades.

To the critical establishment, Frank Stella has lost it completely. He has become “frankly awful.” He is “highly rebarbative.” His work is “staggeringly hideous.” He is “bulky and obstreperous.” He is making “the ugliest art it is possible to make today.” He “looks as if he does not own a comb.” His studio is now “littered with, among other things, fishing gear, mounds of books and countless packets of Chinese duck sauce.” He is “currently embroiled in a highly public and rancorous feud with the leadership of the Museum of Modern Art.” These quotes come from the press kit of Stella’s latest show at Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea.[2] And those are the positive reviews.

Frank Stella has something of a martyr complex: He’s under assault; he wants you to feel his hurt; he’s Van Gogh with the ear thing; his sculpture is the ear. The work now at Paul Kasmin follows a line he took at the gallery a year and a half ago in his infamous “garage show,” an exhibition that still rankles, well, everyone. His sculptures at that time resembled colossal macaroni on beds of aluminum foil. It may be the case that the latest work is, indeed, worse: yards of unpainted auto-exhaust pipe coiled around aluminum latticework, around saber-toothed bits of sheet metal, around something resembling a Paul Henningsen “artichoke” lamp, all marked up with assembly-line permanent pen, attached with regular hardware fittings, and suspended from the gallery ceiling. Always the bookworm, the titles of these pieces—“kandampat,” “gegantoesan”—come from Balinese words and phrases as quoted in the “1942 photographic essay Balinese Character by anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.” What more need be said? Rubberneckers should not miss the car wreck currently on view at Tenth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street. Frank Stella would not have it any other way.

Indeed, the crack-up of Frank Stella has become the art world’s spectator sport—and no more so than for Frank Stella himself. For years, it seems, he has set the stage for his own demise. This is not to suggest that his recent work has been, somehow, brilliantly ironic. “Post-critical” might be a better term. Or maybe plain “bad.” That’s not the point.

From his press materials, we learn that Stella keeps a heavily underlined edition of Moby-Dick at his West Village studio. He reads Heinrich von Kleist. Might we additionally include “Also Sprach Zarathustra” on the list? Stella is a literary romantic. He has built his own Pequot, and he’s cruising for a whale: Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, they work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! This whale, of course, is of Stella’s own design.

The human sculptures of George Segal—and they are human; plaster, gauze, and bronze cast from the forms of real people—have always struck me as a little too folksy, a little too urban, a little too stuck in the low-art idiom. Most of the work now on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash we have seen time and time before.[3] Yet his style hold up suprisingly well, it communicates its own craftsmanship, and with the current show it takes on some new poignancy: this is the first solo exhibition of Segal’s since his death in 2000.

There has always been an element of the sepulchral in Segal’s oeuvre. By freezing life in a crude instant, as he did through his plaster casting and bronze “double casting” techniques, Segal created human facsimiles—trench coats, sunglasses, high heels, and all—that are anything but lively. He then positions his figures into theatrical arrangements—beneath a street sign, resting on a chair, walking past one another. The faces, captured in a moment, resemble the blank visages of the Napoleon death masks that seem to crowd the world’s museums; the bodies, something like the figures caught two millennia ago in the ash clouds of Pompeii. “The Body” is something of a hot subject in critical theory (thanks, Lacan). Segal’s hyperreal figures—weak, small, and, let’s face it, unimpressive—remind us of the body’s impermanence.

When I was working as a literary assistant some years ago in Gstaad, the artist I most ran across in the ski chalets of the well-to-do was Roy Lichtenstein. Just behind him was Miró, and behind Miró David Hockney (especially the landscape work). But who’s keeping score. It might go without saying that of the three, and indeed of almost any other artist I can think of, no one produced so many mediocre paintings as Lichtenstein. His Toontown aesthetic was relentlessness and persistent. It could go anywhere, survive anything, be big or be small—just don’t forget the Ben-Day dots, a chuckle, and a yawn.

It therefore comes as a surprise to find a different trick coming from Lichtenstein, like the old killer twisting the knife in a new way. Although this quintessential pop painter had worked in sculpture since 1965, his installation at the Met’s roof garden may be the first time that viewers consider his plastic work on its own terms.[4] What might appear straightforward in reproduction—Lichtenstein paintings die-cut and propped upright—turn out to be quite maniacal, fiendish, and weird when investigated up close. Let’s remember what we’re dealing with here: an artist who takes the themes of mechanical mass-printing—primary colors, flattened images, off-set screens, the dots—and reproduces them, enlarged, repeatedly, through conventional painting technique. The sculptures, then, take “the Lichtenstein thing” one step further—a copy of a copy passed through multiple mediums. What do Ben-Day dots communicate to the eye on a three-dimensional surface? Why should these dots be in low recess? And the way these sculptures curve and ooze and twist, almost botanically—it’s a Lichtenstein greenhouse on the Met roof this summer, a kind of B-movie “it came from Mars” bioterror. In his riffing on the conventions of the day, whether the SAVE ME! chivalry of comic-book characters or the brushstrokes of the Abstract Expressionists, Lichtenstein’s art makes social commentary on Americana. House III (1997), the ranch-style centerpiece of the Met show, may be the residence of Homer Simpson. But even this most straightforward Levittown icon plays a clever trick on the eye: one that I will not reveal in these pages. Juxtaposed against the hard-edged, modernist New York skyline, the city never looked so inviting. Toontown may be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Notes
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  1. “Joel Shapiro: Recent Sculpture” opened at PaceWildenstein, New York, on May 2 and remains on view until July 31, 2003. A catalogue with an essay by Arthur C. Danto has been published by PaceWildenstein. Go back to the text.
  2. “Frank Stella: Recent Work” opened at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, on May 8 and remains on view until June 18, 2003. Go back to the text.
  3. “George Segal: Bronze” opened at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on April 23 and remains on view until June 14, 2003. Go back to the text.
  4. “Roy Lichtenstein on the Roof” opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on May 1 and remains on view until November 2, 2003. Go back to the text.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 21 Number 10, on page 55
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