Joel Shapiro
Dispersed throughout a vast space, the ten beams of Joel Shapiro’s installation Untitled, 2012–14, took over the large back room of Paula Cooper Gallery. These lengths of wood, each painted a different color, hung in midair, suspended from the ceiling and anchored to the floor with industrial cord. They are mismatched—some are flat planes, some are more boxlike—such that the work, taken as a whole, seemed unstable and incoherent, if not discombobulated and absurd. The sculpture was certainly at odds with gallery’s stately grandeur and order, especially the harmonious, serial regularity of the wood rafters lining the ceiling.
Speaking about his work, Shapiro cites Kandinsky’s concept of dynamic equilibrium. Here, the equilibrium feels as if it were running amok, stretched to the breaking point—the work comes off as a geometric abstraction undergoing a chaotic explosion. The emptiness of the space is as much a part of the work as the beams and wires.
Shapiro’s beams are neither vertical nor horizontal but diagonal, and thus peculiarly dislocated, all the more so because they appear to be perpetually on the move, their momentum seemingly changing with their shifting relationship to one another. The work engages the body of the viewer, inviting him or her to move freely in and through the installation. The appearance of the work changes dramatically as the viewer’s position does; the spectator’s roaming perspective is the installation’s mobile center. Metaphorically speaking, the beams are passing moments in an endlessly expanding cosmos, spurious presents in the vastness of space-time. Their colorful immediacy makes them seem autonomous even as their interdependence shows that they are details of an incomprehensible and incomplete whole. For all the straightforwardness of its details, the installation has a certain baroque flamboyance.
The show also included four smaller, untitled sculptures. These, too, invite the viewer to change his or her perspective. The audience must move around them to comprehend them, even as their incongruent parts make them ungraspable as a whole. Shapiro crafted an angular 2013 work such that the whole thing balances on one of its four black “legs.” Perhaps the most unusual work was a 2002 construction of wood, wire, and casein. Suspended with wire and situated on opposite sides of a plywood platform, two groups of small wooden geometrical elements of various sizes—one earth-colored, the other purple—hover in space, recalling Paolo Uccello–esque warriors waiting to do battle. According to Shapiro, the sculpture prefigures the grand installation. Four small pastels, all 2013, completed the exhibition, their charming naïveté showing Shapiro’s skill with a brush, love of color, and taste for tension—a briskness that carries over to the rest of this forceful show.