Why Not All These Things at Once?

Wood, stone, metal, clay. Before our current, more profligate era, sculptors generally employed one material at a time. The techniques associated with each—carving, casting, welding, forming—have all been available but used singly. Choosing one material would seem to preclude the others; rarely have artists thought to combine two or more in a single work. (The culture of installation art is a different branch of the tree.)

The sculptor Arlene Shechet works in the high modernist tradition using traditional materials—wood, glazed ceramic, carved stone, welded aluminum, and anodized steel—but she combines them into ensembles, achieving, in the rightness of her combinations, a kind of alchemy of style. What I mean by the modernist tradition is that her ideas are embodied in distinctive structures and articulate shapes. The narrative component of her art is a product of the formal component: the internal drama of the decisions about what to make and how to make it. For a sculptor, technique is thinking in three dimensions. There’s a path from idea to result; the way one traverses that path, how imaginatively or resourcefully, determines the character of one’s art.

Neither strictly abstract nor figurative, Shechet’s art is a work of parts—it’s relational, and it uses off-kilter, surprising harmonies of shape, material, texture, and color with aplomb. Her sensibility is contrapuntal; the disparate forms are joined together to create an imagistic gestalt that has a specific character: animated, jaunty, sometimes even giddy, occasionally somber. Her sculptures have a social dynamic as well: they can be seen as a study in cooperation and acceptance. She will sometimes put a work under pressure to absorb an untoward or ungainly element in order to see how it adjusts to the intrusion.

With all these components, Shechet’s work really does need to be seen in the round; it doesn’t come off in photographs. The camera is no match for the specificity of her surfaces and their quick-change, Scheherazade-like improvisation. As in the late fashion stylist Anna Piaggi’s transgressively accessorized outfits, the in-your-faceness is mitigated by an inherent dignity and a quirky charm. Somehow an awareness of the passage of time gets into it too. Charm as the flip side of melancholy—it’s not so strange.

Most artists can be said to create their own precursors. Shechet’s modernist lineage starts with the casually improvisational mode of Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914) and finds common cause with the Futurism of Umberto Boccioni before moving on to the sunny formalism of Anthony Caro, among others. That’s only the beginning. Shechet crisscrosses a broad stylistic landscape: her work has echoes of funk art, postminimalism, European porcelain of the sixteenth to nineteenth century, late Baroque German wood carvings, and all manner of liturgical and devotional objects, to name just some of the comrades in arms who gather under her big tent. But this far-ranging list is not to suggest that her work feels dispersed or lacks focus; it is taut and highly resolved, even polished.

(opens in a new window) Continue reading at nybooks.com.