Sculpture of The Absurd

By ROBERT HUGHES

The small but choice show -- only 26 pieces -- of the sculpture of the New York City artist Joel Shapiro, 48, now at the Baltimore Museum of Art, reminds one of what odd twists can come out of supposedly settled styles. Shapiro has always been vaguely connected in peoples' minds with early-1970s New York minimalism. And yet, although his work in some ways coincides with that movement, it has little to do with it. It is idiosyncratic, emotionally concentrated and mostly quite small in scale: everything minimalism was not.

Shapiro first earned attention in the '70s with pieces that reversed the cult of Big Size in American sculpture -- a bronze house 9 in. high, for example, or a lilliputian metal chair sitting on the floor. Seen in the huge white-wall and oak-floor gallery spaces of early SoHo, these looked totally out of sync with their surroundings. Yet the contrast between the object and the space around it was part of Shapiro's project. The smallness seemed to gather and focus the room, stretching the distance between your eye and the sculpture, while giving the dumb-looking thing an irksome, gnatlike insistence.

Clearly, Shapiro had learned a lot from the way Giacometti's tiny figures could control the distances around them. Equally, part of his point was to challenge the idea that there was a "right" distance from which to see a sculpture. Should you get down on the floor with it and look for detail? But there was no detail, or not much. The sculptures were sitting in your space. So might you stand back and take in the general effect? But there was no general effect: the pieces were too small to produce one. Shapiro's little sculptures conspired to make you feel you were looking down the wrong end of a telescope at something right next to you, seeing it very sharply, very densely and puzzlingly far away.

Then Shapiro began to move toward the human figure. This note is struck in the very first object in the Baltimore show, made in 1974, which from across the room (or in reproduction) looks like one of the abstract scatter pieces done by minimalist sculptors in the '70s -- Serra or Barry Le Va -- but is in fact an image of human dismemberment. Look closer, and the bits of wood turn ! out to be an artist's mannequin that Shapiro broke up in a fit of anger -- "I pulled it apart and just threw it around the room," he says to curator Deborah Leveton in the catalog interview. "It's a pretty aggressive piece." Indeed it is, almost childishly so, although its distant ancestor is a surrealist classic by Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932.

But the work underscores the central oddity, and the source of originality, in Shapiro's art: his desire to use a style derived from "radical" modernism to make credible images of the body. Minimalism didn't want the figure. It hated the idea of the totem. It despised any kind of liveliness. It wanted to be its chilled, nonreferential self: a box, a row of bricks on the floor.

Whereas liveliness, if not lifelikeness, is exactly what Shapiro's sculptures are about. They are assembled from simple elements, generally balks of timber, run through a big planer to true up their sides, or (for the larger pieces) wooden boxes. Mitered together, these become blockish dolls -- sexless signs for the human figure. Sometimes the wood is left as it is; sometimes it is partly painted; and since the late '70s, Shapiro has taken to casting it in bronze.

He has a fine, brusque sense of sculptural form -- art that hides art. One might think it easy to put six or seven blocks and rods together and make a figure: child's play, literally. So it is, but not with the results he gets. Every alignment, every chamfer and plane speaks of aesthetic decision. This sense of deliberation is increased by his craftsmanly regard for surfaces, which -- particularly in the bronze pieces from the '80s -- is almost fanatical. The bronze preserves some of the texture of the wood from which it is cast. This skin, quoted (so to speak) by the metal, mediates the smooth blockishness of shape, filling it with discreet incident, as does Shapiro's way of polishing some minor planes to take the light, leaving larger ones dark.

But whatever the subtleties of finish, these homunculi take on an uncanny degree of expressive life. His block figures sprawl on the floor or hunch in submission. They balance precariously on one leg, flailing their arms like whirligigs; they strut sassily along like Robert Crumb's cartoon figures or lean forward half-collapsed, as though their joints had given out. Sometimes, as in the big bronze Untitled (JS 866), 1989, which consists of nothing more than two legs with a block for a torso, they can be read in two ways, as a figure either reeling backward under shock or leaning forward into its own run, and off-balance either way.

This sense of disturbed balance, in particular, is a key to Shapiro's work. Although he wants you to think the sculptures stand naturally in their postures of frozen movement, this is by no means the case. To make sure, for instance, that the long legs of a "fallen" figure stay off the ground instead of tipping the body back up, he will sneak an invisible counterweight into the torso.

The works are frank about their artifice -- Why not? -- and hospitable to memories of older art. Their instability distantly reminds a viewer of some of Degas's bronzes; their theatricality, of Carpeaux's. Sometimes they invoke older sculptures quite openly. There is a dense little untitled figure from 1979-82, cast in bronze from seven small chunks of wood roughly joined with wax, that seems to have been done in homage to Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta -- the slumped vertical body in a posture of exhaustion. A strong pathos underlies the movement of Shapiro's figures: they are signs for men, but absurd signs, and their Dionysiac freedom looks anxious and vulnerable for all its laconic shamelessness of gesture.