Word: shapiro
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...