From Elvis To Balzac And Back
Arlene Shechet’s Titles For Sculptures

By David Levi Strauss

I’ve always thought of writing as a sculptural process. One comes up with a quantity of words and phrases, and then endeavors to mold the resultant mass into something coherent and reflective. The process is both additive and substractive, at different times. You build up and you pare down. It’s handwork, involving a good deal of physical labor.

Consequently, I’m drawn to the way sculptors use language, and I’m especially fascinated by their use of titles. All the sculptors I know agonize over titles, because they recognize how much damage one can do to a work with an over-determined one. Untitled is always preferable to Apocalyptic Storm.

A Shechet title is a prepositional nudge. It gives the viewer a gentle push, a familiar but not presumptuous prompt, to get that part of one’s brain moving away from the obvious: “Good Ghost,” “Twin Rockers.” Her titles often reflect the ambiguity of forms—“Anything and Always,” “Even and Perhaps Especially,” “Is and Is Not,” “No Matter What,” “Everything Seems to Be Something Else”—and the risky temerity of accretion: “So and So and So and So and So and On and On.” Isolated from their referents, these titles could be lines of dialogue spoken by Gogo and Didi in Beckett’s Godot.

Shechet’s vessels are so embodied as forms that the physical agon of their making and their being is palpable. They lean and slump and struggle to stand. Their utter exigency becomes a driving force. Surfaces are distressed to the point of excrescence or annihilation. The vessels are hollow, so they breathe, and if they stop breathing, they will die. Their humor arises from this insistent incarnation. There would be no humor without human suffering and death. Gods are notoriously unfunny.

Shechet didn’t set out to make buddhas. Rather, the forms she was making began to resemble buddhas, until their identities became comically inescapable. Then came the titles, in which the word “buddha” (in Sanskrit, the past participle of “bodhati” — “he awakes”) becomes a thing, itself—both an image, and a sonic, even onomatopoeic, utterance, in alternating bursts: “Mountain Buddha,” “East Buddha,” “Classic Buddha,” “Madras Buddha,” “Soaked Chorten Buddha,” “Buddha Which Occurs,” “Not Buddha,” “Buddha Buddha Buddha.”

A similar process occurs in Shechet’s non-buddha heads, where we get the iterations “Existing Head,” “Aware Head,” “Filigree Head,” “Fireworks Head,” “Head Being There,” “Collective Head,” “Questing Head,” “Red Head,” “Smelling Head,” “Fleeting Head,” “Essential Head,” and “Head in My Head.”

Shechet’s approach to titles is analogous to her use of bases. The bases support works in a way that is both straightforward and oblique. Her titles do the same, but from above. Two-word titles abound — “Sleepless Color,” “Reclining Incline,” “Was Still,” “Sound Sense,” “All Sound,” “Idle Idol”—because they provide stability and a cracked symmetry from which Shechet’s singular shapes can be suspended. One-word titles are rare, like exclamations: “Loll,” “Swoon,” “Elvis.” The latter is a physical manifestation of the goofiness and sexual awkwardness of the King, and ultimately, of Pop itself.

One title from 2010, “My Balzac,” is attached to a glazed and fired ceramic piece on a tall wood and steel base. It is anomalous among Shechet’s titles in its direct, if cheeky, reference to Rodin’s bronze Balzac monument of 1897. In her magisterial Passages in Modern Sculpture of 1977, Rosalind Krauss relates the Rodin sculpture to Brancusi’s bronze The Newborn, from 1915, and ahead to Richard Serra’s film Hand Catching Lead, from 1969. “The fragmentation of the body,” Krauss writes, “is one way of freeing the meaning of a particular gesture from a sense that it is pre-conditioned by the underlying structure of the body understood as a coherent whole.”

In her homage, Shechet also uses a fragment to free the body. Krauss’s articulation of Rodin’s “lodging of meaning in the surface” of the Balzac monument is, as it turns out, highly relevant to Shechet’s entire oeuvre: “Meaning does not precede experience, but occurs in the process of experience itself. It is on the surface of the work that two senses of process coincide—there the externalization of gesture meets with the imprint of the artist’s act as [s]he shapes the work.”

In Shechet’s sculptures, the meeting of “the externalization of gesture” and “the imprint of the artist’s act” is stunningly off-kilter and often unexpected, as if the physical world is push- ing back, gesturing back, in uncertainty, risking oblivion, with an underlying, enduring kindness.