On Separation and Creation: A Postlude with Arlene Shechet

with Michaëla Mohrmann

For several months between 2019 and 2020, I had the privilege and delight of working closely with Arlene Shechet in the organizing of Skirts, her first solo exhibition with Pace Gallery. Whether hearing her thoughts on the catalogue, watching her reconfigure the gallery space, or seeing her install her work, I witnessed how Shechet’s ingenuity turned every task pertaining to the show’s realization into a creative pursuit inseparable from her art. On the eve- ning of February 27, 2020, Skirts opened at Pace’s new headquarters to much critical praise, offering an enlivening aesthetic experience to a diverse cross section of New York’s cultural sphere. Three days later, New York announced its first case of COVID-19, a virus-borne disease that by mid-March would be recognized as a global pandemic. As a result, Skirts, along with the rest of Pace Gallery, closed within two weeks of the show’s inauguration. In the subse- quent months, the disease claimed a staggering number of lives, especially in the Tri-State Area, while an imposed lockdown eliminated millions of jobs. Shechet could not countenance publishing this catalogue without acknowl- edging and reflecting on this momentous tragedy. On May 14, with the world still in the throes of the pandemic, she shared with me her thoughts and feelings on this unprecedented crisis, the exhibition it prematurely shuttered, and its impact on her creative process. — Michaëla Mohrmann

Michaëla Mohrmann (MM): I wanted to give you the opportunity to share how you’ve been processing the COVID-19 crisis as an artist, to be sure, but also as a New Yorker and human being. I’d like to begin with a simple and open-ended question that now carries more weight than ever before: How are you? How have you been?

Arlene Shechet (AS): Up and down, you know. I now resist thinking I’m in a completely stable place even though it’s more comfortable, or at least familiar. At first, it was procedurally so com- plicated. How can we even eat and walk? You know, what’s possible? So now it’s procedurally smoothed out, but the weight—there’s weight that rises and falls, and occasionally I can slough it off. But there’s also a news cycle that I try to get off of most of the time, but at the beginning it was impossible. It would be four in the afternoon, and I would be in my bathrobe “educating” my- self. So now I am more protective, limiting that media consumption. I’m increasingly grateful for having a place that feels safe. It does draw huge parallels with 9/11, because actually we got this house [in Woodstock] then—the classic reaction to feeling trapped and with no place to go during a difficult time. And I said, “I’m not going to have that happen again,” so we did get the house then and at least that was a good result that is enact- ed in this moment.

MM: When did you get the house exactly?

AS: It was the summer of 2002.

MM: And did you have your current Woodstock studio right away?

AS: No. The original idea was to get a house up- state and to have some old barn as an extension. And then, of course, the house that I fell in love with was a 1964 flat-roofed modernist house that was completely anti-barn (fig. 1). So I knew I was going to have to build the studio in the next few years, but it took a long time to save the money and develop the hubris to do it, because it did feel like a privilege that I was insecure about. The kids were also young, so the possibility of working in the studio wasn’t going to be there until my youngest was in high school. That was now about eleven or twelve years ago.

MM: I wanted to ask you about this lived history that you have as a New Yorker. 9/11 is part of that, but we could go even farther back in time to the AIDS crisis and the way that New York alone lost about sixty-five thousand people, many from the cultural sphere.

AS: Totally.

MM: It’s interesting to consider your work within this broader history because so much about your sculptures—their organic or abject forms, their seemingly teetering arrangements—has always spoken of a sort of vulnerability and porosity of the body, of states of precarity. And I wonder, what is it like for you to think about and look at your own work right now? Does it hit too close to home, in a way, or does it help you grapple with the current circumstances?

AS: No, I like that. I like that the work speaks to our existence as human beings, and in a very broad sense, that it continues to have relevance. And the precarity, the fragility, the slumping, slipping, and sliding—I do think that that state is a constant, but in different ways. Initially, it was [there because I was] a young person brushing up against another young person—somebody I was very close with—who was dying—and that was just beyond. And then through this Buddhist lens of understanding, I saw that the elephant in the room is that we are going to die but we pre- tend this isn’t true, or we avoid the commonplace truth of it. People in our culture don’t deal with that very much. We only deal with it as a negative, right?

MM: We resist the truth that all life is suffering. We want to box it off.

AS: All life is suffering—the way the Buddha spoke of that saying, it doesn’t really mean “all life is suffering,” it means pay attention to how life isn’t suffering as much as it means pay attention to the fact that there is suffering. What it means is: Don’t be grasping, don’t try to hold on to anything, including your grief but also your happiness. Also, obviously anything in the mate- rial world—all of these things—will sift through your fingers sooner or later, and constantly. So all life is suffering, but we are also living in the Garden of Eden, and it’s incredibly beautiful and human beings are miracles. So when you’re talking about the bodily in my work, I feel like I’m trying to say, “This is gorgeous.” It’s not abject in the classic sense— although I have no problem with the abject, I love abject—but it’s what people feel is grotesque, difficult. It’s something not to shy away from: Be compassionate toward what is rejected. It’s funny, because I’m sitting here looking at this. Can you see these flowers?

MM: Yes, I can. Are they daffodils?

AS: Yes, I always have flowers. But these are dead and they’re so beautiful. I like the whole cycle; I don’t like them just when they are fragrant and blooming. I like the complete cycle. When they’re shriveled, there’s so much information in that. In a way, it describes a lot of what I think about. And New York is that kind of place. New York is a body that has a lot of cracks in it but is very alive. What could be more alive than crazy, mixed-up, urban places? Not just New York, it’s true in India, in cities all over Asia. I love going to these places that have an intense exuberance.

MM: Your sensitivity to the vitality of both urban sites and the natural world makes me want to backtrack a little to this moment when you relocated to Woodstock. Tell me about how the new location impacted your work, because you not only have this amazing natural landscape around you, but you also have this modern architecture that’s part of your everyday life. It’s a unique combination.

AS: I should say that when I was still only in Tribeca, I was beginning to work with wood and there was zero place for me to do that. Also, I did not want to use prefabricated plywood but big, live hunks of wood, which I was already sourcing from people upstate and getting into the city. Getting closer to the source really made the wood, in particular, much more possible and much more part of my vocabulary. Also, I went out of my way to meet all sorts of workers up- state, to find steel workers, for example. I built  a front-loading kiln. That was huge. I would not have been able to continue making ceramics in Tribeca.

The other thing was the actual process of build- ing the studio. I’ve always been interested in architecture and construction in general, just the everyday of building, framing, all of that stuff. I loved it so much: building a stone wall, building a retaining wall, all of the discussion around build- ing, all the thinking around building, the structural observations. The modernist house was fore- shadowed years before when I lived in the Russel Wright house, Dragon Rock (fig. 2), for a number of summers [as a resident artist at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center]. For five summers I was living and breathing modernism, so I enact- ed that in designing the extension of my house as a studio. Here I had this great, California modernist, redwood, flat-roofed house, and I was going to honor it by making something that at least extended it in a way—so that it reads as somewhat interrupted but with continuity.

MM: Often when people talk about your work, they analogize it to the human body, but I think that there’s also a very plausible analogy with the modern architecture of your home. There’s this contiguity between indoors and outdoors, as well as a combination of different materials—redwood being chief among them, which is another way of integrating nature. And there’s also a play with levels. All this is present in your work: the porosity, juxtaposition of materials, a sense of movement, too. I remember walking into your house and having to go up and back down to the studio. The movement encouraged by the structure makes it hard to have a clear mental map of the place. Similarly, your work encourages circumambulation, and because of its counterintuitive structure, you can’t predict what will emerge or unfold in the process.

AS: Yes, I like that! When you’re talking about that—there’s the permeability, the multiple lev- els, the movement, the porosity of the spaces. In the city, I live in an 1866 cast-iron building—an industrial space—which also has this permeability. In fact, Russel Wright had trees and rocks grow- ing right inside the house. There is a complete permeability, and my house is sited on a blue stone quarry, so there’s rock ledge everywhere. I also felt the house was actually very modestly scaled, so I wanted to extend the living room space by making a green roof. I actually excavated to build the studio so that the roof of the studio is now level with the living room floor.

MM: I didn’t realize that was your intervention in the building! The way that the green roof extends the living room space outdoors and brings our attention to the mountains reminds me of your careful calibration of sight lines in your exhibition. It also finds a parallel in your sculptures, in the way that they frequently direct vision back to the space around them—Altered States,  for example.

AS: Yes, and during the right season, having a green roof with the plantings, it’s almost like a microcosm of the landscape. So talking about sight lines, I really think you’re onto something that I haven’t thought about a lot, but I’ve definitely thought about the permeability. The mix of materials (fig. 3)—for example, in some areas the studio floor is this perforated grate, so you can see between levels of the studio. And then I used that same flooring material outdoors, so you can see the landscape through it. I don’t think there are a lot of sculptors who haven’t thought about architecture. It’s such a natural thing. It’s also such a privilege to be able to have had the opportunity to build a space. You know, when you see my loft in the city, which has weird levels, it’s sort of the same. The job was always to make the most of a space and to make it beautiful.

MM: I really see that in the colors, also, that you chose for your living room’s walls—a yellow with green tones that’s in dialogue with the green roof but also with your sculpture in the living room. The sculpture is in that way integrated with the room’s decor, the architecture, and the outdoors.

AS: I’ve always felt that color is a physical thing. It’s not that it’s just on the surface, it is the thing. And it can be felt as another form, in a way. It’s vibrational and can be felt in the body. I mean, some people I know have talked to me about color as such an aberration—a sculptor using color. But I think a lot of sculptors have used color in a big way—Judd, for instance.

We think of his art as being so strict, but it’s insanely colorful.

MM: I saw that a couple of days ago you posted on social media about your show and how you missed it. You described it as a “separation at birth,” and I thought that was really poignant and powerful. To me, it implies that after you’ve created work and installed it, you’re actually not quite done, just like a mother is not done with her child after birthing it. A birth is a beginning, not an end. What does installing a show mean to you, and what is your relationship to it after it opens? How is it a beginning and not a conclusion for you?

AS: First of all, the show is an opportunity to learn what I’m actually doing. I’m learning and pushing myself and testing the boundaries of things and playing while it’s happening. But as you know, it was very much work that was happening the last year or two. My sculptures just take a long time to gestate and when they go out into the world, I don’t send out anything that I have questions about in terms of rigor or quality. But I have lots of questions about it in every other way. How does it live? What does it mean? All of those things, I feel, are a shared experience with the viewers. It’s always been wonderful for me to have shows. I’ve been very fortunate to have shows in New York, in particular, because I know a lot of people there and have a good audience, people who talk to me about what’s happening with the work. I’m really learning so much from that experience. That’s really important. The other thing is, the installation gives me the opportunity to ask why I did some things. I did the installation on a gut level, creating the walls, the sight lines. So how is it really working? I only started to look at that, and because installation is very important to me, I need to learn from that in order to make the next show and the next one after that. How does it fit into my whole oeuvre? If art is about making meaning, the meaning has been wrenched from me in a certain way. The meaning is a ghost or something. I want, I need, a little more, or I need a lot more.

AS: I just didn’t want in any way to not reflect on this experience and not have this experience reflected in whatever work I did. But in my life, just for me to move forward, I needed some other stuff to be happening. With the idea of the show being taken from me, I thought, let me just conjure the memory of it by doing drawings that would end up... I don’t know. I’ve put myself in the position, in order to do this, of trying to just do it and not look at it. Just go do it. Don’t try to figure it out. Don’t show it. Don’t do anything. Right now, just keep doing it, keep feeling it.

MM: To be in a state of flow, essentially, of presentness?

AS: Yes. And for memory to maybe call some other unexpected thing out. In a funny way, this recent drawing period has reminded me of when I had children. For each child, when they were born, I took a year off and just did drawings, because you can’t really make sculpture and nurse. It’s messy being a sculptor. You can make a space for drawing and do it in isolated periods. I didn’t think of this until you just said it: the “separated at birth” was related to that period, that place in between. And I’ve always thought of clay as a three-dimensional drawing material. You can get your body into clay without a tool, so in working with clay I resolve a lot of my draw- ing needs. Drawing is very still compared to my regular art-making activity, which is very physical and active. There’s a stillness and interiority. It’s something else. I don’t think it’s instead of the show. It’s what I could think of doing, what I felt like doing to answer the need in the moment. What was I going to make? Why? Would I make anything? I wanted to be lost, begin again, to feel into being adrift and be true to the moment. I did a small meditation video in response to some organizations asking me to make, to show them what I was making: so here! [Laughs] And I’m also in the middle of doing some walking meditation, something or other. I like the idea of disruption. I’ve never pushed against it, but there’s a sad- ness to this now that is pretty deep.

MM: There’s been this radical shift to online plat- forms for discussing and experiencing art right now. How do you feel about this move online? Have you been partaking in a lot of these online events that have been bringing the art community together, or have you also taken a step back from that?

AS: I have participated a little. I find it difficult. It’s not the way I would prefer to spend my time. I feel it’s bottomless at this point. Every gallery wants to make a living, and every art organization needs to stay afloat, and I need to make a living. So where are these boundaries, and how are we going to work all this out? I’ve never resisted the idea that I’m a small business. I feel that if you’re an artist, you’re a small business. Just face it. It’s not like commerce is a nasty thing. I love letting go of work and having it have a life, but the pressing for resolution is the problem. I know there are going to be these post- COVID shows, but we may never be post-COVID. So now they’re saying, you know, just get used to it. And what does that mean? I feel like maybe it’ll be a good time, strangely, for outdoor sculpture.

MM: I’m glad you just said that, actually. There’s no access to art with all the galleries and museums closed. Unless you’re part of an elite of collectors, you just don’t have art around you. Public outdoor works are one of few options at the moment. You’ve been going in that direction with those wonderful, large-scale works for Madison Square Park, in Full Steam Ahead a couple of years ago. Now in Skirts, you have two beautiful works, Iron Twins and Oomph, that can be placed outdoors or are in dialogue with public art in New York. Do you see yourself going further in that direction? Does this new context make you view your outdoor, public sculpture differently?

AS: Yes, I feel like in the last years I’ve wanted to do outdoor sculpture because, for me, that’s the last frontier of being an artist where I can draw on an audience that’s less precious, less direct- ed. Having my work just be incorporated into an everyday experience is a dream. It’s a wonderful dream. I love to do that and having had that experience, and I’m hungry for more. I’ve begun to see that it has problems but also great bene- fits. I have been very excited about it. I love those outside works, and I do hope somebody will help us get them into the right situations, because,  of course, there are a lot of not right situations for outdoor sculpture. But hopefully it’s going to be one of the places where people can feel like it’s worth that investment long term.

MM: You just mentioned that outdoor sculpture is often placed in situations that are “not right.” What are your primary concerns when you exhibit your work outdoors in public spaces?

AS: I feel that putting things outdoors is a kind of offering, and if you’re making an offering and it’s in an urban environment, everything has to be contextualized. You can’t just plop something down, or you can, but it will most likely lead to an ego-driven mistake. I haven’t often been tested on this, but if you’re making an offering in an ur- ban environment, people should be able to touch that. The works should be generous in how they are placed and what they’re made out of. There’s a lot of temptation to make big things out of nasty plastic stuff, and that’s a problem that maybe is going to be addressed increasingly because it is an environmental issue. There is also this drive to awe. Scale becomes an issue. But if you have works that are more accessible and have many different ways of giving, they’re not going to be competitive with the trees and the buildings. In fact, I’m against this competitiveness. You have to be in sync with all that stuff. You have to be clever. It’s just a question of being smart. I loved so much having people—non-art audiences— finding my work in Madison Square Park. They’re just found; they’re not expected there. One comes upon them. People were climbing all over my stuff, and it had to stand up to that. It’s a privilege that we have to exercise as artists and curators in a sensitive way. There’s striking a balance between something that’s quiet and merges with the environment and something that’s not afraid to be assertive. You don’t want to be fearful, and you don’t want to be unnecessarily muscular.

MM: To me, that balance exists very much in Oomph. It’s a large work made of bronze, a material that has a long history in sculpture, so it has that gravitas. But it’s not intimidating. It does have that generosity that you speak of. It seems receptive to its surroundings,

in part due to its horn, which opens the form. Its highly textured surface invites people to touch it.

AS: The working title for that piece while I was making it was Receiver, actually.

MM: Oh! I didn’t know that, but I see it.

AS: For various reasons, I didn’t want to use that title, but it speaks to what you are addressing. The other thing I was thinking about was Niki de Saint Phalle, because I’m working on this UCSD [University of California San Diego] project, and one of her first outdoor sculptures in the US was the first commissioned piece for the Stuart Collection [of public art at UCSD]. I experienced that sculpture and thought there’s a way that the female presence is something she never shied from. The assertiveness of that work—it’s an explosion of color and texture. You can see why she was buried in art history for so long. I’m not going to say that Oomph is an ode to her, but her work is definitely one of the things that I have spent time with during the last year. And you know, Max Ernst, too. There are things in there that are within a language of art history that is outdoors. I also visited Niki de Saint Phalle’s art in Japan, and it’s so “other,” so weirdly other. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. But the risk-taking quality of that impressed me a lot. I wanted some of that energy.

MM: Yes, because aside from the receptivity one can see in Oomph, there’s a promise of abundance. The form is corpulent, almost inflated. It feels buoyant and expansive. That’s present in de Saint Phalle’s work, too. I’m think- ing of large-scale, penetrable works like She, where the body of woman in its erotic but also life-giving capacities is evoked. This receptivity goes hand in hand with an abundance and creative exuberance detectable in your work as well. You’ve mentioned motherhood, and I’d like to circle back just a little bit to the metaphor of “separation at birth.” In its gendered image and specificity to female creation, it raises a long history of obstacles that only women artists have faced. And yet this is also a story of resilience and perseverance, of crafty adaptation—and I use that last term knowingly. Your show is titled Skirts, after all. Do you feel like your experience as a woman artist and working mom in a still patriarchic society has informed your perspective on difficulty and adversity? Could you talk about that subject position, which you’ve weaved into your language around the show?

AS: Well, resilience is a good word. I like that, and if you’re going to be an artist, you better
be resilient and single-minded. I’ve just always been super committed, and worked through everything, and incorporated what could be a problem into part of my methodology. When you were asking before, for instance, about the two studio locations (fig. 4)—that kind of separation, I actually felt over the years was a great bene- fit for me. Because no matter how attached I’ve been to what I was doing in the studio, I would have to go to the city. Being wrenched from the studio, being away for a couple of days and com- ing back, that non-attachment, the new eyes, the deep looking—those disruptions guarantee that fresh perspective. In the same way I always work on six or seven pieces at the same time. I think disruption is a positive, and even having children—that was a big thing, you know. That studio-life disruption was an enormous positive in my development. I learned to work and live more on the edge, to work more fearlessly.

RISD asked me to come back a few years after I graduated to give some kind of talk to the stu- dent body, and I spoke about how nobody tells you that you’re still an artist even when you’re not making art. The whole ethos of art school is to get in the studio and be productive. My professors sitting in the audience were so pissed off at me after I gave this talk, because it was so against what everybody had been trying to say. But I had to live it: I had to move to New York, I had to build a loft, and then the next year I had a kid. I actually did not lose my certification as an artist. You don’t actually have to be “making it,” to be an artist. You have to be sometimes pulled back from it and developing the hunger. If you let yourself get hungry and lost—making art is a belief system, and I believe the creative energy is cooking even without the work being produced. Then you go back with a much more intense and focused point of view and energy that you can give the work.

MM: This idea of disruption, of disruptive truth telling, like when you point out that you are still an artist even when you are not producing, makes me think of the role of humor in your work. People have often talked about the humor of your language games and grotesque forms as  a “self-deprecating” aspect of your work, and I really don’t see it as that. If anything, humor— being funny—is something that has always been the prerogative of men; women haven’t been allowed to be funny. There’s been a surge, for example, in recent years of female stand-up comics. Many of them have always been there, but we’ve never paid attention to them until a couple of years ago.

AS: It’s such an interesting thing that you’re say- ing, because I’m remembering Gracie Allen and comedy’s male-female dynamic has always been about putting the woman down, who then has to poke back. Even I Love Lucy—you know, she’s the fool.

MM: Right. It often doesn’t go beyond slapstick either. But your work has always had a playful- ness, a humorous grotesqueness that is subversive and that even seems to jab at—or at least contrast with—the high seriousness of a lot of canonical male artists. I’m thinking, for instance, of Altered States with its mirror-like, electroplated-brass tiles that remind me in their industrial seriality of Minimalism, like Carl Andre, but that lead to all sorts of distortions by reflecting the rest of the work. These distortions are destabilizing and playful in nature. It strikes me as a smart retort to Minimalism. I think of how Andre bristled when any critic compared his floor pieces to rugs, associating them with the decorative, the feminine, the low, and possibly the comical.

AS: Using humor does require hubris and is em- powering. Humor is often about failure, but it’s also about taking control of the narrative. So something that is about to fail, or invokes the notion of failure, people find funny—including my- self. It took me a long time to synthesize it. But I do think it’s that vulnerability. If you’re not will- ing to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, you’re never going to be funny. There’s nothing funny about those big, brawny, self-protective things or overblown, macho things, but I think what you’re saying is interesting about it being the male prerogative, because it is an empower- ing thing at the same time. It’s about this thing I was just talking about, about addressing insecurity. You can poke fun at this, because you know that it’s powerful.

MM: I think it’s interesting that you’ve been drawing and becoming more introspective with that medium, because this book we are working on together is also this other moment of introspection, as well as an opportunity to give the show another dimension.

AS: I feel like this book is more important than ever. And even though there was the idea for a fleeting second that we would have the book ready for the show, I never actually cared about that because I always want to have the installation shots in there. But now it’s more essential that we have a longer time to consider what this book means. You asked me about online stuff— to me the book is closer to the sculptures than an online representation of the work. It’s physical, it’s an object, and it has an organization that is similar in nature to an installation.

MM: And there’s also this question of access. The gallery show is this rare window during which all this work is assembled and available to the public for free. Even though the show has been prematurely closed, this book will be able to circulate. It’s relatively affordable, and the experience of reading it is physical, tactile, unlike seeing art online.

AS: And I’m very conscious of that in the design, in the different weights of paper. But I’ve always thought of books as being the ultimate editioned artwork, if you do it right. I love books. I love the shape of them, the smell of them, the whole thing. It’s a crazy amount of work that ends up in this fabulous package that you can have in your house, and you can have a lot of them, and they are worlds. A few years ago people were saying, “Books—no, forget it. Nobody is going to look at books anymore. We are going to get everything online.” But my husband is a writer, and I think everybody feels like they want books now more than ever. I was thinking about it recently, because I bought a couple of books of poetry. Poetry is such a time-based medium, I could never read a poem online and have it be satisfying. It would be like reading the words to a song and believing you heard the music. There’s something perverse about it. In a way, an artwork is like a poem. It’s not like a novel. It’s this condensed experience, completed yet open in its vocabulary. And so I really like drawing my mind into the idea of this book we are putting together as an extended poem related to the show. I hope we can make it personal and beautiful like that.