Arlene Shechet and Deborah Solomon in Conversation

March 19 & 20, 2020

Deborah Solomon (DS): I consider you one of our best sculptors, perhaps because you seem less interested in building monuments for the ages than in using form to capture life in all its humor, awkwardness, and instability. You totally break with the classical tradition in sculpture and its obsession with balance.

Arlene Shechet (AS): Maybe I’m more interested in releasing the viewer from needing to be in awe. I want the works to be approachable but strange. That fuels my desire to be anti-monumental.

One of the things I work really hard at is having things maintain their sense of being provisional. They appear to be shifting and moving and very casual, but they’re engineered to be all one piece and super stable. Humor also gives people points of entry into the works.

DS: So the works are all internally secure, but comically disproportionate.

AS: Yes! My things are shifting, gesturing, and bending over. It feels as if they can be toppled— but still, of course, they are very far from doing that. In making sculpture, the attention to structural integrity is a big part of what one has to deal with. I’ve had to learn a lot about engineering, maybe too much.

DS: I can’t think of another sculptor who uses such a wide range of materials and techniques, from clay to porcelain to carved wood, steel and cast concrete, which sometimes coexist within a single piece.

AS: I’m just restless in that way. I can’t imagine how boring life would be to keep working with one thing over a long career. That’s why in art school I put up such a fight when they tried to make me concentrate too heavily on one medium, with blinders on. Really, many artists dip into lots of different media; most of us have an appetite for more than one thing.

DS: But each material and medium has its own demands.

AS: Any given material isn’t really that unique in terms of the methods and physical intelligence it takes to work with it. One medium isn’t really that different from the next. The history of art is all about moving between mediums.

DS: It’s a much more flexible time now, isn’t it? We’re a culture of “mix masters.”

AS: I don’t know. Picasso did everything. Rauschenberg, Fontana, and then what about Da Vinci and Michelangelo, just to get started! Lots of people have gone beyond what is familiar. That’s ambition.

DS: Where do you think your freedom with color comes from? You are fearless about mingling clashing and unexpected colors.

AS: First of all, everything is color. I think every- thing has color, and I think that’s another language that some people are more sensitive to than others. It’s in your body—how you react to color and how you see color.

DS: If you believe that color is entirely intuitive, do you feel drawn to any particular palette?

AS: I think what you said about the clashing is true. I like to butt colors up against each other that logically undermine each other, but then maybe end up going together. It has to do something electric in the whole piece. It’s not about liking or not liking. I am drawn to green. Sometimes I look around my studio and think: Everything is some version of green. But I’m playing with color all the time.

DS: Green is my favorite color, too. I have no explanation for my love of green. Is it simply because we both have green eyes?

AS: There’s something emotional about green. It can be read as verdant, succulent, sweet, and crisp, but also dark and dirty or aggressive in its brightness. For me, it’s the glue that makes everything else work. I love the full palette and am always shocked to hear folks say that people are uncomfortable buying green art.

DS: What led you to call your new show Skirts? It’s an evocative word, conjuring both the female figure and avoidance, as in skirting a responsibility.

AS: It’s more like skirting the edge, being on a precipice. The word skirts has layers of mean- ing in a very simple form. It’s a noun and a verb, a sculptural term, and a misogynist expression. So I am also reclaiming this slightly derogatory word that has been used to dismiss women.

DS: Can you tell us how you ended up with studios in New York City, Woodstock, and Kingston?

AS: I built the studio in Woodstock about twelve years ago. A little over two years ago, when I was working on the Madison Square Park project, I rented a 3,200-square-foot space in midtown Kingston. I was feeling guilty about needing more space, but then our mutual friend Tom Nozkowski said to me, after I told him I was growing out of my studio: “Every seven years you need another space.” Now I mostly do ceramics in Woodstock, because that’s where I have a kiln. Skirts was the first show where everything got put together in Kingston, although much of it was made in Woodstock—I go back and forth between the upstate studios every day.

DS: I’m wondering if the Kingston studio led to the increase in scale of the work in your current show.

AS: Yes, in part, but in addition Skirts is my debut show at a new gallery, Pace. Also, I haven’t had a gallery show in New York City in more than four years; I was hungry to show off new work to my New York family of supporters and artists.

DS: Your show does feel like a jump from the one before it, in part because the scale of the work greatly increased. I seemed to notice more tall pieces that are nearly six feet high, compared to a preponderance of short and squat pieces in the past.

AS: Yes, overall the pieces do have more mass. I’m giving in to the totem.

DS: Fancy, which is about five-foot-seven [67 inches], might be called human-scaled. The same goes for Ripple and Ruffle [66 inches] and Under cherry trees [74 inches]. And then The Crown Jewel is larger-than-life, almost eight feet tall [94 inches]. Do your vertical sculptures consciously allude to the human figure?

AS: I think they are attempting to be all about life. They have gestures; they aren’t straight up and down. They’re bending like trees, bending like humans. I have this idea that art can create empathy. My husband isn’t in art and seeing him become sensitized to it and learning from it really makes me see what a powerful language it is, and what a “meaning machine” it is. If you can open your heart and mind to this inanimate thing, you can reach out across divides to other humans as well, to people, places, and things that might be considered “other.” I think art does create empathy in that way. Maybe that’s what it is—it’s a language of empathy and meaning.

DS: Without the use of words.

AS: Right, and that’s so essential because with words, people push back. With sculptures, people can be more open.

DS: I feel a strong sense of art history blowing through your work, especially Surrealism, with its juxtaposition of dissimilar objects. Do you ever think about Surrealism?

AS: Mainstream Surrealism is a bit too dramatic for my taste. It tends to have a punch line, it’s often a directed read. That said, early Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington are all artists I admire. The thing I identify with is the sense of discomfort, or misalignment, that many Surrealists use to good effect. Less so with their explicitness.

DS: How do you feel about Cubist assemblage?

AS: What’s not to love? It’s so structurally satisfy- ing. The shapes are puzzled and nuzzled together, but there’s still a lot of room for disarray.

DS: Your sculpture Touching Summer, in the current show, reminds me of a big, chunkier Glass of Absinthe by Picasso. Plus, it is wonder- fully summery, with all that white and tan. Like the colors of linen jackets.

AS: I was worried about that. It made me ner- vous, the color. I had feared it was too pretty. But hopefully leaving some raw tree and chainsaw marks pushes it enough.

DS: What tradition do you feel closest to?

AS: Well, the tradition of sculpture I grew up on was Minimalism, Judd, everything’s on the floor, everything’s horizontal, no pedestals, no verticals, no elevation. Carl Andre, Flavin, work that’s reflecting and adhering to its environment.

DS: Do you see yourself as a Postminimalist, to use a broad but I hope not meaningless category?

AS: I don’t think of myself in those terms, but I do take up and take on some Minimalist vocabulary: in this show, the metal plates on the floor, the steel plates, the reflective, mirrored tiles which for me call out both Minimalism and the decora- tive. I love those contradictions. For the last ten years I have been using both bricks of my own making and fire bricks, and repeated forms. Iron Twins, even though that is made from cast iron,  I explicitly sought to work it so it had a patina that looks very much like lead.

DS: Which Minimalists do you particularly like?

AS: Fred Sandback, of course, because for me he was the ideal—color, fragility, but yet very structural and architectural, like painting/drawing/ sculpture. I once had a whole conversation with him just about yellow. I love that he is just drawing in space and with space. Barry Le Va, Donald Judd; when I moved to lower Manhattan, I’d pass Judd’s house on Spring Street. My upstairs neighbor had been Dan Flavin’s assistant. It was soaked into me. And in art school, everything  was on the floor. It was against the religion to make something vertical. We were totally uninterested in that. Oh, I love Richard Serra’s lead pieces. My heart still beats for so much of that work.

DS: You share with him a love of curving and swerving shapes.

AS: I’m just hungry for it all and I embrace it all. I don’t feel like I need to push one thing out in order to move on to the next thing. It’s often the more repellant things that have taught me the most. So maybe that mélange, that putting things together, is just me getting to the point of feeling completely free and not paying attention to any hierarchy or any art religion, because art can be so conservative in its narrowness. Guston was really cast out because he stopped making abstract art! He had his studio over the hill from me in Woodstock before I moved here, and the fact that he came here under fire from having broken through to whatever he wanted to do, that wasn’t lost on me. That was one of the reasons I ended up wanting to have a studio here.

DS: Are you saying you acquired a studio in Woodstock because you admire Guston?

AS: No, it really had to do with the kids crying in the back of the car at two hours; I said, “Stop the car wherever we are, this is it.” But knowing about Guston and the long history of this place, and its pull for artists and writers and musicians, helped me feel like this was a good spot.

DS: How are your kids doing these days? And do you have any advice for us on balancing the roles of wife, mother, and brilliant artist?

AS: Well, back at you, Deborah! You do this, too. There’s nothing simple about it. But I’m very grateful for having so many people to love.

DS: Where were you born?

AS: I was born in Queens, in Forest Hills. DS: What did your parents do?

AS: My father was an accountant, and my mother had been a librarian, but then was convinced it was unseemly to work. So she was a housewife, but she had a painting studio in the basement.

DS: What did her work look like?

AS: Paintings, mostly still lifes. I even found sketchbooks and journals from her days at Hunter College. She didn’t realize how cut off she was from her desires until she saw me making art myself. We ended up having fun talking about her paintings together, and going to museums. As for the artists I knew she loved, these were maybe the usual: Matisse, Picasso, and then the French Impressionists.

DS: Do you think being an artist is a choice? Or would you agree with Louise Bourgeois’s state- ment that artists aren’t made, they’re born.

AS: I agree with LB. I feel like being an artist is not a choice. There’s some way that it chooses you. My mother would go to the art supply store but she didn’t give me any tools to figure any- thing out; she didn’t say let’s sit down and draw together. I would just inhale the art supply store. It was a strong, full-sense experience, I loved seeing all the colors along with all those toxic smells. And we did go to museums. Every Sunday we had some kind of city excursion, getting out of Queens and going into the big borough of Manhattan. Once, I was standing in front of a Robert Motherwell painting as a little kid and saying how much I loved it. And my mother said, “This is amazing that you are loving this painting. What are you seeing in this?”

DS: Motherwell was a precocious taste! Clearly you felt comfortable with abstract forms at an early age. Where was that, at MoMA?

AS: Yes. MoMA was a big destination.

DS: What about the rest of the city?

AS: The thing about growing up in New York was that at least I could get on the subway and go places by myself. I started doing that when I was eleven. I’d walk around Greenwich Village, all that. I didn’t have any art education growing up, I went to underfunded public schools.

DS: You grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home, which I find interesting, especially since
you later came to reject so much art-world orthodoxy.

AS: My whole life has been pushing up against orthodoxy—even being a mother and an artist is pushing up against art world orthodoxy. Maybe being a sculptor and wrangling heavy, difficult materials and structural issues is pushing up against that very early message of female disempowerment. From the point of view of my family, it was so unlikely that I would become a sculptor. It was perhaps not terribly unlikely that I would be a painter, but impossible that I would become a sculptor, which in my childhood was almost completely identified as a male vocation.

DS: Where did you go to college?

AS: I was very restless and saw my college years as my ticket to see the world. I went to Skidmore, which had an art department. But I wasn’t focused on being an artist at that time. I whipped through Skidmore in a year and then I went to Sarah Lawrence, and to Paris for a semester. I went to Stanford so that I could get to California. I was thinking about the locations more than the schools, and then I ended up at NYU, which I never would have gone to straight from high school.

DS: What did you study at NYU?

AS: I took a lot of art history, but also I was politically active. Robert Rosenblum was there; this was around 1969, 1970. I also did social sciences because I felt like I needed to save the world. I was very split at that time. I thought I would be an art historian because practicing art seemed too indulgent. Art history was outward focused, and I thought I would become part of an institutional conversation.

DS: Were you making objects at this point?

AS: I was drawing, but I wasn’t making much sculpture, maybe some papier-mâché things sometimes. When I was at Stanford there was a pottery studio in the basement of a dorm, and up to that point I had never seen anyone use clay on a wheel. I started to help this person, and I got my hands dirty and helped build some stuff. I started to learn what it was like to make some- thing from that. I learned on the wheel; it was mesmerizing, but I also felt like: Okay, now what?

DS: How did you end up going to graduate school?

AS: I applied to graduate school with some drawings, and a few small sculptures. And I ended up at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design], which was my dream.

DS: What kind of work did you make at RISD?

AS: I felt about RISD the same way I felt about college; I saw it as a place to play with all the toys. I made some sculpture, but I also made video and photography and I did some painting. I hated the ceramics department—they were very old-school—but I had a studio in the sculpture building, and I spent a lot of time hang- ing out with people in the glass department, who looked like they were having the most fun. Dale Chihuly was there on faculty, and there was a lot of action in that department. Chihuly

was always bringing in artists from the outside; he brought in his friends: Italo Scanga, and also one of my very favorite sculptors, Robert Grosvenor.

DS: It sounds like you were more interested in process than product.

AS: One aesthetic that I was interested in was repetition. Segments. Everybody, including me, was making a hundred of something. A hundred little plaques, or a hundred sheets of foam. The thing about Providence is that it was a small industrial town and had a lot of shuttered factories. You could get all kinds of things there. Little cast parts in metal, fake gemstones, foam. There had been a big textile industry there. It was all very funky and had a lot of character.  I was at RISD for two years, and then they hired me to teach, which was great because after two years I felt that there was so much more I wanted to do. I was teaching beginning sculpture; it was called something like “Form and Space.” It was  a very Bauhaus type of structure where everyone took everything, and I just basically taught my students what I wanted to learn.

DS: Can we talk a bit about your current process? Do you create the parts of each sculpture with the finished work in mind?

AS: Sometimes yes, but mostly no. I give myself a lot of leeway and make parts without knowing what is going to happen. I’m making different parts over time and then constantly moving things around. The piece Fancy, for instance, the central gray element—I made that concrete part maybe five years ago, cast in a cardboard box. It was sitting in my garage. It didn’t go anywhere when I made it. And then I came back to it.

DS: What made you pour the concrete into a cardboard box?

AS: That’s a good way for me to sketch and find form. I make form both additively and subtractively, casting, carving, building. Every different operation of building is a part of my practice, and I think that is what’s different about the way I work. Within a single piece, I might find myself working across a lot of disciplines that encourage—or require—different ways of making.

DS: It’s interesting to me that you use so many different types of techniques and traditions within single pieces. In Fancy, there’s carving on the base, cast concrete in the middle, and the top is partially carved.

AS: Yes, in black walnut. But let’s not forget the two-dimensional surface applications: there’s also paint and a touch of gilding. I don’t isolate the two- and three-dimensional experiences. The processes come at different times, but I want these finished sculptures to work as dimensionalized paintings. And to be clear, I believe glazing is also a form of painting.

DS: I see, so one part leads to the next.

AS: I actually make some of the sculptures in a generative way. Very often one part is cast from the next. I carve and construct with wood, and then I might cast clay or plaster into some of the cavities. That’s why the parts can fit together so snugly. The parts “need” one another, and  I use that physical reality as a metaphor.

DS: How often do you replenish your supply of parts?

AS: I go into my studio and it’s almost like I’m finding these things again—I call it “shopping at home.” I have a lot that has built up over the years. I’m very critical of what I’m doing. I’ll look at something and if I am impatient with it, if it’s not right, I move it out of the way, but I don’t discard it. In Fancy, I didn’t make the ripple; it occurred in nature. I knew I had to use it, but I wasn’t sure how. I don’t remember what it looked like when I found it many years ago, but it was part of a much bigger tree section. I’m using entire trees or pieces from pruning, or someone calls me and offers me something. There are several pieces in the show that happened like that. It’s almost like when I was in Providence and go- ing to junk shops, or moving to lower Manhattan when Canal Street was lined with similar stores. Now I’m just shopping in nature, or as I said, shopping at home. I’ll rearrange a pile, and in that process I’ll puzzle out new information.

DS: Are all your forms natural? Do you use any man-made materials like plastic?

AS: I never think of it like that, actually. I prefer to think of all of my materials as alive, rather than natural, because most of them really are alive on a molecular level: glass still moves, wood grows and shrinks, even metal is moving.
As for man-made materials, there’s brass. I’m not averse to using plastic; I have cast in resin, but it feels limiting because I am interested in transformation and having my hands on things. Jessica Stockholder is somebody who uses plastics very well. She uses a vast range of materials and transformative processes, and she also is interested in aligning painting and sculpture.

DS: How often do you work with found objects?

AS: The forms I’m working with are half-made, half-found. I almost never use a whole thing. I’m finding things and then violating them.

DS: They’re altered ready-mades. Do you ever use an unaltered object?

AS: Yeah, maybe, or close to unaltered. In Ripple and Ruffle, that trunk, that was somebody calling me up and saying, “I just took down this amazing tree, want to look?” and that’s one of the parts.  I actually brought back to my studio about a half ton of wood, and when I picked through it, this piece was just waiting for me. I ended up loving the way it’s dancing and swaying. You can’t see it if you just look at a single photograph, but it looks very close to things I’ve made with clay. There’s a big lump with a hole in it; I’ve literally handmade things like that.

DS: It has a very expressive shape.

AS: I took the bark off of it, and I found all kinds of drawings made by insects on it—insect trails that are to me just drawings. It had a cut in it from the logger who took the thing down. He went at it twice, and so there was a big slice in it; that’s where I have that ripple coming out of it. There’s an example of me using a kind of unaltered object—I used that slice in the wood as an occasion for a new formal interruption, instead of removing it. Someone else may have seen it as a dam- aged part, to be discarded.

The ripple is a piece of plywood that I cut to look as if it came straight out of the center of that thing, like a slice of the pith. That’s my inside joke. In New York we call plywood “wood,” but that’s not wood. But it’s coming out of this very, very natural thing, and so I’m putting the industrial into the natural form. And that hunk of brass at the base is a riff on a branch.

DS: How do you feel about Noguchi? I ask because of his love of materials—rock, wood— and his ability to bring them together in a single piece.

AS: Yes, he worked with clay as well! I love that he thought on a domestic scale but also on a grand scale in his environmental works. He was incredibly innovative in all of the different ways that he organized his materials within a work, and the works with one another. And also his set design—he was a restless innovator, and had this very fruitful relationship with Buckminster Fuller!

DS: Any other boundary crossers you think about?

AS: Robert Grosvenor, who uses crazy combinations of construction materials in an ill-fitting, loose manner that is also very specific and con- trolled. He crosses boundaries in terms of function, architecture, furniture, cars. There’s a subversive humor in what he does, which is also true of Richard Tuttle, another early influence for me, particularly his paper and wire works, from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Eva Hesse, particularly—I think Tuttle was picking up off of Hesse. And possibly Ree Morton, Lee Bontecou...

All of whom favored anti-monumental forms. I think this relates to what we were talking about with the totem. In most cases, using gravity and stacking things straight up is the simplest way to make something both large and structural. Just stack the materials right up and the bottom sup- ports the top. That’s the easiest way to build and balance, but I tend to work against that formula. I’m learning to accept that there is something compelling about making vertical work, some- thing towering—that power—I’m trying to own the totemic a bit more but to tweak it and make it mine. For instance, the vertical and very tall The Crown Jewel is like a guardian figure at the en- trance to my show.

DS: Right, vertical work is inevitably experienced in relation to the human figure.

AS: I’ve thought a lot about scale. For instance, with Madison Square Park I decided to make
the works human scale, or generously human scale—a little bigger than human-sized, between seven feet and twelve feet—which in the context of New York City is relatively small and counts as human scale. I placed the sculptures so that they were in the way, in the middle of the paths. My premise was that, if the work is in your face, you’re not looking up and around as much, so this placement changes your relationship to scale and the work no longer needs to be gigantic in order to be powerful. Then I could make the sculptures in relationship to humans rather than in relationship to the trees and the buildings.
I advocated for this scale, I knew that getting close to the sculptures, touching them, would override the benefits of seeing them in relation- ship to the architecture. Give people something close; you can’t have everything.

DS: You’re referring to your wonderful, site- specific project Full Steam Ahead, which was commissioned for Madison Square Park two years ago. Some of the parts related to chairs and tables. Is furniture something you think about in relation to your forms?

AS: Sure, I bet there’s no sculptor that doesn’t have a chair collection.

DS: It’s interesting how often chairs are used in art as a stand-in for the artist.

AS: Or for the figure in general! DS: Right, a chair is body-like anyway.

AS: Yeah, an anthropomorphic form. There is a back, seat, arms, legs, feet—making all those parts work together is a sculptural conundrum. Every sculptor loves looking at a chair and learn- ing from the proportions. A chair is a complicated form and there are so many versions of it.

DS: It’s funny that the parts of a chair have names that resemble human body parts: arms, legs, backs.

AS: Same as a vase. A vase has a neck, a lip, a foot, an empty womb; it’s a big stand-in for the body. Louise Bourgeois did all that stuff about the house as a female body. I think humans just anthropomorphize everything. We see a reflection of ourselves where we can.

DS: We should talk about your titles, which are so poetic! I am wondering about the title of your piece Under cherry trees / There are / No strangers. Is that from something we should know?

AS: I have a friend, Jonathan Cott. He used to write for Rolling Stone. He’s brilliant. And he sent me this haiku, by [Kobayashi] Issa, after he came to one of the performances at Madison Square Park, where I had created this space for people to gather. There was so much shared joy in experiencing that performance together, among strangers.

DS: How about the title of your sculpture Grammar?

AS: Rosalind Krauss uses the term grammar in Passages in Modern Sculpture. And I love that word for its layered meaning, from mundane to esoteric. The painted wood part of that piece came from Thomas Cole’s color wheel, which is a two-dimensional grammar.

DS: You said that you generally don’t start off with a preconceived idea. You play with the forms and figure out later how to hold them in place.

AS: Yes, that’s true. With a piece like Grammar and a piece like Via the Moon, the top areas are built just from clay. I messed with those sculptures over six to nine months, working with wet clay in both an additive and subtractive manner, making and re-making using methods similar to those of a painter but in three dimensions.  A painter might create a ground and then
start moving an image and marks around and finding things. The process is gathering, doing, disassembling, reassembling, finding, considering. I think making all art is just about paying attention and “listening,” forming a partnership with the artwork and letting it become what it wants to be.

DS: Do you tend to enjoy the experience of having a show?

AS: I love creating exhibitions. Putting together a show, I think about the works, the space, and then design the walls and the flow to keep the viewer aware and a bit surprised. Having a show is learning about the work. I love hanging shows. I love the architecture of it. I love creating the sight lines, the relationships. I saw relationships that I never would have seen in my studio. I don’t think you can make art without having shows. It’s part of the process. I love that—there’s final- ly more space to work. And going to look at the work in the gallery gives me jumping off points.

DS: Some artists go through a postpartum depression after a show.

AS: I don’t actually go through that. I never really understood that.

DS: How do you move forward after having a show as major as your current one?

AS: There are still things in the studio that didn’t make it into the show, that aren’t finished—“runners-up,” which aren’t inferior by any means, they just aren’t part of the particular conversation I was creating with this show. They’re still there. And I love walking away from them and coming back with the new insights I have gained from having the show. That’s so much a part of my process, anyway. You know, leaving. Coming to New York, coming back. Going from Kingston to Woodstock. They are spaces in between. I’ve learned to count on those spaces to break me open, to get me off track.