Arlene Shechet: History Matters

By Rachel Silveri

It is a story occasionally told in the literature on Arlene Shechet: the year was 1994 and the artist had included some of her early Buddha sculptures in a group show at a gallery in Tribeca. The artist recalls that, during the making of the works, those who visited her studio expressed horror and embarrassment. At a moment when the art world was witnessing the consolidation of a conceptually driven postmodernism, the rise of performance and participatory art, new forms of expanded art making and installation, here was Shechet with her quasi-abstract sculptural nods to Eastern philosophy. And yet at the gallery exhibition, the artist Kiki Smith came by and purchased a work. She did not know who Shechet was but appreciated the work’s connections to the “unfashionable” and the “handmade.” She called the artist on the phone in order to meet her. A friendship began.1 And so at the very beginning of Shechet’s career, she found support: not necessarily from critics, historians, or dealers, but from another (woman) artist.

This is an essay about canon making and institutional support. It is about artistic lineage and shared dialogues. It is about the entwinement of history and recognition. What concerns me is the placement of Shechet’s work within an overarching narrative of modern and contemporary sculpture and, equally, how that placement allows her works to speak. Shechet’s production certainly shares all the punch and power of a traditional canon of twentieth-century sculpture (from Auguste Rodin, say, to Carl Andre), and it can be situated within that lineage accordingly. Doing so emphasizes certain qualities over others. Yet it is my premise that there is also a matrilineal dialogue within Shechet’s recent oeuvre—(woman) artist to (woman) artist—that needs voicing. And it is only when listening to that reception that certain aspects of Shechet’s oeuvre come rightfully to the foreground: her work’s hybridity and eccentricity, its eroticism, its insistence on handicraft and the decorative, its vibrant materiality. This is to say that Shechet at once fits neatly into a traditional canon and skirts it, too, and this essay will follow both the through line and its feminine edge.

Passages in Time

If there is a name that comes up most consistently within the literature on Shechet, it is perhaps Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). The father of modern sculpture is right there in the introduction to the catalogue for Shechet’s midcareer retrospective, which displays his Monument to Balzac (1891–98, fig. 1) side by side with her My Balzac (2010, fig. 2).2 Enveloping the writer’s body in a thick cloak, Rodin’s sculpture strikes a delicate balance between detailed physiognomy and abstracted form, transforming the block of vertical fabric into an ascendant and energetic movement. Shechet’s sculpture, with a title she described as a “rare moment of direct reference,” is six feet tall.3 Atop a wood-and-steel understructure, a black mass of glazed ceramic coils seem to have a life of their own, as they stretch and tilt upward in a diagonal movement reminiscent of Rodin’s abstracted mass. According to Shechet, she wanted to articulate the dual sense of protection and vulnerability encompassed in Rodin’s monument—how the thick, shielding cloak gives way to a sense of the writer’s exposed humanity.4 In her own work, this tension manifests itself through the juxtaposition of the sculpture’s imposing scale and metallic base with the fleshy organicism of its coils, suggesting the innards of a creature laid open for display.

And yet it is neither Shechet’s titular reference to Rodin nor her formal allusions to his work that are important here. It is, rather, that she is inserting herself into a lineage of modern sculpture concerned with phenomenological engagement. For Rosalind Krauss, Rodin’s monument heralded a moment in modern sculpture in which the viewing process was transformed from an idealized, singular instant into something that unfolds over time. Viewers move around the work’s form, discovering the points where the expressions of Balzac’s body, the presence of Rodin’s hand, and the processes of bronze casting are simultaneously captured and revealed.5 In this type of temporal passage, viewers become aware of how the shifting of their own bodies in space changes and adds meaning to the work’s experience.

All of Shechet’s recent work—certainly all that is present in Skirts—relies exactly upon this sort of durational and embodied viewing. Take, for instance, The Crown Jewel (2020, p. 19). From one, seemingly frontal, perspective, the viewer encounters a wooden C-shaped form, its interior painted a royal crimson red, set miraculously atop a jumble of glazed ceramic blocks, which embrace a wedge of wood and rest atop a wooden pillar. Moving leftward, the viewer sees that the dark-blue ceramics have
a series of angular cuts painted red—the same red as the wooden crown above, its royal connotations shifting to exposed flesh and blood. As one progresses further around the sculpture, the experience continues to build: the dark, leathery hide of the blue glaze gives way to a speckled and pock- marked cerulean layered atop a reddish ground. What at first appears to
be one piece of sandwiched wood is, in fact, two. The wooden pillar is itself composed of blocks, giving hints of edges (or skirts) painted red. And if there is something of a pièce de résistance within The Crown Jewel, it is the luminous, shining, treasure-like forms that have been fitted into the pillar’s base, nestled within the knots of the wood. Suggestive of gold, the material is, in fact, cast bronze.6

In Shechet’s work, surfaces change. That which is hidden becomes revealed. Something seen becomes something else. A viewer may have to stand on tiptoe and look up, or bend knees and lower her eyes to the base to witness the work’s transformative effects. For Krauss, the phenomenological engagement with sculpture that began with Rodin culminated in Minimalism, with its rejection of illusionism and deflection of visual interest, forcing viewers to confront their own bodies in space.7 Shechet’s work, by contrast, promises something different: a phenomenology that carries visual delights, keeps both the body and its pleasures, and recognizes that the materials encountered might have multiple meanings. The Minimalist dictum that less is more is transformed in Shechet’s oeuvre to more is more; the Minimalist insistence on “what you see is what you see” gives way to visual metamorphosis, to a belief, borrowing one of the artist’s own titles, that “magic matters.” 8

In the eponymous work, the steel rectilinear forms that could otherwise have been found in the Minimalism of Carl Andre (b. 1935) here, with the right step, the right shift, the right moment in time, become reflective surfaces for the shimmering appliqué of silver leaf on wood (p. 179).9 A similar dynamic occurs in Altered State (2020; p. 35), where the viewer, again from a particular angle, catching a particular moment in time, glimpses how an array of industrial brass tiles electroplated with chrome and nickel becomes a source of shimmering impressions. The Minimalist serial forms have become a reflective pool; even further, they cast their own glistening light onto the block of hardwood positioned above, creating the conditions in which, all of a sudden, the solidity of painted blue wood grain becomes waterlike. Take a quick walk past Shechet’s work, or look at her sculptures from one adamant angle, and none of these details, of course, appear. The more time one spends with the work, the more views one accumulates, the more one relates to the work, “body-to-body,” the far greater the rewards.10

Transformations

In the history of modern sculpture, there is another artist, aside from Rodin, whose oeuvre depends on the magic of transformation, and Shechet is in dialogue with him, too. Observe, for example, her work My Absinthe (2018, fig. 3), a small, terracotta-hued vessel with a horizontal top that branches, barnacle-like, into multiple forms as the viewer walks around it. Shechet’s glazes give the work a fantastic quality: there are bright-blue tubular coils, irregular pastel stippling, orange molten layers that ooze. However abstract the work may be, both its title and scale reference Pablo Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914, fig. 4).

The sculptural practice of Picasso (1881–1973) varied throughout his career, but he has often been celebrated for aligning sculpture with assemblage and using everyday materials.11 More recently, Ann Temkin and Anne Umland have praised Picasso’s sculptural practice as a “magic of making” that engages in a “game of metamorphosis” whereby various materials (artistic and otherwise) are reworked “in the service of visual metaphor.” 12 Perhaps nowhere is this transformation game more apparent than in Glass of Absinthe, where the artist painted the cast bronze work so that the material resembles plaster rather than alloyed metal. He also shaped it in such a way that its form seems soft rather than hard, and he created a series of telling contrasts between the readymade spoon, the block of marble made to imitate a sugar cube, and the handcrafted (though ultimately cast) glass itself.13

Many of Shechet’s works engage in a similarly magical play with mate- rials. Touching Summer (2020, p. 83), for example, at first appears to be composed of a series of disparate found objects, stacked perilously atop one another and on the brink of collapse. Two hollow cylinders the color of deep rust are incorporated into the assemblage: one at the very bottom, supporting all the weight, the other near the top, as if it could roll off. At an initial glance, they seem to be an oxidized, aging metal; they are, in fact, made of ceramic and glazed. Large blocks of natural hardwood have been painted in artificial pastels; they are scored with parallel lines that suggest artistic intervention rather than organic wood grain; and they abut white speckled forms that summon a series of materials—coral, stone, styro- foam—though they, too, are glazed ceramics.

This type of visual metamorphosis by Shechet occurs in other works, such as Under cherry trees / There are / No strangers (2020, p. 163). A glazed, handcrafted ceramic has the appearance of a found, readymade stone.

Passages of burnt sienna paint imitate the natural knots of wood. At times, the abstract assemblage seems to snap into place as a figure, carrying staff and stone, before sliding back into the nonrepresentational. Deep Dive (2020, p. 99) presents viewers with two bright-chartreuse shapes that seem like sponges excavated from the sea (they are ceramics). Ripple and Ruffle (2020, p. 147) has a topmost form that appears to be an extension and elaboration of the hardwood below, giving us the texture of bark, the hues of wood pulp, the contours of the organic (it, too, is actually glazed ceramic).

Shechet makes other nods to Picasso, as well. Iron Twins (2020, p. 115) has a form suggestive of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1931–32) or, perhaps of a closer model, his Sylvette (1954, fig. 5). Like Under cherry trees, these Twins participate in the dynamic back-and-forth between abstraction and figuration; Shechet herself has claimed that she is interested in cultivating a “hybrid language” between these two categories, eschewing both pure abstraction and literal representation so as to “play in the middle.” 14 As if
to demonstrate this, the Twins have the appearance of malleability—they seem to be made from tape and cardboard painted in aluminum grey, or created from a soft, shaped lead—yet they are, in fact, cast iron. Formally they relate to another set of Twins executed in concrete, as well as to two individual works using glazed ceramic, Then That Way (2016, fig. 6) and Knowing Sylvette (2018). This is all to say that a great part of Shechet’s oeuvre relies on the magic of transformation, on a shape-shifting play, on the visual delight of the surface mutations that occur when a thing assumed is suddenly revealed to be something else altogether.

Architectural Skirts

In Shechet’s work there is often a turnabout of top and bottom, work and groundwork, form and faux base, so that the “pedestal” becomes a lively and active part of the art object (fig. 7). This dynamic stems, in part, from Shechet’s engagement with the legacy of Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957). Describing the Romanian sculptor’s importance, Roxana Marcoci identifies his primary innovation as the “revolutionary reversal of the base from passive podium to generative element,” as seen in works such as Golden Bird (1919/20, base ca. 1922, fig. 8).15 With Brancusi, as with Shechet, pedestals or bases become fully integrated units within a whole, providing what Shechet has described as a “kind of architecture.” 16 No longer a type of interchangeable or unremarkable display, these architectural structures are unified with the work itself. “I’m not sure if I think of them as bases anymore,” Shechet has remarked, “All the parts need each other. They’re all essential.” 17

And one can see the many generative capacities that this practice brings to her oeuvre. Fancy (2020, p. 227), for example, features a piece of carved, dark hardwood, painted in shades of sunflower and orange, balanced atop a block of concrete. These two forms rest on a wooden plinth—its size, shape, material, and supportive labor all place it in dialogue with the sculptural “pedestal,” but how wrong it would be to call it such. Gnawing at its form are a series of yellow scalloped carvings, proliferating from the bottom of the wood to its middle, spilling out on three of its sides. This concave cluster sets up a series of motifs that run through the rest of the work: the undulating lines of the dark hardwood’s edge; the scalloped  curves of concrete; the shades of yellow, which reappear in applications of gold leaf, placed in areas where the wood above has been chipped away. What’s more, the lemony curves of the lightwood plinth carry their own connotations, as if we might be seeing something of the work’s “skirt.”

As another example, take Shechet’s Grammar (2020, p. 131). A bulbous blue ceramic sits atop a steel structure under which has been fastened a wooden bell-shaped form. Once again, the wood and steel together perform the labor of supporting the handcrafted ceramic above and so are situated in dialogue with the traditional pedestal. Yet along the sides of the hardwood bell, Shechet has painted color scales—blue, green, yellow, and red, each hue ranging from lighter to darker—with additions of black and white pigment. These bands of color immediately attract the viewer’s eye, setting up something of a competition between the ceramic above and the painted “pedestal” below. In addition, Shechet placed a color scale on the round wood surface below the bell, all but invisible to viewers unless they awkwardly lower themselves to the ground and look up. The gesture reveals Shechet’s respect for the architectural base. No longer a passive and replaceable support system, this element is now an active and integral part of the overall work. As color scales belong to the “grammar” of painting, pedestals, one might say, belong to the very grammar of sculpture (“Bases are the eternal problem of the sculptor,” Shechet writes).18 Rather than banishing the base (as done in Minimalist sculpture, which sits directly on the floor), Shechet welcomes it as a fully expressive part of the work, essential to its meaning.19 Even works that almost rest on the floor—such as Day In Day Out (2020, p. 195)—never quite do so. In this particular example, part of the sculpture’s structure consists of a thin horizontal steel plate acting as its ground.

While Brancusi played with repeated, modular elements in his pedestals, Shechet, at least in this body of work, insists upon something feminine, even decorative, about the architectural base. Grammar has its fluted, colorful skirt. Fancy has it’s scalloped lace. Altered State has its running train of shiny, electroplated chrome. The Crown Jewel has its details of royal red and gold. Ripple and Ruffle has a golden brass strut that resembles a lifted hemline. Touching Summer rests on a ceramic conduit, trans- forming, in Shechet’s words, “a material that is marginalized as ‘fragile and feminine’ into something that is ‘monumental,’ durable and resilient.” 20 It is as if, in Shechet’s work, the emotional labors of feminine care and support are materialized, rendered physical, shown to be what they, in fact, are: a toughness, an integrity, a form of necessary architectural underpinning. For an outdoor installation, Full Steam Ahead (2018–19), at Madison Square Park in New York, the artist featured a series of squat, rounded forms made of pigmented resin, something like pedestals in and of themselves. Their sides were decorative, pleated, and curved. People could sit on them and rest. They were called Skirt Seats (2017–18, fig. 9). This, then, is Shechet’s innovation of the sculptural base: not simply to unify it with the overall art- work, but to align its support system with a type of foundational feminine labor, varyingly sensitive and tough.

Double Trouble

By this point the reader can see the strategy of this essay. Rodin. Picasso. Brancusi. It is clear that Shechet is engaging in a sustained dialogue with the ancestry of modern sculpture: she inherits and reworks the phenom- enology ushered in by Rodin, the magic making of Picasso, the play with pedestals initiated by Brancusi. These tools have allowed her, in part, to get out of the impasses of Minimalism and its conceptually driven legacies. Still, questions linger. It is not clear, for example, that the work of these masterpiece men has anything to do with a sculpture like Shechet’s Show Off (2018, fig. 10), which suggests a severed piece of mottled flesh extend- ing its reach with five dancing tentacle-arms. It is also not fully clear how the myth of masculine genius, which so aided the careers of the canonic men, may have, in turn, inhibited Shechet’s own reception.

Looking at Shechet’s career to date, one sees a feminism that is ever present. In 1992 she participated in a forum on motherhood, published in the journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G. In 2020 she contributed her work To Be Continued (2018) to the activist show Abortion Is Normal. For the former, her text reads as a clarion call to end the art world’s discrimination against women, particularly mothers. Speaking of the work of raising her two children, she writes, “I do not go to openings or to many studio visits, phone calls are minimal, WAC [Women’s Action Coalition] meetings come at story time. This relative sequestering from the mainstream has taken its toll on my art ‘career.’ From a professional point of view it is clear that to be an artist and a mom is double trouble.” 21 Then she adds, “The taboo against motherhood (and/or speaking of it) seems fostered by the male myth of art as separate from and above all else. This is old stuff.” 22

Old stuff, indeed, but still sadly potent. Until recently, critics have acknowledged Shechet as “underknown,” admitting that when hearing her name, one “can’t immediately picture any of Arlene Shechet’s artwork.”23 Curators have likewise wondered “why has it taken until now for Shechet to become a marquee name?”24 It is a question that animates this essay, too: given Shechet’s clear and vibrant engagement with a canon of sculptural greats, why has her work not been more readily adopted into art history?

Various answers abound: one is that Shechet refuses to work within a single idiom, employing a single material in a way that could create some- thing of a commercial image or signature. “I have, at my peril, resisted the name-brand thing,” she admits. 25 Another reason may be that many of the materials Shechet employs—clay, ceramics, porcelain—have connotations of craft, the decorative, the everyday, the low, the feminine. Thus they continue to be relegated to the margins of a discourse that stubbornly privileges High Art. (“The decorative arts is such a disparaged category,” Shechet observes, “because it’s thought of as female.”) 26 And yet another response would simply be to acknowledge that the institutions of art— museums, galleries, art history, auction houses—continue to be misogynist structures, hostile to women, hostile to mothers, despite decades of feminist critique and advocacy. This, too, is something Shechet has voiced, as the statements on motherhood above demonstrate. She has described the “plight” of the woman artist as the struggle “to achieve recognition in a white man’s world.” 27

It is my contention, however, that part of this plight within the particularity of Shechet’s own oeuvre stems from the fact that she is in dialogue with many other women artists who have themselves, historically, been cast
to the sidelines of traditional canons. As a prime example, Shechet has insisted repeatedly, beginning in 2013, that Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889– 1943) is an important influence; nonetheless, the institutions of art have responded with silence because Taeuber-Arp continues to be marginalized in our dominant histories and discourses.28 Shechet’s citations of this predecessor have not merely been verbal: she has referenced the Dadaist’s marionettes and costume designs (fig. 11) in works like The Body Is an Ear (2016) and the namesake Three Sided Dream (For Sophie) (2019, fig. 12), declaring her affinity for Taeuber-Arp’s engagement of medium hybridity, her union of the “geometric and organic,” abstraction and figuration.29 The failure of critics to investigate this lineage within Shechet’s career is all the more lamentable because so much of her oeuvre—its eroticism, eccentricity, monstrosity—stems from what I would like to call a matrilineal canon, a longstanding conversation with a history of women artists. To phrase this somewhat differently: Brancusi can help elucidate (in part) the colorful skirt of Grammar, but his work really has nothing to say about the sculpture’s bulging, porous, bodily ceramic above.

Mother Molds

At the core of the matrilineal canon that Shechet mines—precisely at a time when the art world has been privileging either blue-chip painting or an expansive post-studio practice (depending on one’s proclivities)—is an earlier moment when women sculptors were turning to their studios, experimenting with materials, and exploring notions of the body, the sexual, and the abject.30 Key to her practice seems to be a nexus of artists whose work was varyingly associated with postwar Surrealism and eccentric abstraction, with Louise Bourgeois (described by Shechet as a “beacon”) acting as the linchpin for both.31

The series of sculptures that Bourgeois (1911–2010) began executing in the early 1960s is central to her influence on Shechet. Works like Amoeba (1963–65, fig. 13) project from the wall and swell in form, offering viewers a gaping, visible orifice amid abstracted curves. The relief varyingly suggests a creature coming to life, a hardened crustacean shell, a human torso. Other sculptures, like Lair (1962), are developed from a series of labyrinthian coils layered and looped to create a nest-like form, but one that does not keep suggestions of the body and its processes at bay.32 Such organicism continues in Fée couturière (1963, fig. 14), a drooping plaster work hung from the ceiling, filled with crevices at once suggesting a being and a chamber, as if it were a sculpted hive. Much of what has been written on Bourgeois revolves around the “psychodrama” of her performed biography and her work’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory.33 What I would like to emphasize here, though, is Bourgeois’s use of plaster to sculpt works that evoke both the body and its surrounding space (nest, den, shell), creating encrusted “lairs” at once concealing, vulnerable, and “utterly regressive.” 34

The body comes into play in the work of another Surrealist artist, Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). Her soft sculptures are spun of flesh-colored textiles sewn and stuffed with wool and various odd objects to give them shape. The results, such as Nue couchée (1969–70) or the relief forms of Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot (1970, fig. 15), turn into a contortion of bellies and back- sides, flailing limbs and protruding knees. For Alyce Mahon, their plush forms suggest a body both enrapt with “palpable desire” and trembling  in seizure.35 Tanning’s work certainly courts the uncanny—as if a doll has come to life—and relies on its disjunctive connections to the human body (offering, say, torsos without heads). It also stages a tension between violently contorted forms and the softness of their construction. These postwar Surrealist explorations of the body—in all of its sexual, abject, and delirious capacities—occurred in tandem with the rise of what feminist critic and curator Lucy Lippard termed “eccentric abstraction.”36 Looking to artists such as Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou, Alice Adams, and Bourgeois herself, Lippard sought to explain a trend in modern sculpture that resisted the industrial finish, order, and literalism of Minimalist art. For Lippard, eccentric abstraction was “devoted to opening up new areas of materials, shape, color, and sensuous experience,” playing with “perversity,” eroticism, humor, and what she deemed a “life-giving element.” 37 With Ingeminate (1965), for example, Hesse (1936–1970) rejects industrial fabrication and only engages Minimalist repetition to the extent of doubling, offering viewers a humorous and absurdist pair of oversized sau- sages that prompt a series of bodily associations—breasts, testes, capillary tubes—while still also being “absolutely none of these things.” 38 Other artists in Lippard’s roster, such as Bontecou (b. 1931), create an “evocative element” with large, gaping relief structures, such as Untitled (1959), that at once summon a visceral response and prompt their own series of bodily metaphors. 39

How might these works—these “mother molds,” so to speak 40—inform aspects of Shechet’s own oeuvre? Perhaps we could read, for example, her Deep Listening (2018, fig. 16) as a type of homage to Bontecou, in which the cavities are tripled, simultaneously projecting outward with a series of crackled ceramic appendages and receding inward through a central carved wooden form. Like Bontecou, Shechet presents a medium-defying assemblage that is “rife with associations”—natural, bodily, mechanical—while ultimately remaining elusive in its allusions, refusing to be “pinned down by one-sided definitions” or singular interpretations, constantly expansive in its meanings.41 Other works, like Origins (2019, fig. 17), summon Bourgeois: the bronze sculpture hangs on the wall, protruding outward as a sort of full-bodied breastplate; at once hardened armor and sensitive skin, phallic and feminine, the work suggests an exoskeleton, as if it could be both body and bodily protection. In a some- what different mode, the aforementioned My Balzac takes the enwrapped coils of Bourgeois’s Lair and extends them outward, upward, building them up into a livelier creature, less the recluse and more the adventurer.

And still other works, like No Noise (2013) and Show Off, seem to be creatures of another sort, as if their fleshy ceramic skins have come to life, animated and organic like one of Tanning’s fabric constructions. The reliefs It Might Be That (2010), This and That (2016), and A Soft Hard Rain (2017, fig. 18) seem particularly to evoke Tanning’s Chambre 202 installation, as if Shechet’s kiln has produced mottled beasts who can climb up and emerge out of walls.

To be clear, there are vast differences among all of these artists: figures like Tanning were more in dialogue with earlier Surrealist artists, while Hesse was speaking to her Postminimalist peers; many of them, too, have been discursively linked to psychoanalytic theory, which seems less visibly pressing in Shechet’s oeuvre. Yet it is not the case that Shechet’s engagement with these artists is a merely selective or idiosyncratic synthetic pro- cess. I fully agree with Roberta Smith that her work is “full of references” yet resoundingly “debt-free.” 42 Rather, I think that Shechet taps into a legacy of women sculptors who played with wildly disparate materials in order to engage the body, the sexual, the abject. Such mining occurs at a moment (then and now) when bodies are continually regulated, surveyed, and managed, and at a moment (then and now) when the popularity of post-studio and conceptually driven practices seems to have eclipsed

the historic importance of women sculptors’ gaining access to the studio and, along with it, the right to experiment with diverse, weighty, and lively materials.43 Shechet, in other words, takes humor, sensuality, and irregularity—the broad components of an eccentric abstraction—and uses them to fuel a contemporary production entirely her own. The presence of those qualities demands an engagement beyond the canon of great men and, further, demands a feminist analysis that privileges material making and material play in addition to any text-based, image-based, or conceptually driven practices.

These elements of a contemporary eccentric abstraction are everywhere present in the artist’s latest works. Shechet’s Via the Moon (2020, p. 67), for example, consists of a hollow ceramic form, glazed in pinks and creams, which sits atop a hardwood structure brushed with layers of gray wash. Numerous crevices appear in the upper form, of diverse sorts and types, as if the cavernous holes of Bourgeois’s Fée couturière have been endlessly adapted and multiplied: the work contains tube-like appendages, cavities, puckered lips, opened folds, and layers of clay that have been lifted and reattached, leaving behind arcs of negative space. These openings prompt a chain of bodily associations: navels, anuses, eye sockets, aortas, gaping mouths, phallic spouts, labial slits. The metamorphic slippage refuses to close and it continues, expansively, from the everyday banal (exhaust pipes, leaky faucets) to the extraterrestrial (lunar craters). This is a facet of Shechet’s work that seems significant: the connotations are perpetually additive, the metamorphic chain endless. Thus the works do not simply negate binaries (masculine/feminine, inside/outside) but overwhelm them with an endless array of supplements (masculine, feminine, heart, hydrant, hole, moon). In accomplishing this, Shechet places the human body among other bodies, a profoundly equalizing gesture.

Shechet’s play with an abstract eroticism comes not only in forms riddled with orifices; she explores the metamorphic capacities of bounded surfaces, too. For instance, In My View (2020, p. 51) features a large, two-part ceramic form that grasps and holds the viewer’s attention. One part of the ceramic is glazed a suggestive, seemingly moist pink—muscular, labial, tongue-like—though areas of its curvaceous body are also covered with white crackling, giving us a flesh that might be sickly, a dried and flaky skin. This otherwise rosy form envelopes and holds another ceramic on top, its hue darkened a burnt garnet. Rounded, undulating, it’s edges consist of organic curves and its concave facade funnels inward. It is this puckering action that captures the gaze: gathering, sucking, contracting the folds of its surface and the viewer’s lines of sight into a tight invisible knot. Shechet’s sculptural form, in other words, summons the bodily not through appearance alone but also through action; as if it is both noun and verb, the body and its behaviors, the flesh and the squeeze.

The artist’s Oomph (2020, p. 211)—a lumbering form over six and a half feet in height, a bulbous, full-figured creature—animates us toward conclusion. It is one of Shechet’s works that carries all that we have been discussing so far: irregular in its shaping, with forms that twist into a surprise, it demands the phenomenological engagement of its viewer. Possessing a peridermal

exterior of darkened umber and golden browns, from afar it offers the textured skin of a wooden tree trunk—cast bronze, in fact, it is another example of Shechet’s magic-making material play. Not resting on the floor, its jovial form is lifted into space by a concrete cylindrical structure integral to the overall work. And what about the body and it’s metaphors? In Oomph, they are everywhere present: the surface expands into erotic bulges that suggest fulsome bellies, buttocks, and breasts, it contains crevices and slits, navels and clefts, a sheath occasionally pimpled and sometimes smooth, a skirt that swings up into the air. There’s a grotesquerie here, and a humor, too, as if one of Bourgeois’s more bosomy sculptures (say the bronze Avenza Revisited II, 1968–69) filled up and hurriedly went

to perform at the circus. The great surprise in this work comes when the viewer encounters the gaping vortex emerging out of one side on the sculpture’s top. An echo of Bontecou’s voids, a face exploded into a black hole, it revs up the metamorphic play: ear canal, singing trumpet, loud mouth, animal horn.

There’s a liveliness here—as indicated in the title Oomph—and I would argue that this energy extends to all of Shechet’s work. If Shechet forsakes the “psychodrama” of Bourgeois and Hesse, what she offers instead is far more rewarding: a practice further attuned to the aliveness of things, a feminist new materialism of sorts.44 Her work incorporates natural wood, wields alloys and molten metals, twists and forms organic clay, letting it become exposed to air, heat, and fire. The results are human-sized sculptures that carry a vibrancy, made of matter that carries its own meanings. Shechet has said that she wants to make works that reflect how it is “to be alive and breathing,” that manifest “what it’s like to live life within a body.” 45 She has articulated her studio practice as one attuned to “promoting aliveness,” a practice in which material is allowed to “speak back” and where time is given for “a conversation with the thing, body to body.” 46 It is a conversation that continues from the studio to the gallery. Here it becomes the responsibility of the viewer—the historian, the critic, the art lover, the collector, the curator—to take the time to listen, to hear what the work says of its own matter and meaning, to engage its lessons on the body, to become attentive to both its liveliness and its historicity, too.

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Michaëla Mohrmann, Associate Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery, for the kind invitation to reflect on Arlene Shechet’s work. I’m also grateful to Editorial Director Gillian Canavan, who provided many helpful resources during the writing process. Biggest thanks go to Arlene Shechet for her time, for her work, and for the spirited and energizing conversations that we had.