Maybe the most striking thing about Joel Shapiro’s exhibition is how you end up anthropomorphising each piece of work – despite the fact they’re basically just bits of painted plywood. Look at that bolshy red one over there, you think. And how about that cute little blue one, hanging over there in the corner. Despite being inert sculptures, they all seem to dip and soar and dive – propelled silently, invisibly, by their own internal drama.
Shapiro was born in 1941, which makes him about a decade younger than the chief cadre of American minimalists who set about removing as much as they possibly could – imagery, symbolism, handcraft – from their art in the ’60s and ’70s. (This tended to culminate in things like steel shelves, rows of bricks and all that other stuff that still drives people berserk in galleries today.) By contrast, Shapiro – a self-confessed romanticist – seems to be trying to put stuff back into his sculptures, while honouring his forefathers’ restraint.
His sculptures can be lumped into two categories: big, boxy and made up of torquing parts, or thin, slight and made up of perpendicular planes. Some are suspended with cord in mid-air. Some sit on the floor. They’re all slickly made, although clearly by the hand of a carpenter rather than a machine in a factory. Tack-marks and eyebolts connecting the cords all feel like part of the art, part of the spectacle. But – as per the old minimalist adage – it takes you, the viewer, walking around them, to bring that spectacle to life. To be in the presence of Shapiro’s work is to feel like you’ve wandered into a tableau vivant, each piece a protagonist, bickering and jostling with the next. Especially that bolshy red one. That one’s definitely a troublemaker.