Page 105 - Flaunt 170 - The Phoenix Issue - Kiernan Shipka

new york-based artist arlene shechet has forged a career creating sculptures that defy her medium’s longstanding con- ventions. Pieces suggest a universe liberated from the shackles of rigid hierarchies and freed from reductive identarian no- tions—a regeneration, a different kind of dawning. In Skirts, her first solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, New York this spring, Shechet presents her latest works: large but still human-scaled sculptures that juxtapose disparate materials, including his- torically marginalized ones such as ceramics, in a wide array of forms, ranging from the biomorphic to the geometric. As suggested by the show’s witty, multivalent title—a verb, sculptur- al term, and misogynist expression—her art obliquely addresses the enduring gender disparities structuring the art world and, more broadly, contemporary society. In anticipation of Skirts, fellow upstate sculptor and installation art contemporary, Judy Pfaff, visited Shechet’s studio to reflect on their respective careers navigating the oft-inhospitable waters of the art world, fearlessness, process, and spirituality. Judy Pfaff: The first time I saw your work was in Art on Paper. You had the cover? Arlene Shechet: Yes! JP: And I was like, ‘who’s doing that? I’m really jealous.’ Beautiful paper vessels in blue and white. I didn’t realize that the imagery on the pots were of the plans of stupas and also referenced Delft Blue porcelain. Anyway, so many sets of opposites in this and most of your work. Someone said of your work that they are “di- agrams of cognitive dissonance — or of just how complicated the world is.” You had an interview online with Jane... AS: Dickson? Jane Dickson? JP: Yes! It seemed that she knows you really well. I hope this goes as good as that! AS: Judy, the thing that she didn’t have that you have is a deep understanding of what it means to be a sculptor, which is so much its own language and so much in our bodies, right? I was telling somebody the other day that if a painter comes by, or is even in my house, they always put themselves in one spot in rela- tion to the thing. And it made me think about a linear language as opposed to the sculpture which is a circular language. JP: It seems to me that if you make something in 3D, you can add and subtract over time, always watching, physically in space, becoming, waiting for it to make sense, and you don’t really know what it is. The making reveals itself. AS: Because you don’t know yet. It’s like meeting a new character, new person. I think it might be true of all art that is successful. I’m about to have a show and I don’t know it. And that’s one of the reasons to have a show. I mean, there are the obvious pe- destrian reasons to have a show and necessary reasons to have a show and I want to share the work outside of my body. I want to be in the world with the work but I’m just looking forward to learning what the work is by seeing it outside of my studio and putting it together in a different rhythm. JP: It’s been thrilling to watch the pace of your growth, the amping up of materials and scale in the last few years, Arlene. You worked with paper, then clay, adding wood, steel, glass. You add a new material, a new element, a new level of understand- ing. In the city you do the thinking and the model-making. In Woodstock, you work on the clay. You’re like on fire. Your new studio is in Kingston with big stuff, wood, trees, major trees! And then I was thinking about the choice of Woodstock as a spiritual center, home of Byrdcliffe, the oldest center for the arts and crafts movement. AS: That’s the reason I moved here. JP: I was wondering, are you following your intuition or what you need? What your body needs? What your thoughts need? AS: No, but I do operate in the world intuitively, and the Wood- stock thing really happened after 9/11; the city went from being my dream, no problems, everything is perfect, to the next morn- ing being like ‘get me out of here.’ JP: Woodstock, it’s a special place. And people got it a very long time ago. My introduction to Byrdcliffe was through the research of Tom Wolf. He walked me around and it became clear of its importance as a utopian and spiritual community. It’s the land of clay, wood, stone, cement, bluestone. Kingston, where your new studio is now, is where all the brick, stone, and cement were made that built so much of New York City and the Brooklyn Bridge. So much history here. AS: It is deep here because it’s a real place and there’s a lot of in- teresting architecture. It’s sad that a lot of things got taken down. It was the first capital of New York. I am an architecture buff. JP: I think we share that too! So much has happened to you Arlene, amazing things. You have tested venerable institutions, you’ve organized a retrospective of 20-years work, and managed to produce outdoor gigantic porcelain sculpture, and in a few days, opening a show of new work at Pace. At The Frick, you were the first living artist there! They must have trusted you in a deep way. AS: It grew. For instance at The Frick, that goes back to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, so I was working at the Meissen Porcelain Factory. I didn’t know exactly why I was doing that except that I loved factories and seeing early industrial archi- tecture. I was traveling back and forth to Germany. Arlene Shechet IT’S A VERB, A NOUN, BUT IN BOTH INSTANCES RATHER BEAUTIFUL Interviewed by Judy Pfaff 99