Arlene Shechet | Together With Distance

On a typical Sunday, while I was soaking up the extra hours of a sunny afternoon, I clicked on the film Tasha Giliberti created for STUFF, a group exhibition organized by sculptor Arlene Shechet at PACE. 

“I have this basic belief that art is so expansive that it makes its own connections, and I also believe in humans to be more expansive than we give them credit for,” I paused the film as Arlene articulated her curatorial vision to Oliver Shultz. Pondering over Arlene’s words, an intricate rush ran through my body—it must be incredibly liberating yet dicey to have faith that breaks through barriers and prepossessions. 

Born and raised in New York, Arlene has always been drawn to the built environment, but more than anything, Arlene’s fascination with building and inventing has allowed her to be fluent in many materials. By pushing the boundaries and exploring beyond each material’s innate qualities, Arlene has established her decades-long career on the endless possibility of approaching and creating works that are ever-evolving in the nature of their objectiveness.

The notions of fluidity and volition are instilled in every aspect of Arlene’s creative process. She interacts with the materials through empirical methods while responding intuitively in the moment. Instead of guiding the conversation, she is more interested in the chemistry that sparks between her artworks and the audience that comes upon them. 

Like the title of this story, Arlene and her works are open-ended—to know her as an artist, all you have to do is to accept the invitation, encounter, and embrace the experience freely.

The Only Message Is To Be Open

Q: How would you describe yourself as a curator?

A: Very open. I’m trying to be both the artist and curator at the same time. I’m trying to leap over the art historical correctness. Not that I have any argument with art history, but I want to incorporate a more open perspective that relates to artists more directly. I’m keeping one foot in being an artist and one foot in being a curator and trying to pull that together rather than have them act separately.

Q: Your art viewing experience, how does it differ when you have a different role as an artist and a curator?

A: I’m not separating out my personality or my functions in the world. I’m trying to integrate them. It’s possible to use my vision as an artist and do a curatorial job, practice, whatever that is. So I’m always looking at things and being interested in them, whether or not they’re in my studio, in somebody else’s studio, in a museum, in a gallery, it’s all the same eye. It’s often the same way of behaving.

Q: Do you communicate with the viewer through your curatorial work? Do you normally have a specific message that you want to communicate?

A: I’m absolutely against messages in my own work and in my curatorial work. The only message is to be open, to experience something deeply, and not separate mind and body as well as mind and emotion. So I’m definitely trying to express the joy of art. I think people are intimidated by art but don’t need to be. I’m trying to make things available without making it dumb.

STUFF, organized by Arlene Shechet, June 29 – August 19, 2022. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery.

Q: Why do you think people are intimidated by art?

A: I think sometimes it’s the personality of the art viewing situation that’s intimidating. Sometimes people are intimidated to go into a museum. Maybe it has a flavor of being a very proper place, a fancy place. So I think the physical space can be intimidating, which then projects a situation or message of pushing away people rather than embracing people. I don’t think it has to. I think once you reach that membrane, you can understand that everybody is trying to be open in as many ways as possible. I love art history, I love knowledge. There’s nothing wrong with intellectuality. But I don’t think that you need a framework. I think that the beauty of art is its own language, and we can relate to it on many different levels. One level is not higher than another level. It’s not hierarchical. It’s a language that leaps over a lot of problems.

Q: As much as art is expansive, do you think art is inclusive? And is it part of the curator’s responsibility to cultivate and forge that inclusivity so the viewer reciprocates in kind?

A: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if I can speak about all art. But great art is expansive. It’s made by people who are coming at it for the right reasons and are dedicated. It rises above all of the things that we need to rise above and expands into a space that nothing else can expand into.

Q: What role does the city play in your personal life and your work life as an artist?

A: I was very fortunate to be able to go to museums starting from a young age. So I actually did have that experience of going to museums and not knowing what I was doing there. New Yorkers have a sense of inclusivity about life. New York is one of the most diverse places in the world. People from all over the world are living very closely with one another, and for the most part, making it work. You can be on the subway or down the street and see people from every walk of life and every mode of thinking. I can’t imagine that that didn’t give me permission to be open to other things, art being one of them. There’s a cultural opening that New York provides. I think I was lucky to have that. I love architecture. I think that came out of living in New York and looking at buildings and understanding how things were built. So maybe that contributed to me being a sculptor.

Q: Besides your home, studio, galleries, museums, do you have any special places in the city that you go to get inspired or simply just spend some time there?

A: I love Grand Central Station: that incredible ceiling, the idea of having the history of people coming and going. I’m interested in portals. And there are small garden spaces, like the Morgan Library, which just opened. I like to think of every street in New York as special. I walk down the street and I say, “oh, I haven’t been on this street,” and there’s so much to look at. So yeah, I think every streetscape is amazing.

Still, Movement

Q: As an artist who’s so experimental and forward with pushing against the creative boundaries, what about making sculptures that excites you the most?

A: Well, number one, it’s such a dynamic medium because sculpture can be very still and yet have movement. Every view and every sight line is important. It creates a kind of choreography for the viewer so that the viewer must move around in order to understand it. It’s like magic. I find it incredibly challenging and interesting to try to make something that has a 360-degree point of view. Something that exists in real space, incorporates air and light, and changes so much with every shadow and every light. Often, painters want to control the light.  Sculptors are the opposite—let’s not control it, let’s see it change constantly. Returning to New York City and the built environment: Everything is built. I ‘m not just interested in the buildings. I’m interested in the process of building the buildings. When I was a kid, and even now, I would stand in front of one of those barriers surrounding a construction site and watch its workers build a foundation. It fascinates me. And in watching that process, I can become privy to a language of building and making things. A building in and of itself is very interesting to me.

Q: Would you describe your creative process to be deliberate or intuitive?

A: Both. The making of the work involves intuition, not over-determining what the end will be, which doesn’t mean that it’s not seriously considered. It’s just that as I make something, that thing I’m making participates in the decision. It always sounds a little crazy to people who aren’t doing it, but it pushes back, it gives me information that maybe I didn’t think about, but you have it in front of me. If I’m paying close attention, I can play with what is coming up and then push that in different directions. Once I feel like the language within the piece that involves intuition and play is complete, there’s a whole level of engineering and craftsmanship that I have to use in order to make something. For me, it has to have a high level of accomplishment in the technical aspects as well as the aesthetic, so that they stop being separate, that they come together to be one.

Q: Your unique glazing technique when working with clay, how did it come about?

A: I don’t have one method. Some glazing techniques give me a broad language of being able to use a big palette—a lot of different textures and colors. And that involves a lot of scientific method. Hundreds and thousands of hours of testing over many years. Because the bottom line of what ceramic involves is sticking something in an oven at two thousand degrees for days and then cooling it for days. Sometimes I think that’s just unbearable. On the other hand, the alchemical nature of it, the fact that you’re putting fire, earth, water, and air together, the chemistry of that is very compelling. It is extremely difficult to find other materials that do as much. It’s also ancient, so it flies across time. When I first started doing ceramics in the art world, it was 12 or 13 years ago, and nobody wanted to think about ceramics at that time. There’s a hierarchy of what was acceptable, and I was attracted to it in part because it was so cast off. It’s sort of vulgar or ugly as a raw material. I mean, it’s ugly and beautiful at the same time. That ugliness and beauty, I really love. In my work in general and in other people’s work, if something’s too pretty or beautiful, it’s not interesting. It has that as its basic quality, but it’s extremely demanding. So I thought, I’m going to take this vulgar thing and I’m going to make it beyond the outskirts of the art world.

Arlene Shechet, Together: Pacific Time: 6 p.m., 2020-2021, glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, 57-1/2” × 24-1/2” × 23” (146.1 cm × 62.2 cm × 58.4 cm). © Arlene Shechet, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Arlene Shechet, Together: Pacific Time: 9 p.m., 2020, glazed ceramic, powder coated steel, 24” × 19” × 12-1/2” (61 cm × 48.3 cm × 31.8 cm). © Arlene Shechet, courtesy Pace Gallery.

The Language of Color

Q: Let’s move on to talk about your solo show, Couple of, at T Space, I read that the title Couple of is embedded in the idea of couplets, could you elaborate a bit more on the context and inspiration of it?

A: Over time, I have seen that I used doubles. There’s just an interesting thing with doubling and mirroring. It has both tension and opening. It’s about coming together, but it’s also about creating a space within it. So that’s quite compelling. For the opening of the show, I had a collaboration with a musician and a poet, because the poet was writing a book of couplets and the musician was experimenting with fugues. We all came together and reinforced the notion of doubling and mirroring as going across all these mediums. Instead of saying “Couple,” which would be closed, the title Couple of has an opening to it. I like questions more than I like answers.

Q: How do you incorporate the surroundings when creating and making art for a site-specific project?

A: Everything is site specific, in my view. Of course, when it’s outdoors, there’s a bigger choice. T space was initiated by Steven Holl. Every summer, he does two shows, and I was one of them this year. He invited me and said, “oh, well, I have this sculpture trail and very few people have done things for it, would you be interested in doing something?” As I was walking on the trail, it became so clear that I wanted to do something. There was a crevice of a boulder, and I built a sculpture inside the boulder. I love doing things outside because people can just be passing by. The audience is much larger and the audience is not a tutored art audience, but rather just anybody. I’m very interested in just anybody seeing and interacting with them. And in this case, on a private trail with huge boulders, it’s like interacting with the geology of the Hudson Valley, interacting with the trees, the light, and the smell of the forest.

Q: Another series that I like to talk about is the Together series, you created this in 2020, and you titled each piece after the hours of the day. Time seemed like an even more obscure and elusive concept during the pandemic, how did it affect you and your approach to art making?

A: It felt like the dark time and that mood, almost the first time in my life, kept me out of the studio for a while, for about a month and a half. Because the studio is such a lifeline for me, it became clearer to my family and to me that I needed to find my way back. We were isolated but I was very lucky to have my studio in the Hudson Valley and close to my home here. So using that good fortune, I decided that instead of thinking about everything or making work that was about being despondent, I was going to try to make work about what I needed to get out of my despondency, and color became one of those things, but also I needed the work to have a kind of vulnerability. I have always wanted to make things that reflect what it’s like to be alive and in a body, and that has a kind of vulnerability and precariousness built into it. So I started to work on these smaller pieces that I could be lifting up by myself and moving around what was in my studio. But making that intense color, I realized there was so much strife that color could be a language that people can’t fight back, because people were fighting with each other with words. I feel like that’s where we’re at now, in our world condition. Words are too loaded. We’re giving them too much importance and that we have to find new vocabularies. The language of color or the language of art could be a vocabulary. Having intense color really brought me joy because I have always been excited by color, but I made works that were more monochromatic, so the density of the color became really different. I love the Medieval Book of Hours and that was a reference that I had about time. Each time period is a kind of print. So I started to see them as a version of a contemplative object that held time and had the language of color.

Arlene Shechet, Mystery History (for T Space, detail), 2022, dyed hardwood, steel, glazed ceramic and silver leaf, 84” × 34” × 24”(213.4 cm x 86.4 cm x 61 cm). © Arlene Shechet, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Arlene Shechet, Iron Twins (for T Space), 2022, cast iron, 49” × 25-1/2” × 38” (124.5 cm × 64.8 cm × 96.5 cm). © Arlene Shechet, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Knowing within the Unknowing

Q: I really resonate with your liberating and unconstrained approach to art, the idea of creating and not knowing where it will lead to and how it will look like, it is poetically philosophical. Is there still anything that you want to be in control of and absolutely have to be sure of during this process though?

A: I am 100% maniacal about how I make my work. I’m not mushy about that. Some people, when they think about the phrase “not knowing,” they immediately regard it as ignorant and oblivious, but it is the opposite of that.  The idea of “not knowing” comes from Buddhism. It goes beyond the limits of knowing and practices the wisdom of being. When I’m making something, I have to be sure of everything. The main thing about using your intuition is that you are very confident. It’s a form of trust in yourself. For instance, when I’m working on sculptures for a year or two, sometimes more than two years, during that time, there are many periods where the work is quite ugly, quite awful, physically and emotionally. I have to have the confidence to work through it, and sometimes the confidence to get rid of it, to just throw it out, even when it’s finished. I throw things out when they look too good, because it doesn’t have the edge. It’s an expression of knowing within the unknowing. 

Q: You once said that “the nature of sculpture is really three dimensions insist upon hiding something,” and also “the thing that’s unseen is sometimes way more interesting than what people want you to see.” Could you elaborate a bit more on these two points?

A: The sculpture in its very nature is hiding. And what it’s hiding as you walk around, as you view it from different angles, keeps on changing. All those differences are what’s hidden. What you’re not seeing at first, very often in life and in art, is more interesting than what you are seeing. So it’s a question of peeling off the layers and spending time with the artwork. 

Q: Is there anything you’d like our audience to remember the next time they go to see one of your exhibitions?

A: Well, I think to realize that the artwork is trying to speak to you, and listen: do you hear anything? Do you see anything? I am making things that are trying to reach out to the audience, and how the audience receives it is up to them. But if I’m doing my job, they will receive something. I am trying to reach out. I am trying to create a bridge between me and my audience, between the artwork and my audience. And they can know that there are many roads to that bridge.

Interview by Carrie Xu. Photography by Runze Yu.

This story was published in noisé 02 A Falling Leaf Heralds Autumn, 2022.