great laugh
This dancing guy is the most effective way to conjure a smile on someone's face. It consists of only five bars which are smartly located.
The legs walk so hard, that you would get muscle gain in deputy. By the right-angle between the torso and the arm we recognize our autistic defects. The neck and head are stretched bizarre. This piece of art makes us happy.
The sculptures are usually a serious one. This piece is 100% positive and asks us to stap forward, to balance, to dance, to be curious.
Delicious, great laugh.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
lekker lachen
Dit dansende mannetje is het meest effectieve manier om een glimlach op iemands gezicht te toveren. Het bestaat maar uit vijf balken, die op een uitgekiende plek zitten.
Met de benen wordt zo hard gelopen dat je plaatsvervangend spierpijn krijgt. Door de haakse hoek tussen de torso en een arm herkennen wij onze autistische gebreken. De hals en het hoofd zijn bizar ver uitgerekt. Dit kunstwerk maakt ons blij.
Sculpturen zijn meestal serieus. Dit kunstwerk is 100% positief en vraagt ons om een stap vooruit te zetten, te balanceren, te dansen, nieuwsgierig te zijn.
Heerlijk, lekker lachen.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.associationforpublicart.org:
The texture and the playful quality of the prancing figure provide a lively contrast to the formal stone-and-glass walls of the lobby.
www.wp.wwu.edu:
As he progressed as an artist, Shapiro wanted to resist the confines that galleries placed on art such as walls, right angles, and scale ability. This is why he started building bigger scale pieces to stand alone as sculptures. Shapiro built his pieces out of wood, wire, or casted bronze, so they could hold up against weather outside. However, Shapiro is quoted as saying 'what is important is the utilization of the material' not the material itself. In his later works, Shapiro depicted the feeling of falling or mocking gravity to evoke the sensation of carelessness.
www.associationforpublicart.org:
From these four they selected Shapiro, a widely recognized contemporary sculptor. Though his style connects him to the minimalist movement, his work is considered less austere, more 'human' than she severe forms of minimalism. The sculpture for One Logan Square was the largest work Shapiro had yet produced. The bronze was cast from a wooden form, and the wood-grain detail was emphasized with a brown patina. The texture and the playful quality of the prancing figure provide a lively contrast to the formal stone-and-glass walls of the lobby.
www.artcritical.com:
When it comes to whimsy, exuberance and pizzazz, the sky’s the limit for Joel Shapiro.
Shapiro does not reject the anthropo-morphic basis of most traditional sculpture. His sculpture does not resist symbolic readings, even though his work has a formalist bent. All his works are untitled, even the ones that instantly remind us of the human figure. Subjects are evoked, but not always assertively. The welded rectangular blocks somewhat or closely resemble organic forms: trees, roots, human figures. They also represent lines of force, bursts of energy emanating from an invisible source and drifting toward the perimeters.
Whilet may be that, like seeing shapes in clouds, making correspondences between his sculptures and common objects in the world is cognitively empty, it is nonetheless the case that Shapiro manipulates figuration and plays with our powers of recognition. The reduction of means relates to Shapiro’s poetic worldview. In the early 1900s Suprematists and Cubists painted or drew figures consisting of squares (the pelvis, stomach, chest and shoulders) and rectangles (arms, legs and an emaciated block head). Suprematists used squares, circles and rectangles to create a complex symbolic language. Shapiro’s figures are not inspired by a revolutionary zeal or longing for a philosopher’s paradise. In fact, one of the most interesting things about Shapiro’s work is the way in which the viewer projects human qualities on to geometric structures.
Shapiro emphasizes contingency and the sculptures in this exhibit that do not resemble figures are abstract assemblages reminiscent of the pieces in David Smith’s Cubi seh’s totemic and animated, polished and scumbled stainless-steel sculptures consist of squares and rectangles. Smith, like Shapiro used a limited assortment of shapes to build complex arrangements. The impersonality of Shapiro’s sculptures lends a bit of Easter Island mystery and primitive gusto to them. He provides minimal details and little or no surface texture. The twists and turns made by his forms conjure up cubist simultaneity, and involve the compression of many different points of view.
Barbara Rose, commenting on Post-Minimalist sculpture in her book Autocritique stated that 'it lies around passively and dismally, defensively retreating from engagement with the environment rather than actively and aggressively demanding confrontation.' Shapiro avoids the typical pitfalls of Minimalism, aloofness to the point of absurdity, rejection of metaphor, and a pretentious monotonousness, by transforming rectangles into active figures. His block people tumble, run, lurch and leap. They are braced fo or in the midst of doing something, and this activates the space around them. Dan Flavin devised a way to engage the spaces surrounding the art object. His sculptures literally shed light upon the walls, floor and ceiling. They force the viewer to consider the entire context the art object exists in. Shapiro does the same by making forms that are reminiscent of the human figure. Some of the sculptures are assertively humanoid and resemble the crisp black figures on roadsigns. Perhaps they represent 'anonymous human units of mass society.' Shapiro countered Minimalist anonymity with figuration and asymmetry. As Max Kozloff stated in his book Cubism/Futurism, 'Because we are so egocentric in our nervous, muscular, and social identifications with it, the image of the human body can become a remarkable index of meaning in the work of an artist…' These sculptures also push people away from them because of their explosive quality and the way in which they threaten to topple over. We anxiously await the fr> www.tate.org.uk:
Discussing his figurative sculptures in 1982, Shapiro stated: ‘I am interested in those moments when it appears that a figure is a figure, and other moments when it looks like a bunch of wood stuck together – moments when it simultaneously configures and disfigures’ (Joel Shapiro, ‘Commentaries’, in Whitney Museum of American Art 1982, p.101). Although he made this statement before Untitled was produced, this sculpture seems to exemplify Shapiro’s idea of creating a work that is both a single, cohesive figure and a collection of discrete blocks. The critic Donald Kuspit has argued that all of Shapiro’s sculptures feature this ambiguity, claiming that ‘each part’ of any work ‘has a geometrical self-evidence, whose strong, determinate presence is compromised by its ambiguous – insecure, tenuous – connection with the other parts. The over-all result is an open, inconclusive form’ (Donald Kuspit, ‘Joel Shapiro’s Figurative Constructions’, in Joel Shapiro Roan Academy in Rome, Rome 1999, p.88). In Untitled this disjunctive quality is exacerbated by the varied scale of its ‘limbs’, which prevents any concrete interpretation of the work as a coherent body. In 1982 Shapiro also connected his use of bronze casting with this same dynamic of unity and fragmentation. Discussing an earlier figurative sculpture that was cast in bronze (Untitled 1980–1, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), he wrote: ‘Although the piece is very much about joining, I was interested in the unification of it through casting and the insistence on its form through casting. I was adamant about it being cast as one piece’ (Shapiro 1982, p.101).
Discussing Shapiro’s figurative sculptures in 1982, the critic Roberta Smith argued that they generally revolve around a ‘vigorous’ relationship between ‘the horizontal ground plane of the sculpture’ and the ‘vertical position’ adopted by some of its elements (Roberta Smith, ‘Joel Shapiro’, in Whitney Museum of Americaseems to address this dynamic relationship through its raised, vertical ‘leg’ that is balanced by a prone ‘torso’, as well as the elongation of the leg and the slight elevation of the torso from the ground.
www.wikipedia.org:
Joel Shapiro (born September 27, 1941 New York City, New York) is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. The artist is classified as a Minimalist as demonstrated in his works, which were mostly defined through the materials used, without allusions to subjects outside of the works. He lives and works in New York City. He is married to the artist Ellen Phelan.
While serving his Peace Corp time in India, Shapiro saw many Indian art works, and has sa"India gave me the sense of ... the possibility of being an artist." In India "Art was pervasive and integral to the society", and he has said that "the struggle in my work to find a structure that reflects real psychological states may well use Indian sculpture as a model." His early work, which also drew inspiration from Greek art, is characterized by some by its small size, but Shapiro has discounted this perception, describing his early works as, "all about scale and the small size was an aspect of their scale". He described scale as "A very active thing that's changing and altering as time unfolds, consciously or unconsciously," and, "a relationship of size and an experience. You can have something small that has big scale." In these works he said that he was trying "to describe an emotional state, my own longing or desire". He also said that during this early period in his career he was interested in the strategies of artists Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd.
By the 1980s, Shapiro began to explore larger and life-size forms in pieces that were still reminiscent of Indian and Greek sculpture but also inspired by the early modernist works by Edgar Degas and Constantin Brâncusi. The bulk of these pieces have been commissioned or acquired by museums and galleries. Later, Shapiro further expanded his repertoire by creating pieces that depicted the dynamism of human form. For instance, his subjects were portrayed in the act of dancing, crouching, and falling, among others that explored the themes of balance, cantilever, projection, and compression. His later works can have the appearance of flying, being impossibly suspended in space, and/or defying gravity. He has said about this shift in his work that he"wanted to make work that stood on its own, and wasn't limited by architecture and by the ground and the wall and right angles." These can be demonstrated in the case of the large-size outdoor art he made for the Hood Museum of Art. The bronze piece was an attenuated form that leans over a walkway and its near-falling form is viewed as an energizing element in the museum's courtyard. This sculpture, like all of Shapiro's mature works, are untitled.
This dancing guy is the most effective way to conjure a smile on someone's face. It consists of only five bars which are smartly located.
The legs walk so hard, that you would get muscle gain in deputy. By the right-angle between the torso and the arm we recognize our autistic defects. The neck and head are stretched bizarre. This piece of art makes us happy.
The sculptures are usually a serious one. This piece is 100% positive and asks us to stap forward, to balance, to dance, to be curious.
Delicious, great laugh.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
lekker lachen
Dit dansende mannetje is het meest effectieve manier om een glimlach op iemands gezicht te toveren. Het bestaat maar uit vijf balken, die op een uitgekiende plek zitten.
Met de benen wordt zo hard gelopen dat je plaatsvervangend spierpijn krijgt. Door de haakse hoek tussen de torso en een arm herkennen wij onze autistische gebreken. De hals en het hoofd zijn bizar ver uitgerekt. Dit kunstwerk maakt ons blij.
Sculpturen zijn meestal serieus. Dit kunstwerk is 100% positief en vraagt ons om een stap vooruit te zetten, te balanceren, te dansen, nieuwsgierig te zijn.
Heerlijk, lekker lachen.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.associationforpublicart.org:
The texture and the playful quality of the prancing figure provide a lively contrast to the formal stone-and-glass walls of the lobby.
www.wp.wwu.edu:
As he progressed as an artist, Shapiro wanted to resist the confines that galleries placed on art such as walls, right angles, and scale ability. This is why he started building bigger scale pieces to stand alone as sculptures. Shapiro built his pieces out of wood, wire, or casted bronze, so they could hold up against weather outside. However, Shapiro is quoted as saying 'what is important is the utilization of the material' not the material itself. In his later works, Shapiro depicted the feeling of falling or mocking gravity to evoke the sensation of carelessness.
www.associationforpublicart.org:
From these four they selected Shapiro, a widely recognized contemporary sculptor. Though his style connects him to the minimalist movement, his work is considered less austere, more 'human' than she severe forms of minimalism. The sculpture for One Logan Square was the largest work Shapiro had yet produced. The bronze was cast from a wooden form, and the wood-grain detail was emphasized with a brown patina. The texture and the playful quality of the prancing figure provide a lively contrast to the formal stone-and-glass walls of the lobby.
www.artcritical.com:
When it comes to whimsy, exuberance and pizzazz, the sky’s the limit for Joel Shapiro.
Shapiro does not reject the anthropo-morphic basis of most traditional sculpture. His sculpture does not resist symbolic readings, even though his work has a formalist bent. All his works are untitled, even the ones that instantly remind us of the human figure. Subjects are evoked, but not always assertively. The welded rectangular blocks somewhat or closely resemble organic forms: trees, roots, human figures. They also represent lines of force, bursts of energy emanating from an invisible source and drifting toward the perimeters.
Whilet may be that, like seeing shapes in clouds, making correspondences between his sculptures and common objects in the world is cognitively empty, it is nonetheless the case that Shapiro manipulates figuration and plays with our powers of recognition. The reduction of means relates to Shapiro’s poetic worldview. In the early 1900s Suprematists and Cubists painted or drew figures consisting of squares (the pelvis, stomach, chest and shoulders) and rectangles (arms, legs and an emaciated block head). Suprematists used squares, circles and rectangles to create a complex symbolic language. Shapiro’s figures are not inspired by a revolutionary zeal or longing for a philosopher’s paradise. In fact, one of the most interesting things about Shapiro’s work is the way in which the viewer projects human qualities on to geometric structures.
Shapiro emphasizes contingency and the sculptures in this exhibit that do not resemble figures are abstract assemblages reminiscent of the pieces in David Smith’s Cubi seh’s totemic and animated, polished and scumbled stainless-steel sculptures consist of squares and rectangles. Smith, like Shapiro used a limited assortment of shapes to build complex arrangements. The impersonality of Shapiro’s sculptures lends a bit of Easter Island mystery and primitive gusto to them. He provides minimal details and little or no surface texture. The twists and turns made by his forms conjure up cubist simultaneity, and involve the compression of many different points of view.
Barbara Rose, commenting on Post-Minimalist sculpture in her book Autocritique stated that 'it lies around passively and dismally, defensively retreating from engagement with the environment rather than actively and aggressively demanding confrontation.' Shapiro avoids the typical pitfalls of Minimalism, aloofness to the point of absurdity, rejection of metaphor, and a pretentious monotonousness, by transforming rectangles into active figures. His block people tumble, run, lurch and leap. They are braced fo or in the midst of doing something, and this activates the space around them. Dan Flavin devised a way to engage the spaces surrounding the art object. His sculptures literally shed light upon the walls, floor and ceiling. They force the viewer to consider the entire context the art object exists in. Shapiro does the same by making forms that are reminiscent of the human figure. Some of the sculptures are assertively humanoid and resemble the crisp black figures on roadsigns. Perhaps they represent 'anonymous human units of mass society.' Shapiro countered Minimalist anonymity with figuration and asymmetry. As Max Kozloff stated in his book Cubism/Futurism, 'Because we are so egocentric in our nervous, muscular, and social identifications with it, the image of the human body can become a remarkable index of meaning in the work of an artist…' These sculptures also push people away from them because of their explosive quality and the way in which they threaten to topple over. We anxiously await the fr> www.tate.org.uk:
Discussing his figurative sculptures in 1982, Shapiro stated: ‘I am interested in those moments when it appears that a figure is a figure, and other moments when it looks like a bunch of wood stuck together – moments when it simultaneously configures and disfigures’ (Joel Shapiro, ‘Commentaries’, in Whitney Museum of American Art 1982, p.101). Although he made this statement before Untitled was produced, this sculpture seems to exemplify Shapiro’s idea of creating a work that is both a single, cohesive figure and a collection of discrete blocks. The critic Donald Kuspit has argued that all of Shapiro’s sculptures feature this ambiguity, claiming that ‘each part’ of any work ‘has a geometrical self-evidence, whose strong, determinate presence is compromised by its ambiguous – insecure, tenuous – connection with the other parts. The over-all result is an open, inconclusive form’ (Donald Kuspit, ‘Joel Shapiro’s Figurative Constructions’, in Joel Shapiro Roan Academy in Rome, Rome 1999, p.88). In Untitled this disjunctive quality is exacerbated by the varied scale of its ‘limbs’, which prevents any concrete interpretation of the work as a coherent body. In 1982 Shapiro also connected his use of bronze casting with this same dynamic of unity and fragmentation. Discussing an earlier figurative sculpture that was cast in bronze (Untitled 1980–1, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), he wrote: ‘Although the piece is very much about joining, I was interested in the unification of it through casting and the insistence on its form through casting. I was adamant about it being cast as one piece’ (Shapiro 1982, p.101).
Discussing Shapiro’s figurative sculptures in 1982, the critic Roberta Smith argued that they generally revolve around a ‘vigorous’ relationship between ‘the horizontal ground plane of the sculpture’ and the ‘vertical position’ adopted by some of its elements (Roberta Smith, ‘Joel Shapiro’, in Whitney Museum of Americaseems to address this dynamic relationship through its raised, vertical ‘leg’ that is balanced by a prone ‘torso’, as well as the elongation of the leg and the slight elevation of the torso from the ground.
www.wikipedia.org:
Joel Shapiro (born September 27, 1941 New York City, New York) is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. The artist is classified as a Minimalist as demonstrated in his works, which were mostly defined through the materials used, without allusions to subjects outside of the works. He lives and works in New York City. He is married to the artist Ellen Phelan.
While serving his Peace Corp time in India, Shapiro saw many Indian art works, and has sa"India gave me the sense of ... the possibility of being an artist." In India "Art was pervasive and integral to the society", and he has said that "the struggle in my work to find a structure that reflects real psychological states may well use Indian sculpture as a model." His early work, which also drew inspiration from Greek art, is characterized by some by its small size, but Shapiro has discounted this perception, describing his early works as, "all about scale and the small size was an aspect of their scale". He described scale as "A very active thing that's changing and altering as time unfolds, consciously or unconsciously," and, "a relationship of size and an experience. You can have something small that has big scale." In these works he said that he was trying "to describe an emotional state, my own longing or desire". He also said that during this early period in his career he was interested in the strategies of artists Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd.
By the 1980s, Shapiro began to explore larger and life-size forms in pieces that were still reminiscent of Indian and Greek sculpture but also inspired by the early modernist works by Edgar Degas and Constantin Brâncusi. The bulk of these pieces have been commissioned or acquired by museums and galleries. Later, Shapiro further expanded his repertoire by creating pieces that depicted the dynamism of human form. For instance, his subjects were portrayed in the act of dancing, crouching, and falling, among others that explored the themes of balance, cantilever, projection, and compression. His later works can have the appearance of flying, being impossibly suspended in space, and/or defying gravity. He has said about this shift in his work that he"wanted to make work that stood on its own, and wasn't limited by architecture and by the ground and the wall and right angles." These can be demonstrated in the case of the large-size outdoor art he made for the Hood Museum of Art. The bronze piece was an attenuated form that leans over a walkway and its near-falling form is viewed as an energizing element in the museum's courtyard. This sculpture, like all of Shapiro's mature works, are untitled.