Shape Report Defined
A photo essay with roving, interconnected considerations of shape.
The Shape Report is an evolving index of found form, aleatory assemblage and folk sculpture seen while walking around.
It surveys the territory somewhere between Googie’s Atomic populism and UnMonumental sculpture’s improv comedy. It loves a laff within the built environment.
I don’t remember exactly when I decided to train my sights on shape, but it was around when I came out as a Minimalist Sculptor.
As detailed in previous entries, my MFA cohort seemed to view my work as kitschy and retro, concerned with thrift store acquisitions and gift shop souvenirs, nothing slick or digital. I considered myself to be INTERROGATING AMERICAN ACCUMULATION by dragging a pillow case full of broken angels into the desert, installing nuns in abandoned grottoes to be riddled with bullet holes, photographing bonneted cacti at mountain outposts, spines perforating their paper wimples.
I was assuming a brazen posture, cutting through inhospitable terrains in my Toyota Camry, nurturing my isolated auteur persona, especially in the thick of quarantine.
My MATERIAL was the multiple gin and tonics I downed at the dive bars far from the Strip.
My CONTENT was excess and abjection, hallucinatory logic wreathed in blinking lights.
My work at the Las Vegas Neon Museum fanned this flame.
I’d give 45 minute tours of the collection peppered with bad stand up comedy on 100 degree nights. Wearing a safari hat and tiny amplifier around my neck, I’d bellow across the stagnant desert air. I’d gesture at golden nuggets studded with broken bulbs, four pointed stars crowning a stylized mushroom cloud, and giant decontextualized letter forms as grasshoppers bounced around and incinerated in the colored footlights.
At home in my tiny casita apartment I read Amy Sillman’s landmark essay (emphasis mine) “Further Notes on Shape.” To wit, once you start seeing shape, you can’t unsee it. Reading this queer painter’s account of Ab Ex boy brawls over form (91) snapped my own concerns into focus.
When it came time to stage my thesis, I had to make my aesthetic loyalties crystal clear.
I bought a black leather jacket and painted it in hot red paint with an oblong inverted heart cribbed from Ellsworth Kelly. I emblazoned the back edge with text from an imaginary motorcycle club, Ellsworth’s Angels, and posed in front of an expanse of chain link fence for a portrait. It was my 38th birthday and I was announcing myself as a Minimalist Sculptor.
Yes, I was hand stitching psychedelic bunting and injuring my wrists making log cabin quilts, but they were edged in metal grommets and stretched across steel frames.
We contain multitudes.
Overlay
Amy Sillman asks: “Is there a poetics of shape ?…Is it that shape doesn’t have a specific substance, a commodity - attached to it, like color and pigment? “
The subjects of the Shape Report don’t have a commodity attached; they’re strictly NFS. I feel the instinct to align them with visionary art environments, roadside attractions and unaccredited “museums,” where sometimes the biggest challenge is finding the front door. One doesn’t simply drop the coordinates of these public artworks into Google Maps.
The best Report Shapes are architecture with a human touch—duets between geometry and junk, always with an element of surprise. That’s where the comedy comes in.
“This is exactly how I’ve seen art: as the sensation of ill-fitting parts” says Sillman, (94).
In line, my friends and I used to meet Sunday nights for live jazz at a club called the Chatterbox in Indianapolis, where we’d watch the musicians and draw. One drawing game was : What’s the jazziest shape ? My answer was flat asterisk. This points to midcentury design’s influence on the genre, album art framing sound. Alvin Lustig’s interrobangs & S. Neil Fujita’s metered geometry. It also highlights the importance of improvisation.
And then there’s the point of discovery. And anonymity.
There’s perfect geometry to be found in the Goodwill bins, where a melted ice cream sandwich can be found inside a Lucy Lippard book. These are free associated poetics, collaborations with time, the elements, and the absurd.
Sources cited:
Amy Sillman, “Further Notes on Shape,” Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, After 8 Books, 2020.
Shape Reporting for Duty
Hell yeah