PETER SHELTON

(I promised some thoughts about my friend Peter Shelton's work in my recent post about our studio visit there. Here's making good on that promise...)

            I’m not an art critic. I think I never was, in the true sense of the term, even though I contributed reviews to national magazines for many years. I was a “flaneur”, a “boulevardier.” I wandered around the galleries, looking for something that resonated in some way with my own views, my own interests, my own feelings. I chose what to write about. I never considered it my responsibility to represent what was happening in the galleries in my home town to the world at large. It was, and remains, all personal.

            That said, one of the great pleasures I have enjoyed along the way was being able to visit an artist in her or his studio, where I come to understand much more about who they are from interesting conversations as well as from the environment they have created as a working space. Some are almost unbearably neat, others (for me) pleasingly cluttered. And everything in between.

            So it was last week with an old friend, Peter Shelton. As I wrote a while ago, I had imagined a huge, open space, hospitable to the scale and ambition of his work. The view from outside of an almost block-long warehouse with a high industrial gate seemed to promise a confirmation of my guess. Once inside, though, what I found was something quite different. Subdivided into numerous rooms connected by congested narrow corridors, the vast space was reduced to something more like a rabbit warren than an art gallery. Art works—some finished, some still in process—mingled with the machinery of their making: hoists and chains, scraps of metal destined for some later application, fiberglass molds cast aside or ready for new castings. The jungle of a sculptor’s restless imagination.

            There was a good number of completed art works that Peter had temporarily installed wherever there was space available, with the intention of inviting people in to see the latest developments in the work. I was reminded of what had attracted me to his aesthetic in the first place—its insistent reference, beyond abstraction, to the human body. Heads, torsos, limbs, internal organs, all in various stages of distortion, some quite painful, others calm, serene. Swellings, excessive elongation or contraction, intestinal evocations in odd shapes and sizes—if you pay close enough attention you can actually feel these pieces as though parts of yourself. 

            Like the human body, too, almost all have what the artist refers to as “orifices”—cavities such as we all have and use as natural, if sometimes unnoticed, even embarrassing parts of our day-to-day existence: pores, ears and nostrils, navels, urinary tract, rectum…             

            These important, sometimes hidden, sometimes prominent features of Peter’s work  draw my attention in part, of course, because , well.. I have them—as do you. As even a human baby knows, they are a source of fascinated exploration. They seem to draw the exploratory fingers inexorably toward and into them. In part, too, they call to my attention because they are the way in and the way out. They lead into the interior darkness, the mystery within, perhaps, you might say, the spirit of the piece. In some of Peter’s larger works they might be quite small, little openings at the corners, tiny but vital imperfections in the otherwise smooth, imperturbable surfaces. They invite (don’t touch!) the curious finger to explore their depths. In others—like, say, a massive donut shape—they are the dizzying vortex that summons us within. 

            The human body, Peter’s work suggests, has its own peculiar beauty. Its surfaces are smooth, infinitely appealing, complexly curving everywhere, inviting the caress—if only, in the case of fragile sculptural surfaces, the visual caress of the eyes. But the body is also vulnerable, subject to painful, sometimes lasting wounds. Peter and I have spoken of this before and he makes no secret of the wound that significantly affected his life as a child and persists in his artistic vision to this day: his father was the victim of a sniper’s bullet in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, receiving a head wound from which he was five years in recovery and from whose effects he never fully recovered. Peter’s sculpture heals no physical wounds but, to anyone who spends time with it, is balm for the aching soul.

            Much of what I saw in Peter’s studio, including quickly sketched ideas on tiny note pads moving, some of them, to framed finished drawings, had to do with proposals for work in public spaces. Some of them are completed—we are lucky to have “sixbeaststwomonkeys” (Peter’s titles are typically unspaced, uncapitalized strings of words) outside the Los Angeles Police Department building on Spring Street—many fell victim to the vagary of committees along the way. Public art inevitably exposes the split between the artist’s vision and his sense of integrity and the whims of sponsoring agencies who have their own ideas about what the work should look like. From what I understand, Peter has largely given up on trying to resolve this issue; and more’s the pity because whether it “understands” it or not, the public has much to learn—perhaps by simple osmosis—from this artist’s vision.

            It’s with a great sense of privilege and gratitude that I experience studio visits such as this one. It’s an act of generosity on the part of the artist to invite me into the space in which his or her ideas take form and go from a tiny scrap of paper to a fully-formed work of art. Without wishing to get pompous, I do I think of studios as sacred spaces where miracles—at least acts of prestidigitation—are performed by men and women who have the overweening audacity to want to share their vision with the world. Good on them, I say. We should all be thankful for their grace and generosity.