Paul Shore | Whirligig.
Shore's exhibition of recent drawings opens September 12, 2024.
Paul Shore, Whirligig No. 139, 2023, pencil and colored pencil on paper, 12 3/4 x 19 inches.
“All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.
George Washington collected them. Washington Irving wrote about them in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. They descend from the folk art of sailors and farmers, a craft related to the weather vane of the American barn—but distinct from it. Behold: the quirky, Sisyphean, whirligig. An eternal machine for our modern times.
The traditional American whirligig1 catches the breeze with a wooden propeller which activates some other repeating moving parts. In Sleepy Hollow, it is “a little wooden warrior who, armed with a sword in each hand, was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle of the barn.”2 When the artist Paul Shore became fascinated with these objects a few years ago, the first whirligig he collected featured a man chopping wood. These devices may have descended from useful objects at farm and at sea—two places the fact of the wind matters immensely—but by at least the early nineteenth century, they served no function beyond revealing that we are all caught in time’s circle, eternally repeating our trivial efforts. For the last two years, Shore has been imagining what else whirligigs might show us.
II. Whimsical and Weary.
Shore’s work often settles into the trench between the whimsical and weary. His last exhibition, ManhattoLand, documented the sights of New York, with emphasis on its water-towers and traffic cones over Times Square and the Brooklyn Bridge. Life is made of small places and moments that we see again and again—the comfortable squeak of the doorknob, the smell of your corner deli: these humble things make up life as much as the top of the Empire State Building.
Swapping the quotidian for the grandiose is a central pleasure in Shore’s work. In Nuclear Dreams, Shore presented the nightmare of nuclear war through his own literal nightmares—the global made intimate in the most extreme. The collaborative Licked, Sucked, Stacked, Stuck (2010, with Nicole Root) presents icons of contemporary sculpture through the medium of checkout-lane candy. Here is Donald Judd, in Jolly Ranchers; here is Richard Serra, embodied by Starburst. It’s not satire and it’s not straight art history, but a reminder that nothing stays with you like a brick of Bazooka Joe.3
Whirligig is a similar cross-pollination of dread and bemusement, equal parts True Detective and Groundhog Day. Shore collected a few traditional whirligigs, and with the pandemic still releasing its grip on the world, he started to imagine his own whirligigs. Could a whirligig power a lightbulb? Of course. Could a whirligig turn a lightbulb on and off? Even better. Could a whirligig roll a boulder up a mountain? Could it expel Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, or adjust Glen Gould’s stool? The physics of woodcraft have limits that a drawing does not, and so Shore’s series of 162 drawings is able to celebrate the silly and terrifying iterability of modern life in ways you wouldn’t want topping your barn. Like ManhattoLand, the series is not an exhaustive exercise: every possible whirligig is not documented, but the artist has toyed with the limits of the medium. The odd dozen works on view from September 12 through October 5 at CG Boerner, a Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art presentation, are enough to give a taste of how endless repetition can be deadening or restorative—depending on how the wind blows.
Join us for an opening reception on September 12th from 5-8 PM at 526 West 26th Street, 419—the artist will be present. On view through October 5th, 2024.
The windless variants go back even further into the centuries—string- and stick-powered whirligigs were used in Renaissance depictions of Jesus.
Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 1820, p. 25.
Licked, Sucked, Stacked, Stuck was presented physically at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, and as a body of photographs documenting the confections at L Parker Stephenson Photographs in 2012. Beth Rudin DeWoody’s Bunker will exhibit Licked, Sucked, Stacked, Stuck in December of this year—watch this space for more details.