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LOS
ANGELES—A chair, Peter Shire says, is “more than just
where we put our butts.”
For the
59-year-old artist, born and still living and working in
Echo Park near downtown Los Angeles, a chair is also a
dialogue between human anatomy and industrial
architecture.
“It is
as individual as a table is communal,” he says. “A chair
is a symbol of economic stature that goes back to when
kings sat on thrones and common folk sat on the ground.”
 Shire
himself is perched on a polished concrete floor in the
newly refurbished lower level of his 1937 home, which he
describes as “California bungalow gone wrong.”
Surrounding him, like a swarm of Mondrian-colored
Tinkertoy constructions, are the sculptural seats he
designed for Chairs, a new exhibition at the Frank Lloyd
Gallery in Santa Monica.
Upstairs, the 1,400-square-foot space where Shire and
his wife, Donna, have lived for more than two decades is
a similar riot of color and texture. This is what the
home of a working—some would say obsessively
prodigious—artist looks like.
The
original stone fireplace with weeping mortar is painted
lavender, complemented with a mint mantle set against a
crimson wall. Bookcases hold volumes on art and the
ceramic teapots that Shire has made since his days at
Chouinard, the famed and now-defunct
Los Angeles
art school. Cats sprawl on the kitchen floor, a crazy
quilt of 1950s-flavored green, gray and pink linoleum
tile. Shire’s hand-built furniture—Douglas fir cabinets
with vibrant teal-painted details from the 1980s, and
more recent steel and glass tables—are layered with
paintings and drawings.
“Organized chaos is the artist’s inevitability,” Shire
says.
“It’s a
comfortable, lived-in space,” says Adrian Saxe, Shire’s
former classmate and now a professor of art at the
University of California, Los Angeles. “There are some
artists’ houses that are so tricked out, God knows where
they sit down and enjoy themselves.”
Shire’s
younger brother, who owns the Billy Shire Fine Arts
gallery in Culver City on the west side of
Los Angeles
and the Soap Plant/Wacko in Silver Lake near downtown,
says the house is something of a design laboratory.
“Peter
has mastered so many materials and industrial processes
and used them in his home in a way that feels warm and
organic,” Billy Shire says. “It strikes a balance
between looking crazy and being functional.”
Much of
Shire’s decor is a bit of both. He splattered paint on
old medical lamps and dressed a “funked-up sofa that we
bought at a garage sale” with a slipcover that resembles
Joseph’s amazing Technicolor dreamcoat. He devised a
bookshelf with steel wheels that rolls away from the
wall so that he can access his furnace room. He even cut
and welded his own curtain rods, which are powder-coated
in fire-engine red.
These
creative touches are not immediately evident; it takes
time to pick them out in the presence of so many shapes,
patterns and colors. Although he is a designer, the
artist in residence is clearly more interested in
exploring his restless visual curiosity than creating
tasteful interior tableaux.
“My wife
is Japanese, and I share her cultural belief that there
is no separation between art and craft. They are all
one, and a daily living experience is worthy of
aesthetic consideration,” Shire says. “But the reason
that certain aspects of my life, such as my house, are
not caressed is that I am totally focused on my work.”
In a
career that has spanned five decades, Peter Shire has
become well-known as a potter, furniture designer and
site-specific sculptor whose work includes civic
installations.
“His
work is very informed by craft, which is problematic for
people who want artists to bare their souls and weird
everybody out,” Saxe says. “And as a designer, he is
more influenced by Miro and Calder than Eames.”
Fascinated with clay at an early age, Shire started
taking ceramic lessons from a bohemian instructor who
lived in a downtown Victorian house with Asian bridges,
African artifacts and Mexican Day of the Dead figures in
the fern garden. After high school, Shire attended
Chouinard.
“I can
draw well, but I am not a natural draftsman or a
painter,” he says. “I am a maker of things, a
hand-skills guy. So ceramics was my romantic vision. I
wanted to be a potter wearing funky sandals and an
apron.”
He spent
much of the 1970s following in the tradition of Gertrud
Natzler, making elegant, footed compotes with rich
organic glazes. Even then, he was obsessed with bright
solid colors. He found that expression in furniture,
constructing a group of deck chairs made out of canvas
and wooden frames that looked like giant Popsicle
sticks.
In the
late 1970s, young artists in the fashion and design
industries were galvanized by the pop music phenomenon
known as New Wave. The genre traded in the safety-pinned
garbage bags and angry guitars of punk rock for
fluorescent architectural clothes and futuristic
synthesizers.
It also
sparked a visual language that was used in marketing,
advertising and product packaging. In
Los Angeles,
the bible of that look was the short-lived Wet magazine,
which often featured Shire’s work.
The
graphic elements of the style were a collage of
design-driven art movements including Bauhaus, Deco,
Dada and Constructivism jazzed up with the retro-cool of
Jet Age advertising and the newly emerging industrial
style known as High Tech. Architects and interior
designers led by the Milan-based Ettore Sottsass
deployed this vocabulary of shapes, materials and colors
into an international movement known as the Memphis
Group.
“They
were the people that defined postmodernism as it applies
to decorative arts,” says Peter Loughrey, owner of Los
Angeles Modern Auctions. “And Peter Shire was one of the
only American members of the group.”
According to Lois Boardman, the former director of the
California Design exhibitions, Shire’s distinctive work
“vibrates with the colors of Los Angeles.” If Sottsass
were the acknowledged master of Italian refinement,
Shire, who worked with the group in Milan, was the
“robust American.”
“Peter
is to L.A. design and sculpture what Ed Ruscha is to
painting,” says architect Marco Zanini, a member of the
Memphis Group who also worked at Shire’s
Echo
Park
studio. “And Peter’s house is the image of him.”
Memphis
took its greatest inspiration from early Modernist
design, overlaid with unlikely, absurd combinations of
color and materials once considered tacky, such as
Formica.
“The
Bauhaus notion was that design that is honest to the
materials and the process will cause people to have
honest and better lives,” Shire says. |
