THE ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY
Robert Therrien, No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown), 2007, at The Broad.
(Joshua White, jwpictures.com / The Broad)
On any given day at The Broad museum, one of the places you are most likely to find a crowd is under and around a nearly 10-foot-tall sculpture of a table and chairs on the third floor. Under the Table (1995), created by LA artist Robert Therrien, renders an ordinary Gunlocke dining set into something that is quite literally larger than life — 3.6 times the scale of ordinary life, in case you’re wondering. The piece emerged from photographic studies he made of his own dining table. “I always thought of it as being experienced as an interior with a complexity of horizontals and verticals and diagonals,” he told critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in 2000, “so that it would be like being in a jungle of legs.”
Therrien, who was best known for turning mundane household objects into monumental sculpture, is now the subject of a retrospective on The Broad’s first floor, and I found myself enthralled by its weirdness, its humor, its relentless obsessiveness. Organized by Broad curator Ed Schad, the show, titled Robert Therrien: This is a Story, gathers 120 works from throughout the artist’s half-century-long career. (He died at the age of 71 in 2019.) The exhibition provides a critical backdrop to a figure whose works can be cryptic and befuddling. Besides the oversized domestic objects, Therrien also created a series of rather inexplicable pieces inspired by seemingly random shapes like circles and snowmen.
An early gallery greets visitors with a towering stack of dinner plates and a cloud-like form made out of wires and telephones. (Joshua White, jwpictures.com / The Broad)
Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947, but his family moved to Palo Alto when the artist was a boy so that he could receive treatments for his asthma. He relocated to Santa Barbara for his university studies, where — critically — he met painter James Jarvaise, an influential teacher who encouraged his work and suggested he continue his studies at USC. (The late Jarvaise influenced a host of other SoCal artists, including Charles Arnoldi and Henry Taylor, who devoted an entire show to him this past summer.) By 1971, Therrien was firmly ensconced in LA, where he would create the works for which he would become known — and where he would remain the rest of his life.
By all accounts, the artist was taciturn and rather awkward. In a short note at the beginning of the excellent exhibition catalog, Broad museum co-founder Edythe Broad describes an early visit to his studio, in which “he seemed like he was relying on his dog for support.” But if Therrien might have seemed unsure in his interactions, he was dogged in pursuing a singular path as an artist, which emerged as much from his personal experience as it did from formal quests. A 1988 drawing in the first gallery, No Title (dots, keystone, and head), features a series of crudely rendered, solid black circles — these emerged from memories Therrien had as a child, of seeing dots hover before his eyes when using his nebulizer.
These circles became a recurring feature in his work, as did other shapes: coffins that evoked the loss of his father when he was a teen, snowmen that turned on their side could be read as clouds, a structure with an asymmetrical spire that could evoke a chapel, a vintage oil can, a raised middle finger. In the exhibition, you’ll find his shapes rendered as drawings, paintings, wall sculptures, and freestanding sculptures — crafted in a range of materials and colors. In one vitrine, a small shadow box from 1986 features a tidy row of his favored shapes crafted out of wood. It’s a charming piece — as if Therrien wanted to be able to carry with him the forms he held dear.
Therrien's work included large-scale environments and drawings of shapes.
(Joshua White, jwpictures.com / The Broad)
But what is most bound to grab visitors by the eyeballs are the works that toy with scale. These include one of his monumental towers of loosely stacked white dinner plates from 1993 (which are dizzying to walk around), as well as a behemoth replica of a folding table and chairs, completed in 2007, that is so meticulously crafted, the pieces actually fold. Also included are some of his later room environments, which imagined entire spaces at uncanny sizes — like No title (room, pots and pans I) (2008-15), which shows a section of a kitchen cabinet cluttered with pots and pans so large, they could be used to cook for Gargantua.
These monumental works are often described as inducing a childlike wonder in the viewer. But there is also something unsettling about the experience — the everyday taken to proportions that render us helpless. Other artists create otherworldly environments from scratch; Therrien was finding them in his kitchen cabinets. He could make the prosaic feel completely foreign.
No title (table leg), 2010. (Joshua White, jwpictures.com / The Broad))
The critic Susan Tallman once described Ed Ruscha as an artist who explores “the thinginess of words.” Therrien explored the “thinginess” of things. And it makes for a journey that is as peculiar as it is enjoyable.
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Robert Therrien: This Is a Story, is on view at the Broad through April 5th; thebroad.org.
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