A Rocket Ship to the Sun | The Panafold Issue 04
Photo by Lauren Lotz for The Panafold
“Martha Graham once told fellow dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille that an artist’s only task was to “keep the channel open.” This directive could be a mantra for Shire himself, whose channel appears not just open, but flung wide.”
Peter Shire is standing across from me in his studio—a capacious, skylit former auto repair shop in the Elysian Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles’ Echo Park—reciting lines from a poem. “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big one on me… Do you know it?” he asks, eyes a-glitter. “Robert Frost.” He provides no more context, flitting off to a nearby bookshelf, where he is trying to find a particular volume to share. Interviewing Shire is like trying to catch a hummingbird with your bare hands. He articulates himself through allusions and aphorisms, stories of childhood friends, personal anecdotes, references to movies (he’s a major cinephile). It’s all connected—and Shire tacitly expects you to keep up. “You’ve seen it?” he asks several times about various films (some of his favorites include The Horse’s Mouth, Mon Oncle, Pygmalion, and Greaser’s Palace). I invariably have not, but the fact that I have a master's in film studies seems to please him.
Within ten minutes of my arrival, we are scrambling up a steep, dusty hillside to pick the engorged lemons from a neighbor’s tree for the day’s team lunch. We scrub them with sponges, the sink splattered with paint. While we never find that book, we do come across a pair of red and green curly wigs in the style of Harpo Marx; Shire quickly dons one and hands me the other. He is constantly moving, buzzing about, come-let-me-show-you-this-ing. Until, that is, he settles in with a paintbrush or a pencil or a lump of clay—at which point time slows and organizes itself around him. His face changes, impishness giving way to a placid focus. “Painting is when I’m my best self,” he once shared, in a 2018 interview with Surface Magazine.
For more than half a century, Shire has been making art—and taking play seriously—here in Echo Park. His wildly prolific oeuvre spans ceramics (with a particular affinity for teapots and cups; he credits artists like Peter Voulkos, Ron Nagel, Robert Hudson, and Ken Price for opening his eyes to the possibilities within the world of clay), furniture (especially chairs), toys, kinetic sculpture, paintings, stage design, public art, and even outdoor discotheques (which he built for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics). At the center of this universe is a fascination with functional objects that Shire insists are never merely utilitarian. “Function isn’t just utility,” he reflected in a 2007 interview with The Smithsonian. “We really do build our lives and our ways of thinking and our feelings with the ephemeral… with thoughts and objects and visions and visuals and metaphors.”