Watch Forrest "Frosty" Myers at work in his Brooklyn studio — a onetime meatpacking facility he converted into his workplace and family home — and you don't automatically think "light touch." First of all, he's a dead ringer for Joseph Stalin. Second, he spends much of his life whacking at snarls of metal rods with a homemade cricket bat. But for the past 40-some years, while many of his drinking buddies from the sixties New York art scene quietly settled into one recognizable niche or another, Myers has been bashing together witty and largely uncategorizable sculptures, like Pineapple, a roll of cyclone fencing topped with a plastic house plant (it looks improbably like the title fruit), or Sperm Lamp, a delicately balanced working light fixture/fertility fetish made of three elements: a base of heavy iron steam fittings he found on a SoHo street and a slim fifteen-foot steel arc that leads to a round halogen lamp that bobs, lightly and somewhat obscenely, with the slightest vibration in the room.
Many of these sculptures are, in fact, furniture — like Sail Away, a seventeen-foot-long chaise longue from 1992 that seems equally indebted to Calder's airy mobiles and David Smith's burnished stainless steel. It was offered for $175,000 at Design Miami/Basel two years ago. Though it was later withdrawn (Myers can sometimes find it hard to part with his one-of-a-kind pieces), the clamor showed how heated the interest can become when one of his signature works hits the market.
"People look good in these chairs," Myers said, inviting his visitor to sit on Sail Away, which swayed like a yacht on a calm sea. "I take something abstract — I abstract a chair — and then when a person sits in it, it becomes figurative. People are essential to make the piece work." Other chairs looked more like Giacometti's scribbles, except that Myers achieved this hasty effect by tirelessly working tremendous lengths of half-inch metal rods into various shapes — club chairs, ottomans, slouchy settees. He likened the process to "wrestling snakes."
Myers, a vigorous 67, was born in Long Beach, California, and can still sound like the Gidget-era surfer he once was. (He uses "bitchin'" as a superlative.) He came to the art scene out of California car culture: His first aesthetic experiences involved going to the local drive-in on Friday nights and critiquing the pinstriping and bodywork of the fifties-era hot rods (think Ed "Big Daddy" Roth). Ever since Myers moved to New York in the early sixties, his career has been distinguished by an almost Waldo-like omni-presence. In 1965, he helped found what was arguably the first SoHo gallery — the Park Place, which is now the subject of a retrospective at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. (The show runs from September 28 through January 18, 2009.) He unveiled his most famous installation, The Wall, a seven-story grid of aqua-colored I-beams on a blue wall at Broadway and Houston Streets, in 1973; it has long been regarded as the unofficial gateway to the downtown art world. After nearly a decade of real estate maneuvers and litigation (resulting in the The Wall being disassembled and stashed away in a basement), it was finally restored and reinstalled last year.
