Excepts from Robin Mandel’s statements about his sculpture and practice:

Here's a bit about my position in relation to the viewer:

Jonathan Franzen published an essay in 2002 on the notoriously dense
fiction of William Gaddis.  The essay deals with the issue of
interpretive difficulty in art, and frames two different models for how
fiction relates to its audience.  First, Franzen presents what he calls
the Status model, which holds that the best novels are great works of art,
the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if
the average reader rejects them, then the average reader is a philistine;
the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independently of
whether people are able to enjoy it. He cites Flaubert as the champion
of this way of thinking, a way that
“invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance.”  Franzen
places Gaddis squarely in this camp. (239-240)
The opposing model Franzen calls the Contract.  Here, creative work
“entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a
group…Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the
deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of
connectedness.”   Writing and reading entails an agreement, an exchange
of valuable attentions, and “a novel deserves a reader’s attention only
as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust.” (240)  This is not
to say that the reader should expect meaning dished out, predigested
and easy to swallow.  Interpretive work is welcome, is expected, but so
is reward.  This model proposes the role of the artist “as a cook who
prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many course meal.  Not just ice
cream but broccoli rabe as well.” (261)
When I read this essay, these two modes of relating to one’s audience
made a lot of sense to me.  As an artist, it is tempting to subscribe
to the Status model, as it puffs up my own importance in the equation,
and serves as insulation from criticism, or at least from
underappreciation.  But I am viewer as well as a maker (indeed, the
First Viewer, of my own work), and as a paradigm of the relationship
between art, artist, and audience, Contract holds vastly more appeal.  
I like the idea of a trust between artist and viewer.  I think this
comes partly from looking at a lot of contemporary art and experiencing
a distinct lack of trust, a suspicion that I’m being fooled.  In my own
work, I want to address the audience in a way that encourages their
trust, in a way that signals my own sensitivity to the work of looking.
  I want to make challenging, mutilvalent sculpture, sculpture that is
rich with meaning, but I also want to engender a satisfying and
pleasureable experience of looking.  
Franzen again: To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn’t eat yourself, to
build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn’t want to live in:
this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any
fiction writer.  This is the ultimate breach of contract. (263)

Here's a bit about the Window, the Box, and "ideal" objects:

...Along side this emergent theme of nomadism and transience, there
occurred a kind of lateral shift, from the “ideal home” to the more
general concept of ideal forms, ideal objects as stand-ins for a type.  
Concurrent with the kinetic work, I made a group of welded steel
sculptures that read as outlines or contours of household objects.  For
me, these objects aspire to some sort of archetypal status; as an
outline, or trace, Window refers not to a specific window but to an
ideal instance of such a type – the “Platonic” suburban window.  These
sculptures share some ground with series of ink drawings, some of which
I made as early as 2001.   The drawings depict simple objects, discrete
units that can be handled, possessed, or itemized.  These objects, a
matchbook, a crown, a mitten, a baseball bat, are drawn boldly in ink,
one per page, in a visual mode that is part cartoon and part diagram:
minimal detail, minimal light and shadow, just enough information to
convey the thing’s identity.  The drawings suggest icons, ideal
instances; the image stands for the entire class of object, be it boxes
or banjos or whatever. The welded sculptures grew directly from these
drawings, as an attempt to manifest the same sort of idealization in
sculptural, 3D form.  They took shape as a sort of drawing-in-space,
proceeding from the fairly simple idea of tracing the edges of an
object and then removing the object itself.  Looking back, Big Bat,
with its graphic qualities (it has been repeatedly likened to an
exclamation mark) was a precursor to this group of work.
The piece Moving Box #1, then, marks the intersection of two paths in
my work.  A black steel outline of a large, empty moving box, top flaps
splayed open, it stands both as an emblem of transience, of
groundlessness, and as a manifestation of an ideal form, the thing that
lies at the end of the chain of associations.
I have tried to determine where this interest in ideal forms comes
from.  It might come from an interest in language; to make or use
objects that have no particular history, but which instead serve as a
marker of a type, like a word.  To use a shoe that doesn’t refer to
this shoe, with its unique history of ownership, but rather to this
type of shoe, and the type of person who might wear it.  There is a
level of specificity present in the larger aspects of the theme of
American domesticity, suburbia, etc., but it is not exactly my history,
nor is it the story of any particular family.  The theme is kind of
like a myth: the myth of American domestic life.  Icarus, Sisyphus, or
Willy Loman; myths deal with types, and use stand-ins for those types.
The objects I use in my sculpture can be viewed as idealized objects,
stripped of particular histories and arranged in some kind of
spatial/syntactical relationship to one another, acting as stand-ins
for types.  But also, the whole overarching theme at work here is an
idealization; the home as a princely realm, fortified against outside
forces and arranged just so.  It is the dream of complete stasis,
balance, order – and the nightmare of the same.  It is success and
failure, growth and decline.  I want my work to embody these paradoxes;
to express both my desire for this state of order and certainty, and my
dread of the stagnation and decay that I fear would accompany it.
The ideal itself is flawed, empty at its core.  It is folly to achieve
it, but it entices nonetheless.  I seek to articulate both the
enticement and the folly.

Here's a bit about the Door:

For me, Door taps into the phenomenon Kwon articulates, the psychic
destabilization of constantly being elsewhere.  The way this piece
relates to its site, and the relationship it fosters between the viewer
and the site, manifest very clearly the estrangement she describes. It
puts the viewer in the right place to consider the state of being in
the “wrong” place – it creates a very specific feeling of
non-specificity.  It inserts a pause in the endless chain of
elsewheres.  Opening the door, the piece locates you unambiguously,
here, between point A (the light) and point B (the blue door).  But it
also transports you; by virtue of the scale of the small door, the
darkness of the room, and the linkage translating your movement, you
are invited to leave your physical location and project yourself to the
dream-like world of the smaller door.  The blue door, it its spare
detail, recalls an interior door of a home, in contrast to the more
public/institutional door at which you stand.  Like peering into a doll
house or a diorama and imagining yourself actually navigating those
spaces, the experience of Door generates a brief moment of dislocation
from one’s physical self.  You go to the small door in your mind.  
There is also an aspect of mirroring generated by the duplication of
the gesture of opening the door; this mirroring effect, in combination
with the shifts in scale and distance, gives an intimation of an
endless reflective loop, the infinite receding space of two mirrors
reflecting each other.  Or perhaps it is more like a false mirror, a
Marx Brothers mirror, in which there is no reflective surface but
rather a surrogate who mimics your every move.  Upon entering the room,
the door shuts, the light goes out, and your projected self is left
floating, with no visual pathway back to its origin.  You are
simultaneously inserted into and subtracted from the scene, generating
a very peculiar sense of inbetweenness and dislocation.  Kwon writes:
Despite the proliferation of discursive sites and fictional selves…the
phantom of a site as an actual place remains, and our psychic, habitual
attachment to places regularly returns as it continues to inform our
sense of identity.  This persistent, perhaps secret adherence to the
actuality of places (in memory, in longing) may not be a lack of
theoretical sophistication but a means of survival. (165)
Door becomes a kind of “phantom site”.  It does not itself restore any
sense of lost identity, but rather it brackets this loss, and conjures
up a sense of dislocation from a place that exists “in memory, in
longing.”  It draws on the discursive site of deterritorialization, of
unhinging, of endless motion, the shared sense of “ungrounded
transience, of not being at home.” (156)  It interrupts the
destabilizing seriality of one place after another, and in that pause
it refocuses the perspective of the viewer by locating him/her in two
places at once. Here's a bit about the piece Nights and Weekends, theatre, and illusion:
There is the tradition of theatre in which the seamlessness of the
illusion is valued, and where this illusion of reality is upheld by a
set of conventions: the concealed lighting, period costumes, the
proscenium stage, with the audience located at a distance, viewing from
a fixed vantage point.  But there are other traditions of theatre where
the illusion is exposed to varying degrees: bunraku puppetry, mime,
improvisation.  In a way, the conventions of these alternative
traditions can be thought of as solutions; solutions to the problem of
evoking a convincing version of reality within a given set of
constraints.  The constraints can be physical, i.e. the challenge of
manipulating a complex puppet in gravity, or they can be thought of as
economic; getting maximum emotional force from limited means – no
props, no costumes, no lights.  In any case, the magic that occurs is
that we become simultaneously aware of both the problem and the
solution.  We can see the puppeteer in black, we can see that there is
no teacup in the mime’s hand, but we can also see that the drama
portrayed still resonates, despite these rifts in the illusion.  In
fact, the drama resonates that much deeper in its transcendence of the
rifts that are left exposed.
In this context, I make sense of the relationship in my kinetic works
between the animated “drama” and the mechanism that animates it.  In
the piece Nights & Weekends, the box conceals the motor, but the
objects are linked to the motor by wires and rods that are plainly
visible.  The illusion of ghostly, disembodied motion is not the goal;
the evocation of a set of relationships, through the sound and motion
of these objects, is what is desired.  The objects begin to take on
character traits and relate to each other as figures in some family
drama, and the tension, the strife, the romance of this drama coexists
with the mechanical elements of the sculpture.  There is a delineation
between the two – the box forms a kind of envelope around the motor –
but the viewer remains aware of both.

Here's a bit about kinetic work, time, and endlessness:

...and while one of my challenges in working with motors has been to
pry open that interval of repetition and make it longer, slower, more
inhabitable, the fact remains that the action will repeat itself, and
will continue to do so as long as the motor is running.  In my recent
work Dinner, two wine glasses sit on turntables that rotate at slightly
different speeds.  These turntables are mounted to a dining chair and
illuminated by an electrical candle bulb.  With each revolution, the
glasses come nearer to touching, and about once a minute they meet up
and toast each other in a mini-climax of romantic intimacy.  But there
is a very palpable sense that the animated action, however
anthropomorphized, is still mechanical, and this explicitly non-human,
non-feeling force behind the action colors the viewer’s understanding
of the objects and their implied narrative.  In other words, the
feeling of endless, mechanical repetition pushes back against the
implied human presence.  It is part of the sadness and the horror, as
well as of the humor, that the action could go on forever, endlessly
repeating…