Richard Nonas: The Man in the Empty Space

RICHARD NONAS THE MAN IN THE EMPTY SPACE

RICHARD NONAS THE MAN IN THE EMPTY SPACE “Some sculpture is illustrative; discursive, literary in its thrust; and that doesn’t interest me much. But some sculpture is terse, stubborn, wordless; almost stolid in its intensity. It sits there and glares. It is.”

– RICHARD NONAS

Witkacy’s Tail, 1991 Steel; 71 ½ × 123 × ¾ inches Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York / St. Barth.

Photo © Tadeusz Rolke

His works range dramatically in size and scale, as they do here, from a 3 ½ × 3 ¼ × 4 ½ inch steel sculpture, Untitled (Fist Series) installed in the back gallery to the 3,000+ pound granite chairs in the main space. No matter their dimension or weight, they retain an immediacy and an intimacy, a particularly human quality— suggesting the traces of human activity. Despite their enigmatic character, they impart a strange familiarity, a mysterious recognizability. Yet, they resist simple explanation.

“…the act of making sculpture is the actual reverse of the sculpture itself. It is, always, the private attempt to jump out of myself; to do the impossible; to escape from the world my sculpture must join. Making is my attempt to leave home.—But sculpture is coming home again.”

Untitled (Fist Series), 2014 Steel 5 × 6½ × 4½ inches 6 × 6 × 4½ inches 7 × 4 × 4 inches Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York/St. Barth

For five decades, Richard Nonas has created works whose concise, simple vocabularies of form, material, and making belie their power to alter our sense of landscape and architecture—of place.

His sculptures are made from earthy and industrial materials— wooden railroad ties, granite curbstones, steel plates, birch logs, and rough-hewn timber—often with little manipulation and no unnecessary detail. They take on a timeless character—totemic, for lack of a better word—transcending the historical associations of their materials and declaring a direct, irrefutable presence.

“I trust only the sculpture that is immediately and wholly there.

I trust sculpture that means its specific world by instantaneously becoming it. I trust sculpture that does not grow, but simply appears—shuddering, like a knife stabbed into wood.”

Nonas often arranges his works in pairs, series, grids, or combinations that create a dialogue and tension between them— creating a new whole, a single visual experience, from these parts.

He hangs his sculptures on the wall, or leans them against it. He assembles expansive fields of repeated forms which sit directly on the ground, as do the railroad ties which stretch across the museum’s large gallery in an arc.

Nonas turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s at age 30, after working for 10 years as an anthropologist, doing fieldwork in northern Ontario and the Yukon Territory in Canada, and in northern Mexico and southern Arizona. His work as an anthropologist directly influenced his sculpture and his desire to make objects that create places.

“I lived in a village of 50 people in a desert in Mexico. Over the two years I was there, I grew to understand that metaphor, juxtaposed meanings, was central to the way people held their thoughts together. And also crucial to how they understood place. When they walked through the desert, it seemed as if they were walking through a series of separate rooms, but there were no visual borders that I could see. They mapped the desert with mythology and memories—events that occurred at that particular site (for instance, where someone’s grandfather fell off his horse and broke a leg one hundred years ago). What I realized is that place is defined as much by memory as by geography.”

Nonas’ sculpture functions like those memories that mark the desert, inserting a trace, a cut, an order that shapes a place.

“The pull we feel toward that transformation of space to place is inexorable. We do, must, live in a domesticated, humanized, linguified world.—Place is our curse-of-the-garden; our own original sin.—It is what it means to be human. It is what makes us human.”

As is art. Nonas’ sculptures provide those places, but do not pin them down; he opens them, expands them, and leaves them to us to fill.

“And making sculpture? I start with memories of how places feel. The ache of that desert, those woods, that room opening out.

Places I’ve been, places I’ve seen and felt.

And felt always with some component of unease, apprehension, disquiet, fear even, discomfort certainly. Memories of places that seem always slightly confusing, slightly ambiguous. Places whose meaning slips away, but not too far away.”

MASS MoCA’s former factory spaces are such a place, a particularly fitting venue for the artist who has been drawn to raw industrial buildings since his early career in the 1970s when he and peers Alanna Heiss, Alan Saret, and Gordon Matta-Clark presented exhibitions in unexpected and abandoned spaces in New York and in SoHo’s groundbreaking, artist-run alternative space, 112 Greene Street. That former warehouse was a liberating laboratory for works that rejected the constraints of the commercial art world.

Nonas remains attracted to environments that already have a strong immediate presence—from the thousand-year-old but recently abandoned town of Vière (a two-hour walk from the nearest road) in the foothills of the French Alps where he created an installation last year, to our museum’s industrial complex. Nonas’ installations magnify, recapture, and redirect the power and sense of place that his sites already possess.

These spaces, in his words, “leak” their pasts, their ghosts, their histories of human imposition, use, and emotion, and in doing so convey human meaning in general.

“Some sculpture does what other art only implies, describes, or illustrates. Some sculpture changes the world by cutting into it, by marking it. Some sculpture is the direct manifestation of change knifed into, marked onto, the physical site on which it most surprisingly and visibly happens.

That is what the Nazca Lines in South America are, what the Carnac Stone Settings do, what the many circles of Standing Stones in northern Europe are, what the Viking burials do, what the Egyptian and Mesopotamian Obelisks are, what the great Meso-American columns do, what Inuit and other cairns are, what sacred paths and ritual circuits do, what the Australian Dreamlines are, what the long lines of Tibetan prayer flags do. And that is what some of the best contemporary sculpture is and does. All are lines. All are cuts. All are the most direct, simple, and immediate marking of human thought onto complex cultural and natural reality.

That is why the as yet unopened New Jersey Turnpike became Tony Smith’s dream of what sculpture could be, why railroad tracks became Carl Andre’s, why the great vertical line drawn by the Paris Obelisk became Brancusi’s, and why a single shallow half-mile-long irrigation ditch— scratched two inches wide and three inches deep by an Indian farmer leading water across the Mexican desert by dragging a steel bar along its surface—became mine.”

– RICHARD NONAS The Raw Edge (detail), 2012 104 blocks of Luberon limestone at 3 sites Each 17.7 × 23.6 × 7.9 inches Vière, Haut Provence, France Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York / St. Barth

Granite Chairs (2016 Series, Chairs for Björn), 2016 Left: Cutting a stone Below: Chair: 59 × 40 × 29 inches Stool: 21 × 24 × 26 inches Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York/St. Barth

“There is a language of place, and it is the most direct human language there is—the most basic way to impose human order and meaning on an outside, non-human world.”

In the large gallery of MASS MoCA’s Building 5, Nonas has created Single Artificer, a major new work made of 50 weathered railroad ties arranged in an expansive curve that extends diagonally from one end of the gallery to another. The materials and their arrangement conjure the juxtaposition of the railroad line and the river that made the museum’s location the ideal spot for the former factory that houses it. Three massive granite chairs—each with an accompanying stool —share the space, punctuate it, while a selection of small wood sculptures from a series titled Crude Thinking holds the walls. Framed as a single installation—a single place, Nonas has named the complete room No Water In. While the installation as a whole illustrates Nonas’ sensitivity to both space and place, the granite chairs and the wood railroad ties individually illustrate his efficiency in making and his understanding of his materials. With the wood pieces, he has chosen found objects that possess an already-there presence, and has added to their potency with his placement of them. With the chairs, which were cut from granite quarried in Sweden, Nonas uses both the objects he has drawn and had excised from the stone as well as the remains, the off-cuts. The stools, which have a palpable power of their own, are simply the stone which is left after the legs and seat of the chair are split out of the granite block. Confusing usual distinctions

In the back gallery, Nonas installed a selection of works which includes a series of steel sculptures titled Skid (2014). Placed at regular intervals in a line that cuts across the space and reaches into the main gallery, the work integrates the two spaces, returning them to their historical unity. Though the individual sculptures are meant to be considered and contemplated as discrete objects, they function together as a single entity, a single place, and are titled as such, the constellation of works in the lower gallery named Slant. The grouping of works on the balcony is titled Cold Coffee and is anchored by a row of five 6-foot tall steel plates, Steel Drawing (1988)—one painted red, one yellow, the others raw steel—which lean against the back wall and are just barely visible to viewers entering the main space below.

Steel Drawing, 5 Plates: One Red, One Yellow, 1988 Oil paint on steel 71 ½ × 123 × ¾ inches Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York/St. Barth

between art and function, the chairs confirm for Nonas that a powerful object is a powerful object, without distinction. The slightly odd chairs, too heavy, too big, exude a level of welcome ambiguity, though they nonetheless invite visitors to sit on them. They offer the body a place to rest, just as Nonas’ sculptures in general allow the mind to rest, allowing for—indeed provoking—intuitive, visceral responses, its own kind of what Bertolt Brecht called “crude thinking.”

In the two adjacent galleries, including the balcony that overlooks the main space, the artist has placed a selection of sculptures in wood, steel, and lead that date from the ’70s to the present.

“Sculpture is the object underlined, the special object, the focused object, the placed object, the re-placed object, the canceled object, the isolated object, the glowing object, the disappearing object, the sliding object; the object larger than life, heavier than it could be, more present than it should be, more compelling than it can be; the numinous object; the pointed object; the indigestible object; the unavoidable object; the absorbent object; the indecipherable object. The paradoxical object.

The oppositional object. The object that will not remain alone.”

Nonas often combines already-existing works into new works, new combinations. The titles he has given the constellations of works here reflect this use and re-use, all referring to his past exhibitions and publications. (All the titles in the exhibition are taken from a single short book Nonas has been writing and re-writing for years. These titles are more poetic than informative —a form of textual sculpture in themselves. And the confusion this might create is welcomed by the artist who, as he explains, “aims for the near side of uncertainty.”) Nonas’ sculptures, in fact, speak for themselves, articulating meaning more viscerally than language. “The job of art,”

he says, “is to convey what language cannot.”

And while Nonas’ works emanate powerfully, they remain open and shifting—both visually as viewers walk around and through them— and in meaning and association—balancing on the edge of one thing becoming another.

Ambiguity is Nonas’ primary interest. He has said that what both anthropology and art have most crucially taught him is the emotional power of doubt. Complexity and doubt. Nonas expresses that with the simplest of means, using the most pared down of objects to point at the way the world truly is—to embrace it— constantly shifting, in flux, and uncertain.

“—Clarity does not interest me. Open eyes are a dream...Understanding is tentative.

Knowledge is conditional. Each person’s world is only partly his own. Even marginal communication is difficult. It’s a slippery stage we give our speeches from.

—And besides, what I want is a place to stop in. A place to bump around in. A place to jump from. What I want now is a place to make from.—Listen: A place to thump—in the dignity and propriety of dangerous objects.”

All quotes by Richard Nonas are from the artist’s publications and correspondence with Susan Cross, Curator of Visual Arts.

Skid (New Word Chaser Series) (installation view), 2014 Steel 9 parts, each 20 × 20 × 12¼ inches Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York/St. Barth

Richard Nonas was born in New York, NY, in 1936.

He studied literature and then social anthropology at the University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina. He practiced as an anthropologist for 10 years, teaching at Queens College and doing field research on the native peoples of northern Canada, Mexico, and Arizona. At age 30, he moved to Paris to devote himself to making sculpture, before eventually returning to New York. His work was collected early on by Dorothy and Herbert Vogel and Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, and his sculptures are permanently installed in the stables at the Villa Panza in Varese, Italy. Nonas’ solo and two-person exhibitions include Cross Cuts at the Knockdown Center, Queens, NY (2014); The Raw Edge, Vière, Haute Provence, France (2012, permanent); Shoots Good Not Straight, Musée d’art de Saint-Etienne, France (2010); Smoke, Art OMI, Ghent, NY (2009); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (1998); Hip and Spine (Stone Chair Setting), Josephine F. Ford Sculpture Garden in collaboration with the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI (1997, permanent); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1993); Lucifer Landing (Real Snake in an Imaginary Garden), Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI (1989, permanent); Lund Museum of Art, Lund, Sweden (1988, permanent); and Viewpoints: Richard Nonas, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (1978). Among other significant group exhibitions, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, New York, in 1973, as well as PS1’s inaugural exhibition, Rooms, in Queens, NY (1976) and Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977). The artist has numerous permanent, public installations around the world. Nonas lives and works in New York.

Richard Nonas: The Man in the Empty Space On view February 13, 2016 – September 5, 2016 This exhibition is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Francis Greenburger and Isabelle Autones.

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