“To restore silence is the role of objects.”
Samuel Beckett. Molloy.
At the end of her book on Picasso, Gertrude Stein observed: “When I was in America I for the first time travelled pretty much all the time in an airplane and when I looked at the earth I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane."
By this I took her to mean that the earth as seen from above appears compartmentalized, divided into fields and rectangular spaces, is ordered in a way that we never perceive from the ground, the vantage point from which Molloy saw everything “so far away, so near at hand, so far beneath, so many things, fixed and moving” – the conceptual and sensory overload of noise which he attempted to stop by concentrating on a single object.
In the Twentieth Century much philosophical inquiry in linguistics, anthropology and physics has been focused around the overlapping and inter-related areas of entropy, the laws of probability and information theory; the systems by which we perceive or make sense out of apparently random disorder, how we receive, perceive, or decipher a message, how we distinguish words from noise.
Artists express what the rest of us can merely attempt to explain or interpret. It is therefore not surprising to me that the quote from Molloy at the beginning of this essay is one of Nonas`s favourites, for what Beckett describes so well in that novel is what it feels like to exist in a state in which all information or incident seems to be of equal weight or importance, is received seemingly at random, and in which the predictability of any future events is so improbable as to seem impossible, a state in which, I venture to say, many of us lead our lives.
The sense we have of moving through time or of things moving through time and the knowledge that many things happen simultaneously and therefore the impossibility of knowing or truly comprehending anything is one aspect of this; a condition of confusion which we generally find intolerable and which we attempt to quiet by imposing on it a structure. Nonas`s work addresses both the discomfort of this confusion and the arbitrary nature of the structures or systems we invent to limit it. He has dealt with the relativity of such structures in his writing and books, in which contradictory, or implicitly past and future events are woven together into a single narrative. He has engaged this problem similarly in his sculpture.
Carl Andre once said the perfect sculpture is a road. Nonas once said to me that the perfect sculpture is a fenced field. Both statements have to do with defining sculpture in reference to place, location, and temporality, but while Andre`s permutations address the possibility of endlessness, Nonas`s sculptures address the contradictory nature of special and temporal boundaries.
Some of Nonas`s most thrilling pieces have been extended markers that delineated pre-existing spaces either in outdoor settings or indoors in which the pieces transversed rooms and in which, although their ends were always visible, it was impossible to see them whole at one time. To comprehend the pieces one therefore had to rely on memory, and memory so enforced creates a sense of nostalgia; for the remember means that something is past or lost, is no longer tangibly there, and in this sense these pieces, otherwise so aggressive in their possession of vast amounts of space and material weight, also seemed acknowledgments of what we cannot know completely, and that any advance is also a loss of something left behind.
Other pieces marked places by concentrated weight and in these, too, it seems to me a loss is implied as if, by the act of marking it, the place, per se, were lost; the impossibility of knowing, parallel to the desire to know, two things simultaneously. Memory and presence in overlay. What is marked marks what is not there.
Nonas`s earliest works were crudely constructed from chunky, rough-hewn timbers, fashioned upon the most primitive – that is, direct and un-tricky-means, by simple abutment, overlay or overlapping of parts. These seemed to have, indeed they exuded, references to primary, archetypal structures, at once altar, table box or, in a condensed and concentrated way, fences. In reference to these early pieces Nonas`s recent work (such as Eraser and Gordon in Dogtown) seems to me to have come full circle, articulating, delineating or encircling space in a much more opened and lyrical way, while retaining a visual and philosophical consistency with his work from the 1970s.
Nonas`s work is at once about formal concerns: perception, the ordering, disruption or demarcation of a specific space or location, either by interrupting its surface space or by the marking on it of a particular point. These formal concerns and some of his means of achieving them (modular units, horizontals set against verticals, undisguised joining) he shares with many of his contemporaries. But there is also in Nonas`s work, and very much connected to the making of it, a sensitivity and purposeful allusion to the psychological and social implications of the arrangements of objects in space and the methods used in constructing them.
Nonas`s sculpture alludes to fences, paths and markers both as functional structures that mark boundaries, protect property, point us in a certain direction, but that also satisfy a psychological need. To the extent that they allude to these other man-made structures, Nonas`s sculpture reminds us of the desire we experience to limit or quiet the irrationality of actual space (and time) by enclosing and marking it and that, if they served no other purpose, we would build objects simply in order to restore silence.
Phyllis Rosenzweig, Associate Curator
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.