The job of art is to change the shape of the world; slightly and temporarily, but absolutely.
Richard Nonas, If Beale Street Could Talk: Art As The Trace of Place (1984)
Perceiving is pinning one`s faith, at a stroke, in a whole future of experience, and doing so in a present which never strictly guarantees the future; it is placing one`s belief in a world. It is this opening upon a world which makes possible perceptual truth and the actual effecting of a Wahr-Nehmung, thus enabling us to “cross out” the previous illusion and regard it as null and void.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Consciousness is the acme of emphasis…Concernedness is of the essence of perception.
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
What great value, then, an album of sites would have for interrogating our solitary being and revealing the world where we must live in order to be ourselves!
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie
Richard Nonas has been regarded as an artist who arrived late on the scene of Minimalism, refining but not fundamentally reconceiving it, at best “existentializing” what was already essential in it. For example, Jan van der Marck thinks of Nonas as one of the leading practitioners of third phase Minimalism, so-called “behaviourist” Minimalism, “a synthesis of the formal and the procedural”. (1) The “thesis” of the first phase is brought together with the “antithesis” of the second phase, making for a new grandeur and completeness of Minimalist effect. Robert Morris thinks of Nonas as one of several artists who “have worked permutations by dividing large spaces with either dense or immaterial markers; or they have added weight or size in attempts to give presence to long-familiar Minimalist configurations”. (2) But the questions are, what really is Minimalism – what do its customary stylistic manifestations signify – and what does it mean to add to or elaborate an idea rather than originate it? Is the elaborator`s role really less significant then the originator`s? I will argue the contrary: an authentic elaborator, like Nonas, discloses what is most basic – and usually unexpected – in the style.
Conventionally understood, Minimalist style is about the articulation of unity, the unity that transcendentally exists both before and after the appearance of variety, the unity that frames the world of experience, forcing intelligibility upon it. It is a logical unity from which all traces of empirical confusion – not only inconsistency but lack of cohesion – have been dismissed. There is no indication that the unity had to be won, that there was any struggle or difficulty bringing it into being. Its logical conception was its spontaneous generation. It was beyond the reach of the forces of disintegration, or for that matter integration. Minimalism supposedly articulated essential primordially given, unity, rather than unity that was the result of any “constructive” effort. That is, Minimalism was not a new kind of Constructivism; it was not a manifestation of modern dynamicism, nor more particularly of the technological imperative. Its unity was entirely conceptual, and thus both the sculpture`s point of departure and its end effect; the sculpture was totalized from the start, and its end was also “conceptual”: to generate and epiphany of the unity. Preconceived unity made Minimalist sculpture emblematic and seamless , living esthetic proof of the unity that both underlies and subsumes the world – makes it possible and intelligible, gives it whatever stable shape it has.
To say, as van der Marck does, that Richard Nonas`s sculpture belongs to the most unified, final phase of Minimalism is presumably to say that it realizes more than Minimalist sculpture of the earlier phases the Minimalist goal of manifesting absolute unity absolutely. It should by the final Minimalist phase appear to be self-revealing, needing as it were no conditions for its appearance. But Nonas`s sculpture works in a completely opposite way than might legitimately be expected. Instead of giving unity its perfect appearance – a perfection to match the perfection inherent in its divine nature – it emerges awkwardly, even fitfully, as though it was distrusted – as though it could not be taken for granted. Hence, to reinterpret Morris`s sense of what Nonas`s sculpture is about, the buttressing of original Minimalist configurations (articulating “metaphysical” unity) with powerfully physical means, is not another indication of their self-certainty, but is undertaken to reinforce the charisma of the original configurations (articulating “metaphysical” unity) with powerfully physical means, is not another indication of their self- certainty, but is undertaken to reinforce the charisma of the original configurations, to reassure us – and them? – that it is not a will-o`-the-wisp. But instead of reaffirming and strengthening the configuration, the physicality threatens to overwhelm it and the unity it represents – usurps it, and seems to imply that the unity it meant to state is more mythical than metaphysical, less self-evident than appeared to be the case at first glance. The point is, Nonas`s sculpture implies that, like Henry James`s golden bowl, there is a hidden fault or flaw in Minimalist unity; it is a subtly unstable crystal, incomplete in its integrity, in effect ready to fall apart. In truth, Minimalist unity is more about the difficulties of giving shape to unity, or finding existing shapes that could represent it adequately, without any experiental misgivings – implying the difficulty of fundamentally conceiving it – then about its self-evidence and power of determination over all shape. Miniamlist unity is less radical and more elusive than was originally supposed. From this recognition, comes to use Whitehead`s language, the “subjective form” of Nonas`s art, its powerful emotional effect (and as we will see anthropocentric meaning) – inseparable from a feeling for such a central generalization as unity, and from the feeling that it is not experientially or existentially the case, but must be “realized” artistically.
Even then it betrays or belies itself, showing a certain relativity in its appearance that suggests the inadequacy of any conventional conception of it. It was only after Minimalist style had been elaborated to the point where all its variables – the formal and the procedural – were explicit, that its full implications and complexities – true depth – could become clear. Nonas was able to understand and articulate the deepest implications of Minimalism because all the rules and thus technical possibilities of the Minimalist game were available to him, free from the sense of novelty that accompanied their original invention, the “original” look they had when they first appeared. It was then that the experiential problems accompanying the perception of sculpturally embodied , particularized unity could make themselves urgently felt, and take their toll on the conventional understanding of Minimalist intention, even on Minimalist self-understanding.
What was most problematic and contradictory in Minimalism was necessarily neglected when it first established itself. It created a look before it realized the complex meaning of the look – adopted in rebellious competition with other looks rather than to articulate an issue. The look not only hardly conveyed the complexity of the meaning behind it, it suggested there was none – it suggested that Minimalism solved a problem rather than disclosed one (as I think the best art does). The stylistic look was assumed to have a self- evident meaning, as when Robert Morris, a seminal figure of formalist first phase Minimalism, wrote that the “hieratic nature of unitary form” (gestalt) binds “more cohesively and indivisibly together” the “particularizing relations of scale, proportion, etc.” of sculptural value. Little did he realize that in the more thorough than formalist working out of Minimalism, such as we find in Nonas, the subsuming of “every other sculptural value” in that of the “single most important sculptural value – shape” would not lead to the “greater unification and integration” effect he expected. (3) The experience of the third – final – behaviourist phase of Minimalism suggests that the unity of the unitary form is less inherent than originally supposed. Its integrity is not axiomatic; the particularizing relations are not tranquilly subsumed in shape, but conflict with it, creating an unresolvable tension within it; the unexpected climax of the experience of the sculptural gestalt in its concrete environment is a heartbreaking sense of subtle disunity or incomplete unity – unity as a Sisyphean idea that keeps breaking down, that cannot be maintained. After a certain point, unification and integration become self-defeating, have diminishing returns. Nonas often makes the point by locating the gestalt in a very particular natural terrain, where its simplicity of shape is disrupted, its unity and integrity do not come off, do not work properly to effect a perceptual epiphany. The gestalt seems to have just missed simplicity, making simplicity – sign of unity – into a regulatory, numinous idea but one without absolute power of determination on the sculptural construction. The gestalt is present more by implication than in actuality – the perceptual condition of its recognition have caught up with it, introducing scepticism into its presence. The theatre of perceptual conditions that was always crucial to the experience of Minimalist sculpture, even according to Morris – the “distance between (sculptural) object and (bodily) subject…creates a more extended situation, for physical participation becomes necessary” (4) – undermines the original expectation of a strong grasp of the logic of pure unity it aroused. The situation of perception becomes more anthropocentric and “concrete” than was originally intended, forcing us to reconceive the semblance of unity that is presented. Nonas, as is well known, comes from a background of anthropological studies, making it “natural” for him to lead the way in the behaviourist third phase reconceptualization of Minimalism, with its shift in emphasis from the logic of unity to the experience of its perception. The focus is now on the perceiver and his effort to make concrete the idea (of unity) implicit in the sculptural object he perceives – on how the perceiver`s sense of concreteness originates – how the sense of concreteness in general is established. The problem of Minimalism in its final phase is to create the conditions that permit the perceiver to assert that he perceives an idea concretely, especially a fundamental idea such as unity. The balance in the Minimalist equation shifts, in Nonas`s sculpture, from consciousness of the pure idea of unity to the sense of concreteness physically experienced by the person who perceives the idea. In other words, Minimalism, which began offering a facile solution to the problem of conception, ends discovering the problem of perception, which is the problem of where one`s sense of concreteness comes from. The important idea of unity is still necessary for an understanding of Minimalism, but attention to the conditions for its perceptual realization are even more necessary. Minimalism at root is a sophisticated investigation into what we mean when we say we perceive concretely rather than a naïve sculptural articulation of unitary shape, as it is sometimes understood to be. Recognition that concreteness is a problem destroys belief in self-evidence, and in the supposedly unchangeable, unified shape of the world.
The “failure” of unity opens up previously invisible doors of meaning; and it was a failure not predictable from the original Minimalist gestalt – from the formalism in which Minimalism first manifested itself. The original Minimalist look put one on a path that led to a completely unpredictable destination. Only when the implications of the original Minimalist unitary configurations were elaborated through their intense physicalization, could the hidden meaning of Minimalism become clear – a meaning altogether opposite from, and subsuming, the original meaning Minimalism was (pre-) supposed to have. The elaboration of the Minimalist idea brought out was truly revolutionary in it, that is, disclosed the dialectic that was its source, made clear that even unitary form was dialectical in character – that the living experience of gestalt simplicity was quite different than what theoretical understanding of it led one to believe. The experiential elaboration of the original Minimalist idea showed that it was inauthentic and invalid to the extent that it regarded itself as absolute – regarded the beginning of Minimalism as its end – rather than a dialectical starting point. This is why first phase formalist Minimalism has an empty, merely fashionable look today – seems only to signify socially artificed change of taste. The momentum such a mechanical change generates hardly has the substance of the realization of the latent truth in seemingly self-evident form. Minimalism had to outlive its disruption of habitual modes of appearance in order not to become one itself; it succeeded only by signifying something not only more fundamental than but completely contradicting the impression it originally conveyed.
Minimalism, in its formalist first phase, intended to extend non-objectivity towards that absolute zero degree of intelligibility, that irreducible intelligibility, that was always the implicit goal of its “reductionism”. Irreducible intelligibility was signified by the geometrical gestalt, self-consciously regarded as the completest renunciation of objectivity and liberation of primitive form from illusionism ever achieved. Gestalt simplicity was presupposed but not transparently manifested in non-objective art. Yet what Minimalism, pursued to the bitter end, discovered, was that intelligibility was not to be taken for granted – not even the intelligibility of the gestalt. Minimalist sculpture came to discover, against its own will, as it were, an abyss of increasingly subtle unintelligibility, not unreminiscent of the flurry of energized particles (“details”) revealed when the “original” pristine nucleus of the atom was “opened”. At bottom, the worked was unintelligible – unintelligibility (subtle quirks in structure) kept being experienced the more intelligibility was presupposed. The Minimalist artist came to realize that he was in the position of pursuing intelligibility rather than having it to hand in gestalt form. The gestalt subtly – incompletely – disintegrated, suggesting that its supposedly primordial integration was an illusion in the first place. There was no ideal intelligibility, or rather, intelligibility was an idea that kept encountering the reality of unintelligibility. Unity self-deconstructed in the very act of being sculpturally materialized, a kind of test case of its empirical embodiment. Unity never could in fact be materialized easily, unquestionably. Skepticism entered the very process of sculptural construction. Nonas`s sculpture exemplifies this process to perfection. In his sculpture the original Minamalist model of intelligible unity comes apart, even if its original structure remains as a ghostly trace.
The problematic of Nonas`s sculpture can be approached another way. One can start not with the standard Minimalist assumption of gestalt unity, but with the assumption of disunity, ultimate unintelligibility implicit in Morris`s idea that Minimalist sculpture creates a strong reflexive “awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work”. What if space and matter were inherently unintelligible, did not really hang together in a unified structure? What if our spontaneous ability to differentiate between them indicated that they never can come together seamlessly in primitive unity, never can be conceived as essentially one? What if a strong experience of our own bodily presence in a space is ultimately responsible for our consciousness of the unity of matter and space – which is what sculpture works through? This strong bodily experience countermands, as it were, our original consciousness of the separateness of space and matter, offering a new consciousness of their unity, which carries with it a stronger than usual sense of their concreteness – than the usual weak, everyday sense of their concreteness that results from spontaneous recognition of their separateness. The enhanced sense of concreteness is borrowed, as it were, from our self-consciousness about our bodily presence – catalysed by the Minimalist yet physically raw sculpture. This self- consciousness is invested in the total spatial situation, which is experienced unitarily. What Morries is really saying is that the situation is unitary, rather than the work, or rather that the sense of bodily connection we feel with the physically raw work becomes the basis for our sense of the unity or intelligibility of the work`s form, and by extension of the space in which the work exists. The works`s raw physicality catalyzes a strong bodily experience in us, leading to an extraordinary consciousness of body – perhaps to an epiphany of bodiliness – that lets us experience it as space-binding. Space is an unintelligible immensity that we make momentarily intelligible by our intimate presence in it, which otherwise has no determinate presence of its own.
Our relationship to the sculpture compels us to experience the body`s integrity, which is then projected back onto the space as its unity. This is the import of the strong bodily awareness of space implied by Morris`s assertion that the Minimalist sculpture makes us aware of existing in the same space as it. Our impact on space is what counts in the Minimalist situation, not space`s impact on us.
Thus, the freshly physicalized Minimalist sculpture of the behaviourist phase has anthropocentric import in that it makes the body self-conscious about its “position” in space. This is the point of Nonas`s early (1971) differentiation of himself from Judd – a formalist first phase Minimalist – whom he describes as a “plumber”, while describing himself as an electrician “dealing in power”. And this is the point of his question of the same year: “How much difference is there between my feelings about charged objects and those I am starting to work out now about charged space? They may in fact be identical. The point may be simply to treat space…as an object…that carries meanings, energy, associations as any object does…Can any space really be empty?” No, because the body participates in it, intensifies it – is what is experienced through it. Behaviourist Minimalist sculpture exists to bring the body to consciousness of the way its power radiates through space – its power over space – by restoring our sense of the body`s concreteness thorough experience of the concreteness of the Minimalist sculpture. Minimalist sculpture gives bodiliness, and with it the world a fresh shape.
Minimalist sculpture can take one of two paths: it can construct an illusion of spatial unity, from which all traces of bodiliness are supposedly eliminated (the gestalt), or it can become emphatically, almost disruptively, physical, calling attention, as it were, to the concreteness of space. Formal and procedural Minimalism go the former, “idealistic” route, inventing temporary clarity and unity – sculpture as a temporary, intimate “clearing” of intelligibility – where there is none. Their synthesis unexpectedly points the other way – towards the truth of unintelligible concreteness, what Plato called materia. Behaviorist Minimalist sculpture does not issue in “inevitable” (gestalt) forms of space, but in a strange, anxious sense of bodiliness, dialectically uniting the infinite openness or intangible immensity of space and the oppressive finitude and closedness of matter. It is a new version of the ancient dialectic between freedom and fate – the strange struggle to transcend the primordial feeling of containment through intensification of the primordial feeling of bodiliness. Transcendence exists only through bodily integration embodied in the Minimalist work`s “behavioural” effect.
What is important for our understanding of Nonas`s sculpture is htat the supposedly more primordial formal and procedural Minimalism issues in an essentially different sense of world than the Minimalism that emerges from their synthesis – in illusion of completely cohesive world in contrast to a reality of incompletely cohesive world, dark with primitive matter untransubstantiated by universal clarity. Behaviorist third phase Minimalism “proves” that unity is not a universal, opening the way to the greater awareness of material that Morris notes as characteristic of Nonas. Paradoxically, and even more unexpectedly than the discovery of the primordial unintelligibility lurking within presupposed intelligibility, Nonas`s sculpture articulates not simply a greater sense of concreteness than either formalist first or procedural second phase Minimalism, but a sense of what Hegel called the “concrete universal” – not to be interpreted as the logically pure universal made illogically concrete, but as the universal that cannot exist or be itself unless it is concrete. Nonas`s sculpture is about what is fundamental to sculpture, creating a sense of the concrete universal: restoring a sense of concreteness to spatial and bodily experience that makes them “metaphysically” manifest without assuming any coherence in their relationship.
The concrete universal emerges from the dialectic of the formal and the procedural – the sense of a space as formally structured (gestalt in form) and as a process. The concrete universal emerges through a sense of the bodily presence that is romantically “beyond” yet was always implicit in both. And the “romantic” experience of the body – is it a disguised, puritan version of the romaniticization of the body itself? – available through behaviourist Minimalist treatment of space has unconscious import, for it opens the self to what behaviourist Minimalist sculptures mean to evoke, even to function as: “potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized, with conscious approximating…of inevitably unconscious truths which follow from them.” These words, from a Levi-Straus quotation used by Nonas, referring to what “music and mythology bring man face to face with”, suggests the ritual character of behaviourist Minimalist sculpture, and especially their psychologically transformative intention. The ritualized sculptural unity of raw materials creates what has been called subjective form, that is, each sculpture is a conscious, shadowy approximation of an unconscious truth, an attempt to bring such a difficult truth into spatial focus. Its existence through space – that it, in nondiscursive or nonlinguistic form (incompletely objectified or “rationalized”) – permits the truth to retain its unconscious charge. Space becomes the subjective form of unconscious truth, its concrete universalization. One might say the sculpture ritualizes space into bodiliness, which is what gives the space unconscious import, makes it seem to be a manifestation of self.
Nonas restores to Minimalism the sense of self that its formalist first phase thought was beside the point; the self-evident intelligibility of gestalt form did not seem to imply it – did not seem to be a “representation” of bodily “ritual” in space. Behaviorist third phase Minimalism shows that gestalt form is ritual bodily presence simpliefied and misapprehended as categorical form. In fact, the history of Minimalism through its three phases demonstrates that there is no form that is categorically the case; the entire notion of categorical from is undermined. There is only “subjective from”, and it is the basis of our sense of the “world”, and the reason why it is possible for Nonas to assert, as he does in the epigraph that heads this examination of his sculpture, that art means changing the shape of the world. The “world” can be changed because it is a subjective from to begin and end with.
The world is the realm (referring to the Merleau-Ponty epigraph) where perception occurs, where the truth is “taken” or experienced, where the perception of the concrete truth – the truth which concreteness alone is, the concreteness which alone is true – occurs. (All perceived concreteness – anything that is perceived concretely, as irreducibly concrete (without the slightest possibility of being illusion) has the character of tautology, of what might be called the tautology of truth.) The sense of specificity conveyed by Nonas`s sculpture is inseparable from its communication of a specific sense of “world”. The “off” character of Nonas`s structures signifies an insecurity about the “integrity” of world – an uncertainty about how to make its concreteness manifest – that can be read metaphorically as an indication of the struggle to achieve integral selfhood. The artistic act initiates a sense of self as much as of world, that is, has an unconscious as well as conscious intention. As long as that unconscious intention remains incompletely specified in the consciously made sculpture, the sculpture will retain an indeterminate charge which suggests the intention to change the world – in no specificably way, that is, in an unconscious way, which suggests a change in perception of what is concrete about it. (One`s sense of concreteness is strongest when it fuses the unconscious` sense of what is emotionally/mythically concrete with the conscious recognition of concreteness). Nonas struggles to make the self`s sense of its possession of space concrete, an almost impossible task because it is blocked by the sense that the world “owns” space, which is why it is conventionally thought of as unified.
To fully grasp what it means to say that nonobjective art, especially in its Minimalist formulation, is an attempt to demonstrate the concrete universality of subjective form – incipient selfhood – it is useful to substitute the Whiteheadean concept of concrescence for the less specific concreteness. It carries with it the idea of the simultaneity of the coming together of data into the unity we mean when we speak of “world”, and the coming into being of the self that perceives this world – the perceiving self that is formally or logically correlate with the world, despite their both being unique configurations. Whitehead writes: “The word Concrescence Is a derivative from the familiar Latin verb, meaning “growing together”. It also has the advantage that the participle “concrete” is familiarly used for the notion of complete physical reality. Thus Concrescence is useful to convey the notion of many things acquiring complex unity. But it fails to suggest the creative novelty involved. For example, it omits the notion of the individual character arising in the concrescence and creativity (or creative novelty or immanent creativity) are complementary for Whitehead. In Nonas, the aura of subjective form is created by the peculiar “incompleteness” with which his aboriginal material data coheres in the world of the individual work, making it thereby more individualized. This is due to the primacy of space in its structure. It is this sense of the spatial concreteness of incompleteness – the peculiar tangibility of space – that generates the “mythic” and subjective possibilities of Nonas`s work, completing its “primitive” character.
The sense of incompleteness plunges us into what Whitehead called “the dim massive complexity of our feelings of derivation”, correlate with our intuition that “appearance is an incredibly simplified edition of reality”. (7) The incompleteness makes us aware of how the formalist sense of gestalt simplicity falsifies the sculpture – strips it of our feelings of its subjective derivation. Space becomes subjectified through this awareness. Merleau-Ponty has pointed out that “mythical or dream-like consciousness” – dim consciousness of appearance`s derivation from a complex, unapparent, yet felt reality – “and perception, are not, in so far as they are different heretically sealed within themselves”. (8) “They are not small islands of experience cut off from each other, and from which there is no escape”, but on a fluid continuum. Together they create our sense of “world, that is, a whole in which each element has meaningful relations with the rest”. (9) What has been called the “primitive mentality” is a state in which the relation between the mythically real and the perceptually real is so highly fluid that they cannot always be differentiated. Nonas`s sculptures seem to have been made by such a primitive mentality, their spatiality now purely perceptually, now mythically, readable. Unexpectedly, it is in the primitive state of mind that one has the strongest sense of concreteness, making appearances most compelling.
The experience of concreteness is a compound consciousness of aboriginal material data and a generalized feeling of universal meaning; “concreteness” is the vector of their convergence. Consciousness of concreteness is a complex state of dialectical awareness, leading to the perception of a “world” on the basis of a highly emotional sense of ultimacy. “The dim (mythical) apprehension of some great principle is apt to clothe itself with tremendous emotional force”. (10) In Minimalism, unity is the great principle, which initially seemed self-evident, and then turned out to be less readily perceivable that had been supposed – which made it all the more mythical in import, all the more fraught with unconscious meaning. It came to signify the archaic unity of the self available only in sculptural “dreams”. All these dreams do, as Nonas himself has said is “to point at the complexity itself” (11) he complexity of self and space, and of their correlation, implied. It is especially the subtle incompleteness, lack of resolution of Nonas`s sculpture that makes clear that, as he has said, he is “working from a kind for general idea that world, perception, is in fact so complex that it is impossible for us to grasp it”. (12) Nonas`s incompleteness makes this impossibility manifest, and makes clear that it has to do with the fact that authentic perception of the world – true consciousness of tis concreteness – is impossible without engaging the most fundamental sense of self and idea of the world, namely, the ambiguous experience of their unity. Our perception of the world`s concreteness is inseparable form our uncertainty about our own and the world`s unity of being. We can say, then , that Nonas offers a particularly “existential” kind of Minimalism, in the sense in which Merleau-Ponty wrote: “We have said that space is existential; we might just a swell have said that existence is spatial, that is that through an inner necessity it opens on to an “outside”, so that one can speak of a mental space and a “world of meanings and objects of thought which are constituted in terms of those meanings”.” (13) Nonas`s sculpture is a mental space in which a great principle of being is explored, which does nothing to diminish the fact that the principle remains mythical in import because it continues to be only dimly apprehended. One might say that Nonas`s sculpture demonstrates the continuing mythical condition of the idea of unity, just when Minimalism thought it had been formally and procedurally demonstrated.
“Art is always specific; and criticism always general”, wrote Nonas in 1970. Let me now try to talk as specifically as possible about the art in the context of this criticism. Jan van der Marck offers a particularly brilliant, exemplary description of the way Nonas`s sculpture Telemark Shortline, built in 1976 at Dartmouth College, works, Van der Marck compares it with Fresno Shortline and Sairy Gamp, noting in general that “Nonas employs four basic space-bounding devices: the incomplete circle, the triangle, the open square, and the linear marker. They constitute the simplest definitions of place – the kinds that can be, and usually are, staked out by walking”. Nonas, indeed, “studies his outdoor sites carefully, and “is, of course, aware that his sculptures resemble the totems and ceremonial enclosures gradually evolved in primitive societies from markers and gathering places. As his sculptures are often inspired by traditional (even archetypal) partitioning of land, it is fitting that they be returned to the land in the form of art”. Van der Marck also notes Nonas`s “programmatic refusal to make the final connection” of all the parts in his sculptures, which “resembles the Navajo weaver`s compensating for imprisoning patterns by running a “spirit line” across the border between the design and the edge of the blanket, thus providing the sprits with an escape hatch from the inner maze”. (14) The way out of course can be a way in; Nonas`s spirit line articulates quite particularly the general sense of incompleteness conveyed by the spatiality of his sculptures, and helps make the world of the work a self-symbol. For the spirit line is really not about the spirit going in or out of the world of the work, but is innate to that world, for it is about the work`s subtle incoherence and seeming lack of cohesiveness, which makes it available for concrete perception – which makes it all the more concrete, forces us away from seeing it as a self evident pattern and toward seeing its materiality and the process through which its pattern comes into being. In fact, the spirit line makes the work manifest as a search for elusive unity – for the binding power that can create the illusion of absolute unitary pattern of rom – rather than an articulation of Platonically real, self-evident gestalt unity.
Indeed, the spirit line effects is of crucial importance for generating our sense of the work`s complexity, and of its availability for symbolic or unconscious use. The entire problematic of the work hinges on the success with which the spirit line effect works – on the success with which a sense of radical incompleteness is created. The spirit line effect registers the momentum of that incompleteness – opens the way to its unconscious implication that what seems like a finished and fated if disguised (geometrical) unity is in fact a “holding pattern”, even a “test pattern” for the world and the self. All shape is heuristic rather than eschatological in Nonas. While, as van der Marck says, Nonas`s works, however dense their materiality, tend to have “low visibility” – in part by reason of the terrain that absorbs them but mostly because of the sublime immensity their incomplete space implies – and “intentionally simple execution”, so that “the slightest exercise of choice by the artist becomes an attention-demanding event”, it is not at all true that Nonas`s sculpture is “of slim expressivity”. (15) The kind of attention that is demanded implies just the opposite; every detail becomes expressive, that is, fraught with dim, unconscious implications. With increasingly concentrated attention, details seem to multiply exponentially, and become qualitatively more significant as well. Every detail becomes mythical, in import, suggesting that the way the work particularizes derives from some profound insight into the fundamental condition of the world – into what it fundamentally means to be concretely in the world. That is, the sculpture is fraught with the burden of its own overwhelming concreteness, as every choice of detail remind us. Nonas`s attempt, in his own words, to “isolate (the) element of ambiguity”, to “focus” more on “the notion of things changings, vibrating” rather than “on balance”, to “indicate the normality of…tension”, (16) makes for a powerful unconscious, expressive effect of which concrete choice is the instrument.
(It is worth noting that elevation of detail which explodes ideal unity, symbol of system, can be taken as a criticism of the ideal of rational social system ,which reduces everything to instrumental use and forces it into apparently foreordained unity.)
Even Nonas`s choice of material – in a 1973 Clocktower show, he first used steel instead of his more customary wood - was made to serve his mythical, expressive ends. This is why, as he says, “the visible materials” he uses, “the form, the shapes, the techniques of putting things together, are simply and clear parts of everyone`s experience; there is little mystery, little confusion about them”. (17) This is deliberately so; starting with the formal Cartesian clarity of everyday experience, the superficial because unconcrete universality and intelligibility of daily reality, Nonas, by a process of concretion, brings out the indeterminacy and unintelligibility within it, which is especially evident when an attempt is made to unite (even if only in an esthetic unity) its elements into a world. That unity never comes off; incoherence and lack of cohesion are experienced; the world is never whole, and never really experienced as whole. Mystery and confusion – “expressivity” – are generated through the tension and ambiguity – rather than unity – that is made manifest. The more realistically remote the unity becomes, the more mythically it is conceived – the more it becomes a “distorted” dream. This is why, as Nonas says, “al perception is about selection, about distortion. DISTORTION.” (18) This apparently conscious distortion registers the unconscious pull of the dream of unity – a dream which, with the force of gravity, causes certain concrete elements to seem more “select” or instinctively right than others. This is especially the case for those elements which constitute the ambiguity/tension which is the sign of unintelligibility/disunity – which must be overcome if unity is to be achieved. But of course they cannot be overcome; Nonas`s sculptures is in the last analysis an exploration of the unintelligibility – lack of wholeness – latent in our general idea of the world, but disregarded until it shows up in particular empirical detail. Our drawning perception of this unintelligibility is subject to suppression by our unconscious dream of ultimate intelligibility, but it nonetheless finally becomes a perception of the inevitability of unintelligibility. The more conscious of unintelligibility the perceiver becomes, the more concrete – the less general (the less informed by the expectation of intelligibility – perception becomes, that is, the more it is invested in detail, the detail that shatters all sense of unity or wholeness, all sense of perceiving a coherent world. Correlate with this, there is a greater sense that the world can be changed – down to its least detail, or perhaps only in its least detail, but with the conviction that a change of details is substantive change – a change with profound implications for the shape of the whole. (Because it is always imaginary or mythical, it is always ready to change, and changeable.)
Nonas`s earliest works, Marker for Ali Chuk and Two-Piece Rudolf (both 1967 in Paris), already show the toemic incoherence – the incoherence that generates a totemic effect and sense of radical concreteness (concrete universality) – that is later transposed into what I call site construction sculpture, that is, sculpture which in and of itself is a constructed site. The material rawness and figural implications of the works are worth noting; the raw material remains, if becoming more discreet – communicated with a greater sense of emphatic detail – while the figural allusion is lost the moment the work becomes land-based, responsive to a terrain. This begins to happen in 1969, with Notched Windfall, extraordinarily reminiscent of Brancusi`s Endless column ( a seminal work for Minimalists), here turned on its side. The cutting of the wood is more aggressive than in Brancusi`s case, and the over-all effect is much more primitive. A triangular piece of the same year, Chico`s Marker (for the Scar of the Dance, Ali-Chuk) with its mix of manufactured and raw wood, signals the contrast between construction and natural site that is later crucial for Nonas. The gaps in this piece, caused by the tilting and shoring up of the superimposed beams, are the basis for the more definitive realizations of Sairy Gamp and Bicycle Bill (both 1973), among other works.
In 1979-71 Nonas created a number of intriguing serial pieces, “intriguing” because the seriality is, if not underminded, then persuasively counterbalanced, by the raw material. In Light to Dark (Dark to Ligth) at 112 Greene Street the irregularly cut, chunky wood draws attention away from its serial procession, and leads to the expectation that the series might stop at any moment. Similarly, in Rochester Surround the crude material (branches) and execution (tied together) seems to countermand the expectation of infinity aroused by the procession of “modular” units, perhaps because the units are not precisely modular, but bristle with erratic, that is energized detail. The detail here is that of nature itself, as in Brush Corral (1971). In Roebling`s Toe, the detail could just as well be natural rather than manufactured, because it is inherent to the material (metal rather than wood). The corral – later becoming the general idea of enclosure – principle remains the same, as it does in a number of 1972 pieces (especially Block Circle a very strong broken circle of wooden blocks, not unrelated to Smithson`s work), but already in Roebling`s Toe (created on site at the Brooklyn Bridge, rich with poetic, that is mythical, unconscious associations) something new, that will stay, appears: the enclosure is broken or open: incomplete or unresolved, depending upon how one wants to see it. This makes the piece itself a kind of site, whether or not it is actually sited – makes it in and of itself a specification of place rather than simply of space. That is, the “erratic” delimiting of space – the strategies of achieving erratic effect have already been noted – converts it into place. For Nonas, the transformation of raw space into raw place – of general place into particular place – which retains rawness through the raw, dense materiality of the construction, is accomplished not simply by giving us a sense of delimitation of space, but by showing us delimitation as an anxious, uncertain process, a certain kind of behaviour marking out space. This marking out of space through raw material is clearly anthropocentric in import, since someone must do the marking, create the delimitation. But the resulting construction remains cosmic in import, since space is still very evident in it, suggesting the “incompleteness” if readiness for use of the place. But the newly constructed space is not really available for everyday use; at best it is a sanctuary in which certain meanings are put for safekeeping. It is as discontinuous as it is continuous with everyday inhabitable space. It inhabits an in between zone, marking as it were the transformation from a state of nature to a state of sociality, from existence completely in the open to the idea of enclosed existence that is crucial to civil society and civilized life. It is a rudimentary “civil” space – which is exactly what it means to speak of it as a “site”, as in “camp site”. It is a no man`s zone , but also one relatively removed from nature, if still showing material traces of it, that marks the transition from the “freedom” of nature to the acceptance of one`s fate as social. This transitional character – frozen in the construction – is the essence of what we mean by “primitive”. Nonas`s primitive enclosures move us from biological existence in nature, still fundamental, and signalled by the relatively raw natural material, to social existence in place, signalled by elementary enclosure, “open” to show the “passage” – and its reversibility. This is important: the many 1972 enclosures imply that one can regress to a state of nature as well as advance to a more formal, ritualized social state of togetherness, unity – worldness, But neither quite happens; one remains ambiguously and tensely – primitively – poised between the two. This sense of conflict latent yet subtly evident in Nonas`s work is largely responsible for its charge, its expressive effect or power over the unconscious (perhaps the most real power there is). Nonas`s works become extremely persuasive at this time because, while eschewing rhetorical ambition and overstatement, like all authentic modernist art (which invariably tends towards “minimal” statement), it becomes emotionally effective because o the general principle it evokes – weeds out of the mass of detail which could be put is not rhetorically manipulated, used to grandiose external effect.
In a number of 1973 works Minimalist control and restraint become every greater. There is a paring down of materials, a greater sense of economy of means. In some Clocktower pieces the lift off the floor is about as “minimal” as it can be. (Is Nonas differentiating himself from another “plumber”, Carl Andre?) The wood is more finished, and in O.K. Lola, installed in the CUNY Graduate Center passageway between 42nd and 43rd Streets, lift is almost altogether absent, perhaps because of the danger involved, but also, one senses, to reflext the solidty and stability of the enclosing architecture. Whitehead has pointed out that containment is one of Plato`s great principles imposing intelligibility on the world – it is certainly an elementary form of unity – and much architectural containment seems to be absolutely reified containment. This is directly reflected in Nonas`s perhaps too architectural piece.
As if in compensation, a number of linear pieces are created in 1974 – pieces eschewing any idea of overt containment. These pieces, sometimes notched, sometimes running and angling through grand spaces, show a greater ambition to encompass space, as well as a new strategy of delimitation – one which already assumes placeness. That is, Nonas here is responsive to an already existing place; he is not, as in earlier work, trying to create his own primitive sense of place out of raw space. Hew works now in clearly finished places, that is, already delimited and highly socialized spaces. This is true for the Fresno piece as well. Only in the Artpark Boundary River/Boundary Man piece is there a return to a “primitive mentality” – the renewal of the primitive attempt to create a sense of (“civic”) place where there is only space – in abundance. Nonas struggles with the grant openness of the Artpark site, and the precarious edge of the Niagara Gorge, using beams as manipulable edges and angles as emblems of containment, without actually creating any. To do so would be a false delimitation, for the Artpark space is transparently infinite; to create an enclosure on it would accomplish nothing, except to give a trivial sense of place, and even to trivialize the very idea of place, in contrast to sublime infinite space. Even the “crossings” only acknowledge that sublime space – don`t even try to suggest its encompassment. Artpark is not really a site, it is a section of cosmos, and Nonas respects its cosmic implications by refusing to construct enclosures on sites in it, but rather “marks” it – redundantly, emphatically. The blocking of the path along the gorge is particularly effective, since it denies the path`s role of going between places. There is no place to go, Nonas seems to be saying; we are reabsorbed by the space through his markings ot it – only now it is a conscious return to the infinite rather than an unconscious immersion in it. The Artpark piece shows just how much Nonas`s constructions signify conscious engagement with space, rather, than unconscious acceptance of it. To overcome naivete about space is one of the great tasks of sculpture.
In 1975-76 Nonas created a number of works that were responsive to established place rather than general space. There is movement between rooms, movement along walls, markings before openings to larger, outdoor space – responsiveness to all kinds of “civilized” stings. But already, with the discussed Telemark Shortline, there is serious movement into open space, heralded by the grand Artpark piece. This movement continues in the notched Documenta 6 piece Single Artificier (1977), and various other 1977 pieces in courtyards or semi-enclosed spaces – particular places that open to generalized spaces. The works articulate the concrete universality of such transitional or in between sites as much by their placing as their construction strategy. Placement has always been crucial to Nonas, but now, with the secure achievement of a vocabulary of shapes and materials, becomes even more of the essence of his syntax - of the choice that makes for concreteness. Indeed, the “concrete” that makes for concrete universality has perhaps more finally to do with placement than with material or shape, since placement directly articulates the mental borderline between general space and particular place, which is the concrete universal that obsesses Nonas.
In the last half decade Nonas has continued to produce a body of extraordinarily subtle “boundary” works, sometimes involving new shapes (the pentagon in 1978 in Houston), sometimes very elaborate, sometimes almost exruciatingly “minimal”. Material has veried, and there have been texts and drawings, in my opinion to reaffirm the primitive in danger of losing its anthropological roots – its aura of “field work”. (“Montezuma`s Last Dead Breakfast in Mexico” is particularly exemplary, revealing Nonas`s identification with a sophisticated primitive, that is, one self-conscious to the point of being aware and trying to control, as his world passes from his control, every detail of its, and his, existence.) (19) “Chair” forms have been created that unexpectedly resemble similar forms form New Guinea, as though Nonas must unwittingly make the primitive sources formally explicit at the very moment they are in danger of becoming obsolete in his work – that is, at the very moment it is in danger of becoming stylized. One can see this explicit primitivist emergence, evident materially rather than formally in 15 Apparitions of chunky steel, as a conscious effort to distance himself from the possibility of falling into the trap of mannerist Minimalism, all too knowing about the vocabulary of material, shape, and syntactical placement available – all too linguistic in substance, and implying a linguistic approach by regarding the site constructions as texts of space. The very allusion to “apparitions” restores the rights of the unconscious over these works, signals that their expressive effect is to take precedence over the linguistic/literal character. This effect seems to work, especially when the pieces, as in recent work in Sweden, involve natural spaces. Then the place the constructed site establishes is indeed forcefully primitive.
In the other works, the mannerist mentality is perhaps not so much avoided as assimilated; density of material and syntactical complexity of placement are self-consciously used to the point where self-consciousness seems a form of unconscious expression, since the results suggests a power beyond all style, a power that no longer worries about whether it is or is not in tune with space, able to finesse it into place. In the recent work the erratic seems to be an end in itself, signalling Nonas`s inclination - unexpected in so meticulous an artist – to rely on instinct. There is a kind of exuberance to the handling of detail, also communicated by the extra-density of the material – its more over physicality, if that is possible – that reveals the driven quality to Nonas`s work. That was there all along, but it is now more evident than ever. To manifest it is to be truly primitive, for finally to be primitive is to unapologetically, directly manifest power, and to make clear that structure exists really not to contain and control but to display power. Nonas`s new idio-syncracy of structure makes the original power of his work clear – the power behind the drive to delimit, the power behind the drive to demonstrate physicality in an epiphany of the sense of concreteness. There is in Nonas the passive strength to endure space, and the power to actively master its unintelligibility. Perhaps in the end all power is derived from the ability to withstand the unintelligibility of the world – traced to an effort to either force intelligibility on it (power is spent when this seem accomplished) or to ride the unintelligibility out, strengthening oneself, increasing one`s power. This now seems Nonas`s resolve: to acknowledge lack of cohesion and coherence more than ever by making excentricity as the sign of the spirit line, and the impossibility of unity – dominant in his work.
Donald Kuspit, 1985
New York
(1) Jan van der Marck, “Richard Nonas: Field Works”, Art in America, 65 (Jan.-Feb. 1977): 114.
(2) Robert Morris, “American Quartet”, Art in America, 69 (Dec. 1981): 96-97.
(3) Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture”, Minimal art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New york, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968), p. 228.
(4) Morris, p. 231.
(5) Morris, p. 232.
(6) Alfred North Whitehead, “Adventures of Ideas”, Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology, eds. F. S. C. Northrop & Mason Gross (New York, The Macmillan Co., 1953), p. 855.
(7) Whitehead, p. 833.
(8) M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 292.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Whitehead, p. 854.
(11) France Morin, “Richard Nonas in conversation with France Morin”, Parachute, No. 9 (Winter 1977-78): 4.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Merleau-Ponty, pp. 293-94.
(14) Van der Marck, p. 116.
(15) Van der Marck, p. 117.
(16) Morin, p. 4.
(17) Ibid.
(18) Ibid.
(19) Richard Nonas, “Montezuma`s Last Dead Breakfast in Mexico”, Hotel (New York, Tanam Press, 1980), p. 225f.