SCULPTURE AND ITS PLACE, FRANÇOIS SALMERON
Understated, sequenced and meticulously arranged in the exhibition area, the work of Richard Nonas (1936–2021) appears to be an extension of Minimalism with its raw materials and elementary shapes. At first glance, we notice that Untitled (2016) flows across the gallery floor in the manner of Carl Andre’s manufactured pieces, stripping sculpture of its pedestal to better return it to the laws of gravity. This sculpture can also be interpreted as an extensible amalgamation of parts, like the process established by Donald Judd, all the more so in that the dimensions of Untitled adapt to the exhibition area, here with 12 granite edging pieces distributed across two spaces. On the other hand, the piece from the Curl Drawing series (2016) seems to draw inspiration from Richard Serra’s curved compositions, hoisting the flat sheet of paper into a 3D structure, blurring the lines between drawing and sculpture.
In opposition to Minimalism
However, the uniqueness of Richard Nonas’s approach is clear. A trained anthropologist, who spent time with Indigenous communities in the USA (Havasupai), Mexico (Papago) and Canada (Cris and Athabaskan) from 1956 to 1964, he differentiated himself from the Minimalists by contemplating the cultural, contextual and spiritual meaning of art and its role in society. For example, Nonas did not share Andre or Judd’s interest in the standardisation of sculpture in the era of industrial production. He preferred to take an artisan approach in his carpenter’s workshop where multiple etched pieces of wood and steel accumulated alongside kayaks built using the skills he learnt from Inuits in Newfoundland and Greenland.
Reconfiguring space
In reality, Nonas’s approach is more comparable to that of the performer Trisha Brown who introduced him to the New York art scene in 1966 as he was leaving anthropology behind and creating his first sculptures with pieces of wood gathered in Central Park, where he met the choreographer during his daily walks – and to Gordon Matta-Clark too, a friend with whom he founded the Anarchitecture group in 1974. “We wanted to use some of the vocabulary developed by [the Minimalists] but with another goal. We wanted to put more emotion into our work and create a reality (...) more rooted in its circumstances (1)”, explained Nonas. Crafted from wooden beams or scraps collected from wasteland, his work at the time had a performative and, contextual scope linked to the alternative places and collective workshops across New York where Nonas placed his sculptures – rejecting the term ‘installation’ – to reconfigure the space and alter our sensory experience of it.
Vibratory material
In this regard, Richard Nonas took an interest in the vibratory qualities of material, such as the steel he worked with from 1973, and granite which he discovered in 1984 during a trip to Scandinavia: the two materials featuring in the exhibition. Nonas praised steel for its substance and emotional qualities. “It’s cold, heavy and smooth to the touch,” he said. “It creates a place that is full of character, which changes the way you feel once you enter (2)", as though very consistency and texture of material and the resulting sensory experience transformed our perception of the space in which the sculpture was placed. Granite fascinated the sculptor as the material of choice for ritual structures, such as the Carnac stones, the Stonehenge rings and Viking tombs, which Nonas referred to in his writings as examples of “a sculpture that instantly changes the world, (...) by literally cutting into it, by marking the world itself with lines of human life (3).”
The cultural value of art
In Nonas’s view, art helps to contain space and shape it like a culturally determined environment. In this way, sculpture and drawing are the “fundamental markers (4)" through which a society evaluates its living space, and its own earthly condition, like this black cross on a red background – Nonas employed colour from 1985 – which welcomes us at the entrance to the exhibition like a Paleolithic sign. From this perspective, art has “cultural value” and an “aura (5)”, while Nonas believed that the material he worked with had its own strength and solidity, giving the sculpture a “raw presence” which “vibrated” and “shone” like the boli fetish the sculptor kept in his workshop. In Nonas’s view, art helps to contain space and shape it like a culturally determined environment. In this way, sculpture and drawing are the “fundamental markers” through which a society evaluates its living space, and its own earthly condition, like this black cross on a red background – Nonas employed colour from 1985 – which welcomes us at the entrance to the exhibition like a Paleolithic sign. From this perspective, art has “cultural value” and an “aura ”, while Nonas believed that the material he worked with had its own strength and solidity, giving the sculpture a “raw presence” which “vibrated” and “shone (6)” like the boli fetish the sculptor kept in his workshop.
A circuit of energies
So what is the meaning of sculpture ? And its calling ? Richard Nonas refused to reduce it to the illustration of an idea or a technical process resulting in the manufacture of an object, any more than he considered it “static content” decorating an exhibition space which would, in turn, be perceived as an “empty container (7)". For Nonas, it was about regressing to a time before the modern perception of space, which weakened our experience of it, stripped it of vitality and reduced it to a “neutral and standardised” substrate – the logical res extensa – in which fixed pieces were “juxtaposed (8)” but sealed off from one another. To understand the dynamics of Nonas’s sculpture, his biting way of distinguishing his approach from Judd’s gives
surprising insight: “My work is about electricity; Judd was a plumber – I work with energy, not pipes (9)", he snapped. Nonas substituted the modern, rationalist and fragmented conception of space inherited by Minimalism, where sculpture appeared to be a collection of parts – like pipework! – for a dynamic perception of the exhibition space, populated by radiant bodies
and cut through by an electric charge that the sculpture helped circulate. This world in movement, like the “energy circuit (10)" described by 20th-century thermodynamic science and ecology, is a substitute for the rigid categories of modern rationality, perceiving the cosmos as a life cycle: “The current is the stream of energy that flows from the earth, into plants and animals, and once again into the earth in an endless energy circuit (11)", said the American ecologist Aldo Leopold in his essay, Round River. As in Nonas’s work, the river is not a naturalist landscape but a dynamic loop which begins in the earth.
The spirit of the place
In his approach, Nonas sought to carefully survey the space, archaeological cord in hand, to evaluate the exhibition area and determine each sculpture’s location with the utmost precision. “His main objective was to use sculpture to mark specific places (12) ", says the curator Didier Schwarz. Nonas’s sculptures thus appear like beacons marking the field lines of the space they inhabit. They emphasise the “backbone (13)” of the space, its joints and nerve centres. In this way, they follow the rhythm of the place’s spirit, punctuated by moments of respite where each object evokes its auratic qualities. “My work consists of placing objects in space and transforming the atmosphere of a room,” explained Nonas whose sculptures contribute to the
“free-flowing movement (14)” of energies, bodies and materials which vibrate in the exhibition space.
The river as a dividing line
In this manner, the Untitled sculpture is less about illustrating the course of a river, as in a naturalist work, but examining the forces of the place it inhabits. Untitled traces a diving line between two contradictory cosmologies situated on either side of the river, contrasting a modernist and mechanist bank that breaks down space into measurable segments, with a primary and organicist bank that takes the pulse of an environment animated by fluid energies and vibratory bodies. Nonas remained fascinated by the structuralist methodology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes which highlighted the ambiguity of cultural standards, and observed how the values that structure our relationship with the world are reflected in art. “The
meaning of the piece evolves with the needs of society (15)”, said Nonas, who sought both to reject the rationalist foundations of Minimalism and the consumerist materialism of Pop Art, then dominating the western scene, and to celebrate art for its capacity to revive a world mortified and stripped of all spiritual meaning by modernity (16) reducing it to a simple instrumental value. “We destroy nature and natural objects to appropriate them (17)", he said.
Subversive power
Richard Nonas thus highlighted the fundamental ambiguity of art, and rehabilitated its subversive power which, “allows us to depart from the narrow certainty that each culture maintains when it comes to the nature of the world (18).” Art offers a “safe and accessible escape(...) from the predictability of culturally defined categories which [it] calls into question(19)”, making it critical and marginal by definition. It departs from accepted standards and sits on the margins of society defined by the granite borders of Untitled. But if art undermines the restrictive categories cultivated by our “narrow-mindedness,” sculpture also has the capacity, in Nonas’s eyes, to become part of the world and “enrich life (20)". Like Friedrich Nietzsche’s “philosophy with a hammer (21)” which shatters former idols sculpted by the decadent forces of the European idealist culture and seeks to celebrate our vital forces by bringing to light a more fundamental model that the philosopher identified in the Dionysian Greek tragedies, Nonas’s sculpture appears to be “the physical manifestation of our incredible capacity to reshape the world simply by changing our conception of it (22)". However, the deconstruction of the ideological structure that confines us is by no means an end in itself. It only highlights the need for art to “give meaning [back] to our lives (23)", and for sculpture to “command the space around it (24)”, without which, the world would continually give way, creating an “uninhabitable “chaos (25)" – like the unbridled current of a river.
Irrigation deep in the desert
Thus, Richard Nonas turned towards examples of “primary culture (26)" encountered during his time with the Indigenous communities of North America, which he contrasted with a secondary culture carrying the habitus and conventions of European colonies which he deemed as “disconnected” from the material conditions of existence. While the construction of an obelisk pointing skyward or the extension of a railway stretching into the distance appear to be archetypes of Constantin Brancusi and Carl Andre’s sculpture, it is likely that the 1600 metre-long, 5 cm-wide, 8 cm-deep irrigation ditch discovered by Richard Nonas in the Mexican desert during his time with the Papago people in 1963–1964, dug with a simple steel bar, was the model for his sculpture and Untitled. “These are real lines. Cuts in the real sense of the word. This is the simplest, most direct and most immediate marker of human thought and passion on the complex cultural and natural reality (27)”, noted the artist, who admitted to having first perceived the desert as a vast, indistinct expanse.
[1] Words of Richard Nonas quoted in Dieter Schwarz, “The work is never enough”, essay taken from the Richard Nonas monograph published by MAMCO Geneva, 2023.
[2] Interview with Richard Nonas at the Hans Mayer gallery (Düsseldorf), 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ0tYnUk09U
[3] Richard Nonas, Get Out, Stay Away, Get Back, Essay 20, Les presses du réel, 1995.
[4] Dieter Schwarz, “The work is never enough”, op. cit.
[5] Walter Benjamin, L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique (1939), Chapters 2 and 5, Folio Gallimard, 2008.
[6] Richard Nonas, Get Out, Stay Away, Get Back, Essays 6, 7 and 11, op. cit.
[7] Dieter Schwarz, “The work is never enough”, op. cit.
[8] Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), PUF, 2013.
[9] Words of Richard Nonas quoted in Dieter Schwarz, “The work is never enough”, op. cit.
[10] Aldo Leopold, Almanach d’un comté des sables (1949), “La pyramide de la terre“, Flammarion, 2000.
[11] Aldo Leopold, La terre comme communauté, “La rivière ronde. Parabole“ (1953), Éditions Wildproject, 2021.
[12] Dieter Schwarz, “The work is never enough”, op. cit.
[13] Words of Richard Nonas quoted in Dieter Schwarz, “The work is never enough”, op. cit.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Richard Nonas, Justified Margins: Seeking the Soul of Art, 1990.
[16] Carolyn Merchant, La mort de la nature. Les femmes, l’écologie et la Révolution scientifique (1980), Éditions Wildproject, 2021
[17] Richard Nonas, Get Out, Stay Away, Get Back, Essay 34, op. cit.
[18] Richard Nonas, The Snake in the Garden.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Friedrich Nietzsche, Le crépuscule des idoles (1888), Flammarion, 1993.
[22] Richard Nonas, Get Out, Stay Away, Get Back, Essay 11, op. cit.
[23] Richard Nonas, The Snake in the Garden.
[24] Richard Nonas, Get Out, Stay Away, Get Back, Essay 7, op. cit.
[25] Ibid., Essay 21.
[26] Ibid., Essays 25 and 20.
[27] Ibid., Essay 20.
