MESOAMERICAN MODERNISM IN THE ART OF BRIAN NISSEN.
Arthur C. Danto

Brian Nissen is the most cosmopolitan of men, at home in many of the great cities of the West - in London, New York, Paris, Mexico City, and Barcelona, among others. He is, moreover, a person of great cultivation, literary and artistic, who enjoys the friendship of poets, politicians, scientists, and philosophers. As an artist, he has been in dialogue with all the major modernist movements, drawing stylistic inspiration from whatever may have suited a vision that is unmistakably his own. But the culture that defines him as an artist is primarily Mesoamerican. Living in Mexico for many years, he was exceptionally open to the extraordinary artistic patrimony of the Indians who, living in total isolation in Middle America before the ruinous conquests of the sixteenth century, evolved over the centuries one of the great civilizations of history. He engaged with it, not in the spirit of anthropology or cultural tourism but as an artist who saw in the often frightening carvings, the codices, the decorative motifs and ritual architectures of a vanquished form of life, a system of art that implied artistic truths for which nothing he had been taught in the schools, the museums, the galleries of Europe or North America had prepared him. Pre-Columbian art, as it is designated, gave him his subject, the substance of his style, and a philosophy of art that he has embodied in a sculptural oeuvre like no other in the contemporary art world. Obviously it would be impossible for him to live the form of life that Mexico opened up for him aesthetically. He is far too modern a person, and much too much the illustrado, to subscribe to all the beliefs the art that inspired him implies. But he does find in the philosophy that explains Mesoamerican art the principle of artistic meaning that holds the key to his own work.

What he discovered in Mexico was what we may distinguish as an aesthetic of meaning in contrast with the aesthetics of form that dominated so large a portion of the modernist discourse of art. "Created by peoples who had no concept of 'Art'as we understand it," Nissen has written, "their artifacts and sculptures ...played an integral part in almost every aspect of their daily life involving medicine, astronomy agriculture, religion, homemaking and so on." The Mesoamerican concept of an art work was of an object "vested with special powers." Those powers enabled it to play a role in daily life by ritualizing their functions, so that a knife, a dish, a pitcher, for example, operated on two interpenetrating planes - the plane of use, and the plane of ritual enactment. "It was an art not confined to formal elegance or ideas of beauty but most often served as a kind of text." Art could be text, in the sense intended by Nissen, only if life itself were a text, only if the whole of life were sacralized.. Human beings, plants, animals, the heavenly bodies, gods and goddesses, were all caught up in a kind of Gesamtkunsterwerk in which everything implied roles, imperatives, duties, upon the execution of which everything else depended. Art in Europe, especially since the invention of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, was set apart from life - put in frames or placed on pedestals, for contemplation and delectation and the exercise of taste and judgment. It existed for the enrichment of leisure, and for those who possessed the time to cultivate their sensibility. The museum as an institution came into full being in the early nineteenth century as a precinct apart form the demands and exigencies of everyday existence, where art had no task to perform other than to be itself. One learned to appreciate it by understanding its form, itself often analyzed in quasi-geometrical terms, or by situating it in the historical contexts on which the efficacy of its meaning depended. In the eighteenth century - the Century of Aesthetics - some of this of course spilled over into life. But it remained the life of taste and judgment, in manners, interior decoration, costumes, collecting, and recreation, for those who could afford to participate in it.

A particular paradigm of the counter-aesthetic philosophy of art that Nissen discovered in Mesoamerica was the tremendous monolith portraying a colossal female figure called Coatlique, which he first saw in the great Anthopological Museum in Mexico City. This imposing effigy, carved out of basalt, over eleven feet high, is of a terrifying snake-headed figure, wearing a necklace of hands, hearts, and skulls; and a skirt of intertwining serpents. It depicts the mother of Huizilopochtli, the patron of Aztec rulers, who emerged from her womb fully dressed for war. The Coatlique figure is an entire library of emblems, each vested with a specific power - but it would be their totalized power that made her an awesome presence. What impressed Nissen particularly is that there are symbols carved under her feet, present but invisible, implying to us - though hardly to the Aztecs, who would not have had a concept of art as purely visual - that it was more important that there be symbols than that they be seen, since Coatlicue's powers transcended the visual. She was magic through and through, scary and powerful rather than, like the goddesses of Greece, graceful and visually enchanting. It is not strictly true that our relationship to the sculpture is not aesthetic - terror and horror are aesthetic qualities, whose intended affect is to frighten viewers rather than to pleasure the eye, as beauty does or is intended to do. I am not sure that anaesthetic art is entirely possible, Marcel Duchamp notwithstanding. But philosophical aesthetics since Kant has confined itself to a relatively narrow range of the available affects. The range selected by Mexican culture is what one might expect of a culture based on an industry of human sacrifice, felt by its cosmologists to be mandated by the need to keep the earth from being destroyed. Though the actual hermeneutics of symbolic interpretation must, however, be left to the archeologists of Mesoamerica, the implicit system in which that culture's art derived its purpose is a matrix for addressing Nissen's otherwise entirely contemporary oeuvre.

Let's look at Ahuacatl, which in fact means "avocado." It is a sculpture of a schematized avocado tree. But it is that plant reimagined through the perspective of a warrior culture. It looks like a fighter-figure, armed and armored. There are no branches, it casts a shadow but offers no shade. Its front is menacing, like that of Coatlique, its front protected by a garment of spear points. Indeed, its identity is indeterminate - it could be a feathered serpent, a crocodile standing erect with its scales menacing, a cactus-like plant, protected by spines. There are spheres at its base, which could as easily be missiles as fruit. There are appendages, which could imply arms or branches. The figure seems to wear some sort of headpiece. My feeling about this bristling object, erect, defiant, dangerous, implies a world in which everything - humans, animals, plants - have to defend themselves under condition of constant threat - and have to prevail or be prevailed over in the ritual struggles a relentless cosmos demands. I can think of nothing like it in contemporary sculpture - a compact text of cosmological meaning, prickly, proud, fruitful, part serpent, part tree, part weapon.

Aztec civilization was calendrically driven, and its rituals were believed necessary to keep the universe from being destroyed. The world had seen four ages come and go, and the fear was that the fifth - the present age - would be apocalyptically destroyed, allegedly by female monsters of the sort exemplified by Coaclique. The great Calendar Stone is in some way Coatlicue's pendant. Nissen's Katun, through its verticality, appears to be a cognate of Ahuacatl, and my first impression of it was that of an animated figure, lifting a shield, which we see in overlapping stages of upward movement, while an arm or arm-like appendage is extended outward in a gesture of warning or salutation. In fact, its title refers to the four-year unit of time used in Mesoamerica, and the overlapping tongue-like forms convey the passing of the years, rising or sinking, according to ones philosophy of time's passage in the larger scheme of history. However we read it, it has, the work has, aesthetically, an art deco rhythm, an ascending upwardness, easily enough explained, formally, when we reflect on the way Aztec modulations lent themselves to the decorative schemes of art deco in the 1920s, in the design of lamps and columns - or pieces of sculpture by Brancusi or the Futurists- or in the design of fast automobiles and the flirty undulations of jazz-age dresses. It is not, however, an instance of style retro on Nissen's part, who has revived the formal strategies of Aztec art that happen to coincide with the language of art deco and its need to convey through its art and design the speed and sexuality of modern life. What it meant in the 1980s, when Nissen's sculpture achieved its maturity, is another story altogether. My sense is that it is infused with affinities between the state of constant warfare that seemed to be our destiny in the late twentieth century, and the end of the world vision that colored daily life and its expectations in the last days of the Aztecs, before their culture was ended by invaders from a world they had no way of understanding - a real life manifestation of what goes forward today in the fantasies of science fiction. Admittedly, that is just the way I see it.

A third verticality is embodied in Heliotropo - "Sunflower" - which of course is that flower whose radiant face is always turned toward the light and hence lends itself to a religious interpretation, under which it, as it were, gazes - until it withers - at the source of its being and of all living beings. It is in no sense, therefore, an arbitrary reading of the work that it evokes, for Nissen at least, a crucifixion, with its arms stretching up to the agony of its suspension. I immediately saw it, for my part, as evoking the great Rondonini Pieta, in which Michelangelo carved from an ancient column the Madonna and her for the moment dead Son. The two readings share an identity - two stages in the death of a savior god. In Michelangelo's work, Mary is of course hooded, which feels echoed in Heliotropo - but in either case, the arc over the figure has to be read as a halo. Yet we must beware too rigid a reading, for it would stretch interpretation too far to read the same arch in Ahuacatl as a nimbus. In general, Nissen's work implies a field of meaning, rather than an exact one-to-one correspondence between sign and signification. And there is always the possibility that a form was put in place to complete the syntax of the work - as "something needed" without contributing some separate meaning of its own. But I think that the general sense of the implied field is consistent in its cosmological range - of a precarious order, of bellicosity, of risks and threats and cataclysmic consequences if things do not go right - which is the consistent and palpable message of the Mesoamerican form of life in a universe in which gods and warriors are engaged in rituals perceived as far more important in their consequences than a single life or a single death. The captive who gives up his heart as the victim of a sacrifice is entirely aware that he is making a contribution to the overall harmony of things.

The underdetermination of specific meanings is nowhere more evident than in a group of volcanoes that in my view are Nissen's major achievement in the 1980s. Paricutin is a four-sided pyramid, a stylized mountain. Six plumes of flame - or smoke - rise from its geometrical crater, doubling the work's height. The work conveys through its form the sense of a brazier, as an accessory of sacrifice. There is a flight of steps up one side, as in the stepped-pyramids of Yucatan, used by priests, ascending and descending in the exercise of their ritual enactments. It is at once a natural and a architectural form - a mountain, a pyramid, an altar, with nature, religion, and art collaborating in the preservation of the cosmic order. Vermiform tubes, writhe out of the crater and down the slopes, and three cylinders and an arch at the base perhaps implies a village precariously placed at the foot of the thundering, shaking, sulphurous, devouring, flambant opening into the earth's interior. The work stands higher than Nissen himself, in one picture photographed next to it, so its scale is commensurate with its power. What this illustration makes us appreciate is that scale does not imply size in any of the great pieces of the 1980s. They could be realized in any dimension, but lose nothing of their implicit power when physically executed as a table-top sculpture. The work is monumental, whatever its size.

One of Nissen's bronze sculptures has a meaning that might be lost on those whose knowledge of Mesoamerican history is not as deep and rich as his. It is inspired by a "chinampa" - a kind of floating garden - rows of which served an agricultural purpose in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, before the conquest of Mexico. The chinampas were constructed of reeds and rushes, cemented together with mud from the lake bottom, which made a soil rich in nutrients, producing a crop sufficient to help feed a large population. In Aztec times, rows of chinampas floated on the surface of a lake, allowing for fishing in the channels between the rafts, and in a system of canals that still exist in Xochimilcho. A typical "chinampa" by Nissen will have basket-like motif of interwoven strips, reflecting the way the artificial islands were constructed, some forms that reflect agricultural products - like melons or squashes - and perhaps a hut-like edifice for shelter and what may refer to a dock. There are several variations of the chinampa theme, which exemplify, to my mind, the "flat-bed" mode of composition - a term introduced by Leo Steinberg to characterize the work of Robert Rauschenberg. Like all of Nissen's sculptures, the chinampas draw inspiration from the artist's peers in the modern and post-modern era. But the chiampas also celebrate the skills of nameless and forgotten artisans - weaving and interweaving, shaping actual islands out of vegetable matter and muck, putting art to work in the service of life and the sustaining welfare of the larger community. What artists of the modern world can say as much?

Nissen's sculptures characteristically use a vocabulary of assembled flat planes, with appended geometrical forms - cylinders, spheres, smaller truncated pyramids with openings, arcs - and irregular non-geometrical forms, like knobs, rings, hooks, sometimes densely arrayed, like scales or armor. His style is immediately recognizable. The objects formed by these components are not always easily identifiable - Quetzal, for example, looks as if its is formed of sets of three curved brake-pads, which could, in the aggregate, stand for waves, or palm leaves. The sculptures have a simplified moderne look, explainable, as I have suggested, through the fact that art deco - or art moderne - already drew upon Aztec. They have, often, a squat power, and a beautiful bronze patina, real or implied. The chiampas are raft-like platforms, with various impressed patterns, suggestive of weaving and plating, on which are arrayed sculptural forms of the sort just described, suggesting farm structures. They feel like miniature settlements, and carry the artist's sculptural language into a new dimension.

A different if affine feeling is conveyed by Nissen's variations on a theme encountered in nature - the Limulus Pulyphemus or Horseshoe Crab, whose discarded shells resemble readymade Aztec artifacts, familiar to beachcombers along the New England shores. Nissen sees these as having the form and bristling ornamentation of helmets - a shape that has remained unaltered for two hundred million years - the oldest living animal, in the sense that living specimens are morphologically the same as the earliest known fossils. Nissen decided, in an inspired moment, to design news shells for Limulus Polyphemus - a new line of helmet designs, as if for members of a neo-Aztec order, interested in millinery intimidation. So there are blade form (Limulus 1, worm forms (Limulus 7), and even the tongue-forms (Limulus 5), lending support to my initial reading of Katun as a warrior. An exhibition of the Limulus variations is like a catalog of Nissen's forms, put to new uses.

Sometimes, the recycling of forms leads to new and even amazing results. Some of the feeling of Quetzal, for example has been massively amplified in the sculptural mural, The Red Sea, installed at the Centro Maguen David in Mexico City, achieved in 2005. It consists of whitish flat curled planes - like shavings - in various widths, growing increasingly wider in both directions from the center, where the "waters' have been divided, creating a path for the Children of Israel to pass safely between walls of water, across the floor of the Red Sea. To have built a raging sea, divided by the implied might of Jehovah, is an act of artistic daring beyond anything in Nissen's already daring corpus, and unmatched by anything I know of in art. It is a masterpiece of religious art, of church decoration, of mural sculpture - and it is worthy of the tremendous Mesoamerican tradition from which Nissen has drawn his inspiration for four decades, and it is the culmination of a brilliant career.

Arthur Danto , Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, is art critic for The Nation. His books include The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Embodied Meanings, Beyond the Brillo Box, and Encounters and Reflections, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism. He is, in addition, a prestigious and influential thinker widely ready by artist, critics, art historians and philosophers or art.