English / Español


Born in London, England in1939. 1963/78 - lived in Mexico for 17 years. Held exhibitions in South America, U.S.A. and Europe. In 1978 moved to New York where he presently lives and works. 1980-81 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Principal exhibitions - Museum of ModernArt Mexico City. Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Tamayo Museum Mexico City. Museo de Barrio, New York. This document contains images and information about the artist's work in sculpture and painting. Also included are texts and essays in English and Spanish, Resume, Curricula and links to other relevant sites on the web


This section will contains a selection of images of the artists work on certain themes, together with brief descriptions, and links to further commentaries.



Nissen is an inventor of solid forms that suddenly, seized by an enthusiastic breath, are sent into flight - spontaneous multicolor pollen.’ ----------- Octavio Paz

This exhibition at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City in 1983 was an exploration of a prose poem by Octavio Paz, ‘The Obsidian Butterfly’ - a lament by an Aztec goddess over her eclipse and conquest by Christianity. The idea that ran through this exhibition was the re-invention of an ancient pictorial form into the language of contemporary art, and discovering the hidden affinities that link them. The show included relief paintings, sculpture, graphics, and a dance/performance Nissen choreographed as an integral part of the exhibition. Nissen's conjectured codex 'Itzpapalotl’, a pictographic interpretation based on the poem was published together with a recording of Paz reciting his poem.

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OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY


 

The past is never dead: its not even past’


-William Faulkner-


This project began with conversations I had with Octavio Paz in which I had mentioned my interest in pre-Columbian codices, and especially their symbiotic relation to drawing and writing, and that I had already made some conjectured versions based on their screen-fold format. I asked Octavio if he would be willing to collaborate on a codex, and he suggested that a poem of his — the Obsidian Butterfly — would be a perfect vehicle. In the poem the goddess declares ‘Images spring from my body’ and what better than to make these images visible. Make them manifest. This wonderful prose poem is a lament by the goddess Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly. Her song tells of her demise, her cult eclipsed by the arrival of a new religion. She is both a warrior goddess and goddess of childbirth, and is represented as a butterfly with jaguar claws - a curious incarnation of vivacity and violence. Traces of her presence still exist. I found out that some women in northern Mexico are accustomed to put a piece of obsidian under their tongue when giving birth to protect their babies from deformities, though they have no idea where this superstition originates. The myths associated with obsidian — black volcanic glass — come from two sources. Polished obsidian served as mirrors and was believed to be the soul crystallized into rock, and artfully split obsidian was used for arrowheads and sacrificial knives.


This butterfly-goddess, has its origins in a nocturnal species, - Rothschildia Orizaba of the family Saturniidae. Metamorphosed into the goddess Itzpapálotl ( itztili-obsidian, y papálotl - butterfly) it is also known as the ‘butterfly of four mirrors’ in reference to the transparent areas of the wings, which are triangular and evoke the shape of arrowheads. The codex took form as a visual complement to the poem, juxtaposing ancient and contemporary signs and symbols, and Octavio made a special recording of the poem that was published together with the codex. Using the formats of different codices I developed a number of icons and images, which I felt needed to be explored in different media. So I began to develop them, first in sculpture, and then in painting and collage and reliefs.


The question of what art was, what it is, and what it will become is one of the great themes that motivates the art of today. Is there such a thing as progress in art? Certainly visual idioms come and go, and art concerns itself with expressing and relating present to past. Even the concept of Art is quite recent in our history of image making. We may talk of progress in the history of ideas but neither art, emotions, nor our sense of wonder are subject to progress, even though they may be motivated by quite different events. Art mutates, interpreting, sublimating and expressing the world around it. Our vision of the past shines through the tinted lens of translation, sometimes in sharp focus, but more often blurred. Its original context escapes us and although we are enveloped by it’s light, we are barely able to distinguish the things it illuminates.


‘The past is a foreign country’ wrote L.P.Hartley, certainly a very modern sentiment. The ancients made no such distinction between past and present. The past was something actual. Working around the theme of the Obsidian Butterfly was an evocation of past and present, and the way one filters into the other in unexpected ways. I found parts of car batteries corresponding to images of the rain god Tlaloc, and insect limbs manifesting themselves in computer circuit boards. Dozing early one morning I was thinking about the images of Itzpapalotl that are carved on the columns of the Butterfly temple in the ruins of Teotihuacan. Each butterfly has two obsidian circles embedded in its wings. I had just started to work on large, butterfly shaped collages, and it occurred to me that these circles of black obsidian glass could reappear as the black vinyl circles of long playing records. That morning I rushed out to our nearest secondhand record store, and asked the man there for some 80 or 100 records. He kept insisting on finding out what kind of music I wanted, and then became quite uptight when I said I didn’t care as long as the labels were brightly colored. Then he got pretty annoyed, saying that one doesn’t buy records that way, you have to know what kind of music you like and so on. I was obliged to explain what I needed them for in order to calm him down. Anyway, eventually the records were incorporated into many of the works and I loved the idea that they had irretrievable sounds and messages embedded in them. Secret sounds. Mute oracles.


The works woven around this theme were shown at the Tamayo museum in Mexico City. I wanted Octavio’s recitation of the poem he had recorded to be a presence in the exhibition, and so I decided to choreograph a dance sequence to accompany it together with music specially composed by Carles Santos. This was performed at regular intervals for the duration of the exhibition. The dance, to Paz’s recitation and Santos’s minimalist composition of layered voices, was an arrangement of poses dissolving into other poses by four dancers forming symmetrical insect shapes, while on a platform above them a contortionist wound and unwound his body in slow motion.


The exhibition was in a way a visual interpretation and a physical manifestation of Paz’s poem. A commingling of text and context, out of time and re-invented into the present. When Paz first visited the exhibition, he was delighted and told me that he was struck by it not being a just a collection of works around the poem, but as the poem, an organic whole, a single work.


Brian Nissen




This exhibition came about as the result of an invitation by the Ministry of Culture of Catalonia to participate in the 1992 quincenteniel celebrations in Barcelona. Nissen chose the theme of Atlantis, as a fable linking both America and Europe. The exhibition starts with a section of invented maritime maps of Atlantis, and in the area in which they are displayed one hears the faint sounds of whale song. Other works include relief paintings — evocations of sea beds; sub aquatic archeology, floating volcanoes and drifting pyramids. Wood and bronze sculptures of erupting pyramid/volcanoes propose an invented archeology — signs and detritus of the lost continent. At a certain point in the exhibition one enters a darkened area - a conjectured ‘Aquarium of Atlantis’ in which there are illuminated tanks containing transparent acrylic sculptures.

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ATLANTIS


This exhibition came about as the result of an invitation by the Ministry of Culture of Catalonia to participate in the 1992 quincenteniel celebrations in Barcelona. Nissen chose the theme of Atlantis, as a fable linking both America and Europe. The first interpretation of America sent back to Europe was that it was Paradise; Eden - while others subsequently reported it to be Plato’s lost Atlantis. The exhibition starts with a section of invented maritime maps of Atlantis, and in the area in which they are displayed one hears the faint sounds of whale song. Other works include relief paintings — evocations of sea beds; sub aquatic archeology, floating volcanoes and drifting pyramids. Wood and bronze sculptures of erupting pyramid/volcanoes propose an invented archeology — signs and detritus of the lost continent. At a certain point in the exhibition one enters a darkened area - a conjectured ‘Aquarium of Atlantis’ in which there are illuminated tanks containing transparent acrylic sculptures. As an extrapolation of Plato’ Atlantis, this exhibition is conceived a single work.



 

FINDING ATLANTIS


Brian Nissen


Early in 1990 I was given the opportunity to do an exhibition in Spain in the context of the 1992 celebrations of the ‘discovery’ of America (promptly renamed the ‘encounter’). This led me to develop a theme that I had been toying with for sometime but had not been able to get a grasp on - AMERICA/ATLANTIS. Since the second interpretation of America to reach the Spanish court was that they had indeed found lost Atlantis, it seemed the perfect opportunity to undertake a visual exploration of aspects of the great legend, and look at it again in the context of these celebrations linking the old and new continents.


Atlantis is one of the most durable and popular of the great myths that have come down to us from antiquity. It is also one of the great deluge myths, common to so many of the world’s religions. From the Popol-Vuh to the Bible they appear and reappear - a metaphor of fall and redemption. Atlantis is a classic deluge myth, but with an important difference. There is no Noah. No survivor. No witness. No first hand account. In fact Atlantis was invented by Plato, and first made mention of in two of his Dialogues, Timaios and Critias.


Plato claims he heard of Atlantis from his great grandfather, who in turn heard of it from a relative of his ,Solon, who claimed he heard of it from priests on his travels in Egypt. But why did this particular story become one of the great myths of all time? Why did the Greeks cultivate this story? What was its attraction for them and why was Plato so much interested in it? It may well be that the story of Atlantis was used by Plato to demonstrate that such a society as he had proposed in his ‘Republic’ was not only plausible, but possibly existed long ago in Atlantis. This, of course, would give it a credible origin.


For his contemporaries it had a different attraction. It was fashionable at the time for wealthy Greek citizens to travel to Egypt, where they would marvel at the splendor and antiquity of their monuments. The Egyptians, inhabiting a much poorer country than Greece, insisted on reminding them that Egypt had a history that went back all the way to its creation; while no record of ancient Greek cultures existed. And not only that, but Greek art and culture derived directly form the glories of Egypt. This probably did not go down too well with the Greeks. Imagine, then, the appeal of Plato’s Alantis, which demonstrated a great, self-engendered Greek culture that prospered some thousand years before Egypt, and clearly showed that Greek culture owed nothing to Egypt. We now know that this kind of thing is typical of cultural politics - a nation’s re-arrangement and invention of its origins, ancestry, and the hierarchies that go with it. This process has been, and still is, common practice.


Take for example a recent event in Mexico. The tiny island of Mexcaltitán in a lagoon on the shores of Nayarit , in northwestern Mexico, was the object of a presidential visit; a state occasion. The only remarkable thing about this island is its curious configuration - concentric streets bisected by four perpendicular avenues . Local aficionados had compared this layout to early maps of the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, and had found strange similarities and correspondences between the two. This led them to the idea that this little island must have been Aztlán, the mythic home of the Aztecs. Their proposition gained such standing that in 1989 the president of México visited the little island and designated it a national monument, and by official decree it was declared to be Aztlán, origin of Mexico and ‘Mexicaness’. This act in effect invents a pre-hispanic nation ‘Mexico’ which never existed. A minor operation of ‘Manifest Destiny’, legitimizing the ancestry of modern Mexico even though the area it now covers was made up of many different nations, cultures and languages. Again we see the same Atlantis syndrome at work. Countries, nations and empires invent and re-invent their origins, nation memory and identity to suit their own ends.


Of course Mexcaltitán had not escaped notice as a candidate for the site of Atlantis. Every few years a new location of Atlantis is proposed and hits the headlines. Santini, the Azores, Bermuda, the straits of Gibraltar, and so on. America was a great candidate, and from 1492 on has been the subject of intense speculation. We know that the first chronicles sent back to Europe by Spanish priests depicting and interpreting their encounter with the New World concluded that they had found Paradise. Eden. Columbus believed the Orinoco to be the fourth river of Eden. Unknown, exotic fauna and flora that bloomed all year round in an eternal spring had to be the Garden of Eden. Among other proofs given was the curios observation that strange birds had been found (parrots) that imitated human speech. It was well known that in Eden, before the ‘original sin’ — the fall of man — animals had the faculty of speech. The next interpretation of the ‘New World’ to arrive in Europe was that it was Plato’s lost Atlantis. Friar Bartolome de las Casas wrote a whole chapter corroborating this, and other reports confirmed it. Columbus had landed at a town on the Panamanian coast called Atlán. Atlán means ‘on the water’. Strange how much closer it comes in sound and meaning to ‘Atlantis’ and ‘Atlantic’ that the Greek given origin ‘Atlas’ The third and final interpretation of America came via Amerigo Vespucci who claimed that it was indeed a continent whose existence had been unknown to Europeans.


Atlantis is then, like all great myths, a metaphor. Each of us will find in it a meaning that arouses and feeds our imagination. Buried somewhere in Atlantis is our own personal Garden of Earthly Delights, our Lotus Land, Arcadia, Shangri-La, Jauja, El Dorado, Limbo Xanadu. It is our day dream, chimera, fuego fatuo. Our siren’s song. A mental image that reveals the all-enveloping sense of wonder we lost when we grew up.


Brian Nissen

 

These works were based on the idea of the floating gardens on the lake of Xochimilco in the southern part of Mexico City, where the Aztecs had invented a novel system of agriculture that provided provisions for their city, built in the middle of a lake. These sculptures are, in a sense, landscapes. But they are enclosed landscapes. These sculpture/islands are set on bases of dark mirror. Floating reflections. The memory of the water surrounds a sculptural event.


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CHINAMPAS

 

Sometime ago I made my first Chinampa in bronze. Bit by bit the idea evolved into series of sculptures and related works, exploring different aspects of the theme. The idea of the Chinampas - constructed islands, floating gardens - seemed in an odd way to relate to certain premises of Action Painting in which the surface of the painting is conceived as an area or arena on which the act of painting takes place The paint itself becomes the testimony of what has happened - a manifestation of the event. Evidence of a poetic act. The edges of the canvas define the area of the action, circumscribed like an island.

The Chinampas of Xochimilco are also a specific area in which an event takes place - in this case, agriculture. Things are laid out and cultivated. Sometimes a smal temple or an altar is erected. In these sculptures I have used the format of these little man-made islands; but in this case what happens on them is an evocation of forms, spaces, shapes - some organic: pods, plants seeds, roots - others more architectonic -ramps, paths, mounds, enclosures.

The wall pieces evoke an aerial view of the Chinamitl; woven mats made of reeds and rushes used to start the construction of the Chinampa.

The sculptures are, in a sense, landscapes. But they are enclosed landscapes. These sculpture/islands are set on bases of dark mirror. Floating reflections. The memory of the water surrounds a sculptural event.

Brian Nissen.

 

 

Nissen’s most recent works are a series of bronzes and collages Limulus, based on forms of the Horse Shoe Crab. This rather bizarre animal is called a living fossil as it is the oldest living animal known to us that has not changed its form in millions of years, and has long fascinated him. Its simple exterior helmet shape encloses the baroque symmetry of the inside, and he was attracted to developing these contained forms with the idea of inside/outside as a sculptural space; the one invoking the other.


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AMERICAS CENTER ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY


THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK


Symposium and Exhibition celebrating


LIMULUS The Horseshoe Crab


December 4th-20th 2001


 

Brian Nissen


 

My participation in this event had a curious beginning. I was at the celebration of a friend’s 60th birthday about a year ago, seated at a table with nobody I knew. Between drinks and dining I mentioned in passing that I was a sculptor and painter and had been working for some time on the theme of horseshoe crabs. By chance it turned out that I was sitting next to an ecologist, a biologist and a scientist, all well informed about the animal, and so for the rest of the evening an excited encounter of champions of Limulus took over, dominating the conversation.


Until then I had seemed to be a lone enthusiast of Limulus, surprising my friends by my obsession with this strange creature. But then I had spent a long time working around its forms and had found it an inspired subject to explore in my work. Most of the people I knew had never heard of the creature - except some of those familiar with the beaches of New England - and I had felt like a lone herald carrying the banner for Limulus, expounding on its amazing attributes. So this encounter with horseshoe crab fans was a delight for me.


My new friends then organized a trip for us to meet some other biologists and to witness with them the spectacle of Limulus’ annual mating ritual out at the Gateway National Park on Long Island. Once a year hordes of horseshoe crabs invade the beaches of the East Coast, where they appear on the night of the last full moon of May at the height of the spring tide and consummate their honeymoon on the shoreline.


My first encounter with horseshoe crabs was in Menemsha pond, on Martha’s Vineyard. I was fascinated by the appearance of the animal. Fearsome, fantastic, and formidable - a marvel of the mechanics of nature. Something straight out medieval bestiaries, a rival to the Basilisk, the Phoenix, Chimera, Manticore, and Salamander. Artists and poets have conjured up fabulous animals, from the ancients to Lewis Carroll, Joan Miró, and Jorge Luis Borges. But this time, the fabulous creature was for real.


They looked to me like some kind of primitive tank, or a Japanese warriors’ helmet; something out of science fiction: Primeval and futuristic at the same time. I began to be haunted by its shape and structure. The simple helmet shape of the exterior enveloping the complex mechanics of its underside began to show up in my work, first as sculptures, and then as collages and reliefs.


It is true that the horseshoe crab though completely harmless, has a frightening aspect. People are scared to even touch it and fear the awesome spike that is its tail, which serves as a lever used to right itself when flipped over by the tide, and is quite harmless. But I found a strange splendor in this animal; its fantastic shape seemed so ancient and yet strangely modern. From the front we are looking at a kind of stealth bomber: Inside at something that looks like an ancestral scorpion. A true survivor. An amazing design of nature. I collected their cast off carapaces and they became a presence in my studio, sometimes intimidating, sometimes leading me on. Always watching. There is something of Beauty and the Beast, or rather the Beauty of the Beast, in the way we react to Limulus.


What led me into the sculptures was the tremendous visual presence of this animal, with its contrasting shapes encompassing the same space. A conflation of Inside and Outside. The challenge was to make these connected spaces play off each other.


I have a liking for such spaces. They originate with Picasso’s seminal sculpture, his cut-out tin guitar of 1912, which for me, was, as it were, the relativity theory of sculpture, with outside and inside confounding and usurping each other’s natural place. A cylinder protruding from the surface of the guitar represents what should be the hole into the interior, a concept of sculptural space never seen before.


One of the wondrous aspects of the horseshoe crab is that it comes to us intact from the depths of time. Our living fossil has been around for hundreds of millions of years. It was a denizen of Pangaea, and witness to the original supercontinent as it drifted apart. It is so old that it is challenges our perception of time. Although it has survived over 200 million years without changing form, variants can be traced back some 350 million years - give or take a few million. We can’t always be that precise.


- Although - (we are told) a guard in the British Museum’s Egyptian halls who was assisting a visitor who inquired about the age of a mummified body she was staring at -

‘It is 5 thousand and 3 years, 8 months and 4 days old ’ he ventured. ‘Exactly?’ ‘Yes exactly.’ ‘My goodness, how can you know with such precision?’ ‘Well, madam, I have been working here for 3 years, 8 months and 4 days, and when I started it was 5 thousand years old.’


Well, anyway, hundreds of million years is a long time for Limulus to go without changing form, and so I thought it was about time somebody did something about it.


And so, when working on the bronzes for this series, I was acutely aware of the parallels of time and longevity. I made the originals in wax, mindful that I was interpreting this ancient animal using an ancient technology. Bronze casting is probably the oldest of man’s technological achievements, which is still in use today virtually unchanged. The lost wax process used today for casting the titanium fan blades inside jet engines is exactly the same process used for casting bronze 4000 years ago in China and the Middle East - maybe with more precision and temperature controls, but still the same.


Artists and writers from Leonardo, Kircher and Dürer, to Buffon and Audubon, have all enriched the natural sciences. One of the books that has been a kind of touchstone for me is D’Arcy Thompson’s "On Growth and Form’. Two things make the Scottish biologist and classical scholar D’Arcy Thompson worth remembering. One is the sheer brilliance of On Growth and Form, which certainly deserves an honored place in the history of biology. The other is, as Peter Medawar calls it, "beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue".


D’Arcy was equally at home in many disciplines, including classics and the humanities, mathematics, and zoology. He demonstrated how the mechanics of living structures relate to principles of structural engineering. He believed that there was purpose in their design, which obeyed forces of torsion, tension and compression, influencing their growth, function and form, and that all of these were qualified by Magnitude.


Various components of art - color, line, structure, texture, composition, volume and spatial relationships are idioms in their own right, with their own possibilities. D’Arcy Thompson made us aware of another: Magnitude. Magnitude (scale) is a factor as important as the others. Rothko’s paintings need to be a certain size in order for his colors to saturate our eyes in a particular way. The rhythms of Van Gogh’s impasto brushstrokes would not work on a larger scale: they have to do with the movement of the hand, while Richard Serra’s monumental steel ellipses depend for their effect on their particular relation to the human body. Murals and miniatures are extremes of scale working within a given range. Chamber music and orchestral music are conditioned and defined by scale, as are poems, essays and novels. Miniaturization or amplification converts the object not just into a larger or smaller version of itself, but into another entity. A newt becomes Godzilla. (a newtant?). The epic film of Moby Dick seen on a T.V. screen turns into a quest for a white sardine.


So D’Arcy’s masterwork, On Growth and Form, is a profound meditation on the shapes of living things. He makes us aware that we should not only take into account finished forms, but the forces that molded them as well. Process and sequence. Given the combination of his intellectual power and great literary gift it comes as no surprise that his writings have had an enormous influence outside biology, especially on design, architecture and the arts.


The great French architect Le Corbusier, came up with an inspired use of the horseshoe crab’s form in his design for his celebrated chapel at Ronchamp. According to Ann Koll :


"The building's volumes defined in the early sketches show a bulging mass for the roof of the chapel. When describing the birth of the project Le Corbusier speaks of the horseshoe crab shell as his inspiration for the roof. He found the horse shoe crab shell, an objet à réaction poétique, on a Long Island beach during a trip to New York in 1947 and was amazed how strong it was when he put all of his weight on it. The horseshoe crab shell not only suggests the form but also the structure of the roof.


Art today is greatly concerned with perception, expressed with works and strategies that challenge our way of looking at things. Can we then conceive of a horseshoe crab’s view of its world - something we can only imagine with the kaleidoscope of our mind’s eye. The horseshoe crab not only has a pair of compound, faceted eyes, but ultra-violet sensitive eyes, plus a few others. They can see things we can’t see, rather like the way dogs and whales can hear sounds beyond our hearing. We pride ourselves on our ability to see things from different points of view, but we must be humbled before Limulus’ capabilities of multiple vision.


Among other curious attributes of Limulus, are the molecules containing copper that carry oxygen in its bloodstream, instead of iron that we have in our bodies. So the horseshoe crabs really have blue blood, true blue blood - unlike some people we could mention.


Today horseshoe crabs play an important role in medicine, and have given us two important bequests. An extract of its blood cells is used to detect the smallest presence of endotoxins, (powerful chemical poisons released by certain bacteria) which is now used in hospitals worldwide. Scientists have also learned a great deal about how the human eye functions from research on horseshoe crab eyes, especially related to their capability of lateral vision. Thanks, Limulus.


On one of his expeditions to the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh came across strange creatures on the coast of North Carolina, and named them ‘horseshoe crabs’. The local Indians called them ‘see-ekanauk’, and used their tails for harpoon points. The obvious association for the name comes from the frontal shape underneath its carapace. We now know that it is not a crab at all, but rather an arthropod, an insect. But they are still called crabs: like the American Indians - named Indians because Columbus believed he had landed in India, they both got stuck with a wrong name.


Linnaeus gave the Latin name Limulus Polyphemus to our horseshoe crab. It is still a mystery to me where he got the Polyphemus from. With the abundance of eyes that Limulus has, it seems odd that it should be named after the one eyed Cyclops. But my best bet is that it was the fearsome aspect of Limulus that led to this designation.


Artists and scientists have been captivated by Limulus. It has been a delight for me that the horseshoe crab has led me to my biologist friends here with us today. We share a common enthusiasm that has enriched us all. The relationship between art and science is necessarily difficult to define. Intuition and imagination play a role in both, and so there are parallels and correspondences. They are both inventive, but Science is objective, whereas Art is subjective. And while a lot can be learned from one other, Science is analytical, rational and practical, while Art is expressive, ambiguous and impractical. Not only do their goals and methods differ, but both Science and the Arts themselves are split into conflicting factions, each claiming to communicate its own truth about the world.


But then, as the Philosopher of Science, Marjorie Green, complained: ‘Why is everything still Cartesian, relying on Descartes separation of the mechanical brain and the incorporeal mind. The only true statement he ever made was that he was born in 1596 - and even that might have been wrong.’


Science undertakes an empirical journey to find the truth of its investigations. Is art a search by the imagination for a truth of the mind and the senses?


As a youngster in London I used to listen regularly to The Brains Trust, a favorite BBC radio program. On one occasion Bertrand Russell was giving spontaneous answers to listeners' questions.


When he was asked, "What is truth?"


He answered: "The truth is what the police require you to tell."








*READ ABOUT 'SCULPTURE"






Eassay published in the exhibition catalog 'Bronze Ages'. New York 1987


LOST WAX / FOUND OBJECTS:


By Eliot Weinbeger


BRIAN NISSEN'S BRONZE RELICS


I

 

Good sculpture," wrote Ezra Pound, thinking about Gaudier-Brzeska, "does not occur in a decadence. Literature may come out of a decadence, painting may come out of a decadence, but in a decadence men do not cut stone." Within that hyperbole—written, strangely, in spite of the evidence at hand: a master stonecutter killed in a pointless war—is a small seed of truth.

Decadence implies a self-absorbed present: one that may yearn for certain lost moments of history, but in which history has attenuated, and the ancient knowledge, beliefs, customs, mores have lost their vitality. Religion becomes superstition, custom entwines with commerce, taboo turns to common practice. That literature and painting are produced in ages of decadence may owe, in part, simply to their materials, which have so little history. To write (in the West) is to use the language, however stylized, of one's contemporaries—a language not much older than one's grandparents. One paints with materials that are only a few centuries or a few decades old: oil, watercolor, acrylic. But to sculpt—literally to "sculpt": carving or shaping stone, wood, clay, wax—is to work with one's hands on ancient matter: to remain in the present while simultaneously inserting oneself into a continuum that begins in the archaic.

To work in bronze, as Brian Nissen does, is to immerse oneself in a process that has remained unchanged since its invention in Egypt in 2600 B.C. It is to create pieces that—no matter how new or idiosyncratic in form—share their molecules and the act of their making with Anatolian winged centaurs and bull's heads from Ur, Cretan double axes and Corinthian helmets, Saxon heads with silver eyes, Persian ewers incised with lovers and cuirasses with inscriptions from the Qu'ran, Etruscan sunburst oil lamps, hunting reliefs from Vace, Shang bells and drums and tall-stemmed bowls, the long-tailed birds of the Chou, their vessels covered with meanders and continuous volutes, their monster masks with ring handles, their animal-headed daggers and knives, cheekpieces, jingles, harness fittings, the mirrors inscribed "May we never forget each other" with which the Han nobility were buried, shields from Battersea and Celtic buckets, battle-axes from Luristan, Greek charioteers, kings of Nineveh, the gates of the Assyrian palace of Balawat, Marcus Aurelius on his horse, the doors of St. Sophia in Byzantium and St. Zeno in Verona, the seven-branched Easter candlesticks of Rheims, Gothic fonts and covers, Romanesque chandeliers and pelican lecterns, Parthian perfume stills, Moorish aquamanales in the shape of lions, the huge eyes and blank stares of Benin masks and heads, lanterns of musical Boddhisattvas from Nara, Bamun pipes of lizards and ancestors stacked like totempoles, the saints and miracles on the doors of Pisa, Renaissance lamps in the shape of a foot, in the shape of a man with his head between his legs (or worse), Donatello's plaquettes, Degas' dancers, Rodin's ponderer, filligreed flowerbaskets from Kamakura and the four-thousand-pound statue of Queen Napirassu of the Elam, three thousand years old and headless now, but with her hands delicately crossed ... Objects created out of a marriage—traditionally celebrated as such—of copper and tin, whose officiant, the smith, was revered and reviled subject to the same taboos as priests. Objects created in a process that has always been seen as a metaphor of the sacred mysteries: the wax is shaped and encased in sand, clay, or plaster, then baked in a kiln until the wax runs out, leaving the mold into which the bronze is poured. "Lost wax": only when there is nothing, when one has created a nothing, can the work be achieved.

"Sculpture," said Brancusi, "is not for young men."

II

To which, looking at Nissen's work, must be added another layer of history: the New World—which made knickknacks of bronze, but never had a Bronze Age—before the arrival of the Old.

Nissen, born in England in 1939, went to Mexico at age twenty-three and stayed for seventeen years, with frequent visits since. [And there too, a long line of British ancestors: Thomas Blake in Tenochtitlan only thirteen years after Cortés; Robert Tomson in 1556 accurately prophesying that one day it would be "the most populous Citie in the world"; that meticulous 18th century observer, Thomas Gage; Frederick Catherwood, discoverer and the great draughtsman of the Maya ruins; the chronicler of 19th century drawing rooms, Frances Calderón de la Barca, a Scot married into Mexican society; the archeologist Alfred Maudslay; Henry Moore, appropriating the reclining figure of the Maya-Toltec chac mool; the surrealist Leonora Carrington; Lawrence, Huxley, Waugh, Greene, Lowry; and the anonymous legions of scholars-and bohemians, repressed voluptuaries, missionaries, drunks, xenophobes and aristocrats gone native—those who went to escape and those who went to find.]

Nissen, coming out of post-imperial England, found in Mexico, as so many Europeans before him, vivacity—a vivacity that extends even into its obsession with death—and a unity, still extant in the hinterlands, of art and life. (Antonin Artaud: "In Mexico, since we a re talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation.") Above all, he found its indigenous history. Three of the forms of pre-Columbian expression are essential to Nissen's work: the glyph, the codex, and the temple. Their elaborations are tracks towards Nissen's work:

The Maya glyphs are important here not for their individual meanings (decipherment) but for their system of construction. They were laid out on a grid that could be followed in a variety of directions. Within each rectangle of the grid, the individual glyph itself was a conglomerate of component parts (much like the Chinese ideogram): simple pictographs (a house for "house," a vulture for "vulture"), phonetic signs (each representing a single syllable), logographs (non-representational representations of a word), and semantic determinatives (specifiers of particular meaning).

For the Western mind—if not to its native practitioner—the glyph or the ideogram has a concreteness, a weight, that does not exist in alphabetic writing: the word is an object. Further, it seems—particularly to those who cannot "read" them—that each glyph, each word, has the same weight, that the glyphs are equal to one another, giving each thing in the world an identity of correspondence. Charles Olson, in a letter from the Yucatan, writes:

What continues to hold me, is, the tremendous levy on all objects as they present themselves to human sense, in this glyph-world. And the proportion, the distribution of weight given same parts of all, seems, exceptionally, distributed & accurate, that is, that -

sun

moon

venus

other constellations & zodiac

snakes

ticks

vultures

jaguar

owl

f rog

feathers

peyote

water-lily

not to speak of

fish

caracol

tortoise

& above all

human eyes

hands

limbs

PLUS EXCEEDINGLY CAREFUL OBSERVATION

OF ALL POSSIBLE INTERVALS OF SAME ...

And the weights of same, each to the other, is, immaculate (as well as, full)

Elsewhere, complaining of the archeologists Morley and Thompson's romantic image of the Maya as purely intellectual skywatchers, Olson makes the interesting observation that, for the Maya, time was "mass and weight"—

that is, time itself was an entity as concrete and tangible as any other.

The extraordinary scholarship, and partial decipherment, that has occurred since Olson wrote in the early 1950's has proven that the glyphs are even more complex. The Mayaologist Linda Schele notes—to take one exam-

ple—that the world "vulture" could be written in pictographic form, geometric form, or syllabic form. A pictographic vulture with a crown was one of the many ways of writing ahau, which meant both "lord" and one of the day-names of the Maya calendar. The pictographic vulture could also refer specifically to the black-headed vulture called tahol (literally, "shithead"). From that, the vulture glyphs (whether pictographic or geometric) were also used to represent ta '("shit") or ta (a preposition meaning "to, on, from"). There were, then, nearly endless ways to write any given word, and Mayan scribes were valued for their punning and ability to coin new variations while strictly adhering to the rules.

This meant not only that each word was an assembled object, but that each object was in a state of perpetual metamorphosis, its meaning only comprehensible for the moment it is seen in the context of the other object-glyphs. That metamorphosis, within the larger repetitions of circular time, remains, in Mexico, a constant. In the poetry of the Aztecs, the poet becomes the poem itself, which beomes a plant growing within the poem; the plant becomes the fibers of the book in which the poem is painted; the fibers of the book become the woven fiber of the mat, the symbol of worldly power and authority. Octavio Paz's "Hymn among the ruins" ends with this famous line: "words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts."

Nissen, then, constructs his sculptures as glyphs. His work table is covered with small components fashioned out of wax: tiny balls, cylinders, zigzags, donuts, squares, cubes, lozenges, triangles, rods, j-shapes, pellets. In an interview, Nissen has commented: "I use a method based on the found object. The difference being that first, I make the objects, then I find them. Then I assemble them." He has remarked elsewhere that he also considers those components as parts of speech—given elements capable of a near-infinity of combinations. His "Coffer" (p. 57), a box overflowing with morphemes, can be seen as that great toy chest from which the artist invents his games. Their assembly is reminiscent, above all, of language as it is used by children, poets, punsters. The result—the individual piece of sculpture—is a phrase, a stanza (literally the "room" in which the words are arranged), a single moment of relation permanently frozen in bronze.

Nissen has also worked extensively, and with great originality, in the creation of codices. There were two styles of Mexican codices. The Maya—of which only four survive—largely consisted of a hieroglyphic text accompanied by some illustration. The later Mixtec screen-fold codices are more extraordinary: Each page presented complex images—not all of them pictographic—that served as mnemonic devices for the priestly elite trained to "read" them, but were incomprehensible to outsiders. It is a kind of "text" unknown outside the New World, but which has its parallels in the geometric patterns of Amazonian bas-

kets and Peruvian woven cloth, both of which could be it read." [Dennis Tedlock points out that the Maya word for the codex was ilbal, or "instrument for seeing." Today the word is used to refer to telescopes.]

Nissen has continued, in traditional screen-fold book form, the pictographic experiments on canvas of Klee, Tobey, Gottlieb, and Torres-Garcia. His "Madero Codex" invents a witty language of jigsaw puzzle pieces, wooden matchsticks, cigarette butts, human figures (perhaps the Maya "smoking gods"?), crossword puzzles, gridworks of letters that seem to, but don't quite, spell words like "glyph" and transform into a Mondrian "boogie-woogie." In its translation of traditional into contemporary imagery, it is reminiscent of the strangest illustrations in Mexican historiography: those that accompanied F. J. Clavijero's Historia Antigua de Mexico, published in 1780. In that book the artist, rather than presenting the usual heavily stylized renderings of the Mexican originals, simply "interpreted" the glyphs and codices and redrew them in the currenl fashion. Thus, if he thought he saw a hand holding a fish in the original, he drew a hand holding a fish in the style of an 18th century lithograph. The elaborations are wonderful: a running figure with a daisy head, a man with a lily growing from his nose, a snake crowned with arrows. Clavijero's book, whose intentions were scientific, becomes, for us, surrealism. Nissen, with no pretense of historical realism, creates both a science and a grammar.

Nissen's more complex "Itzpapálotl Codex" takes off from the Aztec goddess Obsidian Butterfly and a prose poem on the subject by Octavio Paz. It consists of grids of invented glyphs (some of whose components are recognizable small metal objects: keys, wrenches, nuts and bolts, horseshoe magnets, tuning forks, springs); electronic circuits; graffiti (mosca, fly; tinieblas, darkness; Ramón, Pepe, Berta ... ); butterflies; clippings and maps concerned with the village of Papálotl, home of the goddess' shrine; encyclopedia entries on the goddess; Maya numbers; and so on. These represent, according to their author, a calendar, an entomological taxonomy, a topography, a mathematical reckoning (an accounting, in all the meanings of the word), auguries, and an inventory of tribiutes the goddess has received. The result is extraordinary: beautiful images that leave us just short of comprehension. Much like the ancient codices, in order to understand it the initiated (of which there is only one: Nissen) must recall it; the uninitiated (the rest of us) must invent it. The game has no end.

III What Nissen makes are altars, idols, temples, ruins, machines, ships, fountains …

each, the moment it is recognized, turning into another.

The two basic shapes on which he rings his countless variations are the truncated pyramid and the pillar. The truncated pyramid comes, of course, from the Maya, and Nissen plays, as they did, with the harmonies and contrasts of the simple base and what was placed on the flat top (altars, idols, columns, friezes, false-fronts). It has often been remarked that the Maya pyramids are less works of architecture than sculpture built on a monumental scale. One can imagine them a foot high—the height of many Nissen sculptures—as one could imagine certain of Nissen's pieces as hundreds of feet high, as architecture.

And more: the slender pyramids of Tikal (for example), topped with their high combs, mimic a Maya head with it flattened forehead and elaborate headdress. So Nissen's "Pod" (p. 23), a stack of pea pods placed on a blank base, is simultaneously a fantastic Maya pyramid, an altar on which the pods have been placed, and the blank face and extravagant headdress of an imaginary Pea Goddess—a goddess of fertility and harvest whose last incarnation may well be Carmen Miranda.

The vegetation, the plant forms, that rise out of so many of Nissen's sculptures—as well as the crumbled walls, the gaps (like aboriginal "x-ray" painting) revealing the tombs of images within—cannot help but recall the particularly English preoccupation with ruins. It is an obsession whose earliest record is the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Ruin," a rumination on the rubble of the Roman city of Aquae Sulis (now Bath). An obsession that reached its heights with the Romantics, after the translation in 1795 of Volney's The Ruins, or a Meditation on the Cycles of Empires —one of the four books given to educate Frankenstein's monster, and a book that leads directly to Shelley's "Ozymandias" or Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." One thinks of the architect Sir John Soane, contemporary to these poets, submitting three sketches of his design for the Bank of England: in the first, the Bank appears brand-new and gleaming; in the second, it is ivy-covered, with weathered stones; in the third, the time is a thousand years later, and the Bank is a stately ruin.

The Romantics saw ruins as emblems of the transitoriness of power, the permanence of nature, the destructive force of greed and corruption, the chaos of the heart overwhelming the orderliness of the intellect. It is possible to ascribe such allegorical meanings to Nissen's sculptures, but they are unlikely. In the first place, the work begins as a transformation of what he literally saw in Mexico: buildings half in rubble, overwhelmed by roots and branches. What matters is not the allegorical (that is, literary) interpretation but rather the fact of metamorphosis itself: the temple that becomes a plant that becomes a bronze.

That play of stone, vegetable and metal brings another element into these sculptures: machines. There are works here called "Metronome," "Hydrant," even "Jacuzzi." Some of the pieces are simultaneously reminiscent of both the severely truncated versions of the pyramids (the raised platforms in the Great Plaza of Copan, for example) and, an identical shape, the office typewriters of the 1920's.

One thinks of the great debates in the Machine Age of the 1920's and 1930's between the advocates of the machine as the ultimate icon of the new age—a progressive art to celebrate human progress—and those who argued for the perennial centrality of the organic (then called the "biomorphic"). Hart Crane, carrying the argument to literature, attempted to reconcile the two: "For unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e. acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function." It is interesting to see how, fifty years later, that acclimatization is complete in work like Nissen's—it is not even a question. His "Typewriter" (P. 75) is composed of submarine vegetation; his "Fern" (p. 53) grows razors; his "Zempoala" (p. 85) is a pyramid (in the Totonac site of that name) excavated by Nissen and also a tool box; his "Jacuzzi" (p. 91) is adorned with the rings that are washers that are the hoops protruding from the blank walls of the Maya ball courts that are the life preservers on a ship.

Nissen's verticals are constructivist towers, fountains of leaves, sprouting smokestacks, totemic poles, a metronome that is a reliquary, impossible skyscrapers. Some are meant to be walked around; some, despite their (our) size, are meant to be walked into. Others have only one face, and are meant to be looked at face-to-face: objects for invocation, things to talk to as the faithful talk to the saints and virgins in the cathedrals.

Anyone familiar with Mexican art will hear the numerous echoes and rhymes in Nissen's sculpture: the anthropomorphic columns of Tula, the diamond patterning of the Nunnery in Uxmal and the saw-toothed combs of its House of Pigeons, the hooked nose of the rain god Chac protruding from the temples of Chicken Itza and Kabah. They are not—as in the case of the great Mexican muralists—meant to be folkloric, or glorifications of a national past. (It is, of course, neither Nissen's nation nor his past.) Nor are they meant—as the Surrealists used African and Oceanic imagery—as icons of another reality to transport us to dream arid the archaic. They are never literal.

What Nissen makes are fetishes: objects of power, objects that look at us looking at them. The source of a fetish's power is accumulation: traditionally each supplicant added something to it, and its strength was the sum of all the individual histories attached to it. Nissen, although he remains the sole "author," reproduces that accumulation in each work. Working with a vocabulary of elemental signs, he heaps layers of history that crumble one into another and become tangled with weeds.

They are idols whose attributes are not quite remembered; maquettes for the monuments of a future civilization; machines with obscure functions; altars for a household shrine. They are objects to be buried with.

Nissen has made a number of artists books, several of which have been published. Some of them are based on the format of the Pre-Colombian screenfold codices - Voice Prints,The Madero Codex (Imprenta Madero, Mexico), Aztlan, Codoex Itzpapalotl (Ediciones Poligrafa, Spain) Moviola and Nuptial Rites.
Others include Voluptuario, a book of erotic drawings (Saint Martin's Press), Limulus, and The Atlas of Atlantis .


*READ MORE ABOUT 'BOOKS AND CODICES'



 

VOLUPTUARIO

DRAWINGS BY BRIAN NISSEN -
TEXT BY CARLOS FUENTES

Published by St Martin's press. New York 1997

Brian Nissen's couplings of images are like a gigantic erotic pun, a vast web of allusions where multiple meaning of body and language, stasis and change, come together tied by the knot of sexual description, only to see each knot untied the instant it is fastened, incessantly liberating further meanings: a constellation of images.

Carlos Fuentes

VOLUPTUARIO

Before having read the 'Voluptuario' by Brian Nissen and Carlos Fuentes, I had thought that only in great food and in dreams could word and image mix their secrets in such a riotous blend of harmony and eroticism. But I was wrong. I have never laughed so much. The playful union that these great artists achieve between good art and good literature through an excellent and irreverent sense of humour is unique and to be highly recommended for nourishing the spirit.

Laura Esquivel

CODEX ITZPAPALOTL

Published by Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona 1982

A cojectured codex based on the poem 'The Obsidian Butterfly' by Octavio Paz.

CODEX MADERO

Published by Imprenta Madero, Mexico. 1984 Images involving rituals of games and play.

NUPTIAL RITES -

THE CODEX PIPIXQUI

A screenfold codex based on domestic rituals.




sculpture / mural


The Centro Maguen David is a new religious and community center in Mexico City. The mural occupies a wall 120 ft by 15ft and has a hidden skylight above it, bathing it in light. The sweeping rhythm of shapes suggest the biblical description of the parting of the Red Sea and the journey of the persecuted to salvation. The rhythm of forms open out in a huge surge from a central U - shaped symbol representing the passageway. The mural comes to life as a play of light and shadow, changing its form and its mood as the day progresses as the light shifts upon it, animating the shapes and transforming their flow.

*READ MORE ABOUT 'THE RED SEA'





THE RED SEA

SCULPTURE/MURAL

 

When I first visited the Centro Maguen David at the invitation of Dr Isaac Masri, instigator of this mural project, it was nearing completion. It is a great new religious and community center whose splendid architecture by Elias Fasja and Salomón Gorshstein I found extremely moving both in its concept and its simplicity. On seeing the wall that had been proposed for a mural as the centerpiece for the second lobby, I was struck by the effect of the hidden skylight that ran the whole length of the wall, bathing it in light. This was the main feature that guided my thoughts as I elaborated different ideas as to how to approach the challenge of articulating an area 120 feet long by 15m feet high. Having determined that the mural must be predicated on a play of light and shadow, and by consequence be all in white, I started making a series a working models. These began as a sweeping rhythm of shapes running from left to right. As the flow of these forms developed it dawned on me that this grand torrent suggested the biblical description of the parting of the Red Sea and the journey of the persecuted to salvation. The rhythm of forms would have to open out in a huge surge from a central ‘U’ shaped symbol representing a passageway. The elaboration of the finished mural now presented a formidable task. Transposing the model into its final form required the fabrication of some 250 individually crafted pieces. Mounting them in place was to be like fitting together a giant jigsaw puzzle. As the work spread from the center, any misalignment of a piece would create a distortion which would have an incremental effect as the work progressed. In the end the mural comes to life as a play of light and shadow, and for me the most gratifying surprise has been seeing how it changes its form and its mood as the day progresses and as the light shifts upon it, animating the shapes and transforming their flow. A progression like waves that remind us that we artists are sounding boards bobbing on the ocean swell of the eternal artistic endeavor.

Brian Nissen.

 

 

















BRIAN NISSEN - LONDON - 1939.

Began painting and drawing at an early age, and studied at the London School of Graphic Arts and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1963 traveled to Mexico where he lived and worked for the next 17 years.

In Mexico he continued drawing and painting, becoming strongly influenced by his encounter with pre-Hispanic cultures which turned out to have a defining impact on his thinking about art; not only in a formal sense but in a more general way. Although these cultures had no concept of ‘Art’ as we understand it, it played an integral part in the daily lives of everyone, coming to them as ritual enactment of a mythic sense of wonder, involved in religion, medicine, astronomy, sport, agriculture, homemaking etc. Their artifacts were seen as objects invested with special powers, operating as a kind of spiritual magnet to which the spectator addresses himself. This idea had a powerful effect on his work, and has been the undercurrent of his art ever since.

By the early 70’s he had various exhibitions in Mexico and South America, and by then the three dimensional forms that were appearing on the surface of his paintings had taken on an autonomy, becoming wall reliefs that left the support of the canvas behind. These works eventually led him into sculpture as they became more abstract, dealing with architectonic and organic forms. In the late 70’s he had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, The Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. In 1979 he moved to New York, set up his studio and began working there.

The exhibition at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City in 1983 was an exploration of a prose poem by Octavio Paz, The Obsidian Butterfly, a lament of an Aztec goddess over her eclipse and conquest by Christianity. The idea that ran through this exhibition was the re-invention of an ancient pictorial form into the Language of contemporary art, and discovering the kinds of hidden affinities that link them. The show included relief paintings, sculpture, graphics, and a dance/performance he choreographed as an integral part of the exhibit. He had also published a conjectured codex ‘Itzpapalotl, based on the poem that accompanied the other works. Octavio Paz’s observation on first visiting the show was - ‘Rather than an exhibition of works of art, the exhibition itself was the work of art’ - . This exhibition marked another development in his working method, and was the first large scale development of a theme in different media and materials that he was later to continue in the series Atlantis, Cacaxtla, Chinampas, and Limulus.

In 1980 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. By the mid 80’s he had become fully involved with sculpture, - mostly in bronze - working on relief painting, collage and sculpture simultaneously. He gave a series of lectures on pre-hispanic art at the Cooper Union, New York, and then in 1987 had a exhibition at the Carpenter center at Harvard University.

In 1992 he was invited to participate in the quincenteniel celebrations of the Encounter with America by the Ministry of Culture of Catalonia with an exhibition in Barcelona. He chose the theme of Atlantis, with the idea of making conjectured artifacts linking America and Europe, based on Plato’s myth of the lost continent - Atlantis being the second explanation of America sent back to Spain after the discovery, while the first had suggested that they had discovered Eden, or Paradise. In the first two rooms of the exhibition there were a series of large maritime wall maps, and an Atlas/Poem made by collaging real maps and inventing the texts, marking and citations. These were accompanied by the faint sounds of whale song which ould also be heard throughout the exhibition which included a


series of relief paintings - mixed media works made from wood bark, plaster, epoxy and acrylics, evoking floating ruins, sea beds and drifting debris. The sculptures were made in the form of volcanoes as erupting pyramids and also other ritual pieces that looked as if they had been dredged up from the sea floor
By 1993 he was working on a number of collage cut-outs, drawing with scissors as it were. The series Cacaxtla was shown at the Cooper Union in New York. He spent the winters of 1993/4/5/6 working on ceramic sculptures in Mexico, as a change from working in bronze. The immediacy and spontaneity inherent in the medium opened up new fields and possibilities , leading to the first Chinampa sculptures. These pieces were based on the idea of the floating gardens on the lake of Xochimilco, where the Aztecs had invented a novel system of agriculture that provided for the city of Mexico.

In 1998 he exhibited the Chinampas at the Museo del Barrio in New York. The sculptures of bronze, ceramic and wood were set on reflecting bases - as if on water – while the wall pieces - painted collages - were like aerial views of the islands. The idea of the Chinampas - constructed islands, floating orchards - seemed in an odd way to relate to certain basic premises of Action Painting in which the surface of the painting is conceived as an area or arena on which the act of painting takes place. The paint itself becomes the testimony of what has happened - a manifestation of the event. Evidence of a poetic act. The edges of the canvas define the area of the action, circumscribed like an island. The Chinampas of Xochimilco are also a specific area in which an event takes place - in this case, agriculture. Things are laid out and cultivated. Some times a small temple or altar is erected. In these sculptures he used the format of the man-made islands; but in this case what happens on them is an evocation of forms, spaces, shapes - some organic: pods, plants, seeds, roots - others more architectonic – ramps, paths, mounds, enclosures. The sculptures are, in a sense, landscapes. But they are enclosed landscapes. These sculpture/islands are set on bases of dark mirror. Floating reflections. The memory of the water surrounds a sculptural event.

In 1996 his book of drawings, ‘Voluptuario’ was published in New York, with an introductory essay by Carlos Fuentes.

Among recent works are a series of bronzes and collages Limulus, based on certain forms of the Horse Shoe Crab. This rather bizarre animal - called a living fossil - is only found on the coast of New England and had long fascinated him. Its simple exterior helmet shape encloses the baroque symmetry inside, and he was attracted to developing these contained forms with the idea of inside/outside as a sculptural space; the one invoking the other.

2004/ 2005. Nissen worked on the sculptural mural ‘The Red Sea’ which occupies a wall measuring 120x15 ft. Iit has a hidden skylight above it, bathing it in light. The great sweepi of its shapes evoke the biblical description of the parting of thr Red Sea. This rhythm of forms open out in a huge surge from a central U- shaped symbol representing the passageway. The mural comes to light as a play of light and shadow, changing its form and mood as the day progresses and as the light shifts upon it, animating the shapes and transforming their flow. The Centro Maguen David is a new religious and community center in Mexico City.

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.

Essay from Nissen's Voluptuario, published by Saint Martin's Press, New York 1966


CUNNING STUNTS


CARLOS FUENTES



Pornography literally means the description of our debauche. But what is literal in the world of symbolic forms? A letter is a litter after Joyce brings words the same cunning ambivalence and stunrung corporeality we happily associate with the sexual act. Words and sexes are no longer literal: verb and body are subjected to constant metamorphosis. Do we come out of this wiser but sadder?


Cunning stunts leaves us to. re-Joyce in Sade-ness: Brian; Nissen's couplings of images are like a gigantic erotic pun, a vast web of allusions where multiple meaning of body and language, stasis and change, come together tied by the knot of sexual description, only to see each knot untied the instant it is fastened, incessantly liberating further meanings: a constellation of images.


We are separated from the stunning cunts and the treacherous pricks by the cunning stunts and the 1echerous tricks of the artist: We see but cannot touch these bodies. Like the fruits and the water of Tantalus, forever within his reach, forever receding from his grasp. ...


We can touch only paper and ink. Yet we do touch the image; Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar sees mind as skin: A skin touched, seen, remembered. This is true of Brian Nissen's art: the cunning stunt is that we may not physically touch the stunning-cunt, but we can possess it as it too possesses our mind, touches our mind, sees it and tells our mind: You, too,are skin.


The picture comes forward to posses us. Nissen asks: Are we ready for this? Must we always be the macho spectator who first sees the work of art, sets a price, and then, only then, unzips his mental fly, brings out his psychic trick and says, O.K., I will now have her, I will now rape her and ape her and tape her and gape her and nape her and lape her, whether she wants to or not. The macho spectator of the cunning art will even take his bonded cuntcubine to his creasoikonic harem, show her off, and one day sell her at a profit. She has passed on. She has never reached out to touch her sultan. He believes he has possessed her.


Swat that fly!


From Altamira to Velazquez to Duchamp the cunning stunter asks us to enter the painting only if the painting can simultaneously enter us: this is the bargain.


The bull in Altamira can only be had if we accept to share the arena with him: act out a common scene in a common place, a meeting place of bravery and fear. With him: even be gored.


Ortegay Gasset saw in Las Meninas a double dynamic of the painting coming to us as we go to it. Are we willing to be the erotic objects of the infanta as well as her dwarf, of the dueña as well as the gentleman waiting in the staircase on the yellow rectangle by the door? Are we willing to see the painter's brush spring hard and bushy between his legs, asking us to pay the price of our pleasure: possessing the painting only if we are possessed by it? Are we willing to appear in the mirror of the painting between the King and Queen who sired the infanta who is the subject of the painting within the painting, creating the stunning cuntfusion of a ménage a trois, ménage a droit, ménage a troz, manage at Roy's, mangez a Troyes, le ménage a Troie n aura pas lieu.


Brush your teeth with it.


Spinning, spunning,: Spanish, spunish stunts: a punished trick, a tarnished prick. The nude descends the staircase towards us; her moving skin is touching, is thinking, is changing like the serpent's, just for us. She comes renewed as the Spring. We embrace her. She is another: Under her woman's skin, she is the goddess of metamorphoses, Our Lord Xipe Totec, the Aztec divinity of the flayed skin. Wait for the next movement: He will be She again Tlazolteotl, the lady vulture, the goddess who purifies the world as she devours its filth. Are we ready for him? Are we ready for her? This is Nissen's question.


Touch it. Do not touch it. It is beautiful. But it is dead.


Are we ready for death? Lovers and children do not fear death because death is the only place where they can be together. Their forbidden childhood and their forbidden passion have eluded them throughout life Death becomes more than their destiny: it is their only chance, it is their unity recovered, disguised as death.


Bury it. Save it from the animal's hunger.


Spinning stunts: The best works of art, said the surrealist, are imperfect, because they leave much to be desired. Quote W.Blake: "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." Brian Nissen offers us a multiple vision of desire. The perfection of its form is its imperfection: his art does not consciously aspire to permanence, if this be the sign of perfection: It will last.


Blake once more: "Eternity is in love with the works of time." And Quevedo: "Only what is passing remains and lasts." The permanence of Nissen's art is staked on its impermanence; it depends on the margin left open for desire to occupy. This margin is greater in some works than in others. In the case of Nissen, it is actively expressed by an aesthetic and moral attitude: This is passing. What passes is passion. It moves. It desires. Step in.


I see these figures acting out their cunning stunts and rapidly moving from pornography to sexuality to the erotic: rapidly leaving behind the descriptive [pornographic] or reproductive [sexual] and entering the erotic [supernatural]. The erotic passage towards death without the renunciation of desire: Eros.


The movement in Nissen's figures stirs the stagnant air of the pornographic; it also poisons the blessed air of the reproductive or creative or revolutionary: con bendit!, to con a phrase: coño es caño: coño es ceño: en ceño coño: coño es signo, segno, sign, sine, sigh: signing cunts, sunning cunts, cunning signs, cunning suns, sighing cunts.


Here's a cuntfidence: Nissen celebrates desire but is not duped by it. For desire, whose suppression breeds (blakish) (brakish) pestilence, it is not a song of innocence: We desire in order to suppress the difference between ourselves and the other, between the subject and the object of desire. But this drive towards unity also contains the seeds of alterity and the dangers of submission, enslavement, possession: We want to change the object of our desire. To make it our-self. To suppress the difference between ourself and the other.


The body and the desire to make the impossible possible: to make one of two: Androgyny. To re-unite again and to fail constantly in the attempt, because the object might resist our desire, or act as our subject and desire us more than we desire (or wish to be desired by) it. The permutations become infinite: We must choose erotically between the desire for the desire of unity or the desire for the desire of alterity.


Roller skate towards it.


The Romantic chooses: Let us be whole again. The Orphan accepts: Let us be several again. Modern art is forever posed between the nostalgia of analogy and the temptation of diversity.


The eroticism of Brian Nissen is polycultural: an English artist in the Indo-Iberianworld, dealing with desire, discovers that freedom and necessity are not at odds with one another. He carries his individualistic Anglo-Saxon freedom into a world of dark collective necessity and in the lands of necessity (Mexico, Spain) he discovers that the freedom of the subject consists in transforming him/her/self to reach its object, an object that materially is forbidden it. This is certainly the strongest and perhaps the most positive tradition of the Indo-Iberian world: it suffuses popular art, painting, and writing with an urgency that it would not have if the desire could be materially accomplished. Since it cannot, we, he, the figure we now see, must leap, execute a triple somersault over the chasm separating the shore of desire from the shore of its accomplishment.


Tie a balloon to it. Tie it to a balloon.


A triple somersault, a jump over the void, the mortal danger of desire: Brian Nissen generously extends a safety net below the prancing figures of sex and death, one and other, passage and passion; this net is called fun and games, humor, the ludicrous. In sex as in carnival, time is suspended; nothing exists, nothing happens, outside the concentrated hijinks on a bed. The same bed on which one day we shall throw back our head and see no more, feel no more.


See it fly away with the balloon. It has fallen up. Skyvity. Gravair.


Perception tells me that the earth is flat. Humor and imagination tell me the earth is round. Who wins? The balloon.


Nissen's game saves the body thanks to ludicrous representation. Here it is, for one fulfilling instant, joyous, but clownish, rejoycing at the wake, cunning stunt, penis ceiling, dire trick, spinning, spunning spunished games: forbidden because, as Luis Buñuel used to say, sex without sin is like an egg without salt.


Brian Nissen and I have shared a great affection for Luis Buñuel: The man and his work. We recall a terrible scene from the film EL where the hero, deranged by jealousy, enters his wife's room armed with rope, chloroform, cotton, thread and needle. She is about to be closed: cuntdemned. Her body will not be open to anyone any more.


Your show of shows, choose your own sign: No entrance. No exit. Or S.R.O.?


The sewing up of a body is one of the perversions described by Sade in the 120 days of Sodom. No entrance or no exit? Catalysis is the flooding of the body, the occupation of all the erogenous zones in one simultaneous event. Juan Goytisolo shows me a marquee in a porno movie house on the Boulevard de Clichy in Paris. Its title is Quick, Quick, Plug my Five Holes. Does this lady know any arithmetic?


For Plotinus, we only know what God is not, never what he is. Therefore the body is a way of knowing God because he is not that. The Cathari heretics tried to rid themselves of their bodies, which they saw not as a creation of God himself but of a second, evil God: The God who gave us what He is Not. This Satanic deity charged us with the body, encumbered us with the negation of the soul and dared us to exhaust, to drain this material horror so as to become pure souls. Never has a more perfect justification for erotica pleasure been devised: every sexual act becomes a renunciation, a penitence, a cuntegorical imperative (Immanuel Kunt). But since only death will truly exhaust the possibilities of the body, the Albigensian heresy is demanding its own demise, calling forth the exterminating crusade against Albi. The sensual, perhaps even gracious, piecemeal liberation of the soul through the sexual exhaustion of the body will now be offered in one apocalyptic swipe. The body of the Cathari tree is dead. It has been killed by History: Histery: His Story: Hiss Starry.


Balance the Encyclopedia Britannica on it.


Nuns in colonial Mexico bared their backs and breasts and had their servant girls whip them and call them sacks of excrement, tubes of shit, bags of corruption. Turn that page and see Brian Nissen three centuries later, substituting the ceremony of sin for the ceremony of fun: The channel of corruption has become the stream of humor, the safety net of both excessive reason and excessive faith, the Erasmian praise of folly that renders both the madness of faith and the madness of reason relative: look at these balancing acts in the Nissean concilium, in Brian's circus of the circuts of play saving our bodies from the extremes of cuntdemnation and cuntversion: Brian's circunts, Nissen's cuntcilium: tied pricks, balancing acts, floating games, Siamese sex, boxing balls, jocula, risa, laughter, rire; pranks; sex sucks!


Stop laughing. Are we ready for death? Behind every cunning stunt and lecherous lick and dreadful trick in the Nissen book of erotica, lies a cadaver. The headiest motivation of the sexual conjunction [Octavio Paz] is the unsaid certainty that these bodies now entangled in joy will one day be no more: every sexual act is a reminder of death and every death is a reminder that the body is born alone and will die alone, without its earthly companion, the Other.


Touch it. Not do not touch. It is beautiful. But it is dead.


There is no more painful fact than this: the bodies we love shall leave us before we want to leave them. We will leave the bodies that love us before they want to leave us. The extraordinary eroticism of certain couplings by Titian or Van Dyck or Manet is that Venus or Cupid, the Arnolfinis or a naked woman out on a picnic with a company of fully clothed men are all groupings of passage. The group will never be recomposed. All-of the subjects are separated, dead, unknown - radically unknown - to each other by the time that the painting is seen by us. I touch the hand of the woman - Sylvia - I love standing next to me, watching the work of art. Like Venus, Olympia or Arnolfini's wife, she too will sometime be gone without me or I without her. It is inevitable: bodies are not a synchronized reality. We see the painting. We touch. We must affirm, somehow, that our touch, our sexual act, defeats death: The picture before us says so. It also says that all sexual activity is a rehearsal of death.


Bury it. Save it from the animal's hunger.


Brian Nissen's vision of the erotic passion goes beyond our desire to defeat death: the sense of the erotic is to affirm life in death. This is not difficult for him, who coexists with Mexico and Spain, to understand and fulfill.

;


Exhume it Are you sure it has really died?


The candy skulls of the Day of the Dead in Mexico [Posada, Eisenstein], the funereal poetry of the Spanish baroque [Quevedo, Gongora] are celebrations of the wholeness of life: There is only life, and death is part of it. More than the zone [the soul] of the mystical, this is the province [the body] of the erotic. Only Eros goes beyond the sexual function in life, common to all reproductive organisms, and stakes a claim for sex in death. An ant or a panther [as far as we know] does not conceive sex beyond pleasure and reproduction. To this the child, the lover and the artist add: yes Death. An affirmation: To imagine the loved body beyond its corruption and disappearance? Much more: To save the body from fear of itself. This is what Brian Nissen the artist achieves. He is the Other: theArtist. Only the Other can do this for us. In life or in death.


Is there any other answer? Does the body have any other soul? Does the soul have any other body.

THE CODEX ITZPAPALOTL

Dore Ashton.

Anthropology, when it became prosaic enough to call itself anthropology, brought a distressing challenge to modern art. In those days, the days before linear; history, it said, art was not Art, but an expression of a whole culture. Pre-Hispanic art, for instance, involved total existence. Its painters and writers spoke of cooking, medicine, trading, worshipping, calendar time, heavenly time—every possible aspect of their lives. The modern artist became unhappily aware of his narrowed prospects and longed to find the rich communal language of ancient: societies. From the late 19th century on, modern artists have performed acts of retrieval, acknowledging the profound human need for spiritual continuity. The modern artist often seeks his touchstone in going back to beginnings. There can be no art without material from the continuum. The most striking inventions are only readable if the familiar is posed within a new context.


Brian Nissen's invention of a modern codex is an act of retrieval that not only revives the ideogram as a rich bearer of meaning, but also opens out to acknowledge the voice that has, in turn, acknowledged other voices. In his reading of Octavio Paz's many—tiered prose poem, Nissen has been inspired to find still other images. Paz's voice, ineffaceable, nonetheless gives way to the flow of other narratives that, fittingly, have no beginnings and no endings. By adopting the traditional pre-Hispanic codex format—the screenfold book—Nissen allows his method of free association to flourish. Free, but not unformed: he has held to a scheme, as did the ancients, and in so doing, has been able to speak of the symbolic obsidian butterfly in various contexts.


The poem that hums beneath the pages of this codex is itself a compendium of histories, images, myths. Paz invokes the mythology of obsidian, with its connotations of soul, mirror, sacrificial knife, and its rumored origins as lightning fallen from the sky, in order to tell still other things. It is an historical poem in that it speaks of a fallen goddess, ravished by history through the Spanish conquest. It is transhistorical in that it speaks in the voice of incantation, toughing upon the eternally renewed grand themes that can only be conveyed in the language of Orpheus that speaks to the eye and ear directly. It speaks the language of metaphor—a language whose very soul is rooted in ideograms and hieroglyphics that must be perennially de-coded.


Nissen is true to the spirit of the poem. His symbols draw upon the timeless prototypes of the pre-Hispanic codices, but they are multivalent. He has not forgotten that in those times, it was often the wind that wrote and painted. His conjunctions of visual and poetic imagery always retain a mystery, for there were many mysteries in the ancient cults. Paz' lament, both temporal and atemporal, is the soul of Nissen's codex. The body is in his images that speak, in the artless way of the pre-Hispanics, of six different aspects of community life in readable sequences: Calendar, Taxonomy, Topography, Mathematics, Orations and Inventories. These six divisions are based on various codices in which the Indians recorded their concept of their world. In Nissen's codex, the reigning


metaphor of the obsidian butterfly gathers up all the others. It commences with the calendar, in which he plays upon the motif of the genesis and formation of insect larvae; moves on to the taxonomic play on classification. Here, the butterfly is instigator of several associations. Nissen weaves in electronic motifs to bring both the sound element (the crackling of insects breaking out of their chrysalises, or the fast play of sparks as obsidian is struck) and the contemporary association available in all ancient motifs. In the third section, topography, he introduces a newspaper clipping in which the name of the village Papalotl, the original shrine of the goddess, is mentioned, and a map. Again, the contemporary is diffused in the ancient, with the imagery compounded, as it is in all subsequent sections leading up to the final image frankly stated in contemporary terms: a butterfly composed of steel nuts and bolts.


Throughout Nissen's codex, there are repeated motifs, metamorphosed, as is the butterfly, to suit the context. There are tools, larvae, wings, masks, symbols of mitosis, hieroglyphs and hints of pre-Hispanic forms such as the short-hand version of stones in old manuscripts, or the representation of feather rugs. These in turn suggest certain modern abstractions. In the accounting section, for instance, there are allusions to the vocabulary of the early 20th century abstractionists, whose symbols were based on metaphors and whose "razed alphabet" is here commemorated. If Nissen introduces common objects, such as the drawing pin, screws, washers, and electronic circuits, it is to rhyme them with images drawn from the past, and to bring them together into a grand continuum. Just as Paz' goddess is at one with her mirror, so the reflections in this compendium of images are at one with time—those times and these.


The astonishing 17th century philosopher Vico believed that men sang before they spoke, and spoke poetry before prose. He understood that in their metaphorical language, "impossible universals", as he called them, shone forth. They were images compounded of seemingly incompatible elements that yet bespoke the world. The artist, the poet, brings together objects and ideas in a single concrete image that can be read by those who know the language. Nissen has paced his codex in such a way that his basic vocabulary enlightens the whole. The images central to Paz' poem—whirlwinds, seeds, fire, leaves, animals, insects, stones— provide Nissen with the materials for his impossible universals. In his suite of prints accompanying the poem, the butterfly emerges with the eyes of an Aztec god, wings marked with the electric circuitry suggesting original fire, and larvae that are like atoms. Yet the whole in its stonelike symmetry, is an allusion to the true Aztec prototypes in paintings and stone. In seeing universals in the shapes of the objects that lie about his studio, Nissen is taking his turn as mythologist and retriever, and, including the record with the music of Paz's voice illuminating his language, and the music imagined by Carles Santos of those times with their Godly insect sound, he has rounded and surrounded his subjects in timelessness.

Eassay published in the exhibition catalog 'Bronze Ages'. New York 1987


LOST WAX / FOUND OBJECTS:


By Eliot Weinbeger


BRIAN NISSEN'S BRONZE RELICS


I


"Good sculpture," wrote Ezra Pound, thinking about Gaudier-Brzeska, "does not occur in a decadence. Literature may come out of a decadence, painting may come out of a decadence, but in a decadence men do not cut stone." Within that hyperbole—written, strangely, in spite of the evidence at hand: a master stonecutter killed in a pointless war—is a small seed of truth.


Decadence implies a self-absorbed present: one that may yearn for certain lost moments of history, but in which history has attenuated, and the ancient knowledge, beliefs, customs, mores have lost their vitality. Religion becomes superstition, custom entwines with commerce, taboo turns to common practice. That literature and painting are produced in ages of decadence may owe, in part, simply to their materials, which have so little history. To write (in the West) is to use the language, however stylized, of one's contemporaries—a language not much older than one's grandparents. One paints with materials that are only a few centuries or a few decades old: oil, watercolor, acrylic. But to sculpt—literally to "sculpt": carving or shaping stone, wood, clay, wax—is to work with one's hands on ancient matter: to remain in the present while simultaneously inserting oneself into a continuum that begins in the archaic.


To work in bronze, as Brian Nissen does, is to immerse oneself in a process that has remained unchanged since its invention in Egypt in 2600 B.C. It is to create pieces that—no matter how new or idiosyncratic in form—share their molecules and the act of their making with Anatolian winged centaurs and bull's heads from Ur, Cretan double axes and Corinthian helmets, Saxon heads with silver eyes, Persian ewers incised with lovers and cuirasses with inscriptions from the Qu'ran, Etruscan sunburst oil lamps, hunting reliefs from Vace, Shang bells and drums and tall-stemmed bowls, the long-tailed birds of the Chou, their vessels covered with meanders and continuous volutes, their monster masks with ring handles, their animal-headed daggers and knives, cheekpieces, jingles, harness fittings, the mirrors inscribed "May we never forget each other" with which the Han nobility were buried, shields from Battersea and Celtic buckets, battle-axes from Luristan, Greek charioteers, kings of Nineveh, the gates of the Assyrian palace of Balawat, Marcus Aurelius on his horse, the doors of St. Sophia in Byzantium and St. Zeno in Verona, the seven-branched Easter candlesticks of Rheims, Gothic fonts and covers, Romanesque chandeliers and pelican lecterns, Parthian perfume stills, Moorish aquamanales in the shape of lions, the huge eyes and blank stares of Benin masks and heads, lanterns of musical Boddhisattvas from Nara, Bamun pipes of lizards and ancestors stacked like totempoles, the saints and miracles on the doors of Pisa, Renaissance lamps in the shape of a foot, in the shape of a man with his head between his legs (or worse), Donatello's plaquettes, Degas' dancers, Rodin's ponderer, filligreed flowerbaskets from Kamakura and the four-thousand-pound statue of Queen Napirassu of the Elam, three thousand years old and headless now, but with her hands delicately crossed ... Objects created out of a marriage—traditionally celebrated as such—of copper and tin, whose officiant, the smith, was revered and reviled subject to the same taboos as priests. Objects created in a process that has always been seen as a metaphor of the sacred mysteries: the wax is shaped and encased in sand, clay, or plaster, then baked in a kiln until the wax runs out, leaving the mold into which the bronze is poured. "Lost wax": only when there is nothing, when one has created a nothing, can the work be achieved.


"Sculpture," said Brancusi, "is not for young men."



II

To which, looking at Nissen's work, must be added another layer of history: the New World—which made knickknacks of bronze, but never had a Bronze Age—before the arrival of the Old.


Nissen, born in England in 1939, went to Mexico at age twenty-three and stayed for seventeen years, with frequent visits since. [And there too, a long line of British ancestors: Thomas Blake in Tenochtitlan only thirteen years after Cortés; Robert Tomson in 1556 accurately prophesying that one day it would be "the most populous Citie in the world"; that meticulous 18th century observer, Thomas Gage; Frederick Catherwood, discoverer and the great draughtsman of the Maya ruins; the chronicler of 19th century drawing rooms, Frances Calderón de la Barca, a Scot married into Mexican society; the archeologist Alfred Maudslay; Henry Moore, appropriating the reclining figure of the Maya-Toltec chac mool; the surrealist Leonora Carrington; Lawrence, Huxley, Waugh, Greene, Lowry; and the anonymous legions of scholars-and bohemians, repressed voluptuaries, missionaries, drunks, xenophobes and aristocrats gone native—those who went to escape and those who went to find.]


Nissen, coming out of post-imperial England, found in Mexico, as so many Europeans before him, vivacity—a vivacity that extends even into its obsession with death—and a unity, still extant in the hinterlands, of art and life. (Antonin Artaud: "In Mexico, since we a re talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation.") Above all, he found its indigenous history. Three of the forms of pre-Columbian expression are essential to Nissen's work: the glyph, the codex, and the temple. Their elaborations are tracks towards Nissen's work:


The Maya glyphs are important here not for their individual meanings (decipherment) but for their system of construction. They were laid out on a grid that could be followed in a variety of directions. Within each rectangle of the grid, the individual glyph itself was a conglomerate of component parts (much like the Chinese ideogram): simple pictographs (a house for "house," a vulture for "vulture"), phonetic signs (each representing a single syllable), logographs (non-representational representations of a word), and semantic determinatives (specifiers of particular meaning).


For the Western mind—if not to its native practitioner—the glyph or the ideogram has a concreteness, a weight, that does not exist in alphabetic writing: the word is an object. Further, it seems—particularly to those who cannot "read" them—that each glyph, each word, has the same weight, that the glyphs are equal to one another, giving each thing in the world an identity of correspondence. Charles Olson, in a letter from the Yucatan, writes:


What continues to hold me, is, the tremendous levy on all objects as they present themselves to human sense, in this glyph-world. And the proportion, the distribution of weight given same parts of all, seems, exceptionally, distributed & accurate, that is, that -


sun

moon

venus

other constellations & zodiac

snakes

ticks

vultures

jaguar

owl

f rog

feathers

peyote

water-lily

not to speak of

fish

caracol

tortoise

& above all

human eyes

hands

limbs

PLUS EXCEEDINGLY CAREFUL OBSERVATION


OF ALL POSSIBLE INTERVALS OF SAME ...


And the weights of same, each to the other, is, immaculate (as well as, full)


Elsewhere, complaining of the archeologists Morley and Thompson's romantic image of the Maya as purely intellectual skywatchers, Olson makes the interesting observation that, for the Maya, time was "mass and weight"


that is, time itself was an entity as concrete and tangible as any other.


The extraordinary scholarship, and partial decipherment, that has occurred since Olson wrote in the early 1950's has proven that the glyphs are even more complex. The Mayaologist Linda Schele notes—to take one exam-

ple—that the world "vulture" could be written in pictographic form, geometric form, or syllabic form. A pictographic vulture with a crown was one of the many ways of writing ahau, which meant both "lord" and one of the day-names of the Maya calendar. The pictographic vulture could also refer specifically to the black-headed vulture called tahol (literally, "shithead"). From that, the vulture glyphs (whether pictographic or geometric) were also used to represent ta '("shit") or ta (a preposition meaning "to, on, from"). There were, then, nearly endless ways to write any given word, and Mayan scribes were valued for their punning and ability to coin new variations while strictly adhering to the rules.


This meant not only that each word was an assembled object, but that each object was in a state of perpetual metamorphosis, its meaning only comprehensible for the moment it is seen in the context of the other object-glyphs. That metamorphosis, within the larger repetitions of circular time, remains, in Mexico, a constant. In the poetry of the Aztecs, the poet becomes the poem itself, which beomes a plant growing within the poem; the plant becomes the fibers of the book in which the poem is painted; the fibers of the book become the woven fiber of the mat, the symbol of worldly power and authority. Octavio Paz's "Hymn among the ruins" ends with this famous line: "words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts."


Nissen, then, constructs his sculptures as glyphs. His work table is covered with small components fashioned out of wax: tiny balls, cylinders, zigzags, donuts, squares, cubes, lozenges, triangles, rods, j-shapes, pellets. In an interview, Nissen has commented: "I use a method based on the found object. The difference being that first, I make the objects, then I find them. Then I assemble them." He has remarked elsewhere that he also considers those components as parts of speech—given elements capable of a near-infinity of combinations. His "Coffer" (p. 57), a box overflowing with morphemes, can be seen as that great toy chest from which the artist invents his games. Their assembly is reminiscent, above all, of language as it is used by children, poets, punsters. The result—the individual piece of sculpture—is a phrase, a stanza (literally the "room" in which the words are arranged), a single moment of relation permanently frozen in bronze.


Nissen has also worked extensively, and with great originality, in the creation of codices. There were two styles of Mexican codices. The Maya—of which only four survive—largely consisted of a hieroglyphic text accompanied by some illustration. The later Mixtec screen-fold codices are more extraordinary: Each page presented complex images—not all of them pictographic—that served as mnemonic devices for the priestly elite trained to "read" them, but were incomprehensible to outsiders. It is a kind of "text" unknown outside the New World, but which has its parallels in the geometric patterns of Amazonian bas-


kets and Peruvian woven cloth, both of which could be it read." [Dennis Tedlock points out that the Maya word for the codex was ilbal, or "instrument for seeing." Today the word is used to refer to telescopes.]


Nissen has continued, in traditional screen-fold book form, the pictographic experiments on canvas of Klee, Tobey, Gottlieb, and Torres-Garcia. His "Madero Codex" invents a witty language of jigsaw puzzle pieces, wooden matchsticks, cigarette butts, human figures (perhaps the Maya "smoking gods"?), crossword puzzles, gridworks of letters that seem to, but don't quite, spell words like "glyph" and transform into a Mondrian "boogie-woogie." In its translation of traditional into contemporary imagery, it is reminiscent of the strangest illustrations in Mexican historiography: those that accompanied F. J. Clavijero's Historia Antigua de Mexico, published in 1780. In that book the artist, rather than presenting the usual heavily stylized renderings of the Mexican originals, simply "interpreted" the glyphs and codices and redrew them in the currenl fashion. Thus, if he thought he saw a hand holding a fish in the original, he drew a hand holding a fish in the style of an 18th century lithograph. The elaborations are wonderful: a running figure with a daisy head, a man with a lily growing from his nose, a snake crowned with arrows. Clavijero's book, whose intentions were scientific, becomes, for us, surrealism. Nissen, with no pretense of historical realism, creates both a science and a grammar.


Nissen's more complex "Itzpapálotl Codex" takes off from the Aztec goddess Obsidian Butterfly and a prose poem on the subject by Octavio Paz. It consists of grids of invented glyphs (some of whose components are recognizable small metal objects: keys, wrenches, nuts and bolts, horseshoe magnets, tuning forks, springs); electronic circuits; graffiti (mosca, fly; tinieblas, darkness; Ramón, Pepe, Berta ... ); butterflies; clippings and maps concerned with the village of Papálotl, home of the goddess' shrine; encyclopedia entries on the goddess; Maya numbers; and so on. These represent, according to their author, a calendar, an entomological taxonomy, a topography, a mathematical reckoning (an accounting, in all the meanings of the word), auguries, and an inventory of tribiutes the goddess has received. The result is extraordinary: beautiful images that leave us just short of comprehension. Much like the ancient codices, in order to understand it the initiated (of which there is only one: Nissen) must recall it; the uninitiated (the rest of us) must invent it. The game has no end.



III What Nissen makes are altars, idols, temples, ruins, machines, ships, fountains …

each, the moment it is recognized, turning into another.


The two basic shapes on which he rings his countless variations are the truncated pyramid and the pillar. The truncated pyramid comes, of course, from the Maya, and Nissen plays, as they did, with the harmonies and contrasts of the simple base and what was placed on the flat top (altars, idols, columns, friezes, false-fronts). It has often been remarked that the Maya pyramids are less works of architecture than sculpture built on a monumental scale. One can imagine them a foot high—the height of many Nissen sculptures—as one could imagine certain of Nissen's pieces as hundreds of feet high, as architecture.

And more: the slender pyramids of Tikal (for example), topped with their high combs, mimic a Maya head with it flattened forehead and elaborate headdress. So Nissen's "Pod" (p. 23), a stack of pea pods placed on a blank base, is simultaneously a fantastic Maya pyramid, an altar on which the pods have been placed, and the blank face and extravagant headdress of an imaginary Pea Goddess—a goddess of fertility and harvest whose last incarnation may well be Carmen Miranda.


The vegetation, the plant forms, that rise out of so many of Nissen's sculptures—as well as the crumbled walls, the gaps (like aboriginal "x-ray" painting) revealing the tombs of images within—cannot help but recall the particularly English preoccupation with ruins. It is an obsession whose earliest record is the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Ruin," a rumination on the rubble of the Roman city of Aquae Sulis (now Bath). An obsession that reached its heights with the Romantics, after the translation in 1795 of Volney's The Ruins, or a Meditation on the Cycles of Empires —one of the four books given to educate Frankenstein's monster, and a book that leads directly to Shelley's "Ozymandias" or Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." One thinks of the architect Sir John Soane, contemporary to these poets, submitting three sketches of his design for the Bank of England: in the first, the Bank appears brand-new and gleaming; in the second, it is ivy-covered, with weathered stones; in the third, the time is a thousand years later, and the Bank is a stately ruin.


The Romantics saw ruins as emblems of the transitoriness of power, the permanence of nature, the destructive force of greed and corruption, the chaos of the heart overwhelming the orderliness of the intellect. It is possible to ascribe such allegorical meanings to Nissen's sculptures, but they are unlikely. In the first place, the work begins as a transformation of what he literally saw in Mexico: buildings half in rubble, overwhelmed by roots and branches. What matters is not the allegorical (that is, literary) interpretation but rather the fact of metamorphosis itself: the temple that becomes a plant that becomes a bronze.


That play of stone, vegetable and metal brings another element into these sculptures: machines. There are works here called "Metronome," "Hydrant," even "Jacuzzi." Some of the pieces are simultaneously reminiscent of both the severely truncated versions of the pyramids (the raised platforms in the Great Plaza of Copan, for example) and, an identical shape, the office typewriters of the 1920's.


One thinks of the great debates in the Machine Age of the 1920's and 1930's between the advocates of the machine as the ultimate icon of the new age—a progressive art to celebrate human progress—and those who argued for the perennial centrality of the organic (then called the "biomorphic"). Hart Crane, carrying the argument to literature, attempted to reconcile the two: "For unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e. acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function." It is interesting to see how, fifty years later, that acclimatization is complete in work like Nissen's—it is not even a question. His "Typewriter" (P. 75) is composed of submarine vegetation; his "Fern" (p. 53) grows razors; his "Zempoala" (p. 85) is a pyramid (in the Totonac site of that name) excavated by Nissen and also a tool box; his "Jacuzzi" (p. 91) is adorned with the rings that are washers that are the hoops protruding from the blank walls of the Maya ball courts that are the life preservers on a ship.


Nissen's verticals are constructivist towers, fountains of leaves, sprouting smokestacks, totemic poles, a metronome that is a reliquary, impossible skyscrapers. Some are meant to be walked around; some, despite their (our) size, are meant to be walked into. Others have only one face, and are meant to be looked at face-to-face: objects for invocation, things to talk to as the faithful talk to the saints and virgins in the cathedrals.


Anyone familiar with Mexican art will hear the numerous echoes and rhymes in Nissen's sculpture: the anthropomorphic columns of Tula, the diamond patterning of the Nunnery in Uxmal and the saw-toothed combs of its House of Pigeons, the hooked nose of the rain god Chac protruding from the temples of Chicken Itza and Kabah. They are not—as in the case of the great Mexican muralists—meant to be folkloric, or glorifications of a national past. (It is, of course, neither Nissen's nation nor his past.) Nor are they meant—as the Surrealists used African and Oceanic imagery—as icons of another reality to transport us to dream arid the archaic. They are never literal.


What Nissen makes are fetishes: objects of power, objects that look at us looking at them. The source of a fetish's power is accumulation: traditionally each supplicant added something to it, and its strength was the sum of all the individual histories attached to it. Nissen, although he remains the sole "author," reproduces that accumulation in each work. Working with a vocabulary of elemental signs, he heaps layers of history that crumble one into another and become tangled with weeds.


They are idols whose attributes are not quite remembered; maquettes for the monuments of a future civilization; machines with obscure functions; altars for a household shrine. They are objects to be buried with.

Presentation of the book Voluptuario at Rizzoli, New York. 1996

VOLUPTUARIO

LAURA ESQUIVEL


The richness of Brian Nissen's images and Carlos Fuentes astonishing text inspire ideas and sensations more given to feeling than verbalizing. However I will try to articulate some thoughts that delight has teased out of me.


To confront desire is easier than to talk about desire - which explains our need to substitute the object of our desire by evoking another reality, absent and unnamable. Desire, together with the impossibility of talking about it, stimulates a wealth of invention. To name the unnamable we have to resort to calling the same object by other names, and so that the unmentionable becomes evermentionable: the object is not just itself or its name, but rather all that it alludes to, all the names it evokes.


This play of complex reconstruction has held a fascination for western culture in particular moments of its history, and especially defined the path of the art of certain countries. As Carlos Fuentes says: "... in the lands of necessity (Mexico, Spain) ... the distances between desire and its object are (or have been) immense. This is certainly the strongest and perhaps the most positive tradition of the Indo-Iberian world: It suffuses popular art, painting and writing with an urgency that it would not have if the desire could be materially accomplished.


However, in spite of this fateful mask, the game of substituting the name of the object of desire has engendered expressions rich in ambiguity, and thanks to their free and vibrant character, these substitutions are impregnated with great doses of pleasure; Joyful, playful, spasms of pleasure.


In Mexico, the "albur" consists of a double-edged, two-faced play on words. This play-pun is one of the popular forms of expression that most clearly exemplifies the urge to reconstruct - in its absence - the name of the object of desire. Around a universe of innuendo, which ends up as a great and unique sexual pun, reference to male and female genitals undergo an endless metamorphosis until becoming crystallized, inevitably embedded in our language, moment by moment impregnating our daily speech. Genitals are spoken about without mentioning them. Chewed up and imagined. Detected by the word that hides them, we find them, as it were, not where they belong, but rather on the tip of our tongue.


Brian Nissen, a strange cultural cocktail of British - Iberian - Mexican culture - a New York- Mexico D.F. denizen- reminds us with his Voluptuario of the most typical and jubilant mechanisms of the Mexican 'albur'. He shows us something in order to hide it, to say without saying. Hinting, smiling at our complicity, and the genial pleasure of the genitals, the expression of pleasure. The names of desire appear and disappear in a dizzy play of language, eyes, salt, everyday happenings, the joy of living. Because, if the object is desire - as Carlos Fuentes says of Tantalus - 'forever within his reach, forever receding from his grasp'- we are destined to recreate it at every moment, in every gesture, and in every act of our daily life.


From the toothbrush, the salt shaker, the repetition of the daily dance, sex leaps out converted into words, gestures, flavors, aromas - in our own special way of dousing everything we eat with chile, investing our daily food with erotic connotations.


We say chile for prick, tooth prick, a smooth trick. We say that sex is on everyone’s tongue. Mickey Mouth. It comes out in every word. In the formation of every word that sounds the same and mirrors our desire.


The 'albur'! The play-pun. Joy to the word! Nissen paints puns, draws lines drawing. Joy to the eye, says aye to the eye. If we enter the game, the play-pun of Brian Nissen and Carlos Fuentes the inevitable result will be entry into everyday erotica, spontaneous, elemental and vital. To be penetrated by the image is to be penetrated by the text. In the maze of allusions in which the object of our desire seems ethereal, it escapes our gaze although it is looking at us screwing around and loving.


Brian Nissen invests his version of this form of absent-presences in his imagery. Eroticism, voluptuousness are engraved in his lines, in the invocation that summoned the lines. When we see the image of a figure man-handling the pants of another, it arouses fantasies our own hidden objects of desire. We savor the secret, we screw with the secret and are intensely happy. One has to eat oneself, imbibe sex with ones eyes, with the tongue, with whatever one can. Not in vain that in Mexico, as Brian and Carlos well know, the verbs to eat and to screw are synonymous.


With Carlos Fuentes, the 'play-pun' expands the language, makes it flow. It becomes a play of mirrors; what appears over there appears over here and their meanings disappear because the words refer to something other than what we thought. What is said is meant another way. The sound of the word also carries its meaning. Through his voice images reveal themselves like rebels opening a breach, liberating fantasies from their repressed moral orbits. He shows that the game of the 'albur' - the play-pun, implies dialogue, demands ingesting- incesting the other, the listener. The ambiguity of the rules also allow for the pleasure of being done to, even if only through wangling, wrangling, wanking words.


The intuitive invention of the 'albur' is like a literary device in which a text is infused with a sub-text that evokes other texts. Cervantes Don Quixote contains stories from other sources: Eliot's 'Wasteland' evokes the presence of Baudelaire, Dante, Wagner, Shakespeare and others. How much of Ulysses is in Joyce or Joyce in Ulysses? Fuentes fountain? And so with other literary invocations more or less intentional whose principal function is to conjure up a game of ghostly presences as masterfully played by Fuentes, full of juice, flavor and the constancy of original creation.


It may be that in the relationship between pleasure and the expression of pleasure by way of humor, that Brian Nissan and Carlos Fuentes have uncovered mysterious and subtle links that fuse British and Mexican temperaments. And with this great encounter we are left speechless. An ideal way to master debate.

Water Wizardry

Juan Villoro



water that with the eyelids closed


spurts prophesies all night


Octavio Paz


 

Pre-Hispanic cosmogony registers a moment of intense drama in which the heavenly bodies stopped moving and the winds ceased to blow. In the entire cosmos, the continuity of life was interrupted, and to restore the balance, the gods were reunited at Teotihuacán. In a gesture of sacred desperation, they agreed to commit mass suicide. Then, a dissident emerged. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún described it in these terms: “It is said that one who was called Xólotl refused death.”
The obstinate god was the twin of Quetzalcóatl. With cold lucidity, he argued that such a sacrifice would be in vain. It turns out he was right. The gods killed themselves, but the winds still did not begin to blow again.
This clairvoyant Xólotl is a conflictive god. Being clearheaded in the face of the muddled majority isn’t likely to win you much prestige. As a result, the dark twin of Quetzalcóatl acquired an uncertain reputation. According to Roger Bartra, he was seen as “a numen linked to death and transformations.” He remained an ambiguous deity: the axolotl.
At that meeting in Teotihuacán, Xólotl, who loved life, committed the sin of willful disobedience. To save himself, he chose to occupy an intermediate zone, between land and water. Like the axolotl that bears his name, he was an immature being in a permanent larval state, fearful of mutating into the stable form of a salamander.
It is no coincidence that this creature, which, according to Bartra, represents the vacillating identity of the Mexican, has attracted the attention of Brian Nissen, an artist who has dedicated his pictorial career to reinventing the possibilities of water. One of his best pieces is an oddity of nature: the white axolotl he created for Roger Bartra.
The axolotl was seen by the ancient Mexicans as a “toy” or a “monster” of the water. Although they are opposing concepts, both interpretations help to define the works of a painter who is hypnotized by the ocean, the tides, the liquid flow of colors, and the strength of will required to swim against the tide.
In Nissen, everything has a playful sense, yet that is no guarantee against the appearance of monsters. His canvases are often a peculiar zone of reconciliation where strange—even grotesque—beings disport themselves. Robert Hughes wrote that David Hockney managed to be a consummate artist “without exploring the dark side of human experience.” The celebratory atmosphere of his canvases does not reduce their impact. In Hockney, the handling of sexuality is as provocative as in the work of Francis Bacon, but it is free of guilt or conflict, a fact that perhaps renders it all the more transgressive. Nissen shares the same lineage. Although his style is more biting and incisive than Hockney’s, his disturbing canvases nevertheless exude good humor.
For Witold Gombrowicz, the highest degree of wisdom consists of knowing everything so that one can then learn immaturity. The genius is re-educated to be a child. The drawings, codices, objects, painting and sculpture of Brian Nissen all have the great charm of childlike sassiness. In his landscapes, pencils bend in the sky like rainbows, and nudists display their erect members with the natural pride of people awaiting a civic inspection. As with Hockney, transgression functions paradoxically. The sense of unease these works provoke isn’t derived from suffering or anguish, but rather from a paradisiacal condition: happiness, it seems, has taken the upper hand. How could it be possible for so many figures to play, jump, fuck, smoke, and wreak havoc without their having some kind of price to pay? In this territory, freedom knows no excess and therefore incurs no punishment.
We know that the ancient Greeks and ancient Mayans had powerful, elemental contact with the earth. Their vases demonstrate the tenderness with which dust passed through their fingers. Modernity has distanced us from such primal contact with materials, but it has also produced a phenomenon unthinkable in classical times: having a second land.
Imposed or voluntary exile leads to the loving adoption of strange lands. Brian Nissen arrived in Mexico as a British painter, already fully formed, but willing to acquire a second language. Through poetry, archeology, and popular culture, he became a refugee capable of seeing Tláloc as only someone who comes from afar could—that is to say, of seeing that the rain god’s eyes have the form of vinyl records by The Beatles.
Every navigator lays claim to a second homeland. It is no coincidence that the greatest maritime writer in English literature was a Polish sea captain: Joseph Conrad.
Brian Nissen was born in the London neighborhood of Hampstead in 1939, and came to Mexico in 1963. He was a painter with the athletic build of a sculptor and the passion of a trapeze artist. When Fernando Gamboa invited different members of “the generation of the Rupture” to create murals for the Mexican pavilion of the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, Nissen developed the habit of deftly climbing his scaffolding and coming down from it in the swinging style of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ most famous character. His fearless leaps—like some abstraction of Tarzan—were by and large successful, until he landed smack in the middle of Lilia Carrillo’s mural, producing a gash in it reminiscent of a goring in a bullring. However, Lilia didn’t bat an eye; she decided that her extraordinary canvas would be improved through the unavoidable patching up.
It isn’t the least bit odd that someone born on the island where Dafoe dreamed up the fortunate shipwreck of Robison Crusoe and where Stevenson mythologized pirates should be interested in the sea. What’s more, Nissen has a sailor’s face. His moustache gives him the air of a sea captain, and his features seem to have been sculpted by the wind. He has the attentive gaze of one who knows that his fate depends on the horizon. The tone of his voice is perfect for giving orders on the main deck, with the unexaggerated self-confidence—the smooth certainty bred of expertise—of one who decides the course of the ship. Amid the vertiginous swells of the raging storm, yelling is of little help; one needs the self-assuredness of Nissen, who deftly ties and unties exactly the right knots and who even seems to enjoy the mayhem of the tempest.
The presence of water defines his universe. In his canvases, there is an abundance of blues and the resplendence of a rain of light. Nature, for him, tends so much toward the liquid that occasionally his green turns blue and his gray tries to be. The results are underwater landscapes, fast-moving clouds, domestic cloudbursts, and zigzagging manta rays.
Nissen’s most important sculptural mural deals with a decisive moment in aquatic mythology: the parting of the Red Sea. Located in the synagogue of the Centro Maguen David in Mexico City, the work transmits the powerful divinity of a white tidal wave. Surprisingly, the sculpture continues beyond itself: the tidal swell is reflected in the marble floor, creating a strong current of imagery. Emerging from the wall, the work does not sit quietly. The 250 elements of which it is made are seemingly never at rest. The Red Sea parts every time we look at it.
As part of his marine itinerary, the artist inevitably had to take up the theme of Atlantis, the submerged civilization par excellence. Nearly all cosmogonies speak of a flood, a deluge that transfigured the era, but Atlantis sank without any witnesses. We know it only from legend and rumor. There is little that could intrigue Nissen more than establishing the cartography of a place that is impossible to locate. His mapping of Atlantis is a tourist’s guide to nowhere, the precise coordinates of an ocean that, because it is perfectly imaginary, represents the navel of the world.
Nissen’s development has dealt with the displacement of surface towards volume. From drawing and oil painting he moved towards canvases punctuated by objects, and from there to sculpture. His immersion in the elements carried him towards cutout constructions: the skin divers submerge in 3D.
It is no coincidence that someone who moves from one element to another should be interested in amphibians. Axolotl painter, heir to Xólotl, the god who emigrated in search of a second homeland, Nissen lives to cross borders.
His undersea explorations culminated in the study and re-creation of his ideal mascot, a hybrid being that lives in the deep but reproduces on the sandy shores: the Limulus polyphemus, or horseshoe crab. The antediluvian shell of this animal reflects how well nature understands fortifications and modern art. The armored crab enlivens the ocean as both atavism and avant-garde; it is the ancestor that will outlive us.
No navigator can ignore the compass card or the tide charts. Nissen is fully informed for each of his adventures. The horseshoe crab led him to participate in panel discussions with scientists, just as Octavio Paz’s poem “Obsidian Butterfly” led him to the study of epigraphy.
We have before us an illustrious artist who also paints in his writings. His reflections, which include revealing anecdotes and refreshing humor, have been collected in an exceptional logbook: Expuesto.
There, he dedicates eloquent pages to the horseshoe crab, the “living fossil,” an ancient creature of science fiction. Equally revealing are his thoughts on the codices or the materials with which he works. In a moving passage, he refers to the anecdote of Victor Serge, who saved himself from going mad while imprisoned thanks to a piece of colored paper in his pocket. In a completely gray universe, the rebel had in his possession a small patch tinged with red. The rebelliousness of that scrap of color allowed him to be free. Brian Nissen treats colors in the same way: as points of escape, stains of freedom.
Since he moved to Mexico, he forged lasting friendships with the painters of his generation, who renewed abstract art, and he has studied vernacular traditions. One of the wonders that Mesoamerica revealed to him was the aesthetic of the invisible: the soles of the feet of the stone statue of Coatlicue—which nobody ever sees—are meticulously carved. Certain images function secretly.
He was also enthralled by the experimental workshop of the Mayan gods. The Popol-Vuh and the Chilam Balam refer to the failed attempts to produce man. At first in clay, then in wood, and, finally, out of corn. This process of trial and error—or “work in process”—captivated the artist’s imagination.
How does one react to a tradition that hides some of its effects and seeks transfiguration? “Obsidian Butterfly,” by Octavio Paz, condenses two challenges facing art: mutation and permanence—the life of the butterfly and the life of the rock crystal. Following that impulse, Nissen created sculptures and a codex, Itzpapálotl (with a text by Paz himself), that represent a multiple matrix, variations on a single form, reiterations that change—signs that are images that are light that is flight.
The dialogue with this pre-Hispanic legacy continued in another project, also animated by water: the sculptural series Chinampas. Nissen transformed the floating islands of the Aztecs into modern orchards, bits of city, gardens where industrial dreams grow, the ecology of modernity that floats rudderless in the extinct lake of Tenochtitlán.
The 25 years of work reunited in the exhibition of Brian Nissen in the Palacio de Bellas Artes encompasses one of his greatest periods of productivity—from 1969 to 1990—, a period dominated by a water clock. That is his primordial element, the grammar in which his islands are conjugated.
Although stylistically unified, his oeuvre displays thematic multiplicity. Two axes define his imagination: humor and eroticism. Nissen’s art is full of jokes, a sense of the absurd and a delight in high jinx. In part, this comes from his formative years in “swinging” London and the British talent for nonsense. Some of his figures recall early Hockney, inspirer of Yellow Submarine. A very clear example is Consumidor consumido (The Consumer Consumed), where teeth grin with their own vital force and cigarettes become the most important part of the body.
In a surprising oil painting, Lobo (Wolf), Nissen portrays the great villain of fairy tales, but does so with such sympathy and complicity that the predator smiles and becomes integrated into the landscape so completely that he has even become green. An ecological wolf!
An admirer of tightrope walkers and clowns, Nissen turns his athletes into Olympic contortionists. Relay registers a race where the runners have let themselves be carried away by their elastic inner lives and show that muscular firmness is less important than having a plastic soul. For Nissen, relaxation is not the result—or the final end—of physical exercise, but rather the condition that allows us to practice it. Inner calmness is the secret key to resistance. In his world, the most flexible spirit wins the gold medal.
The relief construction Ping-pong also deals with a sports-related theme. In this case, exercise is an optical trick. The players swing their paddles with such velocity that we do not see the ball, only the diagonals it leaves on the table.
Nissen’s humor has been influenced by one of the most convulsive areas of popular culture: newspaper crime reporting. La autoviuda renders tribute to the most radical form of smoothing out conjugal disputes. The sculptor created a temple of euphemisms that looks quite like the real world, where confessing to a crime is bad for the health, and the guilty party saves his hide by making excuses. Expressions such as “imprudent killer” or “auto-widow” emerged to define the unfortunate task of getting rid of loved ones.
The unequal elements of this piece represent the deconstruction of criminal discourse. Using a do-it-yourself kit, Nissen portrays a justice system that only works mentally, never in reality.
In the work Bandos, the transition is made from judicial irony to politics. The background of the painting registers names of the disappeared in Chile. In the foreground is a repressor whose penis is a pistol, with its trigger in his ass.
This painter who emerged from the sea has not been the least bit shy about engaging in dialogue with classical works of art. His Garden of Earthly Delights is as variegated as the version by Hieronymous Bosch, but it includes a dynamism that only exists thanks to its riotousness. The beach resorts of tropical Mexico are usually overpopulated, and in this overcrowding, strangers brush against one another, smearing each other with sun block cream. Oddly enough, everyone is having a wonderful time. When the philosopher Jorge Portilla wrote about the “phenomenology of the libertine,” he didn’t know he was anticipating Nissen’s bathers, who take advantage of their vacation time to display their erect cocks in all their glory while others play ring toss on them. The landscape—full of automobiles, cigarette butts, and characters sticking out their tongues to lick ice cream cones—is both a critique and a celebration of these vacation sites where annoyances becomes another form of amusement. “Why enjoy yourselves alone when we can annoy ourselves together?” seems to be the question posed by these colorful beings in a state of ecstasy.
Eroticism is another constant in the work of this painter. One of his best paintings, Cinema, shows a movie theatre function where reality also occurs in black and white. While two lovers copulate onscreen, the spectators demonstrate that the gaze is also an erogenous zone: the actors affirm the sensuality of the body; the spectators, that of the mind.
After some decades in Mexico, Nissen perfected his artistic irreverence with respect to good manners through his use of racy puns. The erotic drawings that make up the series Voluptuario are, according to Carlos Fuentes, an exceptional case of icoñografía (‘icuntography’). Nissen gives refined graphic expression to the kind of word play most often associated with the nation’s working class.
His sense of humor impelled him to make objects for joke shops, which, unfortunately, do not exist in any modern art museums. One of them is the Kleenex box Absorbente (Absorbent), with erotic drawings done on tissues; another is the can Dibujos en su Tinta (Drawings in their Ink), a demonstration that penned lines begin in a liquid state. In his nautical bottle, Captain Nissen marinates painting.
The erotic transgresses and transfigures. For a painter of liquidness, devotee of the risqué double-entendre, nothing is as logical as turning a penis into a faucet. This defines desire as a spigot handle and sexual abuse as a plumbing problem. In the painting Grifo (Faucet), the protagonists are enjoying themselves with their plumbing supply sex. In Tryst, however, the scene is more ominous, taking place in an ambiance of transient tempestuousness, calling to mind a hotel that rents rooms by the hour.
Like the god Xólotl, Brian Nissen is a dissident who changed territory in order to celebrate life, interchange, blending, and hybrid creatures.
Suddenly, in the sand, there appear traces: pencils, scissors, toothbrushes, cigarettes, vinyl records, buttons, pencil sharpeners, can openers. How does all this detritus end up on the beach? Propelled by the sea, which is to say, by Brian Nissen.
Twenty-five years of liquid divinations open before us, the water wizardry with which Brian Nissen reveals that the mysteries that matter most do not travel in a straight line—they move in slow circles, follow unknown routes, and eventually reach the shore.

 

 

 

Sea of Light


Gazing across Brian Nissen’s Red Sea


Crossing Brian Nissen’s Red Sea with one’s gaze


Albert Ruy Sánchez



            The Red Sea is an immense and encompassing work. It is nearly impossible to take it all in with a single glimpse. It becomes necessary to go over the forty meters of its length slowly, from side to side, in order to construct a mental image of the immensity of the sensations it offers us. Even before we have it squarely in front of us, the work presents itself in a lateral perspective, which makes it seem even larger than it is; and its various elements—the many curves of which it is composed—constitute a dramatic foreshortening gyration, stretching out to meet our gaze.
            Behind this handful of immediate curves, we see an impressive perspective of both small and large waves in the distance. The sensation of its length reminds us of the views of the horizon, oceanic in scope.
            It’s as if an extensive white wall had changed its surface skin, becoming an tempestuous agitated sea that rises up toward the heavens—a sea made of brilliant light and shadows. As if the sea had really always been only light—volatile agitated, white, and incandescent.
            The effect is multiplied by the reflection on the width of the marble floor that runs in front of this wall of light, between wall and spectator. The mirrored effect is perfect because it creates a kaleidoscopic effect, both duplicating and enclosing shapes; it surrounds us even more, and strengthens the weave of solitary forms, multiplying the swelling waves in front, above and beneath us.
            Now, having the mural directly before our gaze, without much space to move back and get a truly distant perspective, our human dimension seems to be continually and completely overwhelmed by the flood. The waves are always right on top us, constituting a sensorial reference to the uncontrollable nature of the sea, to the uncontrollability of nature’s fury.
            Although there is a great deal of such phenomenal phenomenological gigantism to them, these waves nevertheless retain a perfect aesthetic size. They remind me—with all of the enormous differences aside, of course—of the sensation produced by that tremendously beautiful Hokusai woodblock print: The Stormy Sea off Kanagawa, also referred to as “the great wave.” There, waves in different planes create scenic depth, and we see Mt. Fuji in the background, reduced by distance to a proportionally diminutive presence, especially with respect to the enormity of the raging threat posed by the wave. The reduction in scale of immensity makes the wave feels even more powerful and threatening. But apart from that comparison, and owing to the differences between the images, there is another factor that ought to be considered: in Hokusai’s print the enormity of the sea retains perfect “golden section” proportions, and the vortex mouthful of the hungry sea describes a spiral with its maw. The secret—or at least discrete—composition intensifies the disproportion apparent on the surface. And the same thing happens, in a different way, with the dramatic and extravagant excessive appearance of Brian Nissen’s Red Sea: its intrinsic, implicit harmony, both in terms of its overall structure as well as each of its constitutive elements, reflects a masterful sense of composition.
            Seen from the front, the forty meters of wall were designed—long before Nissen’s mural would occupy it—by the building’s architect as a surface of continuous light, brought in from the ceiling by means of a discrete skylight. It is a very long surface, but it is divided into five rectangles, marked by rectilinear columns that are not flush with the wall but located slightly in front of it, closer to us, framing a kind of balcony space that opens towards the light. In this way, each one of those rectangles has given Brian Nissen the opportunity and the challenge of composing fragments that accentuate rather than interfere with the continuity of the background. The central section panel has more, though smaller, pieces than the others. It is the locus of the greatest and most concentrated turbulence agitation. And right in the middle of it, there is a “U,” like a discrete channel symbolically signaling safe passage for the ailing survivors fragile existence amid the powerfully surging waters.
            Each fragment of the work has its own exact proportions, and they all function precisely together as parts of a poliptych. It is a compositional strategy that allows the columns to read as supports for—rather than a foreground disturbance of—the composition that runs behind them. It is like a gigantic panel made up of five large canvases, connected through an impeccable continuity behind the columns. The polyptych poliptych has the central scene where the waters part, with a pair of scenes on either side, in which the sea is made out of larger pieces—in terms of symmetrical movement and proportions at either extreme—but with each element being very different from the others. Again, while each one of the five rectangles is different, it is evidently part of the same whole. All this contributes to giving us the simultaneous feelings of harmony and uncontrolled movement, of stopped action, of a composition that depicts the decompositions of raw nature, of the parting of the waters a sea that opens, of a miracle.
            If this method of composition had a name it would have to be called “Revelation.” In that sense, The Red Sea has something of the perfect Gothic icon to it, immersed as it is in the most recognized tradition of painting the traces, the features faces, or the effects of the sacred with a Byzantine echo. It shows us an instant in which the extraordinary appears in the midst of the ordinary; the action of the divine or the sacred occurs in the midst of the natural, and the impossible become possible. What was golden and metallic in the iconic tradition here becomes intense light. But the same had been true then, too. The splendor of the saints in the icons was not intended as a presumptuous display of the monetary value of the gold used in their depiction; rather, it was used to reveal an exceptional golden halo. Light, all light, embracing something extraordinary framing uniqueness. Thus, in this surprising and satisfyingly pleasantly strange work we move from the enveloping sensation of forms to the feeling of witnessing a unique instant. We go from the apparent chaos of material to the harmonious feeling of an epiphany. It isn’t a tale about the parting of a sea—a representation of a mythological scene—but rather a sea that actually seems to open before our very eyes.             The technical means of this essentially Gothic icon then travel further ahead in art historical time, incorporating the use of the Baroque principle according to which one can arrive at the spiritual by means of exaggerated form. Sensory experience leads us to tremendous commotion, which, in turn, can carry us, in its overwhelming surge, to intense feelings of transcendence. It is not content but rather form that speaks to us. In the Baroque, one arrived at the divine through form, through the senses, not simply by means of content that has been distilled and purified of its forms, as Protestant Reformation doctrine established in direct opposition to the Baroque Counter Reformation.
            But this Red Sea goes much further because it was forged out of contemporary art, in a historical period of intense laicization of forms, which leads to a different kind of sanctification—another, more radical kind, identified with the very essence of art. As P. Régamey explains in El arte sagrado del siglo XX (Sacred Art of the 20th Century), “every work of art worthy of the name is marked by a certain sacred character, in a very general and profound sense. Art accedes to the sacred from the moment it reaches a certain fullness, from the time in which it empties itself of and clearly breaks with a banal vision of things.” When art breaks with realistic and simplistic representations of biblical anecdotes, for example, when art’s potential is freed from those atavisms, the new art manages, paradoxically, to attain to the sacred. Just as ancient art had done, by different means.             Given that this sculptural mural is abstract art, it counts among its plastic tools the principle of spirituality—analogous to the way in which Mark Rothko understood and handled it so admirably in his Houston chapel and in his many resonating astonishing surfaces. In Rothko’s canvases, each color is more than just color: it is epiphany. Abstract form today is closer to the ancient representations of transcendence because figurative art has become impoverished, ever since the 19th century, by becoming illustration and ignoring the convulsive force pure forms possess.             Religious art stopped being art when it renounced the power of form and preoccupied itself exclusively with portraying—with illustrating—content. It lost track of its power to be a reality, instead of merely portraying or representing a reality. Rothko recovered that power. Brian Nissen goes even further, reinventing it, in another way. In this sculptural mural, his material is light becoming the feeling of tormented waters that stop and open themselves right at their moment of greatest uncontrollability.
            The three key moments of sacred art I have mentioned are only some of the influences flowing into this paradigmatic work, a work that will doubtlessly become an unavoidable reference point in this line of art history in which forms appeal to spirituality, renovating their resources and, literally, going far beyond anything previously achieved.
This mural by Brian Nissen is one of those few works in the history of art that truly forges a language. It establishes new limits and ways of existing. Such aesthetic language may later be more or less imitated, utilized, perhaps invoked as a formal means of recognition for a collectivity that, if it has any sensibility, will ally itself with these forms. Quite literally, it enlightens.
            The connection between art and light has endless implications and echoes. At the most elemental level, it is revelation. It allows us to see a different reality. Afterwards, we act in accord with that vision—or in it—and we can play with light, in the same way one can play with clay. And Brian, as we know, has a great sense of humor and an intense sense of playfulness in life. In this work, he plays with light, introducing white planes that offer light to our gaze in a thousand different ways, producing a luminous metaphor of the sea.
            Being in light, as well as playing with light, we are bathed in light. Light becomes other things—water in movement, for example, as it appears to us here. Each piece of this sculptural mural is a means of touching light in order to turn it into a tidal surge, to accelerate it into an active liquid flow of light.
            Art in which light is a primordial element very often becomes an art of religious implications because light turns into a metaphor of the meaning of life, and, symbolically, it becomes an image of that which transcends us.
            In a temple, for example, just as in the Gothic cathedrals, the architecture forms a kind of concrete theology in which light is a basic element. Everything gradually directs our steps inside the building, crossing areas of alternating light and shadow, towards the site of maximum illumination—the point where, in the ritual of the Gothic religion, matter is transformed into divinity. And that idea of light is retained in the Baroque theatricality of the 18th century rituals. Once we reach the 20th century, light again takes up a more elemental vocation, making itself an echo of rituals and visions considered primitive: more authentic and more fascinating for artists and their public.
            At present, it is difficult to find art that, like past art, might have profound religious meaning and yet fullness at an existential level—a meaning that is neither superficial nor illustrative. True art is never merely the illustration of passages or episodes from whatever religion. It is not a decorative element. A good part of 20th century art struggled to reclaim from ancient arts and cultures that which, according to historian André Chastel, diverse figures—such as Duchamp, Breton, Matisse, Chagall, Klee, and Rothko—have called, in one way or another, “the freshness of a lost world where art and its ritual powers were not at the margins but in the center of society, in the soul of the community activity that gave meaning to life.”
            Art, sincerely made, with intelligence and talent, is always an embodiment, a bodily dialogue, an act of thematic counterpoint or confluence of the spectators with that other form of word that is the material of which it is made. (see footnote) It is simultaneously an intellectual and sensorial dialogue, utilizing, for example, the language of light, as in this case. A complete art, Gauguin said, elevates the richness of symbols and associates itself with the most ancient myths. It recovers the vitality of art only by means of matter, through the forms that the material takes.
            When I first heard of this sculptural mural by Brian Nissen, the sheer scale of the challenge surprised me. And it especially intrigued me because I knew his career and I knew that he has always been an artist who gives very original responses to great challenges. In saying this, I don’t mean merely the large scale of his works, but rather to his way of always reformulating his creative work. He has produced some quite small works that are also creative responses to questions posed by the material, and which he always resolves by giving himself completely to the work, with sensitive intelligence. His entire oeuvre consists of surprising responses to challenges that suddenly and passionately seize him, preoccupying him obsessively during certain periods of his life.
            Some artists create out of a system that merely results in the proliferation of hackneyed forms. Others establish a system, exploiting its inflections or using it as a pushing off point from which to derive certain variations. Brian belongs to the class of artists for whom sensibility is guided by intuition and intelligence, who, at every stage of their creative lives, reformulate the meaning of their way of being in the world.
            In speaking of this Red Sea, long before it took form, Brian mentioned above all else the light cast on the wall of this space. Other artists would have felt called upon to give expression to images figures and colors or to focus on the durability of materials. Here, the primordial material that challenges this intelligent and exceptional sculptor is light, not stone nor metal, as in other cases. And, of course, the challenge includes the theme, which later becomes integrated with his conception of light.
            It is sculpture made of light, sculpture that changes as the day progresses. It is sculpture that is religious, in the most profound sense of the term, without renouncing art’s potentials, but rather by renewing them, augmenting their true achievements. The miracle, the epiphany, the emergence of the exceptional from the commonplace—in the world of art, a work embodying such phenomena is called a “masterpiece.” And, undoubtedly, there is little else that can speak to us as convincingly, movingly, and intelligently of another epiphany.

an act of thematic counterpoint or confluence of the spectators with that other form of word that is the material of which it is made. Literal translation: meaning unclear in English (also pretty obscure in Spanish). Please revise & simplify if possible.

This interview by Peter Bartlett took place in Brian Nissen’s studio in New York.

Peter Bartlett is an Australian writer and playwright.


 

P.B.–It's always seemed to me that talking about art is problematic. How can you verbalize a visual experience?


B.N.–That's something I try to avoid. Verbalizing visual experience can be misleading because it is a translation and rationalization of something often untranslatable and possibly irrational.


P.B.–But surely the artist can give us clues as to what he is up to? Obviously every artist has his own way of going about things and what he says can help to clarify his intentions.


B.N.– Anyway, whatever the artist's opinions are, it is his work you have to focus on. What the artist says, and what the work says, may not necessarily coincide. The artist's view of his own work naturally tends to be subjective. It is the critic who tries to be objective. I prefer talking about working methods, or what sparks off a work of art. Things like that. When Diego Rivera, perched high up on a scaffolding painting a huge, controversial mural in the National Preparatory school in Mexico City was asked by a curious onlooker why he always wore a pistol strapped to his waist while he was painting, explained that it was to help "orientate the critics".


P.B.–One aspect of your work which I have noticed is the wide range of materials and forms you use. Do the materials you use in any way dictate different working methods?


B.N. - Well you know how working methods vary a great deal from one artist to another - each one of us finds the ones that suit us best. I suppose it has to do with the particular way one thinks. Of course one method has no particular merit over another, they are just different ways of getting to the same goal. I have colleagues whose working methods seem totally and admirably strange to me. I usually work on many different things at the same time - that is to say I always have several works continuously underway, and hardly ever start and finish a piece at one go. I like to have several pieces just started lying around, which to me are like propositions waiting to be taken up and have something done to them. Sometimes they just lie around. But it often happens that something catches my eye and I can begin to see in what direction a certain piece needs to develop. Then some do, and some don’t. They can go astray, or just be bitchy, or get lost along the way. Some get covered up and chastised - possibly to be picked up and worked on later. Some seem to go on strike and make demands that can or cannot be negotiated. Happily, and occasionally some pieces seem to find their own way without too much help from me.


I especially like to work on a given theme or subject, exploring it from different angles, aspects, and positions. These subjects usually come to me from a single work I have lying around that suddenly seems to want to be done another way or explored in other versions, and this leads to a series of works done in different media and materials. Variations on a theme.


The materials one uses have a language of their own which must be taken into account and which often define the outcome of the work. For instance when working on my sculpture, I use a method that kind of involves the found object. With the difference that first I make the objects, usually in wax, have them spread about my tables, and then I find the bits I can use. Then I assemble them. Again I have all this stuff waiting around to be used when it is time comes. As the Mexican song says - ‘give time its own time’. That’s how it is. But there are times when I will use materials which are by nature more spontaneous, in which case I do start and finish a piece at one go. Drawing is like that. Almost like a gesture. And when I work in clay it is rather the same as it is such a ductile material that needs to be worked with a certain immediacy.


Often I feel as if I am working like an archaeologist. It's as if the works are already there inside you but you have to know first of all, how to locate them, and then how to retrieve them and bring them to light.


P.B.–The spectator is also involved in something of the same process, and must be able to bring to the work of art a capacity to see it as opposed to merely looking at it.


B.N.–That's right. Looking is not the same as seeing. That was Houdini's lesson. Your attention can be distracted in such a way that you don’t see what you are actually looking at. Sometimes the most evident thing is the hardest to see because we are looking for it in the wrong place, or out of context, or looking at it in the wrong way. I remember a few years ago browsing in a magic shop in the Calle Princesa in Barcelona and while I was poking around, the proprietor was demonstrating a marvelous little box puzzle to a customer. After the client had left I asked him how much the puzzle cost as it looked very intriguing. He told me 100 pesetas, and I decided to buy it. He wrapped it for me, but as I was about to leave I stopped. I had forgotten to ask him how it worked. "Ah, but the secret costs another 200 pesetas" he declared. I had hardly recovered from my surprise and agreed to this additional cost when he said:


"When if I tell you how it works please don’t get annoyed". I laughed. - "Why should I be annoyed?" - "Because the solution is so ridiculously simple. People sometimes get upset".


P.B.–Do you think that works of art–like puzzles–need to be explained? Do they have secrets which have to be revealed in order for them to be understood?


B.N.–I don't think a work of art is necessarily enigmatic. I would say that art is a language that can in part be apprehended intuitively, but which also has to be learned like any other language if it is to be fully understood. However art also deals in ambiguities and irrationalities, and in fact in the context of the artist's work these can be of great use.


P.B.–So the spectator like the artist should be able to live happily with ambiguity?


B.N.–Ambiguity is a necessary part of perception. Although what seems ambiguous in one context may not necessarily be so in another. It's rather like the sensation we have all had of stepping on to an escalator that's not working. We're completely thrown off balance because, even though we know it's broken, we are so used to it moving that we cannot rid ourselves of the sensation of movement. Consequently we find it impossible to walk up it normally and without stumbling.


P.B.–Part of the pleasure of games and puzzles relates to the element of wit they contain. Wit gains its effect from the play upon the unexpected connection of disparate elements. The delight comes from discovering the relation.


B.N.–Again the play upon perceptions. I remember once in Mexico a friend asked an artisan to make him a table. He gave him a design of the table he wanted. It was carefully drawn in perspective. When the friend came to pick up the table it was not quite what he had in mind. The artisan had made it "in perspective", exactly as it had been drawn. One set of legs was smaller than the other, and the front wider than the back. Although the artisan thought the customer a bit of an idiot for wanting a table from which everything would fall off, who was he to argue. It wasn’t his money... My friend on the other hand could only rail against him. But my friend's mistake was to take for granted that everybody could naturally read or understand a drawing in perspective, which is not the case. We are, in fact, taught to read perspective.


P.B.–One of the liberating aspects of Modernism was that it taught us that there are many different ways of looking at things. It also taught us to see the past differently, allowing us to draw upon and appreciate different periods and cultures, past and present. How has this play of the past affected your own perceptions?


B.N.–The question, as you've noted, is largely one of how we are taught to see the past. When I was growing up we were taught to revere the art of the Renaissance. Quite frankly I found a lot of

it bored me. However this was not the case when I came to look at the art of the so-called Dark Ages, the Italian Primitives, or so-called ‘Primitive Art’, all of which affected me far more deeply.


P.B.–Though you grew up in England and were educated within that tradition and now live in New York, you lived for many years in Mexico. How did the past of that very rich culture affect your work?


B.N.–My encounter with Pre-Columbian art in particular exercised a fundamental influence on my work. It triggered a reevaluation of my ways of thinking, so much so that I now think of myself as a cultural hybrid.


P.B.–Or the artist as bee! Cross-pollination of cultural horticulture. To a degree we are experiencing a revival of the cosmopolitan ideal of the eighteenth century, although now to be a citizen of the world means to be a citizen of something more than merely Europe. But did you have any difficulty in integrating such very different cultural traditions?


B.N.–Not really. I think that such integration is more a question of temperament than anything else. It either works or it doesn't. Above all it is an intuitive understanding, and where temperament and feelings find a natural echo. Of course assimilation into another culture is not easy, but one finds ways. For instance, I felt an immediate affinity with Mexican humour, which has a predilection for puns and word play very much like English humour.


P.B.–Do you feel such an echo in your own work?


B.N.–Definitely. Not only did Pre-Columbian art exert a powerful influence on my work in a formal sense, but also in a more general way. In Pre-Columbian societies art played an integral part in almost every aspect of daily life. It was involved in medicine, astronomy, agriculture, religion, homemaking, etc. In those societies art was not assigned a narrow and limited role but


came to them as a ritual enactment of a mythic sense of wonder and desire. Art for us, however, is the province of people with a special sensibility. It reaches us filtered through the context of museums and galleries and doesn't affect society as a whole. In this century we all lament the overspecialization of practically every aspect of our lives–a situation art has not managed to escape. This is no way to say that I'm dreaming of a Utopian return to the past, but I do think there is a very important lesson to be learned from this example.


P.B.–One of our problems is that science and technology have outstripped our capacity to imaginatively re-structure our society. Art, which could affect such an imaginative re-thinking, seems fated to be viewed by our society as nothing more than a form of entertainment or an investment commodity.


B.N.–Societies get the art they deserve. It's hard to get away from that. But that's not art's problem. Artists, like everyone else, are a product and part of their society. Their particular task however is to act as a sounding board for the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that they find about them, and then to manifest them. There will always be artists with a passion to create despite all kinds of pressures. Once again they will survive the overindulgence of the art world.

 

 

 

Without Borders


Conversation with Brian Nissen


Ricardo Cayuela Gally


 

The painter and sculptor Brian Nissen, born in London in the fateful year of 1939, studied at the London School of Graphic Arts and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1963 he came to Mexico, where he would be based until 1979, when he moved to New York—although he would continue to maintain a home in Mexico. He has exhibited his work, among other places, at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, El Museo del Barrio in New York City, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, and London’s Whitechapel Gallery. In 1980 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1983 he created Mariposa de obsidiana (Obsidian Butterfly)—an exhibition focused on a prose poem by Octavio Paz—for the Museo Tamayo in Mexico; and in 1992, invited by the Government of Catalonia, he participated in the celebrations marking the 500 year anniversary of the discovery of America with the exhibition Atlántida (Atlantis). Other exhibitions of his work include the series Cacaxtla, at New York’s Cooper Union, in 1993; Chinampas, at New York’s Museo del Barrio, in 1998; Limulus, at the City University of New York, 2001; and Cuatro cuartetos (Four Quartets), at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, 2006. That same year, he completed the public sculpture Manantial (Source) now installed on Mexico City’s main avenue, the Paseo de la Reforma.
The present interview—conducted in the apartment he shares with his wife, Montse Pecanins, in Mexico City’s colonia Condesa neighborhood—combines two conversations. The first, on the occasion of the Mexico City publication of his book Expuesto: Reportes y rumores en torno al arte y el arte de Brian Nissen (Mexico City: DGE/Equilibrista-UNAM, 2008), in which, along with the essays written by the painter himself, there are texts about his work written by a notable group of authors and art critics. The second, motivated by the great retrospective that the Palacio de Bellas Artes is presenting in the autumn of 2012, which includes his early work, dispersed among galleries and collectors the world over—much of it being shown in Mexico for the first time. A very special event.

Why do you define yourself as a cultural hybrid?

It’s quite true that I think of myself as a cultural hybrid, a product of the places in which I have lived and worked. I have been nurtured by four cities—my hometown, London, New York, Barcelona, and Mexico City—that are very different in character and idiosyncrasy; I think the fusion of them in my life and work has only enriched me. Over time, I have come to think that I inhabit a single, extended city, made up of the sum of these four urban centers. The only nationality I aspire to is that of a nation of artists.
Living among different cultures is something that has attracted me since boyhood, and the possibility of experiencing and absorbing the heritage and habits of each one seemed to me, even then, as something that undoubtedly belongs to a certain temperament. In the same way, to reach an understanding and a deeper perspective of one’s own language, it is useful to speak another: the analogies and parallels between the two become mutually enriching.

How did you learn Spanish?

I came to Mexico convinced that I would never speak Spanish. Years of studying French grammar at school had convinced me that I had no aptitude whatsoever for languages. When I arrived in Mexico, I resigned myself to arranging my life without speaking Spanish. However, to my surprise, after six months I could make myself understood without difficulty, and by the end of the year I was already able to speak reasonably well. The secret was in my frequent visits to the local cantinas, where I joined in on games of domino. In Anglo-Saxon countries, dominoes is considered to be a children’s game, consisting of the simple task of matching numbers, but in reality it is a game involving great skill and complex calculations. To be able to participate, I only had to be able to count in Spanish, and to know a few swear words and a handful of relevant terms. With that little bit of proficiency, I was able to join the games. Since, while one is playing, the vocabulary that is used is certainly limited and constantly repeated, I soon felt sufficiently sure of myself to be able to speak it freely. The confidence that making myself understood in Spanish afforded me helped to increase my vocabulary without worrying about grammar, which would later fall into place. Learning by ear was the only method for me. The method that had been taught to me in school was akin to trying to learn how to swim by reading a book about it: at the end of the day, once you’ve been thrown into the water, books are of little help. The trick is keeping “afloat.” Afterwards, you can learn more elaborate movements. It’s the same way in art: one learns by imitation and through experience.

What was your childhood like during the years of the Second World War?

I was born in June 1939, and the war broke out in September. We lived in London. A year and a half later, when a German invasion seemed immanent, the children in the south of England were evacuated—especially those of us living in the capital—and were sent off to be boarded with families throughout the country, in the north. My father, who was a philatelist (as was my grandfather), took us to Llangolen, a small village in Wales, while he went to work at his London office during the week. Llangolen is located in a landscape of green hills that are dotted with specks of white—the ever-present sheep pastured there all year round. Behind our house there was a canal, built in 1846 for the horse-drawn barges that formed part of the commercial traffic linked to an even larger network of canals dating from the 18th century, which connected most of the country. My father was in the Home Guard, a volunteer territorial defense force. They used to go out at night and set fires on the surrounding hills. The German airplane pilots, on their way to bomb Liverpool, saw the smoke and often thought they had arrived at their target, and so would drop their bombs on the hills.
After the war, we returned to London, to our house in Hampstead. In Wales, there was a school run by Kurt Hahn, a German teacher well known for his educational theories. He had escaped from Germany in 1933 and founded a school called Gordonstoun in northern Scotland. During the war, the school’s buildings were commandeered by the army, and the school relocated to Llandiam, near where we were living. My older brother attended that school and later, after the war, when they moved back to Scotland, we were both enrolled there. I was barely seven years old. It was what is called a “public school” in England, although in reality they are private boarding schools; in this case, the parents paid tuition according to their income. It was a place of very strict discipline, but it was quite liberal in other ways. At that time, I spoke with a bit of a Scottish brogue, which would help me, years later, to learn to pronounce the trilled “rr” in Spanish.

And when did you leave Scotland?

When I was twelve I went to another boarding school, closer to London. At fifteen, I enrolled in art school. I shared rooms with some fellow students and, to survive, at about sixteen or seventeen I began to do book illustrations. Since I was quite adept at drawing, I also did fashion illustration—not creating the designs, but drawing the models wearing fashion designers’ dresses. I always had a facility for drawing, and by the time I was nineteen, things had already begun to go quite well for me.

To a Mexican, it seems surprising that all your formal education took place outside the family home, in boarding schools…

Yes, it’s quite a different culture. Family relationships are much more independent. Here, in Mexico, the idea of children going far away to boarding school is unimaginable; there, however, it was quite common, as was going off at fifteen or sixteen to earn a living.

In London, I didn’t attend classes at art school very often. I went to museums, read, painted and drew all the time. I’ve never taught art, in part because I’m always learning myself, and because I think the value of an art school doesn’t depend so much on what the professors are teaching but rather on the interchanges between the students. Painting and drawing can’t really be taught. They are learned through practice: seeing, assimilating, conversing. What’s more, teachers often constrain talented students more than they enlighten them. What a good teacher can do is motivate the students, inspire them with enthusiasm, and make them understand the difference between looking and seeing.

Could you tell me a bit more about your life in “swinging London”?

It was a city of contradictions, really—on one hand, conservative politicians, and, on the other, quite a liberal society that was breaking every conceivable mold. The sense of openness was palpable throughout the society, with rock music, the drug experience—understood as “doors of perception” rather than an addiction (which I’ve never been interested in)—and the sexual revolution. The changes that were happening even affected the English language, which, prior to the 1960s, was stratified according to social classes and neighborhoods; the mixing and conviviality of people from different social classes and neighborhoods during those years served to unify the language, albeit only partially.
In artistic terms, there was a fascination with American culture, but in a curious way. Think of Pop art. In the U.S. it was a kind of playful, ironic, pamphleteering comment about the society of abundance; but in London, that was impossible: we continued to live in the midst of scarcity, a consequence of the enormous cost involved in winning the war. I don’t mean to discount the work of Allan Jones or Richard Hamilton, but simply to contextualize them. The real British synthesis was in music, where American jazz and blues had been assimilated and we created something original, rebellious, and authentic—British rock—that has influenced the whole world.

When did you know you were going to dedicate yourself to art?

I had drawn ever since I was a boy. It was my passion, and I never imagined doing anything else.

But somehow the life of a prosperous illustrator didn’t satisfy you, and you decide to go to Paris. How do you remember your Parisian life during those years?

I felt restless with what I was doing. I was twenty-one and had only one objective: to paint. So I went to Paris and enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, mostly because that way I could live cheaply. Having the student ID card, the carnet, I could eat for one franc a day. My idea was to live off my savings and dedicate myself exclusively to painting. I lived in Paris for a year and a half, working a lot and absorbing the culture of that great city.

In Paris, I didn’t show up very often at the classes in Beaux-Arts because they were really pathetic. One signed up for an atelier directed by a maestro who was generally a mediocre painter, and who showed up on Saturday mornings and chatted up the two or three pretty girls who were there—and that was it! So I went just to draw from the live models. Very close to the school was the great ruin of the Orsay railroad station. The building was completely fenced off, abandoned, with the train tracks full of water. I used to climb in through a hole in the wall and dream that it was the greatest studio in the world. I thought: “From platform 11 to platform 13, I’m going to paint; from 5 to 7, I’ll do printmaking; and on the others, I’ll do sculpture.”

When, and why, did you decide to leave Paris and go to Mexico?

I had the idea of going to a place where I could settle undisturbed for a while and just focus on painting. Then I read Under the Volcano, and suddenly I knew what that place would be. It’s Malcolm Lowry’s fault, really. I knew nothing at all about Mexico, but that book definitely touched a nerve and decided it for me. I came to Mexico by ship from France, stopping over in New York and disembarking in Veracruz; from there I traveled overland to Mexico City. I didn’t think I would stay more than three or four years. I arrived without knowing a soul, without speaking any Spanish, completely lost, as though I had just arrived on the moon. I went around the city trying to make connections, when someone mentioned to me a certain Ian Canning, an English ceramicist who lived in Xalapa. So I went off to look for him. Canning recommended that I set myself up in San Miguel de Allende, where he had lived, which I did. In those days, it was only a small village, and that’s where I met Joy Laville, the first friend I made in Mexico. I moved into the village, rented a house, and set about painting. Every day I walked for hours through the semi-arid plain, fascinated by the landscape. I lived there for about a year and a half, traveling in to Mexico City once in a while.

Slowly but surely I began to make contacts. I exhibited at Antonio Souza’s gallery and began to meet people, among others, Montse Pecanins and her sisters. Later, I moved to Mexico City and set up a studio in Tacubaya, right in front of Chapultepec Park. I exhibited in the new Galería Pecanins, and my three of four years’ stay in Mexico turned into eighteen.

Coming from the heart of classicism—Paris, and Europe in general—what was the visual impact of Mexico on you? I’m thinking of that text by Nooteboom in Nomad’s Hotel, about the first time he entered the Mexica room in Mexico’s anthropology museum and tried to understand Aztec sculpture, which he found both fantastic and terrifying…

When I arrived in Mexico I began a long process of unlearning, without even being aware of it. To begin with, being accustomed to the pleasant, lush English countryside, I was astonished by the hostile and arid landscape of Mexico’s central plain. I found it quite beautiful and tremendously powerful. When I was a boy, my education was tinged with the imperial values that, still then, reaffirmed the supposed glories of the British Empire and those heroes who had created it. It goes without saying that someone so young doesn’t usually question such things. As a thinking person, once I was an adolescent, I rejected these values. Nevertheless, when I came to Mexico, I was still burdened with certain cultural and political baggage I had considered valid.

At any rate, you come from that sort of imperial and orderly culture. What do you discover in Mexico?

I began to realize there are other values. For example, I saw a completely different system of justice that, while it didn’t seem particularly desirable, nevertheless allowed me to become aware of the fact that the idea I had of British justice was a relative one. I began to understand that those values were not as marvelous as they seemed—that they were covered with such a thick layer of culture and tradition that one couldn’t perceive their real dimensions. Mexico made me question all those things. That’s why I say it was a process of unlearning many of the things I still had weighing me down. It was a decisive encounter. I also discovered that quotidian anarchy can fuel creativity, although it might be a pain in the arse in practical terms.

When did you discover Mesoamerican art, which has been so central in your own art?

That’s a complicated issue, because people generally misunderstand in what way it influenced me. What struck me about pre-Hispanic art wasn’t so much its aesthetic aspect as its anthropological dimension. It forced me to reconsider my ideas about art in general, which were more focused on aesthetic sensations. What I found in pre-Hispanic art, and what I felt passionate about, was the concept of art as a ritual object, as magic, in the sense that it’s something whose essence is invested with powers—a thing that acts as a spiritual magnet—and how those powers operate in the spectator. I was also fascinated by the case of an art that entered into all the aspects of the community’s social life. Their peoples did not have the same concept of art or of beauty as we understand it, an idea that in the Western tradition comes from ancient Greece. The idea of the ritual object, touching on all the aspects of their daily life, is something that seems to me very desirable and compelling—something very different from the demagogic idea of a so-called democratic art.

That’s why you were so surprised to find that the sculpture of Coatlicue has elements that are not visible, that function not so much on the aesthetic level as in terms of meaning…

That’s it exactly. It was something that influenced me enormously. For us, what isn’t perceptible in art doesn’t exist. In the ritualistic Mesoamerican cultures, however, it doesn’t matter if a physical manifestation is visible or not: it still has a ritualistic and symbolic function. That seems to me to be a great metaphor for understanding the meaning of a magical object and the forces it exudes.

That reminds me of the museography of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris—dedicated to non-Western cultures—where there is no interest in or respect for the contextual characteristics of the creation of the thousands of pieces in their display cases.

That happens all the time. “Primitive” art is interpreted outside of its cultural context. I remember when they reopened the Museum of Modern Art in New York with an exhibition titled “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: the Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” The inanity of it was such that, for example, they put a figure from Oceania with its arms spread wide together with a canvas by Roberto Matta that included a figure having the same pose, as though both pieces had some kind of interconnection. The fact is, every culture sees other cultures through its own eyes and prejudices.
In my book Expuesto, I relate Rufino Tamayo’s unhappiness at seeing his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York placed within the framework of the Mexican and Mesoamerican folk art tradition. Tamayo was a modern painter whose visual idiom was formed by the School of Paris, within the lineage of Cubism and Fauvism.

What was the artistic and cultural life of Mexico City like in the 1960s and 1970s?

There are moments when culture and social networks begin to flourish. Who knows why? Those moments involve the confluence of a place, a group of people, and certain specific circumstances. Mexico City experienced one of those rare moments in the 1960s. Although Mexican muralism was in its death throes—and was being kept alive artificially through rhetoric and demagogy—it was still the official art promoted by the government. It became a tyrannical force in the visual arts, and the reaction to it produced a new generation of painters. By rejecting muralism a new art developed, a contemporary language for the plastic arts in Mexico.

The city was different then, more vital and dynamic, more accessible, and not only because of the obvious reason of its size. A curious phenomenon of Mexico City at that time was that its artistic community was very hermetic, intellectually incestuous. Unlike the Chileans, the Colombians, the Brazilians or the Argentines, Mexican painters didn’t feel the need to go to Europe or to follow closely on the heels of the American avant-garde. That’s why, in Mexico, culture was not quite as susceptible to international trends, and in that group of young painters each one painted in his own particular style, something very special at the time. Also, in those days, painters socialized with filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians, and poets, which created a very rich interchange and a spirit of shared struggle in the attempt to introduce new, contemporary cultural expressions in the country.

Why then did you leave the city and move, together with your wife, Montse Pecanins, to New York?

By 1978 I felt the need to move on. My options were my native city of London, Montse’s home town of Barcelona, or New York, where I often traveled and had a gallery that handled my work. I decided for the latter city, in part because of its incredible energy and because it is an intermediate point between Mexico and Europe. Since then I continue to keep a home and studio in Mexico, but I live in New York. New York forces you to infuse structure into your work. Everything is competitive and pared down to the essentials. The city offers you an incredible amount of materials with which to create your work, although that matters less to me—an artist ought to be able to create with whatever he has at hand. It also has on exhibition an unbelievable, endless number of artworks, literally right at your fingertips, in addition to the interchange with other artists from your own culture as well as from every other culture on Earth, from you own or any other generation. It is energy in a pure state.
New York also taught me to mistrust labels and prejudgments. In a single city block, one finds both the First and the Third World, the most primitive and the most modern. Slums mixed with upper-class neighborhoods—something unimaginable in London.

And the shock of dealing with the American mentality?

What you might expect. They have a very receptive attitude toward the new—unlike the Europeans, who have been conditioned by the immensity of their history—, a permanent investment in the future. They invent and renew their tradition constantly. Now, it’s true, in New York there was also a collision between my—rather naïve—idea of pure art and the crude reality of the art market and the public relations or other extra-artistic shenanigans that accompany it, in which certain ingenuous critics and media are also complicit.

What surprised you most about New York?

Discovering in their true context—less rigid and idealized—many of the artistic and musical manifestations I had admired from afar, and the naturalness with which they manifested themselves. For example, the jazz clubs, where someone who for me was a great star might be playing, yet nobody else seemed to be taking the least notice because of their utter familiarity with it.

To finish up with the subject of your four cities, tell me about Barcelona and what it meant for you.

Barcelona is inseparable from my life with Montse and her family. We have lived there off and on since 1972, when she established her gallery of Mexican art in Barcelona. Barcelona had all the right conditions, both geographic and spiritual, to be a great center of European culture, cosmopolitan and open. The great novelists of the Latin-American “boom” were published there, and they themselves lived there for many years. Paradoxically, the persecution of Catalonian culture and the Catalan language had made both more dynamic, and they were on a par with the world’s best cultural expressions. They were years of great creativity. Today, their responses to nationalism have been politicized and appropriated, and the city has gone from being an avant-garde center to one that is much less cosmopolitan and less interesting. It’s amusing to think about my visits to “La Pedrera,” that great icon of Catalonian modernism and a building that is a symbol of Gaudí, today assaulted by international tourism—Art as scenic backdrop. In those years, it was just another of the city’s buildings, with a travel agency on the ground floor, lots of vacant apartments, and more than a few private investigators whose services one could hire out of dingy offices.
Barcelona, for me, has been tremendously entertaining, irreverent, and creative. And it was the city of Tàpies, one of the great painters of our time. He invented a language of material itself that is very powerful. He has always fascinated me. His textures sing and speak. His work has great freedom and an enormous force that I have always admired. Creating is always a dialogue with the material that you’re using.

In your work I detect astonishment in the face of certain forms of nature. A whole series of your work was developed out of the idea of the “horseshoe crab.” Why does it fascinate you so?

One only has to see the creature to discover how extraordinary it is. It’s as simple as that. One is always not only astonished but also intimidated by nature’s forms. Seeing these prodigies, what can one do? The only thing we are left with is amazement and the opportunity to learn from them. When I first saw the crab on the beaches of New England—Limulus polyphemus is the scientific name of this species—I didn’t know it would become a subject for my work. The idea occurred to me while working in ceramics. These themes come to me in an organic way, they’re not a priori propositions, and once I get started they pull me further and further in. The same thing happened to me with Obsidian Butterfly, which was suggested by Octavio Paz. In an almost natural way, more and more works began to emerge from it.

It’s as if you enter into a certain line of research. You exploit it as much as possible and you then move along to another one, isn’t that so?

That’s true. There are works of mine that seem like parts of a series. It’s like finding a rich vein of ore and you mine it until it runs dry.

Considering that you are, after all, an artist who works in series, aren’t you concerned that a single piece will become de-contextualized and not be evaluated appropriately? I’m thinking of Limulus, of Obsidian Butterfly, of Cacaxtla, but also of the series Atlantis, or of your codices and Chinampas…

I like to work in series because it offers the possibility of going deeper into a subject, of seeing it from different angles. Those themes appear suddenly and ask to be worked out in certain ways, but it’s not that I propose to create a series from the start. I simply explore all of a theme’s possibilities, without a preconceived plan. On the other hand, I think that each one of the works stands on its own merits, with or without the immediate context provided by the rest of the series of which it’s a part.

Obsidian Butterfly comes out of the prose poem by Octavio Paz. What was your relationship with that text?

That series germinated from a phrase in the poem in which the goddess says “From my body spring forth images,” and that seemed irresistible to me. I thought, “Oh, yeah? Alright then, we’ll just have to invent those images—make them visible.”

In Obsidian Butterfly there are many historical and anthropological references, but expressed through the language of modern art. What is that process like?

I’ll give you an example. In the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, in Teotihuacán, there are images of the butterfly—the goddess Itzpapálotl—that have circles of obsidian incrusted in the wings. From that, I got the idea of inserting vinyl discs of recordings in the wings, as a kind of modern echo of that ancient stone. I was fascinated with the idea that the grooves cut into those records—some of the discs were broken—contained, embedded in them, sounds that, at a previous time, were able to be heard.

Something like the case of the Coatlicue sculpture—a hidden message in the art object…

Precisely. In addition, I am fascinated by those links and cross-references between ancient and modern—playing with them and integrating them into my work—although I am always conscious of the fact that my plastic language is that of modern art.

In the exhibition Obsidian Butterfly at the Museo Tamayo you not only presented the entire series of pieces that grew out of the Paz poem—in a range of different formats and materials—but you also created the choreography for a dance that was performed at the opening. How did you conceive your exhibition?

The Obsidian Butterfly exhibition offered me the opportunity to investigate from many different angles. The poem inspired many images, which I realized in a number of different materials. On that occasion, I asked Paz to record his voice: for one thing, to add it to my collection of spoken poetry—I prefer listening to poetry, when it’s well read, rather than reading it; and for another, so that he would in some way have a presence in the show. My idea was to work around the poem in a number of different media, and to create an entire ambiance. When he saw the exhibition installed for the first time, Octavio said something really beautiful to me: that it wasn’t an exhibition of individual works, but rather the exhibition itself was the work.

It happened with the exhibition of Atlantis, too—with the songs of the whales as background music…

Yes, that’s right. I like to create different relationships in my exhibitions, incorporating different media.

From Obsidian Butterfly a unifying conception of art emerges, developed through different media, and a profound relationship with literature. Such an approach contrasts with the attitude of certain contemporary artists whose only interest is provocation, but without a reading of the world behind it.

It’s a difficult question, because on one hand there are militant artists, adept at prefabricated scandals, like kamikazes whose work is merely visual propaganda; but on the other hand, I know conceptual artists who are highly cultured and very talented, and whose provocations are oriented toward generating consciousness in people.

I would like you to go a little further with your critique of conceptual art.

Conceptual art proposes to question the nature of art itself. It asks what art is, what its role—its identity—ought to be, more from a philosophical viewpoint than from an aesthetic one. If one follows this idea through to its logical conclusion, art becomes philosophy, which might seem like an interesting prospect but is awfully reductionist, given that art embraces many different manifestations. Most of the time, when I find myself faced with works of this genre, it seems like I am reading the menu instead of eating the food… But that’s another story. At any rate, what is important in the different genres of art, especially when seen a posteriori, is what has motivated them, and the works that have resulted from such motivations. Obviously, there are incredibly important movements, such as Dada, that left a tremendous imprint and opened up many paths, one of which leads directly to conceptual art. And I think that path has become progressively narrower, to the point that it has led to a blind alley. It makes me think of the book by the great James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, which exhausted a genre impossible to sustain.

When one reviews the career of the modern artist par excellence, Picasso, and his different periods, one discovers that, before being a Cubist and a “de-constructor” of works, he was an extraordinary draughtsman, that he had a masterful control of technique, and that it was on the basis of that mastery that he could propose breaking with it. In music, the same could be said of Stravinsky, for example. What one feels is missing from contemporary conceptual artists is that many of them do not understand the instruments of art, beginning with drawing. It’s as though art were no longer necessary in order to question art.

I think it’s a little risky to pass judgment on artists who aren’t gifted at drawing. I think of artists like Picasso or Matisse, who were as much composers as executors; there can be composers who are disasters at playing the piano, just as there are pianists who have no idea how to compose music. They are two autonomous talents, in a certain sense. And today’s conceptual artists would be akin to composers rather than performers. However, it’s entirely another issue whether or not what they compose is interesting. I think conceptual art that is taken to its ultimate consequences will find itself in a hopeless contradiction. Ninety percent of the works that follow out of Tristan Tzara, in one direction, or Marcel Duchamp, in another, are simply uninteresting repetitions.
Avant-garde movements exist in very specific moments, when dominant trends are worn out and have become pure cliché. There comes a time when there has to be a rebellion against those old forms, by inventing a new language. The avant-garde cannot become an institution; it can neither be permanent nor self-sustaining. It serves its purpose—renews values, opens new avenues—and then disappears, leaving behind its repercussions.

Getting back to your work, in the bronze sculptures modern language comes up against an ancestral technique that dates back to the Egyptians, although it still remains essentially unchanged in our time.

It’s seductive to think that there still exists a technique that is thousands of years old and hasn’t changed, especially now that everything moves at such velocity and what is useful today will be outdated tomorrow. But this fact obviously doesn’t influence me when I make a work in bronze; it’s just amusing to me to be using the same technique that the ancient Chinese or Egyptians used.

When do you decide that a piece has to be made in clay or ceramic or wood or bronze?

It’s the work that decides for me. Each medium has its own language, and I very much enjoy changing from one to another; each medium has its requirements, imposes its conditions and its methods. One material enriches the work in another. For example, working in ceramics or clay is similar to drawing because it’s spontaneous and immediate. I have always said that when I am working clay I feel somewhere between a child and a baker. With bronze, I make the pieces without worrying too much about the technical issues relating to the foundry—that comes later, because the process imposes its own requirements. Working in wood or stone is quite different. Each material has its language and its way of being handled.

And what is the language that you handle best?

I like everything equally. It’s a question of establishing a dialogue with the material. Each one has its own appeal. Drawing is something very special, underappreciated as a “minor” art. It is the skill of manifesting a thought in the simplest physical form. That’s why it’s important that every artist ought to know how to draw. I think it’s a very important form of mental training; it’s the link between hand and mind.

So, when you draw, do you have the image in your head and then simply portray it?

Not as mechanically as that. In general, the image emerges on its own, from the play of lines and forms. In my case, the process is unconscious. As a working method, I almost always begin with a blank mind, without knowing what is going to happen. I sketch some lines, some forms, and I see what relationships are set up between them; from there, something begins to get going. What I do think is that it is very important to be able to render with precision an already formulated idea.

Why is it difficult to explain visual art with words?

There are things that are incredibly difficult to verbalize—like talking about color, for example. And you notice it often among critics, who usually talk about line, composition, form, and anecdote, but avoid the issue of color. I think that color is expressed best through poetry.

What was the genesis of the Atlantis series?

It grew out of an invitation, in Barcelona, to participate in the celebrations of the fifth century of the “encounter” or “discovery” of America—a very controversial issue. So the idea of Atlantis occurred to me, because of the connection it has between America and Europe. I thought I had to search for some link between America and Europe that didn’t have anything directly to do with such a controversial question. And the notion of Atlantis was one of the first versions of the new continent that had arrived in Spain. Furthermore, the subject intrigued me and it seemed to be a very rich field of imagery. That’s why I invented those large maritime maps of Atlantis. They are a kind of poetic cartography. I also made some bronze volcanoes and relief paintings inspired by the ocean floor.

Why did you want to create your own codices?

The pre-Hispanic codices fascinated me from the first time I saw them, and since then I began to make my own. They were inspired by the folding screen format they have. It’s exciting to realize how they are part of the lineage of narrative drawing, which begins with paleolithic cave paintings and continues right up through modern day comics. What intrigued me the most is their symbolic language of color—something that continues to be a mystery. There are, for example, drawings of certain gods in the Mexica codices in which the drawing is repeated exactly several times, except that the headdresses and the details of the clothing change color. And if, as we have already said, it is an art in which there are no decorative elements—as there are, for example, in the Mayan codices—, in which every element signifies, then color must have a meaning. If the drawing is to be read as a text, it seems to me obvious to think that the use of color is, too. This “language of color” seems to me something unique in the world, and nobody has explained it. That’s something that fascinates me about the Mexica codices.

And what was your process of “appropriation” of the idea of the chinampas—the floating gardens of Xochimilco—in another series of your work?

The chinampas, apart from their own aspect, have a resonance with abstract art that seems to me very interesting. The abstract expressionist painters see the canvas as an area where things happen—in particular, the act of painting. That’s why many of their paintings are intentionally unfinished: if the painting, or the canvas, is the space in which the art of painting occurs, then a work can be simply a stage of that process, stopped at a certain point. The same is true of the chinampas: the flowers and fruit they cultivate are always in motion, gestating; they are neither a definitive nor a finished action. That’s where my fascination with them began.

How did you come up with the idea for the monumental sculpture The Red Sea, in the Maguen David Jewish community center in Mexico City?

As in most of my work, the genesis is derived from the forms themselves. In this case, I went to see the wall where the work was to be located, and, to begin with, two things struck me: the size—46 meters long by 5 meters high—and the effect of the light produced by a skylight along the entire length of the wall. It was a wall bathed in light. I immediately thought that I had to produce a play of shadows, and that the forms had to be white. I began to work on several maquettes, with the idea of rhythms going to one side and rhythms going to the other. In one of them, those rhythms open in the center, and I got the idea of the Red Sea parting under the feet of the people of Israel, as they fled from the Egyptians. The “U” shape in the middle signified the passage; it’s a kind of symbolic tunnel. Being a center of Jewish community, religious, and cultural life, the theme was perfect, but it wasn’t preconceived. The same thing happened with Limulus: I was working on some things and suddenly thought: “But, this is a horseshoe crab!”

In Mexico there has been a lot of discussion about the Estela de Luz (‘Stele of Light’), that awful commemorative monument to the Bicentennial—a combination of bad planning and corruption. What is your reading of public art?

The Estela de Luz is an abomination, a monument resulting from bad planning in every way imaginable. Public art ought to fulfill a number of functions: its relationship to its surroundings, its scale, and its civic function. One has to take into consideration the perspectives from which—and in what way—the work will be seen, together with the buildings, walls, and elements of landscape with which it must enter into dialogue. From the initial stage of developing a maquette, there must be an understanding of scale: it’s not the same to enlarge something from 50 centimeters to 5 meters as it is to enlarge it to 50 meters. Scale is language too, and it must be treated as such. My concept of the sculptural mural The Red Sea began with the fact that the wall was bathed in natural light, and the work had to be a play of shadows. The fountain Manatial, on the Paseo de la Reforma, had to be able to be seen from all angles in a 360 degree circumference, like the Katún in the UAM (Autonomous Metropolitan University, in Mexico City). The project I was commissioned to do for Acapulco, the Virgen resplandeciente (The Resplendent Virgin, as yet unrealized), was for a 200-meter-high monument, situated in the hills behind the port. My first consideration was to take account of the problem of the wind. It had to be a see-through structure and an abstraction of the traditional image that one could recognize from a distance of 16 kilometers. The physical conditions and the surroundings provide the framework for what the final design of a work of public art should be.

A DIALOGUE


Brian Nissen and Claudio Isaac.


Museo Tamayo: January 2006


 

We are in fact looking at four distinct exhibitions of yours in this show, each with a different theme and compiled of works produced over the past few years. The series Chinampas consists of ceramic and mixed-media sculptures, unusual compelling scale models like landscapes, having their origin in the artist’s fascination with the floating orchards of Xochimilco. In Sculptoria, we confront the imposing presence of his bronze sculptures. The subject matter and diversity of these structures produce a different reaction. Some represent archaic temples, truncated pyramids or volcanoes evoking eruptions; others, ruinous larva flows, or the remains of razed temples. In spite of the informal tendencies that are usually found in Nissen’s works, I detect a certain degree of formality in these pieces, probably resulting from their ceremonial aspect. ‘These works’, Brian explains, ‘have a specific frontal view, so the position of the spectator is somewhat predetermined, as if standing before a shrine or an altar.

Limulus consists of a mysterious and extensive series of bronzes and collages prompted by his fascination with the Horseshoe Crab, an animal considered to be a living fossil, which inhabits the east coast of North America, and frequented by Nissen after his moving to New York. The shell of this marine arthropod has remained unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, and in effect the animal has not evolved at all since prehistory. Its strange shape lends itself to a great variety of formal associations, which led Nissen to provoke a surprising metamorphosis of the animal, inspired in part by its evocative structure and its deceptively menacing aspect. although in fact it is perfectly inoffensive.

Atlantis is the fourth series, which is divided in two parts. In the first there are relief paintings, executed with non-emblematic materials, fully textured and intricately balanced but with a forthright composition, conveying the appearance of ostensible harmony. They are variations on things that tides might uncover or bury, vestiges of strange tangled treasures and detritus. The second part consists of an imaginative and ingenious set of conjectured maritime maps drawn on paper stained with ink or translucent watercolor. They are concoctions of archetypal cartography in which we encounter hidden paradises, utopias, fictitious places, improbable marine geography; outlines of coordinates that promise impossible worlds, points located with incongruous, ingenious poetic names, Joycean words games, constantly illuminating and inspiring in us the dream of a mythical realm: a legend is reborn.

Although we are dealing with four independent themes, as well as revealing Nissen’s tremendous creative determination, seeing them together gives us a definitive map of the constants and aesthetic preoccupations informing the authentic expressions of his imagination.

                                                                                                                                                                                               ****

CI: The title Four Quartets suggests a link to music.
BN: Well, it has this title because the exhibition is divided into four different parts, and in order to avoid calling it something as banal as "Four by Four" or something like that, I chose this title of a set of poems by T.S.Eliot, which I thought appropriate. In respect to it having a relation to musical form, there are direct and obvious parallels. One is dealing with rhythms, silences, pauses, as well as sharps and flats, and relating these to color and composition in much the same way. The process is analogous. I usually start with my mind in blank. Then I will do something that serves as a kind of arbitrary statement - anything at all - that establishes a situation, such as making a couple of marks on the canvas. I try to see their possible relationship. Figure out what is going on between them. Then, as I make another mark, the relationships between them change. And so one begins to fool around with them. As things start moving you provoke the elements involved to play off each other. The idea of play is fundamental.
CI: Although it might seem contradictory to your goal of achieving spontaneity, I detect an undercurrent, a more erudite side to your work; I sense that there is a literary approach of interpreting reality, in organizing it, no matter how manifest and dominating the plastic values are.
BN: I love reading - novels, poetry, essays, natural history and so on. I think that this reflects in my work, not so much in the actual making of individual pieces, but in the urge to find a certain subject and to explore it in depth. Then I like to investigate its origins, its mechanisms and everything that I can find out about it. This leads me to new forms and sparks off new ideas. When a new subject comes to me, it is like coming across a new vein or lode, hopefully very rich, and mining it until it is exhausted. I don’t think plastic values are literary, but of course there is a text within the work, which is a very different thing.
CI: You explained that you took the title from T.S.Eliot for this particular occasion. But I’ll take advantage of your mentioning it, to make a comparison of a certain aspect, which is the recovery of a mythical past, of the sources of a culture. Something akin to a work that is both archaeological and imaginative at the same time, rendered with the technique of collage, and composed of fragments that seem to result from a deluge or a disaster, but then are reconfigured in a way that gives them a new meaning.
BN: Yes, well, I always love to find correspondences, connections between the archaic, the antique and the modern, and see the way they can play off each other. Like suddenly seeing that a pre-Hispanic sculpture has a shape that looks just like a car battery. Humor is predicated on the same principle of surprise; the sudden awareness of seeing two unrelated things that apparently have nothing at all in common, but then unexpectedly connect, revealing associations and correspondences that link them, interweaving their own attributes.
CI: You have said that all the great myths are in fact metaphors. It seems that you are interested in an open reading of metaphors, and give them multiple interpretations.
BN: Indeed - I really believe that the function of the work of art is to help to give flight to the spectator’s imagination by provoking and inciting a dialogue with the work. The work should not try to dictate or impose itself, its task is to communicate, to involve and provoke feelings and ideas in the viewer.
CI: I get the impression that many of your images are derived from pre-hispanic codices, hieroglyphics or steles, which all have a ritual characteristics that filter into your work in a playful way, in that you have created apocryphal devices. A ploy which might be seen as a wink to the public as you sow false clues and create deceptive symbols that coexist with the rather more serious aspect of the work. Is that correct?
BN: That’s right, these clues are purposely thrown out and can lead to all kinds of different interpretations. Remember how Picasso was fond of saying ‘art is a lie that tells a truth’. And yes, many things can unexpectedly coexist and become interdependent. For instance, I believe that best eroticism involves humor, with a collusion dependent on the essential element of play.
CI: Some of the first images of yours that I remember, that were made in the sixties in a humorous and straightforward manner, depicted naked, lusty women who were almost always accompanied by quotidian objects such as a plate, brush, or hair dryer, and these objects were invested with a singular dignity and a timeless character by converting them into ritual objects. You place great importance in contemporary daily rituals, but then you say that came from your exposure to pre-hispanic cultures.
BN: That’s right, one of the things that most impressed me on first being exposed to pre–hispanic artefacts and ritual objects was the sense that that their influence had impressed itself on all the events of daily life, not only in religion, but in agriculture, cooking, medicine and so on. Their ubiquitous presence impacted on society as a whole. It was not an isolated presence such as we have in our culture, where art has been consigned to a cultural ghetto. I was fascinated by the idea that the powers invested in these objects filtered into all aspects of everyday life. When I arrived in Mexico the influence of pop art was at its height and the attention it gave to the influence of common objects and imagery curiously coincided with my thoughts about certain aspects of ancient Mexican culture.
CI: When reviewing your trajectory, it occurred to me that your time in the London School of Graphic Arts sharpened your sense of design and that this endows your figuration with a very modern touch; but at the same time your ongoing association with composition and design, not only of the figures but the ornaments, clothes, and graphic elements, which are the secondary motifs found in pre-Columbian artifacts, served you as a door open to appropriating some of their archaic features.
BN: Yes, and as crossroads. However, I have always thought that there are two situations at work in art. Two mutually interdependent circumstances. One is the object itself, and the other is the context in which it exists. One thing is that which is represented: the other, equally important, is the context, which affects the meaning of the whole.
CI: This reminds me of the Kulechov effect in cinema. At the same time as Eisenstein was making films, Lev Kulechov made several experiments. One of them consists of mounting the same image of, for example, a baby with a calm and neutral expression, and juxtaposing it with different images: one of a young devoted mother and another with a embittered looking elder one. The same unaltered image, takes on different meaning and intensity, depending on the dramatic context in which it is situated.
BN: That’s why I am so interested in experimenting with images and symbols and seeing how they function and change when seen in different media, scale, circumstances and contexts. The same object or symbol acquires another life. It is a game that fascinates me.
CI: Speaking of things that you enjoy, it seems to me that you find the elaboration of your explanatory or complementary texts to be very gratifying. No matter how unassumingly they are written, appearing to serve as museographic annotations, they show a side of you articulating theoretical concepts, not only with skill but also with great pleasure.
BN: Not at all - I am in no way a theoretician.
CI: But would you include yourself in the trend of modern artists, who like to express thoughts about their creative activity, like Stravinsky, Rilke, Cézanne or Léger.
BN: Art changes according to its times and the society in which it finds itself, but then its objective always is the same. What changes is its language. To be sure, we now live in a period in which the subject of art is art itself. Its objective is to investigate its own nature. The art of today contemplates itself. That is its objective. This gives to rise to a lot of intellectualizing and theorizing. But we are not concerned with the motivation per se, but what the motivation produces, the evidence of its effect.
CI: In the text that Eliot Weinberger writes about your sculpture there is a quote by Brancusi who states ‘Sculpture is not for young men’.
BN: Yes, but I think that what Brancusi is really referring to is the prior experience needed in making sculpture, the accumulated knowledge required to understand the nature of each medium and material. In some ways it is a process comparable to cooking. It is not possible to cook well without having a certain amount of, experience, as these necessary skills are honed by an accumulation of practice. Only by doing it can you gain proficiency. And sculpture is a bit like this, be it working in stone, wood, ceramics, bronze, all of which have their own idiosyncrasies and inherent possibilities. You have to follow the dictates of the chosen material…
CI: Regarding this, a short while ago you made a comparison between working in ceramics, drawing, bronze sculpture and painting.
BN: That’s right. Working with clay is a lot of fun. It is a really ductile and playful material that encourages spontaneous expression. When playing around with clay I feel like something between a young boy and a baker. There is something quite elementary about it. However, working in bronze is more elaborate and the process requires much more deliberation. I usually start by making forms in wax, which is a malleable material, but then you always have to be mindful of how the piece is eventually going to be cast in metal. The relative directness of working with clay can be compared to drawing. Painting is a more elaborate undertaking simply because of the involvement of color, composition and texture, and so its immediacy can be more easily compromised. You have to rely more on structure and make use of more formal resources. Each material one employs has its modus operandi, its rules and constraints that are a particular challenge. As often happens, one is conditioned by certain external circumstances. For instance, when developing ideas for the mural ‘Red Sea’ for the Maguen David Center, my first thoughts were about light. The forty-two meter long wall was bathed in brilliant light from a hidden skylight. My immediate reaction on seeing it for the first time was to make something based on a play of shadows, taking full advantage of the way the light fell on it. I also had to take into account the practicality of the materials I could use, which determine the form the work would take. These materials are specific, and of course you have to work within their limits and explore their possibilities. At least that’s the way I approach it. We know that every artist has his own working methods, which are basically alternative paths, different means of achieving the same goal, each having its own merit. That does not mean in any way that one is better than another. Just different.
CI: Given the presence in your work of a view of human collective endeavor, of the nature of different civilizations, I naturally want to ask you what you think about the future of art. BN: You never know – it reminds me of something Borges wrote: ‘Love is eternal … while it lasts’. And that’s the way it is with art. Over a century ago Oscar Wilde predicted that the only art that would survive into the future would be poetry, as being unmarketable, useless as an item for investment, unlike other arts, whose works are currently produced, designed for, conditioned and controlled by market forces. In answer to your question, I can only say that there is no way to predict what form art might take. Technology will probably be the determining factor. But I also believe that in spite of everything, our humanity will somehow find a way to continue expressing itself. Think about languages, which are like living organisms that are born, bloom, mutate and undergo all type of metamorphoses. In all probability the destiny of art will be something like that, following a similar pattern. I find it fascinating that so many languages coexist and cross-fertilize, and the diversity generated by each one having its own special value enriches them all. I think it would be terrible if we end up with only one language.

                                                                                                                                                                                               ****

Having been so absorbed in the inventiveness and quantity of Brian Nissen’s artworks, the sensation I am left with is focused on the unassuming nature of this man, who does not seem to be aware of his own talent, only proud of his ability to create and content with his capacity of playful engagement.

STRIPTEASER

 

(from an interview with Raquel Peguero)

Nissen observes that there is something not to be recommended in relation to eroticism, which is talking seriously about it, reasoning that “it is preferable to practice it, instead of talking about it.” With the typically candid laughter that follow his remarks, he assures me that “[i]t is not an easy subject to articulate; that’s why I prefer drawing it.

Although he claims to belong to “the nation of artists,” Nissen was born in England and came to Mexico when he was only twenty-four, and it is where his artistic formation began to solidify. An indefatigable traveler, he also lived in Spain, establishing ties with Catalonia, and generally thinks of himself as a “cultural crossbreed.” Part of this shows in a particularly original British humor that permeates his work, nowhere more so than in the erotic drawings published recently, together with a text by Carlos Fuentes, in his book Voluptuario, where his figures seem to pulsate on the page.

As a lover of codices—and he has made several of them—Nissen conceived of his Voluptuario in the form of a book. “It was not a collection of drawings that I already had made and just gathered together. I was interested in this as a visual narrative, a page-by-page succession of images, linking one to another, and the way they relate in sequence. Its form is somewhat cinematographic: Carlos Fuentes and I thought it would be a great idea to do a version on film, though I’m not sure how. No doubt it would be with animation.” He playfully explains that he has no idea of where these evocative shapes in his sketches come from: “They begin in an abstract way, starting, with a line, which I just take out for a stroll to amuse myself, and then wait to see what happens.”



***



Raquel Peguero: Do you think erotica is a cross-cultural phenomenon?



Brian Nissen: Eroticism is our sexuality decanted by our imagination, and the many things that provoke desire can vary greatly, not only from country to country or from one culture to another, but also between men and women. It is hard to pin down, because the things that may personally arouse you may not excite others. I expect some people may get a libidinous charge from the sight of their national flag or from an apocalyptic opera, which others would just find a great bore. Who knows! Sometimes the most ordinary things can give rise to erotic thoughts. The games that one’s imagination plays are very personal, and the great thing about art is the passion and enthusiasm that it generates. The artist tries to communicate these sensations. It’s all a game. A seduction.



RP: Seduction with toothpaste tubes? Even ironing? How is it that you can make these everyday events so sensual?



BN: That’s a big subject. We all have an enigmatic and intimate relationship with the common objects that surround us, and no doubt there is a fetishistic aspect attached to the things we touch and use, and with which we are involved on a daily basis. There is also the play of contexts to consider, as our perception of an object is always defined by the context in which it is exists. With the art of today it is now common practice to juxtapose objects and place them in an unusual or disconcerting context. The experiments that started with dada and surrealism have now become a routine method. Anyway, with these drawings I play around with the ritual and fetishistic aspects of common objects, such as toothpaste tubes, forks, keys, faucets, pencils, doorknobs, tweezers, Q-tips, bottles, and so on. Some may think this strange, but I think it’s a valid perception.



RP: Do you think there is eroticism without humor?


BN: Absolutely: There is a morbid kind of eroticism, a prurience that goes beyond sex and celebrates violence. Think of the pornography of violence, which has little to do with true eroticism. Then there is the question of what constitutes obscenity, but that is subject to its social context and the morals of a particular society. Given that, there is something common to all people: love, passion, sexuality, the language of touch, and so on. Pleasure drives the erotic realm, and so must be universal. It has to be; if not, we wouldn’t be here.


RP: How does humor save it from being pornography?


BN: Because of its playfulness, I suppose, but also our delight in fun and pleasure, which colors my particular vision of the erotic. There are some who think that Volptuario is a pornographic book—something I can only wonder at. Obscenity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As I see it, eroticism is a game played by an inventive and sensuous mind’s eye looking through rose-colored glasses.


RP: So do you fantasize a lot?



BN: Mmmnn, good question. It is hard to say, because it depends on how much reality one can absorb. I am sure that I have many fantasies that seem to me to be real but that others can see are just fantasies. All artists love to fantasize and see the world not as it is but as they would like it to be. To define one’s fantasies in a way implies defining what one understands as reality.



RP: Do you prefer fantasy to reality?



BN: That depends. Fantasy is sometimes difficult to disentangle from reality, to know where it begins and where it ends. But one certainly feels its effect and, most frequently, it is the very thing that motivates the artist and his work. Fantasy is embedded in the imagination. There are wonderful realities, such as the phenomena of love, an amazingly powerful condition that is often sustained by a fantasy.

RP: Are you a devotee of love?



BN: Naturally! Of course. I wouldn’t have been able to do this book without it. It is a tribute to love.



RP: Is that one of your obsessions?



BN: Obviously! I also have other obsessions. Curiously, one of the things that enhance the erotic effect is the sense of sin: like seasoning, or the icing on the cake. But as for the Puritan idea that pleasure in itself is sinful. Well, that is really appalling.



RP: Of all the deadly sins, would your preference be for lust?



BN: A wonderful sin! Not to enjoy sex is a sin—that’s for sure.



RP: Did you do the things that you have illustrated in your Voluptuario?



BN: Ah! . . . Well . . . sometimes people who have seen the book tell me: “What an imagination you have,” so I tell them: “Well, it could be my imagination—you never know.” But then who knows how much is real or imagined. Can I be sure that in recalling an experience how much is real, or just a trick of memory, or just wishful thinking?



RP: It is amazing how one’s body can twist itself in knots in order to obtain pleasure.



BN: There is an age in which we can manage to make love in countless convoluted, acrobatic positions; after a certain age it becomes trickier. But then, so much depends on one’s imagination, and I believe more in imagination than in gymnastics.

RP: But in drawing you can do anything.



BN: That’s the great thing about drawing: inventing a kind of circus of the imagination. It is curious to see how this book has been received in different countries. In Mexico I find people are more open to erotica and delight openly in it, so it is not as problematic as in the United States, where there is always a puritanical undercurrent preaching hypocritical “moral values” waiting to pounce and censor authentic erotic expression. Both in Mexico and Spain, Voluptuario was received with great enthusiasm: They are all great fans of sex.



RP: Are you at all perverse?



BN: Maybe—at least according to some. (Laughs.) Anyway, I don’t know how one would define it. To begin with, erotica is full of teasing and humor, and there are those who see this in me. Anyway, let’s hope so! There is irony, in that others might think of it as being perverse. I also like the sensuous engagement that is the lyrical, beautiful part of sexuality, but I have no taste for morbidity, which is its dark side. Eroticism enchants me, and it pervades my work, not only in these drawings, which are figurative, but it is also in more abstract works, and especially in sculpture, in the way one plays with forms and shapes:
teasing and flirting with them.



RP: You seem to love experimenting in art.



BN: Yes, I never stop exploring. It’s what motivates me: finding different ways and new angles, and that’s why I like working with all kinds of materials and media, such as bronze, ceramics, wood; drawing, painting, reliefs, and so on. The reason is that I find that every material has its own possibilities, expression, and its own language, and that they are mutually enriching. When I make a sculpture, it enhances my drawing, and vice versa. That’s why I am always changing from one to another.



RP: I imagine that sculpture takes much more time to make. Does that make it very different?



BN: The thing I most like about making sculpture is that one is guided not only by the eye but also by one’s hand. Drawing is more ethereal, not tactile like sculpture, which is its great attraction for me. Making sculpture has a lot to do with the sensation of touch, because one is sensing by touching. I find the physical aspect of it especially attractive. Somebody said that if he believed in reincarnation, he would like to return to this world as Casanova’s fingertips.



RP: Would you like that, to be reincarnated as somebody’s fingertips?



BN: No, I would prefer to come back as myself. My imagination would not want to be that limited.



RP: It is said that it is easier to experience desire that to speak of it.



BN: As with art, desire is hard to articulate. It is much easier to talk about films or novels, where there is a narrative or an anecdote, than to talk about art—especially abstract art or color—which, like desire, is extremely difficult to express in words, although when they affect us we know perfectly well what the feeling or sensation is about.



RP: Do you think it is easier to express desire by drawing or, as they say, it’s all in the mind?



BN: Maybe it is a thing of the mind. But because of its spontaneity, playfulness, and being less elaborate, I think drawing lends itself to erotic expression more than painting, which involves elements such as color, texture, composition, and so on. We can think of drawing as a musical trio or quartet, whereas painting is much more complex, more like a symphony orchestra.
RP: The figures in your drawings are lovingly rendered, men and women alike.



BN: I suppose it has to do with the union of men and women in an erotic situation. It is a moment of synthesis. Of communion. That is what it is about: our bodies losing themselves in one another.

RP: You don’t seem to have a great interest in clothing. Is that the reason your figures are always naked?


BN: That’s right! Off with your clothes!

 

 

CHINAMPAS

 

Sometime ago I made my first Chinampa in bronze. Bit by bit the idea evolved into series of sculptures and related works, exploring different aspects of the theme. The idea of the Chinampas - constructed islands, floating gardens - seemed in an odd way to relate to certain premises of Action Painting in which the surface of the painting is conceived as an area or arena on which the act of painting takes place The paint itself becomes the testimony of what has happened - a manifestation of the event. Evidence of a poetic act. The edges of the canvas define the area of the action, circumscribed like an island.

The Chinampas of Xochimilco are also a specific area in which an event takes place - in this case, agriculture. Things are laid out and cultivated. Sometimes a smal temple or an altar is erected. In these sculptures I have used the format of these little man-made islands; but in this case what happens on them is an evocation of forms, spaces, shapes - some organic: pods, plants seeds, roots - others more architectonic -ramps, paths, mounds, enclosures.

The wall pieces evoke an aerial view of the Chinamitl; woven mats made of reeds and rushes used to start the construction of the Chinampa.

The sculptures are, in a sense, landscapes. But they are enclosed landscapes. These sculpture/islands are set on bases of dark mirror. Floating reflections. The memory of the water surrounds a sculptural event.

Brian Nissen.

 

 

 

CODICES

 

I suppose it was the admiration I felt for the Tlacuilos (artist/scribes of pre-Columbian Mexico) that got me started on making codices of my own. My interest in these works — they usually took the form of screenfold books — was not only in the great artistic quality of many of them, but also in the curious pictorial makeup of the texts, which seemed to operate in a realm moving back and forth between drawing and writing. I was intrigued by the use they made of almost every conceivable graphic convention — especially the great Mixtec codices in which pictograms, ideograms, signs, symbols, phonetic glyphs, rebus symbols, a language of accumulated repetitions, a grammar of juxtaposed color, all come into play with each other. There is no decorative feature. Every form, line, color signifies something.


Codices dealt with subjects as ethereal as the history and motivations of the gods, auguries, incantations and such, to maps, charts, and even the banalities of land tithes, tax accounts and inventories. Theirs is a visual idiom with a highly charged pictorial vocabulary of remarkable inventiveness. The various codices I have made have become part of an on going project that has served me well as a source book for my work in painting and sculpture. With each codex I try to get involved with different pictorial themes and develop a visual vocabulary particular to each one. I made a codex in the form of a diary, in which I did a page every day at the same hour, another based on images of a Moviola; Voice Prints; the codex Itzpapalotl based on six different pre-Columbian codices, and the Madero Codex, which relates to the visual world of games and puzzles.


I like to poke about and explore. Consider this: When does a drawing become writing, writing become drawing? After all we can read a painting, see a text in a tree. Is music speech? Or the other way round?


But then art always gravitates to its own element: play. The key to imagination’s door that leads us to where lines go between, forms deform, dots do their thing, color shapes itself, and space shuttles. All this makes more than meets the eye. These codices invoke a certain feeling of kinship with the Tlacuilos. So I like to hang out with them in what has become one of my favorite pictorial playgrounds.

Brian Nissen

DOUBLE VISION

Brian Nissen


..only an auctioneer can equally and


impartially admire all schools of Art..


(Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Artist.)

 

A scene from a popular film I once saw comes to mind. The heroine is preparing herself to sleep in a jungle clearing in a remote part of northern Australia. She is a young, blonde, beautiful reporter on assignment from New York, and has come to do a story about a famous crocodile hunter. He is trying to convince her that there is no danger in sleeping out in the jungle. Out of the night an aborigine in full ceremonial dress suddenly appears and confronts her. She screams. She is terrified. The hunter tells her that the aborigine is a friend of his, and means no harm. Regaining her calm, she takes out her camera, and pointing it at the aborigine, prepares to take some photos of him. The aborigine waves an admonishing finger at her, saying - ‘You can not take my picture’. She lowers the camera, apologizing profusely. ‘Please forgive me — I should have known better. Of course you people believe that capturing your image is like capturing your soul. How insensitive of me. I’m sorry’ …and so on. ‘No no,’ says the aborigine ‘You can not take my picture — you have forgotten to take the lens cap off your camera….’


When looking at art that comes from a culture not our own, we have to look at it with an awareness of the context in which it was made. We should realize that our frames of reference will probably inhibit or distort our appreciation of what we are looking at. It is not a problem of loss of certain nuances, but rather of misreading. What we see is a translation. Our version of the Other. When dealing with archaic or aboriginal art we are immediately confronted with a contextual gap.


No one doubts that the cult of Primitivism among early twentieth century artists served as a catalyst, a stimulus to their imagination and as an instrument that helped them to demolish worn out concepts and jaded aesthetic canons. But their appreciation had precious little to do with the real meaning and potency of the works they held in such esteem. They imposed their own contexts on them — mostly exotic, colonial or romantic idealizations (the noble savage), the purity of naïve art, infantile art and art of the deranged.


Examples abound of the pitfalls of cross-culturalism. I remember the great 1984 exhibition ‘Primitivism in the 20th Century at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so flawed by the insistent pairing of ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ works side by side in a most banal and misleading way. Invidious juxtapositions. I recall some small African aboriginal sculptures in the exhibition — figures with greatly distorted features; bulbous limbs and zany anatomical structures that were heralded as examples of expressionist sculpture until later they were found to be realistic portraits of deformed and diseased people.


In New Guinea after their first contact with Europeans, ‘natives’ were seen wearing Kellog cereal boxes as ceremonial headgear, to the great amusement of the foreigners. But then we put their magic artefacts in our museums. We do the same violence to context, but of course will not recognize it as such.


I remember the tremendous impact my first encounter with pre-columbian sculpture had on me when I went to live in Mexico, and especially my first sight of the great Aztec monolith, the earth goddess Coatlique. This enormous, brooding stone is surely one of the world’s greatest and most powerful sculptures. It also has a strange history, and has been through a stunning metamorphosis of contexts. Octavio Paz has written a telling account of her various incarnations — from Goddess to Demon to Monster to Masterpiece. Torn down from the great temple of Tenochtitilán where she had reigned as a goddess she was buried by Spanish soldiers as a pagan idol, Coatlique laid undiscovered until 1790, when she was uncovered by accident, categorized as a demon, and was promptly reburied. She was again excavated briefly in 1803 so that Von Humboldt could take a look at her and then reburied. Later she was dug up once more, and kept in the university hidden behind a screen and regarded as a freak, a monster. Eventually she was put on public display, now seen as a scientific and anthropological curiosity. Today she is to be seen in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and exalted as a masterpiece, a sublime work of art. The Coatlique monolith is still the same the same object, but the metamorphosis of the meanings attributed to it is the result of it existing in different contexts. We appreciate it as a work of art, but its spiritual context is lost to us, as is all art of the past that existed as spiritual magnets. Coatlique has elaborate signs and symbols carved on her; she was a physical and a conceptual presence. There are also signs and symbols carved under her massive feet. These were only ever seen by the sculptors who made her and the attending priests who directed the work. The magical functions of these hidden carvings are no less potent and important as those on the visible parts of the sculpture. The fact that they would never be seen was irrelevant. We are not looking at an ‘art object’, but at a magical presence, a force whose power was dependent on belief, and is therefore untranslatable. Her meaning and intensity are all but lost on us and we are reduced to admiring what is, as it were, a shadow of the original.


In 1990 the flying birdmen of Papantla from the state of Vera Cruz in Mexico were brought to New York to perform as part of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition ‘30 Centuries of Mexican Art’. They perform a dance on top of a hundred foot high pole and then spin off, unwinding on ropes in ever widening circles. Their pole was erected between the twin skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. As they prepared for their dangerous dance, insurance agents arrived, and insisted they change their splendid ceremonial headdresses for crash helmets. A safety net was also required. The birdmen always hold a ritual ceremony before each dance to insure their safety, which involves sacrificing a rooster by cutting its throat. An outraged Society for the Protection of Animals arrived to stop the ceremony. The birdmen refused to perform without the security of their ritual. Negotiations between the Mexican Consulate and the organizers became heated. Finally the requirements of crash helmets and safety nets were set aside, but the Birdmen held their own safety ritual in secret, cutting a rooster’s throat in the nearest men’s toilet in the basement of the skyscraper.


Although we see the art of the past and that of other cultures through the dark mirror of interpretation in which meanings and motivations may only be dimly perceived, many formal aspects of their works affect our sensibilities and perceptions through an amalgam of affinities. Malcolm Lowry’s great book ‘Under the Volcano is regarded in Mexico as a modern Mexican classic - a difficult and rare achievement for a foreigner writing about Mexico. Other English writers — talents such as D.H.Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene had been in Mexico and written about it, but their observations and perceptions of the country tend to be superficial novelized travelogues, or as in the case of Evelyn Waugh an acerbic and jaundiced view of it. Lowry didn’t necessarily understand Mexico any more than they did, yet his novel touches a very particular Mexican nerve. The point is that Lowry had a strong temperamental affinity with the country and its ways. That was his point of contact.


The meaning of a thing is tied to its context — change one and you change the other. If we want to tune in to other minds doing other things, we should tune into both the doing and the context in which it is being done.


Published in (Parenthesis) Vol. 1 #5 - April 2000. Mexico

ATLANTIS


This exhibition came about as the result of an invitation by the Ministry of Culture of Catalonia to participate in the 1992 quincenteniel celebrations in Barcelona. Nissen chose the theme of Atlantis, as a fable linking both America and Europe. The first interpretation of America sent back to Europe was that it was Paradise; Eden - while others subsequently reported it to be Plato’s lost Atlantis. The exhibition starts with a section of invented maritime maps of Atlantis, and in the area in which they are displayed one hears the faint sounds of whale song. Other works include relief paintings — evocations of sea beds; sub aquatic archeology, floating volcanoes and drifting pyramids. Wood and bronze sculptures of erupting pyramid/volcanoes propose an invented archeology — signs and detritus of the lost continent. At a certain point in the exhibition one enters a darkened area - a conjectured ‘Aquarium of Atlantis’ in which there are illuminated tanks containing transparent acrylic sculptures. As an extrapolation of Plato’ Atlantis, this exhibition is conceived a single work.



 

FINDING ATLANTIS


Brian Nissen


Early in 1990 I was given the opportunity to do an exhibition in Spain in the context of the 1992 celebrations of the ‘discovery’ of America (promptly renamed the ‘encounter’). This led me to develop a theme that I had been toying with for sometime but had not been able to get a grasp on - AMERICA/ATLANTIS. Since the second interpretation of America to reach the Spanish court was that they had indeed found lost Atlantis, it seemed the perfect opportunity to undertake a visual exploration of aspects of the great legend, and look at it again in the context of these celebrations linking the old and new continents.


Atlantis is one of the most durable and popular of the great myths that have come down to us from antiquity. It is also one of the great deluge myths, common to so many of the world’s religions. From the Popol-Vuh to the Bible they appear and reappear - a metaphor of fall and redemption. Atlantis is a classic deluge myth, but with an important difference. There is no Noah. No survivor. No witness. No first hand account. In fact Atlantis was invented by Plato, and first made mention of in two of his Dialogues, Timaios and Critias.


Plato claims he heard of Atlantis from his great grandfather, who in turn heard of it from a relative of his ,Solon, who claimed he heard of it from priests on his travels in Egypt. But why did this particular story become one of the great myths of all time? Why did the Greeks cultivate this story? What was its attraction for them and why was Plato so much interested in it? It may well be that the story of Atlantis was used by Plato to demonstrate that such a society as he had proposed in his ‘Republic’ was not only plausible, but possibly existed long ago in Atlantis. This, of course, would give it a credible origin.


For his contemporaries it had a different attraction. It was fashionable at the time for wealthy Greek citizens to travel to Egypt, where they would marvel at the splendor and antiquity of their monuments. The Egyptians, inhabiting a much poorer country than Greece, insisted on reminding them that Egypt had a history that went back all the way to its creation; while no record of ancient Greek cultures existed. And not only that, but Greek art and culture derived directly form the glories of Egypt. This probably did not go down too well with the Greeks. Imagine, then, the appeal of Plato’s Alantis, which demonstrated a great, self-engendered Greek culture that prospered some thousand years before Egypt, and clearly showed that Greek culture owed nothing to Egypt. We now know that this kind of thing is typical of cultural politics - a nation’s re-arrangement and invention of its origins, ancestry, and the hierarchies that go with it. This process has been, and still is, common practice.


Take for example a recent event in Mexico. The tiny island of Mexcaltitán in a lagoon on the shores of Nayarit , in northwestern Mexico, was the object of a presidential visit; a state occasion. The only remarkable thing about this island is its curious configuration - concentric streets bisected by four perpendicular avenues . Local aficionados had compared this layout to early maps of the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, and had found strange similarities and correspondences between the two. This led them to the idea that this little island must have been Aztlán, the mythic home of the Aztecs. Their proposition gained such standing that in 1989 the president of México visited the little island and designated it a national monument, and by official decree it was declared to be Aztlán, origin of Mexico and ‘Mexicaness’. This act in effect invents a pre-hispanic nation ‘Mexico’ which never existed. A minor operation of ‘Manifest Destiny’, legitimizing the ancestry of modern Mexico even though the area it now covers was made up of many different nations, cultures and languages. Again we see the same Atlantis syndrome at work. Countries, nations and empires invent and re-invent their origins, nation memory and identity to suit their own ends.


Of course Mexcaltitán had not escaped notice as a candidate for the site of Atlantis. Every few years a new location of Atlantis is proposed and hits the headlines. Santini, the Azores, Bermuda, the straits of Gibraltar, and so on. America was a great candidate, and from 1492 on has been the subject of intense speculation. We know that the first chronicles sent back to Europe by Spanish priests depicting and interpreting their encounter with the New World concluded that they had found Paradise. Eden. Columbus believed the Orinoco to be the fourth river of Eden. Unknown, exotic fauna and flora that bloomed all year round in an eternal spring had to be the Garden of Eden. Among other proofs given was the curios observation that strange birds had been found (parrots) that imitated human speech. It was well known that in Eden, before the ‘original sin’ — the fall of man — animals had the faculty of speech. The next interpretation of the ‘New World’ to arrive in Europe was that it was Plato’s lost Atlantis. Friar Bartolome de las Casas wrote a whole chapter corroborating this, and other reports confirmed it. Columbus had landed at a town on the Panamanian coast called Atlán. Atlán means ‘on the water’. Strange how much closer it comes in sound and meaning to ‘Atlantis’ and ‘Atlantic’ that the Greek given origin ‘Atlas’ The third and final interpretation of America came via Amerigo Vespucci who claimed that it was indeed a continent whose existence had been unknown to Europeans.


Atlantis is then, like all great myths, a metaphor. Each of us will find in it a meaning that arouses and feeds our imagination. Buried somewhere in Atlantis is our own personal Garden of Earthly Delights, our Lotus Land, Arcadia, Shangri-La, Jauja, El Dorado, Limbo Xanadu. It is our day dream, chimera, fuego fatuo. Our siren’s song. A mental image that reveals the all-enveloping sense of wonder we lost when we grew up.


Brian Nissen

 

THE RED SEA

SCULPTURE/MURAL

 

When I first visited the Centro Maguen David at the invitation of Dr Isaac Masri, instigator of this mural project, it was nearing completion. It is a great new religious and community center whose splendid architecture by Elias Fasja and Salomón Gorshstein I found extremely moving both in its concept and its simplicity. On seeing the wall that had been proposed for a mural as the centerpiece for the second lobby, I was struck by the effect of the hidden skylight that ran the whole length of the wall, bathing it in light. This was the main feature that guided my thoughts as I elaborated different ideas as to how to approach the challenge of articulating an area 120 feet long by 15m feet high. Having determined that the mural must be predicated on a play of light and shadow, and by consequence be all in white, I started making a series a working models. These began as a sweeping rhythm of shapes running from left to right. As the flow of these forms developed it dawned on me that this grand torrent suggested the biblical description of the parting of the Red Sea and the journey of the persecuted to salvation. The rhythm of forms would have to open out in a huge surge from a central ‘U’ shaped symbol representing a passageway. The elaboration of the finished mural now presented a formidable task. Transposing the model into its final form required the fabrication of some 250 individually crafted pieces. Mounting them in place was to be like fitting together a giant jigsaw puzzle. As the work spread from the center, any misalignment of a piece would create a distortion which would have an incremental effect as the work progressed. In the end the mural comes to life as a play of light and shadow, and for me the most gratifying surprise has been seeing how it changes its form and its mood as the day progresses and as the light shifts upon it, animating the shapes and transforming their flow. A progression like waves that remind us that we artists are sounding boards bobbing on the ocean swell of the eternal artistic endeavor.

Brian Nissen.

 

 

MASTERING METHODS


BRIAN NISSEN


 

 

'Though this be madness, yet there is method in't'


(Hamlet Act.2 Sc.1)



'The Method' was a term given by Lee Strasberg to a style of acting based on the teachings of Stanislavski, which he developed and promoted for many years at the actors studio in New York. It was the focus for a generation of young actors engaged in a new, experimental way of approaching their craft - probably influenced by the vogue for Freud which was at its apogee at the time, and with a little bit of Zen thrown in for flavor. The idea was to situate the actor in the role guided by his emotional interpretation in response to the character and situation, rather than absolute fidelity to the text. Brando and many of his fellow actors were a product of it - and even Marilyn Monroe had a go at it.

You need a method.


Artists, poets, actors, and composers of all schools and periods have their own personal methods of going about their work, their own modus operandi, some quite predictable, others idiosyncratic. A curious example of this was proposed in the 'Seven Percent Solution', a book whose premise was based on the encounter of Freud and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes went to visit Freud hoping he would help cure him of his heroin addiction. An immediate friendship followed, and Freud told Holmes about the baffling case of a patient he was treating without any success, as she was not only mute, but seemed to be in waking coma, making it impossible to establish any kind of communication with her. Holmes asked if he could see the patient. Naturally Holmes was able to find out the identity of the patient and what had caused her condition by observing all kinds of tiny, tell-tale details of the girl's demeanor, clothing, physical aspect and so on. Freud was dazzled by Holmes' method of deduction and his amazing powers of observation. Holmes then instructed Freud on his particular methods of investigation, which Freud subsequently adopted as his own method of diagnosis - thereby giving birth to modern psychoanalysis.


A method is a means to an end, and there are endless paths that lead to it. Exhibitionists such as flashers, streakers, and strippers have quite distinct methods of revealing themselves to the world. The same could be said of the artist though his motivation and goal is something else.


The hardest thing is to talk about one’s own method - especially when one is unaware of it. I tend to begin a work with absolutely no idea in my head of what I am about to do. My mind blank. That's already difficult. Faced with the frightening aspect of a blank canvas or an immaculate sheet of paper which does its best to intimidate one, there is no other recourse but to mess it up somehow before getting to work on it. So I get started by maybe putting a couple of marks or stains on the paper or canvass, and try to see what goes on between them. Add another and their relationships all change. Things start happening between them. One thing leads to another. Ideas come into play and things start to move and communicate with each other. With sculpture it’s the same thing. I start fooling around with different shapes and forms until something starts to happen between them, and the piece shows me the way it wants to go. This is obviously a pretty risky method, and means that a lot of works get lost along the way, some aborted half way through, some become really stubborn and won't cooperate while others just get confused. Some even go on strike and have to be negotiated with. Others are left alone until they feel like getting going again. That's the way I do it, or at least how the work does it to me.


You've got to have a method.


I have colleagues who use totally different methods of creating a work of art. Some may have the work conceived and completely worked out before starting on it, and then it is really just a question of making it manifest. Think of a sculptor working on a block of marble. The sculpture is already inside the block; it is just a question of chipping away at the marble in order to reveal it. There are other artists who start and complete a work in one session. Some, (like myself) work on many pieces at the same time, all in different stages of completion, the way a chess master might play against several opponents simultaneously. Then here are those who use a process akin to that of an archaeologist, who knows where to search, but doesn't quite know what he might find. His method is to carefully poke around until his intuition tells him where the hidden objects are located. Then he uncovers them and they are finally made visible.


The use of chance as method has been an instrument frequently adopted over the past hundred years and was raised to cult status by the surrealists. The acceptance of the value of ambiguity and the use of chance and accident as a method has allowed intuition to play a greater role in creating works of art, and been adopted by artists in all fields. Reams of critical theory were written about the use of two actresses in the same role in Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, and how he had carefully worked out the brilliant idea of showing the duality of the girl's temperament and nature by this device. But it was the brilliant the use of chance that led to it. As told to me by Juan Luis Buñuel who was on the set, the actress Maria Schneider had been cast in the role, and two weeks into the shooting was found to be impossible to work with. Another actress had to be found in a hurry. After interviewing several prospective candidates, they were left with two possibilities and unable to decide between them. The pressure of time was intense, as they had already lost too much time. As the bickering went on and on Buñuel suddenly said - 'that's enough - use both of them and let's get on with it'. An inspired use of chance captured by a master.


 

An important part of an artist's method involves defining when a work of art is finished. The abstract expressionists would say it is the particular state the work is in when you stop working on it. Renoir said he knew when a painting was finished when he felt he could pinch the bottom of the image of the model. With others it might be just filling in the blank spaces. Some seek to provoke certain reactions in the spectator, whose active involvement completes the work. And so on.


There are so many different ways an artist will initiate a nascent work of Art, but the basic motivation is the same. The need to communicate. And for that you need a method. It is not enough just to go into a trance.


The popular idea of the artist sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike is such a cliché it is hard to convince people that it doesn't happen that way. The artist is not like Mr. Micawber (David Copperfield), who was always waiting for 'something to turn up'. Or an athlete sitting around and one day saying 'today I feel like running a four minute mile', because if he is not in training and on top form he will never do it however much he feels inspired. Certainly artists have their special moments when things work out just right, and good works can come from them. But they have to be poised and ready, as they never know when the moment may turn up.


Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote books by monthly installments for magazines - with the requisites (with some, the panic) of a deadline to stimulate both them and the storyline. The marquis de Sade needed the peace and quiet of prison to get his literary works in shape, as the riotous and over stimulated life he led before must have left him little time to concentrate. Consider different methods used by some film directors. Woody Allen never tells his actors what the film they are working on is about - they only know their particular lines. He claims it makes their acting much more fresh and spontaneous. Fellini would improvise a great deal while Hitchcock reportedly wouldn't even bother looking through the camera lens as he had every detail and movement carefully worked out beforehand.


All methods are valid and should be the best instrument available to get you to where you are going. A method is a strategy for achieving a particular goal, and though the goal may vary from the sublime to the absurd the method can still be of merit. I have a particular fondness for inventors - especially those who invent ingenious objects of doubtful utility. My favorite among all those I have seen is a bicycle that can climb trees. This elaborate invention is cleverly made with giant prongs and pincers jutting out of the front wheel. In theory it works, (- remember the French philosopher who admonished his English colleague saying 'Well yes, it works in practice, but will it work in theory?) but that the effort required is beyond human strength did not deter the inventor pursuing his goal. The inventor rides up to the tree, and pulling the bicycle up into a vertical position, the pincers grab hold of the trunk and with a monstrous effort he manages to haul the bicycle up a few inches. The invention still needs perfecting. We also have rotating motorized, forks that wind up spaghetti for you, thus avoiding having to do it by hand, and alarm clocks that rip off the bed sheets, and so on. These inventions might make you think why bother? But even though it was not their intention, there is poetry in them.


There are methods used in art that parallel these inventions, as when it is the creative journey itself becomes the goal rather than the destination. Very much the idea adopted by the abstract expressionists.


Methods are also composed of greater or lesser proportions of tics and superstitions, irrational but necessary elements. The great French painter Douanier Rousseau reportedly would don his official customs uniform when painting, possibly out of respect for the metier, but I bet he wouldn't get the same results dressed in his old everyday suit.


My most recent encounter with the absolute need of a method, happened to me about four years ago when I had just signed up with a Health Insurance company in New York. One has to choose a primary care doctor, and the company sent me a directory with a list of affiliated doctors, and asked me to choose one. It was the size of a phone directory, with thousands of names. Chose a doctor. But how? I had to have a method. But which? I could let the book fall to the ground, and find a name on the page that had accidentally opened by throwing a dart at it from a distance. Or I could be blindfolded, open a page at random and stick my finger on a name. The method I finally used worked out very well. I thought I should try and find the name nearest to Frankenstein. It was Finklestein, and he is now my physician, an excellent and conscientious doctor.


You better have a Method.

OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY


 

The past is never dead: its not even past’


-William Faulkner-


This project began with conversations I had with Octavio Paz in which I had mentioned my interest in pre-Columbian codices, and especially their symbiotic relation to drawing and writing, and that I had already made some conjectured versions based on their screen-fold format. I asked Octavio if he would be willing to collaborate on a codex, and he suggested that a poem of his — the Obsidian Butterfly — would be a perfect vehicle. In the poem the goddess declares ‘Images spring from my body’ and what better than to make these images visible. Make them manifest. This wonderful prose poem is a lament by the goddess Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly. Her song tells of her demise, her cult eclipsed by the arrival of a new religion. She is both a warrior goddess and goddess of childbirth, and is represented as a butterfly with jaguar claws - a curious incarnation of vivacity and violence. Traces of her presence still exist. I found out that some women in northern Mexico are accustomed to put a piece of obsidian under their tongue when giving birth to protect their babies from deformities, though they have no idea where this superstition originates. The myths associated with obsidian — black volcanic glass — come from two sources. Polished obsidian served as mirrors and was believed to be the soul crystallized into rock, and artfully split obsidian was used for arrowheads and sacrificial knives.


This butterfly-goddess, has its origins in a nocturnal species, - Rothschildia Orizaba of the family Saturniidae. Metamorphosed into the goddess Itzpapálotl ( itztili-obsidian, y papálotl - butterfly) it is also known as the ‘butterfly of four mirrors’ in reference to the transparent areas of the wings, which are triangular and evoke the shape of arrowheads. The codex took form as a visual complement to the poem, juxtaposing ancient and contemporary signs and symbols, and Octavio made a special recording of the poem that was published together with the codex. Using the formats of different codices I developed a number of icons and images, which I felt needed to be explored in different media. So I began to develop them, first in sculpture, and then in painting and collage and reliefs.


The question of what art was, what it is, and what it will become is one of the great themes that motivates the art of today. Is there such a thing as progress in art? Certainly visual idioms come and go, and art concerns itself with expressing and relating present to past. Even the concept of Art is quite recent in our history of image making. We may talk of progress in the history of ideas but neither art, emotions, nor our sense of wonder are subject to progress, even though they may be motivated by quite different events. Art mutates, interpreting, sublimating and expressing the world around it. Our vision of the past shines through the tinted lens of translation, sometimes in sharp focus, but more often blurred. Its original context escapes us and although we are enveloped by it’s light, we are barely able to distinguish the things it illuminates.


‘The past is a foreign country’ wrote L.P.Hartley, certainly a very modern sentiment. The ancients made no such distinction between past and present. The past was something actual. Working around the theme of the Obsidian Butterfly was an evocation of past and present, and the way one filters into the other in unexpected ways. I found parts of car batteries corresponding to images of the rain god Tlaloc, and insect limbs manifesting themselves in computer circuit boards. Dozing early one morning I was thinking about the images of Itzpapalotl that are carved on the columns of the Butterfly temple in the ruins of Teotihuacan. Each butterfly has two obsidian circles embedded in its wings. I had just started to work on large, butterfly shaped collages, and it occurred to me that these circles of black obsidian glass could reappear as the black vinyl circles of long playing records. That morning I rushed out to our nearest secondhand record store, and asked the man there for some 80 or 100 records. He kept insisting on finding out what kind of music I wanted, and then became quite uptight when I said I didn’t care as long as the labels were brightly colored. Then he got pretty annoyed, saying that one doesn’t buy records that way, you have to know what kind of music you like and so on. I was obliged to explain what I needed them for in order to calm him down. Anyway, eventually the records were incorporated into many of the works and I loved the idea that they had irretrievable sounds and messages embedded in them. Secret sounds. Mute oracles.


The works woven around this theme were shown at the Tamayo museum in Mexico City. I wanted Octavio’s recitation of the poem he had recorded to be a presence in the exhibition, and so I decided to choreograph a dance sequence to accompany it together with music specially composed by Carles Santos. This was performed at regular intervals for the duration of the exhibition. The dance, to Paz’s recitation and Santos’s minimalist composition of layered voices, was an arrangement of poses dissolving into other poses by four dancers forming symmetrical insect shapes, while on a platform above them a contortionist wound and unwound his body in slow motion.


The exhibition was in a way a visual interpretation and a physical manifestation of Paz’s poem. A commingling of text and context, out of time and re-invented into the present. When Paz first visited the exhibition, he was delighted and told me that he was struck by it not being a just a collection of works around the poem, but as the poem, an organic whole, a single work.


Brian Nissen

AMERICAS CENTER ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY


THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK


Symposium and Exhibition celebrating


LIMULUS The Horseshoe Crab


December 4th-20th 2001


 

Brian Nissen


 

My participation in this event had a curious beginning. I was at the celebration of a friend’s 60th birthday about a year ago, seated at a table with nobody I knew. Between drinks and dining I mentioned in passing that I was a sculptor and painter and had been working for some time on the theme of horseshoe crabs. By chance it turned out that I was sitting next to an ecologist, a biologist and a scientist, all well informed about the animal, and so for the rest of the evening an excited encounter of champions of Limulus took over, dominating the conversation.


Until then I had seemed to be a lone enthusiast of Limulus, surprising my friends by my obsession with this strange creature. But then I had spent a long time working around its forms and had found it an inspired subject to explore in my work. Most of the people I knew had never heard of the creature - except some of those familiar with the beaches of New England - and I had felt like a lone herald carrying the banner for Limulus, expounding on its amazing attributes. So this encounter with horseshoe crab fans was a delight for me.


My new friends then organized a trip for us to meet some other biologists and to witness with them the spectacle of Limulus’ annual mating ritual out at the Gateway National Park on Long Island. Once a year hordes of horseshoe crabs invade the beaches of the East Coast, where they appear on the night of the last full moon of May at the height of the spring tide and consummate their honeymoon on the shoreline.


My first encounter with horseshoe crabs was in Menemsha pond, on Martha’s Vineyard. I was fascinated by the appearance of the animal. Fearsome, fantastic, and formidable - a marvel of the mechanics of nature. Something straight out medieval bestiaries, a rival to the Basilisk, the Phoenix, Chimera, Manticore, and Salamander. Artists and poets have conjured up fabulous animals, from the ancients to Lewis Carroll, Joan Miró, and Jorge Luis Borges. But this time, the fabulous creature was for real.


They looked to me like some kind of primitive tank, or a Japanese warriors’ helmet; something out of science fiction: Primeval and futuristic at the same time. I began to be haunted by its shape and structure. The simple helmet shape of the exterior enveloping the complex mechanics of its underside began to show up in my work, first as sculptures, and then as collages and reliefs.


It is true that the horseshoe crab though completely harmless, has a frightening aspect. People are scared to even touch it and fear the awesome spike that is its tail, which serves as a lever used to right itself when flipped over by the tide, and is quite harmless. But I found a strange splendor in this animal; its fantastic shape seemed so ancient and yet strangely modern. From the front we are looking at a kind of stealth bomber: Inside at something that looks like an ancestral scorpion. A true survivor. An amazing design of nature. I collected their cast off carapaces and they became a presence in my studio, sometimes intimidating, sometimes leading me on. Always watching. There is something of Beauty and the Beast, or rather the Beauty of the Beast, in the way we react to Limulus.


What led me into the sculptures was the tremendous visual presence of this animal, with its contrasting shapes encompassing the same space. A conflation of Inside and Outside. The challenge was to make these connected spaces play off each other.


I have a liking for such spaces. They originate with Picasso’s seminal sculpture, his cut-out tin guitar of 1912, which for me, was, as it were, the relativity theory of sculpture, with outside and inside confounding and usurping each other’s natural place. A cylinder protruding from the surface of the guitar represents what should be the hole into the interior, a concept of sculptural space never seen before.


One of the wondrous aspects of the horseshoe crab is that it comes to us intact from the depths of time. Our living fossil has been around for hundreds of millions of years. It was a denizen of Pangaea, and witness to the original supercontinent as it drifted apart. It is so old that it is challenges our perception of time. Although it has survived over 200 million years without changing form, variants can be traced back some 350 million years - give or take a few million. We can’t always be that precise.


- Although - (we are told) a guard in the British Museum’s Egyptian halls who was assisting a visitor who inquired about the age of a mummified body she was staring at -

‘It is 5 thousand and 3 years, 8 months and 4 days old ’ he ventured. ‘Exactly?’ ‘Yes exactly.’ ‘My goodness, how can you know with such precision?’ ‘Well, madam, I have been working here for 3 years, 8 months and 4 days, and when I started it was 5 thousand years old.’


Well, anyway, hundreds of million years is a long time for Limulus to go without changing form, and so I thought it was about time somebody did something about it.


And so, when working on the bronzes for this series, I was acutely aware of the parallels of time and longevity. I made the originals in wax, mindful that I was interpreting this ancient animal using an ancient technology. Bronze casting is probably the oldest of man’s technological achievements, which is still in use today virtually unchanged. The lost wax process used today for casting the titanium fan blades inside jet engines is exactly the same process used for casting bronze 4000 years ago in China and the Middle East - maybe with more precision and temperature controls, but still the same.


Artists and writers from Leonardo, Kircher and Dürer, to Buffon and Audubon, have all enriched the natural sciences. One of the books that has been a kind of touchstone for me is D’Arcy Thompson’s "On Growth and Form’. Two things make the Scottish biologist and classical scholar D’Arcy Thompson worth remembering. One is the sheer brilliance of On Growth and Form, which certainly deserves an honored place in the history of biology. The other is, as Peter Medawar calls it, "beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue".


D’Arcy was equally at home in many disciplines, including classics and the humanities, mathematics, and zoology. He demonstrated how the mechanics of living structures relate to principles of structural engineering. He believed that there was purpose in their design, which obeyed forces of torsion, tension and compression, influencing their growth, function and form, and that all of these were qualified by Magnitude.


Various components of art - color, line, structure, texture, composition, volume and spatial relationships are idioms in their own right, with their own possibilities. D’Arcy Thompson made us aware of another: Magnitude. Magnitude (scale) is a factor as important as the others. Rothko’s paintings need to be a certain size in order for his colors to saturate our eyes in a particular way. The rhythms of Van Gogh’s impasto brushstrokes would not work on a larger scale: they have to do with the movement of the hand, while Richard Serra’s monumental steel ellipses depend for their effect on their particular relation to the human body. Murals and miniatures are extremes of scale working within a given range. Chamber music and orchestral music are conditioned and defined by scale, as are poems, essays and novels. Miniaturization or amplification converts the object not just into a larger or smaller version of itself, but into another entity. A newt becomes Godzilla. (a newtant?). The epic film of Moby Dick seen on a T.V. screen turns into a quest for a white sardine.


So D’Arcy’s masterwork, On Growth and Form, is a profound meditation on the shapes of living things. He makes us aware that we should not only take into account finished forms, but the forces that molded them as well. Process and sequence. Given the combination of his intellectual power and great literary gift it comes as no surprise that his writings have had an enormous influence outside biology, especially on design, architecture and the arts.


The great French architect Le Corbusier, came up with an inspired use of the horseshoe crab’s form in his design for his celebrated chapel at Ronchamp. According to Ann Koll :


"The building's volumes defined in the early sketches show a bulging mass for the roof of the chapel. When describing the birth of the project Le Corbusier speaks of the horseshoe crab shell as his inspiration for the roof. He found the horse shoe crab shell, an objet à réaction poétique, on a Long Island beach during a trip to New York in 1947 and was amazed how strong it was when he put all of his weight on it. The horseshoe crab shell not only suggests the form but also the structure of the roof.


Art today is greatly concerned with perception, expressed with works and strategies that challenge our way of looking at things. Can we then conceive of a horseshoe crab’s view of its world - something we can only imagine with the kaleidoscope of our mind’s eye. The horseshoe crab not only has a pair of compound, faceted eyes, but ultra-violet sensitive eyes, plus a few others. They can see things we can’t see, rather like the way dogs and whales can hear sounds beyond our hearing. We pride ourselves on our ability to see things from different points of view, but we must be humbled before Limulus’ capabilities of multiple vision.


Among other curious attributes of Limulus, are the molecules containing copper that carry oxygen in its bloodstream, instead of iron that we have in our bodies. So the horseshoe crabs really have blue blood, true blue blood - unlike some people we could mention.


Today horseshoe crabs play an important role in medicine, and have given us two important bequests. An extract of its blood cells is used to detect the smallest presence of endotoxins, (powerful chemical poisons released by certain bacteria) which is now used in hospitals worldwide. Scientists have also learned a great deal about how the human eye functions from research on horseshoe crab eyes, especially related to their capability of lateral vision. Thanks, Limulus.


On one of his expeditions to the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh came across strange creatures on the coast of North Carolina, and named them ‘horseshoe crabs’. The local Indians called them ‘see-ekanauk’, and used their tails for harpoon points. The obvious association for the name comes from the frontal shape underneath its carapace. We now know that it is not a crab at all, but rather an arthropod, an insect. But they are still called crabs: like the American Indians - named Indians because Columbus believed he had landed in India, they both got stuck with a wrong name.


Linnaeus gave the Latin name Limulus Polyphemus to our horseshoe crab. It is still a mystery to me where he got the Polyphemus from. With the abundance of eyes that Limulus has, it seems odd that it should be named after the one eyed Cyclops. But my best bet is that it was the fearsome aspect of Limulus that led to this designation.


Artists and scientists have been captivated by Limulus. It has been a delight for me that the horseshoe crab has led me to my biologist friends here with us today. We share a common enthusiasm that has enriched us all. The relationship between art and science is necessarily difficult to define. Intuition and imagination play a role in both, and so there are parallels and correspondences. They are both inventive, but Science is objective, whereas Art is subjective. And while a lot can be learned from one other, Science is analytical, rational and practical, while Art is expressive, ambiguous and impractical. Not only do their goals and methods differ, but both Science and the Arts themselves are split into conflicting factions, each claiming to communicate its own truth about the world.


But then, as the Philosopher of Science, Marjorie Green, complained: ‘Why is everything still Cartesian, relying on Descartes separation of the mechanical brain and the incorporeal mind. The only true statement he ever made was that he was born in 1596 - and even that might have been wrong.’


Science undertakes an empirical journey to find the truth of its investigations. Is art a search by the imagination for a truth of the mind and the senses?


As a youngster in London I used to listen regularly to The Brains Trust, a favorite BBC radio program. On one occasion Bertrand Russell was giving spontaneous answers to listeners' questions.


When he was asked, "What is truth?"


He answered: "The truth is what the police require you to tell."

Frankenstein’s Fallout



You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.
Caliban
Shakespeare, The Tempest




Undoubtedly, Dr. Frankenstein’s brainchild was a creation that ambition and intuition compelled him to construct: a living being capable of thinking, feeling, and expressing emotion. His achievement inevitably prompts a question: was Frankenstein’s monster a work of art or a work of science? It could be argued that his creature was an avant-garde work of art whose unfamiliar form was a flagrant affront to the accepted canon. Or was it in effect a work of scientific investigation, a precursor of genetic engineering—an innovation come before its time. Something so bizarre that it roused the enmity of those who perceived it as an alarming threat, an abomination of nature that provoked a violent reaction in those who saw or heard about it. Proud though he was of the success of his creature, Dr. Frankenstein was aware of the terrible moral dilemma it entailed. He suffered remorse, convinced that his tampering with nature had been unethical and had disastrous consequences. In Mary Shelley’s introduction to her novel, she explains her thoughts:



My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bound of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many years later, this was echoed by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, who was instrumental in making the atomic bomb. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world,” he said. “We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing.” As the first atomic bomb exploded he recalled the ancient words of the Bhagavad Gita:

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.



As a work of science, Frankenstein’s intuition was prescient. Our ability to clone living things, create new forms of life through genetic manipulation, and deploy weapons of mass destruction prompts momentous moral and ethical questions. The story of Dr. Frankenstein’s attempt to create life is a powerful metaphor for our cultural aspirations and achievements. Man, as creator, inventor, and cultural phenomenon, has many attributes, among which the most notable are his achievements in art and science. Both are creative enterprises with moral and aesthetic connotations that cross paths and have many parallels, products of the profound sense of wonder and curiosity we are born with. Imagination, vision, and inspiration are requisites of both, but where they basically differ is in the goals they pursue. While art is subjective and paradoxical, based on or influenced by personal feelings, taste, and opinions, science is an objective endeavor whose judgments are not influenced by such concerns. Art cannot be quantified or proven, conditions that are essential to the practice of science. Empirical experimentation, the bedrock of all scientific investigation, results in new, practical discoveries. These discoveries are incremental, built on precedent, observation, and demonstrable evidence that can be used to examine and explain nature and the world we live in.

Science and technology are verifiable and advance in linear form. They have a utilitarian usefulness applicable to practical matters, with theory and logic driving their solutions. Art, on the other hand, accepts and exploits ambiguity, randomness, and chance as part of its process—an anathema to science in the past—and renews its vigor by mutation. And, unlike science, it eludes precise definition. The practice of philosophy falls somewhere between art and science in that it strives to explain by rational analysis why we have faculties such as free will, reason, and language. However, philosophy is conjecture, and, like art, its vacillations are not provable and never deliver demonstrable conclusions: its advancements are more like adaptations to contemporary thought and behavior. Thinking about thinking, its postulations and theories are often reasoned refutations of speculations offered by other philosophies.

Art behaves like the weather: like the seasons, its vicissitudes follow certain general patterns but it is unpredictable, unstable, and erratic. It is said that only the passage of time will distill and validate the quality and merit of a particular work of art. This is not strictly true, however, as the appreciation of art varies, subject to each society’s cultural temperament and sensibility. Though art may be thought of as ageless, having the capability of communicating with us over millennia, undoubtedly countless great works remain undiscovered, forgotten (Vermeer, Caravaggio) or unrecognized. In our time, aboriginal artifacts, long ignored or only of interest to anthropologists, suddenly acquired expressive force, their inherent potential released to become a vital influence on twentieth-century art.

Unlike science, art should not be thought of in terms of progress, but rather of metamorphosis and mutation. We may think that the art we practice and enjoy today is a kind of upgrade on the art of the past, but in reality it is always the same phenomenon made manifest in different idioms and contexts. This is not to say that art is ahistorical, as works of art have a cumulative influence on the art that succeeds them. Art movements advance in cyclical patterns, being either renewed or absorbed into other cultures by cross-fertilization, and artists build on the example and experience of their predecessors by generating new practices and procedures that, over time, become consolidated and eventually embedded as tradition. Ultimately, the tradition’s pulse weakens and dissipates into cliché, once again precipitating renewal and regeneration. In science, new discoveries make earlier ones redundant; this is not the case with art. What is lost over time is the context in which it was made, and this inevitably affects our perception of the object—rather like reading literature in translation in which nuances of the original are either blunted or missing altogether.

Art’s expressions may take different forms through the ages and vary between cultures, so much so that they may appear unrelated. But art has a common thread wherever and whenever it appears, and, though conveyed in dissimilar format and style, it is our way of processing experience—it is a palpable manifestation of our humanity. It gives shape and sense to our being and the world around us in accord with society’s aesthetics and sensibilities.

The path from unfamiliar to familiar begins with a shock of recognition. A seminal painting of twentieth-century art, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, was seen as a failure, outrageous and grotesque. This heretical, subversive painting was a negation, an affront to all established concepts of beauty and pictorial content that shocked both his critics and his closest colleagues. Even Matisse, a fellow iconoclast, expressed his indignation and considered it a hoax. For the next thirty-nine years the painting remained largely unknown and unseen. Even so, it served as the catalyst for cubism and a consequent rethinking of modern art. Picasso later characterized it as his first exorcism painting. It is now regarded as a masterpiece.

***



Leonardo da Vinci was an exceptional fusion of artist and scientist, a paragon in both disciplines. A painter of prodigious talent, and also an engineer, an anatomist, and an inventor, he was the embodiment of humanity’s capacity for intellectual and artistic achievement. Archimedes’ cry of “Eureka!” heralding his sudden flash of understanding epitomizes the thrill of the intuitive discovery of a scientific truth. A bump on the head by a falling apple led Isaac Newton to hit on the concept of gravity, while Albert Einstein claimed that the theory of relativity came to him in a dream: he declared that he was “enough of an artist to draw freely upon his imagination,” evidence of inspiration and the critical role of intuition in the realm of mathematics and physics as in art.

The composition and behavior of light, and the colors it produces as it passes through a prism, are scientific phenomena perfectly well understood in physics. But that the instinctive interaction of colors deployed in a painting can produce sensual and emotive effects is inexplicable, and color’s ability to activate innate aesthetic feelings deep within us is a mystery. Like chords composed of musical notes or words that make up a poem, colors play off each other and resonate with our senses. There is a particular beauty or harmony in numbers, formulas, and equations that triggers a gut feeling in mathematicians and leads them to solutions that would otherwise remain obscure. The music of the spheres, an ancient philosophical idea, perceived harmony and proportion in the motion of stars and planets, discerning in them patterns of shapes and resonances that produced cosmic sounds relating to their orbits. The idea that a musical note’s tone and pitch was in proportion to the weight of a hammer striking an anvil or to the length of a plucked string resulted in Pythagoras’s discovery of the mathematical properties of music. Music is possibly the most emotive and abstract of the arts, the most closely related to mathematics—the most poetic of sciences.

The legend of Orpheus’s ability to charm and mesmerize wild beasts with his music is echoed in the film Bride of Frankenstein, in which we see how the monster is enchanted by melodious sound and responsive to its call. Drawn by the music he hears coming from a cottage in the woods, he enters and becomes friends with its occupant, a blind violinist unaware of his weird appearance. Music soothes and delights the creature, and they enjoy a companionable relationship drinking and smoking together. Inevitably, his persecutors find and attack him, create chaos the cottage, and in the ensuing conflagration the musician dies.

In the same film, Dr. Frankenstein swears to renounce his experiments. But then he recants and makes a Faustian bargain with his colleague, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, to create the mate that the monster had demanded of him. Through his discovery of a so-called organic process Pretorius has already made miniature humans who were fully endowed with reason and speech as well as period costumes. One is a tiny ballet dancer, who, to the doctor’s chagrin, would only dance to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song.” Another, a mermaid, is the product of “an experiment with seaweed.” Unable to make these happy homunculi life-size, he has enlisted the help of Frankenstein, whose techniques depend on the agency of electricity to give the spark of life—insinuating, perhaps, a divine spark—to his creatures. The bride they make is, of course, an improvement on Frankenstein’s previous effort, sporting a coiffured hairdo with a lightning streak that makes her look as if she had just stuck her finger into a light socket. Both the monster and the bride display emotion and feeling. The bride’s beauty instantly enchants the monster, but when he attempts to make tender approaches to her, she screams, repelled by his unsightly appearance and terrified by what she perceives as his brutish nature.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a parable about the danger of playing God. It was an instant success and became a fully fledged global myth with the making of the film in the 1930s. Boris Karloff’s portrayal has become the defining image of the monster, and the model for all subsequent recreations, overshadowing Shelley’s more nuanced and sympathetic original by emphasizing the creature’s bestial nature. Shelley’s version tells of the monster’s frailty, his sensitivity, and the inner turmoil that resulted from the constant hostility directed toward him. She describes him as highly articulate and able to expresses his confusion and remorse for the terrible acts he is driven to commit.

The fabled feats of fictional heroes and villains take hold in the popular imagination through stories: metaphors that represent desires, ambitions, or prejudices. Among typical archetypes are the sage, the trickster, the magician, the avenger, the devil, and the mad scientist. Examples from the modern age abound: Tarzan is a thinly disguised expression of white supremacy—the son of an aristocrat who rules the beasts of the jungle. Superman, modest and unassuming, a classic knight errant, vanquishes the forces of evil when roused. Dr. Faustus sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and supernatural power, while Dorian Gray trades his soul for eternal youth and a life of hedonism. Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis first brought the archetypical mad scientist to the screen in the form of Rotwang, the malevolent genius whose machines sustain the underground city and who invents a way to clone the heroine—or at least a vindictive version of her.

Perhaps no modern fictional hero has been more influenced by science’s strategies than Sherlock Holmes—an atypical hero of mental rather than physical prowess. Public awareness of the advances and benefits of science had grown at the time, and the idea of the age of scientific man was in the air. The character of Sherlock Holmes, more sapiens than Homo, fit perfectly with this recognition. His genius for logical deduction and analysis made him an emblematic figure embodying the idea of scientific methodology: solving a crime was analogous to solving a mathematical equation. Precise observation and his ability to identify and locate hidden clues, proceeding by inference and association to ascertain the correct—and in his case always astonishing—solution, echoed the ways of the scientist. Playing the violin fortified his meditations and helped concentrate his mind—and a little cocaine provided sharper focus.

***



In the 1790s, Dr. Luigi Galvani discovered that when an electric current was applied to the nerve tissues of dissected animals, their muscles quivered and jerked. Arising from this discovery was the belief that this process, galvanism, had the ability to liberate life forces in dead material. In conversation with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley expressed this thought: “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and endued with vital warmth.” Galvanism was later developed as electric shock therapy, but in fiction the method used by mad scientists was electricity, seen by a lay public as having mystical powers.

The use of the electric chair, which was introduced in 1890, added a negative connotation to what was seen as the positive benefits of this new source of energy. The spark of life could also be the spark of death. It was Nikola Tesla’s experiments with electricity, especially his invention of huge copper coils and spheres that generated electric fields with massive voltage levels discharged in bursts of lightening bolts like pyrotechnic displays, that inspired the spectacular climaxes in the early Frankenstein films. In the collective imagination the metaphor of electricity as a source of mythic energy was later replaced by the agency of radiation, laser beams, and transmutation.

Had Frankenstein’s monster been solely a result of scientific achievement it would have been a robot, a humanoid able to take instruction, execute assignments, and make calculations—even act upon them. But it would be incapable of the feelings that could drive its actions, kindred relationships with human beings, or the ability to engage in intelligent discourse with them. The idea of the automaton has its origin in ancient mythologies—humanoid dolls made with moving parts are common in many cultures. Aristotle and da Vinci, among others, conceived of sophisticated mechanical figures, and from the eighteenth century on, public displays of automata were popular entertainment. The golem of Jewish legend, an anthropomorphic monster created from an inert substance like clay and endowed with life by magic, was a witless lout able to carry out tasks through Pavlovian reaction but little more. It behaved like a robot. Mary Shelley was fascinated with mechanical automata and the legend of the golem, and they were certainly on her mind when she wrote her novel.

New ideas and innovation in accord with current sensibility encourage cultural vitality, whereas the power of habit binds us to rigid customs, which, when congealed, become a stultifying treadmill of tradition. Routine and convention impede renovation. The ability to see things from different points of view are essential to a vigorous culture, permitting it to break free from the fatigue of entrenched practice. Vision and imagination enable us to revitalize the aesthetic experience and lead to new horizons. Comparison and perspective endow greater degrees of perception, just as knowledge of another language deepens our understanding of our own mother tongue.

The concept of collage, assembling different materials by juxtaposing and arranging them into a coherent composition, was one of the founding propositions of modern art. Frankenstein’s monster, a mutant cobbled together from organs and body parts, was a kind of human collage given the breath of life. We might wonder if he would ever age, having come into existence as a full-fledged adult, and fantasize about what he might have revealed under analysis on Freud’s couch (another Dr. F). Was he asexual like an angel? Did he need to sleep or suffer from insomnia? Did he fantasize about becoming handsome and so alleviate the aggression shown him? Was he in denial about being badly dressed? He must have suffered from depression. He couldn’t have repressed memories, since he would have no memory of growing up. No parents, no Oedipal complex. Had he been tolerated, his better nature not battered by malicious incomprehension, what a tale he would have had to tell, a fantastic story that would have given us a valuable insight into his quasi-human experience.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus tells of the talented sculptor Pygmalion, who carved a beautiful ivory statue—so beautiful in fact that he fell in love with it. He adorned it with dazzling jewelry and fine fabrics, tokens of his adoration. The goddess Aphrodite, moved by his pleas and offerings and, one imagines, flattered by seeing the statue’s unparalleled beauty resembling her own, granted his wish to make the statue come alive. Caressing and showering kisses on the statue, he soon felt her limbs soften and respond—and, of course, heard her proclaim her adoration for her creator. The story is a metaphor for how the artist, with his passion and obsession for his creations, can achieve transcendence and fulfillment through his art.

By letting our imagination take flight, art allows us to constantly reinterpret our nature unencumbered by the constraints of reason and, by weaving a network of disparate associations, create an authentic work of art. Embracing alternative visions and perspectives enables us to enhance experience by adopting and accepting the unfamiliar, the strange, and the extraordinary.

Mary Shelley subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus, embodying a classic parable: as with Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden, insatiable curiosity and the quest for knowledge are punished by the gods. These emblematic stories are cautionary tales and, as with fables and fairy tales, allegories of archetypal situations—some of which could use a little updating.

A young woodcutter, wandering through the woods, hears a plaintive voice coming from the undergrowth. He stoops and sees a frog, who says to him, “I m not really a frog, but a beautiful princess cursed by a wicked witch to inhabit this shape until a man will kiss me and break the spell. Please, please kiss me and end this curse I have had to endure.” The woodcutter takes the frog, looks it in the eye, and puts it in his pocket. “But good woodcutter, why will you not kiss me?” pleads the frog. The young man pauses and then answers: “Well, there are many princesses in this world . . . but a talking frog ?!”