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.