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 -

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.