Richard Nonas makes poetry out of wood and metal. Originally trained as an anthropologist, Nonas fell into sculpture rather circuitously, and without any formal training. He’s been quietly making minimalism for decades, headquartered in a live/work space in Tribeca that resembles an industrial workshop and kayak-building facility as much as it does an art studio. Scott Indrisek met Nonas there earlier this summer to discuss his upcoming show at Fergus McCaffrey, which opens at the gallery’s new 514 West 26th Street location on September 10.
How will you approach the show at Fergus McCaffrey?
I have a good sense of that space—a good sense of what Fergus thinks that space is, not necessarily what it is to everyone else. It is a space I have already done a lot of research on, and I have a good sense of what it can be if it is handled one way, and what it can be if it is handled another. And when I say what it can be, it’s how it can be changed by what’s put in it, how it can affect the people who pass through it. And that’s what really interests me.
In an exhibition like this, are the pieces discrete objects, or all part of one large group or installation?
The show is the piece. It is one thing made up of parts: a partless whole made up of parts that are also partless. And that formula is an interesting one. Another way of saying it is that each part is a tool used to make the next one. Let’s say that pieces of steel make up one sculpture downstairs—parts that make the whole. But then that sculpture has to be a single thing; in a real sense it has to feel like a single thing for me. But at the same time, you start to see a connection between the wall pieces and the floor pieces. The wall piece and the floor piece are tools to make something else happen. They are parts of another whole. What I want is a kind of low-level, biting ambiguity.
You began your career as an anthropologist—what did that teach you?
I was an anthropologist with no training in art. At one point I lived in a village of 50 people for two years in a desert in Mexico. At first, in a very real way, nothing made sense. But it made perfect sense to everyone else who was there. I was writing a book about how I noticed that special clues, special metaphors were much more central to the way these people put their thoughts together. As we were walking on a road in the desert, it was as if we were walking through separate rooms, but there were no markers that I could see. These rooms were marked by the cactus or by the knowledge that that was the place so-and-so’s grandfather fell off his horse and broke his leg. There is a kind of meaning-pattern that functions as architecture. That really interests me, so I tried to write about it. But the only way to write about it was indirectly, and I found myself writing details of peoples’ lives, things I wouldn’t want anyone to write about me. It wasn’t comfortable, it was nobody’s business, but it was the only way I could get to that way of thinking.
When you travel in a country where you don’t know the language, we have all had that experience, where we get off the train and we know that’s a car, that’s a bike, but we’re not sure what else. I remember once being in Tokyo, I was walking down the street, and I was walking one way, and everyone was coming the other way. A completely different type of crowd than a New York crowd. Not in the number of people, not necessarily more people, but the density of that crowd was different. I was the only one going that way, and I was uncomfortable, so I turned around and walked in the other direction—but the same thing was true in the other direction! And that’s the kind of confusion that none of the people in Tokyo were feeling, they were feeling something else. It is interesting in the way art is interesting. It is interesting because you say, “Wait, this doesn’t make sense! Why doesn’t it make sense?” What is it about walking down the street that doesn’t make sense? That’s what I think art does.
So that’s the kind of experience you try to provide?
No. Language and culture are tools to take a complicated world and make it understandable, break it up and categorize it, understand it. But there are things language can’t say easily that I feel the need to say. So in every culture we find that there are built-in escape valves: religion on one hand, art on the other. The production of art, in my mind, thinking as an anthropologist, is a way of saying the things that can’t be said directly, or evoking the complex emotions between the named emotions, or combinations of the named emotions that themselves don’t have names. Perceptions and emotions, those are categories that need to be broken into, or skewed, and art is an acceptable way to do it, a way that you are not punished for. The only visual art that interests me is the art that is conveying something that it would not be able to convey directly with words.
When was the first time you had the impulse to create an object that conveyed something without words?
Before I worked in Mexico, I was in north Canada. I brought back a sled dog. And I found myself picking up pieces of wood for him to play with. One day I picked up two pieces of wood, and there was real emotion there, and no story, no narrative, no reason for that emotion. I could describe the emotion, not in a single word, but there was real emotion. Not fake, not conceptual. But it was just two sticks. I thought, Wow, maybe it’s possible to communicate abstract ideas directly with objects, in a way you can’t with words. I got really excited, trying and making things, but I never thought about art. Then, two or three months later, a friend of a friend came to my apartment and said, “You idiot, it’s called sculpture!”
Did you have them hung on the wall?
Some were on the wall, some were just around. I was just trying to figure out what was going on.
When your friend labeled it sculpture, how did you react?
I thought two almost simultaneous things: first, that I had to find out more about this, that I had to figure it out. And second, that I was never going to be a graduate student again. I am not going back to school. I’m not going back to be an art student. So I had to figure it out myself, and that is what I tried to do.
Before that point had you seen a lot of art? Had you engaged with it?
I grew up in Brooklyn, I was interested in the world. I knew modern art, I knew names, but it didn’t mean much.
So was it an instantaneous change, from being an anthropologist to being an artist?
Pretty much. I thought that I would go live in Europe, where it was cheap to live, where I could look at art and just figure this out. I was teaching anthropology part-time at Queens College. I needed an excuse, so I decided I would go to Europe to see how much of the Mexican and Indian stuff was actually Spanish, so I decided to go to Spain. Then I very quickly decided I wanted to be in a big city, so I went to Paris, where I stayed for two years. I met a lot of young artists and I talked to everybody. I bought some tools and tried stone carving. But it was 1968, there were all kinds of wild things happening. I was learning about life as well as art—more about life than about art. The reason I became an anthropologist was that I realized I was a “first-class noticer,” as Saul Bellow said. And there was a lot to notice in Paris in 1968. I also realized that there was a way to use the stuff that I had noticed that had never occurred to me before, which was just to push one thing against another, like two sticks.
“Stuff,” meaning people or materials?
The way the French police would behave; the way the crowds would behave; just things that would be small parts of a novel, but without making a story of it. Something could be communicated, and it might be something that—in words—could only be captured with 10 paragraphs, by making five comparisons and using three metaphors. Creating a situation where people look at two different things at the same time, which starts a process in their heads that is really interesting—and all I need to do to make that happen is to put two things together in a way that makes it difficult for you to separate them.
I came back to New York for a short time, planning to go back to Paris, but that first day in New York I met the sculptor Mark di Suvero. We went out for a drink. Two guys are sitting next to me, and they are arguing about sculpture. So I joined in and told them they had to come to my studio tomorrow, and they both said yes. Two years in Paris, the same group of young artists, we had a beer or a glass of wine together at the end of the day. But no one ever went to anyone else’s studio, because if you invited someone to your studio they would steal your ideas. I thought, wait a second, why do I want to go back to Paris? Everyone was so much more open in New York, and there was so much going on in terms of art. The way of approaching art in 1969 was so much more direct and undecorated by leftover 19th-century embellishments. Things happened so much faster, so much more clearly, you could have a real conversation with almost anyone immediately. You might get insulted, they might come to see your work and tell you it’s shit, but it doesn’t matter; they would come and tell you what they thought, and you could do the same.
You mention that in Paris you wouldn’t visit each other’s studios because people would steal ideas. Didn’t that happen here, too?
But the idea here was that you can’t steal an idea, because the idea is nothing, it’s what you do with it. Any of those stealable ideas were already in the air. Any idea that you would steal, you probably would have thought of in the next two days anyway. That was a very strange kind of time, and I quickly found myself involved with a group of friends whose work was different but playing with the same ideas. And the fact that I use the word playing is important, because none of us knew very clearly what we were doing, but we knew the direction we wanted to go in. Very quickly we solved our own problems; we needed showing space. Alanna Heiss was part of that group, she was a part of that discussion. And one day she said, “I’m so tired of hearing you guys complain about not having places to show, or big enough studios. This city is full of empty spaces, go talk your way into one. That’s all bullshit.”
You’ve stayed in New York from that time through the present day. To say something like what Heiss said now would seem slightly ludicrous here in the city.
Well, except it wouldn’t. In a way what [venue owner] David Sklar is doing in Knockdown Center is similar. That building was open to him, and he had the money to do that. It is some version of the thing that Alanna was doing, what we were doing. The constraints are different, but the thoughts are the same; you have to figure out which rules you can break.
Some people think New York is exhausted, that the next step for an alternative is someplace outside of the city.
I see different problems: Everything has more zeros on it. But both ends of the equation have more zeros. That is, everything costs more, but everything sells for much more. It’s very interesting doing group shows with young artists, because the prices young artists put on their work are higher than the older ones, significantly higher. That’s what they learned in school. The main difference between now and 1970 is the money. Nobody had any. Well, a few people did, but the ones I knew felt guilty about it and were very generous. They gave money to people they believed in. Nobody was trying to be a rock star. That was nobody’s plan. We watched certain people’s careers blossom, and go up and down as well, but the point was to make the work. The point was to keep working, to keep pushing, and then by the ’80s it changed. By the ’80s it was about money. And by that point in the art schools, you were trained to be a rock star. That was one of the reasons people became artists. When the career becomes more important than the work, that’s a change. And the fact that that exists as a possibility is worth notice. There have always been people who care about the status of being an artist and people who don’t. And you work your way through it.
What is your practice like on a daily basis in the studio?
The main purpose of my studio isn’t actually to make things. It’s to force myself to look at old work. And that’s why I have so much shit. I need to be in a situation where I can’t not see the work. I’m seeing it in the worst possible way, I understand that, but what happens is, if we are talking now and someone knocks on the door at the other end of the loft, and I’m rushing over there to answer the door, out of the corner of my eye I see something on the wall, and I think, I hate that. It could be something I made 10 years ago, it could be something I made yesterday, and I stop, look at that thing, and figure out what’s not working. I’m totally willing to take a piece apart, to change it, to throw it out, to break it, to make something else out of it, because the point is to figure out one way to say this, to refine a vocabulary.
If these sculptures are tools, what can you do with them? What can this tool get me to do? What can this tool do for me that I would be unable to do without it? What can it make me accomplish that I couldn’t accomplish without it? Then the next thing is, do I want to accomplish that? If the answer is no, then OK, forget about it. If the answer is yes, let’s go further with this, where does this go next? So it’s that process that’s been going on for 40 years, and I can say without any hesitation, that if I could think of anything more interesting to do, I’d be happy to do it. I’m not committed to the act of painting or making sculpture. I’m committed to an exploration of ways to say things that I didn’t know I wanted to say until I found a way to say them.
A version of this article appears in the September 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
