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 -

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.