North Adams — The architecture of MASS MoCA‘s post-industrial spaces is so imposing that successful exhibitions there have to deal with it one way or another. Rarely does an artist succeed by confronting the architecture head on, but this is precisely what Richard Nonas does in his remarkable new exhibition The Man in the Empty Space (which is open through September 5).

Just like the former Sprague Electric Company buildings, Richard Nonas’ sculpture is simple, spare of decoration, and seeming more attuned to utility than meaning. It is also occasionally huge. One of the new pieces that he has made for this show is Single Artificer. It is an arrangement of fifty-two weathered railroad ties and is many yards from one end to the other.
More than once in this exhibition Nonas seems to deliberately echo or challenge the MASS MoCA architecture. One of the three Chairs for Björn sits immediately adjacent to a repair to the concrete floor that is almost exactly the same shape; and the nine pieces of Hunk are arranged in a striking counterpoint to the diagonal struts that support the balcony that it sits on.
Richard Nonas (born 1936) should be far better known than he actually is. He was one of the leading lights of the artist-run alternative space 112 Greene Street in the early 1970s, showed in the very first (1976) exhibition at P.S.1 in Queens, and in his 50-year career he has had major exhibitions and installed permanent sculptures all around in the world. Still, his name will be new to most Berkshire Edge readers who have a spectacular discovery in store in North Adams.

Nonas’ work is remarkable for the narrow range of its materials – mostly steel, lead, granite, and wood – and for the simplicity with which they are put together. He uses repeated geometrical solids, lays things on the floor, or hangs them from the wall or leans them against it. He arranges things. His very occasionally carving is rudimentary, and he uses color so rarely that it comes as something of a jolt to the senses. In fact, his work is so overwhelmingly monochromatic (he even photographs it in black and white) that a chance glimpse of Wall Drawing 579 in an adjacent MASS MoCA gallery makes the arch-disciplinarian Sol Lewitt look like a carefree hedonist by contrast.
Still, it would be wrong to think of Nonas as a minimalist. His works might sometimes look those of his contemporaries Carl Andre or Richard Serra, and he sometimes uses the same sort of vocabulary to discuss it. But for Nonas the relationship between his sculpture and the space that it occupies is not merely physical. He has a concern with what transforms a space into a place that is entirely individual.
Nonas relates this interest to experiences in his twenties before he ever became a sculptor. He practiced as an anthropologist for ten years, doing field research among the indigenous people of northern Canada, southern Arizona, and northern Mexico. “I lived in a village of 50 people in a desert in Mexico,” he recalls. “Over the two years I was there, I grew to understand that metaphor was central to the way the villagers understood place. They mapped the desert with mythology and memories. What I realized is that place is defined as much by meaning as architecture.”

Nonas sees his sculpture functioning in much the same way. Though the railroad ties of Single Artificer and the long arc that it traces through the gallery might serve to remind us of the railroad and river that enabled North Adams to become the industrial hub that it once was, they are not illustrations of those things. Rather they hint at a meaning for this place, a meaning that each of us must arrive at individually. “The job of art,” Nonas says, “is to convey what language cannot.”
Perhaps this is why Nonas is not better known. His sculptures function quite differently to most contemporary art, less carriers of their own meaning than intimations of meaning in the places they occupy. And his is not an art of easy answers. He aspires to make work that is as complex as the world that it occupies, and with which we must establish the same sort of relationships. “Clarity does not interest me,” he says. “Understanding is tentative. Knowledge is conditional.”
Like all of the very best art that we can encounter however, Richard Nonas’ sculpture permanently shifts our perception of the world around us. This begins at a simple level, and in this case before we are even out of the gallery – we find ourselves suddenly noticing those three wooden steps in the steel staircase, or the grooves and drill holes in an old wooden beam – but eventually we find ourselves encouraged to reconsider the meanings of places in which we live our lives. It is a remarkable gift to take away from an art exhibition.