Catherine Quan Damman on Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture

Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face, by Julia Bryan-Wilson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. 352 pages.

THE ICONIC LOUISE NEVELSON sculpture would appear straightforward to summarize: monochrome, modular, monumental. In general, such qualities—and to them we might add wooden, assemblage, usually black, comprising found objects—indicate an artist singularly absorbed, working through a set of formal propositions over a career, pursuing the archetypal enterprise of the modernist master. In particular, though, up close and personal, Nevelson’s sculptures are, well, defiantly weird.

In confronting their grids and boxes, their all-consuming size, and their dedication to a particular color, the scholar or critic is firmly set upon recognizable, even overly familiar grounds. Looser underfoot is the works’ insistence on so much unnecessary filigree, their many wonky flanges and cavities. More destabilizing still are the ways that the artist’s preferred dusky hues unsettle the eye’s disciplined construal of recess and protrusion, how the voluptuous curves of lathe-turned wood jostle against the firm perpendiculars of the crates that contain them, or the sculptures’ magpie dedication to hodgepodge and their often visibly precarious construction.

The interplay between the established category and the stresses put upon it by any singular articulation is the rich loam of art history. To cultivate it, Julia Bryan-Wilson’s new study comes to us in four slim volumes, which nestle together inside a rectangular slipcover (like a Nevelson, a black box). Their clipped titles—Drag, Color, Join, and Face—are a foursome hewn from the artist’s working method: Here is Nevelson lugging hunks of wood or cast-off furniture parts into the studio, applying color in her idiosyncratic way (before construction, and sometimes even dipping components straight into paint with tongs), assembling the elements, and finally releasing them to the public to “face” fans and critics. Each volume, at around seventy pages, stretches the prototypical academic chapter, elaborating its principal term less like a mathematical proof than a center of gravity exerting centripetal force.

In homage to the hypothetical modularity (rarely enacted in practice) of Nevelson’s work, the author invites the reader to recuse herself from linear consumption. Though my multiple readings were always in the gently prescribed order, I found each volume never to be in the slot in which I was certain I had deposited it, its inky cover accumulating streaks from my fingers, an experience tactile and unruly. I have never touched a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, but perhaps interacting with Drag, Color, Join, and Face mirrors the way her forms make “you think you can feel yourself caressing their knobs, curved bellies, bulging urns, tracing the lips and swells with your finger,” as Bryan-Wilson puts it.

It is not only in terms of objecthood that this book slips the knot of convention. On the one hand, it conforms to the expectations of the scholarly monograph—an in-depth, dedicated study of a given topic (in art history, unlike in other disciplines, the term typically indicates a concentration on a single artist), here focused on what is primarily understood as the “mature” phase of Nevelson’s career, from roughly the midpoint of the twentieth century until her death in 1988. At the same time, it is, in Bryan-Wilson’s opening salvo-cum-admission, purposely an “amonograph or counter-monograph, a feminist queering of the monograph form.”

Bryan-Wilson’s task was not an easy one, as Nevelson is hardly unknown or a victim of institutional neglect awaiting a too-satisfied scholar to rescue her from obscurity. Instead, it is almost the artist’s omnipresence that has been the basis of her dismissal; that is, there is a qualitative, rather than quantitative, paucity of interpretation and encounter. Nevelson’s ample reception history is investigated from two distinct perspectives. In the first of the four volumes, Bryan-Wilson confronts the persistent opprobrium in professional assessments of the artist’s work as “overweening, grandiose, staggering, excessive,” that is, as approaching kitsch or bad taste. (“Yuck” is a verbatim quotation from an unnamed scholar.) In repeated condemnations, Nevelson was cast as a sorceress or witch, at once distinctly, hyperbolically feminized and too masculine in her rejection of lived norms. In the last volume, Bryan-Wilson investigates the sculptures’ commitment to the planar facingness of the relief and also fulfills her initial promise “to pry [Nevelson’s] art loose from hewing too tightly to her body”—that is, to contest the submersion of her sculptures in the deluge of images featuring the artist’s exaggerated necklaces, kohl-rimmed eyes, and false lashes. Yet Bryan-Wilson does not lose sight of or dismiss what Nevelson has meant to myriad others, taking seriously the artist’s “amateur” or nonscholarly reception, her status as a beacon or image: feminist and queer homages in art and poetry alike, the reams of “fan art” Bryan-Wilson found in Nevelson’s archives, a commission for a tiny, dollhouse-size Nevelson sculpture, and her uptake as inspiration for elementary-school arts and crafts projects.

It is in the middle two volumes that Bryan-Wilson most explicitly models an alternative to the reductive calls to “diversify” art history by merely additive methods. In Color, she takes seriously Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland’s assertion of Blackness as “an ever-present medium, imaginary, and lexicon that is manifest and latent . . . within the history of modern art,” interrogating the relation between Nevelson’s “affirmative theory” of blackness, the hue uniquely foregrounded in her art, and the ascriptive category of Blackness as a lived racial designation (an exploration the author undertakes in crucial dialogue with Adrienne Edwards’s 2016 exhibition “Blackness in Abstraction”). Bryan-Wilson highlights the artist’s own engagement with the civil-rights movement and antiracist efforts—given explicit sculptural form in Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1974–85, donated to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s permanent collection—but does not let Nevelson off the hook for her paternalistic statements or her quasi-fetishistic collection and appreciation of so-called non-Western objects. Nor does Bryan-Wilson treat her categories as transhistorical, ontological conditions, but rather as historically specific effects of shifting regimes of racialization, including Nevelson’s own uneasy assimilative march—as a Jewish Ukrainian refugee—from exoticized, ethnic “other” to approximate whiteness. In Join, Bryan-Wilson explicitly links the artistic strategy of assemblage to an earlier theorization of queerness as a mode of “improper attachments.” Here, the collaborative labor of Nevelson’s assistants comes to the fore, especially that of Diana MacKown, with whom the artist cohabited for twenty-six years, arousing great speculation about their relationship. Bryan-Wilson acknowledges the desire to fact-check Nevelson’s queerness (which the artist publicly disavowed), to cement it as history, but ultimately rejects a “forensic hunt for biographical certainties.” She relates this acceptance of ambiguity to a thoughtful inquiry into the role of titles as “thin filaments that connect artworks to our interpretations of them,” a tethering that may be especially important in the case of work that rejects figuration. The wider methodological question is: What do we take as meaningfully referential, and why?

If I have been tempted to draw too-neat parallels in pairing the outer volumes (Drag and Face) and the inner ones (Color and Join), it is perhaps because I have been trained in a discipline that takes comparison as its primary, if sometimes implicit, protocol. Here Bryan-Wilson likewise intervenes. Her comparanda will no doubt ruffle disciplinary feathers and occasion charges of pseudomorphology. The assembled list is hardly unthinking: Precedents include not merely Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, and Ad Reinhardt’s optically thwarting monochromes but also the quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins, the assemblages of Lonnie Holley and Noah Purifoy, the sculptures of Beverly Buchanan and Saloua Raouda Choucair, and the crafts of textile whitework and ceramic blackware. Rather than attempt to legitimize Nevelson’s art by insisting that her formal achievements are equal to those of (white male) artists already firmly in the canon, Bryan-Wilson interrogates legitimacy itself, asking after the constellations shaped by placing Nevelson alongside other historically marginalized stars. Often, her comparisons take cues from, adapt, or even directly interpolate contemporary curatorial sight lines—for instance, she discusses the 2017 exhibition at New York’s Invisible Exports gallery that paired Nevelson and Vaginal Davis. The book is clearly in dialogue with the author’s long-standing interest in questions of labor and with the contradictions of the political commitments at the center of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of Cali­fornia Press, 2009), and it continues the querying of hierarchies between fine art and handicraft that animated Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Yet her inclusion of up-to-the-minute texts, exhibitions, and even personal experiences of climate grief are but a few of the signs that although Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture emerges decisively from decades of expertise, the book is unshy about being marked by its historical moment and desire to experiment in response.

I am sympathetic to those who see art history as a discipline irredeemably shackled to its origins in odious social arrangements at the level of both the symbolic (investments in “beauty,” “taste,” and the phantasm of bodily perfectibility) and the material (colonial extraction and dispossession, the gobsmacking accumulation of wealth). These truths are inarguable, as is the discipline’s role as informational handmaiden to the art market (an arrangement that, among its other effects, leads to the privileging of the contemporary above all) and its parlous status within higher education (art-history departments are on the verge of collapse owing to administrative bloat, the demonization of the humanities, and the ongoing casualization of labor). Amid these crises within academia and the ever-accelerating convulsions beyond the ivory tower, it is sometimes hard, quite frankly, to see the point.

Yet if we are to continue to do art history, despite everything, we should not make a mockery of the enterprise. I don’t know from babies or bathwater, but it seems an error not to disarticulate the wretched baggage of the discipline from some of its granular methods, which might be harnessed toward different ends. Is it not still the task to stay with the snarling contradictions of an artist’s life as it ricochets against a history not of her own choosing, to fuss over little eddies of texture or the unexpected detail, to tumble down the rabbit warren of paper in acid-free boxes, to look and look again and then return to look some more? These endeavors may better be understood neither as commands issued from on high nor as unthinking supplications at the feet of a colossus idealized as “rigor,” but rather as opportunities to luxuriate in the weirdness that only specificity and intimacy can provide, as well as the site of real pleasures, both intellectual and often embodied, even sensual. Here is the art historian traveling to rural Ukraine, eager with anticipation to familiarize herself with vernacular architecture in the artist’s hometown, Pereyaslav; here she is learning to turn wood on a lathe, letting its friction inform her understanding of a sculpture’s tactility; here she is in the archive, puzzling over a turn of phrase on scrap paper; here she is, for several hours, sitting in the galleries, sketching an untitled sculpture from 1964 (and in the process finding out that the objects to which she had previously been referring as “slotted spoons” were in fact shoe trees). Here is a book that is not only a transformative study of a single artist but also a record of the scholar’s own labor—and her devotion. Those who told us to look closely in order to master had it wrong: We look closer to be undone.

Catherine Quan Damman is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is completing her first monograph, on performance and affective labor.