David R. Nelson: Demiurge in the Crucible
The muted colors surely play a role. This is an exhibit of tans and browns and grays and blacks; the occasional green or red is pale, as if mixed with the natural colors of wood or rust. The number of repeated objects certainly suggests an artist obsessed: all but two sculptures contain a canteen, a sieve, or a forked stick like a dowser, and most contain two of these items. Many of Nelson’s sculptures look like failed tools, attempts at mastery by a lost civilization that never quite made it into the industrial era. If a dowser does lead to water, how is the sieve next to it going to help? And more often than not these works have a void at the heart. The sieves, made of wire mesh or a metal plate with holes and mounted on a wooden box, are often placed at the center, so we look through them to an empty space within. In others the center is occupied by a canteen so rusty looking it seems likely to spring a leak or by a half-open box filled with unadorned wooden blocks.
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Almost any old, rusted artifact evokes some sort of nostalgia; but as I started to realize that Nelson fabricated most of these objects himself, my emotional response grew stronger and more precise. I’d already begun to suspect that he’d made all the sieves: many are an unusual triangular shape, and they all looked handmade. Nelson told me that he’d also made the canteens, pointing out that the rough “low-tech” oxyacetylene welding is evidence of his hand. “A bought canteen,” he says, “would probably be mechanically welded. I want the viewer to wonder whether these were made by an individual, and hopefully come to the conclusion that they were not mass produced.” In this way he transforms nostalgia from the vague, sloppy emotion it usually is into a far more pointed feeling. By handcrafting objects that at first seem artifacts from an earlier industrial era, then archaeological finds from a civilization that never was, and finally aesthetic objects made by an artist, Nelson distances himself from traditional artistic self-expression. Redefining his role as something in between cultural critic and anonymous artisan, Nelson locates the work’s melancholy not in his own moods but in the state of our civilization.
Viewers of Nelson’s objects may wonder, as the brothers did, about “how these things would have been used,” about the story behind them. But explanations don’t always come easily. Journeymen-Carryall With Site Markers is a half-open oblong box–a surveying tool? Inside are compartments that hold simple wooden blocks, the “site markers.” On the box’s lid is another dowser with two pegs between its widening branches filled with round disks, as in an abacus. But the pegs are so full of these disks it’s hard to see how they could “take inventory,” as Nelson himself claims. Or consider Journeymen-Metalograph, a box on a high metal platform though most works in the show are wall mounted. To its right are six bullets Nelson found buried in a tree he was sawing into boards. He “excavated” them, building “stories in my own mind about how they might have ended up where they were.” To the box’s left is a shelf with a lead ingot Nelson cast himself. The raw material of which bullets are made reminds us that these are not natural objects but the products of human minds–and mines. A dowser lies across the box, but this time a rubber tube with leather in the middle hangs from its ends, suggesting a slingshot. It would never work–the attachment is too tenuous, the rubber tube too long and inelastic–but it provides a commentary on the bullets and ingot. This low-tech weapon–which can be made by human hands, without machines or molds–isn’t nearly as efficient as a gun. And unlike bullets it suggests heroism, the biblical David.
