Nancy Graves: Sorting the cosmic haze
Nancy Graves, Mars (1973), detail, acrylic on canvas, 4 panels, overall: 96 x 288 inches. unless otherwise noted, images are courtesy of the Nancy Graves Foundation via Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Contributed by Jason Andrew
In 1959, British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, struck by the inability of intellectuals and scientists to communicate and thereby to make sense of and tame nuclear weapons, delivered a lecture at Cambridge arguing that the divide between the sciences and the humanities was intensifying world’s problems. Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the book encapsulating his ideas, became one of strongest post-World War II influences on Western public discourse. Nancy Graves (1939–95), whose paintings and works on paper are now on display at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, took Snow’s ideas to heart by creating art that was at once aesthetically challenging and intellectually probing – the humanities and the sciences all rolled into one. The root of her inspiration, however, was endearingly humble: “I was born and raised in Pittsfield, Mass., where my father worked as a guard in the Berkshire Museum of Art and Natural History,” Graves told the New York Times in January 1979. “In that way I came to think of art and natural history as one.”
Although unknown to many, Graves was a key figure of postwar art, working prolifically in sculpture, painting, printmaking, and film. She is most celebrated for her life-size fur-covered Mongolian Bactrian camels and variations on that theme that included installations of their bones. Their ambitious presentation as sculpture had the art world intelligentsia on both sides of the continent scratching their heads. “This is the most subversive thing that has happened to art since the early modernists abolished the subject altogether,” wrote Alfred Frankenstein in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle in April 1969. Writing for theNew York Times in December 1971, Peter Schjeldahl was “hard put to decide which was more preposterous, the object itself or the theory that was to make the object comprehensible.”
Explaining the far-out radicalism of this particular work, Graves said that “the psychological experience of confrontation with the camel is the occasion to think about the nature of experience.” Graves was claiming the natural world as a topic of artistic interest. If a pile of Brillo boxes could be called art, why not a room full of fabricated camels? She concerned herself not only with nature but also with the technological advances that challenged and sometimes threatened it: Sputnik, lunar exploration, moon landings, space probes, satellites, television, computers, and the nuclear arms race. Jackson Pollock’s observation that “new needs need new techniques” clearly rang true for her. In the early 1970s, 30 years into the Cold War and the postwar onslaught of technology, Graves gave sculpture a rest and focused on interpreting scientific developments in the intrepid work now on view in Chelsea.
