A detail from Tom Nussbaum’s “New Atlas.”
Atlas isn’t sweating. He looks neither overburdened nor eager to get down to work. Nor does he seem surprised by the magnitude of the task. Instead he shoulders the globe like a technician might, heaving it up with his hands and holding it there for the inspection of the visitors at the Montclair Art Museum.
Perhaps it adds to his motivation that the world in his arms is such a beautiful one. Tom Nussbaum has crowned his “New Atlas” with a planet of solid polygons, each one painted a different bright color. The sphere looks a bit like a hundred-sided dice, but there is no way Nussbaum’s sober, heavy-browed titan would ever toss it. He’s got a job to do.
Atlas is just one of the characters who makes his presence felt in “But Wait, There’s More!,” a delightful retrospective that will remain in the Museum’s main exhibition gallery through Jan. 4. The show, presented with obvious affection by MAM curator Gail Stavitsky, covers five decades of the sculptor’s career and includes 80 colorful assemblies, drawings and other works on paper, plus personal letters and a filmed interview with the artist.
As the carnival barker title implies, it’s fun: about as close to an exercise in pure enjoyment as you are likely to find in a Jersey art museum this year. Nussbaum and Stavitsky have filled this chamber with beautiful, friendly-looking objects doused in bright, pure pigment, suggestive of movement yet somehow weightless, approachable and lovable as illustrations in children’s books.
Even Nussbaum’s Mexican-inspired skull, adorned with pastel flowers and crescent moons, looks friendly. Even Death is having a good time.
Some of Tom Nussbaum’s works at Montclair Art Museum.
Yet “But Wait, There’s More!” is also a paean to labor. Many of Nussbaum’s steel creatures are engaged in productive activity. In “Building Up,” a model for a large-scale steel sculpture that is engaging in miniature, human figures stand on platforms and dig, hammer, scrape, climb and push large objects around. One man hunches his back and rolls a gear the size of his body up an incline. This industrial Sisyphus, unlike the Greek original, is going to arrive at his destination.
That hopeful outlook is central to the sculptor’s project. In Nussbaum’s world, things are getting constructed — and those things are good, useful, beautiful and destined to hang together. Some of his most startling fabrications are models of houses, constructed from scores of painted steel strips, some no bigger than a matchstick. These aren’t just visually arresting. They are also statements of faith in the principles of architecture. They are the frameworks of buildings, and though you can see right through them, they feel complete.
The metal, paint and epoxy sculptures that are the heart of this relentlessly upbeat show shouldn’t look sturdy, but they do. Though they are often made of painted rods no thicker than a Tinkertoy, they radiate sturdiness. “But Wait, There’s More!” often feels like an inversion of “A Question of Balance,” the emotionally turbulent Nanette Carter retrospective that preceded it in the special exhibition galleries at Montclair Art Museum. Carter’s Mylar assemblages were fixed in place, but spoke, powerfully, of deterioration and corrosive forces. Nussbaum’s sculptures are made from thin reeds, but they don’t seem the least bit breakable. They are monuments to the artist’s optimism, and his conviction that that which is built, and balanced, will surely hold.
Tom Nussbaum’s “East Orange Boogie Woogie.”
Nussbaum’s upbeat attitude feels rooted in 20th century American ideas about cooperation, connection, self-expression and the positive consequences of hard work. Like many town planners and architect-sympathizers, he seems to believe that benign disorder is a necessary ingredient in any order fun enough to persist. “East Orange Boogie Woogie” is one of the few Nussbaum pieces that sits still long enough to be apprehended in two dimensions: an amalgamation of hundreds of painted steel pieces held together at their corners and ends by black dowels. It looks like the most uncooperative circuit board in the mainframe that powers the circus. “Boogie Woogie” is full of expansive energy, with diagonal lines radiating from a busy core. No two objects in the array are exactly alike. Yet they hold hands, shimmer and sizzle together, and create a single electric effect.
Nussbaum named the piece for Piet Mondrian, who used a similar color palette and danced a Boogie Woogie of his own. But Mondrian, regimented and European as he was, would never have led his partner through such wild and jittery steps. (He also never had a studio in East Orange, as Nussbaum does.)
Stavitsky has positioned “East Orange Boogie Woogie” so that it stares right at another piece that scrambles the highway in a similar manner. In “Road Map America,” Nussbaum paints dashed white lines on macadam-blue strips of steel, and twists some into dangerous bends while others are left Turnpike-straight. Between the bends, he marks the spots with steel Xs, and links everything up with wooden dowels. No GPS readout looks like this. But Nussbaum is getting at something deeper than verisimilitude. He is giving us the sunny-day experience of the landscape as it unfolds while we’re driving without a clear idea of where we are going, but with a certainty that wherever we end up, we’ll be somewhere novel and worthwhile. Because it is raised a bit from the wall, its shadow acts as a second surface — a road beneath the road, a landscape of underpasses, further knitting together the nation through the asphalt cross-stitches.
Between these two visions are the big sculptures in three dimensions, assembled according to the same connective logic, but allowed to curve and twist before us. Expansive as they are, they displace very little air. Nussbaum sculpts with the grace of a man determined to shake hands with the atmosphere. There is a cloud with each curve in a different color, a loose knot of arcs and hoops that looks like an orbital diagram from an overcrowded solar system, and a queen with a red and white crown festooned with flags of different countries. One spiky customer could be an overgrown and excitable viral particle, or a colorful sea creature, or a tumbleweed that rolled through a tray of finger paint. Patterns derived from quilt-making traditions make welded steel look as lightweight and comforting as a homemade blanket.
Tom Nussbaum’s “But Wait, There’s More!”
And right on a platform in the middle of the room is the piece that gives the show its name. “But Wait, There’s More!” is many things at once: a portrait in steel of a marriage, a testament to imaginative labor, an earnest expression of patriotism, a floating carnival in a model ship that no bottle could ever hope to contain. In the hold of a great red-white-and-blue (well, off-white) boat made of staves, ropes, and wires and mainly realized in 3D outline, a group of lightbulb-headed workers have fused with the machinery of locomotion. They are spurred on by a pale and behatted figure with a hammer in his hand, balanced on a beam and tangling with a beautiful mess of wheels of different sizes. The queen of the ship — a fetching little figure in a polka-dotted dress and a blue scarf taken by the sea breeze — raises a trumpet to her lips and announces her imminent arrival. And right in the front, spurring on a single draft mule dragging the ship, is the husband in the hat, red-faced, limbs dangling, proceeding with the same quiet determination of the New Atlas. He, too, has a job to do. The domesticity of this fantastic scene is underscored by a few sweet details, including shorts and undergarments in the rigging like laundry on a line.
Nussbaum supplements the steel and epoxy sculptures with smaller resin statuettes. These are distinguished by the curious smoothness of his subject’s faces and their uncanny composure. Some of these pieces are blatantly psychological and freighted with filial significance, like a figurine of a father-bear carrying a boy on his back. Another sculpture inverts the Eve story by giving an impassive young woman an apple as big as her torso; unbitten, it is either shown or offered to the audience. She doesn’t look particularly tempted, but you may be. Other pieces are studies in détente between things that we’d expect to try to devour each other: cats and birds, dogs and rats, a hungry man and a pantry full of groceries. There is food aplenty in Nussbaum’s peaceable kingdom, but not much evident hunger.
Instead, we get examples of cooperation: between parent and child, between beast and beast, and between busy citizens with things to accomplish. No human beings are shown in “Train Time,” a striking proposal in print for a public art piece in Montclair, but the concerted application of muscle is strongly implied by the elements of manual labor that the artist depicts: pickaxes, stopwatches, pliers, iron bells and grease-squirters, all arranged in a mandala of industry, with every tool in its right place. In another boisterous black-and-white piece that revs up an entire gallery wall, Nussbaum shoots the works, bringing us trains, speeding cars, fishing dinghies, oil rigs and flying farm equipment, with the Stars and Stripes streaming above all of it.
Tom Nussbaum’s “Acme Robots Night Lights.”
Conspicuously absent are any signs of the information economy, or anything, really, that couldn’t have been drawn by Richard Scarry 60 years ago. It is telling that the only robotic figures in “But Wait, There’s More!” are an array of vintage cheese graters that the ever-whimsical Nussbaum has illuminated from within with crimson light. We are firmly in the mid-20th century, with mid-century preoccupations and anxieties, and above all, with the mid-century optimism that we’re building our way to a brighter future.
It hasn’t turned out that way. That is the one note of sadness in this otherwise joyful folk orchestra: it is a reminder of a promise that wasn’t kept. Oh, we have built plenty and forged countless connections, but harmony, happiness and fun did not keep pace with our productivity. In the 21st century, the American road trip has hit some speed bumps. Abundance has not straightened the highway for us; instead, we have become more fractious.
Even as his art has evolved, Tom Nussbaum has continued to believe in labor that feels like play, construction that is sanctified by its beauty and balance and meets the sky on its own terms, and ironclad connections that free rather than bind. He has stayed true to the vision. Maybe one day the rest of us will catch up to him.
The Montclair Art Museum will present Tom Nussbaum’s “But Wait, There’s More!” through Jan. 4. Visit montclairartmuseum.org.
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