The Nature of Perception: Richard Neutra and Maria Nordman
Toward the end of his life, architect Richard Neutra sought to collect his remaining unpublished thoughts in a final volume. He placed a newspaper advertisement for an editorial assistant to aid in this project. Los Angeles-based experimental artist Maria Norman replied enthusiastically.[1] This led to a brief but influential intellectual encounter between the then 78-year-old pioneer of Southern California Modernism and the 27-year-old artist. In the following years Nordman's practice would resonate with Neutra’s theories about the nature of perception and the perception of nature.
Maria Nordman uses architectural concepts, processes, and materials to explore the human relationship to site, focusing on the medium of sunlight. In the late 1960s she traveled extensively in the American Southwest studying societies who live in direct contact with these elements. In the early 1970s, she regularly used wood frames and plaster walls to construct immersive room-sized light-filled spaces. These pieces controlled ambient illumination to alter a viewer’s experience of space. For example, in a 1973 artwork titled Saddleback Mountain, Nordman took over the art gallery of the University of California, Irvine (Fig. 1). She removed everything from inside the space and turned off all the lights. She then replaced the entryway with two long almost parallel walls creating a narrow and angled corridor. Nordman installed a 16-inch-wide floor to ceiling mirror at the end of this passageway. Slightly angled toward the interior of the space, this mirror captured rays of sunlight from the surrounding landscape and projected them into the darkened art gallery. Entering through this tunnel, visitors to the otherwise unlit space would perceive this reflected sunlight as a shimmering wall diagonally bisecting the room. The wall illusion depends on the interaction between the human eye and the light in the surrounding space and thus cannot be adequately captured in photographs. The psychology of human vision, which Nordman has expertly studied and manipulated, simply does not take place inside a camera.
Fig. 1. Page showing Nordman’s 1973 Saddleback Mountain in Peter Plagens, “Maria Nordman,” Artforum 12, no.6 (February 1974): 41. https://www.artforum.com/features/maria-nordman-2-212814/
“Common interpretations of Light and Space art have never quite fit Nordman’s practice. Nordman’s work with Neutra helps to clarify her distinct approach.”
To this day Nordman’s work goes understudied and misunderstood partly due to the inability of still photography to capture her experiential works. More than a constellation of walls and apertures, Nordman’s constructions orchestrate a deliberate encounter between the human body and its surrounding natural environment. This encounter involves the whole body and takes place over time. In the past critics, curators, and art historians have used still images to compare her work with that of other artists working in Los Angeles. To a certain extent her pieces do resemble the installations of her contemporaries like Robert Irwin, who used translucent fabric to perceptually alter the dimensions of a space, and James Turrell, who mixes natural and artificial light to create disorienting immersive experiences. While these artists used similar architectural scales and visual effects to explore perception, they were less concerned with a connection to a specific time and place. Often labeled Light and Space artists, Nordman has consistently bristled at her classification within this group. She has even restricted publication of images of her work to combat these associations as well as to emphasize the interpersonal, site-specific, and temporal nature of her art. Common interpretations of Light and Space art have never quite fit Nordman’s practice. Nordman’s work with Neutra helps to clarify her distinct approach.
Fig.2. Back Cover of Richard Netura, Survival through Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) ã Oxford Publishing Limited
Robert Irwin was the resident theorist of the Light and Space non-group, regularly citing French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe his motivations. Merleau-Ponty countered the Cartesian dictum of cognito ergo sum, the dominance of mind over body, instead arguing embodied experince was the basis of all knowledge. This experience was assumed to be universal rather than specific, based on an amalgamation of senses, rather than a unique individual. Irwin’s artistic interest in perception, and as is often assumed, Nordman’s interest in perception, has been linked to this abstract search for the source of knowledge. Yet there are other possible influences for the so-called Light and Space artists’ interest in perception, beyond the oft-invoked Phenomenologist. Not the least of which was Nordman’s brief stint as Neutra’s editorial assistant in 1970.
Born in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Neutra studied with Adolf Loos and Frank Lloyd Wright before settling in Los Angeles in 1924. Known for his slender supports, glass walls, and integration of interior and exterior space, in the 1930 and 1940s Neutra brought a Southern California flair to the International Style. By the 1950s Neutra’s mostly designed domestic architecture for the middle-class L.A. intelligentsia—professors, artists, writers, including some dear friends of Aldus Huxley and early acolytes of LSD guru Timothy Leary. Like the Los Angeles artists of the 1970s, Huxley, among others, sought to explore the mechanics human perception and to push its boundaries using outside assistance. Such perception minded clients perhaps found a fellow traveler in Neutra who was known for his pseudoscientific interest in the mechanics of the human senses.
“Richard Neutra believed the living conditions that were most perceptually advantageous were those that deviated the least from the state of nature. ”
Fig. 3 Richard Neutra, VDL House, Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California, photo by author, 2018.
Neutra studied, wrote about, and lectured on the psychological, physiological, ecological considerations required to design buildings for living, breathing, sensing people.[2] Neutra most clearly formulated his theories in his 1954 book Survival thorough Design. The back cover of the first edition overlays an anatomical drawing of the human nervous system atop a collage of three building projects. (Fig. 2) A partially completed structure, composed of a network of beams, lies right beneath the chest of the human figure, inviting confusion between sensory and architectural systems. In this treatise Neutra argued that human perception should be the foundation of all good design. Ultimately, the architect believed the living conditions that were most perceptually advantageous were those that deviated the least from the state of nature. Neutra’s home and studio illustrates this principle. (Fig. 3) Transparent walls and low seating welcome in light and views of surrounding greenery. One can see straight through the house to the landscape beyond. Abundant outdoor living space, including exterior stairs and pathways further enmesh the structure and its inhabitants in the surrounding environment.
In an interview accompanying her 1973 Irvine exhibition Nordman explained “I think that is one of things that became so important to me in working for Richard Neutra; all his life he brought his habitants into a direct contact with nature.”[3] The gallery is transformed into an apparatus to perceive the surrounding natural landscape. By using sunlight, Nordman directs viewers to consider their physiological perception in tandem with the natural environment. Art historians often focus on Light and Space artists’ desire for viewers to perceive themselves perceiving. But why would these artists, working in 1970s Los Angeles, be interested in perception in the first place? Following Irwin and Merleau-Ponty, one arrives at questions about the abstracted body in space, the nature of experience. Following Nordman and Neutra, attention to human perception leads us instead to an experience of nature.
Citations
[1] Interview with Maria Nordman, Jan Butterfield papers, 1950-1997, Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
[2] Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 6.
[3] Maria Nordman, Saddleback Mountain, Exhibiton Catalog, University of California Irvine, 1973, u.p.
