Published in LiP Magazine
[http://www.lipmagazine.org]

View the full version of this article on the LiP website

Paul Bunyan of the Hamptoms
-or-
The Austin Nebish Endnote

by Greg Hischak
03.19.01

AUSTIN NEBISH DIED THE WAY HE LIVED—eating while driving. Widely assumed that Austin's drinking and attachment to power tools would be his demise, that his life ended choking on a liverwurst sandwich behind the wheel of his Dodge Pickup—plunging to the bottom of Shinnecock Inlet—seemed cruelly anti-climactic.

Having single-handedly carved a giant splintery niche in 20th-century art, when the bubbles and empty cans of Genesee Cream Ale stopped rising to the surface of the choppy waters off Shinnecock, Nebish was gone and America had lost its greatest Action Chainsaw artist.

"That's not sculpture, that's just logging," Truman Capote once wrote of Austin Nebish's work. In fact the public, those who had been forced to attend one or more art history classes, has always been polarized into two camps concerning Nebish's work: those who viewed him as America's most dynamic chainsaw artist and those who found his work to be kindling.

Like his art, much of Nebish's life is clouded in contradiction. Expelled from the Chicago Art Institute for sawing the legs off a fellow-student's easel, Nebish logged huge swaths of Minnesota before making his way West.

Employed at a recycling center in Monterey, California, Austin Nebish met Steinbeck, who worked alongside him sucking limes out of empty Corona Bottles. Looking at the large black case that never left Nebish's side, Steinbeck asked him if he played french horn. Austin slowly opened the case and pulled out his 22" Stihl 020T. With a bottle of whiskey and a package of Little Debbies, the two proceeded to fell every telephone pole between Monterey and Santa Cruz.

His chainsaw mastery already coming to full fruition, Nebish began working the State Fair circuits through the early 1950's astounding audiences with his chainsaw-hewn bears and cute raccoons shaped from burl. No longer merely decorative, Nebish's was a new and distinctly American artform. Now working with a 3.0 bhp Stihl, Nebish's self-assured virtuosity, and the boldness of his metal-singed images emerging from behind protective netting, propelled him zigzag across the continent, earning money by carving little begging lawn beavers—certainly the inspiration for Ginsberg's famous poem, Little Begging Lawn Beavers.

In early 1955, Nebish came to the attention of the Goodall-Limski Gallery in New York City after dumping a cord of his recent works onto the hood of Diane Limski's car. Nebish's first one-man show opened that Spring.

Gone were the little bearcub boot-scrapers and red cedar raccoons playfully perched on stumps. White Maple Number 8, a tangled gnarl of hastily-sliced logs thrown across yellow shag, was hailed by the Times as "A swath cut through middle-class sensibilities, yet nice-looking when placed near the porch." Austin Nebish had arrived.

Shortly before Christmas of 1956, Nebish's Poplar 21 shocked the art community again with its radical disregard of representational lawn ornamentation. The shag was gone, replaced with powerful mounds of sawdust and traffic pylons sliced into bright orange rings. Nebish's pieces, reflecting a violent and destructive love affair between sawblade and bark, captured perfectly the new post-war love of movement. It was all about action, and when critics attached a capital A to it, it became Action, and a movement was born.

Granted, it was a movement of one—if anyone else had tried to join, Nebish would have likely sawed off their legs. Waking the artworld like the sputter of a trusty Stihl breaks the fragile morning calm, Austin Nebish stood in the spotlight alone. "Paul Bunyan of the Hamptons" Nebish dubbed himself, though his studio was in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Nebish worked relentlessly through 1957—his Jersey studio a heady ambience of bourbon, gasoline fumes, disassembled Intelicarb ™ Compensating Carburetors and wood chips. Mark Rothko recalls going downstairs at three in the morning once to tell his new neighbor to call it a day. Initial encounters with Nebish could sometimes be misleading, and despite the fact that a spruce splinter nearly decapitated Rothko, leaving him partially deaf in one ear, he and Nebish eventually became good friends and great admirers of each other's work.

"Nebish could be cruel," Rothko remembers," ... and he could be dangerous. But if you were his friend, and kept about a six foot distance, your chances of being killed were greatly diminished."

Nebish met William DeKooning at a Gas Trimmer Workshop late in 1957 and an immediate friendship was forged. Embarking together on an extraordinary creative period, DeKooning would later call it "their Summer of Malicious Vandalism citations." Over months of weekend drunks in the Connecticut woods, stand after stand of second growth timber disappeared in a haze of gasoline fumes and salty language—DeKooning barking in Dutch, Nebish screaming "Timber" in his manly high-pitched drawl.

Locals who did not want their timber stands ending up in New York Galleries utilized chain-link fencing and ferocious dogs to keep the creative duo at bay. In spite of this, important composed clearings emerged almost daily. Bristling with tension and rife with side-access chainsaw experimentation, Nebish's work achieved a maturity and clarity that was tempered only by the National Guard being called in.

Red Cedar 13 is the most characteristic of his work that summer with DeKooning—bold splays of jagged pulp and boldly-hewn logs retaining their residual bark and lichen. After a night of drunken whittling and name-calling escalated into Nebish's sawing the front tires of DeKooning's car in half, their partnership ended. Along disparate paths, their work forged on, DeKooning creating colored glass orbs on pedestals and Nebish fleeing to the Hamptons to beat an overdue library book rap. Austin had indeed become the Paul Bunyan of the Hamptons.

Nebish's last show at 721 Gallery in May, 1958 marked still another departure: Endtable 7, a violent indictment of popular colonial stylings, fabricated on-site and without protective netting, splintered art critics and public alike. While some described Nebish's Stihl-masticated construction of plywood as "Chaos anchored in Control," others, forced to wear safety goggles, kept away in droves. Endtable 7 echoed America's final divorce from its history—the past was sawdust and chips. After Nebish's 721 show there was no looking back. It would be all forward momentum now, and if you were in a hurry you'd have to eat in your car.

More than fifteen years have passed since Nebish's death. Late for a dentist appointment that fateful afternoon in March, 1960, walking out the door with his waxpaper-wrapped sandwich—Nebish little realized that an entire movement was minutes away from oblivion.

Left untouched by his estate in memorium, Nebish's Hampton studio remains unaltered save for the addition of a petting zoo in the front yard. Wood shavings still covered the floor, his ripped, oil-stained workboots perch on a stool in the corner. On the wall behind them hang workgloves and safety goggles. Discarded bandage tins still litter the floor around Nebish's last unfinished work: a bulky spruce burl out of which the rough hewn lines of a little elf begin to take shape.

One can't help but speculate as to where Nebish would have gone with his art. Was this a harbinger of a return to representationalism—lawn ornamentation purged of irony and sentimentalism? Was it perhaps a Mother's Day present? The answers to these tantalizing questions sadly lost forever, along with with DeKooning's hedge-trimmer which Nebish borrowed—and never gave back.

[ L i P ]

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE TO A FRIEND. CLICK HERE.

Reproduction of material from any LiP pages without written permission is strictly prohibited | Copyright 2002 LiPmagazine.org | info@lipmagazine.org