Eleven Color Photographs (1966/7-70)

I could only get three, but here they are. By Bruce Nauman, my favorite artist.


Waxing Hot


Eating My Words


Self-Portrait as a Fountain

"I think the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the edge where poetry or art occurs," (B. Nauman)

Here, "Make me Think Me" at the Tate Liverpool. And below, a good article by Jasmine Moorhead for the Yale Herald. Very comprehensive.

- - -
MoMA glorifies modernist art of Bruce Nauman
By Jasmine Moorhead

The Bruce Nauman retrospective which opens Sun., Mar. 5, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan will be the third largest in the museum's history, third to Picasso and Matisse - not bad company. That MoMA has put so much energy and emphasis into an artist, especially one who is still alive, is significant. They are recognizing him as a major figure, if not the major figure in contemporary art. Anyone who visits this exhibit will be convinced that the museum is right.

Nauman, born in 1941, first came into recognition in the mid-'60s when he stopped painting and started doing sculpture. Beginning with materials such as fiberglass, latex, and concrete, over the last 30 years, Nauman's art has also experimented with neon, wax, wire, video, and sound. Upon first glance, Nauman might be associated with a recent generation of artists concerned first with the political, the innovative, and the shocking - a group of artists which may derive from his work, but pales in comparison. With any thought or small moment of observation, the viewer realizes that Nauman does not fall into that mold.

It is Nauman's primary aesthetic that carries the strong emotional pull. There is nothing political about it. Its genius is in the one-on-one game it plays with you when you look at it. Rob Storr, the curator of MoMA's department of Painting and Sculpture, in distinguishing Nauman's work from others' less sophisticated efforts in similar directions, said of the viewer, "If they're not puzzled, they're not getting it." Nauman is about puzzles and about the incomplete reconstruction of these puzzles.

Storr, in speaking on the complexity of the Nauman exhibit, justified his statements by noting that Nauman's work is "not obscure in the way people think it is when they hear of it second hand...." How often have pieces of "modern art" been caricatured as simply strange and shocking? "What is it?" they ask, and "Why is it there?" The caption might ask these very questions for Nauman's cartoon of a couple peering up at an enormous box, the triangular equivalent of the Kaaba stone, only in rough wood and slightly smaller. In this very piece ("Yellow Room"), fluorescent yellow lights from inside illuminate the ceiling above. A door, hard at first to locate, allows entrance to this asylum from the museum. The walls inside are white. There is nothing else but you.

Though a piece such as this one is surely about carnal consciousness and its objectification, there is nothing dogmatic about the way Nauman evokes this awareness. He does not pretend to have taught you something profound about yourself. His work is designing and building the sculpture. You and he can only smile because unknowingly, you have entered his world and he has entered yours. It is an equitable relationship, and likewise engaging.

Because of Nauman's fascination with play and puzzles, his concern with the intellectual side of art, and his recognition of chronological, art historical terms, the comparison between Marcel Duchamp and himself is inevitable. Like Duchamp (and Freud - see "Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious") before him, Nauman was entranced by the play on words. One of Nauman's early sculptures is titled "Henry Moore Bound to Fail." The sculpture is a wax over plaster cast of a human back and arms distorted, tied with rope. In Nauman's title, the central word is pivotal - "Henry Moore Bound" and "Bound to Fail." He calls attention to the ambiguityof the disparate associations evoked by this word; bound meaning held together by force, and bound meaning destined. Nauman has created a package which holds both these meanings. That is where the viewer lies, perhaps where Nauman believes humanity lies: in the space between an uncontrollable fate and our pitiful and limited attempts to hold things together.

Nauman, though, seems to have worked through Duchamp quite successfully. At the time, he had never really seen Duchamp's work, although he admitted "the information was just sort of in the air." The lineage is complex, but Nauman's approach is so fresh that he can hardly be called derivative. One of Nauman's "Eleven Color Photographs" (1966-1967/70) is "Self-Portrait as a Fountain," showing Nauman spewing water out of his mouth. This piece, consciously or not, relates to Duchamp's "Fountain" of 1917, a urinal signed and turned upside down. In Nauman's piece, the artist becomes not only the author but the object, the art. Nauman has taken the loaded image of Duchamp, who, close to 50 years before, had chosen and subverted such a loaded image as a man's urinal, and subverted him. Nauman becomes the active object, one that still spews water.

Nauman's work remains a healthy addition to the art world because he never stops believing that he is a sculptor. He is perhaps non-traditional only because of the media which he uses. Kathy Halbreich, the Director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, who organized the exhibit along with Neal Benezra, the chief curator of exhibitions for 20th century painting and sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, emphasized this point about Nauman: "Bruce is a sculptor." And his sculptures are constructions of constructions. "Musical Chairs: Studio Version" combines a metal circle, overlaid by a wooden triangle, and layered in that is a wooden cross. It is all held together by metal wires, suspended from the ceiling. It is what a sculpture should be: interesting from all angles. But it is not just visually interesting; it is fun, it is playful. For suspended in the midst of these shapes are chairs which seem to dance as you circle around this sculpture that hangs at eye level.

Nauman constructs objects at the same time he constructs ideas. Upon viewing "Musical Chairs," one might think of the light fixtures at a Bonanza Steak House which attempt in vain to achieve the effect of a western barroom. At the same time, one remembers kindergarten when the music stops and you are the one left standing. Nauman gives you the time and the visual cues to bring these ideas together, and you realize that a new combination of ideas has created a new arrangement of emotional responses in you.

The art world, in the progressive spirit of art history which modernism has adopted as its chief characteristic, has constantly striven for innovation. It reaches for the original, but often comes up with only novelties. But Nauman's work is strangely personal and circular - from the viewer to the neon sign or the fiberglass maze and back. Somehow, Nauman has remembered that the art must convey some piece of his humanity to the viewer or they (the viewer and the artist) are never going to meet. He does this very successfully. The exhibit of Nauman's work underlines his desire, if not to construct or create, at least to hold things together.

One of the most endearing things about Nauman is his ability to make us laugh at the frustration of the human condition. One of his sculptures (some might call it an installation, but I would like to avoid that term for the narrowness of its connotations) is a room with four color monitors and two video projections. You are well aware of this room before you actually see it. You hear the moans and groans, shrieks and yells from around the corner. Upon entering, you see clowns on all the monitors and screens. They are in different positions, but the common theme is their inability to complete their act. One cannot get off the floor; one cannot pull a broom off the ceiling where it is stuck. Nauman calls it "Clown Torture," but you laugh because they are clowns, and they make us laugh by assuming our own frustrations. Failure with anyone else would be agonizing, but with clowns this failure is their premise. I did not see anyone come out of the room who did not wear a slightly puzzled smirk on their faces. I laughed aloud, though mostly at myself. The Museum of Modern Art has indeed constructed a wonderful exhibit. No description can do either the artist or the show credit. You must go and hear the sounds and see the videos and walk around the sculptures yourself. Like any exhibit it has its high points and its low points. (Unfortunately, I found that the weakest pieces were also the most recent.) You should go, for not only will you remember him, but history will as well.