I have seen so far only one art work of
Bruce Nauman, a multi--video installation,
Art Make-Up. It was on view at
Hirshhorn, and it exercised a strange effect on me: an artist was preparing his make-up. It was very simple, yet powerful. The videos were developing slowly their story: the condition of the artist, what is truth in him, what is lie; who we are in life, just mannequins, preparing every day to play some bulshit of a role.
Newsweek:
Peter Plagens (see also his other chronicles in
Newsweek) about
Bruce Nauman:
Some people say that
Bruce Nauman is the most influential American artist since
Andy Warhol, but when
Nauman arrived at art school way back in 1964, he had almost no idea where he was headed. Fresh from being a math and science student back in Wisconsin, the tall, laconic young
Nauman painted the most mundane of subjects: landscapes.
I thought art was just something I'd learn how to do, and then I would just do it, he says. He'd landed almost by chance at the
University of California, Davis, home to the most rebellious, irreverent artist-teachers around. (One of them, ceramist
Robert Arneson, would have his officially commissioned monument to assassinated San Francisco Mayor
George Moscone rejected in 1981 because it depicted the
Twinkies from the assassin's
Twinkies defense right there on its pedestal.) The faculty gave
Nauman an empty room in a temporary building and told him simply to go to work.
I knew then, he says,
that I'd have to start out every day and figure out what art was going to be.
From then on, with each and every work he's made,
Nauman has started back at square one, as if neither he nor anyone else had created any previous art to refer to. One time he cast a part of a female body, from fingertip up the arm to the lips, and called the resulting wall sculpture
From Hand to Mouth (1967).
From Hand to Mouth, 1967
Another time, he made
Green Light Corridor (1971): two high free-standing walls, illuminated from above with bilious fluorescent light, and placed less than two feet apart to test viewers' tolerance of claustrophobia. (Back in the day,
Nauman's corridor was impossible to transport in one piece. So a collector instead paid about $10,000 for a license to rebuild it—at his own expense.)
Green Light Corridor, 1970
painted wallboard and fluorescent light fixtures with green lights, dimensions variable
On big public projects, such as filling the enormous
Turbine Hall at the
Tate Modern museum in London in 2004, he's used sound, including a menacing recorded voice saying,
Get out of this room, get out of my mind.
Turbine Hall
For the
Venice Biennale, where
Nauman, 67, is the official U.S. representative this year, he has wrapped the top of the modest, banklike American pavilion with words such as lust and prudence, denoting various vices and virtues blinking on and off in a rainbow frieze of neon.
Today, there's hardly a tyro's installation or video or ad hoc sculpture that can't be traced back to something
Nauman made in the 1960s or '70s. What separates
Nauman from his hundreds of imitators is his deep-down, plain old hand-to-paper artistic talent, which shows up in one form or another in most everything he does.
Nauman draws constantly, from loose diagrams through precise linear renderings to big, expressionist architectural fantasies. But he probably could not have become this influential if he hadn't entered the art world from left field and always remained a bit of an outsider. When he moved from the Bay Area to L.A.'s bigger, more energetic art world in 1969, he set up shop not down by Venice Beach, where all the boho--glamorous
L.A. look artists were, but in the relative backwater of Pasadena. Still, he was given a retrospective at the
L.A. County Museum of Art at age 31—where his father, an engineer, said to him,
You know, you ought to have labels that explain what these things are all about. Then, after he'd become an international art star by showing with such hot galleries as
Leo Castelli in New York and
Konrad Fischer in Germany, he opted not for Manhattan but New Mexico.
My feeling was I would not go to another city—there was no point in Seattle or Houston or Dallas or something like that, he said once.
And so we decided to come here.
Nowadays,
Nauman lives with his wife, the painter
Susan Rothenberg, on a working horse ranch 25 miles outside Santa Fe, in Galisteo. (
I've got to go out and feed this old mule, he says one day before leaving for the
Biennale, his black cowboy hat propped on his head.
She only has a few teeth left, so I have to keep her in a special pen where the horses won't come and eat the feed.)
Nauman's love of private time in the studio—which is frequently burdened with artist's block caused by trying to redefine art, ex nihilo, every day—prompted him to lay down some conditions concerning his participation in Venice. (It's been rumored with every
Biennale over the last 10 that Nauman has turned down the invitation.) First, he told the American curators that he wasn't going to fill the pavilion with a slew of new art. Second, he said that the major new work he'd do had to be another chance-taking piece, installed outside the cluster of pavilions in the
Giardini, to which the official national artists usually confine themselves. He wants to reach out into the city of Venice and capture an audience beyond the black-clad,
Ermenegildo Zegna–suited tribes who usually show up in droves for the
Biennale—though given the state of the economy, they'll likely be fewer in number this year (or at least dressed down a little).
Vices and Virtues
So the
U.S. Pavilion will feature the
Vices and Virtues neon, plus an austere
themed retrospective of just 15 key pieces from 40 years of
Nauman's art. But the work that will have everybody talking—or, rather, listening—will be a sound piece of as yet undisclosed content. Installed in two versions (Italian and English) in two Venetian universities (the economics-intense
Università Ca' Foscari and that incubator of ultramodern architecture and design, the
Università Iuav di Venezia a Tolentini), both will consist of a series of flat-panel speakers suspended in midair along both sides of capacious academic rooms. The soundtrack is being kept a secret until the speakers are switched on for opening day, but we do know it is about
Nauman being alone in his studio trying to figure out—you guessed it—what to do next.
(Contemporary Art)Labels: Bruce Nauman
