Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana on December 6, 1941, is an American sculptor and performance artist who works with other various media including painting, photography, video, and installation.  During the early 1970’s, he was regarded as one of the most provocative and innovative contemporary artists of the time.  He finds inspiration from speech and simple, humdrum activities.

After high school, Nauman attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison and pursued Mathematics and Music in 1960.  He changed his major to art and graduated in 1964 with a BFA.  He then moved west and joined the new MFA program at the University of California, Davis, where he studied under contemporary artists William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson, among others, and was an assistant to American painter, Wayne Thiebaud.  His work concentrated exclusively on sculpture, and he was exposed to experimental art while he was there.  Nauman ran a solo exhibit at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, gaining him praise and immediate attention from the art community. 

While in school, he worked in collaboration with Robert Nelson and William Allan on film projects recording simple tasks like Fishing for Asian Carp and Smoking.  He graduated in 1966 with his MFA and began teaching as a part-time instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute until 1968, travelling back east and signing a contract with Leo Castelli, a highly-reputed art dealer in New York, (person to first sell Andy Warhol’s soup can paintings).  That same year, he also had his first solo exhibition in Europe.

Nauman began experimenting with many different materials like clay, fiberglass, and neon tubing instead of traditional sculpting materials.  Avoiding the highly minimalist, steely style that was becoming popular in New York, he chose to remain close to Eva Hesse’s line of materials, who also worked with fiberglass and other unconventional sculpture mediums like latex, string, and plastics.  Both exploited the way the materials hung, sagged, bunched or fell.

His simple, yet profound epiphany: “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art,” explains his videos that film mundane, repetitive tasks. One of his videos, Stamping in the Studio, shows him recorded upside down, stomping back and forth across his studio.

He became part of the Process Art movement, where art became more about the activity than the product.  Nauman believes that “every human activity, no matter how commonplace, is worthy of being examined.  And he does just that, with his other video pieces like Setting a Good Corner (1999), where he laboriously constructs a fence one corner fence-post at a time, and Bouncing in the Corner (1968), an hour recording of him leaning back into a corner in his studio and bouncing back into a standing position.  The way he structures his video pieces can be traced to composers Steve Reich, La Monte Young, John Cage, and Philip Glass who Nauman admits taking particularly liking to.  He liked how some of their works are just ongoing, “you could come and go and the work was there… you could go back and visit whenever you wanted to,” he told PBS documentary Art21.  He describes his endlessly looped videos as having the static presence of sculptures.

His work often travels a fine line between humor and pain. Nauman is very provocative with his pieces. He controls his viewers and manipulates them to an uncomfortable extent. In his Clown Torture (1987) installation, Nauman dresses up like a clown and records himself in unnerving situations. One sequence shows a clown screaming at an unknown antagonist. And another narrates a story without end: “Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off; who was left? Repeat. Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence,” and each time the clown’s face changes expression (happy, scared, mad, etc.), showing his growing frustration in being unable to finish the story. It’s torture not only for the clowns, but for the viewer also, who is observing the absurd insanity. The viewer is put in an unnerving spot, the feeling of being interrogated as he or she is tortured by the hysteric videos of clown torturing.

Other pieces also point to the psychological and private elements in Nauman’s theme of work, like one of his first neon works, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967). Inspired by a beer sign in a grocery store, it displays the text in a spiral blue and red neon tubing. It was hung in a window facing the street. the viewers (in this case, pedestrians) are most probable to dismiss the sign as art, yet as they chance upon reading it, they are confronted with a discerning, personal opinion in an unusually public space. The effect on the pedestrian is psychological and private, despite the piece’s material of being neon, which is commonly associated with flashy public marquees.

Between 1966 and 1985, Nauman produces a body of work that employs neon lights and words. His interest in the inherent problems in speech is especially evident in his neon works as he plays with the text like the neon Run From Fear- Fun From Rear. His play on words is influenced by Irish, writer, dramatist, and poet, Samuel Beckett, who’s work often provides a dark and bleak vision on humanity, with whom’s philosophy Nauman seems to agree with. His text neon signs, like all of his other work, is meant to be deconstructed and analyzed down to the psychological level of the subconscious. His piece Malice (1980), is a white and red neon sign, measuring 7”x29”, with two words both spelling “MALICE.” They are joined back to back. The front “MALICE” is in white, and the “MALICE” behind in red, is mirrored and spelled backwards. However, there is more to the piece than simply, just the word malice. In the moment the viewer first observes the sign, there is naturally a sense of confusion, at the same time there is a psychological event, a sense of mental busyness, a slight one.

Perhaps it’s the combination of it being in neon tubing, and the word malice having some subtle connection to the sometimes derogatory connotation advertisements give off, especially sleazy neon signs, or the flickering/absent letter that displays negligence on the owner’s part; or perhaps the word MALICE purposely placed and hidden behind in a disoriented fashion alludes to the phrase “malice behind...” (ex. There was malice behind the mayor’s murder), in which the colors also push further this idea of the evil hiding behind good, or good disguising the evil. (White light in our culture is often regarded as innocent and pure, while red is associated with blood, violence, and evil.) All these combinations and interaction between said factors communicate so much more than just the simple word “malice.”

According to French philosopher, Jacque Derrida, founder of the Deconstructionist Theory, words are not as entirely truthful and whole as we perceive them to be.

The world simply doesn’t work by our polarized perspective we so much believe in, like there is only “good” and there is only “bad.”  The former is defined by the latter and latter is defined by the former.  Similarly, there is only black, there is only white... there is only straight, and there is only curved.

What is not black, must be white, etc.  Language, as Derrida, Nauman, and others believe, is not the perfect medium to express the human psyche/world.  Nauman explores the void that our language forces us to dismiss: the world in between the extreme polarities.  Good.  Bad.

His investigation of the inherent problems in speech, creates a psychological experience almost indescribable in words.  Again, his command over his audience is evident, but subtle like the way he orchestrates the viewers in his audio-installation piece, Raw Materials (2004), at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

(An enormous, invisible sculpture, using sound to fill space.)  The room is 500 feet long, 115 feet high, and 75 feet wide, and as you walk down the vast space, you hear Nauman and various other speakers from the walls, from one voice to the next.  The result is an individual experience, combined with a collective one.  The boundary of what is your space, his/her space, is blurred, and liminality seems present, yet not present.  Some of the voices scream, some of the voices tell jokes, some scare you, some soothe... everybody moves in the voices.  When they are switched off, everyone stops.  The viewer is the integral piece of Nauman’s kinetic sculpture.

His psychological games with the audience are something I can relate with in my own work, where I constantly strive to affect the viewer down to the subconscious level.  Like with Nauman’s art, the experience I attempt to force on the viewer is almost indescribable because it’s so rooted in our mind, past our exterior conscious reasoning and objectivity, and down into the pool of raw emotions: the stuff that makes us human.  It’s like listening to music.

Listening to a song that makes you feel unreasonably joyful, gloomy, or relaxed, or perhaps just a song that captures your mood, is a transcendental moment.

It goes beyond our human comprehension. I want to create that experience.  All that is a recent epiphany, however, and before I arrived at my art college my purpose as an artist was less profound.  I came to college as an Illustration major because I wanted to recreate the world I lived in when I was younger.  I wanted to have control over the world that captured my imagination.  Cartoons.  Animations.  Video games.  They were all stories, entire universes for me to get lost in.  A good drawing could say more than a book. Images made more sense to me than words.  So naturally, I took Illustration, thinking it was the only way to relive those experiences as a boy.  But, after almost two semesters of being exposed to “experimental art,” I begin to question my values as an artist, as demonstrated with the recent epiphany of my desire to create a transcendental moment for the viewer and myself.  In a way -- as a child losing his senses from the physical world for another that only exists in the mind -- that sense of journeying to a different place is very similar to that mystical moment when you listen to music.  (I guess that’s what you could call the magic of childhood.)  So perhaps my way of gaining that response from my work is simulating the source of what caused it in my youth in the first place: stories in images.