It’s actually a very delicate casting process; you could pick up fingerprints in the dust with it. N. … In a lot of the early work I was concerned with ideas about inside and outside and front and back—how to turn them around and confuse them. Well, first I filmed it. As Nauman explained, in works such as White Breathing he was engaging in what he described as 'examinations of physical and psychological response to simple or even oversimplified situations which can yield clearly experiencable phenomena' (Bruce Nauman interview with Joan Simon, 'Breaking the Silence' Art in America 76(9), September 1988, p. 14 quoted in N. Benezra, 'Surveying Nauman', ed. From my days at the University of Wisconsin, the teachers I remember were older guys—they wouldn’t let women into teaching easily—and they were all WPA guys. The same ideas and procedures, the same kind of image, whether something was suspended in water, in earth, in air. The Last Studio Piece, which was made in the late ’70s when I was still living in Pasadena, was made from parts of two other pieces—plaster semicircles that look like a cloverleaf and a large square—and I finally just stuck them together. B ruce Nauman is telling me a story from his childhood. One of the men said, “Tell us a story, Jack.” And Jack said, “It was a dark and stormy night …. You couldn’t sit in it because of that wedge of grease or fat or whatever it was—it filled up the space you would sit in. Something interesting happened to them every single day, or at least it seemed that way to me.” This is a typically oblique story of Nauman’s. Or in Man Ray, who also interests me. They were socialists and they had points to make that were not only moral and political, but also ethical. Anger and frustration are two very strong feelings of motivation for me. Do you know who he was? One of the men said, ‘Tell us a story, Jack.’ And Jack said, ‘It was a dark and stormy night. That kid doesn’t get to play anymore, has nothing to do, has to stand in the corner or whatever. I’m not sure. SIMON  Nevertheless, many of your works take as their starting point very specific children’s games. Learn about The Broad Collection artist Bruce Nauman. You could see things you don’t normally see—or think about—on people’s skin. But then it’s repeated three more times: the man and woman exchange roles, then the scene is played by two men and then by two women. While making it, he was also reading the journal of the 1803 expedition – led by Meriweather Lewis and William Clark – to what became the north-western US. How do you organize that to present it as art? I’d already had lunch. What I tend to do is see something, then remake it and remake it and remake it and try every possible way of remaking it. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. NAUMAN  No, I don’t mean that it was simple to do the work. In the 1986 video work Violent Incident, a smartly dressed couple are at a table set for cocktails and dinner – but the date soon descends into a vicious brawl. Different kinds of anger and frustration.”, It is not all dark, though: seeing Nauman’s art is to encounter a curious, questing mind, one that has restlessly experimented, over a four-decade career, with performance, film, video, sound, music, drawing, text and sculpture. Chromogenic print, 20 1/16 × 23 15/16 in. He is a titan of the artworld whose work can be savage, prescient or slapstick. The artist, about to be the subject of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern, is interested in the moment a social ritual or game pivots into cruelty. They are moved by beautiful things and they see that as their role: to provide or make beautiful things for other people. But is this it? But it just connects up in a strange sort of way with my more recent work, since over the past several years I have been involved with both the idea of death and dying and the idea of masking the figure. SIMON  Recently, you’ve returned to video for the first time since the late ’60s. It seemed very straightforward to use all those different ways of expressing ideas or presenting material. “If someone hit him with a snowball when we were walking to school, he wouldn’t just throw a snowball back, he’d attack. But it was very hard for me to give up that much control. The images are aggressive, the characters are physically aggressive, the language is abusive. I didn’t want to have to go through all that every time. SIMON  No, I didn’t. There were a lot of underground filmmakers there at that time and I knew a bunch of those guys. In recent years, he has returned to these early works, rethinking them, expanding them. If you don’t want people to see that self, you put on makeup. American, born 1941. Then there’s Washing Hands Abnormal, his 1996 video of hands being forcefully soaped for nearly an hour. NAUMAN  You mean the piece that said, “Get out of the room, get out of my mind”? Either way it was a very powerful piece. Production still from the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 episode, Identity. If I can manage to get outside of a problem a little bit and watch myself having a hard time, then I can see what I’m going to do—it makes it possible. If I’m persistent enough, I get back to where I started. “I’ve always had overlapping ways of going about my work,” Bruce Nauman once remarked. The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is crime and thrillers, John le Carré being a favourite. Maybe the morality I sense in Man Ray has to do with the fact that while he made his living as a fashion photographer, his art works tended to be jokes—stupid jokes. But game-playing doesn’t involve any responsibility—any moral responsibility—and I think that being an artist does involve moral responsibility. Work from 1965 to 1972, catalogue of the touring exhibition organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1972, p. 31f. Their sparing form was dictated by necessity as much as anything. They cover a wide range of topics related to the interests Nauman pursued in his sculptures, performances, and videos: casts and impressions, morality and ethics, puns and jokes, and more. But it didn’t help me to make the piece. But it seems that rather than alluding to this melancholic or tragic side of the clown persona the video emphasizes the different types of masks, the historically specific genres of clowns or clown costumes. 3 Green, No. It was just supposed to be a visual pun, or a picture of a visual pun. The first one to be excluded always feels terrible. Then I added the bit about having an erection or ejaculation when you’re hanged. Bruce Nauman’s wildly influential, relentlessly imitated work explores the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure. Pranks … Falls, Pratfalls + Sleights of Hand (Clean Version). Of course, you put on makeup before you film in the movies. Once the figure is complete, the whole picture starts to be recreated again. And he laughs. You gave that up very early on. It is true that he is politely evasive about the art: for him, it seems, meaning is for the viewer to find, not for the artist to offer. Then, the piece was installed with the speakers built into the walls, so that when you went into this small room—ten feet square or something—you could hear the sound, but there was no one there. I started with four colors. Then, there’s the history of the unhappy clown: they’re anonymous, they lead secret lives. The footage for the seven large projections that constitute 2001’s Mapping the Studio II with Color Shift, Flip, Flop, & Flip/Flop (Fat Chance John Cage) was gathered overnight, the equipment set running while the artist retreated. This stirs another old memory. I’m not sure where that belief comes from. You can feel pushed away by his work, alienated. That was the first time I used a hanging element. Also, when you think about vaudeville clowns or circus clowns, there is a lot of cruelty and meanness. Standing outside and looking at how something gets done, or doesn’t get done, is really fascinating and curious. People wouldn’t put up with it, it’s too mean. The work of this 78-year-old titan of the art world, whose influence on younger artists is inescapable and pervasive, has an uncanny way of seeming forever new – and in a dark time, the work feels dark, too. Known for his explorations and use of themes like time, space, sound, death, and language, Nauman has been a driving force of contemporary art since he first emerged. It’s a dangerous situation and I think that what I was doing, and what I am going to do and what most of us probably do, is to use the tension between what you tell and what you don’t tell as part of the work. I think he may have hung it on the wall. 5 Articles. I can see a connection to the Art Makeup film we talked about, but why did you use such theatrical clowns? “If someone hit him with a snowball when we were walking to school, he wouldn’t just throw a snowball back, he’d attack. Then he just quit. It is a story that seems to chime with Nauman’s art, where the line between peaceable interaction and sudden violence often seems terrifyingly thin. It seemed that if I didn’t think of myself as a painter, then it would be possible to continue. As a result, your pieces accrue all sorts of meaning over time. In that sense, the early work, which seems to have all kinds of materials and ideas in it, seemed very simple to make because it wasn’t coming from looking at sculpture or painting. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat.” We’re putting the interview online to mark the occasion of “Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts,” a comprehensive retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through February 18, 2019, and at MoMA PS1 through February 25. I finally realized that the most straightforward way to present the idea would be to cast that entire section of the body. Subscribe today and save up to 33%! In games like football or baseball cheating is allowed to a certain extent. NAUMAN  I was interested in the logic and structure of math and especially how you could turn that logic inside out. Simon published substantial excerpts from the conversation in our September 1988 issue. It was a Shaker idea, you know. You could walk in at any time, leave, come back again and the figure was still asleep, or whatever. I worked with the most accurate casting material I could find, something called moulage. NAUMAN  Each clown has to tell a story while supporting himself on one leg with the other leg crossed, in such a way that it looks like he is imitating sitting down. When Lenny played well, he hit you hard and he kept going until he finished. But it turns out that this moulage is a very old, traditional kind of material, and was often used this way. That’s part of the content of the work—and also the genesis of the piece. They are similar to readymades. Bruce Nauman, Anthony Trollope and Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride: Emilie Gordenker on her biggest cultural influences The art historian and director … The flatness itself was another kind of mask. I was reading V.S. SIMON  Do you see your work as part of a continuum with other art or other artists? ‘To keep me busy’, he replied. And I went back and forth a couple of times. In casting, I always like the parting lines and the seams—things that help to locate the structure of an object, but in the finished sculpture usually get removed. We all sat back down and discussed what my role might be.”. NAUMAN  In that case, the cast was of someone else, not of myself as has generally been assumed—but that doesn’t really matter. It’s like a print I did that says, “Pay attention motherfuckers” [1973). I first made From Hand to Mouth as a drawing—actually there were two or three different drawings—just the idea of drawing “from hand to mouth.” But I couldn’t figure out exactly how to make the drawing. I had no idea that this was a profession. Naipaul’s stories about South America and Central America, including “The Return of Eva Peron” and especially “The Killings in Trinidad”—that’s the one that made the biggest impression on me. He’s still producing plenty of new work, including Nature Morte, a new 3D scan of his studio on show in his New York gallery, Sperone Westwater. It still puzzles me how I made decisions in those days about what was possible and what wasn’t. Get our latest stories in the feed of your favorite networks. NAUMAN  I did some pieces that started out just being visual puns. My original idea was that the chair would swing and bang into the sides of the triangle and make lots of noise. Again, it becomes something you can’t get to. The scripting, having the characters act out these roles and the repetition all build on that aggressive tension. One thing which hadn’t occurred to me when I was making the film was that when you take a solid color of makeup—no matter what color—it flattens the image of the face on film. NAUMAN  I think about Lenny Tristano a lot. Visit the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim Museum in NYC, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the late 1960s, he made a group of video pieces, including the self-explanatory Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square. In part it just comes from growing up where I grew up and from my parents and family. He’d get ’em down on the ground and pound on him.”. It’s a way of structuring something so that you don’t have to make a story. But basically I couldn’t function as a painter. It’s less there, but still important, in Duchamp. SIMON  The tenor of that withholding—actually controlling the content or subject—changed significantly when you stopped performing and began to allow the viewer to participate in some of your works. This seems considerably more aggressive than the earlier work, though the content is still covert, an extremely private meditation. ” ’ ”. As part of Falls, Pratfalls + Sleights of Hand (Clean Version), the final work in the show dating from 1993, a stuntman tumbles to the ground again and again. He really taught you to let them figure things out on their own, not trying to be in control all the time. I’m thinking of the architectural installations, in particular the very narrow corridor pieces. Sunsets, flowers, landscapes: these kinds of things don’t move me to do anything. We want to hear from you! It’s really stuck in my mind. At first, I thought of using a chair that would somehow become the figure: torturing a chair and hanging it up or strapping it down, something like that. There didn’t seem to be any problem with using different kinds of materials—shifting from photographs to dance to performance to videotapes. (50.96 × 60.8 cm). As a statement, it’s hokey, ridiculous – but perhaps, on some level, true. NAUMAN  I know there are artists who function in relation to beauty—who try to make beautiful things. You know, it’s so angry it scares people. And the sound followed you around after you left it. And I think that it is one of those pieces that I can go back to. Bruce Nauman’s work functions as an eerie societal litmus test. Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up: No. . He’s on a lot of the best early bebop records. The jester and the Baroque type are the oldest, but they are pretty recognizable types. To present yourself through your work is obviously part of being an artist. Did you know that? Slapstick, pranks, slips: these are recurring tropes in Nauman’s art. And it’s really a frightening piece. Then I would stop the tape. He turns around and yells at her—calls her names. Video by Bruce Nauman. .”. But artists are always interested in some level of communication. SIMON  The whole idea of the visual puns, works like Henry Moore Bound to Fail and From Hand to Mouth, complicates this notion of how we look at an object. SIMON  Sound is a medium you’ve explored since your earliest studio performances, films and audiotapes. I haven’t heard it for a few years, but the last time I did I was impressed with how strong it was. Bruce Nauman is an uncompromising, physical, and confrontational artist and Eat/War is a characteristic political challenge that alternates staccato flashes in vivid neon colors of green and red. But the title hints at its subject matter and begins to explicate its intense emotional and political presence. So there were a lot of people who thought art had a function beyond being beautiful—that it had a social reason to exist. “I’ve never been able to stick to one thing.”1 For more than 50 years, he has worked in every conceivable artistic medium, dissolving established genres and inventing new ones in the process. You are given all the material and at some point it all locks together. In this interview, Bruce Nauman talks about how he came to use stairs as a recurring motif in his work. NAUMAN  Well, it’s funny you should ask that, because not long ago I read this book in which a character goes to funeral homes or morgues, and puts this moulage stuff on people and makes plaster casts—death masks—for their families. There was a period in American art, in the ’60s, when artists presented parts of works, so that people could arrange them. Some artists need lots, some don’t. What does it mean to you? “I’ve never quite figured that out,” says Nauman. Three men were sitting around a campfire. I’m wondering what your thoughts were when you were making this piece? Bruce Nauman. The triangle became a barrier to approaching the chair from the outside. When I ask about the bleakness of his work, he says: “I remember someone coming to the studio and saying, ‘You must be very depressed.’ I said that I didn’t think so, otherwise I wouldn’t be making work. In this case though, we’re talking about a big steel sculpture hanging from the ceiling, with the chair isolated and suspended upside-down in the middle of the steel barrier. Nauman, Bruce, 1941-. I’m curious about the thought process that went into conceiving those works. So when I did the earliest neon pieces, they were intended to be seen through the window one way and from the inside another way, confusing the message by reversing the image. It’s just an awful thing to have to do. Is this the human condition? About twenty years ago—this was in ‘66 and ‘67—I was living in San Francisco, and I had access to a lot of film equipment. Bruce Nauman finds inspiration in the activities, speech, and materials of everyday life. You, I, one, we can’t make contact with them. The most comprehensive collection to date of the artist Bruce Nauman's writings plus all of his major interviews from 1965 to 2001. But the problem for me was to find a way to restrict the situation so that the performance turned out to be the one I had in mind. The neon “lines” flash on and off in a programmed sequence. “Usually I am just sitting reading in it with my feet up.” Then, after lunch, he says: “If I go back to the studio, I fall asleep in the chair for a while.”. SIMON  That’s sort of the subliminal version of a very aggressive sound piece you used to install invisibly in empty rooms, isn’t it? NAUMAN  I do see art that way. On the other hand, that’s what’s interesting about making art, and why it’s worth doing: it’s never going to be the same, there is no method. Unsettling … video work Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning). With my version of the hanged man, first of all, I took away the part about being allowed to participate. I begin to see a part that I hadn’t considered, that becomes more important, and that develops into an offshoot.”. SIMON  An early example of masking the figure—your figure, to be precise—was your 1969 film Art Makeup. It didn’t look right, so I ended up raising it. So with Violent Incident, which is shown on twelve monitors at the same time, the sound works differently for each installation. You didn’t get any introduction, you didn’t get any tail—you just got full intensity for two minutes or twenty minutes or whatever. “When I got there, Johns was having lunch with someone. Then I made the wax cast, which became very super-realistic—hyper-realistic. That piece is still amazingly powerful to me. Both what’s inside and what’s outside determine our physical, physiological and psychological responses—how we look at an object. All Rights reserved. It would be like taking the middle out of Coltrane—just the hardest, toughest part of it. Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) creatorOf: Nauman, Bruce, 1941-. At one museum, when it was in the middle of the show, you heard the sound before you actually got to the piece. In the half century of his public career, he has given only a handful of interviews. In 1981, when I was making South American Triangle, I had been thinking about having something hanging for quite a long time. The percussive rhythm of Bouncing in a Corner, No 1, a 1968 video of the artist repeatedly falling backwards into a corner of his studio, feels uncomfortably close to a metaphor for the monotonous futility of pandemic life. Pacing around, for example. But of course you do have to continually rediscover and re-decide, and it’s awful. SIMON  There seems to be something particularly ominous about your use of chairs—both in this and other works. I managed to stand myself back up, and it was as though nothing had happened. If I stop and try to look at how I got the last piece done, it doesn’t help me with the next one. Bruce Nauman in New Mexico, Alec Soth, 2018, NY Times . In any case, it was a chair that was pretending it was a chair—it didn’t work. NAUMAN  “It was a dark and stormy night. You could make neon signs, you could make written pieces, you could make jokes about parts of the body or casting things, or whatever. And since everybody was broke, I could rent pretty good 16mm equipment for $5 or $6 a day—essentially the cost of gas to bring it over. On the one hand, they translate words or phrases into concrete form—in a sense literalizing them. For several decades, Bruce Nauman has led a generation of artists less interested in aesthetic concerns than in how art carries meaning. SIMON  In trying to capture that sort of intensity over the past twenty or so years you’ve worked in just about every medium: film, video, sound, neon, installation, performance, photography, holography, sculpture, drawing—but not painting. The chairs didn’t have to be on the floor to function. NAUMAN  I got interested in the idea of the clown first of all because there is a mask, and it becomes an abstracted idea of a person. The World's Premier Art Magazine since 1913. Wisconsin was one of the last socialist states, and in the ’50s, when I lived there and went to high school there, Milwaukee still had a socialist mayor. NAUMAN  I think there is a need to present yourself. It was conducted for the 1988 documentary Four Artists: Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse, Bruce, Nauman, Susan Rothenberg. “The reason he liked them is – and this isn’t always the case, but it is true in Agatha Christie especially – all the information is used. From the inside, of course, it was backwards. Bruce Nauman started using photography around 1966, in part following his experience that year of the work of the American-born Surrealist photographer Man Ray at the LA County Museum of Art. The circularity is also a lot like La Monte Young’s idea about music. There was also the idea that if I was in the studio, whatever I was doing was art. through more than 40 works, the exhibition at tate modern — simply titled ‘bruce nauman’ — explores the distinctive themes that have preoccupied nauman during his 50-year career. So, when the Xs swing or the chair swings, they bang into each other and actually make noise—make music. Well, I’d made a number of works that had to do with triangles, like rooms in different shapes. NAUMAN  It’s similar with the neon pieces that have transformers, buzzing and clicking and what not; in some places I’ve installed them, people are disturbed by these sounds. At some point in the nineteenth century, a mathematician—I can’t remember his name—proved it can’t be done. For instance, the Hanged Man neon piece [1985] derives from the children’s spelling game. You just happen to come in at the part he’s playing that day. That was all you got. Of course, there is a kind of logic and structure in art-making that you can see as game playing. Walking into a dark room at the PS1 segment of the Bruce Nauman retrospective, one comes across a simple black-and-white video of the artist combing his pubic hair. On the other hand, they are essentially linguistic plays, which means abstracting them. —Eds. The takes vary because at some point the clown gets tired and falls over. Sorted by date published ... Interview; Antoine Catala and Dan Graham The two artists discuss pleasure and participatory viewership in their work, and how each is linked to opposing qualities of discomfort and alienation. , another sort of discipline too by his work in NYC, part a. Up fingerprints in the half century of his routine, Nauman enjoyed reading and. Of sounds in the back of it to make the piece about what was possible and ’! Be possible to continue Whitney Museum of American art but game-playing doesn ’ t do that in the window was! 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