Bruce Nauman

Disappearing Acts
Bruce Nauman

Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals. 1966
Disappearing Acts

Collection of Various Flexible Materials Separated by Layers of Grease with Holes the Size of My Waist and Wrists. 1966
Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

From Hand to Mouth. 1967

Edited by Kathy Halbreich
with Isabel Friedli, Heidi Naef,
Magnus Schaefer, and Taylor Walsh

Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room. 1968

Contents

12 Foreword Maja Oeri

14 Foreword Glenn D. Lowry

22 Disappearing Acts Appear Kathy Halbreich

34 Selected Exhibition History Taylor Walsh

106 Deceptive Practice Jeffrey Weiss

116 Positions Ralph Lemon

124 Photography from the Studio to the Moon Roxana Marcoci

136 Resistances Suzanne Hudson

144 White Male/Black Balls Nicolás Guagnini

150 “Here is Every” Liz Kotz

162 Neon Sign, None Sing Glenn Ligon

168 Frames and Repetitions: Neons as Moving Pictures Ute Holl

174 Dilemmas of Visibility Magnus Schaefer

188 “Two Kinds of Information” Felicity D. Scott

198 Back in the Saddle Thomas Beard

204 The Space under the Chair Catherine Lord

210 Playing the Game Martina Venanzoni

220 Disquiet Color Briony Fer

230 The Pratfall Effect Rachel Harrison

238 To Come Undone Taylor Walsh

252 Diagramming Nauman in Seven Parts Julia Keller

312 Checklist of the Exhibition

322 Works Illustrated for Reference

324 Selected Bibliography Compiled by Stephan E. Hauser

336 Index

344 Acknowledgments

348 Contributors

354 Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art

Audio-Video Underground Chamber. 1972–74

Foreword Meticulously tailored to the different spaces
in Basel and New York, the exhibition offers visi-
tors distinct experiences. The Schaulager’s Chief
Curator, Heidi Naef, has brilliantly headed up our
team in Switzerland, showing enormous sensitivity
The Schaulager houses the collection of the Emanuel to the work’s challenging requirements in her com-
Hoffmann Foundation, which was established in pelling installation plan. Kathy, Magnus Schaefer,
1933 by my grandmother Maja Sacher. Dedicated and Taylor Walsh have done the same for the instal-
to the care and study of contemporary art, the lations in New York. The publication, designed by
facility also hosts a vast exhibition space. Although Joseph Logan with Katy Nelson, has been produced
my grandmother had no contact with the founding under the thoughtful supervision of Isabel Friedli,
ladies of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, our head of publications. As always, the exhibition
she shared their dedication to the art of the present, and catalogue are indebted to the passion and
and established a collection that has grown steadily intensity invested in the project by every member
since 1933. of our small staff. I thank our equally passionate
Working together in the early 1970s, the Kunst- editors, David Frankel and Suzanne Schmidt, and
museum Basel and the Emanuel Hoffmann Found- an excellent team of translators.
ation purchased their first works by the young Nauman’s wonderful longtime studio manager,
American artist Bruce Nauman. Over the years, Juliet Myers, and his collaborators Bruce Hamilton
we have jointly acquired one of the world’s most and Susanna Carlisle have provided crucial support
important bodies of Nauman’s work. Although the in the planning phase and throughout the weeks of
Foundation’s bylaws require it to collect art of the installing his technically challenging work.
immediate present that has yet to be recognized I deeply appreciate the generosity and enthu-
by a larger public, Nauman has been a focus of siasm of the lenders who have agreed to part with
our interest for over forty-five years, for the simple their precious and often fragile works.
reason that he has always been indisputably con- My most heartfelt thanks go to Bruce Nauman
temporary, consistently creating thought-provoking himself, who allowed us to proceed with the project,
artworks that surprise, disturb, and inspire us. accompanied us every step of the way, studied the
When I became president of the Emanuel floor plans, gave us vital input, and, most exciting of
Hoffmann Foundation, in 1995, and even more so all, created the astonishing new work Contrapposto
when I established the Schaulager, in 2003, I was Split (2017), to be showcased here for the first time.
determined to honor our long-standing commitment
to Nauman with a major retrospective. For several —Maja Oeri, President
years the project was held up for one reason or Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel
another, until at long last, six years ago, MoMA
Director Glenn Lowry signed on to the idea of a joint
venture between MoMA and the Schaulager. The
project gradually gathered momentum with the help
of Nauman’s dealer, Angela Westwater.
Despite the Schaulager’s relative youth, MoMA
and the Laurenz Foundation share a history of fruit-
ful collaboration. Thanks to Glenn’s extraordinary
commitment, the Schaulager’s inaugural exhibition,
our Dieter Roth retrospective of 2003, could be pre-
sented at MoMA the following year. The Museum
and the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation have also
acquired art together: Matthew Barney’s Drawing
Restraint Archive, in 2010, and two major works by
Bruce Nauman: Days, in 2009, and Contrapposto
Studies, i through vii, in 2017.
Eventually Glenn and I approached Kathy
Halbreich, then MoMA’s Associate Director and later
the Museum’s first Laurenz Foundation Curator, to
organize the Nauman project in both Basel and New
York. She has embraced the task with her customary
zeal, turning the curatorial teams on opposite sides
of the Atlantic into a delightfully conspiratorial gang
unstintingly dedicated to creating a unique exhibition
and an inspiring catalogue.

One Hundred Live and Die. 1984

Foreword to our long-standing supporters. Maja has lent her
generosity as a global sponsor, providing leader-
ship support to the presentation of the exhibition at
Schaulager, MoMA, and MoMA PS1. Jill and Peter
Kraus have once again been eager to support the
What is remarkable about the retrospective Bruce most challenging work being made today; as chair
Nauman: Disappearing Acts is less its size and com- of the Acquisitions Committee of the Department of
prehensiveness than the ways in which intertwining Media and Performance, Jill has made her convic-
relationships brought it to life. What made this trac- tion that moving pictures will shape the future of art
ing of Nauman’s career-long concerns possible was history evident in the significant work, made both
friendships of long standing. yesterday and decades ago, that is coming into the
The Museum of Modern Art has enjoyed a warm collection. She is a trustee, and one every museum
relationship with Maja Oeri, President of the Laurenz should have. We are likewise exceptionally grateful
Foundation and of the Schaulager, since before she for the essential contributions offered by our friends
became a trustee fifteen years ago. Her engagement Sully Bonnelly and Robert R. Littman and Ellen and
in the Museum’s intellectual life has been marked by William Taubman. Additional support is provided by
her persistent championing of contemporary artists the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.
and her many transformative gifts to our collec- Nauman’s work teaches us that making and
tion. The acquisition, shared between MoMA and thinking about art involve all parts of the brain and
the Schaulager, of two monumental installations by body. As we move through his environments or
Nauman—Days in 2009 and Contrapposto Studies, stand in front of a drawing such as Make Me Think
i through vii in 2017—testifies to our mutual com- Me, ideas surface about what it means to be alert—
mitment to the artist’s work. MoMA acquired its to be in the world. Challenging the ways in which
first Nauman sculpture in 1978; our holdings were conventions become codified, his work erases all
bolstered by a gift of ten works from Werner and forms of certainty, mandating that we craft our own
Elaine Dannheisser in 1996, and today they include meanings rather than accede to more familiar rules.
more than eighty works by Nauman. MoMA’s and the The lessons learned from Bruce’s penetrating intelli-
Schaulager’s collections together form the largest gence become more and more necessary every day,
single institutional representation of the artist’s work. and I am confident that the importance of his work
It was natural, then, for us to collaborate on this will be clear as long as people find meaning in art.
retrospective. The curatorial team of Heidi Naef and Our foremost gratitude goes to him.
Isabel Friedli from Schaulager and Magnus Schaefer
and Taylor Walsh from MoMA was led by Kathy —Glenn D. Lowry, Director
Halbreich (who, together with Neal Benezra, orga- The Museum of Modern Art, New York
nized the 1994 traveling retrospective that MoMA
hosted). Before becoming the Executive Director of
the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in November
2017, Kathy was the Associate Director of MoMA for
nearly ten years; she remains the inaugural Laurenz
Foundation Curator at the Museum through the pre-
sentation of the exhibition in New York. That her
team was a model of collaboration, historical aware-
ness, and intellectual engagement is proved by this
publication, designed by Joseph Logan with Katy
Nelson. The New York presentation is the largest
in MoMA’s history, occupying the Museum’s sixth
floor and the whole of MoMA PS1. We thank Director
Klaus Biesenbach and Chief Curator Peter Eleey of
MoMA PS1 for their unflagging dedication to the
artist. Juliet Myers, manager of the artist’s studio
for thirty-two years, and Angela Westwater, Bruce’s
long-term gallerist, were genuine collaborators and
we have benefited deeply from their expertise.
Exhibitions such as this are increasingly difficult
to realize, since key loans are often impossible to
secure. We are enormously grateful, then, to the
seventy lenders whose commitment to Nauman
allowed us to make an exhibition both precise and
inclusive. We also extend our deep appreciation

Make Me Think Me. 1993

Sponsor

The Laurenz Foundation is the exclusive sponsoring

foundation of the Schaulager, in Basel, Switzerland.
The Schaulager accommodates the Emanuel
Hoffmann Foundation’s collection of contemporary
art. It also facilitates dialogue and exchange through
its unique concept of open storage, which keeps art
installed and accessible for study upon request to
researchers and students. The Laurenz Foundation
maintains regular contact with the Kunstmuseum in
Basel and has endowed two professorships for con-
temporary art and art theory at the city’s university.
For over fifteen years, the Laurenz Foundation
has enjoyed a close partnership with The Museum
of Modern Art, both collaborating on exhibitions
and engaging in joint acquisitions. The Laurenz
Foundation is delighted to partner with MoMA on
the first Bruce Nauman retrospective in over twenty
years. We are proud to fund the exhibition in Basel
and to be the lead sponsor for New York.

Some Illusions. 2013

P. 1: My Last Name Extended Vertically 14 Times. 1967.
Chalk and graphite on three sheets of paper taped together,
6 ft. 9 3⁄4 in. × 34 in. (207.6 × 86.3 cm)

P. 3: Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at

Ten-Inch Intervals. 1966. Neon tubing with clear-glass-tubing
suspension frame, 70 × 9 × 6 in. (177.8 × 22.9 × 15.2 cm)

P. 5: Collection of Various Flexible Materials Separated by

Layers of Grease with Holes the Size of My Waist and Wrists.
1966. Aluminum foil, plastic sheet, foam rubber, felt, and
grease, 3 in. × 7 ft. 6 1⁄4 in. × 19 1⁄8 in. (7.6 × 229.2 × 48.5 cm)

P. 7: From Hand to Mouth. 1967. Ink wash and graphite on

paper, 35 × 28 in. (88.9 × 71.1 cm)

P. 9: Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room. 1968. Audio

file played in a room. Installation view, Bruce Nauman. Dream
Passage, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2010

P. 11: Audio-Video Underground Chamber. 1972–74. Concrete

chamber, video camera, microphone, rubber gasket, steel
plate, bolts, cord, black-and-white video monitor, and
speaker, chamber: 27 1⁄2 in. × 35 1⁄2 in. × 7 ft. 2 1⁄2 in. (69.9 ×
90.2 × 219.7 cm), buried 8 ft. 2 1⁄2 in. (250.2 cm) deep

P. 13: One Hundred Live and Die. 1984. Neon tubing with
clear-glass tubing on metal, 9 ft. 10 in. × 11 ft. 1⁄4 in. × 21 in.
(299.7 × 335.9 × 53.3 cm)

P. 15: Make Me Think Me. 1993. Graphite and masking tape on

paper, 55 7⁄8 × 38 1⁄4 in. (142 × 97.2 cm)

P. 17: Some Illusions. 2013. Sheet 8 in a suite of nine

silverpoints, sheets 1–8: silverpoint on prepared paper, each:
18 × 24 in. (45.7 × 61 cm), sheet 9: silverpoint and goldpoint
on prepared paper, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.7 cm)

Opposite: Walks In Walks Out. 2015. HD video installation,

one projection, color, sound, 3 min., continuous play,
dimensions variable

Walks In Walks Out. 2015

20 21
Disappearing Acts Appear Given the uncertainty of the future and the slow rate
of genetic change, our genes have provided us not
with fixed responses to specific events (because
Kathy Halbreich these cannot be anticipated with any degree of accu-
racy), but with general tendencies that are adaptive
across local variations. . . . It is for this reason that
evolution has shaped us to be open-ended systems.
—John A. Bargh and Ezequiel Morsella,
“The Unconscious Mind,” 2008

Much of the literature on Bruce Nauman either criticizes or

celebrates the lack of conceptual and stylistic coherence
in his work. Some critics see only disconnected series of
obtuse provocations and narcissistically driven transgres-
sions masquerading as sculpture. For admirers who relish
the seemingly endless (and somewhat anxious) experimen-
tation that permeates all phases of his fifty-year career, how-
ever, these alleged lapses actually manifest the fullness of
Nauman’s inventiveness. While the variety of his media
and forms, interests and advances makes it impossible to
reduce his preoccupations to a closed system of concerns,
it is possible to imagine his mind as a gravitational force that
over time filters out everything unnecessary, leaving behind
something of unusual conceptual purity. This is a compel-
ling way to classify his pursuits, and those processes he
describes as involving elimination rather than embellish-
ment. The pleasure he gets from making lithographs, for
example, may begin with generating “marks on the stone
and drawing with a crayon, making washes, and things like
that, [but] as I work on it for a period of time, a lot of that
disappears or I get that out of the way. There is a finish I can
get, a kind of tightness and clarity I really like.”1
Having returned to a close study of the artist’s oeuvre
after a near-quarter-century break from the analysis accom-
panying the traveling retrospective that Neal Benezra and
I organized in 1994, I was initially restrained by lingering
assumptions about what the artist stood for, as well as
which works were exemplary. But somewhere in the mid-
dle of preparing this exhibition, after a summer of reading
and thinking, I started to make lists, including a geneal-
ogy of aesthetic correlations across the decades, and acci-
dentally stumbled on a logic of correspondences I had not
recognized before. What surprised—really sideswiped—
me was a pattern so persistent that it persuaded me to
construct a slightly oxymoronic alternative to the prevailing
approaches in the Nauman literature: the manifold appear-
ances of disappearance actually constitute a visible, contin-
uous, and generative thread of emotional, intellectual, and
formal attentiveness that began when the artist was a grad-
uate student and continues to this day. Things we experi-
ence in childhood often stick, even if we are unaware of
their potency until later, and Nauman’s preoccupation with
disappearance likely began when he was young. He first
encountered the promise of disappearance, a magician’s
foundational trick, with his grandfather, who he remembers
could make apples and bananas vanish.2 Disappearance,

22 23
then, became a conceptual ligature that helped make visi- said that he wanted his compositions to reflect the fusion 13. and time and again, uses the power of the words “death” definitions evolved that made it more difficult to describe
ble a clearer sense of the whole. of space and time found in Albert Einstein’s theory of rel- and “die” to conjure from the dimness of our unconscious exactly what constituted a work of art and what its materi-
Since a startling number of Nauman’s works are conse- ativity.4 Nauman loves music and numbers, both of which those disquieting feelings about the final disappearing act als could be; concepts as well as ephemeral performances
quential in their prescient content, early adaptation of tech- appear often in his art. He played instruments, including the that we all must perform. In the massive neon One Hundred became malleable artistic materials that could be adapted
nology, and formal innovation, the curator of a retrospective bass in a drone band with his teacher and friend William Live and Die (1984; p. 13), the two poles of human expe- to the contextual variables of space, location, and situation.
finds it a challenge to leave anything out; indeed, as we were Wiley, whose work, like his student’s, is full of philosophi- rience, and a range of others between, flash on and off in Nauman so often circles back to rethink earlier con-
working on the show, there were days when the process of cal speculations hidden in humorous wordplay; a continuous loop, vying for dominance until all but one clusions that the process of thinking—retracing, reassess-
excising objects was so confounding, I joked that the best phrase goes dark. ing, and relinquishing ideas—is as much his medium as the
approach would have been to employ the chance operations 4. dissolves easy legibility, through abstraction in the neon moving images that occupied him early on and continue to
championed by John Cage, whom the artist summons in the My Last Name Exaggerated Fourteen Times Vertically (1967; In constantly challenging the conclusiveness of truth, engage him today. Certainly Nauman has explored ways of
title of the installation Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John p. 248) and through misdirection in Fifteen Pairs of Hands Nauman has tested the ease with which we accept what an making and thinking about things that have later ceased to
Cage) (2001; pp. 84–85). Happily, the recognition of disap- (1996), a series of white-bronze sculptures that gesture artist says and the accuracy of the information he provides interest him. As the profusion of elements of rejected sculp-
pearance as a motif helped to guide our selection. Tethered toward sign language but are in fact abstract motions; about his work. In the sculpture Wax Impressions of the tures that litter his studio floor suggests, abandoned things
to this conceptual thread, the curatorial team and I began to Knees of Five Famous Artists (1966; pp. 106–7), for exam- are often left for another day, when they might be picked up
discover formal and intellectual continuities across the vari- 5. covers his flesh and masks his identity, as well as that of ple, the material isn’t wax and the knees are all his own. The again for a different reason. Many procedures and preoccu-
ous stages of the artist’s career that led us to ask most of the his clowns and mimes, under opaque theatrical cosmetics names of William Wiley, Larry Bell, Lucas Samaras, Leland pations have returned, sometimes after many years, in new
authors writing in this catalogue to explore the relationship in Art Make-Up: No. 1 White, No. 2 Pink, No. 3 Green, No. 4 Bell, and Bruce Nauman are listed on a related drawing forms and through new technological means, mirroring his
between an early and a more recent work, while also exam- Black (1967–68; p. 223), Clown Torture (1987; p. 276), and from a year later (pp. 272–73), which, in its searching dia- stop-and-start studio methods as well as his fundamental
ining thematic loops, theoretical questions, and formal fixa- Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime (1990; p. 216); grammatic nature, deceptively resembles a sketch begin- belief in the disruptive way everything resists final resolu-
tions that we did not feel had been amply explored before. ning an exploration rather than following it. In an aside that tion. While loops, rings, laps, rounds, reversals, and revo-
Functioning as an act, concept, perceptual probe, mag- 6. titles a section of a 1970 Artforum text “Withdrawal as I read as a possible comedic double-cross, Nauman has lutions circulate persistently in his artistic output, whether
ical deceit, working method, and metaphor, disappearance an Art Form”;5 scribbled on the drawing “Do not use Marcel Duchamp,” as movements, sounds, compositional devices, or philo-
has been a useful and persistent prompt for Nauman’s art. but once the Frenchman’s name is singled out, its signifi- sophical meditations, he never simply rests with the famil-
Similarly, when he moved to New Mexico in 1979, his delib- 7. imagines the actor in the video Tony Sinking into the Floor, cance as an attempt to deflect his connection to Nauman iar or replicates his ideas.10
erate retreat from the major coastal cities where art is most Face Up, and Face Down (1973; p. 140) as “disappearing is tough to shake. Nauman’s guile seems to affirm what is The disjunctive results of this process of return are most
often viewed, debated, and sold is sometimes discussed as into another substance”;6 denied. Perhaps that’s exactly what he intended, but some- perceptible in the way Nauman’s two latest immersive instal-
an effort to drop out of sight. The ways in which he engages times influence is so near at hand that it is difficult to see or lations—Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (2015/2016;
disappearance—exploring subjects such as physics, math- 8. focuses bright theatrical lamps in Lighted Center Piece admit. This denial may reflect something emotionally sim- pp. 240–43) and Contrapposto Split, the 3-D video of 2017
ematics, philosophy, and fiction, often stimulated by his (1967–68; p. 278) on the sculpture’s empty center, hiding ilar to the need to stand back from our parents so that we (p. 300)—both reveal and resist the lineage of the earlier video
prodigious readings across disciplines—are too numerous nothing so that nothingness appears, and suppresses the may see ourselves more clearly. Walk with Contrapposto, from 1968 (pp. 238, 300), in which
to name, but a partial list that I began compiling to test my illumination of Floating Room (Light Outside, Dark Inside) So while Nauman has often dismissed Duchamp’s impor- the seductive artist sashayed as few could down one of his
hypothesis suggests the frequency of its recurrence: (1972) to dematerialize the interior architecture; tance, this stance may only accentuate his relationship to an claustrophobic corridors. By exaggerating his hip move-
artist who also fooled with truth, claiming he had forsaken ments and briefly freezing each advance, Nauman know-
1. Nauman fastens the plaque A Rose Has No Teeth (Lead 9. proves the precariousness and unpredictability of sight in art for chess as he struggled in secret for twenty years with ingly yet gently mocked what the early Greek sculptors hoped
Tree Plaque) (1966; p. 275) to a tree whose trunk he expected prints (Vision, 1973; p. 286), corridors (Green Light Corridor, Étant Donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage (1946– to achieve, for the first time in art history, by assigning their
would eventually absorb it, signaling that human pursuits will 1970; p. 73), videos (Thumb Start, 2013; pp. 114–15), and 66), a sculptural mise-en-scène featuring a sprawling naked beautiful male nudes this dynamic asymmetrical pose: an
never outlast the ticks of nature’s time. The phrase is lifted an early notebook sketch that drafts an unrealized installa- woman in a landscape, holding a lit lamp and largely hid- expression of a psychological state or harmonic posture
from the amateur architect and mathematically inclined phi- tion titled So Bright You Can’t See It (1967); den—“disappeared”—behind an old wooden door, which associated with an idealized model of man.11 Because of his
losopher of logic Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical allows a view only through a small pair of peepholes. In good looks and lithe body, though, Nauman remained at least
Investigations, in which language games are used to under- 10. reveals erasure as a multifaceted method of mark-mak- accordance with Duchamp’s instructions, Étant Donnés . . . an approximation of youthful physical perfection. Forty-seven
mine the conventional rules by which meaning is assigned, ing, allowing overlapping washes of white paint to make a was permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art years later, with far less assurance to his walk and more bulk
thereby liberating new connections among thought, utter- field out of deletions (Crime and Punishment [Study for Punch in 1969, the year after his death. I am also inclined to find to his torso, he steps out from under the weight of his origi-
ances, and truth; and Judy], 1985; p. 68), or information and images deemed a provocative vibration in the critique by one of Nauman’s nal investigations of the heroics of art history and manliness.
wrong or unnecessary to remain visible under a scrawl of graduate-school professors, the ribaldly political Robert The price of freedom is bravely demonstrated: his hesitant
2. deletes, isolates, and crops out body parts in such sculp- lines that purport to cancel them (6 Sound Problems for Arneson, who described one of the young artist’s unglazed passage no longer recalls A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
tures as From Hand to Mouth (1967; p. 42), Venice Fountains Konrad Fischer, 1968; p. 45); ceramic vessels as “like a ‘cup descending a staircase’ syn- Man, James Joyce’s early tale of a self-imposed exile, precip-
(2007; p. 270), and All Thumbs (1996; p. 269), the latter a drome.”7 Indeed, it’s senseless not to link three key con- itated by an unsuccessful attempt to balance the demands
plaster sculpture made after the 1994 retrospective ended 11. vanishes the binaries of moral clarity by superimposing cepts that Duchamp put into practice early in the twentieth of spiritual and aesthetic faith, that echoes Nauman’s own
and the artist complained about being blocked and unable on the stone slabs of Seven Virtues/Seven Vices (1983–84; century to those that Nauman began to expand on soon abandonment of urban centers for the refuge of his working
to pursue his craft;3 p. 296) inscriptions of both the seven deadly sins and the after entering a new graduate program at the University of ranch in New Mexico. In revisiting the mechanics of the ear-
seven virtues. The pairings are Prudence/Pride, Fortitude/ California, Davis, in 1964: language is susceptible to distor- lier performance, Nauman finds new meanings, sometimes
3. flips over the sculpture John Coltrane Piece (1968; p. 275) Anger, Faith/Lust, Hope/Envy, Charity/Sloth, Temperance/ tion, human beings can never fully understand one another,8 the opposite of those that informed the first video and some-
to obscure its mirrored surface, testing our faith in the mir- Gluttony, and Justice/Avarice; and an artwork is expressively completed only by the mutual times an extension of them. Old worries surrounding received
ror’s existence—an inquiry appropriate to the great avant- engagement of the maker and the spectator.9 These atti- wisdom and fidelity to sexual roles fade with the disappear-
garde jazz saxophonist, who sought to highlight both the 12. disappears off the edge of the picture in videos such as tudes vaporized modern formulations of language, artis- ance of youth, the creep of time. Balance, our ability to move
mathematical and the spiritual underpinnings of music and Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) (1999; p. 268); tic authority, and art itself. A new, more porous system of forward or back, becomes more and more precarious with

24 HALBREICH 25
age, and since the development of a freestanding object that Disappearance, then, is both a real phenomenon and a (1985; p. 298), for example, a black man and a white woman (pp. 230–31), first proposed in 1969, is often interpreted as
retains its uprightness is also one of the key challenges for magnificently ample metaphor, even when it is accompanied, repeat five times, with fluctuating emphasis, a sequence of commentary on the Earthworks movement, with its manly
a sculptor, the late performance can be interpreted in similar as it often is, by Beckettian worry: will the absent return, or twenty declarations ranging from the commendatory to the bravado and vaunted scale, the work also both spells out
broad strokes as the first one: as a chronicle of both life and will it be gone forever? Close relatives of disappearance—the accusatory. The certainty of each of these attributes is aban- and enacts, in disappearing smoke, an ethical imperative: a
art, of the challenges Nauman faced when cancer treatment absent, the void, and ensuing senses of nonexistence, priva- doned over the work’s hour-long duration. This shifting script command to tread lightly on the earth. The ephemerality of
impeded his sure-footedness and when gravity threatened tion, or omission—appear in many forms in Nauman’s work. mirrors the centuries-old definitional drama about the phil- the artist’s chosen medium mirrors the unlikelihood of our
to topple what he had labored to erect. They are seen, for example, in holes the size of a body part osophical character of good and bad, as well as the related heeding his message, the way a collective will to do what’s
Disappearance likely also makes it possible to live with (p. 5), in the space under a chair, in the destabilizing inter- problem of how to ascertain the necessary proportions of needed often dissipates before the goal is accomplished.
shyness; Nauman keeps his own counsel and responds to vals between words or between the steps of a stairway built each to live decently. As the video suggests, the more we Nauman never explicitly defines what makes a good citizen,
queries with unusual brevity. (If there were such a thing as onto a Northern California hillside (p. 293), in the self vanish- think about this conundrum, the more porous the boundaries or, for that matter, a good artist. Instead his art courses with
a master of humorous haikus, Nauman would be the cham- ing around a corner (p. 278), and in the mental blocks that between the two traits become. At the beginning of the tape, questions and choices. Hypothetical structures, sometimes
pion. When sent a preliminary layout of this book to review, empty creative possibility. the man and the woman speak as one; as they proceed, their titled as “models,” describe ethical possibilities and insist
for example, he replied “Catalogue has arrived. I read every- Metaphor lets the artist transfer meaning from one con- elocution falls more and more out of sync, hinting at the diffi- on the liberation of the imagination to fully understand them.
thing but Greek and it’s all Greek to me. Thanks, Bruce.” I text to another in order to temporarily discipline difficult sub- culty the characters have in aligning with each other across In summarizing what he ideally expects from those viewing
took this as an indirect sign of his trust in and permission to jects. It is easier, for example, to contemplate the unending gender, ethnicity, and age as well as with accepted stan- the nearly blank but somehow molecularly animated screen
the curators, whose many hand-written inquiries sprinkled and bleak black and white image and sound of absence dards and definitions. Lived experience is much more com- of Audio-Video Underground Chamber, in which no figure
through the manuscript went unanswered.)12 Withdrawal transmitted from the buried Audio-Video Underground plicated than the narcotic blandness posited by normative can be seen, he says, “It requires somebody’s imagination—
may also be a productive rehearsal for being alone. In prac- Chamber (1972–74; p. 11) than it is to erase the fear of our ideas, and the questions that stalk us can never be easily, somebody to think about it and involve themselves in it.”14
tical terms, it removes Nauman from the distractions of daily own graying and dissolution. But Nauman is a sly manipula- permanently, or fully answered. After watching this video for Perhaps that drive to invest everyone with the responsibility
life and art-world nonsense so that he can concentrate on tor of meaning, and rewards the patient viewer with a mod- the third time, I wonder, “Are our standards of moral conduct to make their own decisions is the ultimate act of the dem-
the immediate concerns of the studio: scrutinizing uncer- ulation of the immediate distress he presents. He intensifies gendered? What constitutes ‘the good life’? Is it ever good to ocratically inclined and intellectually limber. Where freedom
tainty, distilling methods of fabrication, and synthesizing the alarm we first encounter to such a degree that the mag- help another person die?” And I imagine how circumstances begins, the absoluteness of truth disappears and becomes
feelings in order to shape trenchantly persuasive experi- nification begins to obscure the discomfort, replacing it with alter our inner dialogues, just as the meaning of a work of art various. We have to invent our own set of internalized values
ences. Similarly, I believe he almost fully removes himself an absurd gallows humor, like that of some horror movies. transforms over time and in diverse cultural climates. to guide our decisions, and it is a laborious task.
from the process of organizing exhibitions such as this one With sustained looking, even an empty concrete casket that Good and bad have no place in the construction of what
in order to ruminate and make art, probably because he tempts us to imagine ourselves inside it, trapped or dead, makes art meaningful, nor do they define the responsibilities
knows his own interests and limits, as well as how many shifts its associations: this public sculpture, which leaves of the practitioner. Unhappily, though, when doubt is most Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of
artists fail to keep the urgency going and simply fade out. only a small monitor available to the viewer, becomes an acute, certainty can seem the most appealing defense, and Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laugh-
I don’t know why people are surprised by Nauman’s unthreatening, disembodied picture of disappearance, a we may fall back on the earliest, most primitive lessons our ter of the gods.
hands-off approach to curatorial affairs. Disappearance colorless abstraction rather than the thing itself. Sometimes parents imparted in training us to be good boys and girls: do —Albert Einstein, “Aphorisms for Leo Baeck,” 1953
seems to function as both a factual and an emotional edit- through art we become aware enough of the foolishness of this, not that. It’s evident, however, from charting Nauman’s
ing device helping him to short-circuit the torpor that sets our trepidation that we laugh at the way our agitated uncon- dogged attempts to figure out the simplest way to demon- One of Nauman’s earliest neons—The True Artist Helps the
in when ideas evaporate and creativity recedes. The exis- scious projects apprehension onto the world, leaving some strate what is moral, that he cultivates these binaries of vice World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)
tential dread that springs from a sense that one may be clown repeatedly shouting “No! No! No!” at us, as happens and virtue, which fail to define anything except philosophi- (1967; p. 64)—consists of a single pinkish line that coils
unable to do the task at hand is not that unusual, and wak- in Clown Torture. Nauman specializes in this slapstick phys- cal fictions, as a way to repeatedly test his viewers’ willing- around itself two and a half times to underscore a simi-
ens especially in those who are easily moved by an empti- icality and exaggeration. ness to relinquish the safety of the familiar. If he can shake lar curve of blue script spelling out the title. Part of the text
ness accompanying the suspicion that meaning is elusive himself loose from the easy categorization of individual and in the center of a two-dimensional Archimedean spiral is
and any attempt to fix it is absurd. Creative thinkers across collective behavior—his and ours—as good or bad, then we necessarily inverted, requiring viewers to dip their heads
disciplines, however, possess an improvisational gift that Some have contended that “good” means “desired,” too must dismantle our own fixation with knowing anything right and then left in order to scan the phrase. The rou-
enables them to be patient when the horizon fades, shad- others that “good” means “pleasure,” others again absolutely. For Nauman, a kind of pragmatism—an ethic of tines of several different acts are disturbed: not only is the
ows multiply, and dusk overtakes their world. Invention that it means “conformity to Nature” or “obedience to labor—grows out of these periods of not knowing, of being legibility we desire from language put at risk, while read-
often emerges from the recesses of a mind that has no the will of God.” The mere fact that so many different tied up in knots. Days in the studio are spent pacing, read- ing, normally a passive pursuit, becomes a physical action,
specific destination but is left to wander through light and and incompatible definitions have been proposed is ing, and thinking, paring away the inessential and the man- but here, early in his career, Nauman was aligning a tradi-
dark passages; many artists know how to trust a fluidity evidence against any of them being really definitions; nered. Nauman’s astonishing modesty of means extends to tional trait of sculpture—that it requires bodily involvement
that moves beyond the rational, as when intuitions spring there have never been two incompatible definitions his materials, his techniques, and his content; it suggests to grasp—with something more interrogative and demand-
from the unconscious. This liminal stream is often flooded of the word “pentagon.” . . . It is evident that among a distillation of ideas that only repeated looking reveals as ing than the oblivious ways we customarily wander through
with painful memories or misapprehensions that, while the things that exist some are good, some bad, and hard earned, because they appear so inevitable and direct. space and time. By making us alternate our vision back
influencing our desires and attitudes, are hidden from our that we know too little of the universe to have any Nothing is wasted or too cleaned up, and unnecessary ges- and forth—making us actively and therefore calculatingly
immediate understanding. Inaccessible, these forgotten, right to an opinion as to whether the good or the bad tures are purged. (Maybe the artist, who likes to cook, picked string words together to accumulate meaning—he made
subliminal, or repressed psychic events can be encoun- preponderates. . . . Complete suspense of judgment up this facility at the stove, where sauces strengthen in flavor the often reticent relationship between viewer and viewed
tered by accident, as in slips of the tongue and distorting in this matter is therefore the only rational judgment. the longer they are left to simmer and reduce.) disappear. We comprehend ourselves comprehending; we
elisions, or the dreams that can provide “moral instruction —Bertrand Russell, “The Meaning of There is a decency to behavior that insists on con- become thoughtful. But any conclusion about the meaning
in . . . picture-narratives.”13 But these imbricated confusions Good and Bad,” 1910 servation rather than consumption. This quality reverber- of the work, or about its status as an object—Nauman ini-
can only be tamed by circling purposefully around them, as ates throughout Nauman’s career, projecting the care of a tially hoped the neon would not be immediately recognized
one repeatedly would a chimerical sculpture, spending long Nauman has often parsed the categories of the virtuous and supple conscience rather than the demands of a political as art—is continuously adjusted, and the usual mundane
enough to allow all facets to be revealed. the immoral. In the two-channel video Good Boy Bad Boy orthodoxy. While the skywriting piece Leave the Land Alone function of neon signage, as an advertisement arousing

26 HALBREICH 27
want or desire, is conspicuously toyed with.15 It’s never clear eponymous Letraset phrase “Please Pay Attention Please,” embedded in illumination are by turns poetic, ironic, and space under a chair can be imagined as a solid, a shoe can
what these ten words are selling. laid out one word per line to sustain the pleading ada- derisory. Light—the medium of this sculpture—dissipates be abstracted (p. 88); a few pieces of debris from rejected
It’s something of a characteristic Naumanesque para- mancy of the solicitation, and in that work’s demonic fra- and dies out once the neon sign is unplugged. sculptures—the detritus of failure—can suddenly conjure
dox that one becomes alert or focused by becoming slightly ternal twin, a lithograph from the same year commanding Only two years into his career, Nauman encompassed in something that wasn’t there an hour ago. A drift of asso-
unbalanced. The loss of stability that occurs as we pivot “Pay Attention Mother Fuckers” (p. 75). Like the earlier spi- this neon a number of qualities and concerns that have con- ciations begins.
to make sense of what we are seeing reminds us what it ral, this print frustrates legibility with the most self-effacing of ditioned his pursuits over the past fifty-two years: straight The small things are essential. If one intently observes
means to be grounded, reminds us of things we take so means: to complicate the reading of the order, Nauman sim- talk that can’t be fully understood, the mystery of the com- stars, or for that matter dust motes, the spontaneous com-
much for granted that they normally disappear. And the ply acknowledged the central idiosyncrasy of the medium monplace and simple, the physical demands that change bustion of creative urgency can work its charm. The raw mate-
meandering associations that develop as we angle this way employed, the fact that lithography involves flipping the the role of the viewer from passive participant to one more rial for the seven-screen installation Mapping the Studio . . . ,
and that mimic the artist’s own back-and-forth dance with image it prints. Rather than drawing the slogan in reverse fully implicated in the drama, the breakdown of closed sys- for instance, shot in 2001, was forty-two hours of filmed noc-
doubt, with whether or not he believes the statement he has on the litho stone so that it could be more easily read in the tems that denote meaning without nuance and cramp evo- turnal animation, the “traffic” in Nauman’s studio, which, I
authored to be true. Awareness takes time and is never sim- finished print—a somewhat tedious process—he wrote it lutionary thinking and the promise of change. And he chose was surprised to see, still contained random crates from the
ple; it is an unnamed medium of Nauman’s oeuvre, and its as one normally would, clouding the message and contra- a common commercial sign to spell out the philosophical retrospective that ended its tour in 1995. The artist described
use, being so tied to living a sentient life of understanding, dicting its urgency once the print had passed through the premise that truth is tautological and, therefore, unknow- his approach “as a way of mapping the leftover parts and
offers the possibility that the artist may be a realist at heart. press. To decipher the text, we must pay particular atten- able. But what do his actions tell us of his understanding work areas of the last several years of other completed, unfin-
In The True Artist . . . and other works, Nauman generously tion, a condition slyly accentuated by the near obliteration of the life of a true artist? ished, or discarded projects.”20 But what Nauman was really
delegates responsibility for creating meaning to us; he simul- of that word by deliberate over-inking. Similarly, the slight charting was his faith in the commonplace and in the infini-
taneously extracts a commitment in return, by requiring us to yet noticeable delay between reading and understanding tesimal vagaries of life; allowed to accumulate, they produce
act out a dilemma in order to understand it. But he also sets due to the reversal of the text underscores the testy and There seem to be two ways of finishing anything. a poignant allegory of evanescence as things change from
traps for the gullible. By complicating our ability to decode domineering tone of the language. One is it’s finished when the statement’s clear, and moment to moment, day to day. Nauman reminds us that the
the sentence, and undermining any certainty we might have Yet much remains unknown and susceptible to decep- the other it’s finished when you’ve worked so long on quotidian is both spectacular and the stuff out of which we
about its literal meaning, he allows for—even tempts—a retar- tion. Who is speaking? What should we pay attention to? it it’s ruined. (laughs) I don’t seem to have any mid- construct our more grandiose precepts.
dataire reading of the heroic powers of the artist and the tran- Is the artist instructing us to look at something important way on that. There’s almost the same kind of satisfac- Which brings us to the pencil. A true artist doesn’t need
scendent capacities of art. This intellectual pratfall is stirred by or is a hoodlum about to shoot us? Should we turn away or tion. When I work on a drawing for a long time, and fancy tools; he uses what’s necessary and often at hand. A
the titillation inherent in a romantic fantasy long ago fashioned toward the aggressive voice? Will looking be good or bad I get to the point where I realize all I can do is throw cheap yellow pencil, for example, of a kind found in every
around the artist as supposedly an estranged and authentic for us? Once more we are faced with the quandary sur- it away, but getting to that point (reflectively)—very school-age child’s knapsack, is key to Nauman’s artistic
figure, living beyond the “restraints of theological and social rounding the enterprise of establishing fact from fiction, right curious—has the same kind of satisfaction as getting arsenal. Anyone who has spent a meeting absentmindedly
conventions” and in harmony with nature.16 This is something from wrong. One thing is clear, however: freedom demands one that you still have. Thinking through something drawing on a notepad knows a pencil is the instrument most
of a cliché, a sentimental concept best suited to melodra- canniness and care, the developing of questions rather than until there’s nothing left. closely tied to the unconscious. In childhood we learn to
matic movies. While this model of artistic genius had greater acceptance of the often seductive deceits and prohibitions —Bruce Nauman, 198418 doodle before we write simple words, packed with com-
credence during the last days of the Enlightenment, when it of authority. In encouraging the disappearance of certainty, plexity, such as “mother” and “father.” At that point there
began to flourish as an emotional counterpoint to the rational- Nauman may be the most political of artists after all. The A true artist works even when the will to make something— is no hierarchy between a representation and an abstrac-
ism of the era, its persistence today, still shaping some crit- “mother fuckers” he alludes to may be the slack and lazy anything—disappears. Some days one is either emptied of tion, between figure and ground, so immediacy is pervasive.
ical assessments of who Nauman is, is hard to explain. It’s among us: watchfulness is tiring and interpretation ardu- ideas or tangled up in too many circuits; sometimes those That freedom often persists for the adult draftsman, perhaps
true that he spends most of his time in rural settings, occa- ous. Nauman calls us to act. days add up to weeks of stagnation. Stuck walking around because, if a pencil drawing fails to engage the artist’s mind,
sionally courts “mystic truths,” and persistently engages with In the spiral neon, the words “true” and “truth” are given the perimeter, an artist may become unable to reach a place the page is the easiest thing to destroy, to make disappear.
the transitory nature of life—all traits of late-eighteenth-cen- prominence by being placed one above the other on the where vulnerability—defenselessness—is the center of a Nauman puts his pencil to many uses. He sketches with
tury Romanticism. But to classify him as a romantic loner top of the first and second curl of the coil, but this insis- universe of feeling from which philosophical and physical extraordinary precision how an unrealized sculpture fits into
is to ignore how poorly he fits into this mawkish and artifi- tence is misleading. The work was made in 1967, a year that systems can be shaped and art that’s composed of per- the perspectival demands of a room. A colored-pencil tem-
cial category, tending as he does to temper the metaphysi- brought into focus a necessary interrogation of the nature sonal touch can be made. On those days, trust in instinct plate for a neon reveals the many adjustments required to
cal with the empirical and the tactile. He shies away from the of truth: the nation learned of the army’s secret germ-war- and intuition lessens, and contact with the psychic pow- find the exact size, placement, color, and rhythmic inter-
rarefied and otherworldly, investing not only sculpture but fare tests; witnessed a celebrity questioning authority ers that resist analysis and animate the generative leaps vals of words (p. 65); at other times, these patterns for fab-
works on paper with a visceral materiality that is both beau- when Muhammad Ali, asserting that he was a conscien- of unconscious reasoning is lost. Confidence evaporates ricating figurative neons move away from the confines of
tiful and disturbing in its handmade intimacy, bluntness, and tious objector, rejected his draft call; was introduced to the along with the promise of ontogenic development, the way working drawings to become singular and gorgeous large-
probity. But he is a contrarian at heart, and even his most word “psychedelic”; struggled with the fallibility of technol- ideas connect and compound as a sculpture comes to be. scale images (p. 168). A pencil is also a ubiquitous imple-
straightforward efforts carry the double edge of ambiguity. ogy as Apollo 1 caught fire on the launch pad; and recog- When Nauman faces self-doubt, exhaustion, and the ment for figuring things out, and the artist freely exposes on
Like almost everything he has done and said since making nized the lies that informed racial and civil politics when the specter of having nothing more to say, nothing much makes the paper the mathematical refinements that go into deter-
The True Artist . . . , what he intends is impossible to locate Reverend Martin Luther King denounced the Vietnam War. it out of the studio. Such paralyzing fear, or the depressed mining the technical requirements and proportions of an
exactly. When asked whether or not he believed in the spiral’s Given that context, the longer we test these concepts of boredom that obstructs all creative possibilities, can only architecturally scaled corridor (p. 180). Heavily worked and
empyrean message, Nauman answered, “Probably not . . . . “true” and “truth” the less we know exactly what Nauman be disrupted by surveying small breaks in the barrier. These graphically muscular passages of pencil, watercolor, and
But then why not?”17 He typically answers a question with means, or if we are to believe him (assuming that he is the are the almost imperceptible places where emotional oppor- charcoal capture the brute monumentality of the under-
one of his own. one speaking to us, a somewhat slippery supposition). The tunity seeps out. A true artist also knows to be present so ground tunnels he imagined but never fabricated. A pencil
Across the five decades of his career, Nauman has doubled expression of certainty is further confounded by its that a process can begin. A line in a novel by, say, Vladimir may also be a sculptural element, as when Nauman twists a
affirmed the value of skepticism and instructed us to be proximity to the arcane and evasive connotations accompa- Nabokov or Yoko Ogawa (both writers whom Nauman has bit of wire around one to create a standing figure to inhabit
wary. His deflationary concept of truth in fact necessitates nying the word “mystic.” Like an afterimage stimulated by enjoyed) may prompt a ricochet of ideas, any of which could Model for Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does
vigilance, as he baldly states in a 1973 collage carrying the a flashing neon, meanings are layered, then fleeting. Ideas summon up an earlier daydream or ignite a new one.19 The Not Care (1984; p. 291), suggesting the massive scale he

28 HALBREICH 29
intends for that work once it is realized. He also attaches material thing and the mental image that shaped it, between 27 and 30, 1980,” in ibid., p. 199.
two pencils to a 1989 photograph of an animal taxidermy what the artist first imagines and what finally exists. In the 3. See Calvin Tomkins, “Western Disturbances,” The New Yorker, June 1,
2009, p. 75.
form (p. 131), somewhat magically literalizing the wire used drawing’s knowingly crude lack of refinement, Nauman
4. See Josh Jones, “John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the
as a hanging device in the picture. But the pencil is also forcefully violates historical ideals of beauty; he knows that Mathematics of Music,” Open Culture website, April 2017. Available
something of a stand-in for the artist and the struggles he perfection is unattainable and its pursuit one of stultifying online at www.openculture.com/2017/04/the-tone-circle-john-
experiences in the studio. In a black and white photograph inflexibility. Perfection is never true; to pursue it is to fail. coltrane-drew-to-illustrate-the-theory-behind-his-most-famous-
from 1978 (p. 264) Nauman jams pencils between his fin- But not all is lost. compositions-1967.html (accessed August 2017).
gers and toes, thwarting his manual dexterity and, in his Thinking is the desire to bring something into focus, to 5. Nauman, “Withdrawal as an Art Form,” in Nauman, Please Pay
Attention Please, ed. Kraynak, p. 60. First published in Artforum 9,
absurdist fashion, alluding to the punishing, colorless diffi- give it life. Nauman’s seemingly simple drawing suggests
no. 4 (December 1970).
culty of moving forward with his craft. the erotics of such a mental operation, of massaging and 6. Nauman, in Achim Hochdörfer, “Interview with Bruce Nauman,”
For a private man, Nauman has no qualms about pre- manipulating ideas. The phrase “make me” is vernacular for in Bruce Nauman: Audio-Video Underground Chamber (Nuremberg:
senting himself stuck in distressing psychological situations a sexual escapade; at the same time, this potential inti- Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2005), p. 132.
time and again. Yet I know he is smart enough to be up to macy can’t be divorced from what an artist does or tries 7. Robert Arneson, in Mady Jones, “Oral history interview with Robert
something other than only sharing his anxiety. The artist to do every day in negotiating vulnerability. But it’s also as Arneson, 1981 August 14–15,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. Available online at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/
Stephen Kaltenbach recalls his friend’s unusual intelligence: if Nauman were indicating a momentary loss of identity,
interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-arneson-11807 (accessed
“I never actually saw him under the influence of anything— and were imploring someone—me—to participate in the August 2017).
he was under the influence of a high IQ. . . . that is a bit return of his power to think and thereby reimagine himself. 8. See Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the
psychedelic in its own right.”21 I believe Nauman is mod- There’s a tenderness buried in this dictate: “make me think” is Avant-Garde (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 31.
eling how thinking is always challenging, physical work— a reminder of the reciprocity embedded in the artistic expe- 9. See Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp
if we meditate on something hard enough, the experience rience, of the touching interdependence of the artist and (Marchand du Sel), ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 139–40.
comes very close to delirium in the complexity that arises. his receptive audience. The artist’s voice and mine inter-
10. Paul Schimmel discusses the pervasiveness of all forms of cir-
The drawing make me think me (1993; p. 15) reveals every twine; he speaks to me as I simultaneously play and replay cularity in Nauman’s art in his essay “Pay Attention,” in Joan Simon,
decision that constitutes its reality. It is easy to describe the phrase in my mind, decoding its various meanings as I ed., Bruce Nauman, exh. cat. and cat. rais. (Minneapolis: Walker Art
its physical facts. The ruled lines that contain the title’s parse its compositional structure. “think me” is also an emo- Center, 1994), p. 80.
four penciled words give the drawing a simple but ada- tional invitation to conjure someone, to give the missing 11. See the entry for contrapposto in Gerald W. R. Ward, ed., Grove
mant structure; the thin graphite filament that outlines and bodily form, as if by recalling something as short-lived but Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 142–43.
locates each letter on the page is left visible under insis- carnal as perfume. We are being summoned to engage and
12. Nauman, email to the author, July 1, 2017.
tent black marks, providing an auditory and visual empha- invent; this requires all our capacities and is dependent on 13. Nick Romeo, “Cormac McCarthy Explains the Unconscious,”
sis like someone muttering under his breath, or the sudden all parts of our brain—visual, sensory, and verbal. This is The New Yorker, April 22, 2017. Available online at www.newyorker.
double image that occurs when a camera’s flash goes off what it means to be creatively alive. Scientists have found com/books/page-turner/cormac-mccarthy-explains-the-unconscious
in the dark. The lettering of the sans serif capitals is rough that even when “prompted to use verbal thinking, people (accessed August 2017).
and declarative. A piece of yellowing masking tape, like that created visual images to accompany their inner speech . . . 14. Nauman, in Hochdörfer, “Interview with Bruce Nauman,” p. 138.
15. See Brenda Richardson, Bruce Nauman: Neons, exh. cat.
used to make Cones Cojones twenty years earlier (p. 151), visual thinking is deeply ingrained in the brain.”22 If I listen
(Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1982), p. 20.
separates “think” from the second “me” and consequently closely to Nauman’s instructions, I see my own expecta- 16. James D. Wilson, “Tirso, Molière, and Byron: The Emergence of
from the phrase “make me think,” the trio of words above its tions: I ask that the true artist make me think how to use Don Juan as Romantic Hero,” The South Central Bulletin 32, no. 4
imperfect line. But the placement of the tape also encour- my body and imagination as materials with which to con- (Winter 1972):246–48.
ages a second reading, one that allows for a pause between struct a world that allows for me and for you. 17. Nauman, quoted in Tomkins, “Western Disturbances,” p. 71.
“make me” and “think me.” The tape is not straight, indicat- I am aware of how foolhardy it is to try to prove any- 18. Nauman, in Nicole Plett and Steven Parks, “What Does It All
Mean?,” artlines 5, no. 11 (Winter 1984/1985):13.
ing an unstudied application that belies the complications thing about Nauman’s work, since his pursuit of truth criss-
19. Nauman and I occasionally exchange novels. He once sent me
Nauman manages to squeeze out of a meager four words. crosses, even depends upon, his abiding commitment to Yoko Ogawa’s book The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003), in
Despite the legibility of the text, the monosyl- deception. Perhaps the true artist, as defined by Nauman, is which a mathematics teacher, after a traumatic accident, can only
labic word choice, and the visual clarity of the compo- at least a partial illusionist. He uses lies forthrightly to intro- remember the activities of the last eighty minutes. This work of fiction
sition, the directive “make me think me” is not what it first duce an unsettling elusiveness, leaving things open to mul- is filled with mathematical concepts that become portraits of emotional
appears to be. An imperative registers that something tiple, often conflicted understandings. Freedom, he teaches conditions. For Nauman’s reading of Vladimir Nabokov see de Angelus,
“Interview with Bruce Nauman, May 27 and 30, 1980,” p. 231.
is missing, and this drawing points to a lot of things us, can originate from uncertainty, as it mitigates against
20. Nauman, quoted in “Exhibitions and Projects. Bruce Nauman:
that have disappeared. There’s a sense that things have orthodoxy. Nauman’s act may be construed as a gentle Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage),” available online at the
gone awry, that the world needs to be reconceived and way to expose us, in an ultimately unthreatening manner, Dia Art Foundation website, https://diaart.org/program/exhibitions-
reconstructed. Nauman reminds us, for example, of the to a not so gentle reality. Maybe that’s what true art does. projects/bruce-nauman-mapping-the-studio-i-fat-chance-john-cage-
gap between making and thinking, one similar to that exhibition (accessed August 2017).
21. Stephen Kaltenbach, responding to questions about the San
between reading and understanding the True Artist . . .
Francisco counterculture of the 1960s in a telephone interview with
neon. He also inverts what we consider the usual sequence NOTES
Magnus Schaefer and Taylor Walsh, May 6, 2016.
by which an artwork is realized, one in which thinking pre- 1. Bruce Nauman, in Christopher Cordes, “Talking with Bruce Nauman:
22. Peter Reuell, “The Power of Picturing Thoughts,” Harvard Gazette,
An Interview, 1989 (Excerpts from Interviews: July, 1977; September,
cedes making, as if the result directly illustrated an idea rather May 11, 2017. Available online at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/
1980; May, 1982; and July, 1989),” in Nauman, Please Pay Attention
than synthesizing both the thoughts that prompt a physi- Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words. Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet
story/2017/05/visual-images-often-intrude-on-verbal-thinking-study-
cal object and those that arise out of its making. Similarly, says (accessed August 2017).
Kraynak (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 339.
Nauman demonstrates the inevitable split between the 2. Nauman, in Michele de Angelus, “Interview with Bruce Nauman, May

30 HALBREICH 31
32 AUTHOR NAME 33
Selected Exhibition
History
Taylor Walsh

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) is not an artist who spends

much time looking back. Retrospectives have led him
to dry spells lasting months or even years, and his
on-the-record statements seldom linger on the past.
He has exhibited steadily for fifty years but maintains
no personal archive; in short, he has never been overly
concerned with keeping tabs on his own history.
Curatorial matters are also held at a certain remove:
“Once the work is out of the studio,” he has said,
“it’s up to somebody else how it gets shown. You
can’t spend all your time being responsible for how
the work goes out into the world.”i Respecting the
distinction Nauman draws between art and its recep-
tion, this text favors the latter, using archival material
and period voices to trace the public’s encounter with
his work.
Since his first solo exhibition, in 1966, over 200
have been organized worldwide—so this account is
necessarily partial. Rather than a comprehensive list,
it provides a narrative of selected exhibitions, chosen
for their significance to the artist’s career or to wider
histories of curatorial practice. Rarely seen photo-
graphs and ephemera give insight into Nauman’s iter-
ative method, suggesting how a set design for Merce
Cunningham could inspire a series of sculptures, or
an exhibition of handmade knives might change how
we see the flayed animals in his later work.
This history details the critical response to
Nauman over time, and confirms that, while his
success came early, it was never uncontested. His
“prickly, uningratiating work” divided opinions from
the start; the literature implies that perhaps no liv-
ing artist of his stature has been as polarizing.ii
“Nauman’s best work is experiential,” wrote one
reviewer of his last retrospective, in 1994. “Its mean-
ings are not served up whole on wall texts. You must
see it, endure it, perhaps question and fight with it,
all on your own.”iii

The artist installing his 1986

exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel

34 35
Bachelor’s Degree, University of Wisconsin– Master of Arts Degree Exhibition, University of traditional methods that he could freely misapply. body, making short films to document his labors or
Madison, Spring 1964 California, Davis, Spring 1966 Nauman enjoyed a course in bronze casting taught staging live performances.10 Manipulating the T-Bar
by Tio Giambruni, but used the school’s foundry to is the earliest surviving footage of the artist in his
Nauman graduated from the University of Wisconsin– Nauman completed the MA program at UC Davis in produce more offbeat sculpture. Working in a for- workspace, engaging in a basic exercise for the sole
Madison in the spring of 1964. Raised in a suburb of 1966. In his final exhibition on campus he showed mer army barracks at the edge of campus known as purpose of recording it. Upon graduation he sublet
Milwaukee, he had chosen a public university close to a pair of curious cups: unglazed ceramic in clunky TB 9, he used mounds of clay from Arneson’s studio Wiley’s studio north of San Francisco, where he con-
home, studying math, philosophy, and music theory spirals, a visual shorthand for arrested motion. His as the basis for plaster molds, into which he could tinued to make films of routine physical acts—now
before switching his major to visual art. His professors instructor Robert Arneson described the pair as layer sheets of fiberglass brushed with a viscous among his most iconic (pp. 200, 276). Using a simple
at Wisconsin urged him to look beyond the Midwest “a cup in process—a Futurist rendition, like a ‘cup resin.7 The resulting “soft-shape” forms showed their task as grist allowed him to work on a shoestring
for further study; at the time, he said, the region’s descending a staircase.’”4 Arneson, himself a master seams and ragged edges, with their pitted surfaces budget: “At this point,” Nauman famously said, “art
aspiring artists “either went East or West, and I went of witty works in clay, was among the distinguished left coarse and unrefined.8 became more of an activity and less of a product.”11
West, . . . maybe thinking that the East was a little too faculty at Davis leading “a mild revolution” in art ped- Nauman’s degree was awarded with an empha-
frightening.”1 Nauman married Judy Govan on the eve agogy.5 Nauman studied sculpture with Manuel Neri sis in sculpture, but other interests tugged, and
of graduation, and later that summer they packed the and figure drawing with Wayne Thiebaud, but his Davis freed him to test out concepts in any form
car and drove to California. chief interlocutor was William Wiley, a freethinking that suited. P.P.G. Sunproof Drawing (1965) makes
By September he was enrolled in the fledgling artist just a few years his senior. Wiley led the weekly a mockery of the painter’s tools: he photocopied a
master’s program at the University of California, graduate seminars and the two became fast friends. sheet of commercial paint chips so that all the col-
Davis, an art department so new that it was still There was “no hierarchy at all” between Wiley and ors came out gray. More quixotic gestures remain
accepting virtually everyone who applied. 2 He his students, who found his laid-back teaching style only in classmates’ memories. Stephen Kaltenbach
matriculated as a painter, submitting a portfolio of enabling: he “gave you permission to do whatever recalls the blacktop on the street near Nauman’s stu-
undergraduate work: layered geometric abstrac- you were going to do.”6 dio, streaked with tar to fill the cracks; on his way to
tions in a middle-toned palette, of which just one In landing at Davis, Nauman had stumbled into seminar one day, Nauman signed some of the black
example survives. In his application he described one of the most progressive art departments in the strips, treating the pavement as a found line drawing.9
these paintings as “tend[ing] more and more in an country. He swiftly abandoned his painting practice The most radical and lasting of Nauman’s ven-
expressionist direction,” but also hinted at a cer- to experiment with other media, steeping himself in tures at Davis, though, involved the use of his own
tain restlessness that he hoped graduate school
might satisfy: a “search for another kind of ambi-
guity besides a painterly illusionistic one.”3 A year
into his studies at Davis, Nauman gave up painting
for good.

3
1. Room with a View. 1963. Oil on
canvas, 26 × 18 in. (66 × 46 cm).
2. The artist in his UC Davis studio,
1965, with a fiberglass-and-polyester-
resin sculpture, now destroyed.
3. Manipulating the T-Bar and Sound
Effects for Manipulating the T-Bar.
1965–66. Still from 16mm film, black
and white, silent, 6:22 min., looped.
1
4. Cup Merging with Its Saucer. 1965.
Unglazed ceramic with graphite,
2 × 5 1⁄2 × 6 1⁄2 in. (5.1 × 14 × 15.2 cm)
4

36 EXHIBITION HISTORY 37
Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, May 10– The Slant Step Show. Berkeley Gallery,
June 2, 1966 San Francisco, September 9–17, 1966

Nauman was offered his first solo show a few It started with a trip to the junk store—the Mount
months shy of graduation, at the dealer Nick Wilder’s Carmel Salvage Shop, in Mill Valley, California.
new space on La Cienega Boulevard, L.A.’s “Gallery Nauman went at the behest of his friend Wiley, who
Row.” Chancing on a Nauman sculpture at the home had become fixated on a curious object: a low-
of UC Davis instructor Tony DeLap, Wilder had hated slung wooden apparatus, clad in grubby linoleum.
the drab-colored wall piece on sight but found that Wiley bought the thing for 50¢ and brought it back
he couldn’t forget it.12 to Nauman’s studio, where it became an object of
The small exhibition featured a number of works almost totemic fascination.
that materialize negative space—the gaps beneath William Allan, another local artist and friend,
and between solid forms, which Nauman rendered pegged the obvious question: “Why would this odd
visible. Abstract sculptures in plaster or fiberglass shape get everybody fired up? It wasn’t a Greek
were assigned rambling, descriptive titles: Shelf torso.” But he admitted that, for whatever reason,
Sinking Into the Wall with Copper-Painted Casts of “it was powerful. Nobody had a clue what the hell
the Spaces Underneath (p. 256), Platform Made Up it could possibly be for.”14 The slant step looks like
of the Space between Two Rectilinear Boxes on the a battered footstool, but one without function: the
Floor. Few objects were sold, but the work caught steep angle of its surface would cause anyone who
the eye of a number of art world denizens: John stepped on it to slip and fall. Its mysterious status
Baldessari, the editorial staff at Artforum, and the and origin became a topic of vigorous debate, and
critic Lucy Lippard, who called the show “as exciting a number of Bay Area artists drew inspiration from
as anything I’ve seen in a long time.”13 this homely item. The saga had its public culmination 3
in a group show in San Francisco, for which Wiley
invited his and Nauman’s shared circle to riff on this
“object of uncertain purpose.”15 Nauman and Allan
collaborated on a film—now lost—of their efforts to
sculpt a replacement slant step, which they exhibited
alongside the other artists’ variations on the theme.16
4
At the end of the show, the original was stolen by a
young Richard Serra, who went back to New York
with the illustrious slant step in tow.17
That same logic of thwarted utility is at work in
Nauman’s devices of 1966, a series of sculptures
“that suggest some function, but are entirely ambigu-
ous.”18 A triangular metal box called Device to Stand In
implies an awkward, even dire fate: as Anne Wagner
1 writes, to comply with the title is to be “fixed in place
like a column or a statue,” as if to “allow sculpture to
feed itself on a body’s aliveness.”19

1. Nicholas Wilder Gallery invitation,

1966. 2. Installation view, Nicholas
Wilder Gallery, 1966. 3. Device to Stand
In. 1966. Enamel on steel, 8 5⁄8 × 27 1⁄8 ×
17 3⁄8 in. (21.9 × 68.9 × 44.1 cm). 4. Phil
Weidman. Slant Step Book (cover).
Sacramento: The Art Co., 1969

38 EXHIBITION HISTORY 39
Eccentric Abstraction. Fischbach Gallery, New
York, September 20–October 8, 1966

Nauman’s work found a New York audience in

Eccentric Abstraction, a modest group show that
has since become a watershed. Lippard organized
the exhibition against sculpture’s prevailing tide,
tempering the rationality of Minimalism with a more
visceral, bodily impulse. The participating artists
favored industrial materials such as rubber, latex, and
vinyl, creating lumpen shapes that dared to “intro-
duce humor into the structural idiom.”20 “Eccentric
abstraction” was an awkward label and the moniker
didn’t stick. But it condensed a new generation’s
shared “non-sculptural style,” and linked Nauman
for the first time to Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, and
other East Coast peers.21
Lippard had found Nauman’s contributions
“deceptively shabby . . . at first sight,” and critics
agreed.22 The dingy latex could repel but something
in it seemed to stir. Mel Bochner’s review for Arts
Magazine traced a similar arc: “It looks like a lot of
rags thrown on the ground or draped on the wall,”
he wrote, yet “the tiredness of [the work] is unusual.
The idea of making something really inconsequential
seems to have possibilities.”23 David Antin was more
decisive, singling Nauman out in Artforum as “the
most interesting of the artists shown.”24

1. Lucy R. Lippard. Eccentric Abstraction

(cover). Exh. cat. New York: Fischbach Gallery,
1966. 2. Eccentric Abstraction. Installation
view showing works by Nauman (background),
Don Potts (foreground), and Keith Sonnier
(right). Nauman’s latex Untitled, typically hung
vertically, here hangs horizontally on the wall

1 2

40 EXHIBITION HISTORY 41
Bruce Nauman. Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 2 3
January 27–February 17, 1968

Leo Castelli opened his Upper East Side gallery in

1957, and by the late 1960s it had become the center
of the New York art world. The elegant émigré dealer
represented the leading Pop painters and Minimalist
sculptors—Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald
Judd, Robert Morris—and his early faith in Nauman
was a boon to the young artist’s career.
Nauman’s solo exhibition at the gallery caused a
ripple through the press, and sparked what Castelli
called “a little flicker of wild enthusiasm” in a few
prominent collectors.25 Critics heralded the arrival of
this “West Coast wild-man” on the New York scene,
but determined that Nauman “owe[d] more to Poppa
Duchamp than to Poppa Funk.”26 In its embrace of
verbal puns, the work seemed to incarnate the spirit
of Dada—though Nauman insists that he came to
Marcel Duchamp secondhand, through Johns, and
that Man Ray was the stronger influence.27
The group of works shown at Castelli figured the
body in absentia, whether cast from life but chopped
to pieces, or hollowed at the core. The wax frag-
ment From Hand to Mouth (1967) objectifies a turn of
phrase, while Neon Templates of the Left Half of My
Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (1966; p. 3) portions
out the human form, breaking it down into units of
measure that glow uranium green.

1. Leo Castelli Gallery advertisement,

Artforum, February 1968. 2. From
Hand to Mouth. 1967. Wax on cloth,
28 × 10 1⁄8 × 4 in. (71.1 × 25.7 ×
10.2 cm). 3, 4. Installation views, Leo
Castelli Gallery, 1968

42 EXHIBITION HISTORY 43
 6 Day Week: 6 Sound Problems. Konrad 1. Nauman, telegram to Konrad
Fischer, June 13, 1968. 2. 6 Day
Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf, July 10–
Week: 6 Sound Problems. Fischer at
August 8, 1968 the front desk of his gallery with Six
Sound Problems for Konrad Fischer,
“I hope you are not driven mad by the sounds yet,” 1968. Tape recorder with six tapes,
chair with pencil, dimensions variable.
Nauman wrote to Konrad Fischer, the week after
3. 6 Sound Problems for Konrad
the opening of his exhibition at Fischer’s Düsseldorf Fischer. 1968. Pencil on paper, 19 1⁄4 ×
gallery.28 That noisy installation, Six Sound Problems 25 in. (49 × 63.5 cm). 4. Konrad Fischer
Galerie invitation card, 1968
for Konrad Fischer, was Nauman’s first in Europe,
and ushered in his commitment to recorded sound
as a viable medium for art.
A former painter who had studied along-
side Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, Fischer
had opened his gallery in 1967, championing “an
abstracted, reduced, serial art. Conceptual Art above
all.”29 His eye for young talent helped to build an
impressive stable and drew a number of Americans
to Europe—he was the first on the Continent to
show Carl Andre, Fred Sandback, and Sol LeWitt.
But Fischer’s more drastic leap was in his business
model, which fostered innovation on a budget: he
found a work-around to the prohibitive cost of crating 3
and shipping art across an ocean. Far cheaper to
put the artists themselves on a plane, host them in
1
Düsseldorf, and have them make something new.
That program of installations constructed in situ “set a
new system in motion” in which art was “not imported
2 to Germany, but rather conceived in response to con-
ditions on the ground.”30
This was certainly true of Six Sound Problems . . . ,
produced entirely within the gallery and keyed to its
rectangular floorplan. Nauman boarded a Lufthansa
flight with blank tapes and made the recordings on
site: the din of footsteps, a bouncing ball, a violin
played off-key. Inspired by the kinds of activities he
had performed in his studio films, these tapes were
reduced to their audio components but cleverly spa-
tialized to fill the room. The loops were unspooled
from the reel-to-reel player, stretched across the gal-
lery, and wound around a pencil fastened to a folding
chair. Every day, a different sound would play and the
chair would be moved to a different spot, shifting the
angle and length of the tape in a radiating pattern.31
A reviewer described it as “the high point to date” in
Nauman’s quest to make “the object itself . . . unim-
portant. Its main function is to trigger associations.”32 4

Fischer was the most significant German dealer

of his generation, though not by the usual metrics.
His space had limited foot traffic and its early shows
received minimal press. “What’s important for me is
not how to sell things,” he reasoned, “but how to
get information across to those who are interested,
so that in due course the artists I represent get
somewhere, and people say, ‘Fischer got the right
man.’”33 Nauman would go on to have over a dozen
solo shows in the Düsseldorf gallery, and the two
men would maintain a devoted, easy friendship until
Fischer’s death, in 1996.

44 45
Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. Whitney in 1968. Per his instructions, the three stood in the 1. Sketch for Performance
Corridor, from a letter to James
Museum of American Art, New York, May 19– corners of the gallery and hurled themselves at the
Monte and Marcia Tucker, March
July 6, 1969 wall with a resounding thwack, moving—as Dan 8, 1969. Ink and pencil on paper.
Graham observed—“in and out of phase.”38 That 2. From left: Richard Serra, James
With Anti-Illusion, Whitney curators James Monte perpetual motion went on for an hour, and duration Tenney, Steve Reich, Nauman, and
Michael Snow performing Reich’s
and Marcia Tucker took a risk: their show consisted was key; given time, the work suggests, basic activity Pendulum Music in the program
entirely of newly commissioned work, most of which can trigger an impassioned response. One observer “Four Evenings of Extended Time
did not outlast it. In its emphasis on contingency remarked that “while [it] was going on, one could not Pieces and a Lecture,” held during
Anti-Illusion at the Whitney, May 27,
and fleeting states, Anti-Illusion responded to the help but admire the deadpan earnestness” of the 1969. 3. Installation view, showing
wave of interest in “process”—what Lawrence dancers. But “in retrospect, the mindless masochism works by, clockwise from center
Alloway called a newfound “acceptance of time as of the performance seems altogether horrifying, and left: Serra, Keith Sonnier, Nauman,
a source of change or of effacement.”34 Recognizing Robert Rohm, Eva Hesse, Serra.
in view of the very considerable risk of . . . damage to
Photo: Peter Moore
the increased fluidity between visual and performing its participants, it seems irresponsible of the Whitney
art, the curators invited painters, sculptors, exper- to have permitted it.”39
imental filmmakers, and composers to show their If Monk herself was troubled by the exertion, she
work on equal footing. never let on. “What I appreciate in Bruce’s work,”
By the late 1960s, Nauman’s practice embod- she has said, is “the way he balances playfulness
ied that interdisciplinary spirit, and his varied con- and pain.”40 The following year, though, she asked
tributions to Anti-Illusion reveal the diversity of Nauman to perform a dance of hers, and the cho-
2
his contacts and investments. In the galleries he reography was punishing: he had to line himself up
constructed a freestanding hallway that he called with the edge of the stage and fall off, over and over.41
Performance Corridor, a temporary wooden struc-
ture of parallel walls that formed a narrow passage.
Having built a mock-up in the Long Island studio
where he had spent the previous winter, Nauman
warned the curators to expect “less a sculpture than
a prop,” as the corridor was not meant to be looked
at but traversed.35 It functioned only through a real- 3

time encounter with the spectators who moved in

and around it. As Tucker observed, “Anyone who
enters the work becomes a performer.”36
Temporality was also the governing theme of
the exhibition’s public programs, a series of eve-
nings of what the curators dubbed “Extended Time
Pieces.” May 27 featured a concert of electronic
music by the Minimalist composer Steve Reich,
whom Nauman had met through Wiley the previous
year. Reich was earning acclaim for his technique 1

of rhythmic “phasing,” in which multiple voices or

instruments begin in unison but gradually fall out of
sync. That principle was succinctly demonstrated
in his Pendulum Music, which Nauman performed
at the Whitney along with Serra, Michael Snow, and
James Tenney. Microphones hung from the ceiling
by cords that were pulled taut and then released,
swinging back and forth over upturned speakers that
screeched with feedback at each pass. The mikes
initially moved in tandem but began to drift apart,
unleashing “unearthly howls and . . . interior voices
in their clash.”37
Phasing is ultimately concerned with the glitches
that disrupt a regular pulse—the hiccups within
repetition, where strict patterns waver and err. That
temporal slippage was compelling to artists and film-
makers as well as musicians, and Nauman presented
a piece of choreography at the Whitney that rendered
phasing flesh. In a rare live appearance, Nauman per-
formed with his then wife and the dancer Meredith
Monk, whom he had met at a party in San Francisco

46 EXHIBITION HISTORY 47
Bruce Nauman: Holograms, Videotapes, Art by Telephone. Museum of Contemporary Art,
and Other Works. Leo Castelli Gallery, Chicago, November 1–December 14, 1969
New York, May 24–June 14, 1969
In 1923, so the story goes, László Moholy-Nagy
“The artist’s toes are ‘so real you could touch them,’” called a Weimar sign shop to order some paint-
ends a review of his second show with Leo Castelli.42 ings by telephone. Using the factory’s color charts
The critic was describing the hyperreality of Nauman’s and a scaled grid to instruct the foreman, Moholy
portrait holograms—volumetric images of his body commissioned enamel-on-steel panels decked with
and face, the first ever made by an established art- simple Constructivist motifs.46 Though his distance
ist. He had read about this new kind of 3-D picture from the fabricator may have been exaggerated, the
in Scientific American, and had written to labs and name “Telephone Pictures” stuck, and these works
institutes for several years to find a willing fabricator.43 became known as pioneering examples of techno-
His fascination with the latest imaging techniques logically mediated art.47
led him to partner with the staff of Conductron, the In 1969, the MCA Chicago staged a group show
Michigan lab where he produced his most ambitious inspired by the Bauhaus master.48 Billed as “the first
work to date. exhibition to focus on . . . the remote-control creation
At the time, video was also a cutting-edge of art,” Art by Telephone likened Moholy’s gesture to
medium for art, and this solo exhibition paired the contemporary trends.49 Director Jan van der Marck
holograms with several tapes—grainy, black-and- 1 solicited proposals for new work, with the proviso
white recordings of Nauman in his Southampton stu- that each piece be constructed from specs given
dio, bouncing in the corner or revolving upside down. over the phone. Thirty-seven artists agreed to “distill
These mundane activities droned on for an hour (then the essence of [their] work and surrender the for-
the length of a standard tape), and he often estranged mula to the museum to deliver”—in other words,
common movements by tipping the camera on its they stayed home while their ideas were carried out
side. Portable video gear had just become widely in Chicago.50 The resulting mix was deemed “a con-
available in the form of the Sony Portapak, which fusing assemblage of bright ideas,” but also taken
Nauman had borrowed from the gallery. (Castelli as a sign of institutional respect for “art without
would lend the same hardware to Serra and Sonnier 1. Revolving Upside Down. 1969. objects, and even art without artists.”51 For his part,
to make tapes of their own shortly after.) Still from videotape, black and white, Nauman devised a one-note score and dialed up a
That art should benefit from developments in sound, 60 min. 2. Leo Castelli Gallery museum staffer, asking him to jump in place for an
invitation card, 1969. 3. Nauman, letter
science and industry was a common refrain of the to MCA curator David Katzive, n.d.
hour while recording the act on video. The video was
era. Projects like Experiments in Art and Technology (c. 1969). 4. Unidentified staff member then shown in the galleries for the remainder of the
(E.A.T.) in New York and the Art & Technology performing Nauman’s instructions at exhibition, replacing the fleeting live event with its
the MCA, 1969
Program in Los Angeles acted as matching services, documentation, endlessly looped.
pairing artists with engineers and leading corpora- In scripting the unnamed employee’s actions,
tions. But Nauman took a more solitary route to Nauman adapted an earlier work: he had assigned
access the latest technology, sourcing the equip- himself a very similar task in Bouncing in the Corner
ment and contacting experts for advice as needed.44 the previous year. But his willingness to “hire a
His later work would continue to make casual use dancer” marked a new phase of his practice: a shift
of the newest possible media, employing advanced from body art to what might now be called “del-
techniques “offhandedly, as if they were old hat.”45 egated performance.”52 Nauman would adhere to
this template in instructions he submitted to other
group shows of this period (Konzeption-Conception
in Leverkusen in 1969, the Tokyo Biennale of 1970); 3
he would not physically reappear in his work until
the late 1980s.53
4

48 EXHIBITION HISTORY 49
Group Shows of Conceptual Art, 1969–70

In 1969 and 1970, Nauman participated in a series

of significant group shows in the United States and
Europe, each an attempt to sum up the new ten-
dencies in Conceptual art. These surveys included
Wim Beeren’s Op Losse Schroeven (Square Pegs in
Round Holes) (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, spring
1969); Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head: When
Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, spring
1969); Lippard’s 555,087, its title derived from the
host city’s population (Seattle Art Museum, fall 1969);
Germano Celant’s Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Land
Art (Galleria civica d’arte moderna, Turin, summer
1970); and Kynaston McShine’s Information (The
Museum of Modern Art, New York, summer 1970).
The surge of international attention secured a place
for Nauman among the most adventurous young art-
ists of the day, a roster including Andre, Hesse, LeWitt,
Morris, Serra, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Jan
Dibbets, Mario Merz, Richard Tuttle, and Lawrence
Weiner. With their jumble of epithets, the exhibitions
struggled to name “what came after Pop and Minimal
art,” and to define an improvisatory moment in which
1
“art has freed itself from its shackles!”54
The disparate practices of this new generation
were linked only by a reliance on unconventional
forms, often using nonart materials in pursuit of an
idea. Reviewing When Attitudes Become Form, Erika
Billeter acknowledged that old standards no longer
applied, and that new perspectives were required to
come to grips with these seismic changes: “Those
who expect art are in the wrong place here. Or they
2
have to learn to think differently,” since “art today is
something entirely different from what it was just a
few years ago.”55
Additional venues: for Op Losse Schroeven, Museum
Folkwang, Essen, under the title Verborgene Strukturen;
for When Attitudes Become Form, Museum Haus Lange,
Krefeld, and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and for
555,087, Vancouver Art Gallery, under the title 955,000.

1. Op Losse Schroeven (Square Pegs

in Round Holes), Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, 1969. Installation view
showing My Name as Though It Were
Written on the Surface of the Moon,
1968. 2. Conceptual Art, Arte Povera,
Land Art, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna,
Turin, 1970. Installation view showing
Gilbert & George, with a Nauman neon
in the background. 3. When Attitudes
Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, 1969.
Installation view showing work by
Alighiero e Boetti (left foreground), Mario
Merz (left center), Robert Morris (back
wall), Barry Flanagan (on floor at center),
and Nauman (on wall and floor at right).
3

50 EXHIBITION HISTORY 51
Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, March 17– Set Design for Merce Cunningham’s Tread, 1970 1. Drawing for Wilder installation. 1969.
Graphite and ink on paper, 23 × 25 in.
April 7, 1970
(58.4 × 73.6 cm). 2. Corridor Installation
Nauman supplied the decor for this new piece of cho- (Nick Wilder Installation). 1970. Wooden
Asked to describe the meaning and motivation behind reography by Merce Cunningham, which debuted at wallboards, water-based paint, three
his new installation at Nicholas Wilder, Nauman would the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 5 and video cameras, scanner, frame, five
monitors, video recorder, video player,
only say, “It deals with how you locate yourself in toured widely in the early 1970s. Johns was artistic
videotape, black and white, silent,
space and then doing something to confuse that.”56 director for the dance company and commissioned dimensions variable, 11 × 40 × 30 ft.
The work consisted of six corridors of varying widths, its sets, often turning to fellow Castelli artists such (335.3 × 1219.2 × 914.4 cm) as installed
at Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles,
made of temporary partitions that ran the length of as Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol.
1970. 3. Merce Cunningham Dance
the gallery. (A front room featured drawings of simi- The sparse design for Tread consisted of a row Company performing Tread, Brooklyn
lar hallways and enclosures.) Some of the openings of fans that lined the stage, blasting air at the audi- Academy of Music, January 1970. 4.
between these wallboards were only a few inches ence while the performance went on behind them. Two Fans Corridor. 1970. Wallboard and
industrial pedestal fans, dimensions
wide, others just large enough to walk into. The first Dance critic Clive Barnes grumbled that he “may variable. Installation view, Walker Art
enterable passage had two stacked monitors at the have contracted pneumonia” on opening night, call- Center, Minneapolis, 2017
end: one showed prerecorded footage of this empty ing Tread “a most engaging work—but when you go,
hall, the other a live feed of the space as seen from a take your overcoat.”59 With their store-bought sim-
closed-circuit camera. Mounted at ceiling height near plicity, the industrial fans were a practical choice for
the entrance, the camera shot viewers from behind, a touring company: they could be purchased at each
4
so the on-screen image of their bodies appeared to venue rather than shipped from place to place.60 But
recede as they moved toward the monitor. To catch there was also a certain poetry to the fans’ mechan-
sight of one’s body slipping away was evidently dis- ical oscillation, turning in their limited arcs while the
turbing: for Rosalind Krauss, the setup put “pressure dancers moved with a “coltish friskiness.”61
on the viewer’s notion of himself . . . as stable and Pedestal fans would crop up in several of
unchanging in and for himself.”57 Nauman’s installations in 1970, but his interest in the
The Wilder Corridor Installation gave rise to numer- device dates back to his time at Davis. A classmate
ous variants, which often used surveillance to monitor remembers him bringing an electric fan to a crit, and
sealed rooms to which physical access was barred. 1
“describing how aesthetically pleasing [it] was in
That creeping sensation of being watched made terms of form and sound.”62 Several of his contem-
many critics tense, though the Los Angeles Times poraries (Hans Haacke, Michael Asher) used columns
reviewer thrilled to the “feelings of vague dread that of air as a sculptural material, but Nauman was par-
have become [Nauman’s] trademark.”58 2 ticularly attuned to the audible whir of the fan blades.

52 EXHIBITION HISTORY 53
Body Movements. La Jolla Museum of documenta 5. Kassel, June 30–October 8, 1972 slits at the sides permitted a degree of voyeurism for 1. Green Corridor looking out on
Sky & Ocean at La Jolla. 1971.
Contemporary Art, March 26–April 25, 1971 those who might peer in, but a sliver of the interior
Pencil and pastel on paper,
Nauman was invited to participate in documenta at compartment remained safely hidden from view. In 22 7⁄8 × 28 15⁄16 in. (58.1 × 73.5 cm).
“I’ve had it in my studio for a couple of weeks, the behest of Harald Szeemann, impresario of its fifth a letter to Szeemann, Nauman described the rules 2. Nauman in Green Light Corridor
and I like it O.K.,” Nauman wrote from Pasadena installment, Questioning Reality—Pictorial Worlds governing this interactive work: “A person may have in his Pasadena studio, 1970.
3. documenta 5, 1972. Installation
in 1970, having moved to the quiet L.A. suburb a Today. This mammoth exhibition of over 200 artists the key in his possession for no more than one hour view showing works by Nauman
few months prior. “It doesn’t do any thing terrifically has become a landmark of curatorial practice, show- at a time. . . . He is not to share the key or allow (left), Barry Le Va (on floor), and
unexpected yet it’s quite strange or disconcerting to ing installation, performance, video art, and ephemera another person into the space with him. If these Reiner Ruthenbeck (hanging)
go in there.”63 Nauman was referring to the prototype on equal footing with painting and sculpture. rules are not followed most of the time (we must
of his Green Light Corridor, first exhibited in this Nauman was included in a section titled “Process,” allow for some fuck-ups) some one [sic] must take
group show near San Diego in 1971. The structure along with peers linked to Post-Minimalism and arte more strict control of the process.”67 With Kassel
is a forty-foot-long channel that emits a bright green povera: Hesse, Merz, Serra, Giovanni Anselmo, Corridor: Elliptical Space Nauman furthered his inter-
glow, spilling outward through a twelve-inch opening Barry Le Va, Dorothea Rockburne, and many others. est in close quarters, willed confinement, and their
that beckons entry but is barely passable. Viewers Divided into more than a dozen sub‑genres, the exhi- psychological effects.
who brave the shrunken hall find their vision altered bition was notoriously uneven; the Los Angeles Times Work by Nauman had appeared in the previous
on the other side: as they emerge from this color-sat- critic called it “the most chaotic and exhausting sur- documenta, in 1968, and would in four more to date
urated zone, natural light appears rosy pink—an vey of contemporary art I have ever encountered.”65 (1977, 1982, 1992, and 1997).
afterimage prompted by the corridor’s vivid green. But within that carnival atmosphere, Nauman carved
The effect is both subtle and fleeting but it startles out a space for solitude, trading the hubbub of the
nonetheless, as our eyes betray us with phantom pavilion for what Carter Ratcliff called “an entirely
hues that fade as soon as we perceive them. different order of experience.”66
Over the next few years, Nauman would con- His contribution was a narrow, crescent-shaped
tinue to explore how human physiology shapes per- corridor with a locked door at its center, leading to
ception, through a series of environments bathed in an alcove just big enough for one. A single viewer at
fluorescent light. These architectural manipulations a time could request the key and shut herself inside,
were shown in galleries around the world, including experiencing a period of voluntary isolation. Open
Untitled (Helman Gallery Parallelogram) in St. Louis
in 1971, Natural Light, Blue Light Room at the Ace
1
Gallery, Vancouver, the same year, Floating Room:
Lit from Inside (p. 289) at Castelli in 1973, and Yellow
Room (Triangular) at Konrad Fischer in 1974. In its
immersive sensibility this work was in step with a
2 3
broader regional trend: the Light and Space move-
ment out of Southern California. But Nauman’s
tinted rooms lacked the Zen-like ambience of a
Robert Irwin or a James Turrell—his cramped, off-kil-
ter spaces were designed to put us on edge. “What
really interested me,” Nauman has said, “is what it
is about certain spaces that makes us feel uncom-
fortable, and . . . what emotions do we have when
we sense a room is not right. I didn’t want to escape
that condition. I wanted to go right to it.”64

54 EXHIBITION HISTORY 55
Bruce Nauman: Work from 1965 to 1972.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
December 19, 1972–February 18, 1973;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
March 29–May 13, 1973

Nauman received his first full-career retrospective

at the ripe age of thirty-one. Organized jointly by
Jane Livingston at LACMA and by Marcia Tucker
at the Whitney, the exhibition traveled to six more
venues between 1972 and 1974. The 117-work
checklist comprised “every medium known to man
and Artforum,” from neon signs to video corridors,
watercolors to holograms.68 The survey brimmed
with examples from every phase of the artist’s dis-
parate production, as slack anthropomorphism in
his early latex works gave way to the use of his own
body, then veered into large-scale environments
that begged the viewer’s participation. As Livingston
warned the docents charged with leading public
tours, “Nauman is the sort of artist who is not only
ahead of his audience but ahead of himself . . .
inventing things and then abandoning them before
1
they became assimilated into the art world.”69
Nauman’s lack of a signature style polarized the
critics: some used what they saw as willful incoher-
ence to dismiss the work outright, while more sym-
2
pathetic observers found its variety appealing. New
York Times critic Hilton Kramer panned the “hard to
describe” exhibition, reducing it to “a few sculptures
with no sculptural interest, a few photographs of no
photographic interest, a few video screens offering
images that somehow manage to be both boring and
repugnant.”70 But others applauded Nauman’s “cre-
ative intensity [that] has risen above conventional
forms and means.”71 Despite mixed reviews—and
occasional grousing that so much exposure was
premature—the retrospective cemented his inter-
national standing as one of “the most important
younger artists working today.”72
Additional venues: Kunsthalle Bern; Städtische Kunsthalle,
Düsseldorf; Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Palazzo
Reale, Milan; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; San
Francisco Museum of Art.

1. Bruce Nauman: Work from

1965 to 1972. Installation view,
Kunsthalle Bern, 1973. 2. Nauman,
poster for the exhibition, 1972.
3. Installation view, Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 1972
3

56 EXHIBITION HISTORY 57
 The Consummate Mask of Rock. Albright-
Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, September 26–
November 9, 1975

Sixteen carved limestone blocks were strewn across

the gallery floor, arranged in faintly lopsided pairs, one
cube just smaller than its mate. Accompanying them
was a typed poetic screed, authored by Nauman and
hung on the wall. “This is to mask the cover of need
for human companionship,” reads one line of the man-
uscript, and the text ends with a warning: “people die
of exposure.”73
The Consummate Mask of Rock struck a tenuous
accord between word and image. Long interested
in written language, in the mid-1970s Nauman intro-
duced a new format: long-form lyrical texts combined
with geometric sculpture. These stripped-down
installations were remarkable in their austerity. But the
texts looked inward, shuddering with dramatic shifts
in tone: harsh commands and jeering bravado gave
way to intimate disclosure. Nauman owns that these
works were born of personal and creative struggle: he
was in the midst of a divorce, and feeling depleted at
the close of his retrospective.74 It’s tempting to read 2
the resulting poetry as confessional in nature, its her-
metic lines what Neal Benezra has called a “mean-
1. Contact sheet of installation
dering exercise in veiled revelation.”75 views of Forced Perspective II and
Nauman made a handful of variants on this series Diamond Mind (Diamond Mind
in 1975–76, shown in solo presentations at Castelli, Circle of Tears Fallen All Around
Me), Konrad Fischer Galerie,
Konrad Fischer, the San Francisco Art Institute, Düsseldorf, 1975. 2. Nauman
Sperone Westwater-Fischer in New York, and the installing The Consummate Mask
Ace Gallery outposts in Vancouver and Venice, of Rock at the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, 1975. 3. Diamond Mind.
California. With titles such as Diamond Mind and
1976. Pencil on paper, 30 × 40 in.
Forced Perspective, the arrays were made of carved (76.2 × 101.6 cm)
stone or metal slabs, skewed to tweak their propor- 3
tions. These simple groupings of geometric solids
have strange phenomenological effects: walking
among these wayward cubes, the floor can seem to
tilt beneath your feet. Critics described a crackling
energy that hummed between the units, which “did
not sit idly by like normal Minimal sculpture.”76 These
seemingly “innocent” slabs were seen as “catalysts
for your own awareness of the space . . . the viewer
is asked not only to look but perceive, not only to
stand but think.”77

58 EXHIBITION HISTORY 59
 Rooms. P.S. 1, New York, June 9–26, 1976

Project Studios One opened to the public with the

group exhibition Rooms, a defining show for a decade
whose art was notoriously resistant to definition.
Nauman was among the nearly eighty artists selected
by visionary curator Alanna Heiss, invited to make new
work cued to an art space in a former schoolhouse
(now MoMA PS1). This nineteenth-century brick
behemoth in Queens had recently been salvaged
from demolition, and minimal renovations had left its
peeling paint and weathered floors intact. Participants
colonized every niche from the cellar to the rafters,
spurred by the building’s decrepit charm to “co-opt
the crumminess, draw upon it, work it into the art.”78
Nauman’s untitled sculpture shared in that pro-
visional quality. Two boards rested on cinderblocks
to form makeshift ramps, installed in a rooftop court-
yard. Facing its high walls while climbing the ramps,
viewers observed a shifting ratio of barrier to sky,
such that “little changes in body position . . . resulted
in enormous changes in world perception.”79 The roof
was accessible only by a rickety metal ladder, and
vertigo prevented more-timid critics from getting to
the sculpture at all.80 The work’s scant appearance
and out-of-the-way placement suited this alternative
space, and the strand of 1970s art that was “hard to
see and easy to miss.”81

1. Nauman on the ladder to the roof of P.S.1 with his untitled

installation in the foreground. 2. Artforum (cover), October
1976, showing the P.S.1 building and listing the participants
in Rooms

1 2

60 EXHIBITION HISTORY 61
Bruce Nauman, 1972–1981. Kröller-Müller
Museum, Otterlo, April 5–May 25, 1981

This presentation of Nauman’s work in the Netherlands

was his first solo exhibition organized by a European
museum. Limited to work made since his traveling
retrospective nearly ten years prior, the show high-
lighted his decade-long pursuit of geometric designs
for imaginary spaces. These rings and rhomboids
passed for variants of Minimal sculpture but were
closer to maquettes, doubling as scale models of vast
subterranean tunnels, shafts, and trenches.
Both the catalogue and the critics emphasized a
formal tension at play: between a “reassuring general
impression of the . . . whole and the contrastingly
irritating experience of the detail”—the nicks that mar
a plaster surface, the frayed edges of the fiberglass.82
The elementary forms of Nauman’s stacked circles
imply equilibrium but list to one side, their precarious
balance held in place by thin strings.83
Additional venue: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden.

Installation view, Kröller-Müller

Museum, Otterlo, 1981

62 EXHIBITION HISTORY 63
Bruce Nauman: Neons. Baltimore Museum of
Art, December 19, 1982–February 14, 1983

Bruce Nauman: Neons was the first exhibition devoted

to the artist’s achievements in a single medium. He had
begun experimenting with neon as a student at Davis,
adapting this commercial format to his own more
cryptic ends. A reproduction of James Rosenquist’s
Tumbleweed (1963–66) in an art magazine may have
set his course—he told the show’s curator, Brenda
Richardson, that he liked its mix of hard elements and
concentrated light, prizing the older artist’s “intellec-
tual fitting together of idea and material.”84
Nauman’s earliest trials smothered neon’s inher-
ent glow: he painted the tubes black to block the
light, or submerged them in a crate of motor oil. The
one surviving test case from this period sheathes
an orange tube in fiberglass, which trails across the
floor, in Richardson’s phrase, like “a radioactive,
alien life form.”85
After graduating and setting up a new studio in
a former grocery store in San Francisco, Nauman
began to conceive of his neons as signs rather than
sculptures. Inspired by the blinking advertisements 1
that crowded the windows of delis and bars, he saw
the vulgarity of neon as a way to “make art that
would kind of disappear—an art that was supposed
to not quite look like art. Then, when you read it,
you would have to think about it.”86 Neon signage
served Nauman’s peculiar brand of stilted commu-
nication, and quickly became the material of choice 2
for his nimble way with words. Language games like
puns and anagrams scrambled words to twist their
meanings, exposing the slippery relations between
appearance, sound, and sense.
The Baltimore Museum’s thematic survey dis-
played a number of exhibition copies fabricated
locally—now a common practice, to avoid break-
age of the glass tubes in transit. On the heels of this
show, Nauman’s neon production surged in ambition
and scope. He made elaborate, figurative scenes
through the end of the 1980s but has not returned
to the medium since.

1. Bruce Nauman: Neons. Installation

view, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1982.
2. The True Artist Helps the World by
Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or
3
Wall Sign). 1967. Neon tubing, 59 1⁄16 ×
55 1⁄8 × 1 15⁄16 in. (150 × 140 × 5 cm).
3. American Violence. 1981. Graphite
and colored pastel on paper, 6 ft.
8 in. × 68 1⁄2 in. (203.2 × 174 cm)

64 EXHIBITION HISTORY 65
 The Fine Art of the Knife. Elaine Horwitch 2
Galleries, Santa Fe, December 14, 1984–
January 3, 1985

“A well-made knife should feel like a tool you’ve

been using all your life,” Nauman once remarked.
A pocketknife is strictly functional, but there’s
“something beautiful about its utility.”87 Since the
mid-1970s Nauman has worked to fashion his own
knives: custom designs for himself and his friends,
purpose built to do a job.
That deep respect for proficiency and manual
skill informs Nauman’s whole temperament as a
maker. Forging a knife blade satisfies his need to
make something right and true, and can provide
respite from his more taxing studio practice. “I’m 3
not particularly interested in the old argument about
the line between art and craft,” he has said, but “in
my own work, there are those two different kinds
of things. I see a knife as a tool. It should be well-
made [because] a good knife is more pleasurable
to use. But it doesn’t fulfill whatever intellectual and
emotional demands art makes.”88
Nauman had moved to New Mexico (where he
continues to reside) in 1979, and Western tropes had
begun to find their way into his work. Examples of his
knives were first shown publicly in the winter of 1984,
at this Santa Fe gallery show featuring the work of
several local artisans. Among them was Nauman’s
neighbor George Stumpff, a master hunter and trap-
per seen plying his trade in the 1988 work Hanging
Carousel (George Skins a Fox). This hybrid artwork
combines moving image and mobile sculpture, a 4
metal armature derived from a rancher’s instrument for
training horses. This spindly crossbar is rigged to the
ceiling and hung with lifeless animals—polyurethane
forms made for taxidermy, to be clothed in skins of
hunted game. Nauman shows them bare and eyeless
with limbs left unattached, while a dangling monitor
plays a video of Stumpff meticulously skinning a fox.
Shot in tight close-up, the video portrays George’s
1 calm resolve: despite the grisly visuals, he wields the
knife with “a tender pragmatism,” acting “in complete
harmony with nature and himself.”89

1. Hanging Carousel (George Skins a

Fox). 1988. Steel, polyurethane foam,
monitor, videotape (color, sound), 17 ft.
(518.2 cm) diam., suspended 6 ft. 2 1⁄2
in. (189.2 cm) above floor. Installation
view, Bruce Nauman, Sperone
Westwater, New York, 1988. 2, 3. Elaine
Horwitch Galleries invitation card
(recto and verso), 1984. 4. Still from
video component of Hanging Carousel
(George Skins a Fox)

66 EXHIBITION HISTORY 67
 Bruce Nauman Drawings 1965–1986. Museum für scruffy” tracings to “effortlessly (and elegantly) fin-
Gegenwartskunst, Basel, May 17–July 13, 1986 ished” sheets.93 Wash, watercolor, and chiaroscuro
render solid forms in convincing depth, while more
Nauman’s 1986 retrospective of drawings had been a schematic diagrams “may resemble an engineer’s
long time coming, held as it was after several stalled doodles.”94 Reviewers praised Nauman’s expressive
attempts to highlight his talents as a draftsman. The handling and deft, intuitive line, but they also began to
intrepid curator Kasper König had proposed a pub- credit his drawings with a kind of explanatory power.
lication of drawings in 1971, and the critic and art New York Times critic Roberta Smith saw works on
historian Benjamin Buchloh had suggested a show in paper as the key to Nauman’s oeuvre, and found a
1978—to no avail.90 The long-delayed goal was finally coherence to this exhibition that she felt his others
realized by Dieter Koepplin in a juggernaut exhibition: had lacked: “Both his mind and his sensibility are
over 100 works, eleven venues, and a handsomely more accessible, more on the surface here, and his
illustrated catalogue raisonné. development is condensed into a manageable form.”95
That influential volume sifted through the layers
Additional venues: Kunsthalle Tübingen; Städtisches
of Nauman’s approach. Drawing enters his process Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen,
at various stages and can serve a range of needs: Rotterdam; Kunstraum München, Munich; Badischer
Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg;
quick sketches or notes, exquisite propositions, or
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York;
detailed instructions for a fabricator—“he treats Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum of
drawings with widely differing functions and . . . Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; University Art
demands as equally valid.”91 Nauman also has a Museum, Berkeley.

peculiar habit of drawing finished sculptures after

1 2 3 the fact, returning to a completed work to give the
idea closure. “When I take distance,” he has said,
“I can see aspects of the work that did not appear
before, but which now seem the most important.”92
Critics remarked on the flexibility of Nauman’s
surface effects, which move from “self-consciously
4

1. Sheet Lead. 1966. Pencil on paper,

11 × 8 1⁄2 in. (28 × 21.6 cm). 2. Untitled
(Square Knot). 1967. Watercolor and
charcoal on paper, 30 1⁄4 × 27 1⁄2 in.
(76.8 × 69.9 cm). 3. Study related
to Storage Capsule for the Right
Rear Quarter of My Body. 1966.
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 38 ×
24 3⁄4 in. (95.5 × 63 cm). 4. Crime and
Punishment (Study for Punch and
Judy). 1985. Pencil, black and color
grease crayon, and acrylic on patched
paper, 6 ft. 5 in. × 60 5⁄8 in. (195.6 ×
154 cm). 5. Bruce Nauman Drawings
1965–1986. Installation view, The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987

68 EXHIBITION HISTORY 69
Chambres d’Amis. Museum van Hedendaagse
Kunst, Ghent, June 21–September 21, 1986

The French term “chambres d’amis” means “guest

rooms,” implying a space of hospitality—hosts
opening their homes to visitors, inviting them to
come and stay. That domestic setting provided the
backdrop for a group show of recent art, organized
by Jan Hoet, director of the contemporary museum
in Ghent. The exhibition resisted what Hoet called
“the deadly serious atmosphere . . . that pervade[s]
most museums,” fleeing the white cube in favor of
a more radical solution: “houses, spaces inhabited
by people!”96
Over fifty European and American artists were
paired with as many residents of Ghent, who volun-
teered their bedrooms, foyers, and gardens as alter-
native sites of display. Visitors to the museum were
immediately sent back out with a map, urged to roam
the backstreets and explore the homes of this north-
ern Belgian city. The show attracted nearly 120,000
attendees during its summer-long run, and critics
praised Hoet’s efforts to “take the existing exhibition
structure off its hinges.”97
Nauman’s installation “exposed the underbelly
of the decorous bourgeois interior,” introducing
deviant themes into his allotted space.98 A trio of
works occupied three rooms at the home of Mr. and
Mrs. Serweytens de Mercx, each adding a slightly
sinister twist to the staid and proper milieu. In Good
Boy Bad Boy, two professional actors recite a litany 2
of phrases, like broadcasters delivering the nightly
news. The 1985 video marked Nauman’s return to
the medium after a twelve-year hiatus, with a script
comprised of terse statements of fact that are rarely
uttered aloud: “I have sex/You have sex.” “We don’t
want to die/This is fear of death.” For Chambres
d’Amis, the monitors sat atop low pedestals on the
living room carpet, flanked by china cabinets and a
mantelpiece lined with family photos.
Elsewhere, an audio piece narrated the text of
One Hundred Live and Die (p. 224), adapted from
Nauman’s 1984 neon but read in Flemish (as 100
Leef en Sterf).99 And on the second-floor landing,
his neon stick-figure Hanged Man made a lasting
impression. Decades later, the American curator
Ingrid Schaffner recalled “being led by a uniformed
nanny past children having their breakfast to a neon-
painted hangman, with a jumping-jack-flashing erec-
tion” at the top of the staircase.100

1. Chambres d’Amis. Installation view

showing Good Boy Bad Boy (1985)
installed in a private home, Ghent,
1986. 2. Installation view showing
Hanged Man, Ghent, 1986
1

70 EXHIBITION HISTORY 71
Bruce Nauman. Kunsthalle Basel, July 13– Minimal Art from the Panza Collection. Museo 1. Bruce Nauman. Installation
view, Whitechapel Gallery, 1987.
September 7, 1986; Whitechapel Gallery, Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid,
2. Bruce Nauman. Installation view,
London, January 23–March 8, 1987 March 24–December 31, 1988 Kunsthalle Basel, 1986, showing
Seven Figures (1985). 3. Minimal
July 13, 1986, marked the close of Nauman’s ret- Asked what had spurred his interest in Nauman, Art from the Panza Collection.
Installation view, Reina Sofía, 1988,
rospective of drawings in Basel and the opening of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo had this to say: “He is
showing Green Light Corridor (1970)
another solo exhibition across town. Organized by exploring an entirely new field. He has made a study
Nicholas Serota in London and Jean-Christophe of the relationship between the perceiver and envi-
Ammann at the Kunsthalle Basel, Bruce Nauman also ronment, the reality around man. . . . He is a meta-
traveled to Paris, becoming the artist’s first museum physical artist.”108 Beginning in the 1960s, Panza had
show to reach England or France. Critics took amassed the most extensive collection of American
note of the forty-five-year-old’s somewhat belated Minimal art in private hands. An avowed humanist,
reception—all the more surprising since “Nauman he saw this nonrepresentational work as an exten-
has [long] been the American artist most intensively sion of the classical past, and was drawn to the
discussed amongst his European counterparts.”101 beauty of “pure shapes” and “rational forms”—“a
The show was much anticipated but reactions vision of something ideal.”109 His tastes also tended
were decidedly mixed. After the exhaustive presen- toward large-scale environments and site-specific
tation of drawings that had just closed, this modest sculptures: by the 1970s, he “came to concentrate
survey felt “thin”—a “loose sequence of objects” on works that were, by normal standards, uncol- 3
that was “not representative” of the artist’s achieve- lectable.”110 He ceded whole rooms of his eigh-
ment.102 The mute abstraction of his tunnels and teenth-century villa near Milan to these immersive
trenches seemed at odds with what came next: nar- works of art, renovating its vaulted stables to house
rative videos and neons that marked an “aggressive” Andre floor pieces, Judd boxes, Dan Flavin lamps,
turn in Nauman’s work.103 and Nauman corridors.
The latest neon, Seven Figures (more explicitly Panza featured these works and more in a
subtitled Porno Chain), is a frieze of life-size male and 1 1988 exhibition at the Reina Sofía, one of several
female bodies engaging in carnal acts. A few critics he organized in a decades-long effort to place his
were scandalized by Nauman’s cartoon depictions of collection in a public museum. (That campaign
group sex,104 but others felt the on/off blink of neon ended in 1990, with the sale of hundreds of works
sapped the scene’s erotic charge. Seen in profile, to the Guggenheim in New York.)111 Curator Carmen
the orgy neatened into “an assembly line” of dis- Giménez invited Panza to oversee the installation
crete parts; timed to flash at regular intervals, it was himself, and the liberties he took with fabrication
more mechanical than lewd.105 Fraught content also 2 ran afoul of some of the artists. Flavin was so riled
found dispassionate form in Violent Incident (1986; by the arrangement of his fluorescent tubes that he
p. 208), a bank of video monitors that relay a dinner demanded a work be removed, publicly denouncing
date gone wrong. A man pulls a woman’s chair out Panza’s rendition of his work as “an utter spatial
from under her, and things escalate from there: harsh and architectural misinterpretation.”112 The collec-
words are exchanged, there’s a knee to the groin, tor’s once-genial relationship with Judd soured over
and both lunge for a knife. “This action takes all of similar disputes; in his published screed “Una Stanza
about eighteen seconds” and then repeats with the Per Panza,” Judd accused his most loyal patron of
roles reversed, followed by rehearsal footage of the dealing in “fakes.”113
actors blocking out the scene.106 A French reviewer The trouble arose from Panza’s (trailblazing) habit
described the videos’ obvious staging as a foil to of purchasing works as diagrams or plans, along
the abuse—he saw the work as “a burlesque” of with the rights to (re)make the physical objects at
violence, rather than a glimpse of it.107 some future date. Collecting “on paper” dodged
Italian import taxes and cut the costs of storage and
Additional venue: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
shipping, such that “very large works filling a whole
room can be kept . . . in a desk drawer or the file of
an archive.”114 The more exacting of the Minimalists
balked at the results, but Nauman was more per-
missive, allowing for leeway in the realizations of his
corridors and floating rooms. Expendable by nature,
these works were meant to be rebuilt at each venue;
if anything, he felt that Panza made them “much pret-
tier than I would have.”115 “One or two times, when I
haven’t been consulted, Panza got it wrong,” Nauman
said, “but most of my pieces can be adjusted quite a
bit and still meet the point of the piece.”116

72 EXHIBITION HISTORY 73
Bruce Nauman: Prints 1970-89, Castelli Graphics the height of the conflict in Vietnam, has the ring of 1. Installation view, Lorence-Monk 2
Gallery, 1989. 2. Nauman at work on
and Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, September a tacit indictment.
the lithograph Suposter at Gemini
16–October 14, 1989; Donald Young Gallery, Nauman has maintained that prints appealed G.E.L., Los Angeles, 1972. 3. Me.
Chicago, September 29–October 21, 1989 because “there is a directness to making marks,” 1963. Lithograph, 16 1⁄4 × 11 7⁄8 in.
yet “the technique [can] be a buffer between me and (41.3 × 30.2 cm). 4. Pay Attention.
1973. Lithograph, 38 1⁄4 × 28 1⁄4 in.
Nauman began training as a printmaker in the art the image. I like that, too.”118 His finished works often (97.2 × 71.8 cm)
department at Wisconsin. His earliest surviving litho- thematize the process of their making, with particu-
graph is a 1963 self-portrait, with traces of Egon lar attention to the reversals inherent in lithography.
Schiele in its fitful, nervous line. By the early 1970s Clear Vision (1973) is scrawled backward, its mes-
he had returned to the medium with lasting dedi- sage muddled in the turnabout; and Pay Attention
cation, collaborating with master printers to explore (1973) is wickedly hard to read—“we follow its com-
a staggering range of techniques. Through stints at mand before we know it.”119
workshops such as Gemini G.E.L. and Cirrus Editions Nauman’s prints did not receive their due until
in Los Angeles, he has made sleek typeset screen- this 1989 retrospective, jointly organized by his gal-
prints and fine-limned drypoints, deftly incised. leries in New York and Chicago and accompanied
Nauman first encountered the philosophy of by a catalogue raisonné. Critics were taken with
Ludwig Wittgenstein in college, and language games this “much needed” display of his graphic achieve-
have invigorated his practice ever since. “I try to ment,120 praising these “insistent, often hostile works
work at the functional edges” of language, he told bent on startling our consciousness upward a notch
Christopher Cordes, “when what is known rubs up or two. They are ultimately more touching than aggra-
against what is unknown, or grammar rubs up against vating and often quite beautiful to look at.”121
nongrammar.”117 Puns, palindromes, and other lexical
inversions dominate his prints, which treat words as
both graphic objects and carriers of unstable mean-
ing. A nonsense phrase like Oiled Dead (1975) hints
at ecological peril, and Raw War (1970), produced at

1 3 4

74 75
Bruce Nauman: Skulpturen und Installationen, Dislocations. The Museum of Modern Art, New hurt me/sociology.” Nauman told Storr that he ini-
1985–1990. Museum für Gegenwartskunst, York, October 20, 1991–January 7, 1992 tially tried the lines himself, but “they didn’t sound
Basel, September 23–December 10, 1990 good coming out of my mouth”—hence the casting
Curator Robert Storr’s first exhibition at MoMA sig- of Eckert, a classically trained singer whose bari-
Nauman’s third exhibition in Basel in four years high- naled a changing of the guard. The Museum had tone lent the script a fierce intensity.130 His shouted
lighted his recent work: the sculpted body parts and not mounted a major group show of contemporary monosyllables become a chorus and then a canon,
video environments that had occupied him since art in nearly a decade,128 and critics heeded Storr’s its similarities to Gregorian chant compounded by
1985. These severed heads, disfigured animals, and admission of “more rough-and-tumble forms” into Eckert’s monastic baldness. Tying a directive like
tortured clowns had been shown in New York a few “the temple of modernism.”129 Dislocations posi- “hurt me” to basic human relations (“sociology”)
months prior, earning the artist some notoriety as “the tioned Nauman among a new set of living artists, implied a primal need: Storr wrote that Nauman
Master of the Morbid Fragment.”122 a multigenerational cohort using installation as “articulates an old . . . fear that the rational powers
Nauman had ordered models of deer, coyotes, their medium. His thunderous video piece Anthro/ we appeal to for help will turn on and destroy us.”131
and wolves from a taxidermists’ catalogue, then Socio joined commissions by Louise Bourgeois,
sliced them up to recombine them in “unexpected Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, David Hammons, Ilya
hybrids.”123 Joints were left messy to betray the arti- Kabakov, and Adrian Piper.
fice of their making: “edges don’t meet” and “glops Nauman’s contribution was a darkened room
of yellow glue drip down like honey.”124 More visceral ringed with projections of a talking head, both scat-
still were his waxen busts of human heads, mounted tered on monitors and cast against the gallery walls
on plinths or strung from the ceiling with scraggly at a colossal height. The head belonged to the per-
bits of wire. The hyperrealism of direct casting kept formance artist Rinde Eckert, who intoned a men-
“every wrinkle, every pore” intact, suggesting mod- acing rhyme: “feed me/eat me/anthropology”; “help me/
ern-day death masks in “queasy, Play-Doh colors.”125
The theatrics of a guillotined head were height-
ened in Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime 3
1
(1990; pp. 214–15), a darkened room dotted with
video equipment and ever shifting projections. One
sequence captures the wax heads in silhouette,
backlit against a sheet (p. 219), as they swing in per- 4

ilous arcs before fatally colliding. In the other, a win-

some female mime tries to follow orders delivered by
an unseen male (p. 216). She starts off gamely but
falters when she can’t keep pace with his demeaning 2
stage directions: “Lie down, roll over, play dead.”
“The mime does her best,” Richard Kalina wrote,
“but the voice is never satisfied. Neither is the
viewer.”126 There is no vantage from which to see
the installation as a whole; views are always par-
tial, and fractured further by the images’ constant
churn. Shadow Puppets . . . renders us “incapable
of escaping thematized violence,” as its restless
visuals “turn from cheery treadmills to desperate
endgames.”127
Additional venues: Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt; Musée
cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.

1. Bruce Nauman: Skulpturen

und Installationen. Installation
view, Musée cantonal des
Beaux-Arts, 1991. 2. Museum für
Gegenwartskunst exhibition poster,
1990. 3. Nauman in the gallery
containing Anthro/Socio (Rinde
Facing Camera), in Dislocations,
The Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
4. Anthro/Socio. Installation view
in Dislocations

76 EXHIBITION HISTORY 77
Bruce Nauman. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, monitors or rasped from hidden speakers. The counseled patience: to see past the sensory assault
April 10–June 19, 1994; Hirshhorn Museum racket seemed designed to “put the audience on required a certain “faith that one is in good hands,
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, tenterhooks,” and even the many rave reviews con- that the grimmer phases of Nauman’s process are
Washington, D.C., November 3, 1994–January ceded: “the urge to flee is strong.”133 not dispensable to its purpose, which is to render the
29, 1995 The main culprit was Nauman’s 1987 installation condition of being alive more fully, sharply real.”136
Clown Torture (pp. 204–5), a four-channel, multimon- Additional venues: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
To hear the critics tell it, Nauman’s 1994 retrospec- itor ordeal that served as the “pièce de résistance” of Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;
tive was a throttling experience. Jointly organized this polarizing show.134 Here a clown in full makeup The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthaus Zürich.
by Kathy Halbreich of the Walker Art Center and is put through humiliating paces: spied on in the
Neal Benezra of the Hirshhorn, the sixty-work show bathroom, falling prey to his own gags, wailing “No!
made the rounds to four more museums in the No! No!” in vain. Several critics also saw Learned
United States and Europe. But reviewers were quick Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) (1988;
to liken it to other spaces of heightened encounter: p. 188) as emblematic of the retrospective, with its
an “amusement park,” a “tortured madhouse,” and videos of lab rats navigating a “piss green” Plexi
a “masochist’s delight.”132 maze to a pounding soundtrack.135
This comprehensive, difficult survey did not This was the first opportunity to see the full com-
brook tepid response. For it or against it—and plement of Nauman’s work since the retrospective in
there were strong partisans in both camps—every 1972, and his supporters found it essential, whatever
observer was struck by the noise. Neon tubing its challenges. “His scary yet exalting vision is the
issued a mechanical hiss, motors churned in a real thing,” wrote one reviewer of the Hirshhorn pre-
mechanized sculpture, voices blared from video sentation, and those convinced of Nauman’s merits

1 2

1. Bruce Nauman. Installation view,

The Museum of Modern Art, 1995.
2. Installation view, Reina Sofía,
1993. 3. Installation view, Walker
Art Center, 1994. 4. Installation
view, Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, 1994

78 EXHIBITION HISTORY 79
Bruce Nauman: Image/Text, 1966–1996. Centre Bruce Nauman. Donald Young Gallery,
Georges Pompidou, Paris, December 16, 1997– Chicago, May 1–June 26, 1999
March 9, 1998
Nauman has long been preoccupied with themes of
It’s rare to begin an exhibition catalogue with a visibility and exposure, tweaking spaces and sight
caveat, but the organizers of this show felt com- lines to “put the viewer under an almost indefinable
pelled. As the Pompidou curator Christine van stress.”143 Those abiding concerns found a new
Assche declared at the outset, “There was no real format in Indoor Outdoor Seating Arrangement, the
justification for organizing a new retrospective—the sculpture featured in his fourth one-person show
one in Minneapolis accomplished this task effec- at Donald Young’s Chicago gallery. Four banks of
tively.” 137 While the show did display a sizable bleachers monopolized the central skylit room; a fifth
cross-section of the artist’s career, it was received was installed right outside, facing a brick wall. These
as “a focused exercise, not a sweeping overview.”138 prefab units were rentals, steel girders with wood-
The proximity to the Walker exhibition’s tour called plank seats, like the ordinary grandstands found at
for a thematic approach, and gave the curators a ball field or county fair.
license “to present Nauman’s work from a more Galleries are for looking, and these tiered risers
distinctively European point of view.”139 Image/Text are made to furnish unobstructed views. But Nauman
picked two entwined motifs from the artist’s varied installed them just three feet apart, angled to face
practice: the musicality of language and the outsize one another. Visitors can sit down but there’s nothing
role of the spectator as “the instrument or the target to look at, save the apparatus for viewing itself. Like
of that speech.”140 the surveillance corridors of the 1970s, Nauman’s
Despite the curatorial effort to separate this sur- empty seats beckon interaction, assigning his audi-
vey from the larger retrospective, the memory was ence the dual roles of observer and performer.144
fresh, and critics framed their reactions to Image/ But here the setup is lower tech and the activity
Text with the 1994 show in mind. Jean-Pierre Criqui less prescribed. Some critics welcomed that slack-
called the exhibition “something of an unintended ening of control, as it left the viewer’s task “more
1
retrospective,”141 and Janet Kraynak saw both mono- open-ended and self-determined.” The collective
graphs as “marked by a similar deficit: the inability experience of watching a spectator sport could be
to locate a core within formally diverse works” or to replaced by something insular, the bleachers’ inward
adequately “reveal the theoretical issues Nauman turn encouraging forms of mental reflection.145 But
2
sets in motion.”142 for others the relative passivity of the piece diluted
Additional venues: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; its force and effect. Nauman’s bleachers “display
Hayward Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary little of his talent for confrontation,” wrote Alan Artner
Art Kiasma, Helsinki. in the Chicago Tribune. The seating’s odd configu-
ration allowed viewers to “fantasize a disconcerting
scenario rooted in opposition, but that is different
from conveying the feeling itself.”146 3

1. One Hundred Live and Die.

1984. Pencil, pastel, charcoal, and
watercolor on paper, two parts,
each: 9 ft. 8 15⁄16 in. × 50 in. (297 ×
127 cm). 2. Bruce Nauman: Image/
Text 1966–1996. Installation view,
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1997.
3. Bruce Nauman. Installation
view, Donald Young Gallery, 1999.
4. Study for Indoor Outdoor Seating
Arrangement. 1999. Pencil on paper,
30 1⁄16 × 42 15⁄16 in. (76.4 × 108.2 cm)

80 EXHIBITION HISTORY 81
Samuel Beckett/Bruce Nauman. Kunsthalle
Wien, Vienna, April 2–30, 2000

With Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) Nauman

renders basic movements stiff and strange. Over
the course of the hour-long tape he lurches through
the studio, bent at the waist with locked knees. A
preparatory sketch diagrams the circuitous path he
follows: endlessly retracing his steps, legs jutting at
right angles. Like many American artists who came
of age in the 1960s, Nauman admired the work of
Samuel Beckett, crediting the playwright’s ability
“to follow a seemingly absurd logic” as key to his
own performances.147 Beckett’s characters labor
in vain, exhausting themselves on arbitrary tasks,
and . . . Beckett Walk partakes of that same “highly
systematic nonsense.”148 Like Beckett before him,
Nauman finds “a compulsion in the act of walking,”
and “careful, even tender attention to awkwardness
is a feature of the work of both artists.”149
The Kunsthalle Wien’s exhibition Samuel Beckett/
Bruce Nauman explored that common ground,
drawing parallels that had been noted by scholars
but not yet argued spatially, through objects.150 That
said, reviewers found “this riveting exhibition [to be]
more archive than display,” supplementing footage
of Beckett’s works for the stage, film, and television
with notebooks and rare manuscripts.151 Steeped 1
in both artists’ practices, the show allowed for dis- 1. Untitled (Study for Slow Angle
tinctions as well as affinities: “Like characters in a Walk [Beckett Walk]). 1968–69.
Beckett play, Nauman and Beckett go about one Graphite and colored pencil on
paper, 8 1⁄2 × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm).
another in circles—they meet, wrestle, and go their 2. Samuel Beckett/Bruce
separate ways.”152 Nauman (cover). Exh. cat. Vienna:
Curatorial efforts to pair Nauman with another Kunsthalle Wien, 2000. 3. Slow
Angle Walk (Beckett Walk). 1968.
figure have been on the rise: recent two-man
Stills from videotape, black and
shows (always men) include Body Double: Jasper white, sound, 60 min.
Johns/Bruce Nauman at New York’s Craig F. Starr
Gallery in 2013, an exhibition of Nauman and Ed
Atkins at the Kunsthalle Mainz in 2014, a Nauman/
Alberto Giacometti presentation at the Schirn
Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2016, and Francis Bacon/ 2
Bruce Nauman—Face to Face, at the Musée Fabre,
Montpellier, in 2017.

82 EXHIBITION HISTORY 83
Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio I (Fat
Chance John Cage). Dia Center for the Arts,
New York, January 9–July 27, 2002

“What triggered the piece were the mice,” Nauman

told Michael Auping, recalling the chance encounter
that had set his latest work in motion. His home stu-
dio in New Mexico had been temporarily infested the
previous summer, overrun with so many field mice
“that even the cat was getting bored.”153 Creatively
stymied and feeling short on ideas, he turned to the
interior of the studio itself, setting an infrared camera
to record overnight—“just to see what I could get.”154
What he got was a lot of empty time, punctu-
ated by sudden movements and sounds: darting
mice, the glint of a moth, howls from distant coy-
otes. Footage shot over several months was edited
down to a five-hour-and-forty-five-minute opus, on
view at the Dia Center for the Arts for six months in
2002. The seven-channel video surveilled the room
from different angles, and the images were projected
floor-to-ceiling on all four walls of the darkened gal-
lery. The screens’ monumental scale and 360-degree
presentation had an immersive effect, converting the
Chelsea exhibition space into a kind of surrogate stu-
dio. Rolling office chairs on casters, provided by the
venue, let viewers rotate and spin, lured by flashes
of motion in their peripheral vision, or rare sightings
of the cat.
Critics admired the “desolate beauty” Nauman
wrought from prosaic, even boring material, and some
read the piece as a kind of summa, tying together the
threads of his practice: surveillance, duration, every-
day activity, and a certain ambivalence toward the stu-
dio, which is framed as both a cauldron of invention
and a locus of creative anxiety.155 The artist’s past
is also literally present, stacked in the corners and
littering the floor—discarded sketches, sculptural
castoffs tossed beside a finished pair of wax heads,
and a shipping crate returning work from the Walker’s
1994 retrospective.
The work’s wry subtitle—(Fat Chance John
Cage)—is a nod to the maestro of chance. Nauman
had read Cage’s writings as a college student
and Mapping the Studio . . . is a complex tribute,
designed to alert us to ambient sights and sounds
that would otherwise go unnoticed. As a visual cor-
ollary to the composer’s mantra “There is no such
thing as silence,” he shows that an empty room is
never vacant, that life goes on without us. But for
some Nauman’s tone was far less sanguine than
Cage’s affirmative stance, as the night-vision cam-
eras track the instinctual dance of predator and prey.
Mapping . . . ’s “tranquillity feels subtly dire” if we
focus on the scurry, as Nauman hints at “the violence
that’s hardwired into nature and its agents, which is
something that Cage never really allowed.”156
Installation view, Dia Center for
the Arts, 2002

84 EXHIBITION HISTORY 85
Unilever Series: Bruce Nauman—Raw
Materials. Tate Modern, London, October 12,
2004–March 28, 2005

“Thank you. Thank you. Thankyouthankyou!” yells

the artist through a high-tech speaker, the phrase
pulsing on a loop until its politeness begins to grate.
This expression of grudging hospitality greeted visi-
tors to Nauman’s Raw Materials, a sound installation
commissioned for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Rows
of speakers lined the walls of the atrium’s vast inte-
rior, filling the otherwise empty space with a chorus
of human voices.
The texts were lifted from Nauman’s work of
the past four decades, isolating audio and verbal
components of his oeuvre as “raw material” for
something new. One could call the piece—and
many did—a “retrospective in sound,” though Raw
Materials did more than just compile existing work.
Shorn of visuals, the words were pried from their
original contexts; Nauman said that he wanted to
use speech “in an abstract way, without getting
involved with the meanings of the texts, but using the
rhythms and textures.”157 Directional speakers kept
each bit of dialogue distinct by limiting its range,
emitting targeted blasts of noise that gained force as
one passed by. Inarticulate hums (“mmmmmmm”) gave
way to staccato syllables (“work work work work”)
and whispered threats (“I can suck you dry”). But the
overall effect was cumulative, as sounds buffeted
the listener “in mounting waves.”158 Vocal refrains
blended into “a powerful form of mental sculpture,”
and walking the length of the Turbine Hall was “also
a musical experience.”159
Nauman was offered the cavernous space as 1
part of a series of artist takeovers, following dazzling
installations by Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor.
Critics saw Raw Materials as a kind of corrective to
the grandeur of those projects, as Nauman rejected
2
monumentality and brought the hall down to human 3 4
scale.160 Visitors had nothing to look at but each
other and the shell of the architecture, as recorded
voices mixed with the clatter of live footsteps, the
murmur of the crowd.

1. Draft of the floor plan for Raw

Materials, May 24, 2004. Ink on
papers, 1113⁄16 × 30 7⁄8 in. (30 × 78.4
cm). 2. Tate Modern invitation card,
2004. 3. Bruce Nauman—Raw
Materials (cover). Exh. cat. London:
Tate Publishing, 2004. 4. Installation
view, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2004

86 EXHIBITION HISTORY 87
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1 1. Nauman and William Allan.
Abstracting the Shoe. 1966.
1960s. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film
Stills from 16mm film, color,
Archive, January 17–April 15, 2007 silent, 2:41 min. 2. A Rose Has
No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the
Curated by Constance Lewallen for the Berkeley Art 1960s. Installation view, The Menil
Collection, 2007. 3. Installation
Museum, A Rose Has No Teeth retrained attention
view, Berkeley Art Museum, 2007
on the early years of Nauman’s practice, from his
matriculation at UC Davis through his move to L.A. in
1969. To bracket off his Northern California stint was
to argue for a decisively local formation, reflecting
the ethos—if never quite the aesthetic—of Bay Area
Funk: casual experimentation, unorthodox materials,
a penchant for “the naïve and the vulgar.”161 The
show’s framing lent a regional inflection to Nauman’s
central, animating question, asking, “At this particu-
lar time and in this specific place, what [did] it mean
to be an artist?”162
Years of grant-funded research on Lewallen’s
part produced valuable oral histories: classmates
remembered Nauman as “wildly original,” “with-
out any kind of artifice”—“a guy that everybody
knew was going to go somewhere, he just had that
aura about him.”163 The show’s 120-work checklist
2
unearthed rare finds, including a series of films not
exhibited for decades, modeled on instructional
movies for hobbyists. Shot by William Allan, these
gently absurdist shorts record the making of a quasi-
artwork. In Abstracting the Shoe, Nauman fashions
a man’s shoe from roofing tar applied in muddy,
near-fecal smears. And Span documents an esca-
pade at the creek near Allan’s studio: the artists rig
a tarp across the water and then head home, leaving 3
it to sway in the breeze.
Additional venues: Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte
Contemporanea, Turin; The Menil Collection, Houston.

88 EXHIBITION HISTORY 89
Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens. 53rd 1. Installation view, U.S. Pavilion,
Venice, 2009. 2. Nauman installing
Venice Biennale, June 7–November 22, 2009
with curator Carlos Basualdo.
3. Installation view, showing,
Topology is a branch of mathematics concerned with foreground, two Three Heads
transformation—a set of tools to record “the conti- Fountain works, 2005. 4. Exterior of
the U.S. Pavilion, Venice
nuity of space amid changing conditions.”164 It also
happens to be the last math course Nauman took
at Wisconsin before switching his major to art.165
Topological thinking involves dynamism and flux,
alongside a certain retention: the form is infinitely
malleable while the basic concepts hold.
Fluidity of shape, stability of substance—topol-
ogy allows for contradiction. And it proved a nim-
ble framework for an exhibition of Nauman’s work.
Topological Gardens was the U.S. entry in the 2009
Venice Biennale, curated by Carlos Basualdo and
Michael R. Taylor of the Philadelphia Museum of
Art. Nauman had been included in six previous
Biennales, dating back to 1978, and had shared a
prize for lifetime achievement with Louise Bourgeois
there in 1999. But this was his first dedicated pavil-
ion, and the critical reaction was extraordinary: the
show met with near-universal acclaim and was
awarded the Golden Lion.
The exhibition gave a synoptic account of his
work, more focused than complete—the curators
ducked a retrospective’s totalizing mandate in favor 1 3
of a smaller survey. Around thirty works spanning
Nauman’s career were hung achronologically, loosely
grouped around thematic threads and spread across
three venues: the U.S. Pavilion and two local univer-
sities, Università Iuav di Venezia and Ca’ Foscari.
A subtler version of Nauman’s oeuvre emerged in
the editing, in line with recent changes in the art-
ist’s sensibility—the work had gradually become
“less harsh and more meditative,” and the curators 2 4
followed suit.166 Hostile elements were deliberately
sidelined to arrive at something more restrained,
“distilling from the cacophony of Nauman’s work a
show that is bittersweet, valedictory.”167
That newfound elegance was best captured in
the sound sculpture Days (pp. 92–93), a stream of
spoken words. This 2009 work filled a gallery with a
double row of speakers emitting voices that recite
the days of the week in random order. Long fas-
cinated by the sonic shape of words in other lan-
guages, Nauman also recorded an Italian version,
Giorni, with voice-over by Venetian students. For
Calvin Tomkins, passing the pairs of speakers was
“like moving through discrete ribbons of sound,” the
pattern of utterances melding in space to lulling,
“hypnotic” effect.168 By tampering with the familiar
sequence of days, Nauman disrupted the conven-
tions by which we note the passage of time, “prob-
lematizing a supposedly natural order” that marks
the unfolding of a human life.169

90 EXHIBITION HISTORY 91
 Days. 2009. Fourteen-channel sound
installation with fourteen hanging
loudspeakers, continuous play,
dimensions variable. Installation
view, Università Iuav di Venezia,
Venice, 2009

92 EXHIBITION HISTORY 93
Bruce Nauman: For Children/For Beginners. Bruce Nauman. Fondation Cartier pour l’art
Sperone Westwater, New York, November 11– contemporain, Paris, March 14–June 21, 2015
December 18, 2010
The becoming-digital of Nauman’s work was laid
For Children/For Beginners was Nauman’s tenth bare in this 2015 capsule exhibition in Paris. The
one-person exhibition at Sperone Westwater and his Fondation Cartier’s transparent facade framed a
first at the gallery’s new Manhattan location on the pair of recent videos, displayed here on a giant LED
Bowery. A stacked video projection was calibrated screen fit for an arena. Commanding the ground floor
to fill the soaring, double-height atrium, providing of the Jean Nouvel–designed glass box, the video
a “spare and elegant” solution to Norman Foster’s doubled as a glowing billboard to draw pedestrians
unique architecture.170 in from the boulevard Raspail.172
For Beginners (all the combinations of the thumb This latest work, Pencil Lift/Mr. Rogers (2013),
and forefingers) (2010) depicts two looming pairs of demonstrates a tricky feat, as Nauman holds a stubby
hands, framed in tight close-up against a blank field pencil aloft between the sharpened tips of two others.
of black or white. Hands cleaved from a body may The left side of the diptych isolates the action against
feel anonymous, but several critics recognized these a vacant ground, while the right reveals the domestic
as Nauman’s own, and sustained attention does turn setting in which it was shot, on the artist's iPhone. A
up identifying markers—a man’s hairy forearms, the beat-up worktable is piled high with papers and other
pronounced veins of age, a wedding ring (Nauman studio dreck; at one point Nauman’s cat, Mr. Rogers,
had married his second wife, the painter Susan saunters through the frame.
Rothenberg, in 1989). In this two-channel video the For critic Adrian Searle, this balancing act takes
artist carries out a self-appointed task, extending “concentration and a bit of luck”—though the stakes
and retracting his fingers and thumbs in response to are remarkably low; it’s “the kind of thing you might
verbal instructions. The movements are systematic, do to amuse the kids,” or when you should be work-
as he works through all the permutations—from open ing.173 But in an artist’s hands this exercise in man-
1 3
palms to clenched fists and everything in between. ual skill feels emblematic of the larger enterprise: a
For Beginners . . . resembles a countdown or a form sly homage to Kant’s definition of art as “purposive
of garbled sign language; occasionally, it registers without purpose.” Practiced—even captivating—but
subtle signs of bodily discomfort, as trembling fin- ultimately useless, Pencil Lift’s momentary levitation
gers strain to reach the more awkward positions. must be its own reward.
Manual dexterity is also at stake in a related
work in sound, piped through hidden speakers in 2
4
the gallery’s stark white elevator. In For Beginners
(Instructed Piano) (2010) the artist and musician Terry
Allen plays a halting solo, following the same fixed
pattern of fingerings that Nauman does on screen.
Hiring a professional but essentially tying his hands,
Nauman worked to undermine traditional skill, and
both the video and the sound works pit rigid systems
against their physical embodiment. “Once more,”
the New York Times effused, Nauman has “made
something out of almost nothing, and has again
revealed a kind of power struggle between words
and actions, the mental and the corporeal.”171

1. For Beginners (Instructed Piano). 2010.

Audio installation, stereo sound, continuous
play, performed by Terry Allen, two hidden
speakers, dimensions variable, 13 ft. × 11 ft
4 in. × 18 ft. 9 in. (396.2 × 345.4 × 571.5 cm)
as installed at Sperone Westwater, 2010. 2.
For Beginners (all the combinations of the
thumb and forefingers). 2010. Two-channel
HD video installation, two projections,
color, stereo sound, dimensions variable.
Installation view, Sperone Westwater,
2010. 3. Bruce Nauman. Installation view,
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain,
2015. 4. Pencil Lift/Mr. Rogers. 2013. Stills
from two-channel HD video installation, two
projections, color, mono sound, 4:43 min.,
continuous play, asynchronous loop

94 EXHIBITION HISTORY 95
Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies,
i through vii. Sperone Westwater, New York,
September 10–October 29, 2016; Bruce
Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, I through VII.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 18,
2016–April 16, 2017

Contrapposto Studies, i through vii (2015/2016) finds

Nauman on familiar ground, retracing the steps of
his seminal Walk with Contrapposto (1968; p. 238).
That early video was Nauman’s riff on an antique
pose, a slight imbalance to lend the sculpted body a
pleasing curve. A stationary camera filmed the artist
as he paced his first corridor, swinging his hips as
far as its narrow confines allowed.
Nauman’s new work takes the old as a point
of departure, retaining most of its core elements
while the visuals branch and multiply. Once again
he walks the length of his studio dressed in a T-shirt
and jeans, but the images now echo across seven HD
projections that set the body spinning. At Sperone
Westwater, these seven studies built toward greater
complexity: vertical projections in the first gallery gave
way to split-screens in double registers (pp. 240–41),
and finished upstairs in kinetic grids that bordered
on abstraction. (A slightly altered version was shown
concurrently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
These final studies slice his body into seven pieces
that rotate independently, until “the figure seems to
disintegrate and then come back together.”174 The
dizzying imagery is compounded by the scrape of
Nauman’s boots against the concrete, amplified and
reversed to form a muddled, tuneless soundtrack.
Reenactment invites comparisons with one’s
former self, and the effects of age are manifest in
the artist’s thickened torso and heavy gait. A recent
bout with cancer had weakened the nerves in his
feet, and at times the walk feels labored, each step
hard-won.175
Critics were floored by Nauman’s unflinch-
ing portrayal and hailed the studies as a major
achievement, uniting “late-career classicism with a
mortal ferocity that demands attention.”176 Writing
in Artforum, Jeffrey Weiss called it an unqualified
“masterpiece”—one of those rare works of art “that
stop us cold.”177

Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto

Studies, I through VII. Installation view,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016

96 EXHIBITION HISTORY 97
NOTES Introduction Press, 2014), p. 26. The most detailed breakdown of changed hands several times over the next few decades, 6 Day Week: 6 Sound Problems. Konrad Fischer Bruce Nauman: Holograms, Videotapes, and Other
i. Nauman, in Tony Oursler, “Ways of Seeing: An Interview Nauman’s coursework appears in Elizabeth Allison Ferrell, residing for a number of years with UC Davis alumnus Galerie, Düsseldorf, July 10–August 8, 1968 Works. Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, May 24–
with Bruce Nauman, 1995,” in Nauman, Please Pay “Chronology, 1964–1969,” in Lewallen, A Rose Has No Frank Owen, and returned to the university in 2012. 28. Nauman, letter to Konrad Fischer, July 22, 1968. In June 14, 1969
Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words. Writings and Teeth, pp. 193, 195. 8. “Soft shape” was the artist’s term for See “In Conversation: Frank Owen with Alexi Worth,” section V, no. 001B, document 0151, Archiv Dorothee und 42. S.K. [Stephen Kurtz], “Reviews and Previews,” Artnews
Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Mass.: The these rough-hewn fiberglass reliefs. See Anne M. Wagner, The Brooklyn Rail, November 5, 2015. 18. Knute Stiles, Konrad Fischer, Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, 68, no. 5 (September 1969):20. 43. See de Angelus,
MIT Press, 2003), p. 381. ii. Calvin Tomkins, “Western “Nauman’s Body of Sculpture,” October 120 (Spring “William Geis and Bruce Nauman,” Artforum 5, no. 4 Düsseldorf, Schenkung. 29. Fischer, in “Konrad Fischer “Interview with Bruce Nauman, May 27 and 30, 1980,”
Disturbances,” The New Yorker, June 1, 2009, p. 68. 2007):58. 9. Kaltenbach, telephone interview with the author (December 1966):65. 19. Wagner, “Nauman’s Body of Interviewed by Georg Jappe,” Studio International 181, pp. 256–57, and Joan Simon, ed., Bruce Nauman, exh. cat.
iii. Roberta Smith, “Comfortable? Easy? Not for Bruce and Schaefer. 10. Nauman’s 1968–69 videos Wall-Floor Sculpture,” p. 63. no. 930 (February 1971):70. From 1963 to 1967, Fischer and cat. rais. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994), cat.
Nauman,” New York Times, March 3, 1995. Positions (p. 122) and Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube were worked as a painter under the name Konrad Lueg. no. 108, p. 222. 44. Nauman was among the first to apply
based on performances staged for his classmates at Davis. Eccentric Abstraction. Fischbach Gallery, New York, 30. Michael Sanchez, “A Logistical Inversion: From Konrad to the Los Angeles County Museum’s Art & Technology
Bachelor’s Degree, University of Wisconsin– 11. Nauman, quoted in Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere, September 20–October 8, 1966 Lueg to Konrad Fischer,” Grey Room 63 (Spring 2016):14. Program, but his application was rejected, leading him to
Madison, 1964 “Bruce Nauman Interviewed, 1979 (October 1978),” in 20. Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” Art International 31. This description is drawn from Van Bruggen’s in her go it alone in arranging to collaborate with Conductron.
1. Nauman, in Michele de Angelus, “Interview with Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please, ed. Kraynak, p. 194. 10, no. 9 (November 1966):28. 21. Lippard, Eccentric Bruce Nauman, p. 233. 32. Klaus U. Reinke, “Kunst nach See Nauman, letter to Maurice Tuchman, March 1968,
Nauman, May 27 and 30, 1980,” in Nauman, Please Pay Abstraction, exh. brochure (New York: Fischbach Gallery, Tonband,” Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, July 19, 1968. In repr. in A Report on the Art and Technology Program of
Attention Please, ed. Kraynak, p. 220. 2. Ibid., p. 221, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, 1966). 22. Ibid. 23. Mel Bochner, “In the Galleries,” Arts unprocessed press clippings, Archiv Dorothee und Konrad the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles: Los
and Constance M. Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce May 10–June 2, 1966 Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966):58. 24. David Antin, Fischer. Trans. from the German by Schaefer. 33. Fischer, Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971), p. 240. 45. Jed Perl,
Nauman in the 1960s, exh. cat. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 12. Lewallen cites a 2004 conversation with Tony DeLap “Eccentric Abstraction,” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November in “Konrad Fischer Interviewed by Georg Jappe,” p. 71. “Shrieks,” The New Republic, January 23, 1995, p. 32.
and London: University of California Press, University of and a 1988 interview with Nick Wilder in which both men 1966):57.
California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, recount these events. See A Rose Has No Teeth, p. 44. Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. Whitney Museum Art by Telephone. Museum of Contemporary Art,
2007), p. 9. 3. Nauman, application essay to University of 13. Lucy Lippard, letter to Philip Johnson, August 21, Bruce Nauman. Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, of American Art, New York, May 19–July 6, 1969 Chicago, November 1–December 14, 1969
California, Davis, 1964. Richard L. Nelson Gallery files, UC 1966. In Series 2: correspondence, 1950s-2006, box 14, January 27–February 17, 1968 34. Lawrence Alloway, “Art,” The Nation, June 9, 1969, 46. László Moholy-Nagy’s oft-cited tale of the paint-
Davis, quoted in Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth, p. 11. folder 23, Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American 25. Leo Castelli, in Paul Cummings, “Oral History p. 740. Emphasis added. 35. Nauman, letter to Marcia ings’ origins is told in context in Brigid Doherty, “László
Art, Smithsonian Institution. John Baldessari remem- Interview with Leo Castelli, 1969 May 14–1973 June 8,” Tucker and James Monte with, enclosed, a drawing of Moholy-Nagy. Constructions in Enamel. 1923,” in Barry
Master of Arts Degree Exhibition, University of bered being impressed by the show in a 2004 interview Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. the corridor piece, March 8, 1969. Exhibition Archives Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus: Workshops for
California, Davis, Spring 1966 with Lewallen, and Artforum’s contributing editor John Available online at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ 1931–2000, “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials 1969 Modernity, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern
4. Robert Arneson, in Mady Jones, “Oral history interview Coplans and the magazine’s publisher Charles Cowles interviews/oral-history-interview-leo-castelli-12370 May 20-July 6,” box 0047, Correspondence Artists folder, Art, 2009), pp. 130–33. 47. Moholy’s wife, Lucia Moholy,
with Robert Arneson, 1981 August 14–15,” Archives of both came; see A Rose Has No Teeth, p. 45. (accessed June 2017). Among the owners of Nauman 1969, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Whitney Museum disputed his account of the paintings’ origins, suggesting
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Available online at works listed in the show’s catalogue were Johnson, of American Art. 36. Tucker, “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ that he actually placed the order in person. See Louis
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history- The Slant Step Show. Berkeley Gallery, San Francisco, Jasper Johns, Barbara and Eugene Schwartz, and Materials,” in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, exh. Kaplan, “The Telephone Paintings: Hanging Up Moholy,”
interview-robert-arneson-11807 (accessed May 2017). September 9–17, 1966 Robert and Ethel Scull. 26. John Perreault, “Reviews and cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), Leonardo 26, no. 2 (1993):167. 48. Moholy’s Telephone
5. Ibid. Arneson was speaking in this passage specifically 14. William Allan, interview with the author, Schaefer, and Previews,” Artnews 67, no. 1 (March 1968):22. Robert p. 44. 37. Al Frankenstein, “Extended Timers—And the Pictures had been included in a retrospective of his work
about the teaching of ceramics, but the sentiment applies Halbreich, San Rafael, California, January 28, 2016. Pincus-Witten arrived at the same conclusion, arguing Anti-Illusionists,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier that year.
to the approach of the faculty as a whole. 6. Stephen 15. See Fred Martin, “San Francisco Letter,” Art that Nauman’s sense of humor “seeks comfort at the Chronicle, June 8, 1969. 38. Dan Graham, “Subject 49. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, “Artists Phone
Kaltenbach, telephone interview with the author and International 10, no. 10 (December 1966):80. 16. See bosom of Rrose Sélavy.” Pincus-Witten, “Reviews,” Matter,” 1969, quoted in Kraynak, Nauman Reiterated In Ideas as Art,” press release, October 23, 1969. Art by
Magnus Schaefer, May 6, 2016, and Nauman, in Kathy Cynthia Charters, “The Slant Step Saga,” in The Slant Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968):63. In mentioning “Poppa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 126. Telephone exhibition records, Museum of Contemporary
Halbreich, “Interview with Bruce Nauman” (New York: Step Revisited, exh. cat. (Davis: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Funk” Perreault was referring to Northern California’s 39. Frankenstein, “Extended Timers.” 40. Meredith Monk, in Art Chicago Library & Archives. 50. Jan van der Marck,
The Museum of Modern Art, January 9, 2012). Available University of California, Davis, 1983), p. 9. In addition to contemporaneous Funk art movement, often associated Christine van Assche, “Heart Beat and Silence: An Interview liner notes for Art by Telephone, exh. cat. in the form of LP
online at https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/ his collaboration with Allan, Nauman also made a hollow with Nauman by East Coast critics though not by the with Meredith Monk,” in Bruce Nauman, exh. cat. (London: recording (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1969).
docs/learn/archives/transcript_nauman.pdf (accessed plaster cast, Mold for a Modernized Slant Step (1966), that artist himself. 27. Nauman and Wiley saw Man Ray’s ret- Hayward Gallery, 1998), p. 81. 41. Nauman, Monk, and 51. Harold Haydon, “Art by Phone? Somebody Dialed
May 2017). 7. The origin of these fiberglass sculptures is was not included in The Slant Step Show. 17. Nauman rospective in Los Angeles together in the fall of 1966. See Richard Serra performed this work—based on excerpts the Wrong Number,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 9,
detailed in Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth, p. 17, and Peter says that “Serra stole it” in Phil Weidman, Slant Step Book Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, from Monk’s 1969 piece Juice: A Theatre Cantata in Three 1969. Unprocessed press-clipping files, Museum of
Plagens, Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (London: Phaidon (Sacramento: The Art Co., 1969), p. 7. The slant step 1988), p. 14. Installments—at the Santa Barbara Arts Festival in 1970. Contemporary Art Chicago Library & Archives. 52. Claire

98 EXHIBITION HISTORY 99
Bishop coined this term in “Delegated Performance: Body Movements. La Jolla Museum of Contemporary The Consummate Mask of Rock. Albright-Knox Art cat. (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1982), is cited by Ingrid Schaffner in “Return Guest: Chambres Nauman, 1988 (January 1987),” in Nauman, Please Pay
Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (Spring 2012):91 Art, March 26–April 25, 1971 Gallery, Buffalo, September 26–November 9, 1975 p. 17. 85. Richardson, “Bruce Nauman: Neons,” p. 14. d’Amis,” The Exhibitionist 7 (January 2013):6. 98. Michael Attention Please, ed. Kraynak, p. 333. 107. Jean-Paul
and passim. 53. The one exception to this long caesura 63. Nauman, letter to Tucker, September 30, 1970. In 73. The text is reproduced in full in Nauman, Please Pay 86. Nauman, quoted in ibid., p. 20. Newman, “My House Is Your House: Chambres d’Amis Fargier, “No Man: Bruce Nauman a l’ARC,” in Le Journal
was a brief cameo in Pursuit, a 1975 film that Nauman Series II.A Artists’ Correspondence, 1960–2000, box 28, Attention Please, ed. Kraynak, pp. 86–90. 74. Nauman at Ghent,” Artscribe 60 (November–December 1986):64. des Cahiers, November 1986, p. 10. In Series 3.6 Solo
made in collaboration with Owen, featuring a succession folder 14, Marcia Tucker Papers, The Getty Research connects the work’s themes to these biographical details The Fine Art of the Knife. Elaine Horwitch Galleries, 99. See Simon, ed., Bruce Nauman, cat. no. 332, p. 293. Shows, Other Galleries circa 1952–1999, box 79, folder 5,
of people running on a treadmill. Institute, Los Angeles (2004.M.13). 64. Nauman, quoted in interviews with Oursler (“Ways of Seeing,” p. 380), Santa Fe, December 14, 1984–January 3, 1985 100. Schaffner, “Return Guest,” p. 8. Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of American Art,
in Michael Auping, “Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Simon (“Hear Here,” Frieze no. 86 [October 2004]:135), and 87. Nauman, quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “At the Smithsonian Institution.
Group Shows of Conceptual Art, 1969–70 Light and Space,” in Robin Clark, Phenomenal: California Tomkins (“Western Disturbances,” p. 72). 75. Neal Benezra, Met with Susan Rothenberg and Bruce Nauman: Two Bruce Nauman. Kunsthalle Basel, July 13–September 7,
54. Grégoire Müller, Introduction, in Harald Szeemann, Light, Space, Surface, exh. cat. (San Diego: Museum of “Surveying Nauman,” in Simon, ed., Bruce Nauman, p. 32. Who Define Today Amble in the Past,” New York Times, 1986; Whitechapel Gallery, London, January 23– Minimal Art from the Panza Collection. Museo
Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Works— Contemporary Art, 2012), pp. 80–81. 76. Jeff Perrone, “Reviews: Bruce Nauman,” Artforum 15, February 1, 1997. 88. Nauman, in Nicole Plett and Steven March 8, 1987 Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid,
Concepts—Processes—Situations—Information, exh. cat. no. 5 (January 1977):59. 77. Art Perry, “Steel Yourself for Parks, “What Does It All Mean?” artlines 5, no. 11 (Winter 101. Christoph Schenker, “Bruce Nauman,” Flash March 24–December 31, 1988
(Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969), n.p. Trans. from the French documenta 5. Kassel, June 30–October 8, 1972 Nauman,” The Province, February 7, 1976. Series 3.6 Solo 1984/1985):12. 89. Robert Storr, “Bruce Nauman: Doing Art 131 (December 1986/January 1987):94. 102. A 108. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, in Bruce Kurtz, “Interview
by the author. 55. Erika Billeter, “Kunsthalle Bern: Die Wüste 65. Henry J. Seldis, “Documenta: Art Is Whatever Goes Shows, Other Galleries circa 1952–1999, box 78, folder 17, What Comes Unnaturally,” Parachute 73 (Winter 1994):15. critics’ roundtable on England’s BBC radio called the with Giuseppe Panza di Biumo,” Arts Magazine 46, no. 5
als Konzept,” Die Woche, April 2, 1969. When Attitudes On in an Artist’s Head,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1972. Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Whitechapel presentation “disappointing,” “thin,” and (March 1972):42. 109. “Oral history interview with
Become Form folder, Press I, 22.3-25.4 1969, Kunsthalle 66. Carter Ratcliff, “Adversary Spaces,” Artforum 11, Smithsonian Institution. Bruce Nauman Drawings 1965–1986. Museum für “cold”; see “Critics Forum,” February 7, 1987, BBC Giuseppe Panza, 1985 Apr. 2–4,” Archives of American
Bern Archives. Trans. from the German by Schaefer. no. 2 (October 1972):43. 67. Nauman, letter to Szeemann, Gegenwartskunst, Basel, May 17–July 13, 1986 Radio 3. Transcript in Series 3.6 Solo Shows, Other Art, Smithsonian Institution. Available online at https://
n.d. (c. 1972). In Series II, Artist files 1888–2009, bulk Rooms. P.S. 1, New York, June 9–26, 1976 90. See Dieter Koepplin, “Introduction,” Bruce Nauman Galleries circa 1952–1999 box 79, folder 6, Leo Castelli www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-
Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, March 17– 1969–2005, box 1478, folder 5, Harald Szeemann 78. Nancy Foote, “The Apotheosis of the Crummy Space,” Drawings 1965–1986, exh. cat. (Basel: Museum für Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian interview-giuseppe-panza-12827 (accessed June 2017).
April 7, 1970 Papers, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Artforum 15, no. 2 (October 1976):30. 79. Hap Tivey, in Gegenwartskunst, 1986), pp. 5, 7. The exhibition’s suc- Institution. The other comments refer to the installation 110. David Galloway, “Report from Italy: Count Panza
56. Nauman, quoted in Joseph E. Young, “Los Angeles,” (2011.M.30). Rooms: P.S. 1, exh. cat. (New York: Institute for Art and cessful realization at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel; see Frieder Schnock, “Bruce Nauman,” nike, Divests,” Art in America 72, no. 11 (December 1984):14.
Art International 14, no. 6 (Summer 1970):113. 57. Rosalind Urban Resources, 1977), p. 126. 80. Perreault admits to this was bolstered by a gift of sixteen Nauman drawings from October/November 1986, p. 40 (trans. from the German 111. See James Meyer, “The Minimal Unconscious,”
E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 1977 (reprint Bruce Nauman: Work from 1965 to 1972. Los Angeles fear of heights in “Report Card: P.S. One I Love You,” SoHo the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation in 1973. 91. Koepplin, by Schaefer), and Schenker, “Bruce Nauman,” p. 94. October 130 (Fall 2009):157. Beginning in 2010, The
ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1981), p. 240. County Museum of Art, December 19, 1972–February Weekly News, June 19, 1976. In MoMA PS1 Archives, “Reasoned Drawings,” in ibid., p. 26. 92. Nauman, quoted 103. Hans-Joachim Müller, “Zimmerschlacht auf dem Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, has led
58. William Wilson, “Bruce Nauman’s Unsettling Art Given 18, 1973; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, I.A.48, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. in van Bruggen, “’The True Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Monitor,” Basler Zeitung, July 18, 1986, p. 25. Andrea a major research initiative into the history and conser-
a Masterful Touch,” Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1970. March 29–May 13, 1973 81. Foote, “The Apotheosis of the Crummy Space,” p. 37. Fountain,” in ibid., p. 11. 93. Tony Godfrey, “Contemporary Meuli agreed, claiming “the artist is unmistakably getting vation needs of these Minimal and Post-Minimal works.
68. James Minton, “Bruce Nauman: Gunslinger,” Exhibitions. Basel and Zurich,” The Burlington Magazine harder” as the work’s “aggressiveness is growing.” Another significant portion of Panza’s collection—Abstract
Set Design for Merce Cunningham’s Tread, 1970 Artweek 5, no. 24 (June 29, 1974):1. 69. Jane Livingston, Bruce Nauman, 1972–81. Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, 128, no. 1002 (September 1986):701; Christopher Knight, Meuli, “Noch spricht niemand von Krise,” Nordschweiz/ Expressionist and Informel paintings, along with American
59. Clive Barnes, “Dance: New Cunningham,” New York audio recording for docent training, Bruce Nauman: Otterlo, April 5–May 25, 1981 “Nauman Draws on the Power of Panic,” Los Angeles Basler Volksblatt, July 19, 1986. Both trans. from the Neo-Dada and Pop—is housed at the Museum of
Times, January 6, 1970. 60. See repertory sheet, Merce Work from 1965 to 1972, October 30, 1972. RL-0197-5, 82. Katharina Schmidt, “Nothing Must of Necessity Be Herald Examiner, February 21, 1988. 94. Suzanne Muchnic, German by Schaefer. In Series 3.6 Solo Shows, Other Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 112. Dan Flavin, letter
Cunningham Dance Foundation, Inc., records, Series IV: Balch Art Research Library, Los Angeles County Concerned with Nothing: A Commentary on the Oeuvre “Nauman’s Self Involved Clinical, Examining Eye,” Los Galleries circa 1952–1999, box 79, folder 5, Leo Castelli to the editor, Art in America, quoted in ibid., pp. 158–59.
Repertory Production Files, 1953–2008, box 211, folder 14, Museum of Art. Available online through the Internet of Bruce Nauman,” trans. Rosemary Kunisch, in Bruce Angeles Times, April 5, 1988. 95. Smith, “Art: Bruce Gallery Records. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian 113. Judd, “Una Stanza Per Panza,” 1990, repr. in Donald
call no. (S) *MGZMD 351, Jerome Robbins Dance Archive at https://archive.org/details/clcmar_000079 Nauman, 1972–81, exh. cat. (Otterlo: Rijksmuseum Nauman Retrospective,” New York Times, October 30, Institution. 104. One reviewer suggested that the show Judd Writings, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New
Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing (accessed June 2017). Digitized with the support of Kröller-Müller, 1981), p. 84. 83. See Dorothee Müller, 1987. Knight, in “Nauman Draws on the Power of Panic,” should advise parents of its vulgar content; another York: Judd Foundation, David Zwirner Books, 2016),
Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 61. John J. The European Fine Art Foundation. Preserved by the “Irritation als Prinzip,” Handelsblatt, July 16, 1981. In comes to a similar conclusion. found the neon better suited to “source imagery for p. 656. 114. Panza, Memories of a Collector (New
O’Connor, “Mr. Cunningham and Collaborators,” Wall California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP). Series 3.6: Solo Shows, Other Galleries circa 1952–1999, Playboy magazine.” See Albert Hofmann, “Enthüllung York: Abbeville Press, 2007), p. 138. 115. Nauman, in
Street Journal, January 7, 1970. 62. Roland C. Petersen, 70. Hilton Kramer, “In the Footsteps of Duchamp,” New box 79, folder 2, Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of Chambres d’Amis. Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, mystischer Wahrheiten,” Basler Zeitung, September 6, Halbreich, “Interview with Bruce Nauman.” 116. Nauman,
in Paul Karlstrom, “Oral history interview with Roland C. York Times, March 30, 1973. 71. “Ueber die Vermittlung American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Ghent, June 21–September 21, 1986 1986, and Christian von Kagenek, “Zwei Vertreter unter- quoted in Grace Glueck, “Millions for Art, a Lot of It
Petersen, 2002 Sept. 17,” Archives of American Art, 2002, von Erfahrung,” Der Bund, July 20, 1973. Trans. from 96. Jan Hoet, “Chambres d’Amis: A Museum Ventures schiedlicher Kunstwelten,” Alb Bote, September 3, Unfinished,” New York Times, June 12, 1990, quoted in
quoted in Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth, p. 13. Also the German by Schaefer. 72. Paul Stitelman, “Bruce Bruce Nauman: Neons. Baltimore Museum of Art, Out,” in Chambres d’Amis, exh. cat. (Ghent: Museum 1986. Both trans. from the German by Schaefer. Both Meyer, “The Minimal Unconscious,” p. 171. Nauman’s
available online at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ Nauman at the Whitney Museum,” Arts Magazine 47, December 19, 1982–February 14, 1983 van Hedendaagse Kunst, 1986), p. 341. 97. Pierre Luigi Pressearchiv des Basler Kunstveriens. 105. See Simon, comparatively lax approach to fabrication displeased
interviews/oral-history-interview-roland-c-petersen-12780 no. 7 (May/June 1973):55. 84. Nauman, quoted in Brenda Richardson, “Bruce Tazzi, “Albrecht Dürer Would Have Come Too,” Artforum ed., Bruce Nauman, cat. no. 346, p. 298. 106. Nauman, Panza at times: during the 1970s, Nauman allowed
(accessed June 2017). Nauman: Neons,” in Bruce Nauman: Neons, exh. 25, no. 1 (September 1986):124. The attendance figure in Simon, “Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce multiple versions of certain works to coexist, while Panza

100 101
wanted exclusive rights. For a detailed treatment of their interview with Storr, June 12, 1991. The Museum of (September–October 1997):92. 139. Van Assche, “People Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens. 53rd Venice “Bruce Nauman, Art Provocateur, Returns. Are You
correspondence on this issue see Kraynak, “Dangerous Modern Art Exhibition Records, 1598.59–1598.60. The Die of Exposure,” p. 13. 140. David Perreau, “Bruce Cage). Dia Center for the Arts, New York, January 9– Biennale, June 7–November 22, 2009 Ready?” New York Times, September 8, 2016—and
Variations,” in Nauman Reiterated, pp. 21–65. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 131. Storr, Nauman,” art press 232 (February 1998):82. 141. Jean- July 27, 2002 164. Philadelphia Museum of Art, press release, June 6, many reviewers made mention of the artist’s health.
Dislocations, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Pierre Criqui, “Bruce Nauman. Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,” 153. Nauman, as told to Auping, “A Thousand Words: 2009, available online at http://www.philamuseum.org/ 176. Kennedy, in ibid. 177. Jeffrey Weiss, “Best of
Bruce Nauman: Prints 1970–89. Castelli Graphics Modern Art, 1991), p. 32. Artforum 36, no. 3 (November 1997):112. 142. Kraynak, Bruce Nauman Talks about Mapping the Studio,” Artforum press/releases/2009/738.html (accessed June 2017). 2016: Bruce Nauman,” Artforum 55, no. 4 (December
and Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, September “Bruce Nauman: Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg,” p. 92. 40, no. 7 (March 2002):121. 154. Ibid. 155. Kimmelman, 165. Plagens, “Bruce Nauman: Deft in Venice,” Art in 2016):207, 204.
16–October 14, 1989; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, Bruce Nauman. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April “Art in Review: Bruce Nauman—‘Mapping the Studio I America 97, no. 6 (June/July 2009):126. 166. Tomkins,
September 29–October 21, 1989 10–June 19, 1994; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Bruce Nauman. Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, May 1– (Fat Chance John Cage),’” New York Times, July 5, 2002. “Western Disturbances,” p. 75. 167. Ben Davis,
117. Nauman, in Christopher Cordes, “Talking with Bruce Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., June 26, 1999 The synthetic nature of the piece was discussed by “Bittersweet Cacophony,” Artnet, June 18, 2009,
Nauman: An Interview, 1989 (Excerpts from Interviews: November 3, 1994–January 29, 1995 143. Fred Camper, “Uncomfortable Spaces,” The Chicago Schjeldahl (“Night Moves,” The New Yorker, January 28, available online at http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/
July, 1977; September, 1980; May, 1982; and July, 132. Martin Beck, “The Way He Makes You Go Home,” Reader, May 20, 1999, p. 28. 144. Susan Cross draws this 2002, p. 94) and Jerry Saltz (“Wild Kingdom,” The reviews/davis/bruce-nauman-venice-biennale6-18-09.
1989),” in Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please, ed. Texte zur Kunst 5, no. 18 (May 1995):164 (trans. from the connection in Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience, exh. Village Voice, February 5, 2002). The most insightful and asp (accessed June 2017). 168. Tomkins, “Western
Kraynak, p. 354. 118. Ibid., p. 340. 119. Paul Schimmel, German by Schaefer); Ralph Rugoff, “The True Artist,” LA cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2003), thorough description remains Lynne Cooke’s exhibition- Disturbances,” p. 68. 169. Carlos Basualdo, “To Bear,
“Pay Attention,” in Simon, ed., Bruce Nauman, p. 69. Weekly, August 12–18, 1994, p. 48; and Kramer, “Idiotic p. 19. 145. Susan Snodgrass, “Bruce Nauman at Donald brochure text, which is reprinted in Margaret Iversen, To Endure,” in Basualdo, Topological Gardens, exh. cat.
120. Susan Tallman, “Clear Vision: The Prints of Bruce Curators Present Wretched Nauman Show,” New York Young,” Art in America 87, no. 9 (September 1999):133. ed., Chance (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, and (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), p. 160.
Nauman,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 3 (November 1989):17. Observer, March 8, 1995, p. 1. 133. Perl, “Shrieks,” p. 31; 146. Alan G. Artner, “Insider Art Offers Outside Chance of London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), pp. 199–204.
121. Smith, “Bruce Nauman: Prints 1970–1989,” New Kimmelman, “Space under a Chair, Sound from a Coffin,” Interest,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1999. 156. Schjeldahl, “Night Moves,” p. 95; Tim Griffin, “Cut Bruce Nauman: For Children/For Beginners. Sperone
York Times, October 6, 1989. New York Times, April 24, 1994. 134. Arthur C. Danto, ”Art: to the Chase,” Time Out New York, January 24–31, Westwater, New York, November 11–December 18, 2010
Bruce Nauman,” The Nation, May 8 1995, repr. in Robert Samuel Beckett/Bruce Nauman. Kunsthalle Wien, 2002, p. 47. 170. David Ebony, “Bruce Nauman, Sperone Westwater,”
Bruce Nauman: Skulpturen und Installationen, C. Morgan, ed., Bruce Nauman (Baltimore: The Johns Vienna, April 2–30, 2000 Art in America 99, no. 4 (April 2011):125. 171. Smith, Pp. 98–99, left to right: Jack Fulton, Portrait of the Artist
1985–1990. Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 150. 135. The descrip- 147. Nauman, quoted in Simon, “Sound Problems: Unilever Series: Bruce Nauman—Raw Materials. Tate “Bruce Nauman: ‘For Children/For Beginners,’” New York as Bruce Nauman, 1966, black and white photograph on
September 23–December 10, 1990 tion is Nauman’s, in a handwritten caption to a working Beckett/Nauman,” in Michael Glasmeier, Samuel Modern, London, October 12, 2004–March 28, 2005 Times, December 9, 2010. cardboard with gold and silver paint, 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x
122. Adam Gopnik, “The Art World: Bits and Pieces,” The drawing for the installation. In Series 8.2 Administrative Beckett, Bruce Nauman, exh. cat. (Vienna: Kunsthalle 157. Nauman, in Simon, “Hear Here,” p. 135. 158. Adrian 20.3 cm). Nauman with the Mylar window screen The True
New Yorker, May 14, 1990, p. 88. 123. Max Wechsler, Files, 1969–1997, box 171, folder 17, Leo Castelli Gallery Wien, 2000), p. 31. 148. Ibid. 149. Steven Connor, “Auf Searle, “Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials, Tate Modern,” Bruce Nauman. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contem- Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain, 1966. Nauman and
the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull at the opening of his
“Basel: Bruce Nauman, Museum für Gegenwartskunst,” Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Schwankendem Boden,” in Glasmeier, Samuel Beckett, The Guardian, October 12, 2004. 159. Auping, “Sound porain, Paris, March 14–June 21, 2015
first solo show in New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, January 27,
trans. Joachim Neugrosschel, Artforum 29, no. 4 Danto, Gopnik, and Charles W. Haxthausen linked their Bruce Nauman, p.86. English trans. on the author’s Thinking,” Artforum 43, no. 5 (January 2005):159, 172. Simon notes this intended function in her catalogue 1968. Nauman in his studio in Mill Valley, California, c. 1968,
(December 1990):152. 124. Lois Nesbitt, “Lie Down, Roll sense of entrapment in the exhibition to this work; see website under the title “Shifting Ground,” http://steven 161. 160. Among others see Peter Campbell, “At essay; see Simon, “Double Take,” in Bruce Nauman, exh. still from Shelby Kennedy, The Bruce Nauman Story, 1968,
Over,” Artscribe International no. 82 (Summer 1990):51. Danto, “Bruce Nauman,” p. 154; Gopnik, “The Nauman connor.com/beckettnauman.html (accessed June Tate Modern,” London Review of Books 26, no. 21 cat. (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and 16mm film, black and white, sound, 11 min. Left to right: Keith
125. Jörg Zutter, “Alienation of the Self, Command of the Principle,” The New Yorker, May 27, 1995, p. 103; and 2017). 150. Major earlier essays had included Schaffner, (November 4, 2004):38, and Elisabeth Lebovici, “Bruce New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015), p. 51. 173. Searle, Sonnier, Nauman, Robert Ryman, Bill Bollinger, Robert Morris,
Other,” trans. from the German by David Britt, Parkett 27 Haxthausen, “Bruce Nauman. Los Angeles,” The Burlington “Circling Oblivion/Bruce Nauman through Samuel Nauman; Tate Modern,” art press 307 (December “Bruce Nauman review—a revolving education in art,” Richard Tuttle, and David Lee, illustrated in Time magazine,
(1991):155; Gopnik, “The Art World: Bits and Pieces,” p. 88. Magazine 136, no. 1098 (September 1994):647. 136. Paul Beckett,” in Bruce Nauman 1985–1996: Drawings, 2004):13. The Guardian, March 16, 2015. November 22, 1968. Pp. 100–101, left to right: Nauman, Judy
Nauman, Marcia Tucker, and Nauman’s son, Erik, 1970. Jack
126. Richard Kalina, “Bruce Nauman,” Arts Magazine 64, Richard, “Watch Out! It’s Here! Bruce Nauman’s Work Prints, and Related Works (Ridgefield, Conn.: Aldrich
Fulton, Nauman with deer head in the Grand Canyon, early
no. 10 (Summer 1990):75. 127. Wechsler, “Basel: Bruce Sneaks Up on You,” Washington Post, November 3, 1994; Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997), pp. 15–31; A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s. Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, i through 1970s, from the Masque portfolio. Nauman riding his horse
Nauman, Museum für Gegenwartskunst,” p. 152. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Trouble with Nauman,” Art in Kathryn Chiong, “Nauman’s Beckett Walk,” October 86 Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, vii. Sperone Westwater, New York, September 10– Scarface, New Mexico, c. 1985. Dorothee and Konrad Fischer
America 82, no. 4 (April 1994):87. (Fall 1998):63–81; and Gijs van Tuyl, “Human Condition/ January 17–April 15, 2007 October 29, 2016. Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto with Nauman at the opening of Nauman’s exhibition Heads
Dislocations. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Human Body: Bruce Nauman and Samuel Beckett,” 161. Coplans, Assemblage in California: Works from Studies, I through VII. Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Bodies, at Fischer’s Düsseldorf gallery, 1989. Pp. 102–3,
October 20, 1991–January 7, 1992 Bruce Nauman: Image/Text, 1966–1996. Centre Georges in Bruce Nauman (Hayward Gallery), pp. 60–75. the Late 50’s and Early 60’s, exh. cat. (Irvine: University September 18, 2016–April 16, 2017 left to right: Nauman and his wife, Susan Rothenberg, New
128. Holland Cotter, “Dislocating the Modern,” Art in Pompidou, Paris, December 16, 1997–March 9, 1998 151. Daniel Birnbaum, “Best of 2000,” Artforum 39, of California, Irvine, 1968), p. 8. 162. Knight, “Nauman 174. Basualdo, quoted in Peter Dobrin, “From the Mexico, 1990. Neal Benezra, Glenn D. Lowry, Kathy Halbreich,
Nauman, and Robert Storr at the opening of Nauman’s
America 80, no. 1 (January 1992):100. 129. Jack Flam, 137. Van Assche, “People Die of Exposure,” in Bruce no. 4 (December 2000):126. 152. Arturo Silva, “Samuel as Creator, Inventing Himself,” Los Angeles Times, Studio to Philadelphia, a New Bruce Nauman installa-
retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, March 1, 1995.
“Armchair Activism at MoMA,” Wall Street Journal, Nauman: Image/Text, 1966–1996, exh. cat. (London: Beckett/Bruce Nauman,” Artnews 99, no. 7 (Summer March 23, 2007. 163. Nina Van Rensselaer, Allan, and tion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 29, 2016. 175. Nauman Nauman with cats Mr. Rogers and Tilly, c. 2003. Nauman in his
December 31, 1991; Douglas Dreishpoon, “Dislocations,” The South Bank Centre, 1998), p. 13. 138. Kraynak, 2000):220. Chris Unterseher (former students and faculty at Davis), discussed this side effect of cancer treatment in the New New Mexico studio, May 2008. Nauman during the recording
Arts Magazine 66, no. 6 (February 1992):68. 130. Nauman, “Bruce Nauman: Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg,” Frieze 36 quoted in Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth, pp. 15, 13. York Times preview of the show—see Randy Kennedy, of Days, Waterland Studio, Venice, Italy, June 13, 2008

102 EXHIBITION HISTORY 103

Photograph Credits In reproducing the images contained in this publication,
the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders
Alex Fradkin: 293. • © 2018 Jack Fulton/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York, courtesy Jack Fulton/Art Resource, New York:
above, 299 below. • The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New
York, photo Star Black: 102 center. © Scott Frances/OTTO: 77
whenever possible. If the Museum could not locate the rights 98 left and center, 100 right. • Getty Research Institute, Los below. © A. West: 60–61. • Photo Juliet Myers: 102 right. •
holders, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that Angeles: 56 below. Photo Linda Cathcart: 100 left. • Photo Ed Courtesy Naoshima Fukutake Contemporary Art Museum, photo
any contact information concerning such rights holders be Glendinning: 153, 290 below. • Courtesy Glenstone Museum, Carey Ciuro: 13. • Courtesy Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park,
forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions. Potomac, Maryland: 65. • Photo Tom Haartsen: 288. • Photo Governors State University, University Park, Illinois: 176 below. •
Kathy Halbreich: 221, 291 below. • Photo Eizaburo Hara, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: 286. • Courtesy Bruce
All works by Bruce Nauman © 2018 Bruce Nauman/Artists courtesy Keiko Hara: 302. • Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, photo Alex Nauman: 77 above. • Courtesy Bruce Nauman and Sperone
Rights Society (ARS), New York. Delfanne: 256 above. • © The Robert Heinecken Trust. Photo © Westwater, New York: 19, 37 left, 82 above, 94 above, 95 below,
2017 Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource NY/Scala 114, 115, 128, 178, 180, 182 left, 192–93, 208, 242–43, 256
© 2018 Vito Acconci/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Florence: 244. • Brigitte Hellgott: 55. Work by Barry Le Va © below, 264 above and below, 268 below right, 269, 270 below,
courtesy EAI, New York: 138. • Courtesy Albright-Knox Art Barry Le Va and courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Work 275 above left and right, 282 below, 289 below, 298. Photo Luc
Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York: by Reiner Ruthenbeck © 2018 Reiner Ruthenbeck/Artists Rights Boegly: 95 above. Photo Susanna Carlisle: 300 below. Photo
59 above. • © William Allan, courtesy Kramlich Collection: 88. • Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. • Courtesy Tom Powel: 17, 94 below. Photo Adam Reich: 214–15. Photo
© 2017 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, a museum of Herbert Foundation, Ghent, photo Philippe De Gobert: 80 Jason Schmidt: 103 left. Photo Robert Vinas, Jr.: 134–35, 240,
Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. © 2018 The Andy Warhol above. • Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 241. Photo Dorothy Zeidman: 224. • © 1973 Bruce Nauman and
Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., photo Lee Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles: 75 below right. • Courtesy New
Society (ARS), New York: 203 left. • Archives of American Art, Stalsworth: 42 right. • Photo Alex Jamison: 109. • © Jasper Museum, New York, photo Fred Scruton: 69. • Photo Tim
Smithsonian Institution: 36 right, 38 left and right, 43 below, 67 Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York: 148 right. Courtesy Nighswander/Imaging4Art.com: 220, 248. • Pan Books Ltd.,
above and center, 101 left. Photo Nicholas Walster: 74. • The Art private collection: 111. • Courtesy Philip Johnson Glass House reproduced with permission of Pan McMillan through PLSclear,
Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York: 257 left, 276 below. Collection, National Trust for Historic Preservation, photo Andy courtesy Laurenz-Stiftung, Basel, Archiv: 148 left. • © Douglas
© 2017 The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York/ Romer: 3. • Steve Jongeward: 39 below. • © Shelby Kennedy, M. Parker Studio/courtesy Edward R. Broida Trust: 296 above. •
Scala, Florence: 157, 183, 204–5. The Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy Shelby Kennedy and LUX, London: 99 left, 312, 322, Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art: 96–97. Photo Pasquale
Donald Young Gallery Records, Ryerson and Burnham Archives: 324, 336, 344, 348, 350, 352, 354, 356. • James Klosty: 53 Barisano: 303 above. Photo Michele Lamanna: 90 above and
142; photo Michael Tropea: 81 above; photo Tom Van Eynde: below. • Courtesy Kravis Collection: 131. • Courtesy Kröller- below, 91 above and below, 92–93, 103 right, 303 below. • ©
176 above. • Artforum: 61 right. • Courtesy Baltimore Museum Müller Museum, Otterlo: 152, 156, 210, 266–67. Photo Jan 2017 the Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala,
of Art: 64 above. Photo Mitro Hood: 164. • © Bayerische Brokerhof: 62–63. • © Fotoarchiv, Kunsthalle Basel, Florence: 64 below. • Phillips/Schwab, New York, courtesy
Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, photo photographer unknown: 34–35, 72 below, 258–59. • Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York: 66. • Raussmüller: 52 above, 182
Haydar Koyupinar: 207. • Courtesy Neal Benezra: 79 below. • Kunsthalle Bern, photo Leonardo Bezzola: 56 above. • right. Photo Fabio Fabbrini/© Raussmüller: 129 above, 289
Photo Jacob Birken: 136–37. • Photo Bisig & Bayer, Basel: 170. Kunstmuseum Basel, photo Martin Bühler: 68 above left and above. • Justin Rennilson, NASA-appointed coinvestigator on
• Photo Ben Blackwell: 106–7. • Photo Eric Boman: 102 left. • below, 76 below, 110, 227, 252–53, 270 above, 272–73, 282 Surveyor’s television experiment, regrouped by and © Gary
bpk/Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, SMB/Roman März: above, 283, 287. • © Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg: 233 above. Rennilson: 130. • © 1965 Norman Rockwell Family Entities.
9. © bpk/Roman März: 261. • Bridgeman Images: 294 below, Courtesy Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, photo Helge Mundt: 80 Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency.
305. • Photo Rudolph Burckhardt. © 2018 Estate of Rudy below. • Richard Landry: 47 above. • Courtesy Laurenz Norman Rockwell Museum Collections: 118. • Sammlung
Burckhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Archives of Foundation, Basel, Archive: 42 left, 48 below, 82 below, 175, Ludwig, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen: 275
American Art, Smithsonian Institution: 43 above, 279. Courtesy 179. • Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, below. • Gian Sinigaglia–Archivio Panza. © Giorgio Colombo,
Estate of Rudy Burckhardt and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, Washington, D.C.: 202. • The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Milan: 39 above. • Private collections: 1, 7, 59 below, 184, 272
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: 40–41; work by Images, photo Rob Crandall: 99 right. • Dakota Mace: 36 left. • below left. • Courtesy Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C.:
Don Potts © Don Potts, work by Keith Sonnier © 2018 Keith © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman 40 left. • Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York:
Sonnier/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. • Balthasar Gallery, New York. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard 112–13, 174, 280–81. Photo Kristopher McKay: 162, 278 below,
Burkhard, courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust: 51. Work by Alighiero e College, Imaging Department: 120. • © Man Ray Trust/Artists 306–7. • The Sonnabend Collection and Antonio Homem: 196. •
Boetti © 2018 Alighiero e Boetti/Artists Rights Society (ARS), Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2018. Photo Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York: 151, 278 above. •
New York/SIAE, Rome, work by Barry Flanagan © Barry © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence: Courtesy Craig F. Starr Gallery, photo Light Blue Studio: 108, 254
Flanagan/© Bridgeman Images, work by Mario Merz © 2018 129 below. • Photo Jason Mandella: 133, 260 above, 268 above. above, 257 right. • Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: 50 above, 154
Mario Merz/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome, • Photo Roman März, Berlin: 171. • © 2018 Succession H. (works by Walter De Maria, Marisa Merz, and Panamarenko ©
work by Robert Morris © 2018 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image the artists or their estates), 229, 274. • S.M.A.K., Ghent, photo
Society (ARS), New York. • © Stanley Caidin Film Trust, courtesy © 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Dirk Pauwels: 70–71, 71 right. • © Tate, London, 2017: 86–87
Laurenz Foundation, Basel, Archive: 203 right. • Courtesy Imaging and Visual Resources, photo Thomas Griesel: 226. • above, 86 below, 87 below left, 87 below right, 167. • © Tate,
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: 262–63. • Chazen Museum Photo Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images: 98 right. • Courtesy London, 2017. Courtesy Bruce Nauman and Sperone Westwater,
of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison: 75 below left. • © 2016 Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston, photo George New York: 236, 237. • © Kenneth Tyler, courtesy National Gallery
Christie’s Images Limited: 195. © Christie›s Images/Bridgeman Hixson: 89 above. • Photo Roman Mensing, artdoc.de: 284 of Australia, Canberra: 75 above. • Courtesy University of
Images: 272 left above. • Collège de France, Archives: 173. • below. • Photo Peter Moore: 47 below. • Work by Eva Hesse California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, photo
Photo Sheldon C. Collins, courtesy Whitney Museum of © The Estate of Eva Hesse, courtesy Hauser & Wirth; work by Benjamin Blackwell: 89 below. © William Allan, © Peter Saul
American Art, New York: 198–99. • © Giorgio Colombo, Milan: Robert Rohm © Robert Rohm; work by Barry Le Va © Barry Le and courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York: 234. • Courtesy
73. • Dallas Museum of Art: 284 above. • Photo Manuel Rod del Va and courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York; work by Keith The Fine Arts Collection, University of California, Davis: 37 right.
Pozo: 247. • Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York, photo Sonnier © 2018 Keith Sonnier/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New • University of New Mexico Archives (item#BVRL634974), photo
Stuart Tyson: 84–85. • Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), York; work by Richard Serra © 2018 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Ed Bryant: 290 above. • Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: 79
New York: 48 above, 83, 116, 122, 139, 140, 144, 166, 200, 223, Society (ARS), New York. • Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, above, 254 below. Photo Glenn Halvorson: 5. Photo Gene
238, 276 above, 294 above, 300 above. • Emanuel Hoffmann Lausanne, photo J.-C. Ducret: 76 above. • Archive Museo Pittman: 53 above. Photo Cameron Wittig: 119. Work by Ralph
Foundation, Basel: 209, 216, 219. • Garrett Ewald: 68 above Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid: 78 right. • Lemon © Ralph Lemon. • Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery, London,
center. • Photo Jennifer Faist: 230–31. • Photo © the Fine Arts © Museum Associates/LACMA: 57, 297. • © MCA Chicago: 49 Whitechapel Gallery Archive: 72 above. • Whitney Museum of
Museums of San Francisco: 165. • Archiv Dorothee und Konrad below. Courtesy MCA Chicago: 67 below, 268 below left. • MCA American Art, New York: 46. • Digital image © Whitney Museum
Fischer, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Chicago Library and Archives: 49 above. • Courtesy Museum of of American Art, New York: 54 above, 127, 147, 222. Photo Ron
Schenkung/Zentralarchiv für deutsche und internationale Contemporary Art San Diego, photo Frank J. Thomas: 54 below. Amstutz: cover, 201. • Courtesy Archive Wide White Space,
Kunstmarktforschung (ZADIK), Cologne: 44 above and below, 45 • The Museum of Modern Art, New York: 77 above.. Digital Antwerp, photo R. Van den Bempt: 11. • Courtesy Donald Young
above and below, 58. • Archiv Konrad Fischer Galerie, image © 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gallery, Chicago, photo Tom van Eynde: 260 below. Photo
Düsseldorf: 101 right, 304. • Courtesy Friedrich Christian Flick Department of Imaging and Visual Resources: 188; photo Peter Michael Tropea: 292 below. • Photo Dorothy Zeidman, New
Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin: 52 below, 212. Photo Butler: 68 above right; photo Thomas Griesel: 124–25, 132, 299 York: 15.
Stefan Altenburger, Zurich: 245, 291 above. Photo Christian above; photo Kate Keller: 168; photo Jonathan Muzikar: 20–21,
Schwager: 81 below. • Courtesy Fondazione Torino Musei: 50 32–33, 104–5, 150, 225, 233 below, 250–51, 296 below, 308–9,
below. Work by Gilbert & George © Gilbert & George. • Photo 311; photo Mali Olatunji: 78 left; photo John Wronn: 189, 292

351
Colophon Published in conjunction with the exhibition Bruce
Nauman: Disappearing Acts, at the Schaulager Basel,
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(MoMA PS1). The exhibition is organized by Kathy and
Halbreich, Laurenz Foundation Curator and Advisor
to the Director, The Museum of Modern Art, with Major support is provided by The Jill and Peter Kraus Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager
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Ute Holl’s essay was translated from the German by Cover: still from Bruce Nauman. Green Horses.
Ishbel Flett. Julia Keller’s essay was translated from 1988.
Two-channel video installation, one projection,
the German by Fiona Elliott and Ishbel Flett. Martina two monitors, color, sound, and chair, 59:40 min. See
Venanzoni’s essay was translated from the German by pp. 198–99, 201
Catherine Schelbert.
Pp. 312, 322, 324, 336, 344, 348, 350, 352, 354, 356:
© 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and stills from Shelby Kennedy. The Bruce Nauman Story.
the Schaulager Basel. The essays by Kathy Halbreich, 1968. 16mm film, black and white, sound, 11 min.
Roxana Marcoci, Magnus Schaefer, and Taylor Walsh
are © The Museum of Modern Art. The essays by Julia Printed in Spain
Keller and Martina Venanzoni, and the bibliography
by Stephan E. Hauser, are © Laurenz Foundation,
Schaulager Basel.

All works of art by Bruce Nauman are © 2018 Bruce

Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Copyright credits for certain illustrations appear
on p. 351.

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961680

ISBN (United States and Canada): 978-1-63345-031-8
ISBN (rest of the world): 978-3-906315-10-2

353
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