Bruce Nauman : The Artist's Artist

Raffaele: How did you start doing films?

Nauman: Films are about seeing. I wanted to find out what I would look at in a strange situation, and I decided that with a film and camera I could do that. In one film I did, the title was straight and everything else tipped on its side, partly because you could get more in the picture and partly as a concession to art—so it looked as if I did something to it, changed it. The films I did with Bill Allan are the closest to just making a film, without considering art. We made a film called 'Fishing for Asian Carp.'  Bill Allan got into his boots and went into the creek. We ran the film until Allan caught the fish.

Raffaele: Was it a put-on?

Nauman: No, it’s that you want to make a film, you don’t know how long it’ll take, and so you pick something to make it about that will determine how long it will be. When he caught the fish, it ended.

Raffaele: What is it that films give you that other work doesn’t?

Nauman: I guess the film becomes a record of what went on. Maybe also because you tend to believe that what is shown on a film is really true—you believe a film, or a photograph, more than a painting.

Raffaele: What is this piece called?

Nauman: 'A Wax Mold of the Knees of Five Famous Artists.' Although it’s made out of fiberglass, and they are my knees. I couldn’t decide who to get for the artists, so I used my own knees. Making the impressions of the knees in a wax block was a way of having a large rectangular solid with marks in it. I didn’t want just to make marks in it, so I had to follow another kind of reasoning. It also had to do with trying to make the thing itself less important to look at. That is, you had to know what it is about, too. To go and look at it was to try and think whether you liked to look at it, or just how involved you were in looking at art in general; that was not quite enough though, you had to know these other things, too.

Raffaele: One has to approach your work in terms of itself, because it seems completely unlike anything else. What do you relate yourself to in past art?

Nauman: A little bit of everything. I suppose my work must have to do with some of the things the Dadaists and Surrealists did. I like to give the pieces elaborate titles like they did, although I’ve only been titling them recently.

 Raffaele: How important is the making of the thing, as opposed to your conceiving of it? In this knee piece, is the actual doing of it—the molds and the fiberglass and the pour, etc.—the important thing, or is it the final image?

Nauman: A little of each—although it is should be O.K. if someone else made it. The problem is, you can’t get someone else to make it right. I’ve had that problem. I think I make the plans as well as they can be made, and then I bring them to somebody and they make the piece wrong, or they think they can make it stronger and do it another way.

Raffaele: What determines what medium you’ll use for a particular piece?

Nauman: The reason for making a piece is what it will look like. For instance, at one point I thought about making outdoor sculpture. I thought that outdoor sculpture was usually big, and durable, but that seemed very dumb, because it’s already nice outside with trees and fields, and I didn’t want to put something there and change it all. So I thought maybe I’d make something which fell apart after a while—which would return to nature. Like dirt, or paper, that would disintegrate. Then I made this piece which is a plaque which you put on a tree. After a few years, the tree would grow over it, and finally cover it up, and it would be gone.

Raffaele: That’s beautiful.

Nauman: Then I made plastic copies and I thought maybe I could send them to people I knew all over the world.

Raffaele: It reads, “A rose has no teeth.” What does that mean?

Nauman: I got it from Wittgenstein. He’s talking about language, and he says to think about the difference between “A rose has no teeth” and “A baby has no teeth.” With the first one, you don’t know what it means, because you’ve made an assumption outside the sentence. So when I thought of what to put on this plaque I thought of these words, because they have as much to do with nature as anything I could think of.

Raffaele: Do you think of what you do as art?

Nauman: It’s important that someone should see the work.

Raffaele: Yet the tree plaque is not about someone seeing it, it just exists somewhere.

Nauman: It could be in a gallery.

Raffaele: Then somehow it would be a plan or a scheme—like a new ship at the dock being inspected before its maiden voyage. I mean, the liner is for sailing and not inspecting.

Nauman: I’m not sure how I feel about doing these pieces and then not having anyone ever hear about them. It is really funny about my wanting to make things for people to see, and at the same time making them as hard as possible for people to see. I like to take the reference or contact points away, and those things which people are used to looking at—but that isn’t true either.

Raffaele: I see you’re making a neon sign with words on it. What does it say?

Nauman: “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”

Raffaele: And do you believe that?

Nauman: I don’t know; I think we should leave that open.

From the Archives: Bruce Nauman on Fishing, Surrealism, and Filmmaking, in 1967. By Alex Greenberger. ArtNews  March 16, 2018.  

In 1966, Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker traveled to San Francisco, where they interviewed four emerging artists who mainly created sculptures—very weird sculptures, that is, that often resembled biological objects. One of the artists they spoke to was Bruce Nauman, who, at the time, had begun creating drily funny films, sculptures, and performances that eluded even the smartest of critics.  Excerpted from “The Way-Out West: Interviews with 4 San Francisco Artists”

By Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker. Summer 1967

Though  the artist Bruce Nauman’s home and studio are just outside of Santa Fe, N.M. — a few miles from grapefruit margaritas, enchiladas with red-and-green chile sauce (“Christmas style”), stores selling miniature adobe huts, innumerable yoga studios, innumerable galleries of local artists — the distance feels greater. To enter into Nauman’s world is to leave much of what one feels to be familiar, to suddenly feel all of it is trivial and inessential and to regret that at some point one has to return to it. His house is so unassuming as to be indescribable, his studio not much more than a giant shed. There is a field for a few tranquil horses, a shelter full of bales of hay. It was a dry year, he said in his clipped, hoarse, somewhat unlocatable Western accent, and water-stressed rattlesnakes stayed close to home. Just the other day, he found one on the steps to the studio.

Nauman has lived in New Mexico since 1979, and on a visit this past spring, I often thought he would have been content to speak only about rattlesnakes and horses. For a time, Nauman had a business breaking in and selling horses; though he no longer rides much, the evidence of his obsession is everywhere. At the corner of the sink in his studio bathroom, there is a neatly piled, several-inches thick stack of Eclectic Horseman magazine. In the several hours I spent with him, his most enthusiastic utterance came when he was pointing to images of foals on his walls. “When those babies are born — phew,” he exhaled in delight, “it’s so great.” He told a funny story about the painter Agnes Martin, who had lived not far away, and with whom he used to go to the racetrack to bet on horses. She would carefully observe the horses warming up beforehand, and then choose one to bet on — a method that seemed to reliably win. “She knew how to pick ’em,” Nauman told me. Whether talking about horses or not, he spoke with slowness, deliberation and care. It took me some time to slip into the rhythms of his speech, themselves reflections of an unhurried mind, in which there was time to weigh each word for the right meaning.

Nauman is tall and physically imposing, but the destabilizing effect of meeting one of the most influential American artists was mitigated by his short-sleeved-Hawaiian-shirt-and-dad-jeans mien. He is also — simply and unembarrassedly — aging, his body no longer capable of its previous feats. In his early videos from the 1960s, he displayed his lithe figure and startlingly handsome face to tremendous effect. A 16-millimeter masterwork from 1968, “Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square,” shows the artist in a white T-shirt and dark pants toeing the line of a square in an empty studio, stopping to strike an exaggerated Renaissance-style contrapposto.

Now 76 years old, Nauman’s hair has thinned and his abdomen has filled out, and his recent work accentuates these facts to the same degree that his older works highlighted his balletic grace within arbitrarily delineated confines. He recently survived bowel cancer — “Now I have a bag,” he said, patting where it was on his stomach — and in recent video works such as “Contrapposto Studies, i through vii” (2015-16), he walks gingerly, his body split across multiple screens. Nauman was preparing for a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, his third major career survey, which opens on Oct. 21, a collaboration between MoMA, MoMA PS1 in Queens and the Schaulager museum near Basel, Switzerland. He showed me images of his latest work in progress, a 3-D portrait of his walking a line like someone pulled over for a potential D.W.I. who is forced to demonstrate their sobriety. It came to him when, following chemotherapy treatments, he found that he had lost feeling in his feet and legs, which his doctors feared might be the result of nerve damage. In physical therapy, one of the things his therapist had him do was walk a line. “And at first, I could hardly even stand up,” he said, “and he had to hold me to be able to walk. And if I would fall on the floor, I couldn’t get up; I had to get a chair and pull myself up.” Eventually, he managed to do it. Nauman had planned to recreate six videos from the 1960s. He was only able to do one, and only in a strained manner.

It is conventional to think of Nauman as having no particular style, no unifying idea that is uniquely his. Instead, he seems to have fascinations, or obsessions: stretches of working through the same basic set of materials or ideas over the course of several years. And yet, Nauman does circle around a fundamental problem: the experience, in one’s environment, architecture, language or body, of being controlled. He subjects himself, his artistic collaborators and his viewers to disturbing experiments in surveillance; he makes us participants in art that is hectoring, aggressive, buttonholing and violent, and fills us with a sense of complicity. That he does so in virtually every medium only makes the sensation more overwhelming — when trapped in the mind of Bruce Nauman, there is no escape.

An emblematic piece is Nauman’s lithograph from 1973 that simply asks us, in reverse lettering, to “Pay Attention,” and follows that address with an obscenity. It induces helplessness: As soon as we’ve deciphered the image, we’ve done precisely what Nauman asked us to do. The letters themselves push against their lines, against each other, hemmed in — crushed by the frame of the picture. Another video installation from 1988, a parody of lab experiments that hints at the unknowability of human behavior, features a rat in a maze and a teenage boy playing the drums and is titled “Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer).” Early in his career, Nauman claimed the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the early 20th-century philosopher who probed the “limits of language.” He’s not read Wittgenstein in some time, but he still returns to the works of the novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett. This is unsurprising when one thinks of Beckett’s trapped protagonists: Winnie from “Happy Days” (1961), buried in sand from the waist down; the streaming monologue of “The Unnamable” (1953), narrated by a limbless, trunkless head in a jar. Meaning is often elusive in contemporary art. Nauman constructs scenarios that coerce meaningfulness from our participation in them. We can’t help but at least attempt to understand what he’s trying to tell us. Though Nauman may not have intended it, an examination of his art over the last 40 years says as much about where we have ended up as a society as it does about Nauman.

Appended to Naman’s  studio is a small office, where his longtime, spiky-haired studio manager, Juliet Myers, works, along with Michele Menotti, the assistant to the painter Susan Rothenberg, who is married to Nauman and has her own studio on the compound. (Rothenberg was working the day I visited, occasionally taking a break to watch Serena Williams’s return to the French Open.) I’d expected Nauman’s studio to be overwhelming, crammed with clown costumes and lewd half-finished neon sculptures. Instead, it looked like a messy desk extended over the length of a cavernous warehouse. Nauman told me that he lets things pile up until he decides he needs the space; then he clears up one of the dust-covered piles and gets to work.

Walking through his studio, then, is only partially a revealing guide to the various offhand predilections that have preoccupied Nauman through his career. On one table were coils of electrical wire, copies of Livestock Weekly and Western Horseman, Amazon Prime boxes. There were more Amazon boxes piled in a corner, under photos of horses posted haphazardly along the wall, along with several horse wall calendars. There were saddles, an armchair with the stuffing busting out. There was cat food, a cat litter box and a cat that came in and mewled reliably throughout the day. There were paint cans, rolled-up pink insulation and indeed some oversize clown shoes. In one corner, there was a running projection from “Walks In Walks Out” (2015) in which Nauman walks in front of a projection of “Contrapposto Studies, i through vii”; Nauman told me that his two cats liked to watch it. From the ceiling were hung, to form an upside-down triangle, life-size polyurethane sculptures of caribou and foxes; this was a model for a work called “Leaping Foxes” (2018). One section of the space, somewhat imperceptibly laid out, was set up for the latest video he was working on, with the videographer Bruce Hamilton, in which Nauman would walk in a straight line in the studio. Much of what Nauman explores in his work is hidden or invisible. This is apparently a habit with him, given how much of his work involves his own body. He told the story of when, in the 1960s, the director at the Berkeley Art Museum came to visit his studio in San Francisco, where Nauman lived until 1968, working out of a small storefront in an abandoned grocery store. He’d been working on “Collection of Various Flexible Materials Separated by Layers of Grease With Holes the Size of My Waist and Wrists” (1966), a flat rectangle of foil, plastic sheet, foam rubber, felt and grease, with holes that did not, in fact, conform to Nauman’s body. “Where’s the work? What am I supposed to be looking at?” the director asked.

The breakthrough that Nauman engineered — of falling back on himself, alone in the studio, trying to figure out, as if from a position of supreme naïveté, in whatever medium possible, what it is to make art — is now so normal, his influence so widespread, that it is difficult to appraise his achievement sufficiently. One would have to look to Andy Warhol to find a figure who cast such a long shadow over the cultural landscape. Nauman’s career has done nothing less than create an entirely new language for visual art, a legacy that can be seen everywhere from the aphoristic installations of Glenn Ligon and Jenny Holzer, to the monumental assemblages of Jeff Koons and Richard Serra, to the conceptual mischief of Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler.

Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1941, though his father’s job as an engineer and salesman for General Electric kept the family moving around the Midwest. He became used to isolation, he told me — used to moving to a place and learning to watch and observe. After high school, Nauman went to the University of Wisconsin to study math and music but changed his major to art, graduating with a B.F.A. Later, at the University of California, Davis, he earned his M.F.A. When he began to exhibit work in the mid-1960s, Minimalism was ascending to a hegemonic position over the rest of American art. Figures like Barnett Newman and Donald Judd had tamed and solidified the artwork, and the figure of the artist became solemn to the point of absurdity. The highly finished sculpted object became the locus of attention and of artistic meaning. Nauman recalled how shoddy some Minimalist objects actually looked. “I was surprised at how badly made they were,” he said, speaking of Judd’s early work. Elsewhere he has spoken of how he wanted to make a “less important thing to look at,” as a riposte to the obtrusive self-seriousness of Minimalism. In 1967, for his first solo New York show, he exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Among the standout works was a series of neon rungs titled “Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals” (1966).

Burrowing into the depths of himself, he created art that consisted of others watching him learn what art was. Given an empty studio in Southampton, N.Y., by the artists Roy Lichtenstein and Paul Waldman, Nauman made a series of defining videos in which he tested the space of the studio with his body. (Nauman makes broad sweeping gestures when he speaks; in trying to describe a room, he will sculpt out of the air with his hands.) In “Walk With Contrapposto” (1968), he slithers down a narrow corridor, striking the contrapposto pose of ancient Greek sculpture, arms bent, hands resting on jutted hips. What was for the Greeks a way of reconciling dynamism and rest was exposed in Nauman’s work as something purely artificial, an artistic norm that ran against the natural inclinations of the human body. At the same time, it was terrifically precise: Try walking and striking the same pose as Nauman did, which he invited people to do when he put the corridor into one of his exhibitions, and you’ll feel the effort and planning and grace it took to execute it as he did.

His other great discovery of this period was neon. Nauman had always been attracted to sculpture — painting is perhaps the only medium he avoids — but with neon he found a form that brought with it the synesthesia of sound that fused with light and color: the buzzing and droning of the tubes, along with the occasional pop or crackle. (Nauman admired the sustained drones of the American avant-garde composer La Monte Young, and for a time, he played bass and violin in a drone band in the 1960s.) In his early attempts with the form, he tried blocking the light: painting the tubes black or immersing them in a crate of motor oil. Having worked out of the old storefront in San Francisco, with a neon sign out front, he came to recognize the potential to make signs of his own. He brought to neon his deadpan facility with word games, imbued with his own special sense of sadism and desire to provoke discomfort. In “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)” (1967), the titular message is spelled out in looping cursive in a spiral, moving from the inside out. It secures assent less aggressively, but just as manipulatively, as “Pay Attention” does. Giving viewers an old cliché about what it is artists do, it calls attention to its own Hallmark-card falseness, highlighted by its goofy, peach coloration. The later “One Hundred Live and Die” (1984) is a series of alternately depressing, uplifting and scary variations on the formulas “X and live” and “X and die.” “Suck and die” one says; “Rise and live,” says another; “Piss and live” another. In an exhibition of his work from the mid-1980s, he revealed a series of sex acts in neon, in which figures would turn on and off as they fellated each other.

In the span of two decades, Nauman came to embody a larger transition in the art world, and perhaps beyond the art world. He had created seminal works on video in the studio of Lichtenstein, a Pop artist, which pointed in a direction away from Minimalism and toward some combination of process, dance and performance. And there was the suggestion, in his self-aware language-based works, of what would come to be called postmodernism. The artist did not reveal mystic truths — he simply revealed what it was to make art. Nauman played a critical part in laying out the possible pathways that art could follow. Then, in 1979, he disappeared.

Reflecting on his  move to the desert in New Mexico, Nauman admitted to having been nervous. “I’m not sure how you develop as an artist outside of a major cultural center,” he said, suggesting that you needed that “exposure and intensity around you at least some time in your life.” But he felt he had developed the habits and ideas that would carry him in relative isolation — and that he had been on the hunt for that sort of privacy for some time. He had left the Bay Area because of what he felt was, as he once put it, an “incredible paranoia among most of the people I knew” that reflected a distrust of intellectualism and measures of artistic success, as well as a generalized hatred of New York and Los Angeles, the country’s main art centers. “In New York there’s a season for art and in California it just doesn’t happen that way,” he told Interview magazine in 1973. “Since there is so little gallery business going on, and the weather doesn’t change that much, it doesn’t have that cycle quality.” Nauman has never lived in New York, traveling to the city only occasionally during the one winter in 1968 that he occupied Lichtenstein’s Southampton studio, and he lived only on the fringes of Los Angeles when he moved to Pasadena in the spring of 1969. In moving to New Mexico, he also missed, perhaps providentially, the ballooning of the commercial art world. By the late 1970s, Larry Gagosian had opened his first gallery and Julian Schnabel had sold out his first show of “broken plate” paintings: two events that signaled the crudeness, volatility and sheer commercial swagger that would overtake the art world in the years to come. Nauman’s work from this time stood apart from that world, even as he became recognized for his influence and enduring vision. Pursuing his own path, far from everyone else, he became at once emblematic and singular.

There was always something darkly funny about Nauman’s work — the neon signs that look inviting enough to hang over a mom-and-pop store, if only they didn’t depict an unmentionable sexual position — but his humor, like Beckett’s, was filled with abyssal dread. As he moved further and further away from the trappings of the art world and its society, Nauman’s work shifted. His daughter (from his marriage to his first wife, with whom he also has a son) went to school in the area, and he got to know cowboys: people who, like artists, did a number of different things, in addition to breaking and riding horses. In other words: Art was just another way of life, and consisted of so many different kinds of activity, in a way that both inflated and deflated its importance. Rather than ignore this conflict, Nauman explored it, and his work subsequently, perhaps inevitably, became darker, more combative. In 1994, his second major retrospective traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where the philosopher Arthur Danto, the art critic for The Nation, reviewed it, professing to be utterly confused by the “noisy, awful exhibition,” which he thought was apparently the work of a “smartass perpetrator of aesthetic practical jokes” rather than the “humanist” that Danto had previously “believed him to be.” It was, he said, “aggressive and nasty, cacophonous and arrogant, silly and portentous.” One of the works that Danto and a number of other critics (and no doubt many viewers) struggled with was “Clown Torture” (1987), Nauman’s most terrifying video, previously shown at the 1989 Whitney Biennial. An installation of four monitors and two screen projections, it showed a figure in a clown costume — in a departure, it was the actor Walter Stevens, not Nauman himself — engaged in acts of self-abasement or abject protest. In one, the clown was watched from above, on the toilet; in another, he kicked at the screen with his outsize shoes, screaming, “No, no, no, no, no!” In another, he told an endless joke: “Pete and Repeat are sitting on a fence. Pete falls off. Who’s left? Repeat ...” Here again was the old absurdity, but multiplied — the overall effect a sense of horror, and complicity in the misery of this strange, faceless, unknown and unknowable figure.

Whether it was the nightmarishness of the show or simply the cumulative weight of all the years of work, the retrospective sapped Nauman, and he had difficulty returning to work. He told me that retrospectives were “no fun.” “Sometimes I can’t make any connection with why I did something or how,” he said, when talking about the work that will be shown in the MoMA retrospective this month. Still, he was pleased that so far “there was nothing that I hated.” Revisiting another work from this period included in the show, the video installation “Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime” (1990), in which a voice-over offers degrading instructions to a meek mime, he said, “I hadn’t seen that for years, and it was pretty scary. I didn’t remember it as being scary, but it was.” At the same time, the long silence following the 1990s retrospective signaled another breakthrough. There were signs of it even earlier, like in “Clown Torture”: the fact that he had given up some modicum of control, allowing another person to do the work that he might have done. “One thing that was very hard for me was by allowing people to participate in the work in a very active way,” he said, “I was giving up a lot of control. So that was kind of scary and important.”

That Nauman can find himself letting go in his old age seems like a sharp departure from his previous work. Even if he has returned to focus on his body, what is apparent in his later work is the way his body no longer functions as it once did; age, something that no one can truly fight off, has taken its toll. But there was always an aspect of freedom-seeking in what he did, in setting himself within certain confines and trying to find out what, precisely, he was capable of. He seemed to be looking for a medium, a way of working that would fit with a feeling of being overtaken, of losing control. His more recent work, as with his earlier output, goes deep into the private self, somehow bringing you closer to the world, to the society that you otherwise could not see. As it happens, it isn’t just his body that is giving way — the desert he sought out nearly 40 years ago has begun to change as well. The red, dusty landscape that surrounds his house and studio is rived by a dry creek bed. When Nauman first arrived to this property in 1989, the creek was reliably full. “Now it’s dry,” he said, “except when there are big storms.” But there are fewer big storms, and the water level has dropped seven feet.

Nauman’s work is often a test of how much we can endure: whether we can stomach the horror of an abject clown, a maze of thoughtless rats, a mime performing humiliating instructions, an aggressive injunction to “Pay Attention.” In its exploration of control, discipline and torture, and a linguistic world riddled with pat phrases and evacuated of all meaning, the experience his work induces can be awful, nauseating, horrifying. In moments of sublime social disorientation — we are living in one such moment now — Nauman appears as one of the few artists who tells it exactly as it is, without ever being didactic or eschewing the personal motivations that are the ultimate source of art. “I never saw being an artist as something that’s pure and separate from how you live the rest of your life, the politics of the situation,” he told me. When I asked him whether he was explicitly pursuing political themes, like surveillance, in works such as 1970’s “Green Light Corridor” — a claustrophobic passageway, lit with green neon, in which a camera films the viewers’ attempts to squeeze through (the very same passageway on which Nauman had once struck contrapposto poses) — he was uncertain. “I understood what was going on,” he said. “But it was also more of an investigation of my own feelings about privacy.”

Despite its well-deserved reputation for unpleasantness, Nauman’s work is protean and wide-ranging enough to be, at times, observant, watchful and open. In 2002, he debuted the monumental film “Mapping the Studio 1 (Fat Chance John Cage),” his most thoroughgoing attempt to cede control. In the spirit of the composer named in the title, as well as the unnamed Warhol (whose films, like the eight-hour “Empire,” from 1964, were also inspired by Cage), Nauman created an experiment where he recorded his studio at night, allowing the video to capture both its emptiness and any casual nighttime activities of the animals (cats and mice, principally) that roamed into the frame. The monotony of the piece of course hearkened back to the droning, durational art that he had been inspired by in the 1960s. But it also seemed to have other sources. When I noticed that he had a complete set of the diaries of Lewis and Clark on his shelves, I asked him about them. It turned out he was reading the books while making “Mapping the Studio.” “I would read several days’ accounts every day,” he said. Some of these entries were just a straightforward log of longitude, latitude and distance traveled. But they recorded every day, and, Nauman said, “every day something interesting happened,” as the explorers ventured into the unknown and reported back what they saw.

Bruce Nauman, the Artist’s Artist. By  Nikil Saval. The New York Times , October 15, 2018.

Bruce Nauman : Disappearing Acts. Exhibition, through February 2019. The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, New York.