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.
