Hailed by critics as one of the most important artists of his generation, Bruce Nauman has had a protean career, flowing from one medium to the next and one concept to the next with each work. Concept, indeed, is the core...
[more]Hailed by critics as one of the most important artists of his generation, Bruce Nauman has had a protean career, flowing from one medium to the next and one concept to the next with each work. Concept, indeed, is the core of his work. In order to convey new messages, Nauman challenges traditional notions of art, on the one hand dematerializing art objects and on the other making the immaterial solid (as in "Cast of the Space beneath my Chair" from 1965). Nauman's media include sculpture, video, film, prints, drawing, object installation, audio-video installation, and whatever else he can use to articulate his socially provocative ideas.
Nauman comments that his work is motivated by anger about the human condition, "Specifically...our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like." His own work is hard to ignore. Described by some as autistic, it often features flashing lights and looping audio tracks. In "One Hundred Live and Die" (1984), phrases like "Sick and Die," "Well and Die," "Smile and Die," and "Think and Live" light up in succession, and finally in a bright, simultaneous flash of all the phrases together.
Works such as "World Peace" (1996) address language and miscommunication. In this five-channel video projection, four women and one man talk over each other while repeating ad nauseam: "I'll talk, you'll listen to me," "You'll talk, I'll listen to you," "They'll talk, we'll listen to them." By running these phrases over one another, Nauman reduces each to absurdity. It becomes clear that no one is listening to anyone else, and eveyone's talk has become babble.
Because it challenges our senses and our understanding, Nauman's work is not exactly pleasant to experience. But beauty is not, after all, his concern. His art seeks to produce in the viewer a mental and physical state likely to generate the idea he wants to get across. And at times, it seems like the state most likely to produce Nauman's ideas is irritation, confusion, or even anger. As art critic Robert Hughes writes: "The artist as hero is long gone from American culture, and the artist as social critic is ineffective, but Nauman, with the example of Dada before him and a slackly therapeutic culture all around, has cut himself a different role: the artist as nuisance."
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