BruceNauman

The TrueArtist

Peter Plagens

1 Introduction 2 Schooling the School 3 The True Artist 4 Negative Space 5 American Abroad 6 Nauman in New York, Briefly 7 The Dancer from the Dance and the L.A. Retrospective 8 Upping the Ante, Leaving Town 9 Video Redux 10 Political Art 11 Horses and other Animals 12 The Late Show 13 Deft in Venice 14 Nauman Now 15 Appendices

1Intro-duction

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15Introduction14

1. Introduction

No American artist since the Abstract Expressionists – including that avatar of all things contradictory, Andy Warhol – is as puzzling an entity as Bruce Nauman. He is, and has been all along, entirely sincere, even romantic, about the notion of being an artist. A hard worker, Nauman suffers for his art, struggling with every work, refusing to compromise, polish, sweeten or complicate it to please anyone other than himself. Although irony abounds in his work – which ranges from drawings done by an obviously deft and talented hand, through freestanding objects that all but the most reactionary academic would agree to call sculpture, to neon signs, esoteric installations, aggressively matter-of-fact videos, to what’s often called Body Art, to playing games with language, and pure ‘sound’ pieces – there’s hardly an ounce of irony in Bruce Nauman, the person. A Midwesterner by birth, upbringing and temperament, he lives most of the time on a working horse ranch in New Mexico and displays all the personal traits you’d expect from someone of that description. He’s in good physical shape for a man in his early seventies (1), taciturn but friendly, practical and very straightforward in his opinions and analyses of his and other people’s art.

On the other hand, Nauman’s straightforwardness is so intense that it can be easily mistaken for disdain. The contempo-rary art world (by which I mean those professionals, amateurs and bystanders who can flip through a copy of Artforum and not regard everything in it except the Rolex ad as either faddish entertainment for the international over-privileged, or as academic self-delusion) is vastly in favour of Nauman’s work. A minority, however, still considers him to be – due to the morphological inconsistency of his work, what they perceive to be a disregard for aesthetics, and relentlessly unnerving solipsism – a net artistic negative. The general public (by which I mean those open-minded people who might take in a museum exhibition of serious contemporary art on a nice Sunday afternoon with the idea that there’s a reasonable possibility they might like it) is sometimes nonplussed by Nauman. Unlike, say, Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, Nauman doesn’t give them semi-standardized, logo-like images that, once the penny of hipness drops, they’d be happy to wear on a T-shirt from a museum gift shop. Unlike such Minimalist sculptors as Tony Smith or Donald Judd, Nauman doesn’t give them a clean and clear beauty that, even though they might find it a little cold and industrial, they’ll nevertheless accept as nicely designed and competently manufac-tured. And unlike many current, nominally more radical younger artists, Nauman doesn’t give them anything blatantly shocking or outrageous that would bait them into cathartic rants.

Still, Nauman’s work can be said to contain substantial influences, confluences and dialogues with the work of a long list of such artists, musicians, dancers, writers and philosophers as Art & Language, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, John Coltrane, Merce Cunningham, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Lucio Fontana, Philip Glass, Jean-Luc Godard, Douglas Gordon, Johan Grimonprez, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Michel Journiac, Joseph Kosuth, Thierry Kuntzel, Piero Manzoni, Chris Marker, Marshall McLuhan, Meredith Monk, Vladimir Nabokov, Man Ray, Steve Reich, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol and (last, but nonetheless most profoundly in this un-Naumanesquely alphabetical listing) Ludwig Wittgenstein. Another way of plotting Nauman’s position in modern and contem-porary art is to say that he ‘set out to repeat and develop each singular gap opened by Duchamp’s oeuvre, instituting in his own work a kind of academy of exceptions as rich and diverse as the one that used to prepare students for the Beaux-Arts.’1

Nauman is consequently anything but a boring artist. When viewers see his work and then return to everyday life, they find that it remains persistently, puzzlingly in their heads. That’s probably the kind of reaction Nauman would prefer to the art-world cognoscenti’s rapturous, but often camp-followingly rote huzzahs. ‘Persistently there’ is also exactly the criterion by which

Nauman selects – or more accurately, intuits – which of his ideas will be manifested in his works. He is a surprising combination of a modern artist in bohemian mode (he sequesters himself in a large but bare-bones studio and does whatever he feels like doing), and a consummate professional in the show-business mode. He shows up and delivers, especially for major installations, com-missioned pieces, retrospectives or a command performance such as that at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In almost every Nauman exhi-bition I’ve ever seen (and he’s had, or been in, a stupefying number of shows over his nearly fifty-plus-year career), Nauman has met or exceeded expectations. Even with the added difficulty that, ever since his first solo gallery exhibition at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1966, he has been more or less expected to trash expectations and to deliver something unexpected, he’s succeeded in surprising viewers – often in a subtly disquieting way.

My first encounter with Nauman, in 1968, was with his work, which I immediately and passionately disliked. I was living in Brussels, on a grant to look at my favourite kind of historical art, early Flemish painting, to see if I could let its odd, medieval but ‘ur-modernist’ shifting planes and crisp colours influence my own abstract painting. Through the artist Marcel Broodthaers and a great, edgy contemporary gallery in Antwerp called Wide White Space, I met a Belgian collector named Isi Fiscman. He mentioned a big contemporary art festival in Germany called Documenta, and offered to give me a ride there in his tiny Triumph Herald roadster. (The first couple of nights, I slept in the car. Later, I met Bates Lowry, the director at the time of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, who took pity on me and let me have the sofa in his hotel suite.)

What I saw of Nauman’s work in Documenta were some works from a suite of Eleven Color Photographs (which would be published as an artist’s portfolio in 1970) and the photograph, Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1967). The photographs were jokingly literal visual interpretations of verbal clichés. They struck me – as someone who was earnestly trying to speak French and residing for a while in Europe in order to be absolutely serious about art – as superficial, smart-alecky and, in terms of sophisticated humour, quite lame. My negative reaction was all the more intense because, back home at my first university teaching job at the University of Texas in Austin, I was a bit of a smart aleck myself. My fellow ‘young turk’ colleagues and I were disdained by the older, tenured warhorses on the faculty because we posted what they called ‘little cute-noses’ (funny photos, cartoons about art from The New Yorker, and oddball exhibition announcements) on our office door. To me, it was galling that this unknown young fellow with the prosaically American name had got himself into a big-time international exhibition with the same kind of material that I taped to my office door in order to get a rise out of my old fuddy-duddy superiors.

A couple of years later, I ended up renting a day studio in Los Angeles’s number two artists’ quarter, the Old Town section of Pasadena. (Venice, down by the beach, was number one and already a little pricey for the likes of me.) It turned out to be about half a block down the street from Nauman’s similar day studio, he’d recently moved to southern California from San Francisco. By then, he was famous in Los Angeles’s contempo-rary art world for having had some far-out shows at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, an exhibition or two at the godhead in New York, the Leo Castelli Gallery, and being the subject of many pages of writing in the new de facto magazine-of-record in contemporary art, Artforum. As an Artforum contributor (from 1969 to 1976, I provided the magazine with a monthly ‘Los Angeles Letter’ of four to six reviews each), I very much wanted to meet him. As an artist (an abstract painter who could see the preeminence of my artistic mode severely threatened by, to invoke a very witty 1976 Ed Ruscha word drawing, ‘ARTISTS WHO MAKE “PIECES”’), I was, however, a little afraid to meet him.

Nauman turned out to be a nice guy, even if his work still seemed mildly unpleasant to me – like wearing a stylish Merino wool pullover that looks good but itches – and his studio (a dark, capacious, rickety loft) a fairly spooky place. At first, I had little

1. Bruce Nauman with Juliet Myers, his studio manager

contact with him, since he – almost pointedly, it seemed – didn’t hang out with the rest of our little coterie of artists in the ‘Old Town’ neighbourhood, at La Dru’s coffee shop, the Club 11 bar or the pub called The Loch Ness Monster. He kept, as is his wont, to himself. But he and Richard Jackson, his artist-housemate while Nauman and his wife Judy and toddler son lived in the curator Walter Hopps’s ramshackle house on North Orange Grove Boulevard, liked to play basketball. They included themselves in the Sunday morning ‘artist’s game’ on the outdoor court of Santa Monica High School, a few blocks from the beach. There, I got to know Nauman well enough to kid around, to exchange a little artist’s shoptalk and, eventually, to be asked to participate in a film called Pursuit. It featured several of Nauman’s friends huffing and puffing, against a featureless deep black background, on a treadmill.

Although I wrote an at-bottom negative essay on what I considered to be his premature 1972 retrospective at the Los Ange-les County Museum of Art, Nauman didn’t seem to mind. (Nauman is one of the very few artists whom I believe when they claim they don’t read reviews of their shows.) We had regular if brief contact until I vacated my Pasadena day studio, and he moved to New Mexico at the end of the 1970s. But my persistence in writing art criticism, culminating in fifteen years as Newsweek magazine’s staff art critic, and Nauman’s ascent to the absolute pinnacle of art-world fame, meant that his work resided constantly in my cultural consciousness, and that, every so often, I would write about it.

I grew to like it. In the first place, Nauman could draw. His skill and sensibility either showed up in his delicious drawings for sculpture, or somehow seemed to permeate all the work he did that didn’t appear – on the surface – to have anything directly to do with ‘good drawing’. Secondly, his overall conceptual oeuvre transcended the pretentiousness, self-congratulation, dryness, moralism and Ph.D.-envy so common to the work of other artists who laboured in a generally conceptual vein.

Still, Nauman’s art bothered me. It was both psychologi-cally and culturally threatening, and the very fact that it bothered me bothered me. My consternation was, I feared, evidence of what a young fogey – on the path to being a mature fogey, then a genuine old fogey – I really was. Smart people whom I knew and respected not only enthusiastically (as opposed to reluctantly or out of conformity) liked Nauman’s work, but they wrote and spoke very convincingly about why they liked it and, more impor-tantly, why they thought it was art-historically significant. Now (to invoke a line from the old comic strip, Lil’ Abner), ‘as any fool can plainly see’, Nauman is one of the most, if not the most, influential artists of the last half-century. A walkabout on any day through the galleries of Chelsea in New York, Culver City in south-ern California, the East and West End of London, the mitte in Berlin, or the gallery neighbourhoods of a dozen other major cities, yields at least a handful of exhibitions of work by artists who are making, simply put, knock-off ‘Naumans’.

Nauman’s work demonstrates to younger artists how they, too, might make art that has a possibility of being trenchant at a time when it seems that just about everything major that can be done on canvas or a pedestal has been done, and that most things that are being done in the young media of video and installation are either cheaply clever or only pseudo-profound. Yet it’s reasonable to wonder whether Nauman should be that influential. Since I’ve always functioned as part art-world insider and part (in the area of art that questions the whole idea of art) bourgeois Know- Nothing, I have dragged this issue around with me for more than a few decades. In writing this book, two questions have propelled me: could I really get my mind around Nauman’s work? And, once I tried and, I hoped, succeeded, what would my verdict on Nauman be? I can answer the latter question right now: Nauman is a great artist. The answer to the former question is something that only the readers of this book can provide.

1 Vincent Labaume, ‘Bruce Nauman: Are You Roman or Italic?’ in Bruce Nauman (Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London, 1998).

2. Nauman in his studio in New Mexico

42 43

3. The True Artist

Shortly before Nauman graduated, he and his wife Judy moved to a small rented house in Vacaville, about twenty miles from Davis and closer to San Francisco. Nauman’s first child, his son Erik, was born there in August 1966. (As to becoming a father while still only twenty-four and an aspiring and rather unconventional artist with very little money, Nauman admits, ‘I was certainly oblivious.’) But he wasn’t quite done with Davis, even after graduation. He and Wiley engaged in some collaborative, goofy and sometimes unsuccessful projects. The year before Nauman picked up his diploma, they tried their hands at some work that involved neon in a strange – but for Nauman, perhaps foretellingly – contradictory way. They painted the illuminated tubing black and submerged it in a container filled with oil. But, as Wiley says, ‘It wasn’t too impressive; it leaked.’1 They also wrote jointly to the sculptor H.C. Westermann, whose work they both admired (35), and were tickled when he actually answered. Nothing concrete, however, resulted from the one-off correspondence. But Nauman and Wiley did figure in a collaboration that became an icon – as an object, as an exhibition and as an example of mindset – of what was called Bay Area Funk art.

‘Funk art’ is one of those stylistic terms devolving into an art-historical designation whose meaning, etymology and acceptance by the artists so tagged is murky. The word, prob-ably derived from the Latin fumigare – to smoke – was first used in the eighteenth century to mean something unpleasant (as in the ‘funky smell’ of an overripe cheese), then morphed in the early twentieth century into jazz lingo meaning something that was engaging in an unusual, deeply felt, and borderline-clumsy or ugly way (as in ‘a really funky riff’). It then spread into a pan-artistic term meaning doing whatever the hell you wanted to do, creatively, without worrying about tradition, skill, craft or polish. According to Peter Selz, then-director of the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley (now simply the Berkeley Art Museum), Funk art was ‘hot rather than cool, committed rather than disengaged, bizarre rather than formal, sensuous and fre-quently quite ugly’.2 Or, as Owen puts it, ‘The situation in northern California was very open but there was a steady pressure to do work that was somewhat funny, floppy, rude, offhand, lumpy and that might imply impending defecation or behave like the uncle that nobody wanted at the family reunion.’3

The project with Wiley revolved around a mysterious, ur-funky object called Slant Step (51). Wiley originally discovered it in the Mt. Carmel Salvage Shop in Mill Valley, a junk store near his studio. The object resembled a footstool – made with a darkened plywood frame and a continuous piece of what can only be called funky green linoleum seemingly sliding from its top to the floor. But the part one would step on was slanted downwards towards the front, so that if you actually tried to step up on this puzzling piece of furniture, you would probably injure your Achilles tendon. Nauman was taken by Wiley to see it and, according to one account, talked Wiley into buying it – for less than a dollar. (An alternative legend says that Bill Allan found out that Nauman was captivated by the object, bought it, brought it to Davis and gave it to him.) Nauman showed the slant step around to some artist-friends and the weird little object acquired a ‘certain mystique’.4

Meanwhile, Marion Wintersteen, proprietor of the co-operative Berkeley Gallery in San Francisco, had offered artist’s-model/performance-artist/poet-playwright William Witherup an opportunity to do anything he wanted in the space, for two weeks. Witherup recalls:

I recruited my friends and we met at my apartment on Potrero Hill to plan the two-week event. Bill Allan wanted to have one day devoted to the holiday Thanksgiving. Someone else wanted a ‘shoe day’, to fill the gallery with shoes. [The artist] James Melchert, a very good tenor, wanted to have us spend one day singing medleys from Oklahoma. Meanwhile,

Bill Wiley had found this old linoleum-covered footstool thing. Though there was resistance to the idea at first, Wiley prevailed in wanting everyone to make some kind of art object after this footstool, which originally – though we did not know this at the time – was for people to use to put their feet up on when they were having trouble taking a shit!5

The result of Witherup’s gathering was a supremely odd art exhibition called ‘The Slant Step Show’, which took place in the Berkeley Gallery in September 1966. Wiley’s contribution, a metal casting from the slant step, bore the following inscription: ‘This piece is dedicated to all the despised unknown unloved people objects ideas that just don’t make it and never will, who have so thoughtlessly given their time and talent to become objects of scorn but maintain an innocent ignorance and never realize that you hate them.’ Nauman’s work, Mold for a Modernized Slant Step (1966) (50) echoed the ironic sentimentality of his teacher. It was a rough-surfaced plaster object, an engorged slant step, split vertically down the middle to reveal a cavity on each side in which, with Mold rejoined at the centre, could be cast a comparatively high-tech, mono-material (plastic, resin, metal) version of the original unlikely artistic talisman. As befitted the concept of Funk, some of the artists got drunk the night before the show opened, slipped surreptitiously into the gallery, grabbed their homages to the maddeningly morphed footstool from their curated places, and piled them in a corner of the room. When the vernissage crowd showed up for the opening reception, they had to unpile the goods in order to see the individual works of art.

Although Nauman had by then developed and would later magnificently expand a hilariously impractical pseudo-practicality – as in his ‘device’ sculptures like Device to Stand In of 1966 (47), or Device for Left Armpit of 1967 (48) – he was decidedly not a Funk artist, in the sense that the style was attached to the work of Wiley, Arneson and Robert Hudson.6 Nauman, as the expression goes, was just passing through. Moreover, the Funk style had already been fully established when Nauman arrived in northern California for graduate school. It just happened that, for the briefest of moments, his visually plainspoken Midwestern manner, as manifested in his conspicuously straightforward art, happened to blend nicely with Funk’s aversion to artistic finesse. Nauman, as the artist-critic Willoughby Sharp wrote, made works of art ‘without bothering to shine them or clean them up’.7 ‘Bruce himself argued against his inclusion in the Funk movement,’ says Brenda Richardson, who curated the superb ‘Bruce Nauman: Neons’ exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1982, ‘making the case that his work didn’t fit into the Funk genre’.8 Of course, Funk was one of those designations that, like Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and even Minimalism, was only reluctantly accepted – if accepted at all – by the artists whose art best fit it. Constance Lewallen says, ‘Nauman wasn’t a Funk artist, but then nobody would admit to being a Funk artist.’9

If Nauman had been attracted, and had succumbed, to the label of Funk artist, and had remained in the Bay Area, he might have acquired one of those mellow Bay Area artists’ résumés with eventual shows of his glossy ‘plastic’ pieces in San Francisco galleries and perhaps even one at that deliciously out-of-the-way Funk headquarters, the Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, where many of Nauman’s teachers at U.C. Davis exhibited. As it was, the 1966 ‘Ceramics at Davis’ at the university’s gallery (to which Nauman contributed his Boccioni-esque morphing coffee cups), ‘The Slant Step Show’ and one appearance in a group exhibition at the Belmonte Gallery in Sacramento were the extent of Nauman’s involvement with Funk art. But if he wasn’t a Funk artist, then what kind of artist was he? The answer was that he was practically sui generis.

This quality of not quite fitting any long-established or recently minted category proved to be a momentary stumbling block and then, via a completely serendipitous but entirely de-served chain of events, it turned into a reputation-making, and even art-history-making boon. When Nauman had just graduated, says Wiley, ‘I suggested we take his work to Jim Newman at the

35. H.C. Westermann, Korea, 1965Pine, glass, rope, brass and found objects

Overall: 87.6 × 41 × 21.3 cm (34 ½ × 16 ¹⁄₈ × 8 ³⁄₈ in)The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art,

The University of Chicago

38. John Baldessari, Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art, 1966–8 Acrylic on canvas, 289.5 × 243.8 cm (114 × 96 in)

36. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), 1987 Photographic silkscreen/vinyl, 282 × 287 cm (111 × 113 in)

Private collection

39. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

37. Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959Oil on canvas, 170.8 × 137.2 cm (67¼ × 54 in)

Collection of Kenneth and Anne Griffin

The True Artist

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6362 The True Artist

56.The True Artist Helps the World

by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign)

1967Artist’s proof, neon tubing with

clear glass tubing suspension frame149.9 × 139.7 × 5.1 cm (59 × 55 × 2 in)

Philadelphia Museum of Art

55.Small Neon and Plastic Floor Piece

1965Fibreglass, polyester resin and

neon tubing10.2 × 15.2 × 200.7 cm

(4 × 6 × 79 in)Private collection

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96 97American Abroad

92.Eating My Words

from Eleven Color Photographs

1966–7/70Chromogenic development print

49.2 × 60.5 cm (19 ³⁄₈ × 23 ³⁄₁₆ in)Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,

Gerald S. Elliott Collection

93.Self-Portrait as a Fountain,

from Eleven Color Photographs

1966–7/70Chromogenic development print50.9 × 60.3 cm (19 ³⁄₈ × 23 ³⁄₁₆ in)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gerald S. Elliott Collection

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101American Abroad100

97.Coffee Spilled Because the Cup Was

Too Hot from

Eleven Color Photographs1966–7/70

Chromogenic development print49.4 × 58.7 cm (19 ⁷⁄₁₆ × 23 ¹⁄₈ in)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gerald S. Elliott Collection

96.Coffee Thrown Away Because It Was

Too Coldfrom

Eleven Color Photographs1966–7/70

Chromogenic development print50.6 × 60.3 cm (19 15⁄₁₆ × 23 ¾ in)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gerald S. Elliott Collection

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