The trouble with Nauman - contemporary artist Bruce Nauman, Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain - Cover Story

Art in America, April, 1994 by Peter Schjeldahl

Bruce Nauman's disturbing work, currently on view in a touring retrospective, confirms the artist as a master of black humor and intellectually cunning post-Duchampian strategies.

I feel in a quandary, faced with writing about the gruelingly magnificent Bruce Nauman retrospective that opened in Madrid in December and has begun a high-profile tour of the United States. I think he is the best--the essential--American artist of the last quarter-century. No other contemporary artist means as much to me. And none so discomfits me. I rely on him for pleasures of a formal economy that is like manifested sheer intelligence--mind-made matter--and for a laconic humor that subtilizes amazingly upon reflection, becoming laughter ineffably knowing and wise. I have learned also to expect from him a lonely, painfully self-conscious state of soul that affects me rather like that most respected and least welcome human faculty, conscience: peremptorily, implacably, often harshly. I hesitate to recommend Nauman's work to anyone innocent of it. Why promulgate anguish? I prefer to imagine that I am writing for the already afflicted.

Talking about his work with fellow Nauman fans, I note a peculiarly fiat tone of voice inflecting statements of sincere praise. I diagnose it as a strain of spiritual laryngitis that strikes the heart all but speechless, caused by art that engages deep physiological mechanisms and psychic contents in ways thoroughly impersonal and demythicized. In this art there is abundant communication, but no communion. Enthusiasm finds no nexus of sympathy with the artist to feed on--not even the shady complicity of a Marcel Duchamp or the melancholy compunction of a Jasper Johns, to name two important influences on Nauman. (Nauman cites Man Ray's defiant eclecticism as even more decisive for him, while also doing without the hook of that artist's cavalier panache.) The question of "liking" Nauman or not seems impertinent. Confronted with his work, the rational mind is extraordinarily clarified, and emotional responsiveness, stricken, falls in a hole. Consider Clown Torture (1987) a raucous environment of video monitors and projectors showing clowns trapped in no-win situations. You "get the joke" at once, but the joke won't stop. Those clowns are telling the same circular stories, getting bopped by the same water bucket and monotonously screaming "no! no! no!" as you read this. They do so for eternity. Nauman makes us squirm, and by "us" I mean fans. What he makes others do, in my observation, is glaze over, tense up and flee.

As installed by Neal Benezra and Kathy Halbreich in a sort of pharaonic maze at Madrid's Reina Sofia, where I saw it, the Nauman retrospective gave no whiff of "development." It was a labyrinth of situations, each discrete and as present-tense as an emergency. It began with the famous 1967 neon spiral Window or Wall Sign, whose silly and/or profound message "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths"--affects the mind like a pestering insect you can hear but not see. The show ended with Shit in Your Hat--Head on a Chair, a complex work that incorporates a video of a winsome mime being put through torturous paces by an offscreen voice one of a 1990 series of videos that, I think, strip bare some eerie and stirring imports of the verb "to perform." The mime's determination to obey, in high mime style, the voice's humiliating instructions makes the work's sadism a victimless crime, perhaps--and may induce a shocking reflection on the unpleasant things we all do every day, as well as we can and even with pride and joy, at the behest of unsympathetic powers. In between, there were worlds of enough meaning to exhaust anybody's capacities for absorption many times over. Emerging from the show on each of the several times I saw it, I felt exalted and beaten up. After 25 years of following Nauman's work, maybe I should be used to this feeling, but I never am.

On the retrospective's evidence, Nauman was never not Nauman. At least from the moment in 1965 when he arrived in San Francisco from the Midwest and ended a brief involvement with painting, he has made only "mature" work. Perhaps he exhausted his growing pains in the disciplines, pursued before he switched to art, of mathematics and music. What, by the way, is the significance for his art of that early training? Only someone equally adept in math, music and art itself--and throw in Nauman's lifelong vigorous involvement with animals and the outdoors---could say for sure. Our culture seldom produces such people. This artist routinely disrupts the settled expectations and predictable manners (bad manners included) of art-schooled art. He forbids us conditioned responses. He makes us start repeatedly from scratch: from our individual resources, such as they are.

Things don't evolve in Nauman's work. They happen. Early on, in the 1960s, an incredible profusion of things happened. Nauman's early production had an abbreviated representation in Madrid, but the variety of what was on hand still flabbergasted. There was one of his loaf-shaped fiberglass sculptures that splits the difference between Minimalist form and the human body; a wax cast of folded arms joined, with conceptually intoxicating effect, to knotted lengths of heavy rope; a video monitor that, as you turn a corner, gives you a glimpse of your body disappearing around the comer; a film (transferred to video, with recorded film-projector clatter) in which the artist gravely covers himself in layers of white, red, green and then black pigments (sumptuous images that can seem somehow to say all that needs saying about painting); a series of high-production-value color photographs literalizing word-plays and morphological japes (Waxing Hot, Self-Portrait as a Fountain); rather terrifying holograms (still the best work I have ever seen in this medium) of the artist in hellishly lighted, polymorphously grotesque poses; and a room in which a menacing voice growls and shouts "get out of this room, get out of my mind!" (If you stand in the exact middle of that room, by the way, the voice seems to come from inside your head.)