How Did New York Change Bruce Nauman?

Looking Back on a Radical

Period in the Artist's Career
By Artspace Editors. Aug. 3, 2015
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/news_events/bruce-nauman-peter-plagens-53026

With a large-scale retrospective at MoMA and Basel's Schaulager recently

announced for 2018, and a show of his works over the past 30 years at
Gagosians Paris location currently underway, the celebrated American artist
Bruce Nauman is clearly receiving the institutional great-man treatment these
days. It's well deserved, too. The prolific artists work in video, neon, sculpture,
and more have set the tone for much of the art that has come in its wake
making Nauman unquestionably one of the most influential living artists. Though
born in Indiana and currently residing in Northern New Mexico, Nauman is often
considered to be a Californian artist due to the amount of work he produced
there following his now-legendary time as a graduate student at U.C. Davis. As
the art critic and historian Peter Plagens reminds us in this excerpt from
Phaidons Bruce Nauman: The True Artist, however, Nauman nevertheless
managed to leave his mark on the New York art scene of the 1960s with his
gamechanging performance videos. Here is a little-known but important chapter
from the artist's bravura career.
David Whitney, who worked for Leo Castelli in his gallery in New York, came to
L.A. in 1966 on one of his periodic West Coast trips. Nick Wilder told him to get
himself up to Davis, California, to see the work of an interesting, if puzzling,
young artist named Bruce Nauman. Whitney visited Nauman, saw some of his
work, but voiced concerns about how Naumans pieces did not look at all like
finished works of art, and about how flimsily they seemed to be made.
Nevertheless, he marked him out as an artist whom Castelli should seriously
consider. And the gallerist did just that after seeing the group show that Richard
Bellamy put together in Noah Goldowskys gallery during the summer of 1966,
later claiming: I had relatively little doubt about Nauman, because there was an
element there that was very familiar to me like in earlier Jasper Johns. It was
a Duchampian element that I took to, that I like.
Nauman made his first trip to New York in conjunction with the exhibition, but
returned quickly to the Bay Area. In the autumn, however, he was awarded a
National Endowment for the Arts individual artists fellowship for $10,000, and
conspired to get himself a little closer to Manhattan. Paul Waldman husband
of Guggenheim Museum curator Diane Waldman; an odd horse in the Castelli
stable; and a painstaking Surrealist in a minimalized Salvador Dali mode had
taught as a visiting artist at U.C. Davis, and, with Castellis star Pop artist Roy
Lichtenstein, owned a house with a studio in East Hampton, out towards the
end of Long Island. Since neither Waldman nor Lichtenstein planned to be in

residence during the winter of 19689, they agreed to let Nauman rent it from
them, with Judy and Erik coming along too.
Naturally, Nauman forayed into the city. And one of the first things that struck
him about New York was that its art world was unashamedly opinionated:
"Wiley and the rest of the artists I knew in San Francisco were against
judgment, against saying that this or that work of art was better than any other.
It was Sol LeWitt who said to me, 'Its OK to have an opinion. Just because you
think this work of art isnt as good as one by somebody else doesnt mean that
you think the artist who made it is a bad person.' After we went to a Jets
[football] game in the cold, we went out to dinner at a Spanish restaurant. [The
artist] Dorothea Rockburne came in with some other women artists, and they
started talking to Sol from the next table about math and art. Sol was having
none of what they were propounding, and it got into a real loud argument.
Afterward, I said to Sol that the argument seemed a little scary. Sol said, 'What?
Thats just New York art conversation.'"
During the previous three years, Nauman had been making his recorded timebased art in the form of about a dozen 16mm films, including Fishing for Asian
Carp and the disorientating Revolving Landscape. Part of the house deal with
Waldman and Lichtenstein was that Nauman was not to do anything to disturb
the nice white walls in the studio. So instead of sculpture or drawings, he made
ten hour-long videotapes.
Castelli had paid about $1,200 for some new SONY portable video gear, and
Nauman got to use it first. Previously, he had made some films using a 16mm
camera obtained at a pawnshop and some prepackaged three-minute reels of
film. But the SONY videotape recorder gave him a one-hour capability, with the
additional virtue of sound-on-tape. The videos he made were titled with his
typical anti-romantic, anthropological straightforwardness more like labeling of
forensic evidence of something medical or criminal Bouncing in the Corner
No. 1, Bouncing in the Corner No. 2, Lip Sync, Revolving Upside Down, Pacing
Upside Down, Stamping in the Studio, Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), and
Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., and reworkings of U.C. Davis works Wall-Floor Positions
and Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube.
With the exception of Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., what all the works have in
common is, as Nauman described it: You have the repeated action, and at the
same time, over a long period of time you have mistakes or at least chance,
changes, and you get tired and all kinds of things happen, so theres a certain
tension that you can exploit once you begin to understand how those things
function. And a lot of the videotapes were about that. He could have been
describing some of the action in several works by the Irish novelist and
playwright Samuel Beckett, an author whom Nauman had recently been
reading. In fact, Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) conforms almost exactly to
Becketts description of his character Watt, in the eponymous novel:
"Watts way of advancing due east, for example, was to turn his bust as far as
possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far

as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible
towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible
towards the north, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the
north and to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south."
Much like Beckett, the young Nauman was tall and thin. Like Beckett, he was
obsessed with the absurdity absurdity as in what on Earth to make of it?
rather than as slapstick comedy of ultimately solitary human existence, the
recognition that youre born alone, die alone, and in between are absolutely
mystified by the experience of being here. And like Beckett, Nauman was
compelled to exteriorize these troubling thoughts by creating works of art.
Nauman, who was not primarily a writer but a visual artist, chose actions
recorded on videotape rather than words written on a page to get his point
across. Compare, for example, the sucking stones passage from Becketts
novel Molloy, quoted in a footnote in full because both its cadence and content
parallel Naumans way of artistic thinking, which is to take the long road through
a paradox.
The descriptions in the catalogue of Electronic Arts Intermix, the New York
distributor of Naumans works on video, of two other tapes that Nauman made
that winter cannot be improved upon by the author. Lip Sync: An upside-down
close-up of the artists mouth, Nauman repeats the words lip sync as the audio
track shifts in and out of sync with the video. The disjunction between what is
seen and heard keeps the viewer on edge, struggling to attach the sound of the
words with the off-kilter movements of Naumans mouth. (The two words start
to couple in reverse, and it soon seems as if Nauman is actually saying, Sync
lip.) And Revolving Upside Down: The inverted camera catches Nauman
standing at the end of the room, slowly spinning around on one foot, first head
down in one direction, then head up in the other direction. The tape seems to be
as much a trial of Naumans endurance as an exercise in becoming a human
machine, some type of cog or mechanized weather vane. Of course, the
connection in the latter videotape to Molloy is explicit and intentional. As
Nauman himself says in the catalogue, I wanted the tension of waiting for
something to happen, and then you should just get drawn into the rhythm of the
thing. The passage in Becketts Molloy about transferring stones from one place
to another, in the pockets of an overcoat, without getting them mixed up, is
elaborate without any point. I have the temerity, however, to disagree with my
subject here; there is a point to both his work and to Becketts, which is that
they articulate the solitariness and futility of human existence.
Watching Naumans early videos is an odd experience. Seeing them, as I did on
several occasions back in the day, in a gallery context, you become terribly
conscious of two questions: first, This is art? and second, What is my body
doing standing here? Although Nauman wasnt the first to use video as a
serious art medium (that honor is usually given to the Korean artist, Nam June
Paik, who made art with the new SONY Portapak equipment as early as 1965),
he employed it early enough for his work to profit and suffer from the
unfamiliarity of the medium. In the mid- and late 1960s, contemporary art
galleries were filled with big, abstract Color Field paintings and physically
formidable Minimal sculpture. The products of video art, by contrast, were

monochromatic, grainy and displayed on the homely little monitors then

available and either required galleries to be darkened substantially or were
washed pale by the rooms intense track lighting. What many called the Wow!
experience of the big, bright, bombastic contemporary art of the time was
missing with video. On the other hand, video art wasnt TV, either. No ordinary
citizen would relax on a couch at home, open a beer and a bag of potato chips,
and sit back to watch an entire, stationary-camera hour of Bruce Nauman
revolving, stamping, bouncing or lip-synching in black and white. And nor would
people have been likely to file into a theatre to watch the same thing projected
on a large screen, even if the technology had existed at the time.
Whether watched at home or in a theatre, Naumans videos still wreak havoc
with the conventional idea of a narrative arc. Most of us are almost incurably
conditioned to expect it from anything moving on a screen, and this expectation
was even stronger forty years ago. It wasnt as if Nauman totally negated
narrative, although he was averse to the idea of making movies. Watching his
growing fatigue in these videos, as well as the shifting camera angles that give
the impression he is walking on a wall or the ceiling (in Slow Angle Walk
(Beckett Walk) and the out-of whack sound and image in Lip Sync, is an
experience of almost Hitchcockian suspense: how will it turn out? Will Nauman
collapse? Will the tape descend into total incoherence? In short, the tapes
arent like stationary paintings and sculpture that you can dip in and out of and
will remain exactly the same upon each revisit. It was therefore extremely
difficult for even art-hardened observers to stand still in the gallery and, as with
a Hollywood feature film, remain until the end.
That challenge was as much physiological as it was mental (i.e., trying to fend
off boredom). Standing on an art gallerys hardwood floor (the norm in vertical
New York) or concrete floor (common in horizontal, cellarless Los Angeles) in
order to look at a single work of art abstract art, in the sense that it
manipulated basic human actions like an abstract painter manipulates shapes
for more than a minute or two was physically taxing. The stiffness waxing into
an ache that you started to feel made you conscious of your own body and its
limitations; that consciousness, in turn, made you even more aware of
Naumans efforts, which, in turn, made you yet more aware of your own
discomforts. You became, by dint of a concentration no longer necessary with
todays razor-sharp, full-color and almost blindingly bright luminosity, indirectly
complicit in Naumans videos. You became, in other words, a semiparticipant,
caught on an uncomfortable edge between seeing and doing, between
witnessing and facilitating. That catching of the viewer, and dragging him or
her into a disconcerting conspiracy with the work of art has been a pervading, if
varied, feature of Naumans work from his U.C. Davis days right up to the
present.
Although Nauman would continue to live in California until 1979, and be
regarded by many critics as a California artist with a California Funk
sensibility, his 1968 exhibition at Castelli and his subsequent sojourn in New
York marked the point at which that perception veered into emphatic error. But
for all the unvarnished, tough works of art that Nauman made, he never
became a New York artist, either. He never lived in New York until, later in his

career, he acquired a pied-a-terre for the necessary extended stays involving

exhibitions and major projects. And he left the Bay Area before its own ultraserious and formidable Conceptual movement rose to challenge the mellowedout ideas of Wiley and his ever-growing school.
Nauman knew about Bay Area Conceptual artists, but fairly peripherally. He
says, I knew Tom Marioni some, had met Howard Fried, and was around some
of their performances. And I think I saw something with Terry Fox, but didnt
know Paul Kos. In Brenda Richardsons view:
"[Nauman had] little commonality with Fox, Fried, Marioni. Terry was into
European-style performance art and testing the boundaries of his own physical
limits. (Theres some of that in Bruces work, of course, but I think it comes from
a different place. Notably, Bruce brought a broad sense of humor to his work
as did Wiley another reason they bonded. Terry had zero sense of humor)
Howard Fried was as mental as any artist Ive ever known. Strictly in his head.
No humor. Not about physical limits. Strictly about intellectual exercise. No
concern for the object. I cant see any meaningful connection between his work
and Bruces."
If Nauman wasnt a Bay Area Funk artist merely seeing if an East Coast
working ambience suited him, if he wasnt a card-carrying New York
Postminimalist like Keith Sonnier as in his Wall-Cloth Piece of 1968 or a
process artist in the vein of Lynda Bengliss poured-foam sculptures Night
Sherbet A of 1968 for instance and if he wasnt a strict and dry Conceptualist
along the lines of Lawrence Weiner (the 1968 statement-work, An Amount of
Paint Poured Directly upon the Floor and Allowed to Dry, for example, then
what was he? The artist stylistically if such an appearances-orientated word
can indeed be used here closest to him at that point was probably the
greatest American sculptor of the last third of the twentieth century (and
ongoing), Richard Serra. He, too, was (and is) rather uncategorizable. At the
time Nauman was taking his sojourn in New York, Serra was producing his
molten-lead splash pieces (which have a kinetic residue not unlike Naumans
Holes the Size of My Waist and Wrists sculpture of 1966), and a film, similar to
Naumans New York videos in its Beckett-like even Sisyphus-like
pointlessness, Hand Catching Lead (1968). But where Serras aesthetic soon
coalesced into a predominant concern with keeping abstract sculpture alive and
breathing in the wake of Minimalisms blanketing frost, Nauman maintained his
serious-gadfly methods. In short, while most other artists seemed to be
different by means of programmed and focused aberration from what had
recently gone before, Nauman managed to remain unique because he was
persistently and consistently questioning his work, laying bare the fact that he
just hadnt figured things out yet. The disarming glory of his whole oeuvre is, in
fact, its continuous admission that its author has never figured anything out for
keeps.