Nauman, Bruce

Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews (Writing Art)

Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex and pluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based works to elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, and architectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums, including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparent eclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistic tendencies are conceptual continuities, one of which is an investigation of the nature of language.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nauman has refrained from participating in the critical discourse surrounding his own work. He has given relatively few interviews over the course of his career and has little to do with the art press or critical establishment. Indeed, he granted Janet Kraynak and The MIT Press almost complete autonomy in the preparation of this volume. In contrast to Nauman?s reputation for silence, however, from the beginning of his career, the incorporation of language has been a central feature of his art. This collection takes as its starting point the seeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words.

Please Pay Attention Please contains all of Nauman's major interviews from 1965 to 2001, as well as a comprehensive body of his writings, including instructions and proposal texts, dialogues transcribed from audio-video works, and prose texts written specifically for installation sculptures. Where relevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were composed. In the critical essay that serves as the book's introduction, the editor investigates Nauman's art in relation to the linguistic turn in art practices of the 1960s?-understanding language through the speech act--and its legacy in contemporary art.

Bruce Nauman: Theaters Of Experience

One of the most significant, funny, and nails-on-a-chalkboard jarring artists of the second half of the 20th century, Bruce Nauman has expanded the scope of traditional art practice and influenced a generation of artists. He has made himself into a fountain (one upping Marcel Duchamp?), cast the space under a chair, fashioned a screeching carousel of carcass-like parts, reinvented the neon sign as a contemporary haiku, and, most recently, recorded the dullness of his studio in real time. His ongoing investigation of our most basic physical, emotional, and psychological states has been literally experienced by each of his viewers. Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience is a focused selection of works in a range of media, including sculpture, video, holograms, neon, and architectural installations, which examine the artist's use of performance devices as a conduit for heightened self-awareness for both artist and audience. Featuring works from the Guggenheim Panza Collection, augmented with loans from several German collections, the exhibition and catalogue trace the theatrical elements in Nauman's oeuvre, as well as his manipulation of the performer-spectator roles.

A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California--first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s. A Rose Has No Teeth demonstrates that Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary during this period and that he laid the groundwork for fundamental ideas he addressed throughout his oeuvre, such as the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over its form. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents. This book shows that Nauman was at the forefront of these revolutionary changes and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist.
Copub: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light

Intrigued and inspired by the neon beer signs on shopfronts in his San Francisco neighborhood, Bruce Nauman created his first neon piece, Window or Wall Sign, in 1967. He wanted, he said, to achieve "an art that would kind of disappear--that was supposed to not quite look like art." Light offered Nauman a medium both elusive and effervescent, but one that could also aggressively convey a message. Over the first three decades of his career, Nauman used the medium of light to explore the twists and turns of perception, logic, and meaning with the earnest playfulness that characterizes all his art. Elusive Signs focuses on the discrete body of Nauman's work that uses neon and fluorescent light in signs and room installations, and includes images of nearly all Nauman's work with light.

After Window or Wall Sign, Nauman embarked on a series of neons that grappled with the semiotics of body and identity, and with My Name as Though it Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), he forces the viewer to contemplate the role of naming in forming identity. Language--signs and symbols--plays an important role in Nauman's art. His later neon works emphasize the neon as a sign, presenting provocative twists of language and offering harsh and humorous sociopolitical commentary in such pieces as Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972). This series culminates in the monumental, billboard-size One Hundred Live and Die (1984), which employs overwhelming scale to bombard the viewer with sardonic aphorisms. In incisive essays that accompany the images of Nauman's work, Joseph Ketner II of the Milwaukee Art Museum (which originated the exhibit this book accompanies) and critics Janet Kraynak and Gregory Volk analyze the works in light both as a body of work and as an access point to Nauman's entire career.

Distributed for the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Bruce Nauman: Audio-Video Underground Chamber

Before spider holes made their media debut, there was Bruce Nauman's spectacular 1972-74 installation Audio-Video Underground Chamber. Its single concrete vault, with dimensions close to those of the human body, is buried--like a coffin--one and a half meters deep. Integrated into the space are a lamp, a camera and a microphone, which transmit image and sound to a gallery. The actual existence of the buried cabin is concretized only in the viewers' imagination by means of the live broadcast and two of Nauman's explanatory, blueprint drawings. Image and sound call up associations with the psychic and existential borderline areas around which Nauman's art often revolves, with feelings of isolation and claustrophobia, experiences of loss of communication and of orientation, and traumas such as that of being buried alive.

Bruce Nauman -- Raw Materials (Unilever)

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) is arguably the most influential contemporary artist at work today. His pioneering explorations of sculpture, performance, film, video, neon, and sound art have seen him investigating different areas of art years before his peers, providing inspiration for innumerable artistic careers. Exhibiting internationally since the mid-1960s, Nauman has always drawn on a wide range of sources for his work, from philosophy, literature, and music to gestalt therapy. He has collaborated with a wide range of filmmakers, musicians, dancers, and artists, including Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Meredith Monk, and Merce Cunningham.

Nauman is the fifth artist to take on the cavernous space of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. This book, a record of this unique event, contains extensive illustrations alongside working drawings and texts by the artist, plus an essay by Emma Dexter that documents the installation and provides an overview of Nauman's career to date. AUTHOR BIO: Emma Dexter is a senior curator at Tate. Her previous publications include Luc Tuymans and Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph.

Bruce Nauman 25 Years

Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me

Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me features a collection of critical appraisals of the artist by leading writers. It focuses on one aspect of his work: his preoccupation with the human condition. More than 60 works from 1966 to 2005 are illustrated and discussed, including sculpture, neons, video, performance, installation, and drawing.

NaumanÂ’s fascination with and manipulation of language are examined, as well as his use of the body, be it his own, the viewerÂ’s, or that of the animal and human head casts he has made since the late 1980s. This timely survey will bring new insights into the career of one of the most influential artists of the last half-century.

Bruce Nauman: work from 1965 to 1972

Bruce Nauman: True Artist

A group of drawings and photographic works made by Bruce Nauman in the 1960's are collected and examined by Beatrice bon Bismarck as indirect self-portraits of the artist.