Bruce Nauman

Coosje van Bruggen

Dieter Koepplin

Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel

Franz Meyer

Basel, Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, May 17th - July 13th, 1986

Bruce Nauman - Drawings 1965-1986

Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as a central figure in contemporary art, and the stringent questioning of values --both aesthetic and moral-- that has long sustained his project remains urgent today. For more than fifty years, Nauman has explored how mutable experiences of time, space, sound, movement, and language provide an insecure foundation for our understanding of our place in the world. This richly illustrated catalogue, which includes rare and previously unpublished images, offers a comprehensive view of the artist's work in all media --including drawings; early fiberglass sculptures; sound environments; architecturally scaled, participatory constructions; rhythmically blinking neons; and a recent 3-D video that harks back to one of Nauman's earliest performances. A wide range of authors --artists, curators, and historians of art, architecture, and film-- focus on topics that have been largely neglected, such as the architectural structures that posit real or imaginary spaces as models for ethical inquiry and mechanisms of control. Curator Kathy Halbreich's introductory essay explores Nauman's many acts of disappearance, withdrawal, and deflection as revelatory of his central formal and intellectual concerns. Eighteen further contributions tease out the various themes that run through this protean and elusive artist's work.

Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts

The most comprehensive collection of the artist's work ever published combines sculpture, performance art, video, and text-based works that were included in his many performance pieces.

Bruce Nauman's Words : Writings and Interviews

Please Pay Attention Please

Philip Larratt-Smith

Bruce Nauman (born 1941) emerged in the late 1960s Los Angeles art scene, as part of a generation of artists who dramatically expanded the possibilities of sculpture and performance. His emergence also coincided with the ascent of gestalt psychology, behaviorism and philosophers following in the wake of Wittgenstein's philosophies of language. Nauman's work is thus deeply literate and steeped in the history of psychology--particularly Freud's work on puns and slips of the tongue, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, work that Nauman has explored in numerous language pieces using oxymorons, puns and Spoonerisms. Bruce Nauman: Mindfuck is the first publication to look at this celebrated artist's work in performance, drawing, video, printmaking and neon installation, in the light of its relationship to psychology.

Mindfuck

"From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better yet, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn't give you any trace of whether you're going to like it or not."—Bruce Nauman "Bruce Nauman's art is about heightened awareness, awareness of spaces we usually don't notice (the one under the chair, out of which he made a sculpture) and sounds we don't listen for (the one in the coffin), awareness of emotions we suppress or dread... It's hard to feel indifferent to work like his."—Michael Kimmelman, New York Times One of America's most important artists, Bruce Nauman has worked in a dazzling variety of media since the mid-1960s: sculpture, photography, performance, installation, sound, holography, film, and video. What has been a constant throughout his career, however, is his persistence in exploring both art as an investigation of the self and the power of language to define that self. The latest volume in the acclaimed Art + Performance series is the first book to combine the key critical writings on Nauman with the artist's own writings and interviews with him, as well as images of his work. Bruce Nauman offers a multifaceted portrait of an artist whose determination to experiment with style and form has created a body of work as eclectic and perhaps more influential than that of any other living American artist.

Bruce Nauman

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