Bruce Nauman Going Solo

3 Bruce Nauman Going Solo Bruce Nauman Going Solo Robert Slifkin companion editions Introduction Stephanie Snyder Copy TK 7 introduction, continued. 8 3 notes * A version of this essay was presented at the Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture 1945–1975 symposium hosted by the Getty Museum in 2008. Besides the other speakers and members of the audience who provided valuable feedback at that event I would also like to thank Hal Foster, Frank Heath, Ryan Holmberg, and Alexander Nemerov who read and commented upon earlier drafts 1. Jacob R. Brackman, “he Put-On,” he New Yorker ( June 24, 1967), p. 34. According to the artist, the choice of neon was inspired by a beer sign that remained in the artist’s studio from its previous incarnation as a grocery store. Interview with Michele de Angelus, 1980, in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p. 252. 2. Interview with Brenda Richardson, June 21, 1982, quoted in Bruce Nauman: Neons, exh. cat. (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1982), p. 20. 3. Quoted in Richardson, Bruce Nauman: Neons, p. 20; Interview with de Angelus, in Please Pay Attention Please, p. 231. 4. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5. One could even extend this argument further back in Belting’s analysis and note that the sacred relics proceeding from the tradition of icons, which were actual things rather than representations, still operated within a igural paradigm, as a metonym of the saint’s body, in that a corporeal fragment igured an absent totality. 6. Michael Camille, review of Belting’s Bild und Kunst in Art Bulletin 74 (September 1992), p. 514. Bruce Nauman Going Solo Robert Slifkin Like many of the artist’s sculptures from the 1960s, Bruce Nauman’s John Coltrane Piece (1968) couples intransigent materiality with willful inscrutability to produce a mysterious, if not melancholic efect. Created the year after the celebrated saxophonist’s death, the three-foot square sheet of aluminum, rising only three inches of the ground, stands – however lowly and unassumingly – as a portable cenotaph. he work’s mirrored base, invisible to the naked eye, yet intelligible through the work’s written description, keenly literalizes its appeal to nonexistence. Partaking in the artist’s penchant for punning titles, the work concretizes Coltrane’s composition “Peace on Earth.” With its lack of a traditional pedestal, and its level, horizontal alignment on the gallery loor, Nauman’s sculpture is, literally, a “piece” on earth. Like its Minimalist contemporaries, and in particular the loor works of Carl Andre assembled out of square metal tiles, the speciic objectivity of Nauman’s John Coltrane Piece – manifested 2 11 most visibly in its geometric austerity and industrial materiality – invites a degree of subjective projection from the viewer. Without a discernable focal point, let alone compositional order or igural referent, the work (again, like a great deal of Minimalist art of the time) diminishes signs of artistic authority, in turn increasing the participatory aesthetic possibilities for the viewer. Yet if Andre’s works similarly do away with conventional markers of aesthetic autonomy (like pedestals) in order to expand their engagement with the space in which they are situated, Nauman’s piece, through its hidden mirror, paradoxically makes the dark and slender space between the sculpture and the loor its primary site of focus. hat is to say, while Minimalist works like Andre’s efectively blurred the boundary between art and life, Nauman’s piece claimed that boundary as a space worth examining in and of itself. If mirrors are conventionally used as a means for seeing oneself, or the world outside of oneself, as a representation, in Nauman’s John Coltrane Piece, any such self-identiication is rendered impossible. Nothing can be relected without light or distance, both of which are denied in the work. (Nauman would explicitly explore the necessary condition of light in a related sculpture, Dark, also from 1968. In Dark, the work’s title is written underneath a similarly large and lat square steel panel placed directly on the ground.) Repeatedly in Nauman’s work from the 1960s, this space – where art meets life, where the artiicial meets the natural, where the igurative meets the literal – is shown to be a site of darkness, of indeterminacy, of illegibility, and of privacy, a place where meaning breaks down and becomes solely a personal matter and messages become intransmissible. 12 In a 1970 conversation with curator and critic Willoughby Sharp, Nauman commented upon this aspect of his Coltrane Piece, noting that the work, and his art in general, “tends to fall in the private category.”1 In many ways the related themes of privacy and concealment (and their antipodes of communication and clarity) have been central concerns throughout the artist’s lengthy career. In a 1972 interview Nauman acknowledged that his preoccupation with the subject of privacy entailed the danger of hermeticism, noting that “if you make work that’s just too private, nobody else can understand it.”2 he tension between the desire for communication – and as a possible analogue, community – and, as Nauman put it, the “personal fear of exposing myself,” runs through much of Nauman’s oeuvre. In many ways, it would become the central theme of the remarkable body of work that Nauman produced between 1967 and 1973, in which the artist began to use ilm and video – media that, because of their capacity to automatically mirror the world back to the artist and correspondingly project or transmit it to a distant audience – serve as ideal formats through which to explore the agonistic duality between the appeal for an intimate, if not private, experience within the viewer, and the 1 Nauman, in conversation with Wil- loughby Sharp, in Please Pay Attention Please, Bruce Nauman’s Words, Selected Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 129. 2 Nauman, interview with Lorraine Sciarra, in Please Pay Attention, Please, 169. Michael Auping has more recently noted the centrality of this theme in the artist’s oeuvre: “hroughout his career, Nauman has grappled with the tension between private thought and public exposure - one of the great dilemmas facing the modern artist who is challenged to be intensely personal in a very public way.” Auping, “Sound hinking,” Artforum 43 ( January 2005), 160. 13 acknowledgment that any successful artistic statement entails a degree of publicness that must transcend the boundaries of the individual subject.3 he exploration of private and public meaning established materially and spatially in sculptures like John Coltrane Piece and Dark was particularly “humanized” in a pair of nearly hour-long videos created by Nauman in 1973, in which two actors attempt to meld their bodies into the loor of a television studio. Nauman provided the actors with explicit instructions and allowed them to practice the exercise before the recording began. As evinced by the titles of the two videos – Elke Allowing the Floor To Rise Up Over Her, Face Up, and Tony Sinking Into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down – once again it is the thin space between body and loor that becomes the crucial site of Nauman’s artistic investigation. While the action in both videos is generally quite uneventful (depicting the actors gradually getting their bodies comfortable in a horizontal position, and then holding the position for a long period of time) in both cases the participants had to stop mid-exercise due to the disturbing intensity of the experience. Elke “sufered” from what Nauman called “a violent reaction,” and Tony “coughed” and “choked,” succumbing to the fear that the molecules of his skin might be torn from the surface of the ground.4 Like the space between Nauman’s Coltrane Piece and the gallery loor, the space between the actors’ 3 Nauman, interview with Jan Butterield, 4 Nauman, interview with Ian Wallace in Please Pay Attention, Please, 182. he artist goes on to say, “We really want to expose the information, but, on the other hand, we are afraid to let people in.” and Russell Keziere, in Please Pay Attention Please, 191. 14 bodies and the loor of the television studio becomes both the focus of the viewer’s attention and a site that suggests a certain impossibility, whether of metaphysical transcendence, meaning, or simply visibility. Nauman’s interest in the meditative, if not quasi-therapeutic practices enacted in these two videos from 1973 were, in part, inluenced by his reading of the 1951 book Gestalt herapy by Frederick Perls, Ralph F. Heferline, and Paul Goodman. he book, whose irst sentence invited readers to “invade your own privacy,” espoused ways to establish a sense of psychic cohesiveness, or what the authors called a “strong gestalt,” through a series of attention-focusing exercises that examined the interplay between the “organism and its environment.”5 According to the authors, due to the dulling efects of modern life with its various forms of distraction, most individuals cast of parts of themselves in the name of eiciency only to ultimately render themselves less psychically efective because of these losses. “Attention, concentration, interest, concern, excitement and grace are representative of healthy igure-ground formation, while confusion, boredom, ixations, anxiety, amnesias, stagnation and self-consciousness are indicative of igure-ground formation which is disturbed.”6 5 Fredric Perls et. al. Gestalt herapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: he Julian Press, 1951), 3. For a discussion of the inluence of Perls’ book on Nauman, see Marco De Michelis, “Spaces,” in Carlos Basualdo and Michael R. Taylor, Bruce Nauman, Topological Gardens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67-71. Nauman acknowledges his interest in the book in his interview with Lorraine Sciarra in Please Pay Attention Please, 166. 6 Perls et. al., Gestalt herapy, ix. 15 It is quite understandable why the book’s diagnosis of the blurred boundaries between the self and the external world resonated with Nauman. he artist’s irst major body of sculpture consisted of iberglass molds that were split such that their interiors were as visible and sculpturally important as their exteriors. his interest in making interiority visible – and converting “ground” into “igure” – was perhaps most famously explored in the artist’s concrete sculpture Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965-68). hat said, Nauman’s work hardly suggests a wholesale adoption of the tenets of Gestalt herapy (which would promote the strong articulation of such boundaries). Insofar as Perls and his collaborators provided various exercises to help demarcate one’s gestalt, Nauman drew upon these attention-focusing practices and turned them into methodologies for examining moments of what might be called gestalt incohesion – situations in which the body might meld into its surroundings.7 In fact, the artist created a series of works that, in their instructional character, appear like perverted exercises from the book; but Nauman’s “exercises” appear to be less about the cohesion of the ego or its luid interplay with its environment, and more about its dilution into its surroundings. For instance, in Instructions for a Mental Exercise, written in 1969 but not published until 1974 (and apparently serving as the foundation for the two “loor melding” videos from 1973), Nauman encouraged the participant to attempt just such a physical amalgamation with his or her surroundings.8 7 Nauman described the exercise in Perls’ book as promoting situations where “you can’t relax following resistances.” 16 Quoted in Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizolli, 1988), 228. INSTRUCTIONS A. Lie down on the loor near the center of the space, face down, and slowly allow yourself to sink down into the loor. Eyes open. B. Lie on your back on the loor near the center of the space and slowly allow the loor to rise up around you. Eyes open. his is a mental exercise. Practice each day for one hour, one half hour for A, then a suicient break to clear the mind and body, then one half hour practice B. At irst, as concentration and continuity are broken or allowed to stray every few seconds or minutes, simply start over and continue to repeat the exercise until the ½ hour is used. he problem is to try to make the exercise continuous and uninterrupted for the full ½ hour. hat is, to take he full ½ hour to A. Sink under the loor, or B. to allow the loor to rise completely over you. In exercise A it helps to become aware of peripheral vision - use it to emphasize the space at the edges of the room and begin to sink below the edges and inally under the loor. In B. begin to deemphasize peripheral vision - become aware of tunneling of vision - so that the edges of the space begin to fall away and the center rises up around you. In each case use caution in releasing yourself at the end of the period of exercise. 8 Instructions for a Mental Exercise was originally written in 1969, titled Untitled (Project for Leverkusen), and published under this title in the journal Interfunktionen 11 (1974), 122-24. 17 Nauman continued this line of investigation in another instruction-based piece entitled Body Pressure. First exhibited at the Konrad Fisher Gallery in 1974, the work entailed nothing more than a free-standing wall and a set of instructions, printed in German and English, and similar to the earlier Mental Exercise. In Body Pressure, the participant was instructed to press his or her body against the wall and, according to the accompanying text, “form an image of yourself (suppose you had just stepped forward) on the opposite side of the wall pressing back against the wall very hard.”9 Like the pair of “loor melding” videos from 1973, and the two loor sculptures from 1968 already discussed in this essay, Body Pressure utilized a lat surface – in this a case vertical one – as the focal site of the work. Yet in this instance, rather than the incorporation of the body into a resistant surface, a bodily double is projected on the other side of the wall. Nauman notes in the inal line of the instructions: “his may become a very erotic exercise.” he distinctly erotic potential of Body Pressure may be best understood in relation to a work by Dan Graham from two years earlier entitled Body Press. (he titular similarity suggests the possibility of direct inluence.) At once a sculpture, a performance, and a ilm, Body Press encompassed a cylinder with a mirrored interior in which a naked man and woman, both holding 16 mm ilm cameras, were instructed to record their skin – both in the distorted relection of the curved, mirrored interior, and by directly ilming their bodies – changing cameras 9 he text of Body Pressure is reprinted in Please Pay Attention Please, 83-85. 18 midway through the exercise. he two ilms were then projected on opposite ends of the gallery space so that, in a sense, the mirrored surface of the cylinder served as a literal preiguration of the performance’s subsequent projection. he cinematic component of Body Press makes explicit the way in which the wall functions in Nauman’s Body Pressure as both a barrier that the self should literally internalize, and a screen upon which the self is virtually projected.10 With its enactment of bodily projection across a lat screen, in many regards the situation proposed in Body Pressure resembles that of the respective transmission and projection of video and ilm. As art historian Rosalind Krauss recognized in a seminal essay from 1976, the use of mirroring, whether literal or imaginary, was a central component of a wide array of early video art practices. Repeatedly, artists such as Nauman, Graham, and Vito Acconci placed themselves between the video camera and the monitor so that “the self [was] split and doubled by the mirror relections of synchronous feedback.”11 For Krauss, this technique of “self-encapsulation” revealed the medium of video art to be not so much a material substrate (as it was in traditional artistic formats such as painting or sculpture) but rather, a psychological 10 It also reveals the central concern for ics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), bodily projection and incorporation in 55, 53. And while the critic suggests at various of Nauman’s works. My underthe end of her essay that this move into standing of Nauman’s engagement with narcissism might have larger cultural imbodily projection is deeply informed by plications in general, her interest is more Gabrielle Gopinath’s reading of his work in terms of the question of sustaining in her unpublished essay “Bruce Nauman’s modernist tenets of medium speciicity Astral Projections.” in the face of the distinctly dispersed ap11 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: he Aesthetparatus of the video format. 19 2 3 condition of narcissism. Placing their bodies between the recording input of the video camera and the receiving output of the monitor, early video artists entered into a literal situation whose virtual compression of time and space found a material correlate, not only in the lat horizontal planes of Nauman’s John Coltrane Piece and Dark, but, perhaps even more explicitly, in the series of plywood corridors that Nauman constructed between 1967 and 1974. Like much Minimalist art of the period, Nauman’s corridor works emphasized the viewer’s bodily engagement with the work of art, activating the space in and around the object and, in turn, like the dispersed apparatus of video, complicated and expanded conventional notions of autonomous and pure artistic media. In fact many of the ostensibly sculptural corridors had material connections to video. he irst one Nauman constructed, Performance Corridor, consisted of nothing more than two parallel twelve-foot-long unadorned plywood walls set twelve inches apart from one another, and was originally created as a prop for his video Walk With Contrapposto (1967). Several of the structures utilized actual mirrors, sometimes placed at the end of the corridor at an angle, which presented confusing views to approaching spectators. In other instances, Nauman placed video monitors at the end of passageways, further substantiating the connection not only between mirror and monitor, but between the corridors and the dynamics of the video apparatus.12 For instance, in Nauman’s Live Taped Video 12 In an interview with Sharp, Nauman notes that “the closed circuit functions 22 as a kind of electronic mirror.” In Please, Pay Attention, Please, 150. Corridor (1969-70) two monitors stacked vertically were placed at the end of a walkway. he top monitor showed a closed-circuit image of the narrow space between the walls, taken from above the entrance so that as a person approached the monitor they confronted an image of themselves from behind, producing an unnerving efect in which one’s body diminished in size the closer it came to the monitor; the lower monitor displayed a previously recorded image of the corridor empty. Like many of the works already discussed, Live Taped Video Corridor presented a situation in which a body enters a physical space only to have its materiality seem to simultaneously diminish, and ultimately disappear, within it. Nauman has stated that the corridor pieces were “about the connection between public and private experience,” going on to add that “the video helps the private part even though it’s a public situation. he way you watch television is a private kind of experience.”13 Repeatedly in his published interviews the artist describes his use of video and ilm in terms of his interest in examining “the connection between public and private experience.” Describing how he began making videos after producing a series of short ilms, the artists stated, “Video is a much more 13 Nauman, interview with Chris Deacon, in Please Pay Attention Please, 310. In an essay addressing the recent trend in using the artist’s body as a sculptural medium, Willoughby Sharp notes that “Generally the performance is executed in the privacy of the studio. Individual works are mostly communicated to the public through the strong visual language of photographs, ilms, videotapes and other media, all with strong immediacy of impact.” In Willoughby Sharp, “Body Works,” Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), 14. 14 Nauman, interview with Chris Dercon, in Please Pay Attention, Please, 309. 23 ‘private’ kind of communication” than ilm. “You sit and have contact with a television set, as opposed to ilm, where generally a lot of people go and the image is very large; it’s more of a common experience.”14 If, in the 60s and 70s, Nauman associated privacy with the medium of video, this motif found a degree of overdetermination in his chosen locale for almost all of the video works, namely, his studio. Unlike many 1960s artists who radically undermined the romantic vision of the solitary artist working in seclusion in the studio – through managerial models (Warhol), physical displacement (Smithson), or dematerialization (Conceptual Art) – Nauman’s artistic practice, while hardly traditional, was resolutely studio based.15 At precisely the same moment of art’s displacement, dematerialization, and expansion beyond traditional media and modes of production, Nauman used the studio as a means to determine the ontology of the work of art and his identity as an artist. As he recollected about this crucial moment in his early career: “[Because] I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever it was I was doing in the studio must be art. And what I was in fact doing was drinking cofee and pacing the loor. It became a question of how to structure those activities into being art, or some kind of cohesive unit that could 15 For a discussion of this transformation in studio practice, see Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio, Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Michael R. Taylor, in his essay “Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio, Changing the Field,” in Topological Gardens, states that “Nauman’s 24 work … simultaneously challenges and reinforces the twentieth-century notion of the artist’s studio as a private, almost sacred space, where the creative act takes place within an atmosphere of solitude and relection … ” 49. be made available to people. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”16 Nauman’s solution to this crisis of artistic identity, and, as he notes, communication with a public, was to document his activities – irst through ilm, and then after obtaining the necessary equipment from his dealer Leo Castelli – through videotape. In works such as Stamping in the Studio and Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (both 1968) Nauman literally videotaped himself pacing around the studio for sixty minutes, albeit with a rigorous intensity that invested his actions with an artistic intentionality that was reiterated in the oftentimes skewed or even inverted camera angles.17 he video apparatus of camera and monitor thus became a structuring boundary that could demarcate artistic production just as categorically as more conventional markers of aesthetic signiicance like frames and pedestals. By simply recording an event, even drinking cofee and pacing the loor could be discerned as art. And by performing acts that entailed a certain degree of rigor and endurance, Nauman sought to engender a model of communication with his audience. As he noted to Sharp, “If you really believe in what you’re doing and do it as well as you can… if you are honestly getting tired… there has to be a certain sympathetic response in someone who is watching you.”18 he medium of video with its divided modes of recording 16 Nauman, interview with Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere, October 1978, in Please Pay Attention Please, 194. 17 In “Video: he Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Krauss notes that in the 1970s, artists’ capacity to present work, in public, via reproductions and dissemination in the media, is “virtually the only means of verifying its existence as art … ” 59. 18 Nauman, interview with Willoughby Sharp, in Please Pay Attention Please, 148. 25 and transmission allowed Nauman to attain a degree of public communication, and through its durational component, which Nauman took to its material limit in the form of a sixty minute tape, even expressive potential. Yet the aesthetic boundary of video was one in which the self could be not only recorded and transmitted but, as in Body Pressure, and to a lesser extent John Coltrane Piece, also incorporated, albeit virtually. And, as in other works that employed actual sculptural elements to igure this merger of body and artistic medium, the process intimated a sense of privacy. If a central strategy of Nauman’s art has been to “give two kinds of information that don’t line up” in an efort to forge a productively thought-provoking confusion, the artist’s use of video, speciically, has aligned this approach with his equally strong interest in examining the dichotomy between public and private experience.19 As David Joselit has recently noted: “Television is the irst major public medium experienced in private,” going on to describe how this intimacy was enhanced by its low-grade resolution (especially in its formative years) which promoted the use of close-ups and more intimate modes of reception, typically in the viewer’s living room and bedroom.20 While the video apparatus ofered a means for defeating the privacy of experience through a model of mass reproduction and distribution, it nonetheless encouraged a private mode of viewership. Nauman would igure the fundamental intimacy of the medium 19 Nauman, interview with Michele de Angelus, Please Pay Attention Please, 272. 20 David Joselit, Feedback, Television 26 Against Democracy, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 21. by documenting himself performing a series of hermetically intense actions alone in his unadorned and nearly vacant studio. Yet by recording and exhibiting these actions, the artist made public – publicized – this privacy. “You work alone in the studio,” he stated, “and then the work goes out into a public situation.”21 If, for Nauman, the studio was a site of privacy, and the gallery a “public situation,” video made the fundamental, if rarely considered dynamic of privacy and publicness underlying any artistic utterance an essential condition of its medium. In fact, the artist would describe the nature of television as “opaque,” going on to add that “it only gives to you, you can’t give back. You can’t participate. I like that.”22 hat is to say, the video apparatus – with its split formats of recording and transmission – made explicit the ultimate public reception that haunts even the most solitary moments of artistic production, as well as the possibility of a private experience of a work in its public exhibition. In Nauman’s video works an intimate symmetry is established between the solitary artist and an (imagined) isolated viewer. his aspect of the medium of video was powerfully reinforced by its use of monitors, the very same material substrate required in the medium of broadcast television. Some of the artists who irst explored the potential of video art explored the possibilities of public broadcasting, albeit frequently perverting the dominant understanding of its mass-communication potential by producing willfully recalcitrant and boring programs. In 1967, the same year that Nauman began working with video, he 21 Nauman, interview with Chris Dercon, 22 Nauman, interview with Chris Dercon in Please Pay Attention, Please, 309. in Please Pay Attention, Please, 313. 27 participated in a televised video project produced by his friend and previous teacher at U.C. Davis, William Allan. In the hour-long program, broadcast on kqed (public television channel for the San Francisco Bay Area where Allan was an artistin–residence at the Experimental Television Project) Nauman opened ive ten-pound bags of white lour and proceeded to make “lour arrangements” with the mass of ine powder using a long wooden plank and his limbs. As Nauman went about his task, Allen and the painter Peter Saul sat on a raised platform (and notably behind a real lower arrangement) and discussed various topics in the casually conident demeanor characteristic of television talk show hosts. A camera mounted directly above Nauman recorded aerial shots of his work in progress that were then interspersed between Allan and Saul’s commentary, and occasionally projected behind the two interlocutors. Nauman’s performance on Allan’s program expanded upon a series of seven color photographs that the artist produced the same year of similar “lour arrangements.” According to Nauman, the Flour Arrangements series came out of the same central problem of determining the essence of artistic identity. Trying to produce an intentionally “unfamiliar situation” Nauman emptied his studio and worked exclusively on these arrangements “for about a month.” If Allan’s program ofered a release from the hothouse environment of the artist’s studio, turning a sculptural “unfamiliar situation” into a decidedly public one (via its broadcast from a television studio) it nonetheless partook in a decidedly indiferent, if not antagonistic, attitude towards public, let alone mass-media, communication.23 28 Nauman’s indiference to reaching large audiences was related to what he described as his “mistrust [of ] audience participation.” Describing the already mentioned Performance Corridor, Nauman noted that “he piece is important because it gave me the idea that you could make a participation piece without the participants being able to alter your work.”24 Such control – literalized in the extremely narrow passageways of most of his corridors that allowed for only one body at a time to enter and experience them – ensured, according to the artist, that “people were bound to have more or less the same experiences I had.”25 Like the instruction pieces, the corridors were predicated on the idea of recreating a sensation that the artist himself had already personally experienced through a strategy of making the work “as limiting as possible.”26 As such, these works engaged in a dialectic between privacy and publicness, at once demanding an intimate, singular experience in the name of communion, if on the interpersonal rather than collective level, breaking down the 23 he deeply parodic nature of Allan and Saul’s personas suggest that the possibility of communication with a mass (or even moderately large) public was not really an issue in the program. Even if there was a sizable audience for the “show,” it is hardly likely that many watched it, let alone understood it. In fact Nauman noted that he was not particularly interested in bringing his work to “a wider audience.” (Nonetheless in his interview with Sharp, Nauman remarked that he would like to do something for network tV: “I’d like cBs to give me an hour on my terms… to present some boring material.”) Nauman, interview with Sharp in Please Pay Attention Please, 152. 24 Nauman, interview with Sharp in Please Pay Attention Please, 113 – 114. 25 Nauman, quoted in van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman, 18. In an interview with Jan Butterield, in Please Pay Attention Please, Nauman describes a similar efect in his Floating Room of 1972 in which “people seemed to either have pretty much the same experience or they were blocking it out” 179. 26 Nauman, interview with Sharp in Please Pay Attention Please, 114. 29 barriers of privacy, albeit through techniques that destabilized, if not destroyed, the stable igure or ego of the participant. his paradox encapsulates the challenge that Nauman’s artistic project faced in terms of privacy and publicness. Like many artists working in the 1960s Nauman was wary of facile and fallacious models of communication, such as expressionism, that promised universal comprehension. Yet he was also suspicious of the phenomenologically-inlected reception of Minimalist art that ostensibly ofered ininitely unique subjective feedback. Against the two extremes of tenuous universality and incommunicable individuality, Nauman sought to produce situations and objects that restricted the subject’s agency and yet, within a diminished scope of experience, ofered the subject a transmissible situation and sensation. One might say that Nauman’s works present a communal experience of disappearance, or that the possibility of community is experienced in these works as an absence – as privation – thus complicating and expanding the possible elegiac connotations of works such as the artist’s John Coltrane Piece. For Nauman, the privacy of the studio engendered a corresponding intimacy for his work’s “public,” and in turn promoted an empathetic response in a small but selective audience. As he told Sharp, “I don’t think that it bothers me that the pieces are not for many people, because the way I work, it seems that I am doing them in the studio for me or for the small number of people who come to the studio, so it really is one-to-one… However, most of the people that came to the studio are sympathetic 27 Nauman, interview with Sharp in Please, Pay Attention Please, 80-81. 30 anyway (you can really feel that quickly).”27 Nauman’s sustained anxiety and interest in questions of privacy and the narrowing of public experience may be seen as a complex engagement with what Richard Sennet has called the “intimate society,” a cultural condition in which “closeness between persons is [seen] as a moral good” and “social relationships of all kinds are [seen as being] real, believable, and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person.”28 For Sennet, the intimate society represents a betrayal of the modern and particularly Enlightenment tradition of the public sphere and civic engagement. Yet rather than merely relecting the cultural condition of late modernity, Nauman’s works may also suggest a stringent and intense attempt to sustain some sort of authentic, if drastically contracted, public experience at a moment when publicness itself, and the artist’s relationship with his or her public in particular, seemed endangered. Considering this possibility, Nauman’s distinctive concern with barriers (walls, loors, and screens), marshalling them as sites to be transcended and yet which can also incorporate the subject, may imply an almost hysterical desire for communion in the fragile intimate society of postmodernity. In videos such as Playing A Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (1967-68), Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (196768), and Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968), Nauman seems to drain the esteemed performance tradition of the solo of its 28 Richard Sennett, he Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 259. 31 most prized attributes, transforming a moment when the single artist demonstrates his or her tetchnical mastery and personal individuality into a repetitive and emotionless task which, more often than not, occludes the artist’s personality. In these works Nauman’s art makes intimacy seem perverse or even grotesque, reminding the viewer of the privation at the base of our culture’s cherished privacy. 32 Robert Slifkin is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he teaches courses addressing various aspects of modern and contemporary art. Slifkin has been the recipient of fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Henry Moore Foundation. His essays on the work of James Whistler, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, and the concept of Action Painting have appeared in such journals as October, American Art, Oxford Art Journal, and he Art Bulletin. His manuscript Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Reiguration of Postwar Art recently was awarded the Phillips Book Prize and is forth-coming from the University of California Press. 35 Bruce Nauman, Basements Douglas F. Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College january 27 – march 9, 2012 curated by Stephanie Snyder Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance), 1967-68 8:24 min., black and white, sound 16 mm ilm on video, digital projection Flesh to White to Black to Flesh, 1968 51 min., black and white, sound Displayed on Sony Trinitron PVM-2530, 25 in. monitor Violin Film # 1 (Playing he Violin As Fast As I Can), 1967-68 10:54 min., black and white, sound 16 mm ilm on video, digital projection Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., 1969 60 min., black and white, sound Displayed on Sony Trinitron PVM-2530, 25 in. monitor Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, 1967-68 10 min., black and white, sound 16 mm ilm on video, digital projection All Works © 2012 Bruce Nauman Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, NY Wall-Floor Positions, 1968 60 min., black and white, sound Displayed on Sony Trinitron PVM-2530, 25 in. monitor Bouncing in the Corner No. 1, 1968 60 min., black and white, sound Displayed on Sony Trinitron PVM-2530, 25 in. monitor 39 Colophon Copy TK Image on pages 20-21: Bruce Nauman, Flesh to White to Black to Flesh, 1968 51 min., black and white, sound Displayed on Sony Trinitron PVM-2530, 25 in. monitor Back Cover Image: Bruce Nauman, Wall-Floor Positions, 1968, 60 min., black and white, sound 16 mm ilm transferred to digital video displayed on monitor © 2012 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ars). Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (eai), New York, NY. ISBN-10: 0-9824240-8-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-9824240-8-7 2 3 2