Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
The long-awaited career retrospective of artist Bruce Nauman is now open in New York City, filling both MoMA PS1 and the sixth floor of MoMA’s main exhibition building in Midtown with the artist’s challenging, often outrageous body of work in sculpture, video, light works, and other formats. The show, which is on view through February, is an intriguing and in-depth look at the work an artist always looking to push the boundaries of his craft, and often the viewer’s comfort level.
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
Nauman has spent half a century inventing forms to convey both the moral hazards and the thrill of being alive. Employing a tremendous range of materials and working methods, he reveals the mutability of time, space, movement, and language, using each of these fundamental materials as an unstable foundation for understanding our place in the world. Ruptures and breaks in the formative elements of understanding and existing are utilized to create pieces that seem to hinge on, and often dangle over, a chaotic mass, occasionally even descending into incoherence. Works like his famous neon pieces are just on this side of legibility, shifting landscapes of light and often profane gestures used as a way to both exploit human emotional responses and to use this clustered materiality to push that same sense of catharsis ever further. For Nauman, both making and looking at art involve “doing things that you don’t particularly want to do, putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, following resistances to find out why you’re resisting.†At a time when the notion of truth feels increasingly under attack, his work compels viewers to relinquish the safety of the familiar, keeping us alert, ever vigilant, and wary of being seduced by easy answers.
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
Disappearing Acts traces what Nauman has called “withdrawal as an art formâ€â€”both literal and figurative incidents of removal, deflection, and concealment. Bodies are fragmented, centers are left empty, voices emanate from hidden speakers, and the artist sculpts himself in absentia, appearing only as negative space.
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
His early work in the show charts the artist’s photographic practice, drawing on the use of minimalist tropes to create commentaries on the history of art and the creation of the object, often placing his body into the frame as a manner of reproducing iconographies of classical figuration through more instantaneous techniques. Over the course of the show, Nauman’s work seems to evolve along this line, the body and its presence (or absence) always seems to sit underneath the surface of the work, allowing Nauman to work with the body as both symbol and construction material, always arriving at pieces that are as much about what the body does as how it looks. Nauman’s pieces are impeccably attuned to the manners of speaking and the modes of producing the image, the word, the idea, and push this intellectually rigorous process to its extremes.
The artist’s work is on view through February.
Bruce Nauman, Disappearing Acts (Installation View), via Art Observed
— D. Creahan
Read more:
Bruce Nauman at MoMA [Exhibition Site]
Bruce Nauman at MoMA [Exhibition Site]
