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

Description

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

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

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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.

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Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light

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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.

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Bruce Nauman (Art + Performance)

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Bruce Nauman -- Raw Materials (Unilever)

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Bruce Nauman (1941 -) is arguably the most influential artist at work in the world today. His pioneering explorations of sculpture, performance, film, video, neon and sound art have seen him investigating areas of art practice years before his peers, providing inspiration for innumerable artistic careers. Nauman has always drawn on a wide range sources for his own work, including the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the music and writings of John Cage, Gestalt Therapy, and literary sources including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Elias Cannetti and Samuel Beckett. He has collaborated with a wide range of film-makers, musicians, dancers and artists including Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Meredith Monk, Terry Allen and Merce Cunningham. In 1989 he married the artist Susan Rothernberg and moved his home and studio to a ranch in New Mexico, where he indulges an increasingly intense interest in training horses. He has exhibited internationally since the mid 1960s. Nauman will be the fifth artist to accept the challenge of taking on the cavernous space of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in Autumn 2004, following on from Olafur Eliasson's mesmerising The Weather Project that utilised mist and an artificial sun to transform the space, and the vast, scarlet, trumpet-like shape of Anish Kapoor's Marsyas sculpture that stunned visitors in 2002-3. These Unilever-sponsored projects have become a bigger event in the calendar every year, attracting ever larger crowds and more extensive, international media coverage. The accompanying books, with incisive, accessible texts and dramatic installation photography, have been equally successful. Bruce Nauman will contain extensive illustrations of the works in the Turbine Hall exhibition, alongside working drawings by the artist and an essay by Emma Dexter that both surveys the works in the exhibition and provides an overview of Nauman's career to date. The book will function both as a record of a unique event and a key to understanding the work and motivation of one of the world's leading contemporary artists.

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Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens: Installation Views (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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Winner of the Golden Lion for the Best National Participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens is celebrated in this photographic documentation of the thematic installation as presented at three sites in Venice: the U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, and two of the city’s most esteemed academic institutions, the Università Iuav di Venezia and the Università Ca’ Foscari.

With a body of work that encompasses video, installation, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and neon, and that spans from the 1960s to the present day, Bruce Nauman (born 1941) is one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Through Michele Lamanna’s stunning series of photographs, commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this publication captures the visitor’s experience of encountering Nauman’s work and coincides with the American premiere of the artist’s newest works—Days and Giorni—in Philadelphia.

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