He said somewhere along the line like 'a work of art out of hit you like being
hitting them back at the neck with a baseball bat'
He doesn't want the experience to be pleasant and perfumey. It's supposed to be disturbing at first
not cheap, shocking disturbing but just:
'What the hell is going on here?'
He's a master of filling space whether it's with sound or light or color and the
works, although in very very different technologies and media, speak to each other
He's really inquisitive. Will this work? Will that work? Because it's interesting.
What I love about Bruce's work is he basically works with what's there.
Weaving forms together, trying to find
places between the cracks of the art forms and I think it continues to this day.
One of the things that he shies away from is the artist has a kind of big personality.
He would rather let the work speak for itself.
When he was at Davis they gave graduate students studios and
the only directive from the faculty that you go into this room - what do you do?
- well you do whatever you do.
He took it logically which Bruce does
Whatever I do in this room is art because I'm an artist so he started
doing those early black and white videos where he just puts himself in different positions
He's making sculpture with the least amount of material that he can
make a sculpture with which is saying: 'well what I've got is my own body I've
got me this is what I've got to work'
I met Bruce in the summer of 1968
he was doing a piece at the Whitney with his first wife and Bruce and me.
Each of us were in a corner of the room basically for an hour we fell back
against the wall and then came back up.
I was very impressed that you could make a
piece just with one action. What made it exciting was that there was a sense of
playfulness you know the playfulness and that sense of beginner's mind in art is
what makes the magic happen, not knowing everything.
Somewhere about the early seventies Bruce relocated from Los Angeles to New Mexico
He likes to be at a distance, he's a loner in the studio and he goes into
the studio and sits and thinks. He drinks a lot of coffee
Bruce operates with artist's block. Artist's block is to him like Gesso on a
canvas is to a painter. It's the first thing you do but there has to be a
certain amount of faith that something will come.
Probably the single most
well-known work of Bruce is the spiral neon that says the true artist helps the
world by revealing mystic truths. I think he's testing that idea.
There's that old saying: 'how do I know what I think until I hear myself say it?'
Bruce is one of those people of: 'how do I know that this philosophical idea has any
traction to it until I see it manifested out there?'
I think Bruce is somehow obsessed with language.
It's the subject of the work but it's also kind of the content
and the work seems to concertina between sense and nonsense.
You think you understand something, you think you read something and then it turns into
something else which is kind of funny but also it's violent.
Bruce is interested in a kind of intellectual distance on something
that's very visceral. The people poking each other in the eye and there's the
other one which I find hilarious is the pornography but it's in these blinking
fingers in neon. He does it in a way the completely drains it
and makes, it in a word, slapstick. He's one of funniest artists there is.
Humorous in the sense that the bottom line is that the world is absurd.
He is not concerned about beauty. I mean they're terribly ugly to your aunt Nelly.
Your grandmother Edna would think this is not art,
and part of it is in order to make something make beautiful you have
to have an idea of what is beautiful and that hamstrings you right from the get-go
'Raw Materials' was the name of the project that Bruce Nauman made for Tate
Modern's Turbine Hall
What was genius about Bruce is that he filled the
Turbine Hall with corridors of sound so you actually walked from silence to
sound to silence to sound
The peace played both with the spatial aspects of
the building but also a kind of register of emotions for the visitor
I know that he always was
very interested in loving music very much
and I do find his work very musical, his structures are very musical
It's a compositional rhythmic form you feel the impulse of music even if you're not hearing it
What I think about Bruce is that he's a person that has total integrity, this is
an artist work this is their body of work and they manifest mediums based on their ideas
There's certain artists to come along and they give subsequent artists permission
You can do anything you want
you