Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1633450317 ISBN 13: 9781633450318

Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018

Synopsis

With a magician’s sleight of hand, Nauman’s art makes disappearance visible

At 76 years old, Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as a central figure in contemporary art whose stringent questioning of values such as good and bad remains urgent today. Throughout his 50-year career, he 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 catalog offers a comprehensive view of Nauman’s work in all mediums, spanning drawings across the decades; early fiberglass sculptures; sound environments; architecturally scaled, participatory constructions; rhythmically blinking neons; and the most recent 3D video that harks back to one of his earliest performances. A wide range of authors―curators, artists and historians of art, architecture and film―focus on topics that have been largely neglected, such as the architectural models that posit real or imaginary sites as models for ethical inquiry and mechanisms of control. An introductory essay explores Nauman’s many acts of disappearance, withdrawal and deflection as central formal and intellectual concerns. The 18 other contributions discuss individual objects or themes that persist throughout the artist’s career, including the first extensive essay on Nauman as a photographer and the first detailed treatment on the role of color in his work. A narrative exhibition history traces his reception, and features a number of rare or previously unpublished images.

Bruce Nauman was born in Indiana in 1941 and raised near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He studied math, music and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before switching his major to visual art, and received an MA in sculpture from the University of California, Davis, in 1966. In 1979 he moved to New Mexico, where he continues to reside. Nauman’s work has been the subject of two previous retrospectives, in 1972 and 1994. In 2009 he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where he won the Golden Lion.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Beard is Co-Founder of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn and Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Briony Fer is Professor of the History of Art at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Isabel Friedli is Curator and Head of Publications at the Schaulager, Basel.

Nicolás Guagnini is a New York-based artist.

Kathy Halbreich is the Laurenz Foundation Curator and former Associate Director at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Rachel Harrison is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn.

Ute Holl is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the nexus of cinema, perception, and knowledge.

Suzanne Hudson is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.

Julia Keller is Curatorial Assistant at Schaulager Basel.

Liz Kotz is an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at University of California, Riverside.

Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer and visual artist based in New York. His recent exhibitions include Bibelots, at Bortolami, New York in 2017, and Union Gaucha Productions (with Karin Schneider) at Artists Space, New York.

Glenn Ligon is an artist based in New York. A mid-career retrospective of his work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2011.

Catherine Lord is a writer, artist, curator and Professor Emerita of Art at the University of California, Irvine.

Roxana Marcoci is Senior Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Magnus Schaefer is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Felicity Scott is Associate Professor of Architecture and Co-director of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program at Columbia University.

Martina Venanzoni is a member of the research and editorial team at Schaulager Basel.

Taylor Walsh is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Jeffrey Weiss is Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where he codirected the Panza Collection Initiative.

Review:

By refusing to prettify the nature of human existence, and by interrogating the way people act when alone, with each other, and in uncomfortable scenarios, Nauman might inadvertently provide hope for those seeking a way to understand our current situation. (Dore Bowen Art in America)

This two-part, all-media retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 offers a master class in the limits of the body, the limits of language and the artistic desire to push beyond them. (Jason Farago New York Times)

A discontinuous parade of creative brainstorms that tend toward engulfing installations of sculpture, film, video, neon, and sound, any of which might anchor the whole career of a less restive artist. (Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker)

An adventure that is as much ethical as it is aesthetic. (Peter Schjeldahl New Yorker)

Nauman has changed the way we define what art is and what is art, and made work prescient of the morally wrenching American moment we're in. He deserves to be seen in full. (Holland Cotter The New York Times)

[Nauman's work] forms a discontinuous parade of creative brainstorms and engulfing installations, resulting in an ethical adventure as much as an aesthetic one. (Peter Schjeldahl The New Yorker)

In videos, sculptures, and installations, Nauman has persistently used linguistic play and spatial manipulation to probe the fears and desires that underlie perception. (Art in America)

Nauman has done much to change the way we define what art is, and what is art. (Holland Cotter The New York Times)

If anything unites his disparate efforts in sculpture, drawing, photography, and video, surely it is his often-comic bleakness. (Deborah Solomon WNYC)

Amassed from international institutions and collectors, and touch on ideas wrought in every imaginable medium over the course of the artist’s 50-year career. (Artnet)

About this edition

• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1633450317
• ISBN 13: 9781633450318
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 356
• Editor: Halbreich Kathy, Friedli Isabel, Naef Heidi, Schaefer Magnus, Walsh Taylor