Bruce Nauman at the Stedelijk Museum
An exhibition and collection history
Longread — May 25, 2021 — Leontine Coelewij
In 2021 the Stedelijk Museum presents the first major museum retrospective of Bruce Nauman's work. Since the 1960s, Bruce Nauman (1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States) has stretched our understanding of what art can be in all directions. For Nauman, everything starts with an idea, and that idea can take shape in all kinds of ways – as a sculpture, a text, sound, neon, or a filmed action or interaction. In this essay, curator Leontine Coelewij, one of the curators of the exhibition, examines the significance of Nauman’s work for the Stedelijk Museum.
The brilliant Bruce Nauman, a shockingly innovative figure whose works have precipitated many others. He has the ability to touch and intrigue us on all fronts.1
Curator Wim Beeren used these words to introduce the artist Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) to the Stedelijk Museum in spring 1969. He had invited the American artist to participate in Op Losse Schroeven: situaties en cryptostructuren (Square Pegs in Round Holes. Situations and Cryptostructures), an international group exhibition featuring thirty-four artists, which was designed to present a picture of the latest developments in the visual arts and is now considered one of the most groundbreaking exhibitions of the late 1960s.2 Beeren gave Nauman plenty of space in Op Losse Schroeven: he was one of the few artists in the exhibition with his own room. The ensemble of works that Nauman showed there was, in a sense, a summary of his work until that point. His attention to language, the use of neon, and his investigation of the artist’s actions in the studio all came to the fore in this exhibition.
Outside the entrance to the room was First Poem Piece (1968), from the collection of Martin and Mia Visser, a married couple who were among the first private collectors of Nauman’s work. They had commissioned the Nebato construction company in Bergeijk to make this metal sculpture based on a design purchased from Nauman. First Poem Piece is a form of concrete poetry on a steel plate on which the words ‘You may not want to be here’ are engraved. The sentence is written in eighteen lines, with one or more words missing each time, so that different meanings emerge. All that remains at the bottom is ‘You … here.’ The lightness of the text that increasingly disappears is in contrast to the physical presence of the steel plate, which weighs more than 250 kilograms.
Following that prelude, various works were combined in the room itself, including Thick Mirror on a Steel Plate (1968), Steel Channel Piece (1969), and four films he had recorded in his studio in 1967–1968. Those films had come about because there were no materials available and the artist used his own physical actions to express what art could be: ‘Art is what the artist does in his studio.’
The neon My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968) was also included in the exhibition. Nauman began experimenting with neon in the mid-1960s. His studio was in a former grocery store in San Francisco, and he sometimes hung the neons in the display window. This work, which features the letters in the artist’s first name, each repeated six times, and was inspired by the first satellite photographs of the lunar landscape, was added to the Stedelijk’s collection in 1969 and was the first work by Nauman to be acquired by a museum in Europe. For Nauman, 1969 was the year of his breakthrough – not only in New York, with exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery, at the Whitney, and at the Guggenheim Museum, but also in Europe, where he showed his work in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Bern (When Attitudes Become Form), the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (Kompas IV), and in Düsseldorf.
Two years later, in 1971, Nauman was back at the Stedelijk, this time in an exhibition that was not created by the staff but by an external curator, James Harithas. In the group exhibition Lucht-Kunst (Air-Art), Nauman showed Wind Room (1970), one of his less well-known installations. Based on his designs, a double-walled room was constructed, which the public could not enter. Fans were used to blow air between the two walls, and the sound of these invisible streams of air could be heard outside the room. As with the Acoustic Wall, which he had made in 1970 at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery in Paris, the emphasis here shifted from a visual to an acoustic experience. These were works, as Nauman himself said, that could be described but were increasingly difficult to explain, as they really had to be experienced physically. In an article in Artforum, Marcia Tucker pointed out the analogy between these works and the phenomenon of a sudden storm or other atmospheric changes in a particular area, which can create serious emotional instability among local residents.3
Nauman’s room in the exhibition Door beeldhouwers gemaakt (Made by Sculptors, 1978) was a kind of mini-retrospective. For the organizers, Stedelijk curators Rini Dippel and Geert van Beijeren, Nauman occupied a central position within the sculptural art of the 1970s. They considered, in particular, the blurring of boundaries between different media (sculpture, film, photography) and the use of the artist’s own body to be determining factors in the sculptural art of that time. The curators showed twelve works by Nauman, mainly from the museum’s own collection, including My Name… and various videos, films, prints, and photographs from the period 1966–1978. In the 1970s, the Stedelijk had, in addition to the smaller neon EAT-DEATH (1972), primarily acquired audiovisual works by Nauman, probably to reinforce the international collection of time-based media, which was built up from an early date and was unique in Europe. However, acquisitions of important three-dimensional works, like those made by institutions such as the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Double Steel Cage Piece, 1974), the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller (Untitled, 1978), the Van Abbemuseum, and later the Haags Gemeentemuseum, were not made by the Stedelijk, not by Edy de Wilde and not even when Wim Beeren was the director of the Stedelijk Museum, from 1985 to 1993. Nauman did, though, take part in the group exhibitions ’60-’80 (1982), with Corridor with Life Image and Taped Image (1970), and Energieën (Energies, 1990), which included Clown Torture.
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Bruce Nauman, 'Pursuit/Pursuit (Truth)' (1975), installation during 'Door Beeldhouwers Gemaakt', Stedelijk Museum, 1978. -
Bruce Nauman, 'Corridor with Life Image and Taped Image' (1970), coll Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Tentoonstelling '’60 – ’80', Stedelijk Museum. -
'Clown Torture' (1987) in the exhibition 'Energieën', Stedelijk Museum (1990). -
Bruce Nauman, 'Double Steel Cage Piece', 1974. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. © 2021 Bruce Nauman / Artists Right Society (ARS), Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
It was not until the mid-1990s that the monumental neon sculpture Seven Figures (1985) was acquired by Rudi Fuchs, a group of seven schematic male and female figures having sex. Nauman had already done a lot of work with neon in the 1960s. In the 1980s, his neon sculptures became larger and more complex, with violent and explicitly sexual scenes. As different figures in the group light up in turn, a narrative appears to emerge, but a dramatic development is absent. There is no plot here, no catharsis, only repetition that leads nowhere. In Seven Figures, the figures constantly flash on and off, condemned to mechanical copulation until the end of time.
The acquisition of Seven Figures did not occur without resistance. When Fuchs’s plans for acquisition were announced, the reaction was a storm of protest, mainly among conservative art critics. They said the work was a joke – and an expensive one at that. It took months for Fuchs to gain permission from the city council to purchase the work. Seven Figures is now one of the museum’s icons, occupying a key position within the group of Nauman’s works in the collection – not only in relation to an earlier neon like EAT/DEATH (in which the words partly overlap, flashing on and off), with its constant repetition that makes us ponder the notion of ‘free will’ and the absurdity of existence, but also one of the later video works, Washing Hands (Abnormal), made in 1996 and acquired for the collection in 2001. This video sculpture consists of two monitors stacked on top of each other. We see Bruce Nauman washing his hands. The camera is zoomed in on a simple action that, because it is extended to an hour, takes on obsessive traits. The changing camera angles and the different colors give the images great visual variation, with the hands almost becoming autonomous objects, similar to the groups of hands that Nauman cast in bronze in the 1990s.
Setting a Good Corner (1999) was the last work by Nauman to be acquired by the Stedelijk. In this single-channel video piece, we watch from a static camera angle as Nauman works at his ranch in New Mexico for an hour, building a fence to make sure his horses do not escape. The length of the video is determined by the duration of the activity: ‘You began when the job started, and when the job was over, the film was over. And that became a way of structuring it without having to think about it, other than deciding what the job was that you were going to call the work.’4 This manner of structuring on the basis of time or duration already fascinated him back in the 1960s in films by Andy Warhol, such as Sleep, and in the work of the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. In contrast to the early film works such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1968) and Bouncing in the Corner (1968–1969), with which he wanted to define the artist’s activities in the studio, Nauman shows in Setting a Good Corner what his work is both as an artist and as a rancher. And also that those two roles coincide: ‘It had a real purpose on the ranch here; I needed to do this.’5
Nauman’s investigation of what art can be determines the extraordinary cohesion within the group of his works in the Stedelijk Museum’s collection. At the same time, it touches upon the condition humaine, fundamental human needs such as eating, drinking, and sex, and emotions like fear, anger, and frustration. Nauman himself situates his work in the confrontation between the personal experience and the public revelation of that experience.6 This confrontation, visible to everyone in his exhibitions, has a wide scope: ‘I think [my work] is almost a philosophical response to the environment at large, to the culture or whatever.’7 This is what makes Bruce Nauman an important and influential artist who has been able to touch us and to intrigue us for more than fifty years.
Sources
- Op Losse Schroeven: situaties en cryptostructuren, exh.cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1969.
- Op Losse Schroeven, 15 March–27 April 1969, is often mentioned in the same breath as When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern, curated by Harald Szeemann, which opened two weeks later and in which largely the same artists participated. Also see: Christian Rattemeyer et al., Exhibiting the New Art: ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969, Londen 2010.
- Marcia Tucker, quote in Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman, New York 1988, p. 238.
- Setting a Good Corner, Art 21, https://art21.org/read/bruce-nauman-setting-a-good-corner.
- Ibid.
- ‘Op het tweede gezicht: Bruce Nauman’, Stedelijk Museum, juni 1983.
- Bruce Nauman, interview with Michele De Angelus (1980), in Janet Kraynak, Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews, Cambridge 2003, p. 285.