Recently, I was in the library and I came across a DVD about Bruce Nauman titled “Make Me Think”. This DVD moved the audience through the dynamic collection of Nauman’s work including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nauman has been exhibiting since 1969 and has been said to film the viewer in a voyeuristic sense with different sizes and scales. Also, throughout the DVD, several fellow artists spoke about how he is aware and conscious to how you as a viewer respond to space and in some cases making you excruciatingly uncomfortable.
After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nauman received his BFA in art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California Davis. In 1966, he became a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute while simultaneously working in film with Robert Nelson and William Nelson. Nauman has a strong use of language in his work and believes “as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols” he explores the limits of every day situations in a playful in dept manner. He has shown at Nick Wilder’s gallery in Los Angeles, Leo Castelli in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York. In 1993, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Arts and in 1999 the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Visual Arts in Japan in 2004. Also, in that same year he received the Beaux-Arts Magazine Art Awards for Best International Artist in Paris. Most recently, the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs selected Nauman to represent the United States in the 2009 Venice Biennale. Some of Nauman’s influences include Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass.
While watching “Make Me Think”, I noticed Nauman works with a broad range of size and texture. Compositions for his performance were either framed up tightly around the subject and object, or the viewer was pulled back from the act and seeing the performance as it scanned from one side of the space to the other. Described on the DVD, Nauman wants the viewer to question him/herself what it would be like in any different scale and how does the viewer imagine him/herself in relation to what’s around you. I like the fact that the audience can interpret his pieces according to the way they feel in a specific space. For each person, their feelings toward size and spaces will inevitably be different therefore creating a large spectrum of different conceptual thoughts for each piece.
For my upcoming pieces I would like to incorporate a stronger sense of playfulness while maintaining balance. I found his pieces that evoked tension and issues of morality were the most interesting. For example, he had one piece that comprised of a room with four white painted walls, a speaker on two walls barking strange noises back and forth, and reverberating sounds throughout the room. This piece had a strange amount of negative space that kept the viewer thinking something was going to jarringly appear in the foreground.
Video Data Bank
Sperone Westwater
Art 21
"Make Me Think" DVD Directed by Heinz Peter Schwerfel
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