Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts

About this book

With a magicians sleight of hand Naumans 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 Naumans 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 authorscurators artists and historians of art architecture and filmfocus 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 Naumans 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 artists 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 A narrative exhibition history traces his reception and features a number of rare or previously unpublished images.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 WisconsinMadison 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. Naumans 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.