The work of this 78-year-old titan of the art world, whose influence on younger artists is inescapable and pervasive, has an uncanny way of seeming forever new – and in a dark time, the work feels dark, too. Being from the west coast, I’d probably had it at noon, and it was probably 1.30pm. SIMON  The whole idea of the visual puns, works like Henry Moore Bound to Fail and From Hand to Mouth, complicates this notion of how we look at an object. It can only go so far and then real life steps in. Lenny Tristano was a blind pianist, one of the original—or maybe second generation—bebop guys. They struggle and both of them end up on the floor. I was fascinated by mathematical problems, particularly the one called “squaring the circle.” You know, for hundreds of years mathematicians tried to find a geometrical way of finding a square equal in area to a circle—a formula where you could construct one from the other. I ended up drawing on music and dance and literature, using thoughts and ideas from other fields to help me continue to work. But it didn’t help me to make the piece. SIMON  All your work seems to depend not only on this kind of tactile precision, but also on a kind of incompleteness—a fragmentariness, a sense of becoming. NAUMAN  No, I don’t mean that it was simple to do the work. Unsettling … video work Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning). You have to put plaster or something over the back of it to make it hold its shape. This stirs another old memory. For one thing, they’re not mute. But in the circus it’s okay, it’s still funny. NAUMAN  When I was in school I was a painter. Bruce Nauman is an uncompromising, physical, and confrontational artist and Eat/War is a characteristic political challenge that alternates staccato flashes in vivid neon colors of green and red. Bruce Nauman was born on December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It is true that he is politely evasive about the art: for him, it seems, meaning is for the viewer to find, not for the artist to offer. At some point in the nineteenth century, a mathematician—I can’t remember his name—proved it can’t be done. The chair is a central element in the action and the whole tape centers on a cruel joke. The most comprehensive collection to date of the artist Bruce Nauman's writings plus all of his major interviews from 1965 to 2001. Some still do. They get me into the studio, get me to do the work. There was also the idea that if I was in the studio, whatever I was doing was art. N. … You couldn’t sit in it because of that wedge of grease or fat or whatever it was—it filled up the space you would sit in. Some artists need lots, some don’t. Are we condemned endlessly, futilely, to fall? “As he got older, he couldn’t use his body as he had done 20 years previously, but he still understood how to make it function in a really interesting way – to use the edges of what he was able to do, to use that tension and make it into an artwork. Then I would stop the tape. NAUMAN  Each clown has to tell a story while supporting himself on one leg with the other leg crossed, in such a way that it looks like he is imitating sitting down. Walking into a dark room at the PS1 segment of the Bruce Nauman retrospective, one comes across a simple black-and-white video of the artist combing his pubic hair. But the problem for me was to find a way to restrict the situation so that the performance turned out to be the one I had in mind. But it just connects up in a strange sort of way with my more recent work, since over the past several years I have been involved with both the idea of death and dying and the idea of masking the figure. Bruce Nauman’s exhibition at Tate Modern showcases a life dedicated to an urgent and consistent experimentation. As Nauman explained, in works such as White Breathing he was engaging in what he described as 'examinations of physical and psychological response to simple or even oversimplified situations which can yield clearly experiencable phenomena' (Bruce Nauman interview with Joan Simon, 'Breaking the Silence' Art in America 76(9), September 1988, p. 14 quoted in N. Benezra, 'Surveying Nauman', ed. You know, they used it to cast tire prints and things like that. I can see a connection to the Art Makeup film we talked about, but why did you use such theatrical clowns? BRUCE NAUMAN  There is a tendency to clutter things up, to try to make sure people know something is art, when all that’s necessary is to present it, to leave it alone. Apparently, he poured me quite a few bourbons – because when Merce finally came in, I went to stand up and my legs just gave way from under me. “I’ve always had overlapping ways of going about my work,” Bruce Nauman once remarked. In hockey breaking the rules turns into fighting—you can’t do that in a bar and get away with it. He turns around and yells at her—calls her names. We want to hear from you! Copyright © 2021 Penske Business Media, LLC. You spend all of this time in the studio and then when you do present the work, there is a kind of self-exposure that is threatening. Still, how to proceed is always the mystery. Something interesting happened to them every single day, or at least it seemed that way to me.” This is a typically oblique story of Nauman’s. NAUMAN  I think there is a need to present yourself. I finally realized that the most straightforward way to present the idea would be to cast that entire section of the body. Or I load it emotionally in a way that it is not supposed to be loaded. She grabs the cocktail glass and throws the drink in his face. ‘To keep me busy’, he replied. The symbol is more powerful. I started with white. “I probably had the violin around for a month or two before I made the film,” Nauman said in an interview conducted at San Jose State College in 1970 with Willoughby Sharp. I’m thinking of the architectural installations, in particular the very narrow corridor pieces. But then when I built it so that the chair hung low enough to swing into the triangle, it was too low. It’s like a print I did that says, “Pay attention motherfuckers” [1973). And it’s really a frightening piece. © Art21, Inc. 2001. In the half century of his public career, he has given only a handful of interviews. Oral history interview with Bruce Nauman, 1980 May 27-May 30 [sound recording]. . Much of this inventiveness has been based on very slender means, often the materials to hand in the studio. Naipaul’s stories about South America and Central America, including “The Return of Eva Peron” and especially “The Killings in Trinidad”—that’s the one that made the biggest impression on me. But let me describe how it got into its present form. The triangle became a barrier to approaching the chair from the outside. Because it was in a separate room, the sound was baffled; you only got the higher tones. But you do see other artists asking the same kinds of questions and responding with some kind of integrity. Bruce Nauman watches a video of Untitled (1998–99) in his studio, New Mexico, 2000. You gave that up very early on. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. And the tape says over and over again, “Get out of the room, get out of my mind.” I said it a lot of different ways: I changed my voice and distorted it, I yelled it and growled it and grunted it. He poured me a bourbon. It’s been taken out of the game situation. In the video Walks In Walks Out (2015), he is no longer the lithe figure of the 1960s but inhabits an ageing body that has seen a great deal of life. SIMON  The tenor of that withholding—actually controlling the content or subject—changed significantly when you stopped performing and began to allow the viewer to participate in some of your works. He slaps her, she knees him in the groin and, as he’s doubling over, he grabs a knife from the table. In the 1986 video work Violent Incident, a smartly dressed couple are at a table set for cocktails and dinner – but the date soon descends into a vicious brawl. But art is like cheating—it involves inverting the rules or taking the game apart and changing it. The jester and the Baroque type are the oldest, but they are pretty recognizable types. I just want to leave them alone. The text is the source of some of his best-known quotes, including the lines about his desire to make art “that was just there all at once. NAUMAN  I got interested in the idea of the clown first of all because there is a mask, and it becomes an abstracted idea of a person. Well, first I filmed it. Both what’s inside and what’s outside determine our physical, physiological and psychological responses—how we look at an object. But is this it? JOAN SIMON What do you think about when you’re working on a piece? I found the stuff at some police shop. NAUMAN  I think about Lenny Tristano a lot. In an interview with Willoughby Sharp in 1970, Nauman commented on the difficulty of articulating his work: “It’s very easy to describe how the piece looks, but the experience of walking inside it is something else altogether which can’t be described. Bruce Nauman’s wildly influential, relentlessly imitated work explores the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure. With From Hand to Mouth—completed over twenty years ago—what other meanings have occurred to you? SIMON  Your most recent videotapes feature clowns. It’s less there, but still important, in Duchamp. NAUMAN  It’s similar with the neon pieces that have transformers, buzzing and clicking and what not; in some places I’ve installed them, people are disturbed by these sounds. That piece is still amazingly powerful to me. Truth or hokum? Reading the Naipaul clarified things for me and helped me continue. His approach was to step outside the problem. The images are aggressive, the characters are physically aggressive, the language is abusive. What does it mean to you? SIMON  There seems to be something particularly ominous about your use of chairs—both in this and other works. On the one hand, they translate words or phrases into concrete form—in a sense literalizing them. It seemed very straightforward to use all those different ways of expressing ideas or presenting material. Pranks … Falls, Pratfalls + Sleights of Hand (Clean Version). They were socialists and they had points to make that were not only moral and political, but also ethical. Anger and frustration are two very strong feelings of motivation for me. The man holds the woman’s chair for her as she sits down. The only thing that was allowed … Nauman’s early film Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square. You could make neon signs, you could make written pieces, you could make jokes about parts of the body or casting things, or whatever. SIMON  That’s sort of the subliminal version of a very aggressive sound piece you used to install invisibly in empty rooms, isn’t it? Then, there’s the history of the unhappy clown: they’re anonymous, they lead secret lives. Video by Bruce Nauman. This year warrants were issued to arrest hockey players; two minutes in the penalty box wasn’t enough. The music is always going on. NAUMAN  When I take the game, I take it out of context and apply it to moral or political situations. 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