Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts - by Kathy Halbreich & Isabel Friedli & Heidi Naef & Magnus Schaefer & Taylor Walsh (Hardcover)

Book 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 A narrative exhibition history traces his reception, and features a number of rare or previously unpublished images.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.

Review Quotes

... he makes us participants in art that is hectoring, aggressive, buttonholing and violent, and fills us with a sense of complicity... when trapped in the mind of Bruce Nauman, there is no escape.--Nikil Saval "T Magazine"

a five-decade survey that appraises the magnitude of his improbable accomplishment and influence.--Kenneth Baker "The Art Newspaper"

[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"

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"

A master class in producing art, and in curating an exhibition, that confounds the impulse to make coherent statements about it. The more you try to explain its force, the more elusive its power becomes.--Ken Okiishi "Artforum"

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"

An adventure that is as much ethical as it is aesthetic.--Peter Schjeldahl "New Yorker"

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"

Corralling a Lifetime of Creativity: Bruce Nauman has mixed sculpture, performance, drawing, photography, film, video and installation throughout his career; now, MoMA tries to find its through-line.--Richard B. Woodward "Wall Street Journal"

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

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

Nauman's extraordinary catalogue ... features artworks both iconic and obscure, large-scale and intangible.... everything one needs to understand Nauman's complex vision.--David Graver "Cool Hunting"

The most influential American artist of this generation.--Farah Nayeri "The New York Times"

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"

About the Author

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.