Even without the pandemic, 2020 would have been a very difficult year for Bruce Nauman. In May, his wife Susan Rothenberg passed away. She was acclaimed for the raw, essential poetry of her paintings of horses, and Rothenberg’s loss was felt far beyond the New Mexico ranch where she and Nauman made their home.
Nauman’s grief is quietly palpable as we talk on his landline. Mentioning Rothenberg several times, he says he has worked little this year, although usually he would “try to go into the studio every day even if I just read”.
Nauman is now in his 81st year, and even if the American artist never made another piece, he would still straddle the contemporary art world like a bossy, taciturn colossus. (His text and audio works betray a penchant for imperatives yet it’s difficult to find a description of Nauman’s personality that doesn’t mention his disinclination to chat.)
Nauman’s influence on succeeding generations cannot be overstated. From early works such as “Self-Portrait as a Fountain” (1966-67), in which he captured himself spouting water from his mouth, to later pieces such as the video sequence “Clown Torture” (1987) — as disturbing as it sounds — and “Days/Giorni” (2009) in which voices intone the days of the week, not always in sequence, he has forged a reputation for art that is often bleak, sometimes bewildering, frequently very funny and always acutely perceptive of the human condition.
Back in the 1960s, Nauman’s realisation that “whatever I was doing in the studio must be art” fed into the emerging genres of process art and body art. As contemporary art evolved through video, photography, installation and performance, Nauman’s abrasive, ludic spectre was always there. Without him, the practices of artists as varied as Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan and Mark Wallinger would look very different.
Did he know he was fuelling a revolution? “No, of course not . . . I had a need to be what I thought an artist was supposed to be. It was a language that led me away from being a sculptor and abstract painter. I wanted to get more parts of my life into the work. That’s what I was trying to think about.”
Much of Nauman’s work — those repetitive jabbing phrases, the absurdist wit — turns on his fascination with language and its limitations, which has been deepened through his engagement with the texts of Wittgenstein and Samuel Beckett. Just as he is elaborating on why he was excited by Wittgenstein’s method of following a process to a “conclusion that either made sense or fell apart”, a deep barking cuts across his line. “I’ll just quieten this dog down,” says Nauman, his own husky tones in synergy with his canine.
Asked what kind of dog, he laughs and says: “Part chihuahua and part mini-doberman.” I exclaim over the unusual blend, he chuckles some more. “Susan and I always had big dogs, when we lost our last [one], Susan saw this dog’s picture in the paper. We thought he weighed 45lb but when we got to the pound, he weighed 10lb.” He pauses, then adds proudly. “We got him up to 16lb.”
Although I suspect he would rather talk dogs than Wittgenstein, Nauman graciously returns to the topic of language. In truth, he has moved away from text in much of his more recent work. Asked why, he replies, “I always like to make things.”
That artisanal anima, so elegantly elaborated in his sculptures of touching hands “Fifteen Pairs of Hands” (1996), was seeded in his childhood. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nauman was the son of a travelling salesman for General Electric and a mother who, he says, “did a lot of volunteering in hospitals” because her husband “did not want her to take a paying job”. Later his mother became a museum guide and followed Nauman’s career with pleasure. As he talks about his parents, Nauman’s affection is tangible although he says his father “had a rougher time” of accepting his chosen profession.
With the family constantly on the move, Nauman became the child who was always “trying to figure out how I was going to fit in. I was quiet and watchful. I always felt it was OK to be at the edges.”
Aware that he had inherited a facility for draughtsmanship from his father — who drew submarine parts for the US navy — as a youngster Nauman concentrated on “making model aeroplanes and railroads”. Originally, he enrolled to study mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin but later switched to art at the University of California, Davis. The decision to step away from science, he says, came about when he “got into some advanced classes and started to be around people who were deeply involved in ways I couldn’t be”.
Why art instead? “I’ve never understood how I decided to make that switch,” he replies. Whatever his motivation, it’s worked out pretty well. Since the late 1960s, when Nauman was snapped up by the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, the hottest space in town thanks to artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, his career has encompassed, among dozens of shows, exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre (1997), Tate Modern (2020) and MoMA (2012). In 2009, he ticked off the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale and he has shown at Documenta multiple times.
He shows no sign of stopping. This year a shoal of exhibitions includes monographs at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Punta della Dogana in Venice.
Does he still get nervous on the big occasions? “Yes,” he says, sounding like he means it. I have heard, however, that he is unusually hands-off from a curatorial point of view. Nauman agrees, saying that often he doesn’t own the works and installation decisions must be cleared with their institution’s curators. “I can’t just say: ‘Don’t touch that!’” he says, putting on a goofy voice.
Given that many artists of his stature have no difficulty in imposing their will on exhibitions, I venture that he might be overly humble. He laughs and launches into a charming, convoluted story about three curators from different departments in the same major institution who, as they installed his Venice Biennale show, sported differently coloured gloves because otherwise they stole each other’s.
Oblique, mischievous, and surprisingly intimate given the chill that often emanates from his work, Nauman’s conversation is peppered with such tales. Although a reputation for shyness precedes him, in truth he is a beguiling storyteller, a characteristic that might chime with his passion for “mystery novels”, which began when he found himself in Düsseldorf sharing an apartment with the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. “There was a library there [and] he said, ‘You have to read Dashiell Hammett.’”
At one point, Nauman continues, he was so entranced by the genre, he carried a John le Carré novel with him “all the time when I was travelling”. Briefly we digress into a celebration of Alec Guinness’s magisterial command of George Smiley. “He didn’t look like Smiley in the books but it didn’t matter,” says Nauman reverently.
When I say that the linearity of a detective story couldn’t be more at odds with the super-tight, anti-narrative cutting that distinguishes his own work, he gently puts me straight. “But all the parts get used. It’s so efficient.”
How does he make those editorial decisions? “You have to pick something that . . . has some broader possibilities. I’ve known artists to have a great idea and when they were finished it was gone. They couldn’t get from there to the art.”
Nauman’s gift for going for the jugular can make for uncomfortable viewing. Does he ever struggle with the dark matter that is so often his chosen clay? “Sometimes,” he murmurs before recalling his 1981 sculpture series “South American Triangle”. Created after he read of the torture chambers of Latin American prisons, the finished work sees a cast-iron chair suspended by its legs from the ceiling within a steel triangle hung from cables. Exuding nihilistic menace, its making traumatised Nauman. “I put it together out of scrap lumber and hung it from the ceiling,” he recalls. “And it was so powerful I couldn’t work. It just stopped me. I had to absorb it before I could do anything else.”
That paralysis is the price an artist pays for foraging deep in our troubled collective psyche. So often Nauman’s art — the bodies at breaking point, the despotic yet desperate commands, those tender, twisting hands — starts at the point where language and power rupture.
Indeed what took him back to the studio during this hard year was the gift of a college textbook from his grandson. The book contained a copy of a treaty signed by the US government and a Native American chief. “The US general signed his name,” says Nauman. “But [the chief] just made a mark.”
Nauman, who says he was obliged to sign countless legal documents after Rothenberg’s death, had a moment of revelation. “Why can’t I just have a mark? So I’ve been making these videotapes of my fingers and hands signing Xs.” He laughs, sounding suddenly loose and free. “I owe it all to my grandson.”
‘Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies’ to January 9 2022, palazzograssi.it