Menil Collection
Houston
1515 Sul Ross
713 5259400 FAX 713 5259444
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Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
dal 23/10/2007 al 12/1/2008

Segnalato da

Tara Alcancia


approfondimenti

Bruce Nauman



 
calendario eventi  :: 




23/10/2007

Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

Menil Collection, Houston

A rose has no teeth


comunicato stampa

A rose has no teeth

“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,”
reads one of Bruce Nauman’s earliest pieces, a work in blue neon from 1967. Though few people at the time knew Nauman’s name, he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of his time, celebrated for his groundbreaking work in a variety of media over the past forty years.

Beginning October 25, The Menil Collection will provide an in-depth look at the formative years of Nauman’s career in A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (the title of the exhibition is drawn from a 1966 work, an embossed plaque quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein, revealing Nauman’s interest in art and language).

Organized by Constance Lewallen, senior curator of exhibitions at the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where it was first presented, A Rose Has No Teeth includes over 100 works, including sculpture, ephemera, artist books, and video. Several of these works have never been displayed before, and together provide new insight into a vital early stage of Nauman’s career.

Said Josef Helfenstein, director of The Menil Collection, “We are thrilled to host this extraordinary and important exhibition. Bruce Nauman is one of the key artists to emerge in the 1960s, and his work will resonate deeply at the Menil, with its rich holdings of major works by so many key artists of the twentieth century.”

The exhibition presents a full range of Nauman’s early work, exploring how many of the artist’s recurrent themes and subjects first emerged when he was a graduate art student at the University of California, Davis. Although Nauman had his first solo show in 1966 in Los Angeles, his 1968 New York debut established his reputation and associated him with the East Coast despite his subsequent move to New Mexico. Since then, Naumanʹs Bay Area beginnings and influence remained an unexplored part of his 40-year career.

Among the works are notable photographs, videos, and performance pieces such as Eleven Color Photographs, Art Make-Up and Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), which illustrate Nauman’s early ventures in photography and film. Sketches, including the pencil-on-paper conception of A Rose Has No Teeth, provide glimpses of the artist’s original ideas before they were fleshed out as sculptures and performances. Rounding out the exhibition are sculptures and installation pieces, such as Knot an Ear, Cup with Its Merging Saucer and Sweet, Suite, Substitute, created in a variety of traditional and non-traditional mediums including wax, ceramic, fiberglass, neon-tubing and resin.

Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941, Bruce Nauman (who has resided for many years in a remote part of New Mexico), spent his developing years in northern California, first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, from 1964 to 1966, and then in San Francisco as a working artist and part-time instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute. During this period, Nauman began using wordplay in his sculptures of clay, fiberglass, polyester resin, and other non-traditional materials. He created casts of negative space and parts of his own body, incorporated neon tubes into sculptures, and made his now-familiar neon reliefs. He was a pioneer in using his body as a component in live performances, photographs, films, and video recordings. These early experiments, in which he discovered process to be more fundamental than product, established his reputation as one of the most innovative artists of his generation. He created virtually all of his landmark early films and videos during this period, and he was among the first artists ever to include video works in a gallery exhibition.

Over the years, Nauman’s work has remained constant in its explorations yet diverse in range. He employs forms that range from Post-Minimalism and Conceptual art to film and video installations, in which a series of themes and ideas consistently appear: the use of the human body as material; the integration of art and language; the relationship of art and architecture; and such dichotomies as concealment and revelation; interior and exterior; and positive and negative space. Ultimately, as Nauman has stated (quoted by Brenda Richardson in the exhibition catalogue, Bruce Nauman, Neons): “In the end, I think most of my work…[is about] why anybody continues to make art. It’s always interested me how one does any work in the studio at all, what it’s supposed to be about, how you get things started or make sense of the process. Even though the work is coming from somewhere inside, you can’t put your finger on the source, and it never happens twice the same way. When you can’t do any work, you can’t figure out how to get it started, and once it’s started, you can’t figure out where it came from.”

A Rose Has No Teeth provides an unprecedented investigation of Nauman’s career, influences, and contributions to contemporary art, adding to scholarship on both the artist and a particularly influential period in American art history. Lewallen conducted over forty interviews with Nauman’s former teachers, colleagues, friends, and students, as well as artists associated with the Conceptual art movement in the Bay Area. Her conversations with photographer Jack Fulton, who collaborated with Nauman in the 1960s, led to the discovery of a long-forgotten cache of outtakes from the 1970 screen print series, Studies for Holograms.

Published by University of California Press, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, the 256-page, illustrated catalogue, will contribute significantly to existing scholarship on the artist and on Bay Area art movements of the 1960s. The book will include essays by Anne Wagner, an art historian and UC Berkeley art history professor; Robert Storr, an artist, critic, and former curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; curator and writer Robert Riley; and exhibition curator Constance Lewallen, for whom Bay Area art of the 1960s has long been an interest. “If the Minimalists took sculpture off the pedestal,” writes Lewallen in the catalogue, “Nauman was among those who made the creative process fully evident in the work’s final form.”

Image: Bruce Nauman, Infrared Outtakes: Neck Pull (photographed by Jack Fulton), 1968/2006. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of the artist and Gemini G.E.L. LLC. All artworks © 2006 Bruce Nauman/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Media contact: Tara Alcancia t 713 525 9469 press@menil.org

Exhibition Preview: Wednesday, October 24, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

The Menil Collection
1515 Sul Ross Street Houston, TX 77006
open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Admission and parking are free.

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