Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
dal 23/10/2007 al 12/1/2008
Segnalato da
23/10/2007
Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
Menil Collection, Houston
A rose has no teeth
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.