Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
Bruce Nauman’s retrospective, which I saw at the Schaulager in Basel during the northern summer, is now at MoMA in New York. The first substantial survey in the United States for twenty-five years, and the largest ever mounted, it is overdue anywhere, everywhere. In Australia, Nauman is surely the least understood of all the great postwar American figures. Individual works, like the National Gallery of Australia’s well-loved neon The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths (Window or wall sign) and the enchanting Self-Portrait as a Fountain (both 1967), have securely established Nauman’s antic wit, and there are reasonable holdings of videos in various Australian collections. But the depths of the practice have never been plumbed here in a major exhibition.1
What is the core of this famously polyglot practice? Disappearing Acts is predicated on Nauman’s origins as a sculptor, and his long interrogations of its genres, materials and limits across many media. Counter-intuitively at first glance, curator Kathy Halbreich argues that Nauman’s consistent propensity for staging strategic disappearances is the obverse of the physical stuff of the sculptor’s studio.2 It figures: what exists can also be disappeared. So while I have been accustomed to think Nauman through the frames of conceptual interrogation, or linguistic play—both undeniably important—I had never come to grips with his long sculptor’s arm-wrestle with body and materiality.
Yet that is exactly Nauman’s territory, from the rigorous bodily studies of the late 1960s / early 1970s, to the recurring figuration seen in the performative videos and more recent neons. From 1967, for example, a lovely suite showed six inches of Nauman’s knee extended to six feet, explored in fibreglass, and through drawings