She grabs the cocktail glass and throws the drink in his face. You didn’t get any introduction, you didn’t get any tail—you just got full intensity for two minutes or twenty minutes or whatever. Video by Bruce Nauman. I just put one on over the other, so that by the time the last one went on it was almost black. The scripting, having the characters act out these roles and the repetition all build on that aggressive tension. About twenty years ago—this was in ‘66 and ‘67—I was living in San Francisco, and I had access to a lot of film equipment. The moulage is a kind of gel you heat up. While making it, he was also reading the journal of the 1803 expedition – led by Meriweather Lewis and William Clark – to what became the north-western US. That was all you got. It’s a dangerous situation and I think that what I was doing, and what I am going to do and what most of us probably do, is to use the tension between what you tell and what you don’t tell as part of the work. Because your imagination is left to deal with that isolation, the image becomes more powerful, in the same way that the murder offstage can be more powerful than if it took place right in front of you. Because it was in a separate room, the sound was baffled; you only got the higher tones. Then I made the wax cast, which became very super-realistic—hyper-realistic. So, in the end, for South American Triangle, I decided that I would just suspend the chair and then hang a triangle around it. I just put one on top of the other and a metal plate in between and hung it all from the ceiling. Nauman’s most basic resource – his own body in the studio – has often formed material for his work. Reading the Naipaul clarified things for me and helped me continue. SIMON  What David Whitney wrote about your Composite Photo of Two Messes on the Studio Floor (1967)—that “it is a direct statement on how the artist lives, works and thinks”—could apply in general to the variety of works you made in your San Francisco studio from 1966-68. It didn’t help me to figure out how the bolts went on. Pacing around, for example. It’s not like a circle or square that gives you security. According to this account of his routine, Nauman never makes any art, which of course isn’t true. “If someone hit him with a snowball when we were walking to school, he wouldn’t just throw a snowball back, he’d attack. After all, it was hard work; it was a painful struggle and tough. It’s really stuck in my mind. As a result, your pieces accrue all sorts of meaning over time. “I probably had the violin around for a month or two before I made the film,” Nauman said in an interview conducted at San Jose State College in 1970 with Willoughby Sharp. NAUMAN  It’s similar with the neon pieces that have transformers, buzzing and clicking and what not; in some places I’ve installed them, people are disturbed by these sounds. “I had a friend in high school who was a little bit of a loner,” says the artist, speaking by phone from New York. It seemed very straightforward to use all those different ways of expressing ideas or presenting material. The chairs didn’t have to be on the floor to function. NAUMAN  You mean the piece that said, “Get out of the room, get out of my mind”? Some still do. He tells me about his friend, the trainer Ray Hunt, who “was very intuitive with the horses. Think of the electric chair, or that chair they put you in when the police shine the lights on you. “If someone hit him with a snowball when we were walking to school, he wouldn’t just throw a snowball back, he’d attack. I managed to stand myself back up, and it was as though nothing had happened. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. They were socialists and they had points to make that were not only moral and political, but also ethical. But then it’s repeated three more times: the man and woman exchange roles, then the scene is played by two men and then by two women. I first made From Hand to Mouth as a drawing—actually there were two or three different drawings—just the idea of drawing “from hand to mouth.” But I couldn’t figure out exactly how to make the drawing. So with Violent Incident, which is shown on twelve monitors at the same time, the sound works differently for each installation. I was fascinated by mathematical problems, particularly the one called “squaring the circle.” You know, for hundreds of years mathematicians tried to find a geometrical way of finding a square equal in area to a circle—a formula where you could construct one from the other. As a statement, it’s hokey, ridiculous – but perhaps, on some level, true. He turns around and yells at her—calls her names. Apparently, he poured me quite a few bourbons – because when Merce finally came in, I went to stand up and my legs just gave way from under me. SIMON  The whole idea of the mask, of abstracting a personality, of simultaneously presenting and denying a self, is a recurring concern in your work. Some artists need lots, some don’t. The simplest version was Musical Chairs (Studio Piece) in 1983, which has a chair hanging at the outside edge of a circumference of suspended steel Xs. Of course, you put on makeup before you film in the movies. Three men were sitting around a campfire. What is given and what is withheld become the work. Part of it has to do with an idea of beauty. Send us a tip using our anonymous form. And I remember, when I think back to that time, a chair Beuys did with a wedge of suet on the seat. Also, when you think about vaudeville clowns or circus clowns, there is a lot of cruelty and meanness. But it seems that rather than alluding to this melancholic or tragic side of the clown persona the video emphasizes the different types of masks, the historically specific genres of clowns or clown costumes. © Art21, Inc. 2001. And I think that it is one of those pieces that I can go back to. Later, I realized it was never going to be like that, it was always going to be a struggle. SIMON  A number of early pieces specifically capture what’s “not there.” I’m thinking about the casts of “invisible spaces”: the space between two crates on the floor, for example, or the “negative” space under a chair. In one of them, the viewer who could deal with walking down such a long claustrophobic passage would approach a video monitor on which were seen disconcerting and usually “invisible” glimpses of his or her own back. They cover a wide range of topics related to the interests Nauman pursued in his sculptures, performances, and videos: casts and impressions, morality and ethics, puns and jokes, and more. Working in sculpture, video, film, printmaking, performance, and installation, Nauman concentrates less on the development of a characteristic style and more on the way in which a process or activity can transform or become a work of art. The Last Studio Piece, which was made in the late ’70s when I was still living in Pasadena, was made from parts of two other pieces—plaster semicircles that look like a cloverleaf and a large square—and I finally just stuck them together. The piece was originally recorded on film, and later transferred to video.As the film rolled through the camera, it made an incessant clicking sound. Bruce Nauman, Selected Photographs & Excerpts From An Interview Posted on October 23, 2010 by fARTiculate Bruce Nauman, Self Portrait as a Fountain, 1966–67, from Eleven Color Photographs, 1970. Much of this inventiveness has been based on very slender means, often the materials to hand in the studio. It intentionally embarrasses someone and triggers the action. That kid doesn’t get to play anymore, has nothing to do, has to stand in the corner or whatever. In this interview, Bruce Nauman talks about how he came to use stairs as a recurring motif in his work. I think the hardest thing to do is to present an idea in the most straightforward way. In that sense, the early work, which seems to have all kinds of materials and ideas in it, seemed very simple to make because it wasn’t coming from looking at sculpture or painting. He really taught you to let them figure things out on their own, not trying to be in control all the time. But basically I couldn’t function as a painter. ART21: Is there a story behind the stairs? I think he may have hung it on the wall. And he laughs. You spend all of this time in the studio and then when you do present the work, there is a kind of self-exposure that is threatening. The circularity is also a lot like La Monte Young’s idea about music. A video work of his detritus-filled studio is what visitors to Tate Modern will see as soon as they enter the exhibition; the real thing is on the ranch near Santa Fe in New Mexico, where he has lived for over 30 years. The Bruce Nauman quotation is taken from Marcia Tucker, Bruce Nauman, in: Jane Livingston and Marcia Tucker, eds., Bruce Nauman. Oral history interview with Bruce Nauman, 1980 May 27-May 30 [sound recording]. His approach was to step outside the problem. But as she sits down, he pulls the chair out from under her and she falls on the floor. He’d get ’em down on the ground and pound on him.”. I can see a connection to the Art Makeup film we talked about, but why did you use such theatrical clowns? Bruce Nauman’s wildly influential, relentlessly imitated work explores the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure. With a game you just follow the rules. Many artists used to feel all right about making a living with their art because they identified with the working class. Bruce Nauman’s work functions as an eerie societal litmus test. NAUMAN  I know there are artists who function in relation to beauty—who try to make beautiful things. NAUMAN  Well, it’s funny you should ask that, because not long ago I read this book in which a character goes to funeral homes or morgues, and puts this moulage stuff on people and makes plaster casts—death masks—for their families. SIMON  The whole idea of the visual puns, works like Henry Moore Bound to Fail and From Hand to Mouth, complicates this notion of how we look at an object. And, perhaps, another sort of discipline too. No matter how aggressive, provocative, or plain horrific, the artist continues to expand both his intellectual and physical confines to bewilder, bewitch, and bemoan an international audience. He poured me a bourbon. In the past, the studio was for the afternoons, after he’d spent the morning working with the horses he raised and bred professionally. Now this action takes all of about eighteen seconds. My first idea was to have a hand in the mouth with some kind of connection—a bar, or some kind of mechanical connection. Truth or hokum? It brings to mind the very start of the show: that video of Nauman repeatedly falling into the corner of the studio. Again, it becomes something you can’t get to. He’s still producing plenty of new work, including Nature Morte, a new 3D scan of his studio on show in his New York gallery, Sperone Westwater. It was just supposed to be a visual pun, or a picture of a visual pun. You could say that if you make a statement it eliminates the options; on the other hand if you’re a logician, the opposite immediately becomes a possibility. “I had a friend in high school who was a little bit of a loner,” says the artist, speaking by phone from New York. through more than 40 works, the exhibition at tate modern — simply titled ‘bruce nauman’ — explores the distinctive themes that have preoccupied nauman during his 50-year career. Production still from the Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 episode, Identity. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat.” We’re putting the interview online to mark the occasion of “Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts,” a comprehensive retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through February 18, 2019, and at MoMA PS1 through February 25. In hockey breaking the rules turns into fighting—you can’t do that in a bar and get away with it. Or in Man Ray, who also interests me. In the half century of his public career, he has given only a handful of interviews. SIMON  Recently, you’ve returned to video for the first time since the late ’60s. NAUMAN  No, I don’t mean that it was simple to do the work. In this interview, Bruce Nauman talks about how he came to use stairs as a recurring motif in his work. It’s a way of structuring something so that you don’t have to make a story. It’s hard to make any contact with an idea or an abstraction. NAUMAN  Well, I had made a tape of sounds in the studio. It helped me to name names, to name things. Bruce Nauman watches a video of Untitled (1998–99) in his studio, New Mexico, 2000. I find triangles really uncomfortable, disconcerting kinds of spaces. And the tape says over and over again, “Get out of the room, get out of my mind.” I said it a lot of different ways: I changed my voice and distorted it, I yelled it and growled it and grunted it. We want to hear from you! What I tend to do is see something, then remake it and remake it and remake it and try every possible way of remaking it. What it conveys to me is the idea of the studio as, on the one hand, something familiar and everyday; and on the other, a vast and mysterious territory, full of potential incident and drama that the artist cannot control. You just happen to come in at the part he’s playing that day. NAUMAN  The first corridor pieces were about having someone else do the performance. NAUMAN  With the clown videotape, there are four different clown costumes: one of them is the Emmett Kelly dumb clown; one is the old French Baroque clown (I guess it’s French); one is a sort of traditional polka-dot, red-haired, oversize­shoed clown; and one is a jester. Then I complicated it by turning the camera upside down or sideways, or organizing my pacing to various sounds. That was really depressing. It all seems empty, eventless – but if you pay attention, you might see a cat whisk through a shot, or a flicker that might be a rat. One critic, Robert Storr, said recently, “Unlike settling into the reassuring ‘armchair’ of Matisse’s painting, to take one’s seat in Nauman’s art is to risk falling on one’s head. See the renowned permanent collection and special exhibitions. NAUMAN  That film—which was also later a video­tape—has a rather simple story behind it. And for this reason, because clowns are abstract in some sense, they become very disconcerting. And from the time I spent in San Francisco going to the Art Institute, and before that in Wisconsin. And it’s really a frightening piece. They are moved by beautiful things and they see that as their role: to provide or make beautiful things for other people. NAUMAN  “It was a dark and stormy night. Nauman, Bruce, 1941-. “I’ve never been able to stick to one thing.”1 For more than 50 years, he has worked in every conceivable artistic medium, dissolving established genres and inventing new ones in the process. But art is like cheating—it involves inverting the rules or taking the game apart and changing it. . Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. We all sat back down and discussed what my role might be.”. They struggle and both of them end up on the floor. The whole idea of Dada was that you didn’t have to make your living with your art; so that generation could be more provocative with less risk. SIMON  An early example of masking the figure—your figure, to be precise—was your 1969 film Art Makeup. ” ’ ”. If I’m persistent enough, I get back to where I started. I didn’t want to have to go through all that every time. 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