“At times cryptic, at times funny, and always intellectually and emotionally challenging,” writes Robert Storr, “Nauman is fully revealed as an artist whose work is essentially contemporary and central to understanding the complex issues and interdisciplinary nature of art today. In all dimensions of his activity, Nauman touches the raw nerves of contemporary life while making private feelings and hidden doubt publicly accessible.” Bruce Nauman is installed in two roughly chronological parts. Occupying the Rene d’Harnoncourt galleries on the Museum’s lower level, Part I presents Nauman’s works from 1965 to the early 1970s. Part II, in the Museum’s third-floor contemporary painting and sculpture galleries, continues with works from the mid-1970s to 1994. The retrospective opens with Nauman’s early works, after the artist had abandoned painting and had begun exploring the very process of artistic creation in such mediums as sculpture, performance, film, video, audiotape, and holograms. Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals(1966), for example, reveals the artist’s developing interest in his own body as both sculptural medium and primary subject matter. At the same time, Nauman deftly manipulates commonplace words to expose their fundamental strangeness and intensity. He relays messages, simultaneously disconcerting and comic, in the form of one-liners, rhymes, repetition, flipped syntax, mismatches, palindromes, and cliches. Titles are often a punning reference to the work itself.
Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals
