Artistic space #48 - The multifaceted Bruce Nauman
Born on December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. Nauman studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and art at the University of California, in 1966 graduated as Master of Arts at the University of California, Davis (USA). In those years he also studied music and philosophy, although outside the academic field. Throughout his career he has received numerous awards and distinctions and has taught at different universities.
He had his first solo exhibition in 1966 at Nick Wilder's gallery in Los Angeles, although his international recognition came in the 1970s when some important art collections acquired pieces of his.
In his works you can appreciate his wide range of interests: from music, dance or drawing to philosophy, language, mathematics or history.
Bruce Nauman, uses scientific and artistic resources in his work, conceives art as a kind of vital attitude, as something linked to everyday life and that must have a social function. That is to say, as something that cannot be at the margin of the context (social, cultural, political, economic...) in which it is inserted. For him, what is important are not the works themselves, but the ideas, processes and reflections that make them possible and/or generate them.
In the process of creating his works, Bruce Nauman usually starts from personal memories and experiences, using very diverse resources in a symbolic way. He strips that experience of its most anecdotal details, which makes it easier for us to share it. His work Sin título (De dedos y agujeros), in which he investigates the capacity for expression of gesture and touch, is linked to the memory of his grandfather's fondness for magic, who made him interested in hand games, mimicry or the clowns' expressive code since he was a child.
In the 1980s he moved to New Mexico. Much of his work is characterized by an interest in language and its ambivalent capacity. In 1990 he received the Max Beckmann Prize in 2002 he participated in the exhibition Sunday Afternoon for gallery 303 in New York, curated by Patricia Martin, was a selection of works to highlight how the minimization of means and gestures through repetition can produce works of extreme visual, physical and conceptual density. In 2004 he exhibited his work Raw Materials at Tate Modern, London. He is the third most sought-after artist according to Artfacts.
Bruce Nauman's art has always moved beyond the problems of the medium, style or self-conscious expression. Rather, his interests have been directed towards an art generated outside of itself and using an enormous register of non-traditional materials; discarding the old idea that an artist must develop a personal and unique style. Creation is for him a vital act, a commitment of the artist as a person and he tries to relate it to the nature of man rather than to the nature of art. His personality and work have revolutionized artistic practice and exerted an enormous influence over the last three decades, still visible in this new millennium.
Nauman's exceptionality is not due to a romantic or idealizing attitude towards his role, but to a fair adaptation of his artistic formation and conception to contemporary scientific thought, to his musical knowledge, to his expressed interest in literature, philosophy, politics and their influence on our recent history, and even to choreography and dance. Ludwig Wittgestein and Samuel Beckett have been the two authors who have most influenced his work, or with whom he has longest "lived".
In 1981 Bruce Nauman decides to return to work on a real scale, making the three sculptures that make up his South America Series. South America Triangle is the first of the three and has great importance in the further development of his work.
Two of his first sculptures, Cup and Saucer falling over and Cup merging from its Saucer, both made in 1965 when the artist was 25 years old. Still a student, Nauman made a series of performances using simple gestures and actions derived from the manipulation of a fluorescent tube in order to obtain human forms and some of these were recorded on video. These video works are documentation of the actions but at the same time a reflection on the properties of filmic language. One of the artist's mystical pieces, his 1969 Performance Corridor. It is the first of a long series of space pieces with which the artist proposes a reflection on experience.
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