Word: nauman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nauman is good at a particular sort of put-on, a sour clownishness. He makes art so dumb that you can't guess whether its dumbness is genuine or feigned. When you see his spiral neon piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, you assume it's irony, the cadaver of "inspirational" American romanticism-until you reflect that maybe that's what Nauman really thought, or what the vestigial romantic in him would have liked to think, but in no case can the mere neon sign deliver on its promise, and this frustration (one assumes...
When it is really silly, the dumbness can be disarming, as it was with Nauman's predecessor, the American Dada gagman Man Ray. Witness early Nauman photo pieces like Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966-67, the artist expelling a jet of water through his pursed lips. And it is fully in the tradition of Marcel Du-champ, whose puns were equally feeble. An early Nauman like From Hand to Mouth, 1967 (a wax cast of the artist's arm, shoulder and throat) is a retread of Duchamp's 1959 With My Tongue in My Cheek, a cast...
Much is made of Nauman's use of words. His slogans--EAT AND DIE, TOUCH AND LIVE, HATE AND DIE and so on, done in flashing neon--are laconic, all right, but Beckett and Wittgenstein they're not, though the co-curator, Robert Storr, tries stubbornly to argue otherwise. Such eminent names--and Alain Robbe-Grillet's too--function as votive tin cans hung on the tree of Nauman's reputation, enhancing the piety with which one is meant to approach...
...rate, odder--as a conceit than it looks on the floor or the wall. It may be that the impulse to multiply the height of the letters of his written name 14 times their normal size and then trace the result in neon tubing satisfies some inner necessity for Nauman, but for anyone who isn't Nauman, it's meaningless. And you soon lose interest in the "animated" neon pieces, with their spasmodic one-two, on-off movements of violence or puppet sex. They are one-liner art, no matter what windy claims surround them...
Nevertheless, there are moments, individual works in the show, that develop a peculiar grip. An early one is a small white room with nothing in it except two speakers on opposite walls, from which comes a hissing, weirdly broken repetition of two phrases, recited by Nauman: "Get out of this room. Get out of my mind." The paranoid intensity of this cell has to be experienced to be believed. Another is a video piece: the projected image of a mime, with a chair suspended from the ceiling behind it and a green wax head on the chair. A disembodied voice...