Word: nauman
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SHOULD ART BE SEEN AND NOT heard? An old-fashioned notion--the catalog to the Bruce Nauman retrospective, currently at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, has a human ear on its cover. And indeed, no show was ever noisier. Go in, and you hit a wall of sound, all disagreeable: moanings and groanings; the prolonged squeak of something being dragged over a hard surface, like a knife on a plate; repetitious rock drumming; voices reciting mantra-like inanities; and (in its own room full of TV monitors titled Clown Torture) the hoarse voice of Nauman, dressed...
...Nauman, beyond much dispute, is the most influential American artist of his generation. Born in 1941, he is of the same artistic age as Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Susan Rothenberg (whom he married in 1989), but the artists whose work he most counts for are younger; it is safe to say that hardly a corner of the mix of idioms at the end of the 1980s, from video to body pieces to process art to language games of various sorts, escaped Nauman's influence...
There's no mystery about why this should be so. What Nauman practices is a form of psychic primitivism, or atavism if you prefer. His art is chiefly about two states: compulsion and regression. When you see a videotape of him smearing his face with black or green greasepaint, you aren't sure whether he's disguising himself or simulating the fecal games of a backward child. Autism is the governing metaphor of his work's "look"--the long-winded rituals of trivial movement, the ejaculatory phrases, the bouts of ungovernable rage...
...therefore a kind of guru to artists who seek gnomic "enactments" of pain, are obsessed by splits between private and public identity--including their own feelings of victimization--and treat the body as canvas. Not for nothing does one of Nauman's video pieces feature a bewildered rat in a Plexiglas maze, scuttling about under the bombardment of rock drumming. It's Nauman's idea of the relationship between artist and audience. The artist as hero is long gone from American culture, and the artist as social critic is ineffective, but Nauman, with the example of Dada before...
...Nauman doesn't think art has much to do with pleasure. Just about everything that could turn you off is catnip to him: aggro, solipsism, tension, repetition, torpor and bad jokes that may have come out of a misanthrope's fortune cookie. Boredom too. Try watching a fuzzy tape of Nauman overstretching a simple phallic pun by very slowly "manipulating" a long fluorescent tube. You don't so much enjoy this show as endure it; you get through it. Then, in the coffee shop, you peruse the catalog and find such hyperbolic drivel as this, by co-curator Kathy Halbreich...