Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist.  He was born on December 16, 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance art.  He is an artist who seems to want to explore the role of the artist and how the artist himself influences the things he created. His works seem to cause people to have strong emotional responses. It is said of Nauman, "Nauman, beyond much dispute, is the most influential American artist of his generation." [Times. Robert Hughes. 1995] Though his work causes critics to strongly take sides, his art can be found in museums and private collections around the world.

He studied art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis, in 1955-1956.Nauman also studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin Madison, in 1960-1964. He was American artist, Wayne Thiebaud’s, assistant in the sixtiesand became a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1966.  Nauman met the singer and performance artist Meredith Monk in 1968.  Meredith Monk influenced his art as the first person with whom he discussed the "awareness of the body."This meeting reinforced his feeling that even an amateur's movements could become art.

Much of Nauman’swork is characterized by images which are often playful or have a“mischievous manner.”  The neon Run From Fear- Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail displays the artist’s arm tied behind his back.  This image shows Nauman’s interest in the nature of communication and the implicit problems of language as well as the role of artist as communicator and manipulator of a visual language. He received the Golden Lion of the Venice, Biennale in 1999.  He created his work Raw Material at the Tate Modern in 2004.  The influence of the works of certain musicians like John Cage, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young was vital in determining the way that Bruce Nauman would handle time in his films and videos. He sought to reproduce "the continuousness you feel in their music". These musicians and choreographers changed the effects of chance into tight-knit compositions which integrated the concept of a process as an essential element.Bruce Nauman also felt close to the obsessions of certain experimental film makers, notably Andy Warhol, whose films were characterized by a lack of story structures based on real time and the absence of editing: "My idea at the time was that the film should have no beginning or end: one should be able to come in at any time and nothing would change. All the films were supposed to be like that, because they all dealt with ongoing activities.”

            Critics variously described Nauman’s work as humorous or painful. In fact, throughout his career, his work often defied description. It was uncertain whether his pieces were sexual, aggressive, conceptual, or thought-provoking. Nauman's works were received either as a pop-psychology experiment or psychological torture, depending on the reaction they elicited.  Critics seemed to be polarized in their opinions of his works. In an interview in 1987 with Joan Simon, quoted in Artforum International, Nauman observed that his 1968 audio-installation work, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, is “so angry it scares people."

For me, I like Nauman’s Neon works because I saw his works as been very beautiful. His neon works are like advertisements that I’ve seen on business store windows.  I thought his other works were disturbing and confusing.