BREAKING THE SILENCE: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE NAUMAN

Joan Smalls

September 1, 1988 10:00am

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/breaking-silence-interview-bruce-nauman-63570/

BRUCE NAUMAN There is a tendency to clutter things up, to try to make sure people know something is art, when all that’s necessary is to present it, to leave it alone. I think the hardest thing to do is to present an idea in the most straightforward way.

What I tend to do is see something, then remake it and remake it and remake it and try every possible way of remaking it. If I’m persistent enough, I get back to where I started. I think it was Jasper Johns who said, “Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious.”

Still, how to proceed is always the mystery. I remember at one point thinking that some day I would figure out how you do this, how you do art—like, “What’s the procedure here, folks?”—and then it wouldn’t be such a struggle anymore. Later, I realized it was never going to be like that, it was always going to be a struggle. I realized I would never have a specific process; I would have to re-invent it, over and over again. That was really depressing.

After all, it was hard work; it was a painful struggle and tough. I didn’t want to have to go through all that every time. But of course you do have to continually rediscover and re-decide, and it’s awful. It’s just an awful thing to have to do.

On the other hand, that’s what’s interesting about making art, and why it’s worth doing: it’s never going to be the same, there is no method. If I stop and try to look at how I got the last piece done, it doesn’t help me with the next one.

JOAN SIMON What do you think about when you’re working on a piece?

NAUMAN I think about Lenny Tristano a lot. Do you know who he was? Lenny Tristano was a blind pianist, one of the original—or maybe second generation—bebop guys. He’s on a lot of the best early bebop records. When Lenny played well, he hit you hard and he kept going until he finished. Then he just quit. You didn’t get any introduction, you didn’t get any tail—you just got full intensity for two minutes or twenty minutes or whatever. It would be like taking the middle out of Coltrane—just the hardest, toughest part of it. That was all you got.

From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn’t give you any trace of whether you’re going to like it or not.

SIMON In trying to capture that sort of intensity over the past twenty or so years you’ve worked in just about every medium: film, video, sound, neon, installation, performance, photography, holography, sculpture, drawing—but not painting. You gave that up very early on. Why?

NAUMAN When I was in school I was a painter. And I went back and forth a couple of times. But basically I couldn’t function as a painter. Painting is one of those things I never quite made sense of. I just couldn’t see how to proceed as a painter. It seemed that if I didn’t think of myself as a painter, then it would be possible to continue.

It still puzzles me how I made decisions in those days about what was possible and what wasn’t. I ended up drawing on music and dance and literature, using thoughts and ideas from other fields to help me continue to work. In that sense, the early work, which seems to have all kinds of materials and ideas in it, seemed very simple to make because it wasn’t coming from looking at sculpture or painting.

SIMON That doesn’t sound simple.

NAUMAN No, I don’t mean that it was simple to do the work. But it was simple in that in the ’60s you didn’t have to pick just one medium. There didn’t seem to be any problem with using different kinds of materials—shifting from photographs to dance to performance to videotapes. It seemed very straightforward to use all those different ways of expressing ideas or presenting material. You could make neon signs, you could make written pieces, you could make jokes about parts of the body or casting things, or whatever.

SIMON Do you see your work as part of a continuum with other art or other artists?

NAUMAN Sure there are connections, though not in any direct way. It’s not that there is someone in particular you emulate. But you do see other artists asking the same kinds of questions and responding with some kind of integrity.

There’s a kind of restraint and morality in Johns. It isn’t specific, I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s there, I feel it’s there. It’s less there, but still important, in Duchamp. Or in Man Ray, who also interests me. Maybe the morality I sense in Man Ray has to do with the fact that while he made his living as a fashion photographer, his art works tended to be jokes—stupid jokes. The whole idea of Dada was that you didn’t have to make your living with your art; so that generation could be more provocative with less risk. Then there is the particularly American idea about morality that has to do with the artist as workman. Many artists used to feel all right about making a living with their art because they identified with the working class. Some still do. I mean, I do, and I think Richard Serra does.

SIMON No matter how jokey or stylistically diverse or visually dazzling your works are, they always have an ethical side, a moral force.

NAUMAN I do see art that way. Art ought to have a moral value, a moral stance, a position. I’m not sure where that belief comes from. In part it just comes from growing up where I grew up and from my parents and family. And from the time I spent in San Francisco going to the Art Institute, and before that in Wisconsin. From my days at the University of Wisconsin, the teachers I remember were older guys—they wouldn’t let women into teaching easily—and they were all WPA guys. They were socialists and they had points to make that were not only moral and political, but also ethical. Wisconsin was one of the last socialist states, and in the ’50s, when I lived there and went to high school there, Milwaukee still had a socialist mayor. So there were a lot of people who thought art had a function beyond being beautiful—that it had a social reason to exist.

Early Work

SIMON What David Whitney wrote about your Composite Photo of Two Messes on the Studio Floor (1967)—that “it is a direct statement on how the artist lives, works and thinks”—could apply in general to the variety of works you made in your San Francisco studio from 1966-68.

NAUMAN I did some pieces that started out just being visual puns. Since these needed body parts in them, I cast parts of a body and assembled them or presented them with a title. There was also the idea that if I was in the studio, whatever I was doing was art. Pacing around, for example. How do you organize that to present it as art? Well, first I filmed it. Then I videotaped it. Then I complicated it by turning the camera upside down or sideways, or organizing my pacing to various sounds.

In a lot of the early work I was concerned with ideas about inside and outside and front and back—how to turn them around and confuse them. Take the Window or Wall Sign—you know, the neon piece that says, “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” That idea occurred to me because of the studio I had in San Francisco at the time. It had been a grocery store, and in the window there was still a beer sign which you read from the outside. From the inside, of course, it was backwards. So when I did the earliest neon pieces, they were intended to be seen through the window one way and from the inside another way, confusing the message by reversing the image.

SIMON Isn’t your interest in inverting ideas, in showing what’s “not there,” and in solving—or at least revealing—”impossible” problems related in part to your training as a mathematician?

NAUMAN I was interested in the logic and structure of math and especially how you could turn that logic inside out. I was fascinated by mathematical problems, particularly the one called “squaring the circle.” You know, for hundreds of years mathematicians tried to find a geometrical way of finding a square equal in area to a circle—a formula where you could construct one from the other. At some point in the nineteenth century, a mathematician—I can’t remember his name—proved it can’t be done. His approach was to step outside the problem. Rather than struggling inside the problem, by stepping outside of it, he showed that it was not possible to do it at all.

Standing outside and looking at how something gets done, or doesn’t get done, is really fascinating and curious. If I can manage to get outside of a problem a little bit and watch myself having a hard time, then I can see what I’m going to do—it makes it possible. It works.

SIMON A number of early pieces specifically capture what’s “not there.” I’m thinking about the casts of “invisible spaces”: the space between two crates on the floor, for example, or the “negative” space under a chair.

NAUMAN Casting the space under a chair was the sculptural version of de Kooning’s statement: “When you paint a chair, you should paint the space between the rungs, not the chair itself.” I was thinking like that: about leftovers and negative spaces.

SIMON But your idea of negative space is very different from the sculptor’s traditional problem of locating an object in space or introducing space into a solid form.

NAUMAN Negative space for me is thinking about the underside and the backside of things. In casting, I always like the parting lines and the seams—things that help to locate the structure of an object, but in the finished sculpture usually get removed. These things help to determine the scale of the work and the weight of the material. Both what’s inside and what’s outside determine our physical, physiological and psychological responses—how we look at an object.

SIMON The whole idea of the visual puns, works like Henry Moore Bound to Fail and From Hand to Mouth, complicates this notion of how we look at an object. They are similar to readymades. On the one hand, they translate words or phrases into concrete form—in a sense literalizing them. On the other hand, they are essentially linguistic plays, which means abstracting them. I’m curious about the thought process that went into conceiving those works. For instance, how did From Hand to Mouth come about?

NAUMAN In that case, the cast was of someone else, not of myself as has generally been assumed—but that doesn’t really matter. It was just supposed to be a visual pun, or a picture of a visual pun.

I first made From Hand to Mouth as a drawing—actually there were two or three different drawings—just the idea of drawing “from hand to mouth.” But I couldn’t figure out exactly how to make the drawing. My first idea was to have a hand in the mouth with some kind of connection—a bar, or some kind of mechanical connection. I finally realized that the most straightforward way to present the idea would be to cast that entire section of the body. Since I couldn’t cast myself, I used my wife as the model.

I worked with the most accurate casting material I could find, something called moulage. I found the stuff at some police shop. You know, they used it to cast tire prints and things like that. It’s actually a very delicate casting process; you could pick up fingerprints in the dust with it. The moulage is a kind of gel you heat up. Because it’s warm when you apply it to a body, it opens up all the pores—it picks up all that, even the hairs. But it sets like five-day-old Jell-O. You have to put plaster or something over the back of it to make it hold its shape. Then I made the wax cast, which became very super-realistic—hyper-realistic. You could see things you don’t normally see—or think about—on people’s skin.

SIMON All your work seems to depend not only on this kind of tactile precision, but also on a kind of incompleteness—a fragmentariness, a sense of becoming. As a result, your pieces accrue all sorts of meaning over time. With From Hand to Mouth—completed over twenty years ago—what other meanings have occurred to you?

NAUMAN Well, it’s funny you should ask that, because not long ago I read this book in which a character goes to funeral homes or morgues, and puts this moulage stuff on people and makes plaster casts—death masks—for their families. I had no idea that this was a profession. But it turns out that this moulage is a very old, traditional kind of material, and was often used this way. But it just connects up in a strange sort of way with my more recent work, since over the past several years I have been involved with both the idea of death and dying and the idea of masking the figure.

(…)

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Reading this interview was very good for my because I resonated with Naumans words on a lot of levels. He in a way put words to the feelings that I have learned about this year. Art isn’t easy and there is not one path to making great work its an ongoing upward battle, and he speaks about the intensity of making art and how she in some may strives to feel that intensity over and over again. I can relate to that because I have realized that there is not answer to the problems you face during creation but once I achieve this excitement where I do not know what something might end up as, I know I am doing something right.

I also through the way he talked about anything being art when it is done in a studio very interesting, because he goes on to question how can this be presented as art, which is something I am looking forward to experimenting with sop much more throughout this project. A finished work is not finished until you have explored every possibility of presenting it in a space.

Nauman also interestingly uses painting thinking ways and apples them to sculpture, which in a funny is what I have been doing this whole pathway. I might not be wowed by his work but he makes me feel more comfortable and confident in my practice with the way he expresses himself in this interview.

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