Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman was born December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied art, mathematics, and physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1960 to 1964. He went on to study under William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California at Davis, graduating with an M.F.A. in 1966. In 1964, Nauman gave up painting and began experimenting with sculpture and Performance art and collaborated with William Allan and Robert Nelson on film projects. He supported himself teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and again at the University of California at Irvine, in 1970.
Since the mid-1960s, the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes sculptures, films, holograms, interactive environments, neon wall reliefs, photographs, prints, sculptures, videotapes, and performance. His Conceptual work stresses meaning over aesthetics; it often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about existence and alienation, and increasingly it provokes the viewer’s participation and dismay.
In 1966, the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, held Nauman’s first solo exhibition. In 1968, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and the Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, initiated a long series of solo shows. Also in 1968, he was invited for the first time to participate in Documenta in Kassel, and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to work in New York for one year. In 1972, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work, which traveled in Europe and the United States. Nauman moved to New Mexico in 1979. A major retrospective was held at the Rijksmuseum Króller-Müller, Otterlo, and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, in 1981. Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, he has developed disturbing psychological and physical themes with imagery based on animal and human body parts.
Nauman has received many honors, including an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, the Max Beckmann Prize in 1990, the Wolf Prize in Arts-Sculpture in 1993, and the Wexner Prize in 1994. The most recent Nauman retrospective was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and traveled to many venues throughout America and Europe from 1993 to 1995. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s
Others have written about Bruce Nauman's Northern California years, but this exhibition and its accompanying catalog are the first to explore in depth Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and often most innovative works. Between 1964, when he arrived in Northern California, and 1969, when he left the area definitively, Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary. He explored new, untested materials in his early fiberglass and rubber sculptures, as well as the methodology that became known as Post-minimal. He was also among the first to use his body as an expressive instrument in live performance and in his classic studio performances made for film and video, and was among the pioneers of the latter form. His search for new means and sources of expression led him to experiment with neon in sign-like reliefs, to make interactive installations, and to explore the relationship between words and images. He also made his first strictly sound piece during this time.
As a graduate student at UC Davis (1964–66), Nauman studied with Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, and William Wiley. Wiley was especially sensitive and receptive to Nauman's unconventional approach to artmaking. He encouraged Nauman to experiment and, following his own example, not to worry about the final appearance of a work. To this day, Nauman takes a piece as far as he needs to in order to do the job—surface refinement is superfluous.
Nauman had arrived in California in 1964 already possessed of many of the ingredients that were to nourish his art—a grounding in mathematics, science, philosophy, and music, for example—as well as a solid moral sense and, most importantly, a keen and curious mind. Once in California, Nauman not only observed what was happening in visual art on the West Coast and beyond through publications and contact with visiting artists at UC Davis, but drew information from the Bay Area's vibrant new dance and music scenes. Literature (Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Malcolm Lowry, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, in particular) and Gestalt psychology also played into his artmaking.
Many of the themes and subjects that appear in Nauman's work to this day can be found in some of his very earliest works, including in a group of sketches that he left behind in his graduate studio that have only recently come to light. These include the artist's studio as a site; the relationship of sculpture to its physical environment; fountains, stairs, and chairs as metaphor; wordplay (encouraged by Wiley and Arneson); the inversion of exterior and interior; the tension between exposure and concealment; and the art potential of ordinary activities. Most important, though, are the fundamental themes he addresses throughout his oeuvre—the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over whatever form it takes—that define his work and profoundly influence artists all over the world.
Because it seemed to exemplify many aspects of his philosophy, I named this show A Rose Has No Teeth after the eponymous work, an embossed lead plaque, which Nauman made in 1966 when he was only twenty-four years old. The piece is at once a commentary on traditional outdoor sculpture, which Nauman found uninspiring, and a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's language theory as put forth in Philosophical Investigations, from which the phrase derives. The artist intended the plaque to be affixed to a tree where, over time, it would disappear as the bark grew over it. As Nauman sees it, more typical outdoor sculpture, large and ambitious as it might be, can never compete with the scale and grandeur of nature itself. Not surprisingly, given his intelligence and range, Nauman was able, in this unprepossessing work, to raise fundamental questions about both art and language.
Nauman, although geographically removed from the centers of Conceptual art activity, was in the forefront of the revolutionary changes taking place in art and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist. Even as a graduate student, Nauman demonstrated a precociousness and originality that made adventurous curators and dealers take notice. He had his first major solo show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1966 just before receiving his master's degree, and by 1969 was exhibiting with the leading galleries for vanguard art—Leo Castelli in New York and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf. He was included in virtually all the early landmark Post-minimal and Conceptual art exhibitions; in 1972 a survey of his work was co-organized by Jane Livingston at the Los Angeles County Museum and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, an unusual tribute to such a young artist.
Co-published by BAM/PFA and UC Press, the catalog that accompanies the exhibition contains important essays by UC Berkeley art historian Anne Wagner, art historian and curator Robert Storr, and media curator and critic Robert Riley, along with my essay tracing the development of Nauman's work of the late 1960s.

Bruce Nauman wins Praemium Imperiale Award 7 June 2004
The American artist Bruce Nauman was named a winner yesterday of a $135,000 Praemium Imperiale award for sculpture. Other winners of the awards, given annually by the Japan Arts Association to recognize lifetime achievement in arts categories not recognized by the Nobel Prizes, were Georg Baselitz of Germany for painting, Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil for architecture, Krzysztof Penderecki of Poland for music and Abbas Kiarostami of Iran for film. In addition, the Young Sound Forum of Central Europe, a contemporary-music orchestra, was awarded a $45,000 Grant for Young Artists.
BRUCE NAUMAN
Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Since the mid-1960's he has created a far-ranging body of work that underlines his determination to describe the human condition in all its contradictions. His conceptual work stresses meaning over form and often uses irony and wordplay to raise issues about alienation. Like many of his peers in the 1960's, Nauman was expanding artistic practice by introducing performance into his work, moving away from static objects to create an art of experience. The performance-based works offer investigations of our most basic physical emotions and psychological states. Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists today and has set standards both in the diversity of his artistic means and the breadth of his concerns.

Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light
Bruce Nauman deals with the big questions of life, in the words of his 1983 neon: Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain. Nauman's work focuses on the essential elements of the human experience. Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, premiering at the Milwaukee Art Museum January 28 – April 9, is Nauman's first solo exhibition in Wisconsin, the state in which he was raised. Bruce Nauman has been recognized since the early 1970s as one of America's most innovative and provocative contemporary artists.
Bruce Nauman works in diverse media; this exhibition focuses solely on light. Light offered Nauman a medium that has the quality of being both elusive and effervescent while aggressively pervading an environment with its message. Nauman's art is motivated by ideas, not an attachment to a particular medium. Through the use of neon signs, a public and familiar means of communication to relate an idea, Nauman's goal is to make the viewer think. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman noted, "he inspires reverence, or loathing…It's hard to feel indifferent to work like his."
"This exhibition is all about the visitor's experience," said Joseph D. Ketner II, Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator and curator of the exhibition. "Visitors will walk into a darkened gallery full of neon signs and fluorescent light environments. They'll experience a disorientation of light and space, just as Nauman intended."The exhibition is divided into three sections, split by two fluorescent light environments (a room and a corridor). The sections are: early neons based on identity, word game neons and figurative neons. There are approximately 15 works in the exhibition.
The first section in the exhibition features Nauman's early neons on the subject of identity. Working in his first professional studio, the neon beer signs in the shop fronts of his San Francisco neighborhood intrigued Nauman, who became determined to subvert the commercial purpose of the advertisements. In response, the artist created Window or Wall Sign (1967) and hung it in the window of his storefront studio. With this piece he sought to achieve "an art that would kind of disappear – an art that was supposed to not quite look like art." Nauman then embarked on a series of neons that grapple with questions of identity. Interested in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and building upon his early performance works, the artist produced Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (1966) as an innovative exercise in portraiture as sculpture. With My Name As Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968) he forces the viewer to contemplate a signature as the object of art.
Two fluorescent light environments divide the exhibition's three sections. The rooms force the viewer into tight or oblique spaces with harsh lighting effects that heighten the perception of space. The two works are the Helman Gallery Parallelogram (1971), a green fluorescent light room, and the Corridor with Mirror and White Lights (1971), through which the viewer must pass, providing spatial counterpoints to the neon signs.
Language, signs and symbols make up the second section. Nauman's work in neon during the 1970s emphasizes the neon as a sign, presenting provocative twists of language. He was acutely aware of the confrontational potential of neon when exhibited in a museum or gallery and offered harsh and humorous socio-political commentary in such pieces as Raw War (1970) and Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972). This series culminates in the monumental, billboard-scaled One Hundred Live and Die (1984). His largest and most complex piece neon, Nauman employs overwhelming scale to bombard the viewer with sardonic aphorisms.
In the third and final section of the exhibition, Nauman explores the pictographic potential of the medium for image-based signs. Hanged Man (1985) makes a playful reference to the children's word game while providing a biting criticism of human rights abuses then in South America and Southeast Asia. With these neons, Nauman acknowledges the great power of images to convey ideas.
Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941. He grew up in Milwaukee and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1964. His father worked for General Electric and the family moved often. Some of his family still lives in Wisconsin. Bruce Nauman currently lives in New Mexico.
A 96-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with images of 75 Nauman works. In incisive essays, Joseph Ketner II, chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Janet Kraynak, a New York based art historian, and critic Gregory Volk analyze and interpret these works in light.
The exhibition is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum's new chief curator Joseph D. Ketner II. The exhibition is sponsored by Carlene and Andy Ziegler. After its debut at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Elusive Signs travels to Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, N. Miami (2006); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (2007); Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal (2007); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Victoria (2007); and Queensland Art Gallery, Australia (2008).