Some forty-odd years after Bruce Nauman began tweaking the conventions of studio practice and the hallowed persona of the 'artist-as-seer,' Pamela M. Lee wrote in Artforum not long ago, "his station in postwar art history rests secure. His influence--whether through his affectless, task-based performances, his sculptural castings of negative space, or his intermedia mash-ups of language, video and noise--is everywhere apparent in contemporary art." Indeed, from the American artist's early work in sculpture and video, made in the 1960s, through his famous spiral of neon letters spelling out "the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths," which at once summarized and opened to critique the perennial mystique of the artist, up through his three-venue Golden Lion Award-winning exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Nauman's work has long been an indispensable part of the narrative of recent American art. This essential volume, published in DuMont's fantastic Collector's Choice series, treats these and other recurrent themes of his oeuvre, such as sound, language, corporeality and dance, reproducing works from across his career and and providing a new standard overview of this ever-popular artist.
FROM THE BOOK"It its materialistic inversion the metaphysical certainty of 'die and become' is--and quite unequivocally so--nothing but biological passing. It is towards this atheist materialism that Bruce Nauman directs his doubts and his questions. Although his thinking is by no means intentionally metaphysical, these existential boundaries nevertheless mark the point of departure for his measuring of being. The fact that for Nauman the mystical relates to truth, and the two of them in turn to art, was articulated by the artist early on in a tone entirely devoid of derision, if to a degree ironic. And the fact that he considers his investigations political has also been emphasized by Nauman on different occasions: 'Your Activity does become moral and political in the sense that whenever an artist or a philosopher chooses to do original work he threatens the stability of what is known about the discipline, and that is a political situation.' What has continued to drive him right through to the present day, moreover, is his anger about the state of humanity: 'My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition.'"
Eugen Blume, excerpted from Bruce Nauman: Live or Die--or: The Measuring of Being in Bruce Nauman: Live or Die.
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