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Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

by Carlos Basualdo

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Winner of the Golden Lion for the Best National Participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition--La Biennale di Venezia, the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens is celebrated in this photographic documentation of the thematic installation as presented at three sites in Venice: the U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, and two of the city's most esteemed academic institutions, the Università Iuav di Venezia and the Università Ca' Foscari. With a body of work that encompasses video, installation, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and neon, and that spans from the 1960s to the present day, Bruce Nauman (born 1941) is one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Through Michele Lamanna's stunning series of photographs, commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this publication captures the visitor's experience of encountering Nauman's work and coincides with the American premiere of the artist's newest works--Days and Giorni--in Philadelphia.… (more)
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review of
Bruce Nauman's Topological Gardens
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 21, 2012

[As usual, my full review is too long for here. You can read it HERE: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/318088-review-of-bruce-nauman-s-topological-... INSTEAD.]

I saw this bk & one about Dan Flavin's work in a Half-Price Books for fairly cheap & I didn't even bother to get it b/c my interest in both of their work has waned so dramatically over the yrs. Later, I decided that maybe I shd give them both another chance so I went back & got this one. The Flavin was gone.

Where to start? I probably 1st encountered traces of Nauman's work in April of 1976 when I read the Conceptual Art anthology edited by Ursula Meyer. Looking in the bk now I see 7 (or 8 or 6) pieces represented. They're mostly basically one-liners. His famous Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain wch is a foto of him from mid-torso up spurting water out of his mouth. This, I reckon, is supposed to be witty & its significance & that of other related pieces is gone into in Topological Gardens. For me, it's kindof a "I get it" & "I move on" type of experience. The remaining pieces in Conceptual Art aren't also in Topological Gardens. One's a txt instruction piece:

"Drill a hole into the heart of a large tree and insert a microphone. Mount the amplifier and speaker in an empty room and adjust the volume to make audible any sound that might come from the tree.

"September, 1969"

Now, leif BRUSH (b. 1932) has been doing similar work monitoring the growth of plants & such-like as sound sculpture since the 1960s. I reckon that the difference here is that BRUSH did it 1st & actually did/does it while Nauman, presumably (am I wrong?) just wrote the instruction & left the (nonexistent?) realization to someone else. Now, I don't necessarily mind this absence of bringing something to physical fruition, some might even claim that the non-necessity of making an idea physical is inherent to Concept(ual) Art. Of course, most of Nauman's work is actually physical sculpture that's an outgrowth of his early body art & text pieces. & that is a big part of why they're such art market successes. Simple, but 'catchy' ideas, rendered physical thru simple means; simple, but 'catchy' ideas, that people can 'get' immediately but still, somehow, confuse w/ profundity. It's very Warholian.

I remember a bar / performance venue in Washington DC that had large black & white Nauman body art fotos on display. They were striking, as is so much financially successful commercial art, b/c of their imposing size - a size that magnified the simple content & composition. Later, in 1982, the BMA (BalTimOre Museum of Art) had a "Neons" show by Nauman. I didn't attend the show. I was annoyed by the prominent neon on display on the outside of the museum that flashed a wordplay between these 3 words: "violins, violence, silence". I hated this piece, in fact, I still do. Such a trivial wordplay elevated to something to be seen from blocks away was like having an obsessive-compulsive insist on telling you the same bad joke over & over again at a party. To make matters worse, this was supported by big bucks, by the same type of idiots who foisted Nauman on the world as a sortof US ambassador at the Venice Biennale - wch is what Topological Gardens is a catalog from.

When the BMA presented "Neons", my friend & collaborator Richard Ellsberry learned that when the show ended the neons were all to be smashed. I reckon it was too expensive to ship them & store them &, of course, they cdn't be 'allowed to fall into the wrong hands' so it was decided to destroy them instead. After all, they were industrially manufactured & more cd always be made if need be. Richard was disgusted by this waste, as was I, & proposed that we go to the BMA the last day of the show & smash them all ourselves! Brilliant! Alas, we didn't do it. It wd've been interesting to see how the museum authorities wd've responded. I reckon we wd've been prosecuted as 'criminals' & 'vandals', perhaps for doing 'millions of dollars' of damage (assuming there was a huge insurance value on them). In other words, they can & we can't.

In the acknowledgments on p 233, it's written: "Encouraged and enthused by the artist's support, we worked round the clock to put forth a proposal to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State (ECA). [..] Working with Columbia and the State Department has been both truly a privilege and pleasure for the Museum." In other words, Nauman was accepted by the State Dept as no threat to its political interests.

On p 235 of the same section, it's written: "The lenders to Topological Gardens have shown their incontrovertible appreciation of Bruce Nauman by generously dedicating their works for a six-month loan period to the exhibition". Big deal, right?!! Artists collect work from their friends thru trades, art collectors buy work that they might like but w/ a practical eye to the probable increase of its market value - collecting is investing. One of the surest ways of increasing a work's value is to get it exhibited in a museum - esp as part of an international art event that attracts enormous attn. These lenders were only doing the obvious thing to increase the resale value of the work that they own - there ain't nuthin' generous about it at all!

Under "News" in "ART Express, The Newsletter for the Roving Connoisseur (Washington, DC Volume 20 Number 2 April 2009)" - http://artexpresstravel.com/wordpress/?page_id=1786 - I find:

"We’re not willing to let the wretched economy steal Bruce Nauman’s day in the Venice sun. This is the season of the Biennale that will celebrate Nauman’s forty years in the American and international spotlight, along with the lifetime careers of John Baldessari and Yoko Ono, who will receive Golden Lions for their contributions. If the stars are aligned, Nauman will be named the premiere exhibiting artist, as well, in the most anticipated Biennale appearance since Robert Rauschenberg’s 1964 triumph. The Philadelphia Museum of Art commissioners/curators Carlos Basualdo and Michael R. Taylor, plus officials at the museum, are pressed, in the present financial climate, to raise the funds needed to support the ambitious exhibition, which is not confined to the American Pavilion alone, but will also be seen at the Università Iuavdi Venezia at Tolentini and on two floors of a 15th-century palazzo that houses the Universita Ca’ Foscari. Titled Bruce Nauman: Topological Garden, the large-scale survey will cover four decades of Nauman’s art, including installation, performance, video, and neon work. The museum says that at this writing, 80% of the funds are in place, with grants from the State Department, the Pew Charitable Trust, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the State of Pennsylvania. Donors are invited to join the “Friends of Bruce Nauman,” and they are indeed legion." [italics & emboldening mine - reviewer note]

Right, in this time of a wretched economy, it's considered by some arbiters of U.S. culture (the State Dept & the Philly MoA) a worthwhile cause to raise the funds needed to support the ambitious exhibition, this totally trite simpleton work w/ almost no social conscience & certainly w/o a grain of critical thinking about the nature of this wretched economy & the people who're truly impacted by it in the worst way. One of these “Friends of Bruce Nauman", by the by, being Sotheby's, the famous art auctioneers who've sold Nauman work. I wonder if they have a(n in)vested interest here?!!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The opening essay, "Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens", by Carlos Basualdo, one of the "U.S. Commissioners, 53rd International Art Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia" & the organizer of the catalog, is excellent. I might even like it more than I like Nauman's work. On p 19 he writes:

"Most dictionaries define topology dryly as a branch of mathematics that studies the qualitative properties of space. It is concerned not with measurements or distances but with the structure of space, and with the way in which space functions. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines topology as the mathematical study of the properties of a geometric object that remains unchanged by deformations such as bending, stretching, or squeezing but not breaking. A sphere is topologically equivalent to a cube of the same relative dimension because if they were made, for example, of modeling clay, each could be deformed into the other without being broken. A sphere is not equivalent to a doughnut because it would have to be broken to put a hole in it. Topological concepts and methods underlie much of modern mathematics, and the topological approach has clarified basic structural concepts in many of its branches. A topologist, it is commonly said, cannot distinguish a coffee cup from a doughnut, since one can be made the other by simple deformation. The urban structure of Venice, for example, might be better understood through topology than a map, since the representational language of a map is restricted to the abstract and simplified language of two-dimensionality."

Topology is still something I'm vaguely trying to 'wrap my head around' (that, in itself, being a deformation that might be interestingly described in topological terms) having had it called to my attn while in the process of making my documentary about the composer/pianist/writer/performer Franz Kamin whose work was also influenced by topology. Basualdo gives an interesting history of Venice, its mapping, its gardens, the Bienalles, their politics, & manages to tie Nauman in w/ it all & to connect him to topology. No easy feat & done elegantly. p 35:

"As the Italian Pavilion became the container for a certain idea of what Italian art could or should be, a signifier of the peninsula's newly fashioned identity, so too were the national pavilions, under Maraini, asked to become the heralds of their respective cultures and peoples, with art's assignment being that of clarifying and distilling their national identities. Maraini pursued this political goal through a careful selection process, assigning only a marginal role to the Futurists, for example, and stressing instead a more conservative, and romantic form of realism."

Pictures of the Italian & the U.S. Pavilions are shown - the Italian one being presented as Fascist & the U.S. one's being prefaced descriptively by this: "Nothing could be further from this idea than the plural and ever-changing realities that have always characterized the territories of the United States." To me, the U.S. Pavilion looks just as Fascist as the Italian one. After all, they're both 'impressive' w/ columns in the front.

Perhaps the most important part of Basualdo's essay for me is this:

"The point of departure for Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens has been to ask whether an exhibition, through its very structure, could help the viewer relate to both the work it presents and the context in which it takes place. In the case of an exhibition that sets out from the start to achieve the impossible task of representing a country, the challenge is to acknowledge that impossibility productively by making it integral to the logic of the show. It is as hard to imagine that a country could be represented by the work of a single artist - even work with the complexity of Nauman's - as it is feasible to organize a single exhibition presenting the totality of Nauman's practice in an exemplary and exhaustive way. An exhibition that is possible to imagine, though, is one whose structure allows it an active relation with both its subject and its context. In trying to produce such an exhibition, we have used the model of topology to propose a specific, contextually bounded way of approaching Nauman's practice and also of interpreting the urban structure of the city in which the exhibition is set. By allowing the audience to use its experience of the city to relate to Nauman's work, and vice versa, the exhibition sets out to question the ideological foundations of the national pavilions that frame it. Topology is used to establish these connections, to poke into these seemingly discrete territories so that their mutual resonance engenders a more intense relation between them and the audience."

Fantastico! But, uh, I think that says far more about Basualdo's intelligence than it does anything about Nauman. Recently I've been preoccupied w/ the ways that people use language magically - esp in career building. Say that you're doing this-that-&-the-other-thing & wear an expensive suit &, VOILA!, you just might con yr way into a museum director's job & access to millions of dollars that you can proceed to squander until you get fired & replaced by the next con artist. In other words, Basualdo's claim that "we have used the model of topology to propose a specific, contextually bounded way of approaching Nauman's practice and also of interpreting the urban structure of the city in which the exhibition is set" is all well & good but I'm not in the least bit convinced - it's just an exhibit in 3 places in Venice. I don't believe that that really accomplishes more than insuring that people in different parts of the city will witness some Nauman w/o having to travel to all 3 locales. It seems to me that Basualdo's theory has far over-reached Nauman's praxis.

Michael R. Taylor's essay, "Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio, Changing the Field", explores the myth of the artist's studio & the myth's significance in relation to Nauman. I found this interesting partially just b/c I find the very notion of an 'artist's studio' to be obsolete: doesn't the creative person act creatively wherever they are? For me, the 'artist's studio' is like some sort of job place that the artist goes to where they then try to turn on their creativity. It's no wonder that we read about artists sitting glumly in their studio unable to create work or writers w/ writer's block: for them it's some sort of job not who they are. It seems that what they need, then, is a boss!

On pp 51-52 Taylor writes about the neon sign pictured on the back of the bk:

"In 1967 Nauman created a spiraling neon sign entitled The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths [..], which he installed in the large window of the studio he had recently established in a disused grocery store in San Francisco. The patently romantic message, emblazoned in pink and blue neon letters, looked back to the mystical dimension of early-twentieth-century abstraction, but at the same time questioned whether such a statement could still ring true in an age of mass consumerism, the Vietnam War, and the struggle for civil rights, an age when the ironic, parodist stance of Pop and Conceptual art had undermined the notions of aesthetic purity and the redeeming value of art. Nauman later spoke of his desire to test the veracity of this statement, which was

"on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the other hand, I believed it. It's true and it's not true at the same time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take yourself. For me it's still a very strong thought.

"The placement of this illuminated credo in the storefront window no doubt confused and perplexed passersby as they tried to understand what product was being promoted by the brightly colored neon advertising sign. The ambiguous message thus served to demarcate Nauman's studio, like Mondrian's before it, as a site of radical creative experimentation and, just possibly, of spiritual transcendence, a place where the artist-prophet or seer divined mystic revelations."

I found this explanation particularly illuminating (pun intended) b/c it made me see Nauman's txt in a more ambiguous, slightly sarcastic way. Otherwise, I admit to being inclined to accept Nauman's intention as being a face-value statement of philosophy. &, no, I don't think that "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths" is any more 'true' than something like: 'The Average Artist Promotes Themself with Delusions of Revealing Mystic Truths'.

Of course, it's obvious that one of Nauman's strong points is that he has a wry sense of humor. Somehow, tho, the humor is too much of the one-liner variety of the comedy club than it is the multivalent humor of someone like Flann O'Brien. I prefer the latter. Nauman's humor was put more in context for me when I read that "his teachers had included William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson." While I don't know either of their work that much, I've appreciated Wiley's collaborations w/ filmmaker Robert Nelson & appreciated the jocularity of Arneson's representational cartoonish ceramic sculptures (wch I associate, probably thx to David Zack, w/ "Nut Art" - a 'mvmt' that may've existed largely in Zack's mind). &, yes, I can see a very strong link between Nauman & these guys. & w/ Warhol.. & w/ Duchamp..

p 55: "In many respects Nauman's approach to Duchamp echoes that of the American artist Hannah Wilke, who famously declared that "to honor Duchamp is to oppose him" wch (inevitably?) brings me to neoism in wch it's sd things like: "to be a neoist one must leave neoism" & "neoism is a creation of its enemies, the anti-neoists".

Continuing the subject of the studio:

"Ironically, Nauman's interest in the conceptual and metaphorical meaning of the studio coincided with the French artist Daniel Buren's searing rejection of the privileged, ivory-tower model of the artist's private working space as the exclusive place where art was conceived and made. Buren called instead for art to be made directly in the street, as in his own works, in which he painted and pasted alternating white and colored stripes in a wide variety of public and private locations, such as commercial buildings, the sides of trains, and the sails of boats." (p 60)

& Buren was yet another artist presented in Conceptual Art who impressed me as someone w/ fresh thoughts. I liked very much that he was concentrating on how & where his paintings were being presented - w/ their actual visual (or as Duchamp sd: retinal) content reduced to something that was so simple that it united their content across presentation modes. However, I think Nauman's interest in the studio is only tenuously connected to Buren's insofar as it has considerably less articulation of a critique of the artist's relationship to the market society.

I've been reading more art bks than usual (I'd long since lost interest in reading such things) largely b/c I want to re-evaluate my own personal connection to Concept(ual) Art - wch I'm time-to-time associated w/ in newspaper articles & never associated w/ in arts magazines (that I know of - but then I don't really read them). In the other reviews that I've written to date (4 of the more substantial recent examples being here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/310902-solar-system-rest-rooms-review , http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/304821-out-of-order-out-of-sight-review , http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/297435-mia-san-mia-review , http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4958641-on-kawara ) I've speculated that there is no such thing as a Concept(ual) Art mvmt & that Concept(ual) Art is just an umbrella term that critics use(d) to lump together an extreme diversity of work that was mainly united by its difference from the work that proceeded it. ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
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Winner of the Golden Lion for the Best National Participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition--La Biennale di Venezia, the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens is celebrated in this photographic documentation of the thematic installation as presented at three sites in Venice: the U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, and two of the city's most esteemed academic institutions, the Università Iuav di Venezia and the Università Ca' Foscari. With a body of work that encompasses video, installation, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and neon, and that spans from the 1960s to the present day, Bruce Nauman (born 1941) is one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Through Michele Lamanna's stunning series of photographs, commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this publication captures the visitor's experience of encountering Nauman's work and coincides with the American premiere of the artist's newest works--Days and Giorni--in Philadelphia.

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Yale University Press

2 editions of this book were published by Yale University Press.

Editions: 0300149816, 0300164637

 

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