Customer Reviews

Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light

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Who knew? The 19th century poet Emily Dickinson and the contemporary artist Bruce Nauman are on the same wave-length, at least according to the author of one of the essays in this exhibition catalogue.

Gregory Volk writes * ...two Americas are twined: an America of religious vision and another America of spectacle.* Whatever comparison follows is at best disjointed, completely ignoring the distances inherent in time and place, assuming that these two individuals share a world-view, and thus an artistic sensibility. Volk assumes that clowns are the subject of Nauman's neon light works, and that Dickinson's interests are in the circus of human relations. This is a mix-and-match approach to art criticism that is ridiculous at best, irresponsible at worst, and as I read the essay I was tempted to sing *Send In The Clowns.*

The only intelligently written essay in this exhibition catalogue comes from Janet Kraynak, who uses scholarship and research to reach her conclusions. Kraynak places Nauman's work in the context of his peers, examining his influences and strategies for developing his body of work. This is challenging reading, and as Kraynak respects the intelligence of her reader, the ideas are not watered-down. Those who have some familiarity with the complex ideas that permeate contemporary art will appreciate this challenging essay.

The first essay in the book, written by Joseph Ketner, is banal and forgettable, adding nothing new to the discussion.

I'm not sure who the intended reader of this book is supposed to be. If you feel that contemporary art is a circus, then this may be the book for you.

This exhibition catalog is an embarrassment to The MIT Press.
Bruce Nauman deserves better.

For those interested in the works of Bruce Nauman, this exhibition catalog serves as a visual guide to Nauman's light works. The difficulty here is that Nauman's work encompasses far more than neon, and limiting the exhibition hinders our understanding of the art. A sampling of the video works would have greatly assisted the viewer to complete the Nauman picture. Alone, the neon works appear to be Pop art descendants, relating more to Lichtenstein than to another source: the Minimalist influences of Robert Morris and Donald Judd.

The catalog essays further confuse the reader. Only one of the three, written by Janet Kraynak, properly identify and elucidate his work, expanding our understanding and directing our attention to sources outside the work itself. Kraynak is a respected Nauman scholar, having earned a PhD from MIT with a dissertation on Nauman. She discusses Nauman's work in relation to the index of the cast artist's body, devoting most of her discussion to Nauman's early works from the 1960s.

It is truly unfortunate that Kraynak's essay is grouped with those less carefully written. Gregory Volk's contribution is especially perplexing. Clearly a lover of language and literature, Volk focuses on Nauman's neon works that utilize language, but rather than situate Nauman alongside Kosuth (or any other contemporary artist using language!), Volk chooses to discuss Nauman in conjunction with the poet Emily Dickenson. Out of place, and out of time -- certainly a peculiar combination and a mixed reading is the result.

I checked this book out of the library to see if it was worth purchasing. Sorry, no sale.

First, it is about the size and thickness of a typical magazine - there are fewer than 100 pages. Yes, there are a lot of glossy reproductions, but as this exhibition focuses only on Bruce Nauman's neon light works, the reader is left with the impression that this is all that Nauman does. Without any reproductions of his installation work, video pieces or (my favorite) his early body and space casts, it appears that Nauman is instead primarily interested in neon word games and neon clowns engaged in sex acts. Ridiculous!

I was hoping to find some intelligent writing on Bruce Nauman's use of language, connecting him to other contemporary artists who also use language. I am disappointed that this catalog skimps on this important aspect of Bruce Nauman's thinking.

One article in this book seems to be thoughtfully written, focusing on Nauman's use of his body in forming his early sculptures. But these works are mostly missing from the exhibition!

Pass on this book - there MUST be better, more intelligent writing on Bruce Nauman. I'm going to keep looking.

If you want to see Bruce Nauman's art with fresh eyes, read the excellent essays in this book by Joseph Ketner, Janet Kraynak, and Gregory Volk, each of whom approach Nauman's light works from a distinctive angle. In a deliberately provocative gesture, Volk starts his essay with a bravura reading of one of Emily Dickinson's famously elliptical poems in which she compares a crisis of faith---that lofty thing that gnawed at so many nineteenth-century minds---to a carnival being disassembled before vanishing from view, leaving nothing but "miles of Stare." Placing a postmodern visual artist like Nauman side by side with a nineteenth-century poet may seem unlikely, even jarring, but if you're willing to step outside the confines of conventional art criticism into the kind of intellectual extravagance at which Volk excels, you will not be disappointed. The great thing about his essay is that it expands our contextual framework. Given that Nauman's use of language is so central to his artistic practice, it makes excellent sense to draw connections with literary texts. And it's perfectly clear that Volk is not by any means suggesting some kind of simplistic equation between Dickinson's poetry and Nauman's art. Instead, he helps us see how Nauman's work is in dialogue with the enduring strain of Emersonian questing that continues to mark American culture. On top of all that, this playful, jargon-free essay is a pleasure to read, with illuminating commentary on many of the specific works included in the exhibit.

This beautifully produced catalogue provides a comprehensive look at one aspect of Nauman's work--perhaps the most visually seductive but also the most aggressively provocative: his neon. It provides a means of focussing on the themes that run throughout this artists' diverse production, while providing an impetus for going back to see how those themes play out in the rest of his work. As for the catalog essays, I found both Ketner's and Volk's essays to be 'enlightening': Ketner clearly knows the artist's work well, and can situate it within the artist's ongoing concerns with visual and written language, whereas Volk's imaginative and lively contribution examines the neon works in the broader realm of American popular culture and literature. Kraynak's essay reads like the dissertation excerpt it is, and, while pedestrian, is not uninformative.

Although I learned from all three writers, I feel that more attention should have been paid to the issue of beauty vs. vulgarity, elegance vs. 'hard-sell' commercialism in the neon work. All of the writers deal well with the elusive nature of Nauman's signs, but give short shrift to the medium itself. It's as though the gorgeous catalogue design itself had to attest to the beauty of the neon sculptures! Nonetheless, with this one caveat, this is a valuable addition to the literature on Nauman, and it must have been one striking exhibition!

In contrast to other reviewers' reactions, I found Gregory Volk's provocative piece in this book to be a perspective-enlarging and intellectually refreshing experience. Volk steps outside of the parochialism of the art world to draw parallels with literature in a way that surprised and delighted me. Even if Nauman has never read Dickinson and Emerson, their work is still relevant to invoke in discussions about his art because the transcendentalist writers have helped shape the American cultural context, and their contributions have become part of the "collective unconscious" from which our artists draw. And more importantly, it creates a fascinating lens through which to view Nauman's work, emphasizing aspects of the work that don't come into focus through more traditional approaches.

Volk convincingly argues that "Nauman taps into a particularly visionary strain of artmaking in this country" and draws parallels with Emerson's focus on "core-level matters of what it means to be a human being; his mix of cerebral investigation and hard-hitting emotions; and his consistent ability to find fresh, oftentimes highly unorthodox methods for delving into his concerns". Volk creatively explores the implications of these parallels throughout his essay, and at times his cross-disciplinary analysis is so striking that the insights themselves feel transcendent. An example is when Volk points to Dickinson's exhortation, "Tell the truth, but tell it slant; success in circuit lies;" this line is so startlingly apt for describing Nauman's neon work that it provoked a mental gasp when I read it.

As he develops his thesis throughout the essay, Volk explores the synergies between the individual and societal psyche, drawing in cultural influences like transcendentalism to enlarge and explicate the cultural context in which Nauman's work occurs. It takes mental dexterity to be willing and able to cross the artificial boundaries academia has created between disciplines, and Volk's essay rips the conventions of art criticism wide open, leaving the reader exposed to a bracing gust of intellectual "fresh air". To understand Nauman's art in a whole new way, I highly recommend this book and, in particular, Gregory Volk's essay.