Customer Reviews

Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews (Writing Art)

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Please Pay Attention Please offers fabulous insight into the ideas behind Bruce Nauman's art. With its focus on words and language, the interviews in the book help to explain Nauman's relationship with language and its origins, including some of his literary and philosophical interests. Nauman presents his art in a straightforward way, so readers can expect to find some redundancy from interview to interview. I found the book to be invaluable insight into one of America's most brilliant experimental artists.

The interviews in this book are mildly fascinating although they don't reveal all that much about Nauman's practice. But I'd stay clear of the essay comprising the first 50 pages of the book unless you like art writing of this kind, the full pretentiousness of which I can't even convey without being able to reproduce the italics on words like "linguistic":

"But I want to consider more closely the particular components constituting Get Out: specifically, the nature of its sounds. Not simply ambient noise or illegible cacophony, they are linguistic sounds - that is, words, given voice by the artist performing them for a tape recorder, changing the volume and speed of delivery with each repetition, "GET OUT OF MY MIND, GET OUT OF THIS ROOM,...get out of my mind, get out of this room...". Get Out, I propose, is a work about language."

I can think of an easier way to say this: "since there's nothing to look at and just an audio recording of someone speaking, I'd say language plays a role in this artwork". Alas, the vapidity takes less time to surface; I can see why she jazzed it up. A very clear "get out" to those of us who like art criticism without fatty nonsense like this.