A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

Book Description

One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California--first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s. A Rose Has No Teeth demonstrates that Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary during this period and that he laid the groundwork for fundamental ideas he addressed throughout his oeuvre, such as the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over its form. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents. This book shows that Nauman was at the forefront of these revolutionary changes and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist.
Copub: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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

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Fabulous insight

Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews (Writing Art)
Bruce Nauman
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Binding: Paperback

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Bruce Nauman: Theaters Of Experience
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A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s

ASIN: 0262640600

Book Description

Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex and pluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based works to elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, and architectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums, including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparent eclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistic tendencies are conceptual continuities, one of which is an investigation of the nature of language.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nauman has refrained from participating in the critical discourse surrounding his own work. He has given relatively few interviews over the course of his career and has little to do with the art press or critical establishment. Indeed, he granted Janet Kraynak and The MIT Press almost complete autonomy in the preparation of this volume. In contrast to Nauman?s reputation for silence, however, from the beginning of his career, the incorporation of language has been a central feature of his art. This collection takes as its starting point the seeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words.

Please Pay Attention Please contains all of Nauman's major interviews from 1965 to 2001, as well as a comprehensive body of his writings, including instructions and proposal texts, dialogues transcribed from audio-video works, and prose texts written specifically for installation sculptures. Where relevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were composed. In the critical essay that serves as the book's introduction, the editor investigates Nauman's art in relation to the linguistic turn in art practices of the 1960s?-understanding language through the speech act--and its legacy in contemporary art.

Customer Reviews:

Fabulous insight.......2007-07-03

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.

Bruce Nauman -- Raw Materials (Unilever)

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Bruce Nauman -- Raw Materials (Unilever)
Emma Dexter
Manufacturer: Tate
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Bruce Nauman: Theaters Of Experience
Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews (Writing Art)
Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me
Bruce Nauman (PAJ Books: Art + Performance)
Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light

ASIN: 1854375598

Book Description

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) is arguably the most influential contemporary artist at work today. His pioneering explorations of sculpture, performance, film, video, neon, and sound art have seen him investigating different areas of art years before his peers, providing inspiration for innumerable artistic careers. Exhibiting internationally since the mid-1960s, Nauman has always drawn on a wide range of sources for his work, from philosophy, literature, and music to gestalt therapy. He has collaborated with a wide range of filmmakers, musicians, dancers, and artists, including Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Meredith Monk, and Merce Cunningham.

Nauman is the fifth artist to take on the cavernous space of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. This book, a record of this unique event, contains extensive illustrations alongside working drawings and texts by the artist, plus an essay by Emma Dexter that documents the installation and provides an overview of Nauman's career to date. AUTHOR BIO: Emma Dexter is a senior curator at Tate. Her previous publications include Luc Tuymans and Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph.

Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection

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Essays & Photography Great, But Hard to Appreciate Videos

Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection
Maria-Christina Villasenor , Joan Young , Marina Abramovic , Vito Acconci , Matthew Barney , Felix Gonzalez-Torres , Andreas Gursky , Bruce Nauman , Nam June Paik , Robert Smithson , Kara Walker , John G. Hanhardt , and Maria-Christina Villaseñor
Manufacturer: Guggenheim Museum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982
Art Photography Now
Art and Photography (Themes & Movements S.)
The Cinematic (Documents of Contemporary Art)
The Archive (Documents of Contemporary Art)

ASIN: 0892072695
Release Date: 2003-10-02

Book Description

During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli & Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida H fer, Thomas Ruff, J rge Sasse, Thomas Struth, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Matthew Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Sam Taylor-Wood, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, John Pilson and Gillian Wearing.

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Essays & Photography Great, But Hard to Appreciate Videos.......2004-02-21

This book accompanies a 2003-2004 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. It begins with 30 pages of essays: "Introduction," "Picturing Movement, Past and Present," and "Art Photography after Photography." These essays do an excellent job of placing the exhibition in context. In addition, they mention works in a smaller 2002-2003 version of the exhibition in New York, which included some artists (e.g., Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, and Robert Smithson) not represented in the Bilbao exhibition.

The body of the book ("Catalogue Entries") consists of text about and photographs or video stills by 50 artists in alphabetical order (Marina Abramovic through Jane and Louise Wilson). Each of the artists is given up to one page of text. For most of the artists there is only one page of images, but Francis Alys, Matthew Barney, Miles Coolidge, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky, Ann Hamilton, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mariko Mori, Aika Noguchi, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotte Rist, Michal Rovner, Thomas Struth, Sam Taylor-Wood, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Kara Walker have at least three pages. Some works by Dijkstra, Gaskell, Goldin, Gursky, Anthony Hernandez, Manglano-Ovalle, Mori, Orozco, Rovner, Thomas Ruff, Taylor-Wood, and Tillmans are not reproduced in the book but were in the exhibition (per the list on pages 205-216). Virtually all of the works are dated 1990-2002; some images of Goldin's were taken in the 1970s and 1980s but were published later. For each artist, 2-4 "selected readings" are listed in the back of the book.

The photography is mostly great, but the book does not really do the videos justice for a couple reasons. First, there are not enough stills to give the reader a good idea of the course of each video. I would have preferred a larger number of smaller-sized stills. Second, the one-page-of-text limit for each video artist gives the same amount of space for the massive Cremaster series by Barney as for a three-minute video by Patty Chang. You'll have to travel to Spain to fully appreciate the videos, but meanwhile buy the book from Amazon.com!

Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me
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Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me
Anna Dezeuze , and Johanna Drucker
Manufacturer: Tate Gallery
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres

ASIN: 1854377086

Book Description

Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me features a collection of critical appraisals of the artist by leading writers. It focuses on one aspect of his work: his preoccupation with the human condition. More than 60 works from 1966 to 2005 are illustrated and discussed, including sculpture, neons, video, performance, installation, and drawing.

Nauman's fascination with and manipulation of language are examined, as well as his use of the body, be it his own, the viewer's, or that of the animal and human head casts he has made since the late 1980s. This timely survey will bring new insights into the career of one of the most influential artists of the last half-century.

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Bruce Nauman: Prints 1970-1989
Christopher Cordes , and John Yau
Manufacturer: Castelli Graphics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 096252400X

Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light

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Bruce Nauman and Emily Dickinson - Together at Last? With Clowns?
Superficial and Flimsy
Focus on neon light limits understanding

Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light

Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Bruce Nauman: Theaters Of Experience

ASIN: 0944110835

Book Description

Intrigued and inspired by the neon beer signs on shopfronts in his San Francisco neighborhood, Bruce Nauman created his first neon piece, Window or Wall Sign, in 1967. He wanted, he said, to achieve "an art that would kind of disappear--that was supposed to not quite look like art." Light offered Nauman a medium both elusive and effervescent, but one that could also aggressively convey a message. Over the first three decades of his career, Nauman used the medium of light to explore the twists and turns of perception, logic, and meaning with the earnest playfulness that characterizes all his art. Elusive Signs focuses on the discrete body of Nauman's work that uses neon and fluorescent light in signs and room installations, and includes images of nearly all Nauman's work with light.

After Window or Wall Sign, Nauman embarked on a series of neons that grappled with the semiotics of body and identity, and with My Name as Though it Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), he forces the viewer to contemplate the role of naming in forming identity. Language--signs and symbols--plays an important role in Nauman's art. His later neon works emphasize the neon as a sign, presenting provocative twists of language and offering harsh and humorous sociopolitical commentary in such pieces as Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972). This series culminates in the monumental, billboard-size One Hundred Live and Die (1984), which employs overwhelming scale to bombard the viewer with sardonic aphorisms. In incisive essays that accompany the images of Nauman's work, Joseph Ketner II of the Milwaukee Art Museum (which originated the exhibit this book accompanies) and critics Janet Kraynak and Gregory Volk analyze the works in light both as a body of work and as an access point to Nauman's entire career.

Distributed for the Milwaukee Art Museum.

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Bruce Nauman and Emily Dickinson - Together at Last? With Clowns?.......2007-08-19

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.

Superficial and Flimsy.......2006-12-29

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.

Focus on neon light limits understanding.......2006-12-08

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.

Bruce Nauman: Audio-Video Underground Chamber

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I expected prictures, instead the book is 99% interviews

Bruce Nauman: Audio-Video Underground Chamber
Achim Hochd rfer , Stefan Neuner , Wolfram Pichler , Edelbert Kob , and Bruce Nauman
Manufacturer: Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 3938821094
Release Date: 2006-04-01

Book Description

Before spider holes made their media debut, there was Bruce Nauman's spectacular 1972-74 installation Audio-Video Underground Chamber. Its single concrete vault, with dimensions close to those of the human body, is buried--like a coffin--one and a half meters deep. Integrated into the space are a lamp, a camera and a microphone, which transmit image and sound to a gallery. The actual existence of the buried cabin is concretized only in the viewers' imagination by means of the live broadcast and two of Nauman's explanatory, blueprint drawings. Image and sound call up associations with the psychic and existential borderline areas around which Nauman's art often revolves, with feelings of isolation and claustrophobia, experiences of loss of communication and of orientation, and traumas such as that of being buried alive.

Customer Reviews:

I expected prictures, instead the book is 99% interviews.......2004-02-13

Bruce Nauman is the most amazing artist I have ever seen.
I was not much into moder art, until I saw Clown Torture and From Hand to Mouth at the Tate Modern in London.
Since then I am a looking for his work whetherever I can find it.

I felt a bit let down by this book because I expected reproductions of his work instead it is almost exclusively made up by interviews with him or short articles written by him. There might be 10 pages of reproduction in the whole book. Some of his neon work.

In particular there is no reproduction of Clown Torture in the whole book, inspite of the fact that the head of the clown is on the cover.

Book Description

One of the most significant, funny, and nails-on-a-chalkboard jarring artists of the second half of the 20th century, Bruce Nauman has expanded the scope of traditional art practice and influenced a generation of artists. He has made himself into a fountain (one upping Marcel Duchamp?), cast the space under a chair, fashioned a screeching carousel of carcass-like parts, reinvented the neon sign as a contemporary haiku, and, most recently, recorded the dullness of his studio in real time. His ongoing investigation of our most basic physical, emotional, and psychological states has been literally experienced by each of his viewers. Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience is a focused selection of works in a range of media, including sculpture, video, holograms, neon, and architectural installations, which examine the artist's use of performance devices as a conduit for heightened self-awareness for both artist and audience. Featuring works from the Guggenheim Panza Collection, augmented with loans from several German collections, the exhibition and catalogue trace the theatrical elements in Nauman's oeuvre, as well as his manipulation of the performer-spectator roles.

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Partners
Ernst Van Alphen , Paul McCarthy , Bruce Nauman , and Lawrence Weiner
Manufacturer: Walther Konig
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3883757551
Release Date: 2004-03-02

Book Description

One of the most powerful people in the art world--and the only Canadian on that list--Ydessa Hendeles is renowned not only as one of the foremost supporters of contemporary art but also as a brilliant curator and collector. The collection she has assembled under the auspices of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation is one of the most original, prescient, and highly regarded contemporary art collections in the world--if one of the lesser known. Large parts of it are being shown for the first time in Haus der Kunst in Munich, assembled and arranged by Hendeles; this book has been conceptualized by her in conjunction with the exhibition. In typical Hendeles fashion, Partners combines artworks, press photos, anonymous snapshots, and everyday articles. Maurizio Cattelan's HIm, a depiction of Hitler on his knees, plays a key role, as does a large installation of thousands of historical snapshots of teddy bears.

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