Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale (1st review)

If you've read the Philadelphia Inquirer lately, you know that the Philadelphia Museum of Art has received well-deserved accolades for producing an award-winning exhibition at this year's Venice Biennale. The front page of the May 31 Inquirer popped with the headline, "Art Museum on a Grand Stage," and the Arts and Entertainment Section blared, "Philadelphia in Venice." The June 7 A & E pages headlined the artist Bruce Nauman with a mild overview titled, "The Nauman Workout." All the pieces were written by Peter Dobrin, ordinarily a music and cultural writer.

Bruce Nauman, who is 67, works across many media, with unlikely materials and various scales"“ video, sound, sculpture, installation, neon. He's been much feted since his Biennale entry, "Bruce Nauman: Tropological Gardens," won the Golden Lion Prize for best national pavilion early this month. In photographs via the Internet, his neons, videos and clumpy sculpted body parts (hands, heads), arrayed amidst the walkways and open spaces of Venetian classical buildings, exude a brashness that succeeds in making an aesthetic, very American statement. Check out a neon enshrined in a window, echoing both stained glass glorification and beer sign low taste and calorie content.

By all accounts, the effort of the Art Museum and its curator, Carlos Basualdo has been impressive. So praise is due all around. But more needs to be said.

Recognition for the already-recognized

First, by the time an artist is selected for the Venice Biennale, his work has already been recognized. This means that, for the exhibition, the retrospective should assert not only the artist's brilliant accomplishments but deepen our understanding and enlarge our sense of the artist's meaning. I'm not sure that is happening in the city of gondolas and canals.

With only 33 Nauman works in three different venues, some more critical reviewers have remarked that they had seen it all before. (I live in South Philadelphia, not Venice, but over the years I have seen about half of the work) Besides, Nauman— part prankster, part allusionist (he drops names like Wittgenstein and John Cage)— is an artist whose depths are intentionally shallow, and often prickly. This is an acceptable strategy, but ultimately it can add up to series of one-liners more than a sustained philosophical investigation.

"'Profoundly dumb'

Critics and reviewers have always noticed this about Nauman, calling his work profoundly dumb and worse. Unlike Marcel Duchamp, whom Dobrin cites, Nauman's works— with their riffs on the body, the creative process, and the public/private worlds— hint at revelation, but remain more the acts of a provocateur rather than a prophet. The neon in the window to which I referred above reads: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths" (1967). And that's it.

Nor do I find enlightenment in Nauman's amplifications of sotto voce recordings (Days) or the consuming imagery of his 2002 "Studio at Night" video, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), where cats and mice occasionally flit by and nothing extraordinary happens extraordinarily. Nor is there much in the way of sustained truth, either, in Nauman's quasi-violent 1970s Clown Torture video series.

Perversely, I like these works for their sincere tediousness, arch unminimalist designs and anti-art aggressiveness. They're in your face and they were right for the moment. But neither mysticism nor grander ideas materialize.

Compare to Jasper Johns

Nauman is famously uncommunicative about his work. But unlike that master of artist as enigma, Jasper Johns (who was featured to great acclaim in the Biennale in 1988, again, by the PMA), each work in Nauman's oeuvre elaborates rather than enriches his themes. Johns is no mystic, but the density of his imagery, the continuity of his themes, his allusions and the astonishing level of craft in his work create a drama and raise far more questions than he answers, ever.

Nauman is of course an artist of this era and consciously anti-craft and -finesse"“ and the better for it. Yet, yet…. style matters. It's not just about the words and a blunt intrusion of objecthood into meaning.

Annson Kenney's swipe

Here I can't resist recalling my late Philadelphia friend, the excessively verbal, conceptual, body and neon artist, Annson Kenney (1944-1981). One of Annson's neons from 1976, in flaring blue argon with mercury vapor, was meant to be installed in front of a mirror. With the gas flowing through it, the shimmering lines take shape, revealing scripted letters. Stand in front of it for a while and, gradually, you can make them out: W_R_I_T… If you step to the side, you would see the mirror reflecting other letters: E_R_S_C_R_A_M_P. The name of the piece is Bruce Nauman Cramped for Style, and it is a comment on how Annson thought Nauman's use of neon was pedestrian, as well as Annson's own concerns with language and visual art, seeing and reading, and games. It's a shame that he never made it out of Philadelphia.

But another representative from the city has. Philadelphia's most significant new institution for the arts and culture, the Slought Foundation, was chosen to co-curate an exhibition at the 11th Biennale Annual International Architecture Pavillion in November, 2008. Its exhibition, titled, "Into the Open: Positioning Practice," consisted of 16 small scale projects from across the U.S., concerned with urban ecology, migration, housing, grass roots aesthetics, and a real garden based upon principles of sustainability. It is scheduled to be displayed in Philadelphia soon.

In scope and content, "Into the Open: Positioning Practice" is a study in extreme contrasts to Nauman's "Tropological Gardens." It raises questions about the future of art and the role of artists on the planet, and press coverage… but all that is a subject for another time.

It is 2009, and what, truly, represents America and our sense of the arts and culture, including architecture? Like the work of many artists today, "Into the Open" focuses on social and political solutions, and imagination beyond the singular acts and life of one person. This is not to disparage Bruce Nauman, Jasper Johns before him, the Art Museum, or the necessary creative processes of individual artists. But perhaps, as the Slought Foundation generally attempts to do, reflection on art in the context of more limited gestures, with a larger sense of participation, is a position to consider.


For another review by Victoria C. Skelly, click here.
To read a response, click here.