The Whitney Visual Explorer

Artist Biennial

Bruce Nauman

1941–

52 works in the collection 24 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

In 1966 Bruce Nauman rented studio space in San Francisco, which for the recent college graduate “raised the fundamental question of what an artist does when left alone in the studio.” “My conclusion,” he reflected, “was that I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever it was I was doing in the studio must be art.” The images that constitute the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs represent activities and objects in Nauman’s studio— often ordinary such as Cold Coffee Thrown Away. This literal quality takes on a playful aspect in other photographs, which make visual puns of their title phrases by enacting or staging them: Bound to Fail depicts Nauman’s arms restrained by rope; Drill Team documents a row of drill bits; and Eating My Words records him spreading jam on bread shaped into letters.

In these photographs, Nauman performs and embodies language, giving it physical form in often comedic ways as in Self Portrait as a Fountain, where he becomes a fountain, spewing water from his mouth. The title of this work also evokes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and its attendant questioning of what constitutes an aesthetic object—an issue that is also central to Nauman’s work. Indeed this group of photographs augurs a number of the concerns of his restlessly inventive and diverse output of the past fifty years: inquiries into the definition of the artistic act, the body as a subject, and the ability of language to shape perception and guide meaning.

Works in the collection

Exhibitions at the Whitney