Bruce Nauman

Carousel, a merry-go-round of taxidermy models installed in the basement of the Fondation Cartier dates from 1988 but provides the simplest metaphor to describe the direct impact of the work and current status of legendary artist Bruce Nauman, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941.

Everything in this exhibition is an idyll of celibate sensitivity, modulating the mechanisms typical of this retiring and enigmatic American artist.

Every work underscores his great ability to present ideas in their most direct and essential form. A perfect circle is traced on the ground as this pretence of an amusement park – design or the only sign – revolves but it is nothing more than a suspended race of lynx, deer and coyotes, a hybrid of the physicality of the slaughterhouse and the innocence of children’s entertainment.

It perhaps betrays Nauman’s geographic-biographical location as, since the 1970s, the artist has lived on a New Mexico ranch, which not leaving it for the social fixes of the current art system. His work is presented as bare as is his ambiguous pursuit of the deep-seated sense of a work, deliberately unsettling visitors.
Nauman has been like this from the very start, since that 1966 Self Portrait as a Fountain in which the physicality of Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual and founding action was obliterated in a cathartic gesture. The fetish and object component of the famous Mr Robert Mutt’s urinal was cancelled by an arc of water spouted from Nauman’s mouth.

Today, a fresh display of a few, specific and carefully selected works – all familiar to those in the know but for which the artist has sought a different assonance with the architectural space – makes their re-visitation doubly interesting. The procedural nature of Nauman’s work continues to pursue the meditative effect, a sort of mantra in which onlookers are invited to let themselves go. As ever, it is impossible to attempt a potential explanation of the Bruce Nauman enigma. The quantum of illusionism in the raw datum he presents to our senses has a temperature and density that mean no definition of contemporary fits the artist. Certainly, he produces multimedia works, videos and performances but a label would be restrictive since he is constantly renewing his range of visual and sound experiences. Language and word manifested in an operational system remain at the heart of the physicality of all his works.

For Children, presented in a new French and English version, transforms a bare room into a recreational space with perverse effects that conjure up institution types: from school to kindergartens passing via the idea of constructing mental rules. It is a Beckett-like game of instructions for a score by Béla Bartók in which the concepts of discipline and control are cut live into the surrounding space. A splendid drawing accompanies the reception of this unclassifiable sound sculpture like a music score.

Each of the works on show is testimony to the range and staying power of a practice that commenced in the 1960s, incorporating language and performance into constructed situations. Pencil Lift/Mr. Rogers, 2013, is a spectacular version with its large LED screen of a previously barely seen work. In this new location, the video installation presented at the Sperone Westwater Gallery in 2013 is a diptych composed of two videos. Three stubby pencils hover precariously on one white screen, defying the law of gravity. On the other, he continues his reflection on controlling space and, as in many previous works, allows the notion of space to be left open to chance, in this case the passage across the studio of Mr Rogers, the artist’s cat, bringing a memorable variant to the image as a whole.

What seems coincidental is actually a negotiation of the effect of reality. Visitors pass in the darkness before the alienating dirge of Anthro/Socio (Rindle Facing Camera), 1991, and have to deal with both the obsessive text and the idea of the minimal material required to define situations of tension, conflict and anxiety. It is an all over of screens and videos FeedMe/Eat Me/Anthropology. HelpMe/HurtMe/Sociology and Feed me, Help me, Eat me, Hurt me. The words are in a loop and invite you to search for an escape from the overwhelming sensation of being totally in the control of Nauman the choreographer.

The For Beginners/Instructed Piano (2010) sound sculpture in the garden of the Fondation appears to provide the solution, the only one possible. Before emerging into the open, you are shown Untitled (1970–2009), a dual projection seen at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and installed in the last room. Is there any chance of naturally avoiding the action or the possibility of a different repetition? You would not think so if you listened to Terry Allen’s controlled and rigorous piano clusters, produced without moving the hands from the C position on the keyboard, or you follow the repetitive and chronometric dance on a quadrant on the ground by two dancers turning like the hands of a clock.

Bruce Nauman is reconfirmed as the only artist capable of rewriting with his precise language the political dialogue of our Promethean and impossible relationship with reality.

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until 21 June 2015
Bruce Nauman
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
261, Bvd Raspail, Paris