And the Winner Is

© Bruce Nauman, the Artists Rights Society (ARS, NY), Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Bruce Nauman's "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths" (1967)

Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Carlos Basualdo and Michael Taylor

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Bruce Nauman Jasper Johns Marcel Duchamp Post Show A Tale of Five Artworks Anne D'Harnoncourt Dies Unexpectedly at 64 Sonnabend Goes Private Anne d'Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Dies Unexpectedly at 64

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The last in-depth look at the 66-year-old conceptual artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre was 15 years ago, when the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, organized a traveling retrospective. Nauman’s photographs, sculptures, video works and performances, which address such themes as language, time, the body and violence, have “deep and profound resonance with art that is being made around the
world today,” says Michael Taylor, curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and co-commissioner for the U.S. pavilion.

Taylor and his fellow commissioner, Carlos Basualdo, curator of contemporary art at the PMA, say they were inspired to nominate the New Mexico–based artist last year when the museum acquired his 1967 neon work that reads, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” The British-born Taylor, a specialist in Duchamp and Surrealism, and the Argentine-born Basualdo, known for co-curating "Documenta 11," wowed the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions with their Nauman proposal— one of 11 presented—and it was unanimously greenlighted. The last time the PMA organized the U.S. pavilion was 20 years ago, with a show of Jasper Johns’s paintings.

The Nauman exhibition is still in development, but it will most likely be a retrospective of the artist’s 42-year career. “We are looking at things that have not been shown for a long time or haven’t received much attention,” Basualdo told the New York Times. “And when you’re working with a living artist, there’s always the possibility of showing things no one has seen at all.”

"And the Winner Is" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.