Bruce Nauman

© Francois Le Diascorn/Rapho/Eyedea

Bruce Nauman in Pecos, New Mexico, 1983

Damien Hirst Bruce Nauman Jasper Johns Susan Rothenberg Wayne Thiebaud Robert Arneson Jeff Koons Joseph Beuys

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Ask virtually any artist at the outer edge of any paradigm-breaking/paradigm-making activity who they admire and you get the same name: Bruce Nauman. Check any of the top 100 or top 10 lists in the art glossies that track the ups and downs of artists’ popularity among collectors and institutions and you will find that name firmly positioned at or near the summit. Those with the long view will know how surprising this current consensus among practitioners and tastemakers actually is, especially given that taste has been the least of Nauman’s concerns, if it has been a concern at all. Nor has his ascent been meteoric like that of the comparatively young world-beaters with whom he shares such prestige: Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince chief among them. True, Nauman started out fast in the 1960s with attention-getting appearances at Nick Wilder’s gallery in Los Angeles and an exhibition in New York at Leo Castelli in 1968 along with early museum solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in 1972, but for most of his midcareer until the early 1980s he flew just below the radar of market mavens. Moreover, general public enthusiasm for his work has come late, and even now public recognition of the kind enjoyed by peers such as Jasper Johns or Joseph Beuys eludes him. Consider those counter-examples. None of this artist’s images are household icons in the manner of Johns’s flags and maps. Nor is his own image as ubiquitous as Beuys’s has become. Even though he has frequently appeared in his own videos and in other works as a performer, he has not forged a persona or engaged in psychological self-portraiture as such. Neither has he sought the kind of fame Beuys acquired through his public actions or that Johns has achieved through exquisitely dramatized privacy.

Rather Nauman has cut his own path and taken it at his own pace. And while he is among the most respected artists internationally, he is as quintessentially American as Pollock or Warhol. A midwesterner by birth — Nauman hails from Indiana and started college in Wisconsin, those being two of the "flyover" states that coastal Americans and foreigners sometimes mistakenly think of as vast intellectual and aesthetic wastelands — he is a westerner by choice. He did his graduate studies at the University of California, Davis, an agricultural school with a thriving art department then led by the Pop painter Wayne Thiebaud (for whom Nauman worked as a teaching assistant), and the Funk ceramist Robert Arneson (with whose work Nauman’s occasionally has surprising affinities). William Wiley, another faculty member and Funkster, was also an influence and collaborated with Nauman on his first neon. Upon graduating Nauman moved to the San Francisco Bay area where he set up a studio in a former drinks distributor’s depot. There he taped his first videos and made his seminal neon, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), under the inspiration of a commercial neon that had been left behind in the window by the former tenants. There followed a brief sojourn in the New York area after Castelli picked him up — Castelli remained one of the artist’s principal dealers until his death in 1999 — but since the late ’60s, Nauman has lived in New Mexico.

All of that is to say Nauman has kept his distance from the day-and-night schmoozing of the art scene, though he makes fleeting appearances at the openings of his shows around the world, and travels regularly to work on projects and see friends. When offered artworld laurels he has accepted them with little comment, and, when offered the crown, he has turned it down. Thus when Jan Hoet proposed to make him the central figure in Documenta IX with the example of Beuys at the same exhibition in 1977 as his precedent, Nauman politely declined and let a prominently featured but ambiguously confrontational video work, Anthro/Socio, do his talking — or rather chanting — for him.