Bruce Nauman: Collector’s Choice

Some forty-odd years after Bruce Nauman began tweaking the conventions of studio practice and the hallowed persona of the ‘artist-as-seer, ’ Pamela M. Lee wrote in Artforum not long ago, his station in postwar art history rests secure. His influence–whether through his affectless, task-based performances, his sculptural castings of negative space, or his intermedia mash-ups of language, video and noise–is everywhere apparent in contemporary art. Indeed, from the American artist’s early work in sculpture and video, made in the 1960s, through his famous spiral of neon letters spelling out the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths, which at once summarized and opened to critique the perennial mystique of the artist, up through his three-venue Golden Lion Award-winning exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Nauman’s work has long been an indispensable part of the narrative of recent American art. This essential volume, published in DuMont’s fantastic Collector’s Choice series, treats these and other recurrent themes of his oeuvre, such as sound, language, corporeality and dance, reproducing works from across his career and and providing a new standard overview of this ever-popular artist.