{"id":1408,"date":"2009-12-26T01:41:55","date_gmt":"2009-12-26T09:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp\/2009\/12\/links_-_bruce_nauman_forever_1\/"},"modified":"2009-12-26T01:41:55","modified_gmt":"2009-12-26T09:41:55","slug":"links_-_bruce_nauman_forever_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/2009\/12\/links_-_bruce_nauman_forever_1.html","title":{"rendered":"Links – Bruce Nauman forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those people who make lists of the three or four artists who matter amid the multitude who don’t? Few include Bruce Nauman<\/a>,
\nwhose nonchalant profundity continues to be pioneering.  List elitists
\nare almost invariably thinking of the market, as if art were just
\nanother stock.<\/p>\n

Roberta Smith’s review<\/a> of Nauman’s current exhibit<\/a> at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is splendid:<\/p>\n

Even
\nafter four and a half decades, Mr. Nauman still turns out videos,
\nsculptures, installation works and sound pieces that tend to be
\nstripped to the bone, no-frills, unfamiliar and even alien in form.
\nThey don’t “present” as art, yet they lodge in the mind and won’t let
\ngo, disorienting, irritating, inundating and exhilarating the senses.
\nAnd with time, the best Naumans make clear their art-ness, laying bare
\nlife’s basic experiences, distilled and compressed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Small
\ngripe about the NYT: Its links policy is absurd. NYT links lead only to NYT stories. There’s no way to click through to something else, as if once
\nyou’re in, you need nothing else. Yes, NYT, you are the best, but you’re not the only.)<\/p>\n

More on Roberta Smith:<\/b> John Perreault<\/a> is absolutely right about her review<\/a>
\nof Roni Horn. Smith missed Horn’s meaning by miles. Perreault is also
\nconvincing on his thoughts about museum installations in general. (In
\nshort: go lean.)<\/p>\n

Horn – Pink Tons<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

\"ronihornpinkton.jpg\"I’d
\nlove to see the above 5 tons of pink glass in Seattle. That girly-girl
\nhit of  Minimalism would be the elephant in our living room.We might stumble upon it and learn something.<\/p>\n

Home team:<\/b> Jen Graves’ essay<\/a> on Miami topped anyone else’s. <\/p>\n

But the annual art-world migration to Miami is not really about art.
\nIt’s about the art world. About money, people-watching, and tropical
\nescape (the water is so salty off Miami Beach that a body floats
\nuncomfortably high in the cool December air). About rich people trying
\nto look smarter and vice versa. About, as Ben Davis has written, the
\nendless asking of the question “How are sales?” It almost feels beside
\nthe point, like a bonus, that this is pretty much the only way to get
\nthis much contemporary art in one place at one time–a painting in the
\nshape of a trench coat, a bin of musical garbage, a sculpture
\nconsisting of an endless supply of white wrapped candies, fireworks
\nmomentarily spelling the word “RECESSION” in the night sky, documentary
\nphotographs of Texas prison lifers, a New York Times<\/em> dipped in 24-karat gold, a video in which a young Iranian prostitute is tormented by men without faces (Shirin Neshat’s Zarin<\/em>:
\nunforgettable), electronic billboards with messages such as “Confusing
\nyourself is a way to stay honest,” mesmerizing three-dimensional mirror
\nmosaics by an 85-year-old Iranian woman (Monir Shahroudy
\nFarmanfarmaian), a male mannequin with a lifelike crotch, a performance
\nin memory of the Tlatelolco student massacre in Mexico, graffiti on the
\nstreets and in the galleries, drippy ceramics (by Seattle’s Jeffry
\nMitchell), droopy textiles (by Josh Faught, based in Eugene, Oregon,
\nand recent Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award winner), shoe-shine
\nstations painted like shrines, geometric abstractions made in thick,
\nsilvery pencil. That and Picassos, Warhols, Duchamps, Ruschas, Flavins,
\nRichters, and even, this year, a religious painting by the
\nturn-of-the-20th-century Belgian James Ensor, whose retrospective this
\nyear at the Museum of Modern Art was a sleeper hit. And paintings
\n(primary-colored, splashy) by Sylvester Stallone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I hope the male mannequin with a lifelike crotch is Charles Ray’s<\/a>. Otherwise, do your own work, anonymous artist mentioned in passing by Jen Graves.<\/p>\n

What artists read<\/b>: This month Tyler Green began a series on what featured artists read. Great idea, but sometimes I don’t want to know. Reading that Kate Shepard<\/a> values most a book by Mary Baker Eddy<\/a> handed me a problem that I don’t need. When looking at Shepard’s work, I’m going to have to force myself to forget that she’s a fall-for-anything fool. If artists I admire vote Republican, drive a Hummer, believe that civil rights need not include gays and lesbians or that the faithful can pray away cancer, I don’t want to know it. Jackson Pollock had the right idea. He kept what he was reading locked away, lest visitors drawn from that information conclusions that distract them from the work. <\/p>\n

Hey Hey We’re the Monkeys<\/b><\/a>: On a hopeful note, Terry Pratchett, wine glass in hand, held forth on stage<\/a> about the state of things:<\/p>\n

We
\nare shaped by the universe to be its consciousness. We tell the
\nuniverse what it is. …I find it more interesting (than religion) that
\na bunch of monkeys climbed down from their trees to build this and
\nbuild that, to build everything. We’re monkeys. Our heritage is (when)
\nin difficulties to climb a tree and throw shit at other trees. That’s
\nso much more interesting than being a fallen angel…The story of
\nevolution is more interesting than anything in the Bible. It teaches us
\nthat stars are not important. Street lamps are important. As far as we
\nknow, there are only a few million of them in the universe. And they
\nwere built by monkeys. Admittedly, we do err, as when we made Tony
\nBlair prime minster. But given where we started from, crawling up some
\nbeach somewhere, we actually haven’t done that badly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Very
\nnice about street lamps, but Pratchett might want to reread Milton.
\nChristianity doesn’t claim that we are fallen angels. The fallen angels
\nare devils, the greatest being Satan, the hero of Paradise Lost<\/i>. Landing in the abyss, he asked, “What do mine eyes with grief behold?” A monkey wrote that. Impressive, for a monkey. <\/p>\n

Back to street lamps. Sheila Klein’s Vermonica<\/i>. <\/p>\n

\"sheilakleinvermonica.jpg\"Installed in 1992, it predates by 16 years a similar piece in the same town by the great Chris Burden<\/a>. (Story here<\/a>.) Monkeys have the unfortunate habit of copying each other and giving the more famous monkey all the credit. Los Angeles has room for both, but for LA critics to treat hers as if it doesn’t exist is weird. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those people who make lists of the three or four artists who matter amid the multitude who don’t? Few include Bruce Nauman, whose nonchalant profundity continues to be pioneering.  List elitists are almost invariably thinking of the market, as if art were just another stock. Roberta Smith’s review of Nauman’s current exhibit at the Philadelphia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}