… It is this alone that distinguishes the action in question from a trivial one.
This is from Bruce Nauman by Eugen Blume (2010):
… Nauman takes emptiness and a lack of knowledge as the point of departure for his activity, to explore the value of the simplest of things and the relationships between them.
[line break added] His main preoccupation, then, in the most Western country on earth, takes a direction counter to the one in which the Western, rationally and positivistically oriented faction of humanity seems to be moving: instead of the permanent devaluation effected by finite knowledge, he examines the worth of the seemingly infinite scope of the worthless and meaningless.
… his theme is more the search for the reality of transcendence, which is sarcastically formulated in the leaking heads and fish appearing in his later work. Is transcendence not also a form of corporeal leakiness, or an extension of the body letting the soul leak out into infinity?
… Nauman’s anti-illusionism is not explicitly directed towards the optical illusion constitutive of painting and other genres. Rather, he takes aim at art’s self-referential discourse by attributing the intention of both his own work and art in general to the human condition, to the question of existence and its conditions. He explores the illusion, the delusion, the self-deception, the illusory hope and the possibility of true transcendence brought to bear by disillusionment.
… Being altogether without pathos, the chosen form — which ranges through to the most banal of activities, such as walking around the studio, making coffee or doing nothing — is consciously understood as a grasping of the world by means of action.
[line break added] The particularity of the intention underlying the form, as conveyed in terms of action, can be discerned through the self-determination or assertion of a subject as a professional or rather vocational artist. It is this alone that distinguishes the action in question from a trivial one.
[line break added] Yet it also consciously exposes itself to the risk of the converse realization stored within it: nothing is authorized by someone else; nothing that we perceive is actually true. Whatever the artist, the individual, does, is not per se true. Neither is it art merely because he or she intends it to be so.
[line break added] If it is true, if it is art, then it is because it reveals itself to the viewer or ‘recipient’ through a certain action on his or her part. Inherent in the prerequisite of an active counterpart is the hope of some kind of mutual understanding, regardless of how it might come to bear.
My most recent previous post from Blume’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 