Bruce Nauman

Biography

Bruce Nauman , born in 1941 with Strong Wayne, (Indiana) is an artist vidéaste and American painter . Bruce Nauman makes studies of art and mathematics at the university of Wisconsin (1960-1964) then of art at the Davis university in California (1965-1966). Its first personal exposure takes place in 1966. He states to practice " an art which attacks the spectateur".

Work

As of the end of the the Sixties, he works on the topic of his body and his displacements through films, sculptures and video recordings. Thereafter, it will start to work on more organic supports while using, for example, of the moulds out of wax or glass fiber in order to fossilize certain parts of its body. Its first exposure takes place in 1966 and since 1967, it inaugurates a plastic and theoretical reflection of its own body which it cuts out of pieces, upside down or cut dislocated members.

Later, in many performances, he will repeat fragments of gestures or sentences simple, thus exploiting linguistics with in particular of the syllables borrowed from his name. He will play with the letters of the alphabet starting from installations of neons.

It was also interested in the sensory approach, with “Live-taped Video Corridor” (1969 - 1970), in which it uses the esthetics of the surveillance camera (which films Bruce Nauman) to destabilize the spectator who is vis-a-vis his real image.

In the the Seventies and eighty, one will see Nauman almost systematically using the neon spiral which it will associate with violent and/or sexual situations and provocantes. He creates then carousels (animal impaled, dismembered, suspended with metal bars turning in circle), carries out vidéos around the topic of the sex and death;

In 1990, it returns to its own body and films plane its head approximately turning like a gyrophare while it says violent declarations in the forms of onomatopoeias. And like explanation of all that, he says: " Basically my work is resulting from the anger which in me the condition humaine" causes;.

Painter, it also carried out a graphic work in which one finds his passion for the fragments of body, the signs and the writing.

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