Nauman's Body of Sculpture

Author(s): Anne M. Wagner

Source: October, Vol. 120 (Spring, 2007), pp. 53-70
Published by: The MIT Press
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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture*

ANNE M. WAGNER

The year was 1966. In May, Bruce Nauman earned a master's degree in art
with an emphasis on sculpture from the University of California at Davis. That fall
he moved to San Francisco, laid claim to the seedy premises of what had once been
the California Grocery, and put his training to work teaching sculpture at the San
Francisco Art Institute. Eighteen months later, he was still there, directing three
studios for a total of ten contact hours per week, a class load that nowadays would
amount to more or less a full-time job. It saw him putting beginners in touch with
the most basic sculptural materials - clay, plaster, wood - and expected him to have
sufficient maturity, as the course catalog phrased it, "to present material from his
experience, convictions, and technical knowledge in the order and at the rate
which, in his judgment, will be best related to the needs of the individual student."1
Nineteen sixty-six, in other words, is the year that Bruce Nauman went pro-
fessional, the year that, age twenty-four, he got a job. And it is also, for all intents
and purposes, the moment when Nauman became Nauman - when the Nauman
name, as the subpsychedelic lettering with which his friend Jack Fulton framed a
photo (from 1966) of studio-plus-occupant testified, emerged as a real substan-
tive, stood for something to which its bearer could now lay proper claim. Fulton
records, but does not reveal, where that transformation happened: in the
California Grocery, behind grubby windows that had once promised simple plea-
sures: a bag of candy, a bottle of wine. These are the same windows whose
plate-glass surfaces Nauman (formerly the artist) soon washed, then lined with a
Mylar window shade, its blocked-out legend - "The true artist is an amazing lumi-
nous fountain" - assertively framing whatever was (or was not) going on inside.
Does the significance of this year need further emphasis? In 1966 Nauman
emerged from the university as a professional sculptor in the making (or so his
Davis diploma promised), and it was as an instructor of sculpture (what the Art

* This essay is a revised and expanded version of a text that appears in Constance Lewallen, ed.,
Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
1 . College of the San Francisco Art Institute, 1967-68, p. 38.

OCTOBER 120, Spring 2007, pp. 53-70. 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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 54 OCTOBER

Jack Fulton. Portrait of the Artist as Bruce

Nauman. 1966. Courtesy Jack Fulton.

Institute rather pompously termed a "master artist-teacher") that he first found

work that paid. These are the facts in the case. Yet we might be inclined to dismiss
them, not least because they are so hard to square with how we customarily under-
stand this particular artist's coming of age. For years now, since the artist became
Nauman, his art has seemed unclassifiable according to standard media distinc-
tions of medium. Instead, as his window shade insisted, it relied on other skills. Its
anti-magic embraced whatever went on inside the Grocery, whether it involved

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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture 55

writing, drawing, casting, pacing, filming, or stomping; whether it deployed fat or

flour or makeup, a violin or just a squared-off guideline taped directly onto the
floor. All these things happened and were used in the studio. The space was a
petri dish. Activity was all.
How did this come about? Why move, not just from medium to media, but
from art making to art-as-making? As Nauman tells it, his new context was the key.
By now, the story, which dates to a 1970 interview with Willoughby Sharp, has
assumed something of the status of a myth of origins. "The first real change came
when I had a studio. I was working very little, teaching a class one night a week . . .
and I didn't know what to do with all that time. . . . There was nothing in the stu-
dio because I didn't have much money for materials. So I was forced to examine
myself and what I was doing there."2 What this narrative tells us is that "real
change" involved what we might term spatial self-scrutiny: with no materials
around him, the artist was freed from their inbuilt limitations to focus on his own
limits: what he was doing there, how his actions and motives had meaning as those
of a substantive body and mutable self.
Like many myths, this one speaks, retrospectively, to past circumstance, to a
decisive event: Nauman's art had left behind the limits and allegiances built into
devotion to a single discipline. And as myths often do, it seems quite persuasive if
taken on its own peculiar terms. Hanging out in the studio is what made Nauman
into Nauman. It was there that he left his erstwhile "artist's" persona far behind. It
was there, for example, that he famously made Failing to Levitate in the Studio
(1966), that quasi-forensic effort to prove that artists, like ghosts and spirits, do
not exist. Faced with the photographic evidence, who could possibly demur? Of
course art cannot achieve transcendence; or if transcendence is in the offing, it
will take someone other than a Nauman to bring it off. As he will later put it, he is
bound to fail. Unless, that is, he restricts his art to the basics, himself, a body at
work in a studio space. Surely Nauman did his utmost to take the measure of this
fundamental set of facts.
What would happen if we were to follow Nauman's lead? If we too consid-
ered him as a situated body - took stock of the spatial and bodily situations he was
able to register or concretize as form? And what if we also aimed to grasp what it
was in Art that Nauman's actions were working against? What might they have
been devised in order to reject? If these questions motivate this essay, this is
because there is still so much to understand about what is sometimes termed the
"post-medium" condition, for which read the end to the artist's professional alle-
giance to the tangible or the optical, to painting or sculpture - as if such loyalty
was ever a hard and fast rule. Something did happen in Nauman's studio, and
understanding it does not merely involve grasping what, in supplanting medium by

2. Interview with Nauman by Willoughby Sharp, 1970, in Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please:
Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003),
pp. 117-18. The catalog is herefter abbreviated as Kraynak.

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 56 OCTOBER .

mediums (as well as media), he hoped to

accomplish.3 Equally relevant is how that
transformation came about. It did not hap-
pen overnight. Sculpture - a traditional
activity long identified with a specific set of
techniques and materials - first had to be
decisively conquered and then aggressively
destroyed. That inevitably violent process,
of a kind endemic in the 1960s, could not
help but demonstrate, however obliquely,
what the art attacker understood the
enemy's strengths and weaknesses to be.
The result, accordingly, is not mere de-
struction. The new media artists gave an
account of the "old" medium, be it painting
or sculpture, they aimed to put aside.
Forced superannuation is a form of depen-
dency, if not quite a tribute, and it is only
through such back-handed reliance that
the non- or anti-art practices so character-
istic of the moment could have prevailed.
Let us return, then, to Nauman as
the sculptor that, as he completed his
schooling in the mid-1960s, he was train-
ing to become. What did he actually know Robert Arneson. Portrait of the Artist
about his future specialty? As might be Losing His Marbles. 1965. Art Estate
expected, answers are circumstantial at of Robert Arneson/ Licensed by VAGA,
best. On the one hand, art at Davis in the New York.

early 1960s was a young and experimental

department, and its master's degree program, established in 1961, was still work-
ing out the kinks. New professors, including those inventive object-makers Robert
Arneson, William T. Wiley, and Manuel Neri, were arriving nearly every year, and
at least some of their efforts - works like Arneson 's 1965 Self-Portrait of the Artist
Losing His Marbles - come close in their ambivalent tone and feeling toward tradi-
tional sculptural formats (the bust, in this case) to Nauman, to his 1967 Myself as a
Marble Fountain, say. Whether cracked open to expose a man's inner marbles or
spewing out his inner waters, both enact dramas - or melodramas - of bodily
emission and loss. And in each case, a time-honored medium - sculpture - is both
the vehicle and the butt of the joke. On the other hand, the real centerpiece of

3. In using both mediums and media here, I am invoking the practice followed and explained by
Rosalind Krauss in "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1999), pp. 5-7.

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 Nauman 's Body of Sculpture 57

Bruce Nauman. Myself as a Marble Fountain. 1967. 2007

Bruce Nauman/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

sculpture at Davis was not its innovative faculty but rather the metal-casting
foundry and curriculum set up by Professor Tio Giambruni, who, in buying and
installing the necessary equipment, created one of the first such facilities to be
established at any West Coast university. Given this emphasis on bronze and the
monument, the Davis program in sculpture hardly seems modern: on the con-
trary, with its molten metals and crowds of assistants, it is remembered for its
distinctly Renaissance methods and feel. We might imagine that such a context
was inimical to Nauman, yet Giambruni's casting course was one in which he,
along with all the other sculpture students, was expected to enroll.4

4. See "University of California: In Memoriam, 1974" memo for Giambruni, signed by fellow Davis
professors R. M. Johnson, M. C. Reagan, and D. Schapiro, in the Online Archive of the University of
California, http://texts.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docld=hb6h4nb3q7&doc.view=frames&:chunk.id=div00017
&toc.depth=l&toc.id=. Accessed September 20, 2005. In later comments to Michele de Angelus (1980;
Kraynak, pp. 225-26) Nauman makes clear that he saw the Davis sculpture program, with its devotion
to clay or casting, and total neglect of welding, as distinctly outmoded. The focus on bronzes seems to
have sent his mind back to the faux "bronzes" that while an undergraduate at the University of
Wisconsin, he had seen made of tinted fiberglass.

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 58 OCTOBER

It is typical of Nauman in the 1960s that his time in the foundry promptly
sparked perverse uses of the lessons Giambruni had aimed to impart. Process, not
product, was still the issue, but in a notably low-tech way. As Neil Benezra phrases
it, Nauman 's work now "focused on the process of making itself by analyzing the
venerable tradition of casting."5 No one should be misled by this reference to
analysis: less intellectual than practical, its results were rudimentary at best.
Turning his back on the finely tuned operations of the caster, Nauman 's antitech-
nology was distinctly, even aggressively, deskilled. If, like any foundry worker, he
relied on plaster molds and models, his were based on lumpy clay originals quickly
massed as rough-and-ready forms.6 Long loaves and large lozenges were his spe-
cialty; "soft-shape" forms, he called them, as if avoiding other more colorful turns
of phrase. Such abject shapes were promptly joined by stiffer, perkier molds and
models put together from cardboard and wood. Both formal categories - the hard
and the soft - served to generate a whole series of resin and polyester pieces, yet

5. Neil Benezra, "Surveying Nauman," in Bruce Nauman: Exhibition Catalogue and Catalogue Raisonne,
ed. Joan Simon (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994), p. 19. The catalog is hereafter abbreviated as CR.
6. Juding from the evidence offered by the list of destroyed works presented by the catalogue
raisonne, Nauman seems to have initially believed it possible to sidestep the use of a plaster mold taken
from the initial clay "soft-shape." His first attempt in fiberglass and resin, based directly on a clay model
and now documented only by a photograph, did not have the desired effect. See CR D-l.

Installation view of Lucy Lippard's Eccentric Abstraction. Fischbach Gallery, New

York, 1 966. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt, courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
Courtesy the Lucy R. Lippard Papers, ca. 1940-2006, in the Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.

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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture 59

the results have the feel less of authentic originals than of comic replicants. "Same
mold" declares one drawing of two twinned uprights: Nauman soon realized, as
did Rodin before him, that more than one cast could be taken from any molded
matrix, and its identical products joined together to form a strangely palindromic
whole.7 It is as if "Madam, I'm Adam" had been reformulated as sculpture. The
result was a physical pun, the physical here looking distinctly exhausted: some-
thing tells me that Giambruni would have failed to get a joke that speaks so
directly to and of the essence of the cast.
The stuttering of internal replication is not all these strange works are after.
Made as mere skins painted onto, then lifted off of, the mold's surface (which is
how resin and polyester are frequently worked with) the sculptures look like
remainders (and reminders) of some absent form. What kind of form, however, is
hard to say. When the critic Fidel A. Danieli calls such pieces "end or waste prod-
ucts," the reference seems more industrial than natural, as befits their look as
hollow repetitious oddments of workaday stuff. In his next breath, however,
Danieli changes register. Nature triumphs, he declares, with Nauman's "molds"
(particularly his fiberglass sculptures) now emerging as versions of some "static
frozen chrysalis."8 The new phrasing speaks to the brittle presence of these objects
as remainders, cast offs left behind, even while the words reach (desperately?) for
a naturalism that Nauman's castings do their best to disallow.
Danieli was responding not only to Nauman's first solo exhibition (a selec-
tion of fiberglass works was shown at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, in
May 1966) but also to whatever, as a local critic, he had seen in the studio. Its con-
tents would soon become even more widely known. In fall 1966, Lucy R. Lippard
included Nauman's work in Eccentric Abstraction, the notorious exhibition staged
at the Fischbach Gallery, New York.9 What is salient - perhaps even epochal -
about that context is its effort to define what Lippard announced as a new "non-
sculptural" style. As she presents it, its deconstructive tenets move beyond the
nature/culture duality that Danieli insists on, yet basic contradictions still remain
in play. Imaginative, sensual, nonspatial, antiformal, the new work was decisively
bodily, though in a wholly new way. It combined deathly passivity with vital pres-
ence. Now opposites ally: form and content elide. "The future of sculpture,"
Lippard hopefully concluded, "may very well lie in such non-sculptural styles."10
What needs emphasizing in the case of Nauman, however, is how decidedly
that nonsculptural future sets itself against the example of an all-too-sculptural

7. Such works include CR 17-23, seven untitled pieces of 1965.

8. Fidel A. Danieli, "The Art of Bruce Nauman," Artfarum 6, no. 4 (December 1967), p. 16.
9. The show apparently included only a few works by Nauman, among them CR 59, now on
extended loan to the Guggenheim Museum from the Panza Collection. Though installed horizontally
at the Fischbach Gallery, it is most often treated as a vertical work.
10. Lucy R. Lippard, "Eccentric Abstraction," Art International (November 1966), reprinted in
Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall, eds., The New Sculpture 1965-1975, exh. cat. (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990), p. 58.

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 60 OCTOBER

past. Lippard's view of Nauman is her clearest case in point. "Nauman 's pieces,"
she declares, speaking again of the contents of the studio, "are carelessly surfaced,
somewhat aged, blurred and repellent, wholly non-sculptural and deceptively
inconsequential at first sight." Why does she trot out this laundry list of quasi
faults? The answer seems clear: Behind each of Nauman 's apparent failings stands
a shadow antithesis, a bygone practice of sculpture that the artist has coolly
trumped. Real sculpture is not a careless art. It is supposed to be timeless; it wants
to be looked at; it has something to convey. Its meticulous surfaces are made to
last. Not Nauman 's. And this is not all. The negations continue. When Lippard
asserts that the fragility of Nauman's works "suggests fragmentation," that his
pieces are "disturbingly self-sufficient," and that this quality has the "toughness of
lost, leftover function and a total lack of elegance," the outworn ethos of monolith
and monument haunts her every word. While it has no function, Nauman's sculp-
ture still seems purposive, even declarative: the residue of self-sufficiency, even
monumentality, still clings to it, even though it has retained nothing very substan-
tive to say.
Lippard, as always, was in pitch-perfect tune with the changing times. Well
before 1966 Robert Morris and Donald Judd had laid down the commandments
of the new Minimalist aesthetic: The contents of the Primary Structures show, which
was held in April at the Jewish Museum, New York, showed clearly how far the
creed had spread.11 But with Richard Tuttle's having already begun to exhibit his
hand-shaped wall pieces (including two in San Francisco, which Nauman saw and
promptly adapted), the gamut of Post-Minimalist apostasy was well under way.12
There is no doubt that Nauman too was instantly ready to depart from Minimalism,
via an "early" focus, as Marcia Tucker put it six years later, "on certain physical
properties without reference to the object as such." In place of objecthood are
actions: "leaning, hanging, bending, tearing, folding, propping" - this is Tucker's
chosen list.13 What is striking about these postures and movements is how most
court real confusion between the artist and his objects. Who does what? Is the one

11. On "Primary Structures," see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 13-24.
12. Kraynak, pp. 226-27. The works by Tuttle that Nauman had encountered were shown at The 7th
Selection of the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art: A New York Collector Selects, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, Jan. 22-Feb. 14, 1965, and are identified in the exhibition checklist as Abstract
Picture, oil on canvas and wood; and Silver Abstract, plywood construction. The second of these, now
known as Silver Picture or Silver Abstraction, dates from 1964.
13. This and the previous citation from Marcia Tucker, "Bruce Nauman," in Jane Livingston and
Marcia Tucker, Bruce Nauman: Work from 1965 to 1972 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, 1972), p. 32. It is worth noting that Tucker's list, rather more than Nauman 's sculpture, bears a
relation to Richard Serra's "Verb List," of 1967-68. The comparison is telling, as Serra's list, which is
composed of thirty-seven imperatives (beginning "to scatter, to arrange, to repair, to discard" and end-
ing "to continue") and seventeen prepositional phrases ("of waves, of electromagnetic, of inertia ... of
tides, of reflection ... of time, of carbonization) insists on intentions and reference, while Tucker, as
noticed above, is concerned with action or process. See Richard Serra, Writings/Interviews (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 4.

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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture 61

Richard Tattle. Silver Picture. 1964. Collection of Frances

Dittmer, Aspen, Colorado. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.

a surrogate for the other or are they comrades-at-arms? When Mel Bochner com-
plains, "Nauman's work is really not-work," a similar problem looms. When "work"
merely "looks like a lot of rags thrown on the ground or draped on the wall," the
failure can only be traced back to the artist's aggressively inept actions: in 1966,
throwing and draping are not yet bona fide artistic moves. Of course "not- work"
results. Likewise if "not-work" looks tired ("The tiredness of it is unusual"), it fol-
lows that its maker is worn out too.14

Or so Bochner seems to suspect. He was wrong. Nauman was actually only at

the beginning of a process of dismantling an entire system of representation once
impervious to exhaustion, a system deeply bound up with solidity, presence,
coherence, thingness, and embodiment. I do not think this catalog of qualities
exaggerates the case. If sculpture's age-old resources are materiality and bodili-
ness, then these same characteristics could not help but bear the brunt of
Nauman's attack. Sculpture relied on physical presence, thus sculpture's physical-
ity was the enemy; and a formidable one.
The blow could only be struck at sculpture as both body and thing. Already,
late in 1966, Nauman had measured (or claimed to measure) the right rear quar-
ter of his own body, somewhere about buttock height. The curved line that
resulted was then used, in triplicate, as a template to design a quasi-geometrical
container made from galvanized iron and standing, like the artist, precisely six
feet tall. The receptacle looks a bit like a fluted column, or at least a section of

14. Mel Bochner, "Eccentric Abstraction," Arts Magazine 41 (November 1966), p. 58, as quoted by
Richard Armstrong, "Between Geometry and Gesture," in Armstrong and Marshall, The New Sculpture
1965-75, p. 14.

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 62 OCTOBER

one - even more so in Nauman's drawing for the work - except, of course, for the
opening along the frontal edge. This slit declares a practical purpose: it is a work-
ing object, one that claims its readiness for (horrifying) use.15 Designated a Storage
Capsule for the Right Rear Quarter of My Body (1966), it imagines nothing less than
the meticulous butchering of the artist's carcass, even while it prepares a ship-
shape casket ready to seal away the result. Next to this ghoulish concept, Robert
Morris's 1961 Column - the work he designed as a "costume" to be "worn" on stage
until the chosen moment, when with the artist inside it, it would topple - seems
both emotionally and formally contained. Nauman's piece, by contrast, hyper-
bolizes sculpture as a bodily object by figuring a body part - the right rear
quarter - we can feel as part of ourselves, but never look at directly. Feel painfully,
thanks to a process of careful excision: now we begin to realize why Nick Wilder,
the L.A. dealer, was subjected to two months of nightmares after encountering his
first Nauman - nightmares that meant, Wilder soon realized, that here was an
artist worth a solo show.16
In the mid-1960s, Nauman devised a variety of methods to do away with
sculptural objects as bodies and physical things. A perverse tactility is the frequent
result. Like the Storage Capsule, the new works summon the body in absentia,
replacing it by some tangible token that tries, however incompetently, to refer-
ence a fleshly part. Or sometimes to mime the role of flesh itself. Take for
example the notorious untitled 1967 work that combines a folded pair of wax and
plaster arms with a knotted length of a ship's hawser, the only grade of rope with
bodily presence and heft that is truly bodily in size. Nauman uses it to suggest the
innards (bones, muscles, arteries, ligaments) that are contained in or lie beneath
a corporeal shell. The conjunction is deeply distressing, not least because of the
materials in play. The arms themselves, which are vividly present, not only mine
the meticulous naturalism traditionally achievable in wax, but also back it with the
illusion of solidity supplied by a plaster cast. Above the elbows, however, natural-
ism screeches to a halt. This is a body, we soon realize, that has no insides; its
subtle surfaces conceal only twisted hanks of hemp on which the arms are strung.
It is up to us to decide what the knot suggests. Perhaps it is merely material,
although its asymmetry makes it seem more purposeful than that. Rope and arms
form a unit or circuit that summons a particular posture or stance: part bravado,
part wariness, they conjure the studio, the place where the twentieth-century

15. In an interview with Joe Raffaele (1966; see Kraynak, p. 106), Nauman is asked to comment on the
importance he places on process versus conception: What matters more, the actual doing, or the idea
itself? Nauman replies, "A little of each - although it should be O.K. if someone else made it. The prob-
lem is, you can't get someone else to make it right. I've had that problem. I think I make the plans as well
as they can be made, and then I bring them to somebody. And they make the piece wrong. Or they can
make it stronger and do it another way."
16. This story is told by Nauman in the course of his long 1980 interview with Michele de Angelus.
See Kraynak, p. 242. Described only as a "low plastic piece," the work was then in the possession of
Tony DeLap, but has since deteriorated and no longer exists.

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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture 63

artist (think of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning) most often - occasionally
barechestedly - strikes a pose. But this is only one possible reading: might not
they stand in for the psychic makeup of a subject belonging more typically, more
generally, to the year in which the sculpture got done?17 Is this the sixties self,
nightmares and all? Such an empathic or historical reading, of course, would be
entirely consistent with traditional responses to sculpture - a realization that only
insists on how difficult it is to make something be nonsculptural. Sculpture - for
which read bodily presence, bodily expression - will out.
One solution would be to dispense with the body entirely, which of course
Nauman also did. In a whole series of works that also began in 1966, he imagined
various "devices," as some are labeled, to serve as supplements to a body that oth-
erwise would be lost or wayward or, in some cases, simply incomplete. Such
phrases describe Device for a Left Armpit (1967), as well as Neon Templates of the Left
Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals (1966), both of which not only claim to
register the body in its absence but also give it a truly rudimentary shape - think
topography or contour, maybe art or armpit, but not much more. In fact, the
question in both cases is precisely what manner of corporeal being - how shape-
less or shapely, how much marked by these descriptive processes - these works
imply. What kind of a body could actually risk being fitted back into - or initially
used to generate - such strange constraints? What would be the cost to life and
limb? Are life and limb even needed any more?
Nauman 's other devices seem less threatening, though even more (anti)-
sculptural. Chief among them are two works, each called Devices to Stand In (both
1966), though their effects are fleshed out, so to speak, by assorted other pieces,
mostly destroyed, which operated in similar ways. Each aims to limit or fix the
body in a spatial surrounding by giving it somewhere to stand. In the case of the
Devices, the job is done by a simple but efficient contraption, a brass or steel wedge
with a foot slot. (Two destroyed Devices used a rubber mat with left and right foot-
prints, and a slotted cardboard box.)18 On the one hand, each of these experiments
awaits an occupant: it needs a human presence to seem complete. On the other,
its integrity as a work means it should remain empty, so that the viewer will con-
jure a phantom figure to stand within the empty slot. But what would it actually be
like to assume that position? A sacrifice, no doubt. Fixed in place like a column or
statue, anyone standing there could not avoid taking the place of sculpture, in a
substitution that is also a loss. For if the Devices allow sculpture to feed itself on a
body's aliveness, they extract a high price. Thus commandeered, the victim would
be frozen to the spot. The result would be a body turned into a sculpture, standing

17. Robert Morris has also used rope to summon bodily sensations. See his Untitled (Knots) (1963), a
painted wood and hemp rope piece now at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Not only is this piece certainly
part of the pedigree of Nauman 's piece, but it also invokes another important precedent for Nauman:
Jasper Johns 's Targets with Plaster Casts (1955).
18. These are CR D-9 and D-17. Danieli (p. 18) refers to "a recent green and red rubber pad to be
stood upon," which may well be D-9.

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 64 OCTOBER

upright within the confines of a room. Would that body be a Nauman? Of course.
With works like these he takes the role of Pygmalion's negative alter ego, while the
frozen viewer plays Galatea in reverse.
What all this goes to show is not only how much sculpture needs a body.
Nauman 's antisculpture needs one too, but differently, and those differences are
precisely what these works seem designed to show: flesh, not stone; animation, not
petrification, absence, not presence, ladies and gentlemen, all this by means of a
simple Device. What the Devices also demonstrate, however, is that how sculpture
and space come together was for Nauman a major issue. Only consider the title of
his first artist's book, which he eloquently, prosaically dubbed Pictures of Sculpture
in a Room. Privately published in 1966 while its author was still a student at Davis,
the brief pamphlet (just three folded pages) presents small-scale photographs of
four different sculptures, one per page. Each shows a single work in isolation in
the generic room of the pamphlet's title.19 And not only does each represent a dif-
ferent sculptural format, but each, by virtue of its placement and action (hanging,
leaning), adopts a different pose. None is truly animated, and none nightmarish,
yet given the four individuating characterizations offered by the photographs
(they look like little portraits, carefully isolated on blank white pages), it seems
clear that even here the anthropomorphizing process was well under way. Along
these lines, it is worth recalling Marcia Tucker's remark apropos of the sculpture
that "a change in position affects the properties of volume, shape, size, and location."
What Tucker does not say in this quite orthodox Minimalist reading is that like his
sculpture, Nauman had already begun taking "positions" himself, notably in a
twice-repeated performance that two years later would be recorded on video as
Wall-Floor Positions (1968). It is not that this work allowed the artist to become a
sculpture, or that his changing positions transformed his identity: he stays
Nauman the whole way through. Yet the man and his works are still thoroughly
and self-consciously analogized: only consider the brief catalog of the eponymous
positions offered to an interviewer ("standing with my back to the wall for about
forty-five seconds or a minute, leaning out from the wall, then bending at the
waist, squatting, sitting, then finally standing up") and then the question that
ensued: "Willoughby Sharp: 'Did the performance relate to sculptural problems
that you were thinking about then?' Nauman: 'Yes.'"20
As this exchange reminds us, it will not do to exaggerate the violence
implied by Nauman's artworks: some were as mundane as the actions just
described. Yet no one can overlook his absurdist propensity for macabre play. His
interests leaned toward the body in extremis: frozen still or trapped in meaning-
less motion; absented, fragmented, reduced to elements or parts - for example,

19. See CR 48, which provides identifications of each work. My thanks to Anne Byrd for viewing the
Museum of Modern Art copy of this book as my proxy, and for providing me with scans of its images.
20. The Davis performance is identified in the catalogue raisonne as CR 5; its video version is CR
138. For Nauman's 1970 exchange with Willoughby Sharp, see Kraynak, p. 122.

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Nauman. Wall-Floor Positions. 1968. 2007 Bruce Nauman/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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 66 OCTOBER

Nauman. Left: Wax Templates of the Left Half of My Body

Separated by Cans of Grease. 1967. Right: Wax Templates
of My Body Arranged to Make an Abstract Sculpture. 1967.
2007 Bruce Nauman/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

wax and fat. This was the gambit of a strange work attempted and photographed
sometime in 1967, and later destroyed.21 Seven wax slabs, each again termed a
template of the left side of the artist's body, were stacked in a makeshift tower,
whose six-foot height was provided by seven stacked cans of grease. The arrange-
ment makes both more bodily and more prosaic a related study for a wax template
composition also dated 1967, this one a drawing that vertiginously imagines an
"abstracted sculpture." Here too abstraction only goes so far. Nauman has pep-
pered the drawing with the names of body parts: head, shoulder, chest, waist,
thigh, knee, and calf. In the end, the final, more flgural, arrangement relies
instead on a canonical principle of classical proportion, which dictates that the
beautiful body should stand seven heads tall. Or if not heads, then cans, with tem-
plates added, mime a makeshift spine.22 The result (inevitably titled Wax Templates
of the Left Half of My Body Separated by Cans of Grease) is just bodily enough to make
its anticanonical point. And to suggest something much more ghoulish, a

21. The work is CR D-21. My discussion relies on the information provided by the catalog.
22. Oddly and comically, the cans defer even further to sculptural tradition, in that all seven bear a
brand label with a funny little head, a sign that insists that the figure be understood as seven heads high.

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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture 67

knacker's nightmare of the body as remainder, boiled down to a greasy residue,

then packaged for sale. As a motif for sculpture, the idea harks back to Joseph
Beuys's 1964 Fettstuhl (Fat Chair) - which likewise replaces a body with a sloping
deposit of fat.23 Carefully planed and measured, the slab sits on its chair like a
proxy or substitute; it is left to us to wonder where its parent body went.
The answer that Nauman himself would give to that question is now familiar:
to the studio. If it was there that the figural body was banished from his sculptural
practice, it was also there that he used performance to lay claim to some of the
principal qualities of figurative sculptural form. The guiding wish behind many of
the performances taped in the Grocery seems to have been to approach the simul-
taneous aliveness and deadness of the sculpted work of art. Not only do such
exercises have him declaring his "thereness" as a mere physical property or activ-
ity - a condition of the various ways (walking, stamping, stomping, bouncing,
slowly, quickly, exaggeratedly, at an angle) he takes up space - but in two instances
his scenarios imagine a body assuming basic geometries - sphere and cylinder - in
animate approximation of a Minimalist work of art.24 How might this be done? To
make a cylinder, for example, the performer is to lie "along the wall/floor junc-
tion of the room, face into the corner." Not only is it easy to identify this location
as one much frequented by Nauman's objects, but it is also clear that once estab-
lished there, every fiber of the performer's body is to concentrate on behaving as
cylindrically as it possibly can. How? "Concentrate on straightening and lengthen-
ing the body along a line which passes through the center of the body parallel to
the corner of the room in which you lie. At the same time attempt to draw the
body in around the line. Then attempt to push that line into the corner of the
room." It should be clear that this exercise pits utter immobility against extreme
bodily concentration, even exertion. And it is likewise obvious that for a body to
approach a sculptural minimalism, every fiber of its being must be kept on red
alert. Once again it is sculpture - in its most uncanny version - that is calling the
shots. One of the tenets - even the cliches - of Minimalism is that it puts the viewer
in mind of his or her body. In Nauman, by contrast, the body Minimalism was con-
tent merely to gesture toward is somehow actively immobilized - dis-animated - by
the sculpture that invokes it; through that process body and sculpture are meant
to become quite scarily alike.

23. Although Nauman did not see Beuys's work until a trip to Dusseldorf in 1968, he had heard tell
of it some years earlier. In the 1980 interview conducted by Michele de Angelus, he recalls (Kraynak,
p. 251) that in about 1965 or 1966 he met the curator Kasper Konig, who "told [him] some things
about Joseph Beuys." Nauman's own chair work, A Cast of the Space under My Chair (1965-68), though
produced in its definitive concrete version during the German trip, dates in conception to three years
before. It is possible that as a spatial concretization, the piece also responds to Beuys's rendering of
human presence as fat.
24. Nauman's instructions for "Body as a Cylinder and "Body as a Sphere seem to have been for-
mulated by 1969. See Kraynak, p. 57. The citations below are likewise taken from that source.

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 68 OCTOBER

This essay departs from the claim that Nauman's assault on sculpture
inevitably gives an account of the very medium it worked to take apart. What better
way to conclude, then, by asking once more what Nauman took sculpture to be?
Two major points stand out. First of all is his sense of sculpture's terse concreteness
(as opposed to painting, which he mistrusted as "lush"). Of course that physicality
seems an obvious quality, but what precisely does it mean? Nauman's investigations
of the 1960s take that question to heart. His answer goes like this. As an object,
sculpture offers a means of description, even delimitation. It deals in edges, backs,
and sides. It separates itself from its surround. One reason this seems invaluable to
an artist like Nauman is because those same limits cannot help but raise the ques-
tion of what it might mean to exceed them. Sculpture, in its defining claim to
presence, inevitably evokes such excesses, just as its surfaces summon sensations of
both inside and out. Yet traditional sculpture does not really like to dwell on these
conditions, however inescapable they are. It does not always assert them as the
defining fact. For Nauman, by contrast, no ontological distinction could be more
salient. "Both what's inside and what's outside determine our physical, physiologi-
cal and psychological responses - how we look at an object," he declares.25 If such a

25. Interview with Joan Simon, 1988. See Kraynak, p. 324.

Nauman. Left: Platform Made Up of the Space between

Two Rectilinear Boxes on the Floor. 1 966. Above: A Cast
of the Space under My Chair. 1965-68. 2007 Bruce
Nauman/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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 Nauman's Body of Sculpture 69

statement declares the end of mere surface as the register of sculptural meaning,
it also puts paid to the sensory urgencies lodged in a purely phenomenological
stance. Both what is inside and what is outside are determinant (what is seen and
what is invisible) and to demonstrate those determinations is a further purpose,
not only of the early fiberglass pieces but also of works like Platform Made Up of the
Space between Two Rectilinear Boxes on the Floor (1966) and A Cast of the Space under My
Chair ( 1965-68). 26 Pieces like these point to a fascination with edges, above all,
which emerge uncannily where none can actually be perceived. In casting,
Nauman says, "I always like the parting lines and the seams." These, he continues,
"help to locate the structure of an object, but in the finished sculpture usually get
removed." The implication seems to be that through a project of recovering once-
invisible links and edges, new and more accurate structures can be revealed.27
Finish does not matter a jot: instead, Nauman 's objects aim to do away with
perimeters, by the contradictory tactic of bringing them to light. Perhaps the
issue is that without edges we could not trust ourselves to tell the difference
between bodies and objects, or know how and where they sit within their larger
envelope of space. For Nauman, structure seems to mean all this and more.
Which is to say that in the mid-1960s Nauman took limits seriously and fol-
lowed where they led him: toward the vagaries of domestic objects and interior
space. It is there that he envisions the body, one object among many, but possess-
ing a fragile aliveness that cannot quite be quelled. This is my second major point.
Nauman used sculpture, as well as his responses to it, to measure that aliveness, as
well as to push aliveness to a crux. His work holds the body hostage to the threat
(and the necessity) of an encounter with sculpture as a frozen corpse. I say neces-
sity advisedly. Nauman, alone of all his contemporaries, took the complex
bodiliness of the medium profoundly to heart. This is why we can do no better in
concluding than to remember his attentions to a figure both beloved and reviled
in the 1960s, sculpture's elder statesman, Henry Moore. A series of works - among
them a wax-coated relief sculpture promptly editioned in iron, several elaborate
drawings, and two large-scale photographs - do their best to enter the debate,
with Nauman speaking for both sides. In one image, Moore is symbolically
enshrined: a tomb-cum-storage capsule preserves him, as if cryogenically frozen,
for some future age. In another, one of the two photographs, a strange whirling
spiral - a light trap, Nauman calls it - is set going, as if such sizzling electrification
could catch Moore's essence in its coils. In still another, "Moore" (with Nauman as
his stand-in) is imaged (to cite the work's title) as if "bound to fail." His arms tied
behind him, he looks like Nauman 's hostage, until we remember that with
Nauman himself having served as the model for the role of the elder sculptor, the

26. For Platform Made Up of the Space between Two Rectilinear Boxes on the Floor, see CR 50; for A Cast of
the Space under My Chair, see above, n. 23.
27. Interview with Joan Simon, 1988.

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 70 OCTOBER

younger, for all intents and purposes, becomes hostage to himself. As so often with
Nauman, the sadism is playful, up to a point. The masochism, too. But neither
should obscure the issues that Nauman is contesting with his British mentor: what
Nauman laid waste to - though at the same time wishing to hold on to - are the
surface and substance, the tactility and presence, of the sculptural work of art.
"A point in space is a place for an argument," Wittgenstein declared.28 In
Nauman's case, the quarrel is considerably expanded, to take in nearly every
aspect of sculpture's materiality - its expressive form. It is staged, moreover, by
sustained recourse to a medium to which he owes everything, yet is fully resolved
to leave physically and analytically exhausted - as indeed he does. This may well be
why Alex Potts finds Nauman's "object-like works" "pretty unremarkable." Because
they engage too closely with the problem of what the sculptural object is: they are
so single-mindedly aimed at taking sculpture apart. Potts does concede that
Nauman later arrives at "an emphatic negation of sculptural values" - though only
when he turns to installation as his means. Here I disagree. I think the negation
happens earlier, through the elaborate dialectics I have described. It is as if the
autocritical practices once assumed to be paradigmatic of modernism have been
taken to the nth degree - all the better to subject the paradigm itself to lethal
assault. Of course I am not claiming that there can be no more sculpture after
Nauman. Yet the sensory past with which sculpture was for so long connected -
which it aimed to embody - surely cannot continue. Instead, Nauman's work turns
inward, not in pursuit of introspection, but to turn the very idea of inwardness
inside out. And his work simultaneously turns outward, toward mere surface, or
mere solidity, so as to forsake the privacy, the discreteness, of our sense of bodies
and things. This new congress of inside and outside strikes sculpture at its heart.29
Both a hectic animation and a dead dis-animation are its weapons - so much so
that I cannot help believing that Nauman must somewhere have preserved a long-
ing for a bit of stability, some solid yet animate form, anything other than this
endless backing and forthing of objects and bodies, neither of which can be prop-
erly alive or finally dead. And if it is animate form you yearn for, Moore is the
answer - hence Nauman's prudence in storing him so carefully away.

28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 2.0131, as cited in Ann Wilson Lloyd,
"Casting about with Bruce Nauman," Sculpture 13, no. 4 (July-August 1994), pp. 20-27
29. This formulation arises from discussions with Jeremy Melius, to whom I am grateful.

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