Bruce Nauman was one of the most prominent, influential, and versatile American artists to emerge in the 1960s. Although his work is not easily defined either by its materials, styles or themes, sculpture is central to it, and it is characteristic of Postminimalism in the way it blends ideas from Conceptualism, Minimalism, performance and video art. The revival of interest in Marcel Duchamp in the 1960s also clearly influenced Nauman in various ways, from encouraging his love of word play to infusing his work with a satirical and sometimes absurdist tone. Despite the impact of Dada, however, he has continued to view his art less as a playful or creative enterprise than as a serious research endeavor, one he likes to carry out in seclusion from the art world, one that is shaped by his interests in ethics and politics.

• Some of Nauman's earliest work was shaped by ideas that arose in the wake of Minimalism in the late 1960s. In particular, the way he treated the body - often his own, shown on video completing repetitive tasks - and the way he related the body to surrounding objects, all show the impact of Minimalism's new ideas about the relationship between the viewer and the sculptural object. His occasional interest in abstraction, and in sculptural concerns such as gravity, also betray the style's influence. But Nauman shunned the slick production values of Minimalism, and has often showed a preference for a cruder manner of presentation.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas about language have been an important influence on his work, shaping his interest in the way words succeed or fail in referring to objects in the world. The philosopher's outlook has also no doubt influenced the tone of some of Nauman's work, which sometimes has comic, absurdist touches, employing jokes and word play, and yet also touches on obsessive behavior and frustration.
• Much of Nauman's work reflects the disappearance of the old modernist belief in the ability of the artist to express his ideas clearly and powerfully. Art, for him, is a haphazard system of codes and signs, just like any other form of communication. Aside from informing his use of words, it has also encouraged him to use readymade objects - objects which, unlike paintings or traditional sculptures, already carry meanings and associations from their use in the world - and to make casts of objects ranging from the space underneath chairs, to human body parts.

Bruce Nauman was born on December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father, an engineer and a salesman, moved the family several times to different Midwestern locations, resulting in a somewhat turbulent and lonely childhood for Nauman. A shy and small youth, Nauman enjoyed reading, and studied piano, guitar, and upright bass. Although he was not encouraged by his parents to continue his musical pursuits, he played in a polka band during his high school years in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, and continued to play in bands in college, first a dance band and then in jazz groups, which he found more interesting. He received no training and very little exposure to visual art during his childhood, and did not develop a true passion for creating art until college.

Nauman began his secondary education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he first concentrated on math and physics, but after his sophomore year he informed his parents that he would become an artist, and graduated in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in science with a minor in painting.

He married his first wife, Judy, in 1964. They had a son, Erik, in 1966 and a daughter, Zoe, in 1970. In 1966, he graduated with an MFA from the University of California, Davis. Among his instructors at Davis were William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri. All three worked in sculpture, and outside the norms of the time, which undoubtedly had a profound influence on Nauman's desire for non-conformity. The newly established program's relaxed and somewhat unstructured approach to instruction worked quite well for Nauman, who felt encouraged to critique more formal styles and methods.

Upon his graduation, he moved to a studio in San Francisco and taught a weekly early-morning class at the Art Institute, seldom encountering his colleagues and peers. This solitary lifestyle contributed to the development of a method of working in seclusion that would persist for several years. In his very early career at Davis, Nauman made experimental paintings and "plastic things," mainly working in oil and producing abstract and landscape works. He also experimented with welding steel forms and affixing them onto canvas, painting the dimensional landscape shapes. While at Davis, he decided to give up painting, claiming that the materials "got in the way." He produced his last canvas, Untitled (1964-1965), in 1965. This break with painting spurred an exploration of media, and in subsequent years, Nauman became prolific in film, performance and sculpture. He first produced fiberglass sculptures in 1965, using casting to focus on the process of art-making itself, and entering the Process Art movement by disregarding the art object itself in favor of its creation. By the fall of 1966, art-making for Nauman had become not a method by which to make a finished product, but an activity that was art in itself.

During late 1960s and early 1970s, Nauman's work and career developed quickly. In 1968 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, he had his first solo show, and was also included in many prominent group shows of the time, such as Eccentric Abstraction (1966, New York), Documenta 4 (1968, Kassel, Germany) and Anti-illusion: Procedures/Materials at The Whitney (1969, New York). Although rejected by many American critics for the anti-formal nature of his work, European curators, already primed for critique of formalism by artists like Joseph Beuys and the Italian Arte Povera group, embraced Nauman's work, particularly his alternative media. Nauman's work was shown in forums such as the Kunsthalle Bern and the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam. This surge of interest culminated in 1972 when gallerists Jane Livingston and Marcia Tucker organized a widely touring, extensive survey of Nauman's work for the Los Angeles County and Whitney museums. The deeply private Nauman reacted poorly to the overflow of attention, and in the mid-1970s, severely reduced his artistic output. He began to employ more text in his works, channeling his anger and frustration into phrases such as "Please/Pay Attention/Please" and "Placate My Art" that were featured in the compositions. While attempting to incorporate text into his sculptures of the period, he was challenged to find a cohesive way of incorporating his voice into his commanding structures, and although he created numerous neon light works and installations, his sculpture evolved in a more conceptual direction, withholding information and requiring a complex response from the viewer by creating "uncomfortable spaces and shapes." By the early 1980s, Nauman replaced text-driven installations and model pieces with important, aggressive neon light works and sculptures, evolving his use of language correspondingly. Although never considered a Neo-Expressionist, during the movement, American and European collectors alike coveted Nauman's work, and he enjoyed six solo shows between 1982 and 1984.

From the 1980s onward, Nauman has employed a wide variety of media, incorporating the word play and political commentary for which he is well known. Continuing to experiment with bizarre forms and unusual materials, his art has stayed original and captivating throughout his long career. Some of his most recent works, the sound installation pieces Days and Giorni were featured at the Venice Biennale 2009, representing the United States and winning the Golden Lion award. In 1989, he married painter Susan Rothenberg, and the two constructed separate studios and a home near Galisteo, New Mexico, where they currently reside. The two have managed to remain almost completely uninfluenced by one another, owing to their very different styles and themes.

Nauman remains one of the most influential contemporary American artists. His innovative and provocative ideas are expressed in a wide range of media and materials, which makes it difficult to categorize his work as inhabiting a single style. Even throughout his sixties, he has continued to work primarily in sculpture and video, exploring language and the physical body with unusual themes based on animal and human body parts. He has influenced countless young artists, including the Young British Artists movement, by embracing social and political commentary and helping to loosen the hold of Minimal art. Among his honors are an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989, the Max Beckmann Prize in 1990, the Wolf Prize in Arts-Sculpture in 1993, the Wexner Prize in 1994, and the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 2009.


Below are Bruce Nauman's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness, and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful."

"Sunsets, flowers, landscapes: these kinds of things don't move me to do anything. I just want to leave them alone. My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It's not that I think I can change that, but it's just such a frustrating part of human history."

"I think the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry or art occurs. Roland Barthes has written about the pleasure that is derived from reading when what is known rubs up against what is unknown, or when correct grammar rubs up against nongrammar... If you only deal with what is known, you'll have redundancy: on the other hand, if you only deal with the unknown, you cannot communicate at all. There is always some combination of the two, and it is how they touch each other than makes communication interesting."