Bruce Nauman Asks if Art Can Exist Without a Viewer

LOS ANGELES — That one of the best art shows in Los Angeles right now is an empty room might come as a surprise to most. Bruce Nauman would beg to differ — just as he has for the entirety of his 60-plus-year career. A formidable figure in modern and contemporary art, his practice runs the gamut, from performance to sculpture to video, and beyond, all united by his conceptual interrogations of art itself. But what may seem heady on paper is surprisingly — and refreshingly — simple and even earnest in person. At Marian Goodman Gallery, an exhibition focusing on the artist’s Pasadena Years (1969–79), when he lived in East LA, displays works that he created specifically to center the viewer’s experience of architecture, the body, and art — sometimes making use of nearly vacant galleries. These pieces are the stuff of art history legend (and many college courses), but what, if anything, do they mean to us now? 

Much of Nauman’s art cuts to the core of our engagement with art past and present, looking at foundational interactions between viewers, art objects, and art institutions. In “Performance Corridor” (1969), he exaggerates the sense of confinement in exhibition spaces, constructing a bare, narrow wooden hallway that dead ends on one side into an empty wall. Likewise, “Funnel Piece (Françoise Lambert Installation)” (1971) consists of two tall white walls, identical to those enclosing the gallery, that slant toward each other, almost meeting at their apex. These simple works enact what many artists have labored to prove: that the art world’s structures — both its literal buildings and its larger apparatus — are restrictive and arbitrary, but they are still the primary way we experience art.

In Nauman’s eyes, though, these confining systems and structures birth a seemingly endless array of experiences, objects, and reactions. Videos on view, displayed on historically accurate Sony televisions, show figures engaging with their environments in repetitive actions, from “Bouncing in the Corner, No. 2: Upside Down” to “Revolving Upside Down” (both 1969) or “Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down” (1973), to name a few. The figures in each work demonstrate how even the most banal action can become injurious, ecstatic, and sensual when they are approached as art. Nauman cheekily endorses this attitude in his text-based piece, “Body Pressure” (1974), a pink paper poster that instructs its readers to press their bodies hard into a wall, which he notes “may become a very erotic exercise.” 

In a 1966 interview published in Artforum, sculptor Tony Smith describes driving through the barren, industrial wasteland of an unfinished section of a New Jersey turnpike, surrounded by the same materials that were popular in minimalist sculpture at the time. He called the experience “the end of art.” Smith’s remarks elucidate the values of many likeminded artists who, at the time, believed that the 20th century had seen art through to its natural conclusion, distilling the forms and feelings of modernity so completely that they could not be meaningfully distinguished from a drive down an abandoned highway. Nauman proves otherwise. At Marian Goodman Gallery, the artist demonstrates how interactions between the art object and viewer are, in fact, infinite. Luckily for Nauman, the end of art proves very long indeed. 

Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years continues at Marian Goodman Gallery (1120 Seward Street, Hollywood, Los Angeles) through April 26. The exhibition was organized by Philipp Kaiser with Samantha Gregg of Marian Goodman Gallery, in close collaboration with Bruce Nauman and his studio.