Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Bruce Nauman
American; 20th-century
The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
81%
Carrousel. 1988. Steel, aluminum
This piece confronts the primary issue with postmodern visual art — its tendency to fall unwitting victim to convention by rejecting it outright and so allowing it to fester, sidelong and unconsidered, inside artworks' weird formal recesses — by semantically acknowledging and then conceptually metabolizing the history of sculpture. Namely, the cast steel creatures with the stands still stuck in their feet look like they've been ripped out of bizarre equine monuments, just to be included in Nauman's device. Their presence as, like, debased epitomes of the sculptural medium gives licence to the rest of the work — gridded floor; machine; kineticism — to function as something murkily other than sculpture. Having unyoked itself from the strictures of medium, the piece, with one of its hands, hits you with its straightforward brutality, and, with the other, does legerdemain with meaning. The work is palpably significant, in other words, but also unaccountably vague: of course something repellant has been done to these animals, but the whys and even the whats of it all are completely obscure. The beasts' forms are slightly off-base (and why is one of them hugging another?); the circular movement and the dragging along the floor seem like (literal) overkill; the apparatus at center is way too stark, and yet it's apparently deliberately shaped. And so a gulf opens up between the directness of the piece's import — it is about violence, full stop — and the circuity of its means of meaning this. (TFS, 2026)
Antwerp, Belgium: Middelheim Museum
...%
Diamond Shaped Room with Yellow Light. 1986-90/2018. Concrete, LED bulbs
This piece is evidently a comment on the sterile feelingless environments of commercial buildings from the end of the 20th century (office complexes, department stores, etc.). It evokes very well their liminality and subtle disquieting spatial effects. (It comprises two triangular concrete "rooms" partitioned in the middle, lit by some yellow LEDs hung high up on the interior of the structure.) As with much art from the moment just after Minimalism and Conceptualism, Nauman's piece suffers from its unrooted novelty and its misplacement of aesthetic intent. While the artwork is clearly derived from late-modernist architecture, it makes its claims upon experience via space at the expense of structure. That is, it is an atmospheric situation more than it is a configuration of forms. Great buildings, however, are spaces at the same time as they are structures. Now, of course, Nauman wasn't making a building — he was making a postminimalist "site." But the impossibility of bracketing the history of architecture when you consider this work as an aesthetic whole places unexpected limitations on its value, and this is precisely the problem with postmodern art. Convention — the circumscribing burden of past art — creeps in despite artists' best efforts to shirk it. No matter how phenomenologically eerie this bare set of chambers might be, it could never make as magnificent a claim upon your senses as something by Kahn or Breuer, or alienate as authentically as an actual strip mall. (TFS, 2026)