Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is a contemporary American artist. His practise spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.

The thing this artist does that made me take an interest in him, is how work with neon lights. My project focuses around lights and how indoor and outdoor lights effect the space as well as people within that space as well as the experience they gain from it. Nauman creates great installation with light that clearly link with what I want to achieve in this project.

Nancy Spector wrote:

"Bruce Nauman defies the traditional notion that an artist should have one signature style and a visually unified oeuvre. Since the mid-1960s the artist has created an open-ended body of work that includes fiberglass sculptures, abstract body casts, performances, films, neon wall reliefs, interactive environments, videos, and motorized carousels displaying cast-aluminum animal carcasses. If anything links such diverse endeavors, it is Nauman’s insistence that aesthetic experience supersedes the actual object in importance. Perception itself—the viewer’s encounter with his or her body and mind in relation to the art object—can be interpreted as the subject matter of Nauman’s work. Using puns, claustrophobic passageways with surveillance cameras, and videotaped recitations of bad jokes, he has created situations that are physically or intellectually disorienting, forcing viewers to confront their own experiential thresholds."

The artist uses light to make viewers want to interact with the surroundings just as you would in a normal public environment. The artist is using light to recreate this experience and keeping that experience within an artwork.

 

Green Light Corridor, 1970. Painted wallboard and fluorescent light fixtures with green lamps

My first impressions of his artwork were mixed. As I looked at his neon installations, I could never capture everything with one glance and within one photo. I had to look at several before I could get around the whole artwork. The image above is an example of that. If you walked into the room through that yellow door, you would not be able to see the artwork. You would have to walk around it to see it fully.

Forcing people into moving around the artwork is also the artist's intent. He wanted to create something that you cannot experience from a single photo or from standing still when looking at it in real life.

His artwork creates a feel of curiosity. Usually when you look at something, you glance at it and move on whereas here, you cannot leave the artwork alone without having to move around it.

The thing I like about this artwork the most is that it's interactive, but at the same time you can't do anything to it. You interact by simply walking in circles around the artwork and looking at it from different sides. You also gain different experiences depending on which side you are looking from. If you looked at it from an entrance, you will see a wall with light behind it, but as you move closer, you realise there is another wall behind and the light is actually in the middle.

I think this artist links to my theme of light and illusion. The artist's work is all about deceiving people and forcing them to move around the neon installation which gives them various experiences. My research in Piccadilly Circus gave me similar experiences on it's own. The Trocadero section is filled with neon lights and the place itself feels like one huge installation in style of Bruce Nauman. As you walk around it, you never get enough experience and it makes you want to stay there for longer in order to get around every part of that place.

Links to other artists:

Bruce Nauman is an artist who works in a similar way to Dan Flavin. Although their intentions are different, they use a variety of similar materials and techniques in their work, The main one being working with neon Lights.

In my light box response, I used a variety of color filters to create different atmospheres. Both Flavin and Nauman used various color neon lights throughout their works and both would use an area or a room which in my case was the small box.

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Responses

Something very interesting I found when experimenting with light and perspectives was the angle that the picture is taken at. Below you can see 2 images which look completely different; however they are the same thing simply taken from another angle. I just moved the camera around 15 degrees and the whole light in the image changed drastically.

It wasn't an exact response where I used my primary sources, but it was something I really found interesting and I think this links into Bruce Nauman because his work was all about different perspectives and allowing people to experience the same thing differently when moving around it. This was clearly demonstrated in this experiment because the atmosphere in the image changes drastically when you look at it from different angles and perspectives.