Art Make-Up

Bruce NaumanWW-1967-109612

1967·Four 16mm color films, silent, transferred to digital video (projection); 42 min. 30 sec. loop

Bruce Nauman's influential work explores the poetics of boredom, entrapment, and failure. Many of his important early works, such as Art Make-Up, grew out of his involvement with experimental film and video in the 1960s, in which the artist often used his own body as the vehicle for exploration. Here Nauman applied colored makeup—white, pink, green, and finally black—in successive layers to his face and torso. Art Make-Up introduces the themes of surveillance and masking that recur in the artist's later work. His entire oeuvre can be read as a self-conscious investigation into the conditions and possibilities of art making.

Catalogue

Year: 1967
Medium: Four 16mm color films, silent, transferred to digital video (projection); 42 min. 30 sec. loop
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Bruce Nauman

Artist

Bruce Nauman

Sculpture

Bruce Nauman is widely regarded as one of the most influential American artists living today. The artist’s radically experimental works defy easy categorization, blending the styles and approaches of Conceptual Art, Performance art, Minimalism and video art. His heterogeneous and thought-provoking oeuvre showcases Nauman’s analytical deconstruction of aesthetic and physical experience through novel engagements with language and the body. Often imbued with satirical and socio-political undertones, his confrontational artworks draw upon various formal strategies, from clever word play to large-scale sculptural arrangements, which disorient viewers’ bodies and perceptual assumptions.

Fort Wayne, United States

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