Human Nature/Life Death

Bruce NaumanWW-1983-127211

1983·Neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frames·182.9 × 182.9 × 10.2 cm (72 × 72 × 4 in.)

Regarded as one of the most innovative artists of his generation, Bruce Nauman has produced an oeuvre of stunning diversity, encompassing works of film, installation, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. He creates profoundly aesthetic experiences that are often aimed at disrupting viewers’ habits of perception. In the mid-1960s the artist adopted the medium of flashing neon in order to critically examine the role of language in visual art. Inspired by its hypnotic aura and non-art aesthetic, Nauman began using this quintessentially commercial medium in an ironic way, as a vehicle for wordplay, puns, and jokes. The artist created this neon sign for an invitational sculpture exhibition held in Chicago in 1985. Three pairs of words, antithetical in their connotations, line the six-foot circumference: life and death, love and hate, and pleasure and pain. In the center, human, animal, and nature are repeated in stacked sets of two. Each word blinks independently, ordered so that over several minutes all possible permutations are displayed. Juxtapositions of colors produce optical illusions that create a jarring, visceral effect. This work ultimately insists on language’s inability to deliver a fixed or stable set of meanings, conveying a deep suspicion about what constitutes truth, especially in the public realm.

Catalogue

Year: 1983
Medium: Neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frames
Dimensions: 182.9 × 182.9 × 10.2 cm (72 × 72 × 4 in.)
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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