"When I was at art school, everyone else would make art and find the best parts and then try to cover up everything else so that was all you saw. I was fascinated by the part that didn't appear to be working and I'd keep working on that part until it took over and became the whole piece of art.” Bruce Nauman
In 1995 I went to the opening of Bruce Nauman’s retrospective at MoMA. Walking through his retrospective was like walking through someone else's psychoanalysis: it was full of patterns and recurring wishes, anxieties and obsessions and kept turning out to be about something other than what was being said.1 I felt like I was looking at exactly what I had been wanting to do with my own work, and it was the first time ever where I feared I would never be as good as he is.
Later I heard about his supposed proposal for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, a large tablet that read, “We’re very sorry for what we did and we promise to never do it again.” My stepfather was a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer’s and had been hiding around the house from imagined Nazi’s. At the same time I had been thinking about the subjective experience and what is true, what is not and how do we know? Out of a need for activity I did a drawing for his proposal then had a small tablet2 made. I made more drawings, a maquette for what I imagined the tablet would look like installed, made other signage, I recreated documentary elements that authenticated his proposal.
Any account of history is biased, and my attempt to create an installation out of his proposal circled what seemed to be Bruce Nauman’s most unresolved issues. Mine are in there as well. I’ve consciously incorporated the elements into my life – a tablet is on the coffee table; the maquette is above my desk; the drawings are mixed in with other art, signage is stuffed near record albums, documentary elements are outside the bathroom. This thing is alive, fascinatingly subjective, and exists in the space of potential realization. That may be enough.
1 Andrew Solomon, NY Times, March 5th, 1995 2 Thank you to Visual Graphic Systems of NYC for their generosity and support in creating the tablets and lettering for signage.
"When I was at art school, everyone else would make art and find the best parts and then try to cover up everything else so that was all you saw. I was fascinated by the part that didn't appear to be working and I'd keep working on that part until it took over and became the whole piece of art.” Bruce Nauman
In 1995 I went to the opening of Bruce Nauman’s retrospective at MoMA. Walking through his retrospective was like walking through someone else's psychoanalysis: it was full of patterns and recurring wishes, anxieties and obsessions and kept turning out to be about something other than what was being said.1 I felt like I was looking at exactly what I had been wanting to do with my own work, and it was the first time ever where I feared I would never be as good as he is.
Later I heard about his supposed proposal for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, a large tablet that read, “We’re very sorry for what we did and we promise to never do it again.” My stepfather was a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer’s and had been hiding around the house from imagined Nazi’s. At the same time I had been thinking about the subjective experience and what is true, what is not and how do we know? Out of a need for activity I did a drawing for his proposal then had a small tablet2 made. I made more drawings, a maquette for what I imagined the tablet would look like installed, made other signage, I recreated documentary elements that authenticated his proposal.
Any account of history is biased, and my attempt to create an installation out of his proposal circled what seemed to be Bruce Nauman’s most unresolved issues. Mine are in there as well. I’ve consciously incorporated the elements into my life – a tablet is on the coffee table; the maquette is above my desk; the drawings are mixed in with other art, signage is stuffed near record albums, documentary elements are outside the bathroom. This thing is alive, fascinatingly subjective, and exists in the space of potential realization. That may be enough.
1 Andrew Solomon, NY Times, March 5th, 1995 2 Thank you to Visual Graphic Systems of NYC for their generosity and support in creating the tablets and lettering for signage.