© 2007 Bruce Nauman/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Michael Tropea, © MCA, Chicago, courtesy Berkeley Art Museum
June 7, 2009 - November 22, 2009
53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia
A multifaceted, multi-site exhibition examining and highlighting the central themes of a leading American artist’s extraordinary forty-year career, Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens will represent the United States in the 53rd International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia—popularly known as the Venice Biennale. Composed of three interrelated components on view at three separate locations throughout Venice, Italy, Topological Gardens will present Nauman’s work in the U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale (a park with twenty-nine international pavilions that serves as official center of the Biennale) and on the premises of two of the city’s most highly esteemed academic institutions—the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Università Ca’ Foscari.
Bruce Nauman is widely regarded as one of the most innovative American artists of our time, an artist who pioneered and remains at the forefront of exploring language and the body through revelatory and rigorously conceived and realized individual artworks, installations, and performance. Nauman investigates and purposefully challenges the traditional dichotomies between the body and mind, sight and sound, memory and contemporaneity, offering insights into the paradoxical nature of the human condition. By including a range of Nauman’s work in neon, video, installation, performance, and sculpture—from iconic selections to rarely or never-before-seen works, including the debut of a groundbreaking sound installation—Topological Gardens will encourage visitors to chart connections among various locations in Venice and to shape and direct their own experience of Nauman’s provocative art. This exhibition is structured around the idea of topology—the mathematical investigation of how geometric figures remain fixed amid changing spatial conditions—and resonates with the artist’s own exploration of the boundaries between private and public.
Bruce Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During his undergraduate schooling at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Nauman initially studied mathematics and physics before changing his focus to studio art where he began to investigate art making beyond his earlier abstract paintings. There he experimented with casting objects in fiberglass and polyester resin, leaving their surfaces unrefined to reflect the casting process. While at Davis, Nauman also staged his first two performances, utilizing a fluorescent tube as an extension of his body as he performed mundane actions, which he would later record on video. After graduate school, Nauman occupied a storefront studio in San Francisco where he focused on the act and process of making art by photographing visual puns and daily actions. An old neon beer sign in this former grocery store served as inspiration for Nauman’s celebrated neon, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967). At once genuine and ironic, this statement initiated a tongue-in-cheek discourse concerning the role of the artist in society that persists through much of Nauman’s work. Nauman later moved to Wiley’s studio in Mill Valley, California where he made various films of himself walking around the space while altering his bodily movement. He began to garner critical attention in 1966 with his first solo show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as his inclusion in Lucy R. Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction group exhibition in New York. Nauman’s solo debut in New York at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1968 was soon followed by a one-man exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Gallerie in Düsseldorf, Germany. In 1972–73, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art co-organized the first major survey of his work, Bruce Nauman: Works from 1965–1972, an exhibition that traveled to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and other venues within the United States.
Influenced early on by philosophy and literature, Nauman’s work constantly tests rational systems of language, spatial and bodily boundaries, duration, and psychology through sculpture, video installations, and constructed environments. In the late 1960s, Nauman continued to work with neon and also began to construct corridors, sometimes filming his performances within them. Larger constructed environments in the early 1970s often included video surveillance cameras and monitors that overlooked and recorded viewers as they entered them. Nauman continued to make large sculptures and installations in the 1970s and early 1980s, mapping space with masking tape or evoking physical or psychological constraints through the creation of passages and tunnels. After a ten-year hiatus, Nauman returned to his work with video in the mid-1980s with many multi-channel video installations that further explored language and his metaphorical use of labyrinths and the personae of rats and clowns. In the late 1980s he also introduced the iconography of life-sized animals cast in wax that hang suspended in carousel-like formations. The 1990s brought sculptures of human heads and hands in wax and bronze, video installations, and sustained work with neon. In the early twenty-first century, Nauman’s video work, sound installations, and sculptures continue themes that have resurfaced throughout his oeuvre since the 1960s.
Museum exhibitions have continued to map Nauman’s practice, and notable solo shows include Bruce Nauman, 1972–1981 held at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo in the Netherlands and at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden in West Germany in 1981; a survey organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis that traveled in 1993–95 to Madrid, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York; and, in 2006–07, an exhibition of his early work, A Rose Has No Teeth, that traveled to the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy, and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Among the prestigious group shows that have included Nauman are the Venice Biennale in 1978, 1980, 1999, and 2007, as well as several documenta exhibitions (1972, 1977, 1982, and 1992) ) in Kassel, Germany. Garnering multiple awards throughout his career for his exceptionally wide-ranging and conceptually challenging practice, Nauman has received the Wexner Prize in 1994, the Leone d’oro (The Golden Lion) along with Louise Bourgeois at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, and the Praemium Imperiale for Visual Arts in 2004 in Japan. He holds honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute and the California Institute of the Arts. In 1979, Nauman moved to New Mexico where he continues to work and live along with his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg.
Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens extends beyond the U.S. Pavilion, which traditionally hosts the Biennale’s U.S. representation, to two additional University exhibition spaces. Resonating with Nauman’s investigations into the nature and the boundaries of public and private spaces, this expansion ensures that a more diverse audience will experience first-hand the work of one of the most accomplished living American artists. The three locations of this exhibition highlight the notion of topology as key to understanding both Nauman’s work and the urban structure of Venice, enabling visitors to experience one in relation to the other while productively interrogating the idea of the “national pavilion.”
U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale
The traditional venue for United States presentations at the Venice Biennale, the U. S. Pavilion is a neoclassical building located in the Giardini della Biennale (Gardens of the Biennial), at the tip Castello district of Venice. The freestanding Jeffersonian pavilion, designed by architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich in 1930, is one of twenty-nine permanent national structures located in the Giardini. Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens will be on view at the U.S. Pavilion in the Venice Biennial’s Giardini for the duration of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, from June 7 to November 22, 2009.
Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini
The Università Iuav di Venezia program dates to 1923, when it was initiated as a special architecture course within the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice. In 1926 it broke from the Accademia, becoming Italy’s second architecture school. Founded with the goal of exploring all aspects of design, the Università Iuav di Venezia has since attracted some of the world’s greatest practitioners of architecture and urban planning. Faculties of arts and design, architecture, and urban and regional planning tackle critical issues in surface and building systems, housing development, city landscape and its transformation, as well as environmental processes. In addition to ongoing collaboration with Venetian institutions, the Università Iuav di Venezia actively maintains collaborative partnerships with forty-five other international universities. Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens will be on view at the Università Iuav di Venezia from June 7 through October 18, 2009.
Exhibition Spaces at Università Ca’ Foscari
Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia is renowned for its exquisite Venetian Gothic architecture and its beautiful views of the Grand Canal, spanning the Rialto Bridge to the Accademia galleries. Commissioned by Doge Francesco Foscari and designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1452, the palazzo was converted into the prestigious Università Ca’ Foscari in 1868. Today Ca’ Foscari has nineteen academic departments, seventeen research centers, and numerous partnerships with Venetian cultural and scientific institutions. Topological Gardens will be located on the first and second floors (piano terra and primo piano) of the Ca’ Foscari complex, where it will be on view from June 7 through October 18, 2009.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art was chosen as the commissioner for the 2009 United States Pavilion. Carlos Basualdo, its curator of contemporary art, and Michael R. Taylor, its curator of modern art, organized the Nauman exhibition.
photo: BRUCE NAUMAN © 2007 Sidney B. Felsen
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