Image via Getty
Violins Violence Silence
Executed in 1981-1982. neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frame
62 1/8 x 65 3/8 x 6 in. 157.8 x 166.1 x 15.2 cm.
Some people say that Bruce Nauman is the most influential American artist since Andy Warhol. Today, there's hardly a tyro's installation or video or ad hoc sculpture that can't be traced back to something Nauman made in the 1960s or '70s. Bruce Nauman's neon installation Violins Violence Silence from 1981-1982 sold last night for $4,002,500 with premium. The neon twists and turns the English language with a sense of humor and aggression that forces the viewer to contemplate the visual possibilities of words. This optically engaging and intellectually provocative work is confrontational with its illuminating radiance and at the same time contemplative and seductive. The inclusion of words would imply a degree of clarity; however, Nauman manipulates the words and sentences in his neon pieces to create tension and to challenge our understanding of the message. Clearly influenced by his conceptual and minimalist predecessors, Bruce Nauman's neon signs by their very nature are meant to draw in our attention; however once they have it, his undermines it with great genius. Neon is one medium that serves as a platform for Nauman's formal, linguistic and humorous investigations. Nauman, and other artists working with language, borrowed the format and type face of commercial signs from streets and advertising venues and brought them into galleries and museum spaces. People tend to ignore or pass by signs on the street, yet in an art space, they are elevated to high art. The significance of the artist's neon series is conceptual, dependent more on the message than on the craftsmanship or fabrication of the work itself. Text art proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s particularly with pop artists such as Ed Ruscha, who like Nauman, focused on the meaning in combinations of words and their effect on the viewer. Nauman's first explorations in this genre were word games in which he rearranged words and letters to create new expressions – blurring the lines between language and meaning.
