Bruce Nauman

"Although Nauman thinks of himself as a political artist, he avoids any kind of programmatic categorization he consciously renounces all forms of communicative commitment; all the same, what is not--or cannot be--said in his work nevertheless contains a statement as to the structure of what is actually supposed to be being said. Formulated in various media but not described as such, this statement is not in the least way random, but merely liberated from any kind of prejudice. In a certain regard it is virginity that Nauman is after, a mode of being that is altogether untouched by 'pre-scription,' which quite simply means finding the body concealed beneath layered and historical overwritings, as well as he language of that body."
Eugen Blume, excerpted from Bruce Nauman: Live or Die--or: The Measuring of Being in Bruce Nauman: Live or Die.

"Although Nauman thinks of himself as a political artist, he avoids any kind of programmatic categorization he consciously renounces all forms of communicative commitment; all the same, what is not--or cannot be--said in his work nevertheless contains a statement as to the structure of what is actually supposed to be being said. Formulated in various media but not described as such, this statement is not in the least way random, but merely liberated from any kind of prejudice. In a certain regard it is virginity that Nauman is after, a mode of being that is altogether untouched by 'pre-scription,' which quite simply means finding the body concealed beneath layered and historical overwritings, as well as he language of that body."

Eugen Blume, excerpted from Bruce Nauman: Live or Die--or: The Measuring of Being in Bruce Nauman: Live or Die.

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

BRUCE NAUMAN: MINDFUCK
Edited by Philip Larratt-Smith.
HAUSER & WIRTH
ISBN: 9783952363027 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2013
Active | In stock

BRUCE NAUMAN: INSIDE THE WHITE CUBE
Edited by Honey Luard, Dorothy Feaver. Text by Constance Lewallen.
WHITE CUBE
ISBN: 9781906072674 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 6/30/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

BRUCE NAUMAN: GOING SOLO
Edited and introduction by Stephanie Snyder. Text by Robert Slifkin.
COMPANION EDITIONS, DOUGLAS F. COOLEY MEMORIAL ART GALLERY, REED COLLEGE
ISBN: 9780982424087 | US $12.95
Pub Date: 7/31/2012
Active | In stock

BRUCE NAUMAN: LIVE OR DIE
Text by Eugen Blume.
DUMONT BUCHVERLAG
ISBN: 9783832192846 | US $59.95
Pub Date: 8/30/2010
Active | In stock

BRUCE NAUMAN: AUDIO-VIDEO UNDERGROUND CHAMBER
Essays by Edelbert Kàb, Achim Hochdàrfler, Stefan Neuner and Wolfram Pichler.
VERLAG FUR MODERNE KUNST NURNBERG
ISBN: 9783938821091 | US $20.00
Pub Date: 4/1/2006
Active | In stock

AC: BRUCE NAUMAN
Essay by Christine Litz. Foreword by Kasper Kànig.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883756851 | US $19.95
Pub Date: 5/2/2003
Active | Awaiting stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

BRUCE NAUMAN: THEATERS OF EXPERIENCE
Edited by Susan Cross. Essays by Susan Cross and Christine Hoffmann.
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
ISBN: 9780892072996 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 11/2/2003
Out of print | Not available

BRUCE NAUMAN
Artwork by Bruce Nauman. Contributions by Harry Philbrick, Ingrid Schaffner, Jill Snyder.
THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM
ISBN: 9781888332056 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 6/2/1997
Out of print | Not available

BRUCE NAUMAN: TRUE ARTIST
Artwork by Bruce Nauman. Text by Beatrice von Bismarck.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783893222919 | US $20.00
Pub Date: 10/2/1998
Out of print | Not available

BRUCE NAUMAN
Artwork by Bruce Nauman. Contributions by Kathy Halbreich. Text by Robert Storr, Neal Benezra.
WALKER ART CENTER
ISBN: 9780935640427 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 4/2/1994
Out of print | Not available

Bruce Nauman

"Evoking both the well-known children's game of musical chairs and the terrifying isolation of individuals at the mercy of despotic regimes, people deprived of their basic human rights, the up-ended chair mounted on steel beams in Musical Chair, 1983 is one of Nauman's most haunting inventions. The image of the disenfranchised person forced onto a chair find its Western archetype in the mocking of Christ."

Eugen Blume excerpted from his text to Bruce Nauman: Live or Die, from which this image is reproduced.

Bruce Nauman: Inside the White Cube

Edited by Honey Luard, Dorothy Feaver. Text by Constance Lewallen.
Published by White Cube

This slim volume focuses on the groundbreaking experimental films that Bruce Nauman (born 1941) made between 1967 and 1969, in which the artist’s own body is used as an instrument to relentlessly interrogate the human condition. After graduating from UC Davis in 1966, Nauman set up a studio in a former grocery shop in the Mission district of San Francisco and then in a sublet in Mill Valley. These two locations provided the setting for a series of performed actions which he captured in real time, on a fixed camera, over the ten-minute duration of a 16mm film reel. Among these films of this period are “Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square” and “Bouncing Two Balls between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms.” Published for an exhibition at the White Cube gallery in London, this catalogue is published in a numbered edition of 500 copies.

Bruce Nauman: Mindfuck

Edited by Philip Larratt-Smith.
Published by Hauser & Wirth

Bruce Nauman (born 1941) emerged in the late 1960s Los Angeles art scene, as part of a generation of artists who dramatically expanded the possibilities of sculpture and performance. His emergence also coincided with the ascent of gestalt psychology, behaviorism and philosophers following in the wake of Wittgenstein’s philosophies of language. Nauman’s work is thus deeply literate and steeped in the history of psychology--particularly Freud’s work on puns and slips of the tongue, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, work that Nauman has explored in numerous language pieces using oxymorons, puns and Spoonerisms. Bruce Nauman: Mindfuck is the first publication to look at this celebrated artist’s work in performance, drawing, video, printmaking and neon installation, in the light of its relationship to psychology.

Bruce Nauman: Going Solo

Edited and introduction by Stephanie Snyder. Text by Robert Slifkin.
Published by Companion Editions, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College

Bruce Nauman: Going Solo is the first volume in Companion Editions’ series of pocketbook readers. Robert Slifkin’s meditation on Nauman’s early films and conceptual sculptures explore the significance of the studio environment and Nauman’s relationship to privacy, identity, subjectivity and intimacy.

Bruce Nauman: Live or Die

Collector's Choice Vol. 10

Text by Eugen Blume.
Published by DuMont Buchverlag

Some forty-odd years after Bruce Nauman began tweaking the conventions of studio practice and the hallowed persona of the 'artist-as-seer,' Pamela M. Lee wrote in Artforum not long ago, "his station in postwar art history rests secure. His influence--whether through his affectless, task-based performances, his sculptural castings of negative space, or his intermedia mash-ups of language, video and noise--is everywhere apparent in contemporary art." Indeed, from the American artist's early work in sculpture and video, made in the 1960s, through his famous spiral of neon letters spelling out "the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths," which at once summarized and opened to critique the perennial mystique of the artist, up through his three-venue Golden Lion Award-winning exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Nauman's work has long been an indispensable part of the narrative of recent American art. This essential volume, published in DuMont's fantastic Collector's Choice series, treats these and other recurrent themes of his oeuvre, such as sound, language, corporeality and dance, reproducing works from across his career and and providing a new standard overview of this ever-popular artist.

Bruce Nauman: Audio-Video Underground Chamber

Essays by Edelbert Kàb, Achim Hochdàrfler, Stefan Neuner and Wolfram Pichler.
Published by Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg

Before spider holes made their media debut, there was Bruce Nauman's spectacular 1972-74 installation Audio-Video Underground Chamber. Its single concrete vault, with dimensions close to those of the human body, is buried--like a coffin--one and a half meters deep. Integrated into the space are a lamp, a camera and a microphone, which transmit image and sound to a gallery. The actual existence of the buried cabin is concretized only in the viewers' imagination by means of the live broadcast and two of Nauman's explanatory, blueprint drawings. Image and sound call up associations with the psychic and existential borderline areas around which Nauman's art often revolves, with feelings of isolation and claustrophobia, experiences of loss of communication and of orientation, and traumas such as that of being buried alive.

Bruce Nauman: Theaters Of Experience

Edited by Susan Cross. Essays by Susan Cross and Christine Hoffmann.
Published by Guggenheim Museum

One of the most significant, funny, and nails-on-a-chalkboard jarring artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Bruce Nauman has expanded the scope of traditional art practice and influenced a generation of artists. He has made himself into a fountain (one-upping Marcel Duchamp?), cast the space under a chair, fashioned a screeching carousel of carcass-like parts, reinvented the neon sign as a contemporary haiku, and, most recently, recorded the dullness of his studio in real time. His ongoing investigation of our most basic physical, emotional and psychological states has been literally experienced by each of his viewers. Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience is a focused selection of works in a range of media, including sculpture, video, holograms, neon and architectural installations, which examine the artist's use of performance devices as a conduit for heightened self-awareness for both artist and audience. Featuring works from the Guggenheim Panza Collection, augmented with loans from several German collections, the exhibition and catalogue trace the theatrical elements in Nauman's oeuvre, as well as his manipulation of the performer-spectator roles.

Ac: Bruce Nauman

Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)

Essay by Christine Litz. Foreword by Kasper Kànig.
Published by Walther König, Köln

In this latest work by Bruce Nauman, first mounted to great acclaim at the Dia Art Foundation in 2001, Nauman presents seven large-scale projections of his New Mexico studio interior. Forty-two hours of tape were shot over 42 nights using infra-red lenses, and reveal the basic preconditions for his artistic production: his empty studio.

Bruce Nauman

Drawings, Prints and Related Works 1985-1996

Artwork by Bruce Nauman. Contributions by Harry Philbrick, Ingrid Schaffner, Jill Snyder.
Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

This is the catalogue of the exhibition that stunned critics by bringing together the full and largely underrated range of Bruce Naman's work in everything from sculpture to video to holograms.

Bruce Nauman: True Artist

Artwork by Bruce Nauman. Text by Beatrice von Bismarck.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

A group of drawings and photographic works made by Bruce Nauman in the 1960's are collected and examined by Beatrice bon Bismarck as indirect self-portraits of the artist.

Bruce Nauman

Exhibition Catalogue

Artwork by Bruce Nauman. Contributions by Kathy Halbreich. Text by Robert Storr, Neal Benezra.
Published by Walker Art Center

This is the catalogue of the exhibition that stunned critics by bringing together the full and largely underrated range of Bruce Naman's work in everything from sculpture to video to holograms.