CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/19/2018

Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts opens at MoMA this weekend!

“I am aware how foolhardy it is to try to prove anything about [Bruce] Nauman’s work, since his pursuit of truth crisscrosses, even depends upon deception, his abiding commitment to deception,” Kathy Halbreich writes in Disappearing Acts, the catalogue to the major Nauman retrospective opening this weekend at MoMA and MoMA PS1. “Perhaps the true artist, as defined by Nauman, is at least a partial illusionist. He uses lies forthrightly to introduce an unsettling elusiveness, leaving things open to multiple, often conflicted understandings. Freedom, he teaches us, can originate from uncertainty, as it mitigates against orthodoxy. Nauman’s act may be construed as a gentle way to expose us, in an ultimately unthreatening manner, to a not so gentle reality. Maybe that’s what true art does.” Featured image is Punch and Judy Birth & Life & Sex & Death (1985).