The Torture of the Joker, 1987
Exhibition scene Photo / Zhao Yihan
Exhibition scene Photo / Zhao Yihan
"Wall-Floor Posture" 1968 ◎ After shang
Exhibition: Bruce Naumann: OK OK OK
Duration: 2022.3.11-6.12
Venue: Mumu Art Museum (Qianliang Hutong Museum)
Pete and Repeat sat on the fence. Pete fell. Who is left? Lee Pitt. Pete and Pitt sat on the fence..." The four clowns, dressed in baroque or polka-dot red-haired giant shoes, put on abstract masks, walked into the prescribed area, and unusually, they were not going to perform laughter, but to perform horror. The dark environment, the reality of no answer, persecutes them, and whenever the audience takes a step forward, this persecution is one step closer. As we all know, the suicide rate of clowns is extremely high, they are anonymous and secretive, but they want to contribute happiness and well-being, and it is extremely cruel to think. In the video, the clown sits on the toilet reading a magazine, or holding a fish tank to maintain his balance, or telling endless jokes, and they all protest: "No, no, no! "I can't hold on, I can't hold on!" ...... These images are presented in the exhibition hall of the Mumu Museum "Bruce Naumann: OK OKOK".
"Joker Torture" first appeared publicly at the 1989 Whitney Biennale. Clowns are abstract creatures in a large sense, they are not beings, but dehumanizing beings. Inhumanity is a theme of Bruce Naumann. Lonely but focused, ugly but sad, is the key word of this event, and it is also the story that Nauman expresses with the help of clown images. Naumann also had expectations of the human condition, although cruelty and rejection were also the norm in life.
Art is an act, not a product
Bruce Nauman was born in Indiana, USA, and moved around as an engineer father. In the process, Naumann became accustomed to solitude and practiced "closed" observation in solitude. Naumann studied mathematics, physics, and music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then art at the University of California, Davis. Naumann was one of the first artists to receive a pure art education at the university, and after Naumann, pure art education continued to develop and gradually expanded to today's scale. Naumann's growth is very much related to the development of pure art education, and in a sense he also outlines the limits and possibilities of pure art education for us.
In 1964, Naumann gave up painting forever, and in his artistic career you can hardly find traces of painting. Naumann was concerned with what art should be and what art could become. Without painting, there were many tools at his disposal, such as music, dance, literature, and in fact, Nauman used them all in the beginning. In music, for example, Naumann was passionate about the music of Steve Lech, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Lamont Young, and he even played bass for Lamont Young's band. Naumann's favorite artists were also playwright Samuel Beckett, composer John Cage, and modern dance choreographer Mos Cunningham.
Leaving the field of painting, we are greeted by a new medium. After World War II, the media explosion period, with radio switching as the starting point of television, the media became more and more abundant, and more and more linked to social trends. Naumann is arguably the art world's most medium-oriented artist, adopting almost all important modern mediums, such as video, audio, and holographic projection. Naumann was one of the first video artists, and the emergence of video art was largely due to the advent of portable video recorders. Unlike film machines, portable recorders can be viewed instantly, and can better calibrate and modify the timing and quality of images. Machines are just machines, how can we achieve the symptoms that art seeks through machines? And not only art, but also what is the difference between the ontology involving man?
After leaving college, Naumann worked as a junior teacher at the San Francisco School of the Arts, with little work and money, as well as little absurdity and fun. "If you think of yourself as an artist, work in a studio, but aren't a painter, you don't start with the canvas, you try all sorts of things — you sit down in a chair, or you pace. The question comes back: What is art? Imagine taking the absurd photographs he had concocted with little money and coldly asking himself, what is art? Nauman refused to do repetitive work, and he spent a lot of time observing and thinking, hoping to present what he wanted in the most efficient way. The answer that Naumann came up with quickly became a basic credo shared by the art world in the second half of the century: If I were an artist and in a studio, then whatever I did in the studio, it would be art. In this sense, art is a behavioral activity, not a product.
The artist "disappears" and the audience stops
Between 1967 and 1969, Naumann recorded 24 films in Mill Valley, Irvine or Pasadena, which were simple and focused on the artist's work and the studio. Nauman paced in his studio, threw rubber balls, manipulated fluorescent tubes, repeatedly played a note of the violin, fell into corners, and so on. The theme was later further expanded. Measuring Studio (Think of Beauty John Cage) focuses on the studio's mouse and a unicorn-tailed cat named Tusk. The film is 5 hours and 45 minutes long. When the artist leaves, these wandering little animals draw our attention to explore the narrative woven by the work, the storage box, the ladder, and the videotape. The artist is replaced by a mouse, a stranger to the space, but the anxiety fades and the self gradually develops. And is the corridor in "Corridor with Rooms with Changing Lights" that completes a cycle every 126 seconds such a passage?
Whether it's "Walking Around the Edge of a Square in an Exaggerated Pose" or "Walking In and Out," Naumann focuses on restricted states and expressions. The former has a double-layered square castle and a Contrapposto (balance of opposites) as incisions, which are restricted and free; the latter is incised with fragments of image and space-time, torn apart and then regenerated. What he tried was nothing more than a dialogue with the environment, a dialogue with circumstances, a dialogue with symbolism. He even effectively deprived the audience of their vision, and the audience who walked into it did not receive the blessing of art, but instead they got the nightmare and obscurity of life and desperate situation.
Naumann did not expand the possibilities of using the medium, but rather compressed the medium. Through Naumann's installations and images, all we can feel is a monitor or monitor. Naumann threw almost everything into the display, but it was not Nauman who performed in it, but the fragments of consciousness that every viewer let go. In this way, he walked through the narrow corridor, posing and attitudeing, but the shadows and pains were unreservedly presented in the monitors, mirrors, and performance spaces, and they rolled and broadcast endlessly. The artist "disappears" and the real viewer stays. In fact, the creative connection between such a person and the situation is not difficult to understand. Aren't all the artists underground like that?
"Feed me, eat me, anthropology." "Help me, hurt me, sociology." "Feed me, help me, eat me, hurt me." Anthropology/Sociology (Spinning Rand) is an expanded version of sound sculpture that Naumann attempted in 1969. In 1968, Naumann repeated in the studio, "Leave my mind, leave this room." "Get out of my mind, get out of this room." After listening repeatedly, you will find that the commanding tone becomes soft, the initial trepidation and doubt slowly dissipate, and you catch a picture, and it also grasps you from near and far, probably something similar to memory. You listen over and over again, and you fall into the abyss of this and that not only reality, but destiny. It's like listening to Zen, and it's very different, you're not really moved, but you understand something more and more. These symbols are not just symbols, but how can you be alone or you in front of you? You're in the sound field of Raw Materials and want to disappear, but you're getting hard.
"I had an idea that I could create some art that would disappear, some art that didn't look like art. In this case, you don't notice it until you consciously pay attention to it. Then, as you concentrate on reading these words, you will have to think about them. Naumann once explained. And the art that will disappear is not the art of the university era? That short and pure youth, and of course the youth of modern art, Naumann kept it all, and he took it to mexico, to the underground. When "The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mysterious Truths (The Signs of Windows or Walls)" spins, to whom does "One Hundred Times of Survival and Destruction" belong? And "The Hanging Man" will bring magic and I will disappear, while "Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain" leaves only the squeeze between the letters and letters, the friction between feelings and feelings, the discord between fragments and fragments. Courtesy photo/Mumu Art Museum