"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.