Bruce Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941; he grew up near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has lived in New Mexico since the late 1970s. He studied mathematics, music, and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, before changing his major to fine art. In 1966 he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of California, Davis—where he had studied with William Wiley, among others.

That same year Nauman had his first solo exhibition, at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles; this was followed by more solo exhibitions in 1968 at galleries in New York and Düsseldorf. Nauman also quickly made his name abroad. Following his first participation in documenta in Kassel (1968), he showed work in groundbreaking group exhibitions such as “Anti-Illusion: Procedures / Materials” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and “When Attitudes Become Form” at Kunsthalle Bern (both 1969). In 1972–73 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the first retrospective museum exhibition of Nauman’s work.

After a comprehensive presentation of his drawings—organized by the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 1986—in 1994 the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis initiated a wide-ranging retrospective of his oeuvre as a whole. Both exhibitions toured to museums in the United States and in Europe. Subsequent solo exhibitions included “Raw Materials” at Tate Modern in London in 2004; that same year Nauman was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association. Nauman’s work has been shown in numerous international group exhibitions; he has participated several times in documenta in Kassel and in the Venice Biennale, where his exhibition in the American Pavilion in 2009 was awarded the Golden Lion; Nauman had previously been awarded the Golden Lion for best artist in 1999. Schaulager, Basel, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, now present “Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts,” the first comprehensive retrospective of Nauman’s work in over twenty years, which will give visitors an in-depth insight into the many, diverse facets of his art and into all the phases of his artistic career since its beginning over fifty years ago.

In Basel, a lively interest was kindled in the emerging developments of late 1960s art; works by American minimalist and conceptual artists, as well as the works of Joseph Beuys, which embraced entirely new forms of expression, found an eager audience here and at times sparked heated debate. It did not take long for attention to home in on the young American artist Bruce Nauman. By the early 1970s, a number of Nauman’s early films, sculptures and drawings had already been acquired by the Kunstmuseum, then under the directorship of Franz Meyer, and by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation. In 1973, a group of 16 drawings was acquired by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, followed one year later by the first sculptures. The drawings are deposited in the public art collection of the Kunstmuseum’s Department of Prints and Drawings.

But in the course of preparing this exhibition, nearly a quarter century after the Nauman retrospective I co-organized in 1994, I accidentally stumbled upon a logic of correspondences I had not recognized before. What surprised—really sideswiped—me was a pattern that presented a slightly oxymoronic alternative to the prevailing narrative: the manifold appearances of “disappearance” in his work actually offer a continuous thread of emotional, intellectual, and formal attentiveness that began when Nauman was a graduate student and continues to this day.

Functioning as an act, concept, perceptual probe, magical deceit, working method, and metaphor, disappearance has been a useful and persistent prompt for Nauman’s art. Close relatives of disappearance—the absent, the void, and ensuing senses of nonexistence, privation, or omission—also appear in many forms. They are seen, for example, in holes the size of a body part, in the space under a chair, in the self vanishing around a corner, in the nocturnal goings-on of the empty studio, and in the mental blocks that empty creative possibility. Disappearance, then, is both a real phenomenon and a magnificently ample metaphor for grappling with the anxieties of both the creative process and of navigating the everyday world.

Leaving things open to multiple, often conflicting, understandings, Nauman repeatedly tests the viewer’s willingness to relinquish the safety of the familiar. As we move through his environments or stand in front of a drawing such as Make Me Think Me (1993), ideas surface about what it means to be alert—to be in the world. Challenging the ways in which conventions become codified, his work erases all forms of certainty, mandating that we craft our own meanings rather than accede to habitual rules. This, his work teaches us, is where freedom begins.

Kathy Halbreich

The exhibition begins with Venice Fountains (2007). Reminiscent of a readymade, this work consists of two industrial sinks of the kind that might be found in any workshop. Water coursing through transparent hosepipes circulates constantly, pouring from reversed masks that are actually wax and plaster casts of the artist’s face. This rudimentary sculpture represents, as it were, a portrait of the absent artist on the threshold of a presentation that explores themes of disappearance and withdrawal. With the fountains, Nauman reprises a trope that can be found in his earliest works as a young artist. In questioning his own actions and reflecting on what makes a “true” artist, the fountain became, for Nauman, a metaphor by which he could challenge and ironically undermine traditional notions of the artist as a font of creative genius – as in his literal embodiment of a water-spouting statue in Myself as a Marble Fountain (1967).