Julia Bryan-Wilson Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley

This talk investigates Bruce Nauman's persistent performance of anxious masculinity from a feminist and queer perspective. What might be at stake in Nauman's fantasies of penetration, metaphors of ejaculation, and fixations on anality, and how might we envision his work as offering new-- if fraught-- models of inter-subjective, porous embodiment?

The lectures will take place in the Schaulager auditorium.

Constance Lewallen Adjunct Curator at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Dore Bowen writer, curator, and Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at San José State University

In their book Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters Constance M. Lewallen and Dore Bowen examine the way Nauman’s architectural installations, which begin in 1969 and continue into the 1970s and beyond, place the participant’s body within a field of powerful forces that variously destabilize, confound, and frustrate in order to heighten awareness and test the limits of subjectivity. In discussing the book, Lewallen and Bowen offer their unique perspectives on the topic. Lewallen will discuss Nauman’s architectural work in historical perspective by considering his extensive investigation into corridors, rooms, and other architectural installations. Bowen will discuss her recent reinstallation of Nauman’s Corridor Installation with Mirror—San Jose Installation (Double Wedge Corridor with Mirror) (1970), a project that resulted in exciting research discoveries and ultimately a fresh lens through which to view this and related installations by Nauman.

Petra Lange-Berndt Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar, Universität Hamburg

Based on installations such as his 1988 Hanging Carousel (George Skins a Fox) and his Animal Pyramids, this lecture addresses the theme of animals within the oeuvre of Bruce Nauman. For his installations, the artist uses serially produced polyurethene foam molds of the kind used by taxidermists in their preparation of mounted animals. By way of these objects and materials, Nauman explores the relationship between human and animal, dressage and training, the preparation and processing of bodies, and the Wild West cliché. What body images can be discerned? How are traditional notions of, say, hunting trophies or the subjugation of nature evaluated and expanded?