The exhibition catalog “Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts” accompanies the retrospective of the same name at Schaulager, which was conceived in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The richly illustrated book offers a comprehensive overview of Nauman’s career spanning more than fifty years of artistic activity in a diverse range of media. Nauman’s works are very direct and confrontational and often have the character of simple exercises or critical self-interrogations. Whether through drawing, print, video, sculpture, sound or language, performance or complex installations—the artist consistently explores fundamental questions that examine the phenomenological and psychological experience of body, time, space, movement and architecture. A wide selection of authors turn their attention to series and themes that have previously been neglected in the critical examination of this body of work, such as Nauman’s interest in architectural models or the significance of color. In addition to an extensive introduction on the exhibition concept, 17 shorter essays concentrate on specific recurring ideas or media. An illustrated selected exhibition history featuring numerous rare or previously unpublished images completes the volume.

The publication “Bruce Nauman: A Contemporary” poses the question of Nauman’s contemporaneity and situates his oeuvre in the context of artistic positions and art theoretical discourses from the last decades. Six in-depth essays by renowned authors illuminate Nauman’s work, such as in regard to its inherent humour or the practice of endless repetition. The volume of texts examines the mirror image and rear-view figures, for example, along with questions of contemporary subject constitution, digital image production and cybernetics. Theories of labor and globalization are discussed in reference to Nauman’s creative output, as well as the connections between Nauman’s work and models of behaviorism, software and computer theory, or topology. The various essays consider Nauman’s oeuvre in relation to diverse artistic positions such as those of Ed Atkins, Erwin Wurm, Francis Alÿs, Fischli / Weiss, Dara Birnbaum, Yvonne Rainer or René Magritte. In so doing, the volume of texts seeks to counter the tendency to cast the artist as an outstanding solitary figure of postmodernism and opens up manifold references to works and theories concurrent with Nauman’s active career.