Going through the sprawling Bruce Nauman show that is currently spread between two buildings – the Museum of Modern Art, on West 53rd Street, and MoMA PS 1 out in Queens – I thought of Franz Kafka. The great novelist died in 1924, long before the tragedy of the Holocaust. But his three younger sisters perished in the gas chambers. Knowing that, the nightmare world he envisaged in his fiction seems less a flare of imagination than an act of far-seeing prophecy.
The Nauman show at MoMA brings you another artist whose work is shot through with a sense of extreme foreboding. Now 76 and living near Galisteo, New Mexico, Nauman has been an art-world legend since the 1960s, in part because he never panders or prettifies. He was initially known as a “process” artist who makes rough, unfinished-looking sculptures from rubber and fiberglass; some of them could pass for random machine parts. He also specializes in neon sculptures that make heavy use of the words “live” and “die,” and in ominous videos whose best-known protagonist is an anguished circus clown. If anything unites his disparate efforts in sculpture, drawing, photography, and video, surely it is his often-comic bleakness.
Yet this show, which has been seamlessly installed by departing curator Kathy Halbreich, allows us to see a new Nauman – less the angsty existentialist of yore than an American artist-citizen plagued by the abuses of government and the failure of democracy. I was amazed at how many works in the show, many of them made a half-century ago, are in sync with the current political crisis in this country. His “Double Square Cage Piece,” of 1974, a room-size, chain-link cage sitting inside a larger cage, puts you in mind of the inhumane facilities where thousands of immigrant children have been detained this year. His “Three Head Fountain (Three Andrews),” in which jets of water splash against roped-together casts of lopped-off male heads, inevitably evokes waterboarding and other varieties of torture. His early and now-famous “Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation)” of 1970, requires you to walk down long, claustrophobic corridors in the presence of the dehumanizing gaze of surveillance cameras.
Does Nauman intend his work as social critique? An artist’s intentions and sources can never be fully known, not even to the artist. It’s more useful to think about the way the meaning of a work of art can shift in different eras and contexts. Nauman is much more than the conceptual hipster canonized in art history books. His work offers a reflection on what our English teachers used to call “the human condition,” and it is a measure of his achievement that he has been able to express large literary themes like nature and death through his ever-changing repertory of experimental forms.