Bruce Nauman - Make Me Think

Starting in the 1960s in the Bay Area, artist Bruce Nauman made sculptures from nonart materials like dirt, neon, polyester resin and burlap. With a fertile, almost frenzied creativity, Nauman also pioneered video installations and body art. Now something of a recluse, living in New Mexico, Nauman continues to exert art-world influence. Last year, UC Press published a comprehensive volume about his early period, A Rose Has No Teeth. The book, however, lacked a companion DVD—too much of Nauman s art depends on time and movement to be captured in static illustrations. Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think, a 66-minute 1997 film by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, now available from Facets, provides that missing link. The documentary, filmed at a Nauman retrospective at New York s Museum of Modern Art and several European museums, provides a wide-ranging selection of Nauman s sculptural investigations and his seminal videos. In one video, the artist carefully applies paint to his face and manipulates his cheeks, mouth and eyes; as one of the narratives intones, we are seeing the self-consciousness of a young artist who wants to become his own sculpture. Some of the videos deliberately pummel the viewer: an upside-down spinning head screams over an ear-shattering electronic background. The infamous Clown Torture video satisfies our secret hatred of Bozo but is nearly unwatchable, which was part of the point. The best sequences show Nauman s wonderful neon sculptures in which the brightly flashing words produce oddly affecting alternating phrases like run from fear, fun from fear. A wall of neon lights up with single variations on the dictate to live until the whole piece winks on at once in a spectrum of colored language. The film, taking its cue from Nauman s own style, captures its talking heads in various video-bank arrays mounted in an abandoned warehouse. Reviewed by Michael S. Gant