Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Hands only

Image caption
BRUCE NAUMAN

Hands only

  • 2006
  • Digital print on paper
  • 51 x 71 cm
  • Edition 36/60
  • Cat. F_117
  • Acquired in 2008
By:
Isabel Tejeda

These four photographs belong to the Infrared Outtakes series, on which Bruce Nauman was helped by photographer Jack Fulton in the late 1960s. The first edition was in 1968, with a run of eleven images. The ones owned by the Banco de España Collection are from the 2007 edition, which had a longer run of sixty copies.

‘Outtakes’ generates paradoxical references, as the term refers to the frames that are discarded in film editing or the images from a photo shoot that are not used. They are ‘portraits’ in the form of extreme close-ups of the lips, neck, hands and eye of Bruce Nauman but, as in the videos that the he was making in his studio at that time, they contain no identity traits and do not try to reflect his emotions, but rather explore the body as material for expression. It is a flexible body that is self-deformed and taken to the limit, and not without humour and minimalisation: Hands Only is the title of one of the photographs. This provides a glimpse into the great influence that Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd had on the US artist in his youth. Nauman crosses his hands, pouts, pinches his neck and holds his eye open with his fingers. In keeping with his experiments with materials and disciplines with Fulton, he used infrared film, a material that was not used in the art scene at that time (Nauman belonged to the group of artists that used photography without considering themselves to be photographers)  but rather by the military to take aerial reconnaissance shots to detect camouflage, in medicine and in astronomy. Fulton also used a yellow filter for shoots that gave a golden tone to the photos.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Bruce Nauman
Fort Wayne 1941

Bruce Nauman began to study Mathematics and Physics but soon switched to Art and Philosophy at the University of California, where he was greatly influenced by Irish author Samuel Beckett and Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the late 1960s, when many artists were questioning the meaning of art and thinking about the way in which it was produced and consumed and the modern limits between the various fields, Nauman asked himself what made an object artistic and different from others. He came to the conclusion that art is what an artist does in his studio, which makes it more an activity and a process than a product.

He was one of the pioneers of performance videos, which he produced using a still camera in his studio. He investigated the limits of his body and its links with space and time without losing sight of the purpose of the recording: subsequent screening for viewers.

This played an increasingly central role in his output in the 1970s when he shifted is exploration from his studio to settings that he built specifically; he also shifted from his body to that of the viewer, whom he turned into a user. Nauman designed tunnels or corridors starting from Gestalt readings, which sought to unsettle viewers, make them aware of themselves and get them to control problematic situations. In the 1980s he shifted his role as a performer to the figure of a mime, a clown or another actor, while maintaining his interest in generating spaces, video and sculpture. He also introduced neon as a new basic element.

Bruce Nauman has held retrospective exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles, USA, 1972); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 1973); the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1993); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, USA, 1994); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, USA, 1994); the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden (Washington D. C., 1994); the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1995); the Dia Center for the Arts (Beacon, New York, 2002); the Museum für Gegenwartskunst de Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2002); the Tate Modern Turbine Hall (London, 2005); the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2010); the Art Gallery (Ontario, USA, 2014); and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris, 2015). His work has been shown at numerous biennials, including those of the Whitney Museum (1977, 1985, 1987, 1991, 1997) and Venice (1978, 1980, 1999, 2005, 2007, 2009). In 2014 he received the Frederick Kiesler Prize.

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.