ART REVIEW : Nauman’s Self-Involved Clinical, Examining Eye

Bruce Nauman may be the most objective member of the present generation of self-involved artists. In “Bruce Nauman: Drawings 1965-1986,” a show of sketches and annotated plans for sculptural works, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (through Sunday), the artist spends a lot of time looking at himself. What he sees is an example of a curious species.

At times he is like a little kid screwing up his mouth and observing the weird effects in a mirror. Next, he is an engineer who imagines how three positions of his shoulder could add up to a three-legged stool or how a string of knees could become a 6-foot thigh. He notices that a knot of rope can resemble a human ear or a pair of crossed arms, then designs a cocoon-like storage capsule for a seated body. Spewing water from his mouth, he emulates a fountain in one drawing, then writes: “The true artist is an amazing luminous fountain” around the edge of another sheet of paper.

These early works, from the ‘60s, have nothing to do with conventional notions of self-expression or psychological body language. Bodies and language fascinate Nauman. As a young artist with little money for materials--and lots of time to contemplate himself and his San Francisco studio--he developed a sort of body-based conceptualism. Though the results sometimes suggest self-obsession, they actually indicate a world-weary attitude of dissection and questioning that has become a hallmark of contemporary art since the romance of Abstract Expressionism fizzled.

Nauman’s body is not a temple of virtue, a house of knowledge or a physical wonder. It is just a fascinating thing that takes up space, has moving parts and can be reconfigured to resemble other objects. Issues of ethics, morality and politics infiltrated his work in the ‘70s, but they didn’t take a strongly visible hold until the ‘80s, when Nauman began to use generic nudes or a torture chair to express ideas of sex and violence.

Earlier on, any social commentary tended to take the form of word play. In 1968, for example, a drawing features war written three times with some of the letters colored so that we also read raw .

More recently, he has designed neon signs that flash vices, virtues, platitudes or double-entendres. A 1984 drawing in the show consists of ethnically color-keyed phrases: “White Anger / Red Danger / Yellow Peril / Black Death.” Blocked out in diagonal stripes, they look like roads to disaster.

Between the early, objective body drawings and later works that picture words or a disturbing human presence are drawings of large sculptural installations, mostly done in the ‘70s. There’s a stadium model, a building with no corners, an “absurdly private theater” and a triangle of interlocking tunnels.

They may resemble an engineer’s doodles, but, in a sense, the structures are also about bodies, for we perceive them as enclosures or barriers. (Nauman’s 1969 “Live Taped Video Corridor,” recently reconstructed at the Long Beach Museum of Art, is a claustrophobic hall in which anyone who enters appears to be walking away from himself.)

Nauman drew many of the plans in MOCA’s show in a second-floor Pasadena studio that didn’t accommodate actual large-scale sculpture. Most of the works that have been erected were temporary installations in public galleries. Others have never been built but exist only as ideas on paper. Catalogue essays contend that realizing the concepts is not necessarily important to Nauman who just wants to get a point across. That accounts for the rough look of the drawings, but it won’t satisfy a public that has difficulty imagining them as room-size constructions.

Basically a conceptual artist who constantly works out plans on paper, Nauman can be represented quite fully in drawings, but this show cries out for at least one or two sculptural pieces that demonstrate the relationship between his ideas and their realization in another medium. Ultimately, a museum such as MOCA should organize a full-scale retrospective for Nauman, including his construction-material sculpture, neon signs, videos, photographs, performances and drawings.

The present show (organized by the Kunstmuseum in Basel with Coosje van Bruggen and Dieter Koepplin as curators) ventures beyond the realm of drawing in a 1987 video installation called “Clown Torture.” Four video monitors and two larger projections on flanking walls surround viewers with images of a gaily dressed clown who screams “No,” kicks his feet, flails his arms and tries to repeat a tongue-twister. It’s a purposefully oppressive work that binds the traditional image of a buffoon to the reality of frustration.

Unsettling as this work is, it effectively amplifies the tone of the show by pointing up a theme of psychological and physical restriction. Like Nauman, the clown is not a personality. He may resist unseen restraints in an outrageously childish manner, but he is a type, a specimen, and not an individual human being.

The quality that finally distinguishes Nauman’s art--and makes it subliminally creepy--is his attitude of detachment. Unlike the voyeur who watches for the vicarious thrill of it, Nauman is a clinical examiner. As an artist, however, he is a sensitive innovator who injected subject matter into Minimalism while forecasting a distressing spirit of non-involvement.