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Lot Essay
Conceived for the annual benefit gala for the New Museum, New York in 1985, Double Poke in the Eye II is one of Bruce Nauman’s most iconic neon works. The wall-mounted sculpture depicts two opposed faces in profile—one yellow, one blue—with four pointing hands between them. An internal timer causes the hands to flash on and off in irregular sequence, creating a two-frame animation in which the two figures poke one another in the eye. The hands’ looping motion sometimes settles into a sidelong figure-of-eight: the symbol for infinity. Both playful and ominous, the work literalises the Biblical phrase ‘an eye for an eye’, portraying an endless cycle of retribution. Double Poke in the Eye II was the second in a special yearly series of sculptural editions organised to support the New Museum’s exhibitions and programs. Other examples of the work are in the collections of institutions including Tate, London, the Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart, the New Museum, New York, Princeton University Art Museum and Denver Art Museum.
Nauman created his first neon works in the mid-1960s while he was a teacher at the Art Institute of San Francisco. He had studied mathematics and physics before turning to art, and was uninterested in conventional artforms such as painting. His early works had drawn ideas from the disciplines of dance, music, theatre and literature. Gazing at an old illuminated beer sign hanging in the window of his studio—which was a converted grocery store—he realised that neon offered another unconventional medium in which he could embed language and meaning.
In 1967 Nauman made The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, which remains one of his best-known works. It spells out the title’s words in a neon spiral to create an ambiguous and ironic dual statement, playing the cliché of the artist’s timeless, transcendent role against the work’s formal evocation of mass culture. Nauman’s other early light works included linear, abstracted tracings of his body’s profile and ‘light rooms’ that made the viewer into a performer in disorienting altered spaces. His word-based neons such as Raw War (1971) and Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972) used double meanings, puns and idioms to menacing poetic effect.
Double Poke in the Eye II dates from the climax of a final, intense burst of neon production that lasted from 1980 to 1985. During this period, Nauman used more word games, linguistic patterns and human figures to probe the human predicament and its contradictions of sex and violence, creation and destruction, humour and horror, and life and death. These neons touch on profound, Freudian human drives while echoing the presentation of commercial signage: alluring, flashing emblems that advertise cheap thrills and instant gratification. In the case of the figural works, the motifs’ whimsical, even childlike quality—Nauman’s Hanged Man (1985) draws directly on a children’s game—likewise jars with their philosophical themes.
While neon had proved itself as an artistic medium in the Minimalist and Spatialist creations of Dan Flavin and Lucio Fontana, Nauman’s works gave it a new and complex expressive reach. His neons are performative vignettes, engaging with the big questions of life in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s existential plays. They are at once witty and disturbing, visually sumptuous and bitingly satirical. Whichever way one sees Double Poke in the Eye II, it’s hard to look away. ‘My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition’, said Nauman in 1988. ‘And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s just such a frustrating part of human history’ (B. Nauman quoted in J. Simon, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman’, Art in America 76, no. 9, September 1988, p. 148).
Nauman created his first neon works in the mid-1960s while he was a teacher at the Art Institute of San Francisco. He had studied mathematics and physics before turning to art, and was uninterested in conventional artforms such as painting. His early works had drawn ideas from the disciplines of dance, music, theatre and literature. Gazing at an old illuminated beer sign hanging in the window of his studio—which was a converted grocery store—he realised that neon offered another unconventional medium in which he could embed language and meaning.
In 1967 Nauman made The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, which remains one of his best-known works. It spells out the title’s words in a neon spiral to create an ambiguous and ironic dual statement, playing the cliché of the artist’s timeless, transcendent role against the work’s formal evocation of mass culture. Nauman’s other early light works included linear, abstracted tracings of his body’s profile and ‘light rooms’ that made the viewer into a performer in disorienting altered spaces. His word-based neons such as Raw War (1971) and Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972) used double meanings, puns and idioms to menacing poetic effect.
Double Poke in the Eye II dates from the climax of a final, intense burst of neon production that lasted from 1980 to 1985. During this period, Nauman used more word games, linguistic patterns and human figures to probe the human predicament and its contradictions of sex and violence, creation and destruction, humour and horror, and life and death. These neons touch on profound, Freudian human drives while echoing the presentation of commercial signage: alluring, flashing emblems that advertise cheap thrills and instant gratification. In the case of the figural works, the motifs’ whimsical, even childlike quality—Nauman’s Hanged Man (1985) draws directly on a children’s game—likewise jars with their philosophical themes.
While neon had proved itself as an artistic medium in the Minimalist and Spatialist creations of Dan Flavin and Lucio Fontana, Nauman’s works gave it a new and complex expressive reach. His neons are performative vignettes, engaging with the big questions of life in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s existential plays. They are at once witty and disturbing, visually sumptuous and bitingly satirical. Whichever way one sees Double Poke in the Eye II, it’s hard to look away. ‘My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition’, said Nauman in 1988. ‘And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s just such a frustrating part of human history’ (B. Nauman quoted in J. Simon, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman’, Art in America 76, no. 9, September 1988, p. 148).