BRUCE NAUMAN (b. 1941) Sale 1150, Lot 35 Run From Fear/Fun From Rear Yellow and pink neon tubing with glass tubing suspension frames Estimate: $400,000-600,000 By Robert Brown Startlingly direct and powerful, the Minimalists refined their work to the bare essentials. 'Every revolution in art turns over art from Art-as-also-something-else into Art-as-only-itself,' Ad Reinhardt once asserted, and the Minimalist revolution that took place in America in the mid-1960s clearly belongs to this cycle for, from the very beginning it set out to make work which consisted only of what was most essential and which referred only to itself. This insistence on the elemental was to a large extent a rejection of the elaborate bombastic gestures and pretensions towards the mystic found in Abstract Expressionist art as well as a response to the more cynically objective and industrial aesthetic of Pop Art. The term 'Minimalism' (first coined to describe the art of Russian Constructivism) has entered common parlance as meaning austere, functional and bare. As a label for an art movement however, it is one that was never accepted by any of the artists most closely associated with it; Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris. Like most artists, each resisted the idea of a collective aesthetic and regarded the term as mere commercial packaging bestowed on them by an art world ever hungry for the new. As Judd commented caustically at the time, 'Very few artists receive attention without publicity as a new group. (Minimalism) is another case of the simplicity of criticism and of the public … One person's work isn't considered sufficiently important historically to be discussed alone.' Nevertheless, through the work of these artists and in particular through group shows as 'Black White and Gray' and 'Primary Structures' between 1965 and 1966 a clearly new tendency in art emerged. 'Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture' Judd wrote at the time, accurately gauging the heavily analytical mood of the period and the move in art away from a blind use of accepted conventions towards the creation of works that questioned the very nature of what they were. A hugely important figure in this respect though one not normally associated with Minimalism is Bruce Nauman. As a work like Run from Fear/ Fun from Rear shows, Nauman is primarily interested in the borderlines between convention. Making works that are clearly 'neither painting nor sculpture', Nauman, like the Minimalist artists, used modern industrial materials to explore the anomalies of language. Inspired by his readings of Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and responding to the example of a Pop artist like Ed Ruscha, many of Nauman's early works explore the nature of what words actually are. 'I think the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry or art occurs,' Nauman said. 'Roland Barthes has written about the pleasure that is derived from reading when what is known rubs up against what is unknown, or when correct grammar rubs up against nongrammar… If you only deal with what is known, you'll have redundancy; on the other hand, if you only deal with what is unknown, you cannot communicate at all. There is always some combination of the two, and it is how they touch each other that makes communication interesting.' Presenting only the words 'Run from Fear' and 'Fun from Rear' in neon - so that the viewer focuses entirely on them and the strange anomaly of their meaning created by the simple swapping of two letters - Nauman's works have a startling directness that often strikes the viewer with their meaning long before any conventional thought processes have been engaged. 'It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at,' Judd wrote in 1965. 'The thing as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.' This notion that the more simple a thing is the more powerful it becomes is a central tenet of Minimalism and forms the basis of the majority of Judd's work. Following on from the tradition established in Frank Stella's paintings where 'What you see is what you see', Judd created industrially produced works that often achieve a transcendent sense of beauty and grace through their being demonstrably only what they are. Among the finest of his creations are his breakthrough series known as the 'Stacks'. Untitled of 1969 is a typical example, consisting solely of ten identical copper units of solid form separated from one another by identically sized areas of empty space. Using a minimum of means, Untitled articulates both itself and its surroundings in a simple, logical and eloquent way. A progression of form and non-form Untitled does exactly what Judd once described one of Dan Flavin's white tubes of neon as doing; 'It makes an intelligible idea of the whole wall.' Judd had written this comment about a single diagonal neon light on a bare wall at an exhibition of Flavin's in 1964. In many ways Alternate Diagonals of March 2, 1964 (to Don Judd) returns the compliment. Consisting exclusively of ready-made neon light, Flavin's works are once again 'neither painting nor sculpture' being largely situational works that illuminate their environment, accentuating and articulating the nature of the gallery space as it is. Many of Flavin's works are consequently site-specific - a concept that is commonplace today, but was relatively new in the 1960s and largely introduced by this generation of artists. Carl Andre's work is a sculpture of placement. The only one of the Minimalist artists to refer to his work as sculpture, Andre's work is, like Flavin's a conscious articulation of the space in which it is situated. Evolving out of a conventional carving tradition in sculpture, Andre transformed his approach and decided that 'rather than cut into the material,' he would subsequently 'use the material as the cut in space.' Developing a mathematical grammar that takes nothing away from the material itself but which, like Brancusi's Endless Column, can, through simple permutation, recreate itself in space, Andre's sculptures are nonetheless paradoxical. For as 100 Zinc Squares illustrates, they are usually made up of a substantial mass of material that clearly asserts its physical presence and yet has no significant volume. Andre's sculpture perhaps comes closest to that ultimate sculptural icon of the Minimalist aesthetic, the mysterious dark monolith that appears in Stanley Kubrik's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. As Kubrik's use of this monolith showed, by the late 1960s the reductive language of Minimalism was widely recognised as a modernist language of sincerity and objective truth. As such it was the ideal language with which to convincingly convey a profound sense of the mystic. This was a feature of the Minimalist aesthetic that was particularly well understood by the foremost painter to be associated with the movement, Brice Marden. Through only the use of single coloured monoliths Marden has been able to induce a sense of transcendence in the viewer. From his very earliest monochrome paintings such as Portrait (painted in 1964 and privately dedicated to his son Nicholas), Marden created a series of extraordinarily powerful works whose intense but subtle colour resonates with a deep and almost audible hum that seems to transcend the painting's physical reality. As if to openly demonstrate this extraordinary ability of his paintings' carefully worked surfaces to belie the physical nature of what they are, Marden has left a strip of canvas bare at the bottom of each of these early paintings. This raw and splattered strip revealing the ground of the work demonstrates not only the painstaking process by which Marden's remarkable surfaces have been created but also the material nature of the painting's construction. Openly demonstrating only the nature of what they are Marden's works reflect the Minimalists' belief that the simpler a thing is the more powerful its presence becomes. ROBERT BROWN IS HEAD OF RESEARCH AND EDUCATION, MODERN, POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART Back to top