Bruce Nauman (PAJ Books: Art + Performance) - Softcover

Providing a varied and extensive collection of texts by and about Nauman's work, this anthology opens many doors into reading the layers upon layers of this artist's ironic tragi-comedies... With its focus on Nauman from so many perspectives and its concentration on his performance and new media aspects, this book provides meaningful and extensive resources for both admirers and scholars... In the end, it sets a bountiful theoretical, historical, aesthetic, ethical, and critical context for responding to Nauman's productions.

"From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better yet, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn't give you any trace of whether you're going to like it or not."—Bruce Nauman

"Bruce Nauman's art is about heightened awareness, awareness of spaces we usually don't notice (the one under the chair, out of which he made a sculpture) and sounds we don't listen for (the one in the coffin), awareness of emotions we suppress or dread... It's hard to feel indifferent to work like his."—Michael Kimmelman, New York Times

One of America's most important artists, Bruce Nauman has worked in a dazzling variety of media since the mid-1960s: sculpture, photography, performance, installation, sound, holography, film, and video. What has been a constant throughout his career, however, is his persistence in exploring both art as an investigation of the self and the power of language to define that self.

The latest volume in the acclaimed Art + Performance series is the first book to combine the key critical writings on Nauman with the artist's own writings and interviews with him, as well as images of his work. Bruce Nauman offers a multifaceted portrait of an artist whose determination to experiment with style and form has created a body of work as eclectic and perhaps more influential than that of any other living American artist.