Looking For Bruce Nauman

Note: This post describes one of the rare places in Venice where no photography is allowed—I hesitate to take a guess at how many images are made in this city in one day: 120,009, 500,341, 1,657,023?—so, after some thoughts about how to compensate for this, I have decided to let the words do the talking…

I am slowly learning my lessons the hard way in Venice. Firstly, regardless of how good, large, comprehensive or colour-coded your map appears, you will always get lost in this city. Secondly, always check what days venues are open! After a morning of both getting lost, and trying to see pavilions and exhibitions that were closed, I found one of Bruce Nauman’s venues for this years Biennale.

Along with occupying the United States of America Pavilion in the Giardini, Nauman’s work has been curated across two additional venues in the city: Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and Universita Ca’ Foscari. All three venues include works and installations that span from 1967, to new projects being seen for the first time in Venice. The works have been gathered around the three, slightly innocuous, threads of “Heads and Hands,” “Sounds and Space,” and “Fountains and Neons,” and, just in case you were wondering, there is a free brochure that marks exactly which works fit which thread/s.

After passing though the entrance to the Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini designed by Italian designer Carlo Scarpa—one of the rare modern architectural interventions into the façade of Venice—I walked through a dark, brick corridor filled with the thumps and bumps of Nauman’s Jumping. As one of the sound works from his Studio Aids II (1967-68) that includes Rolling on the Studio Floor, and Violin Tuned D.E.A.D, the sonic impact of Jumping took on a particularly ominous tone here—abstracted from the literal action its title describes, the sound became both tied to the surroundings, and made me aware of the potential vulnerability of my private experiences.

This corridor opened onto an interior, open courtyard, around which, spanning the entire length of one side, Pink and Yellow Light Corridor (Variable Lights) (1972) had been installed. The natural light of the courtyard dulled the incandescent glow of the alternate lengths of pink and yellow neon tubes, and after the rumbling of Jumping this choice of site was slightly underwhelming for me. I would love to experience the work at night, but the venue closes at 6pm. Following the lines of tubes overhead led me to the stairway, and up to the interior component of the exhibition.

What? Think, you say, think, think, think, think. Like an irritating two-year old who has just learned a new word, Nauman’s doubled, bouncing heads of Think (1993) were there as I turned up the stairs. I would really love to have this work in my studio, helping me to charge the often-confusing expectation to manifest thinking and doing, doing and thinking simultaneously. In the adjoining room,Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of My Room (1968) was a threatening partner to Think. In this work, the technical mechanisms are hidden, with only a bare light bulb and a whispered paranoiac voice that seemed to come from everywhere, animating the psychotropic potentials of the architectural surroundings.

The largest interior space of this venue resonated with a muffled chorus of voices emanating from rows of white surfaces, suspended from the ceiling and tethered to the floor. Walking between the rows, each muffled voice turned into an audible chant of partial lists days of the week; some, for example, would chant Thursday through Sunday, while others Saturday through Tuesday. Days (2009) is installed in the universities lecture hall, formerly the refectory (communal dining room) of the convent of the Tolentini, and I could not quell the sensation of a palimpsestic echo from the former uses of the space. Nauman’s  Days  conjured the haunting, repetitious, and embodied measuring of time that is present in the rooms (studios, homes, offices, hospitals, schools) that we regularly inhabit.

Seeing these works together was a really significant experience for me, but, although “opening” its presence out-side of the Giardini is perhaps (as the catalogue suggests) a critical move, I felt like the choices of works and their placement could have been more sympathetic to the building, letting the site and the works do something significant together that would not happen otherwise. It will be interesting to see how the two other shows work with their respective sites. I will keep you posted!