ArtFocus 5 | Archive » Bruce Nauman

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49

Bruce Nauman // Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor)

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Bruce Nauman Born (1941) and lives in the US. One of the most influential artists of our time. Ever since the mid-60s, he has participated in countless exhibitions at prominent museums worldwide. In Recent years, he has exhibited at Tate Modern, London (2005), Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (2007), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2007), the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas (2007), and the Venice Biennale (2007). Nauman will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale (2009).

The video Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor) (1999) depicts Bruce Nauman building a corner, stretching a fence and installing a gate. This work celebrates the artist’s love of ranch life and of its mundane, repetitive physical activities. Nauman works steadily at his task in silence, interrupted only by the sounds of the blowing wind, the tractor and the chain saw. The film’s rhythm is revealed as a metaphor for Nauman’s work itself. It is concerned with the notion of artistic fabrication and of empiricism; it addresses central postmodernist concerns with a touch of rural humor; it reexamines the vital need for local culture and praxis in the age of globalization; at the same time, it echoes the accumulation of Nauman’s own creative strategies and persona rituals, and the struggle that has marked his artistic activity ever since its inception.